by James Philip
At the time of the October War the extensive refurbishment of the building – including the partitioning of the first four floors and the installation of air conditioning and an elevator – had only recently been completed, and the repository had only just ‘opened for business’.
“How do you know there’ll be any kind of shot from anywhere in the plaza?” He asked lowly, scanning from right to left. “I heard the President went everywhere in bullet proof limos?”
There was nobody within fifty feet of the two men.
Nobody to overhear what they said.
Notwithstanding, Lee Harvey Oswald suddenly found himself looking into the tall man’s cold grey blue flinty eyes from a distance of two inches. The other man’s hands were crushing the lapels of his jacket, holding him very nearly off the ground.
“Shut up, you little shit!”
The younger man thought Galen Cheney was going to kill him.
“What’s your problem, kid?” Cheney growled, spittle spotting Oswald’s cheek. He pushed the smaller man away and released his grip as if he had realized he was soiling his hands. “Don’t you want to get something right in miserable life?”
Oswald staggered back several steps; only the wooden picket fence of the low rise overlooking the highway driving under the triple underpass brought him to a shuddering halt.
He bristled with wounded pride.
A voice in his head warned him to keep his lips sealed.
“Don’t try thinking, son,” Galen Cheney grunted, straightening his coat, shrugging his shoulders, “trust me, from what I’ve seen thinking ain’t your strong suit.”
The tall man resumed his meticulous scrutiny of the plaza, ignoring Oswald as if he had ceased to exist.
The younger man had trained as a rifleman; he knew about ranges, deflections, what cartridges to employ, the best angles, lines of sight and corrections, all of that shit. He had told the old man the best shot was from the sixth or seventh floor of the Texas School Book Repository. Although, now that he was standing on the knoll overlooking the entrance to the triple underpass he recognized that there was a much easier shot from closer to ground level, he was having second thoughts. The problem was that he could hardly set up a sniper’s nest anywhere near where he was standing in plain sight.
Several minutes later Galen Cheney turned on his heel and walked away.
Oswald scurried to keep up.
Neither man spoke until they were driving out of downtown Dallas towards Irving. The sun was low on the horizon, glaring off the road and Cheney had donned dark glasses behind the wheel.
“We won’t know until the day whether the President will be in an armoured limousine,” he declared phlegmatically. “Or even if his route will pass through Dealey Plaza. The Secret Service always scouts at least three alternative routes; all we know for sure is that the ‘publically announced’ route may include the plaza. However, if the President’s motorcade comes this way we will have a plan. If he goes another way then there will be another day of reckoning. These things are in the hands of the Lord. He will be our judge in these things.”
“So what? We’re still going with the first plan?”
The man at the wheel sniffed a vaguely derisory snort.
“No. Not unless you improve your scores on the range in the next couple of days.”
“I’m a fucking marksman!” Oswald complained angrily.
“Some days,” Galen Cheney conceded grudgingly. “Other days you’re a disgrace to the uniform you once wore, son.” The way he said it indicated unambiguously that he actually thought Oswald was a disgrace to his old Marine Corps uniform most days.
Lee Harvey Oswald did what he always did when he was stung by a real or an imagined slight; he sulked, brooding about the injustice of a world that was incapable of seeing him for the remarkable, gifted human being that he truly was. His lust for revenge against all those who had put him down, all his old Marine Corps ‘buddies’ who had mocked his lack of stature and slight build by calling him Ozzie Rabbit after the cartoon character, or Oswaldskovich simply because he tried to explain Marxist dialectic to the brainless chumps never dulled. He would have his revenge one day. Soon, he hoped.
One day the World would know his name.
He planned to be famous for all time.
Chapter 42
Saturday 19th January 1964
California Institute for Men, Chino, San Bernardino, California
Miranda Sullivan was horrified by Sam Brenckmann’s appearance when he shuffled into the dirty interview room supported by two hulking warders. His right eye was black, blue and closed and there was a bandage, several days old around his throat. The knuckles of both his hands, manacled before him, were bruised and grazed and his breathless, halting gait shouted to her that he had been savagely beaten. He very nearly fell off the chair the warders dumped him in on the opposite side of the table to his two visitors.
A quietness fell on the room.
“Take off my client’s hand cuffs,” Vincent Meredith asked softly.
“Can’t do that,” grunted the fatter of the two over-muscled guards.
Sam stared dazedly at Miranda as if he hardly recognized her. Or more likely, was trying to figure out what she was doing here.
“Yes, you can,” she hissed, shaking with outrage.
“Miss Sullivan,” Vincent Meredith retorted, “is from the Governor of California’s Office in Sacramento. She is here at the specific order of the Attorney General of California, Mister Stanley Mosk to ascertain that the California Institute for Men has been meticulous in observing its duty of care to Mister Brenckmann and to the other men in its custody.”
Neither of the turnkeys knew what this meant.
“Mister Brenckmann has obviously been mistreated while in the custody of this institution. What are your names, ranks and social security numbers, gentlemen?”
“We don’t have to tell you a goddam thing!”
The attorney made great play of opening his notebook, taking the top off his ballpoint pen and pausing for thought before he started writing.
“Um. That will be news to the State Attorney General. Shall I tell Mr Mosk or do you want to go up to Sacramento to tell him yourselves?”
He focussed on Sam for the first time, but said nothing.
Then he looked back at the two lurking guards.
“Please leave us in private. You guys already need a lawyer, you just haven’t worked it out for yourself yet. However, since that attorney won’t be me, I have no intention of allowing you to eavesdrop on the confidential conversation I am about to have with my client.” He glanced to Miranda. “These guys won’t tell us their names so we’ll have to pick them out from mug shots or at an ID parade later, Miss Sullivan. Take a good look at their ugly lugs.”
The bigger guard scowled and with a jangling of keys released Sam Brenckmann’s chained wrists before he, and his leaden-footed colleague, stomped grumpily out of the interview room.
It was all Miranda could do not to throw her arms around her former boyfriend as the door closed behind the two warders.
“You should see the other guy,” Sam quipped, forcing a smile. “Trouble was he had half-a-dozen friends and they were all bigger than me. Se la vie,” he groaned.
Miranda had been in San Diego when she got the call to meet Vincent Meredith outside the burned out ruin of The Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard. She and Dwayne John had been meeting with groups of Latinos and Hispanics, proselytizing and recruiting for the California Civil Rights Forum. Now that she had fully ‘worked’ herself into her new role every event she organised or community meeting she gate crashed made her feel that tiny little bit less comfortable in her lily white middle class skin.
Dwayne had done most of the driving on this trip because she had been attempting to work up a series of briefing documents for the Governor and a number of draft ‘position papers’ to put before the CCRF. If the new body became a simple builder of bricks for a great wall o
f complaint, or no more than a noisy vent for a hundred years of pent up angst it was going to achieve nothing. The CCRF undeniably had a function as a pressure release valve but that was not what she, in her heart, really believed it was for. The CCRF needed to be heard by the people who mattered and the people who mattered were masters of blocking out heckling and unfocused protest; powerful men – and most of the influential people in the world were still men – learned very early on in their careers how to tune out inconvenient background noise.
She and Dwayne were a good team; he understood where she was coming from and it did no harm at all for him to occasionally ‘drop’ the name of Dr Martin Luther King into conversations that were threatening to turn overly terse. Dwayne had met the great man several times, he had prayed with him, he had sat ten feet away from him as he preached at the Ebenezer Chapel in Atlanta. He had also once attempted to put his overlarge frame between Dr King and an angry bottle and stone throwing mob; but nothing had earned him more kudos than the admission that he had spent much of 1963 playing fast and loose with the FBI acting as one of Dr King’s ‘hares’. That he had eventually been tracked down and unjustly arrested merely added extra spice to those adventures. Moreover, his connections with Dr King and his role within the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, his presence by Miranda’s side gave her an instant credibility of a kind she could not have bought for love or money.
They were not yet lovers.
For one thing even in enlightened California they invariably had to stay in different motels or hotels; for another she suspected the man had no intention of ‘carrying on’ with any woman outside wedlock because that was not the man he was now.
Miranda looked at Sam Brenckmann and felt the tears trickling down her cheeks.
This was all her fault!
She had almost got him killed in the North West on the night of the war. But for her mendacity he would never have been within a thousand miles of Bellingham; and everything would be different.
“I should have said sorry a long time ago,” she blurted.
“For what?” Sam inquired amiably.
“Everything!”
“Nobody put a gun to my head to make me go on that tour Johnny Seiffert booked before the war,” he reminded her, shrugging painfully. “I was already blacklisted in the Bay Area, remember. I can’t remember why. Something to do with not buying my hash from Johnny. Heck, it’s a long time ago now. You look really good with your hair that way...”
While Vincent Meredith was intrigued by the exchange; he was not so intrigued as to be unaware that the clock was ticking. He dug into his jacket pocket and produced a chalky colored pill the size of a dime coin.
“Chew this and swallow it fast,” he directed.
Sam viewed him quizzically.
Miranda was nodding anxiously.
“Just do it, Sam.”
Sam leaned forward and took the pill between his cracked lips.
He crunched it between his teeth, careful to avoid working it between those molars that felt sore and wobbly.
He swallowed and pulled a face at the bitter after taste in his mouth.
“In a few seconds you will start foaming at the mouth, you will feel nauseous, you will be violently sick and you will pass out,” Vincent explained matter-of-factly.
Sam had just swallowed the sour bile generated by chomping on the pill.
“Now,” the attorney said quietly, turning to Miranda, “would be a good time for you to start screaming, Miss Sullivan.”
Chapter 43
Saturday 19th January 1964
Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles, California
“Reggie!” Loretta O’Connell screeched up the broad, polished stairs to the first floor of the newly completed, specially designed house set back fifty yards from the road. “Reggie! There’s two guys here who say they’re from the goddammed IRS!”
When there was no immediate response Loretta, a busty big-haired blond some twenty years her husband’s junior took a drag on her cigarette and went to the foot of the stairs.
“REGGIE!”
Loretta was royally pissed off having to answer the door to Captain O’Connell’s hoodlum and low life friends. Three years ago she had mistakenly got the impression that she was marrying a cop not a small time mobster with connections at City Hall and on days like this she hated having been taken in. Sometimes she honestly wondered if Reggie knew any ‘real’ people; the only people she ever met were movie and TV people on the make, cops she would not trust to keep their hands to themselves in a kindergarten class or a nunnery, and wise guys like the two ‘IRS men’ standing in her porch scratching their crotches.
She thought she heard movement upstairs.
Reggie had had to be carried up the stairs last night; he was so drunk he had pissed himself in the car on the way back to the Hollywood Hills from some benefit he had attended last night.
A benefit!
More likely some studio party where he had had his sticky fingers up some starlets skirt!
“REGGIE!”
“Fuck it, Loretta,” Captain Reginald Carmichael O’Connell of the LAPD cursed angrily as he stumbled to the head of the stairs pulling on a long, lividly colored silk dragon night gown. “Just tell the lunks to fuck off!” With which he turned away muttering to himself. “What the fuck time of day is this!”
“THEY SAY YOU TOLD THEM TO CALL ROUND THIS MORNING!”
Reggie O’Connell halted, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
Too many balls in the air!
I am getting way too old for this shit!
He had very nearly shit himself when the Feds had turned up at Van Nuys and turned over his office. The bastards had turned up here and at his chalet up Loretta did not know about up in the Canyon, too. They had walked off with every piece of paper they could find.
Like I’d be dumb enough to put anything in writing!
As for sequestering of his bank and property records; that was joke!
What was the point of keeping a second set of books if you filed it in a box next to one with a label saying ‘HONEST BOOKS’.
He turned back.
The Feds had been on a fishing expedition. He had warned his friends and clients at City Hall and in the Los Angeles County DA’s Office to expect the Feds on their doorsteps. Nobody was about to break ranks any time soon. Shit like this happened from time to time; afterwards, things soon went back to normal.
“I’M COMING! I’M COMING!”
He stomped down the stairs.
“I’ll deal with this,” he grunted, waving his wife away in the general direction the kitchen. “Make me drink, Babe,” he suggested as an afterthought as Loretta flounced past him in high dudgeon.
He sighed; what fuck is her problem?
Jesus, you would think she had found me between a debutante’s legs! Sometimes I drink too much! Shoot me why don’t you!
Reggie O’Connell peered at the two men, both in their early twenties in the porch. He gestured for them to come in.
“This better be good news,” he growled.
His visitors looked thoughtfully, one to the other.
“Whoever you’re talking to at Irving doesn’t know squat,” the fairer of the two men in cheap, off the peg suits complained. “That club owner you wanted looked after?”
“Doug Weston?”
“He was moved out a couple of days ago. Nobody knows where. Or maybe nobody’s talking to your guy at the Department of Corrections.” The man shrugged, scratched the stubble on his chin and yawned as if he had been up all night. “The DA’s office has lost him, too.”
Reggie O’Connell was suddenly sobering up in a hurry. So much so that the hairs on the back of his neck were starting to stand on end.
“What about Brenckmann?”
“They say he’s knocked up pretty bad. Some guard who isn’t on our payroll broke up the fight. ”
“Knocked up bad? But not dead?”
The younger man shook
his head.
“No, not dead, Chief.”
“FUCK!” Reggie O’Connell’s eyes had narrowed to suspicious, mistrustful slits. “Why the fuck are you telling me this shit? I don’t pay you to tell me this shit!”
The two men looked at him resentfully.
“What do you want us to do, Chief?”
“Nothing! Just fuck off! I need time to think!”
Actually, what he really needed was a drink.
Loretta had already got to the bar ahead of her husband. Although a warm breeze blew into the curving, glassy living room populated with plush chairs and low tables that overlooked the patio and the pool beyond, the atmosphere between the husband and wife was angrily frosty. Reggie O’Connell’s wife had thought that she had had her eyes wide open when she married him – that was why she tried very hard to put as much distance between herself and any of his friends – but had realized the magnitude of her error of her ways in recent months.