The Great Society (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Book 3)

by James Philip

  “Did I mention I bumped into Walter Brenckmann,” Bobby confided to his friend. “Senior, that is, and his wife at Camp David the other week?”

  Katzenbach had only met the man designated to be the new US Ambassador to the United Kingdom a couple of times in passing.

  “He’s a shrewd cookie. I’m not sure I’d like to meet him across a court room. His boy Sam,” the Attorney General hesitated, knowing his deputy was a stickler for protocol and might slap him down, “is in some kind of trouble out on the West Coast. I took the liberty of mentioning it to Director Hoover. My thinking was that so long as the old monster is on his best behaviour we might as well take advantage of it. It won’t last, obviously. Anyway, between you and me I suggest you keep well away from it. In fact I suggest you stay out of the loop. Period. There might be ‘complications’, so I’m apologising in advance. I’m not about to tell you your job, Nick but I think you need to be able to deny ever having anything to do with this. If there is any come back about the Ambassador’s son it is all down to me, okay.”

  Chapter 40

  Saturday 19th January 1964

  San Carlos Avenue, Sausalito, California

  Darlene’s matted auburn hair had fallen partly across Gregory Sullivan’s face but mostly across his heaving torso. Outside it was a cold morning after a rainy, blowy night; inside the second floor ‘studio’ – a room just big enough to accommodate a slightly larger than standard single bed, a sink and an ancient cooker cum stove with a iron hob bolted atop it and a few rickety cupboards, adjoining a ‘bathroom’ which comprised a toilet and a claustrophobic, mostly frigid shower within it behind a canvas screen – seemed warm, almost humid.

  As the man’s totally scattered wits began to coalesce into something a little more like sentience he blew some of the strands of his lover’s crazily spread hair from his mouth and nose, and hugged her breathless, quivering torso close to his body as if he was terrified she would go away. They were lying in a puddle of perspiration, wet everywhere and virtually incapable of moving, she impaled upon him, he pinned deliciously by her weight in the confusion of sheets and blankets. His attempt to stretch beneath her produced a satisfied, complacent gurgling whimper of pleasure.

  Presently, Darlene propped herself on her forearms, resting on his chest. She tried to sweep back her mane of dark hair and peered at him, oddly self-conscious in exactly the way she had not been at any time after she had slipped out of her clothes and he had turned out the lights the previous evening. They had made love four, maybe five times but for the moment she could not organise her recollections in such as way as to confirm, with any degree of confidence that this morning’s coupling had been the fourth or the fifth. She had awakened aching to be fucked one more time and been surprised in the nicest possible way when it had quickly become evident that Gregory felt the same shameless lust.

  She met his gaze, instantly lowered her eyes.

  “Why, Miss Lefebure,” Gregory grinned, saner now that his heart had stopped trying to explode out of his chest, “fancy meeting you here this morning!”

  Darlene giggled and could not stop giggling.

  Or at least she could not stop until her bladder brought her down to earth with a rudely urgent jolt. She rolled off the bed and scurried the three paces to the ‘bathroom’.

  The ‘bathroom’ did not actually have a door but Gregory Sullivan was too much of a gentleman to watch. He waited until she returned to the bed, loudly pursued by the clanking and banging of what passed for the building’s plumbing as the water closet cistern noisily refilled.

  Gregory swung his legs over the side of the bed.

  Darlene planted herself on his lap, reminding the man that there was absolutely nothing he did not completely adore about Miss Darlene Lefebure. From the top of her head to the soles of her feet she was perfect, her lazy southern drawl with its elongated vowels and marvellously melodic rhythms, her minutely turned up nose, the laughter that so often flickered in her eyes, her pale, pert warm, soft nakedness was...perfect. There was no other word, only ‘perfect’ got close and even that seemed vaguely inadequate in the heat of their love making.

  However, after a while they became aware that they were both very sweaty, and well, a little rank and that they ought to make an effort to wash and brush up before they went out. This was the third night Darlene had ‘slept over’ in Sausalito; last night they had surpassed themselves, every time they made love they seemed to fit together better.

  Darlene was a little giddy with it.

  Every time her life had threatened to touch happiness before meeting Gregory Sullivan something had always gone wrong and Greg was far too good to be true. She brushed his face with the back of her right hand; just to make sure he was flesh and blood, that this was not some kind of weird and cruel dream that was going to be snatched away from her in the blink of an eye.

  They nuzzled foreheads for a second.

  Kissed slowly, moistly.

  He had said he loved her last night but that did not count; but likewise, she had whispered back his words.

  It was after ten o’clock by the time they left the house and walked the short distance down to Bridgeway Drive, the road that ran along the Sausalito shore all the way past Marin County before it crossed Route 101, the road over the Golden Gate Bridge. This morning the lovers had no intention of walking that far along the eastern shore of Richardson Bay; or not at least on empty stomachs after their exhaustingly strenuous mutual endeavours of the last few hours. They dived into a diner as a squall of wintery rain began to drift over the hills behind the town, and squirmed onto the benches either side of a table in the window with an unobstructed view out across the misty waters.

  “I should ring Aunt Molly,” Darlene declared. “She’ll worry.”

  “I think they’ve got a pay phone in the corner. It’s usually working in this place,” the man told her, digging in his jacket pocket for loose change as the waitress, an older woman with greying hair who had seen Gregory around before and knew he taught at the school three blocks away, came over to the couple smiling a maternally warming smile.

  The badge on the woman’s lapel said ‘Rosie’.

  Gregory asked for coffees, a glass of milk for Darlene – he remembered she liked to drink a glass of milk for breakfast because she had dropped the information in conversation on their first date – and feeling like a million dollars ordered the sort of meal a starving Grizzly Bear, or a three hundred pound a Hell’s Angel who had been the road one stop ahead of the law for a week, or two long-distance truckers about to run a consignment of guns down to the Mexican border would have demanded. Darlene politely suggested they forego some of the extras, to which he acceded, reality dawning just before it was too late.

  Rosie smiled benignly, mostly at Darlene and departed. She returned to pour coffee, brought Darlene’s glass of milk and a variety of eating utensils, a fresh salt cellar and two napkins, obviously marking down the two polite young people in the window as the sort of couple who appreciated such things.

  “I’ll make that call?” Darlene suggested, a little daunted by the prospect of attempting to innocently explain away yet another night on the tiles. “What time should I say I’ll be back in San Francisco?”

  Gregory thought about it.

  “Never?”

  Darlene gave him a momentarily vexed look before she translated what he had just said to her.

  “Never?”

  Gregory shrugged, suddenly tongue-tied.

  Darlene pursed her lips in thought.

  “I can’t say that to Aunt Molly...”

  “No,” Gregory agreed. “We should be together when we say it to her,” he quirked a lopsided grin. “And to Uncle Harvey and all the other people we need to tell.”

  Darlene giggled, lowered her gaze.

  “We’ll go back over the Golden Gate in time for dinner tonight if Aunt Molly will have us,” Gregory decided tentatively. His Aunt and Uncle did not know about him and Darlene,
not yet. They had been very secretive and he did not think Miranda would have ‘blabbed’ about that time she had come over to Sausalito and Darlene had opened the door. “This time we’ll arrive together. If that’s okay with you, Miss Lefebure?”

  It was completely okay with her. She had done her best not to lie to Aunt Molly but she felt bad not telling her the truth even if it might cause problems with Gregory’s Ma and Pa. Gregory had wanted to drop all pretence a week ago; then she had hesitated and he had backed off. That had been a mistake and she did not plan to repeat it. Just because Gregory was too good to be true did not mean the way she felt about him was not true.

  Darlene smiled and as she rose to go to the telephone booth she leaned over and planted a wet, smacking kiss on her man’s mouth.

  Around noon the couple walked north along the shore until they reached the derelict wartime shipyards which had briefly made the sleepy little town a seething hub of industry. In the years since the 1945 a boat community of several hundred souls had tied up to the wartime wharfs and docks; in the wintery mists and the drizzle the assembled boats – everything from small yachts to motor cruisers, a brigantine to an old Navy PT boat - bobbed drably on the grey waters.

  The lovers held hands but said little until they halted, surveying the rag tag fleet. In Sausalito there were ‘hill’ people and there were ‘boat’ people, and people in between who did not actually own land or property on ‘the hill’ or in Mill Valley or on Mount Tamalpais. The ‘hill’ was the rocky peninsula which anchored the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge; and countless picturesque white wood-frame houses were scattered across its eastern slopes below Route 101, separated from the bay by Bridgeway Drive.

  Stopping by a low wall Gregory helped Darlene to squirm up onto it, and turned to take her in his arms. She was shorter than him by three-quarters of a head; perched on the wall they were eye to eye. Her thighs squeezed against him, holding him close as they kissed.

  Darlene sighed, rested her check on his shoulder.

  “You don’t know me, Gregory Sullivan,” she confessed in a tiny voice.

  How much did anybody know about anybody after seven dates and three bouts of frantic coupling?

  “I know I’m crazy about you.”

  With extreme reluctance Darlene disentangled herself from the man.

  “You’re Momma and Papa are movie stars,” she reminded him. “I’m just poor white trash to people like them...”

  Gregory bit back the urge to instantly object.

  He sat on the wall beside Darlene, staring out across the waters to where he knew San Francisco was shrouded in the fog.

  “To me you are like some fairy princess,” he chuckled, pressing her hand in his. “My very own southern belle. I don’t know what my folks will make of us. Come to think about it I’ve never really known what they make of me, let alone anyone else.” He spoke unhurriedly, matching one confession with another. “My big brother Benjamin is a hot shot lawyer who, if my Ma is to believed, has his sights set on the State Legislature or Congress some time soon. David, my next biggest brother – well, he’s a certifiable genius compared to the rest of us - is a rocket scientist at Rice University in Texas. You’ve met Miranda, obviously,” he added with fond irony, “Miranda could be anything she wants. Me, I’m just Greg the schoolteacher and my folks don’t get it at all. Whatever,” he shrugged, “I know I’ve had it easy. I don’t leech off Ma and Pa but I could if I wanted. I’m lucky. I’m the guy I want to be doing a job I love, and now I’ve met my very own southern belle. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. Leastways, that’s the way I look at it.”

  Darlene was lost in her premonitions as she leaned against him in the circle of his left arm.

  “Besides,” the man chuckled, “I still haven’t told you all about the history of Sausalito. All my other southern belles loved the story, I’m sure you will.”

  The woman laughed. She knew there had been no other ‘southern belles’. In fact there had been few other girlfriends because Gregory Sullivan was the sort of guy who really was waiting for the right girl to come along. Some men needed to have a woman on their arm to feel like a ‘real’ man; Greg was not like that, perhaps, because he was lucky enough to be happy within himself.

  Sometimes people needed to talk; today he needed to talk, another time it would be her turn if she ever gathered the courage to confront the truth of her life.

  Gregory planted a kiss in her hair.

  “We’re looking out across Richardson Bay,” he began, as if he was addressing a school day trip. “It was so named for a seafarer by the name of William A. Richardson, an Englishman, who had been wise enough to obtain Mexican citizenship because way back in his time this was Mexico, not America. If there was any justice in the world, which we both know there isn’t, the bay would be called after the fellow – well, the first European - who actually came ashore here. That would be a certain Don José de Cañizares, a Spanish gentleman. Although in the way of these things he wasn’t so much exploring as searching for booty. The Spanish set up a military garrison at what is now the Presidio in San Francisco a year later but basically, ignored this side of the Bay until Señor Richardson came on the scene. In those days the Spanish capital was in Monterrey and even though there were animals to hunt and trap, and great forests full of wood just right for shipbuilding, nobody had bothered to settle the northern side of the Golden Gate. Until that was, Señor Richardson came along in 1822.”

  Darlene did not interrupt. She had no inclination to do anything but listen. The sound of Gregory’s voice soothed her fears and wrapped her in the comforting blanket of his world, and that was precisely where she wanted to be right then.

  “About five thousand people live here nowadays but as recently at 1880 the population was less than five hundred. In those days Sausalito was a small fishing port with anchorages for a handful of racing yachts; even way back then the rich were different. The town hadn’t grown much since the end of the California gold rush in the early 1850s. By the 1880s well over two hundred and thirty thousand people lived across the Golden Gate in San Francisco but unless you had a boat it was a hundred mile trip over dirt roads from the big city to here.”

  He planted more kisses in Darlene’s hair. Distracted he had to scrabble around in his memory to continue his story.

  “I tell the kids in my classes the fable of how little old Sausalito eventually arrived in the modern world as a kind of object lesson in how things work. Nothing happens overnight, and nothing is simple or easy. It is sort of a contemporary morality fable.”

  “I want to hear it,” Darlene murmured complacently.

  “First of all the Post Office came to Sausalito. That was in 1870. One of the reasons it came to Sausalito was that the NPC – that’s the North Pacific Coast Railroad – was coming to the town and a terminus, a rail yard and a ferry dock was being planned. All of this was way before the Golden Gate Bridge was built, that didn’t open until 1937 remember. Bridgeway Drive used to be the stretch of Highway 101 leading straight down to the ferry port. In the twenties the road behind us would have been permanently blocked with cars queuing for the one of the big automobile roll on roll off ferries across to Pier 39 in San Francisco. One of the ferries on the Sausalito-San Francisco run was the Eureka, in the nineteen twenties and thirties she was the biggest double-ended ferryboat in the world.” He stopped talking momentarily and asked a question: “I bet you don’t know what Sausalito was really famous for back in the twenties?”

  Darlene giggled.

  “Bootlegging?”

  “Clever girl,” Gregory cooed proudly.

  Chapter 41

  Saturday 19th January 1964

  Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas

  Dealey Plaza was built in 1940 on fifteen acres of land donated by Sarah Horton Cockrell, a businesswoman and philanthropist. It was a New Deal WPA – Works Projects Administration – program. Located on the western side of old downtown Dallas it occupied grou
nd where three streets - Main Street, Elm Street and Commerce Street – meet to pass under a railroad bridge known locally as the ‘triple underpass’. The Plaza was named for George Bannerman Dealey, a man instrumental in founding the Southern Methodist University, for bringing a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank to the city and for at one time being the publisher of the Dallas Morning News.

  None of which remotely interested twenty-four year old Lee Harvey Oswald as he and the his tall, brooding companion stood behind the picket fence staring down past the sign Fort Worth Turnpike Keep Right which partially obscured his view beneath the railway bridge. His unwelcome sidekick was looking up at the seven storey Texas School Book Depository building, one of the hundred foot or more high structures delineating the south, east and north sides of the plaza.

  During the week Oswald worked in the book depository and was thus irritatingly familiar with his surroundings. Another source of his irritation was that his older ‘friend’ seemed to be a mine of information about the nondescript block in which he clerked and hefted boxes of books all day long five days a week.

  A lot of things about Galen Cheney were beginning to get on Lee Harvey Oswald’s nerves as he stood atop the grassy knoll looking disinterestedly across the plaza. He assumed Galen Cheney was an alias; who the fuck was called ‘Galen Cheney’? The man was infuriatingly inscrutable, and he had a knack of disappearing into thin air for days and suddenly reappeared without warning. There would be a telephone call, or he would be waiting at the next street corner; it was like being stalked by some frigging born again Apache!

  Nobody at the Texas School Book Repository knew as much about the goddammed place as Oswald knew, courtesy of the tall man.

  His place of work was located at 411 Elm Street on the corner of Elm and North Houston Streets and stood on the site of at least two earlier buildings. ‘At least’ two earlier buildings because the two buildings that anybody knew about were built on land owned until the 1870s by one John Neely Bryan, one of the city fathers of Dallas, who legend had it, had erected a cabin somewhere within the footprint of the modern plaza. Bryan had died in 1877 and a man called Maxime Guillot had run a wagon shop on the book depository site in the 1880s. In 1894 the Rock Island Plow Company had acquired the land and in 1898 thrown up a five storey office. Burned down after a lightning strike in 1901 and rebuilt the following year it was this building, raised to seven storeys and re-modelled in something called the Commercial Romanesque Style which in 1937 had passed into the hands of the Carraway Byrd Corporation when the Southern Rock Island Plow Company went broke. Subsequently, on 4th July 1939 the property was purchased outright by Detroit born David Harold ‘Dry Hole’ Byrd, a wealthy Texan oil mogul and the cousin of the famous explorer Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd who had named Antarctica's Harold Byrd Mountains for him. Byrd had leased the building to the grocery wholesaler between 1940 and 1961, by which time it was generally known as the ‘Sexton Building’. It was only after ‘Sexton Foods’ relocated to a new facility at 650 Regal Row that the block was taken over by the state of Texas and re-designated the Texas School Book Repository.