Destination Dealey: Countdown to the Kennedy Conspiracy

by L. D. C. Fitzgerald

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

  12:48 PM – CST

  Dallas City Transportation employee William Whaley dropped off a fare in front of the Greyhound Bus Terminal at Lamar and Jackson Streets, a quarter mile southeast of Dealey Plaza. He turned off the ignition of the 1961 Checker Cab. Feeling like having a butt, he got out, intending to buy a package of cigarettes. Then he spied a potential passenger walking toward him from the direction of Commerce. Perhaps the smokes could wait.

  Squinting his small, inset eyes, the cabbie scrutinized the guy. Thirty-seven years of experience had taught him to look at a man and be able to tell whether he could be trusted or not. You had to be able to judge people. If a man asked you to wait while he entered a building, you had to know whether to agree, or to ask for a five-dollar bill as insurance. This particular individual wore faded blue khaki trousers with a brown button-down shirt. Disheveled, but maybe okay.

  “May I have the cab?”

  “Sure you can.” Whaley nodded warily. “Get in.” He observed the loner climb into the front seat—unusual, but allowable. He began to second-guess his decision. The guy looked like a wino who had been off his bottle for about two days. He must have slept in his clothes. Shoot. These winos, they get in and ride with you and don’t pay, and there isn’t nothing you can do about it. Sure, you can call the police, but the city gets the fine and you get nothing.

  The taxi driver eased his stocky frame into the car. “Where to, buddy?”

  The man stared straight ahead. “500 North Beckley.”

  As Whaley started the vehicle, he furrowed his brow at the commotion. Sirens screamed, with police cruisers crisscrossing everywhere. Just a big uproar in that end of town. “What the hell. I wonder what the hell is the uproar?”

  His customer never replied. Huh. Must be one of those people that don’t like to talk. Whaley refrained from speaking for the remainder of the journey, noticing that the din faded as they vacated the downtown area.

  Six minutes later, they reached the 700 block of North Beckley Avenue near the corner of Neely Street. The passenger scanned the neighborhood. “This will do fine.”

  Whaley immediately pulled over to the curb, where his rider paid him a one-dollar bill for a ninety-five-cent fare. Cheapskate.

  Whaley sighed. At least he hadn’t been stiffed. After the man exited and crossed the road, he put the car in gear and moved on.

  12:59 PM – CST

  “Come on, let’s go. I’m driving.” Having overcome her initial shock, Iggy tried to get Dee to pick up the pace. She unlocked the door to the pink and black Ford, still parked in the alleyway behind the Carousel.

  Dee shambled toward the car and slid into the front seat. She and Iggy had frantically searched Dealey Plaza for signs of Bick, Quin, and Sera, while circumventing the police. Their friends were nowhere to be found. With both the Chevy and Bick’s bike gone, they presumed that the team members were chasing the presidential killers. Sam was simply MIA. “What if Bick’s in danger?” Dee felt physical pain shooting through her body at the thought. “Or Quin and Sera, for that matter?”

  “Everyone is going to be okay. You have to have faith.” Iggy drove out to Field Street.

  Dee slumped. “What’s the point? I had faith in the mission, and look where that got us. We failed cataclysmically.”

  Iggy stopped the car on the side of the road and turned to Dee. “Don’t go into a tailspin on me now. We must stay focused. The first order of business is to obtain information. We have to go home and see if anyone has returned. If J.D.’s not there, we have to locate him. Those assassins could still be at large.”

  1:00 PM – CST

  Mrs. Earlene Roberts adjusted the rabbit ears on the television set at 1026 North Beckley Avenue where she lived and worked as a housekeeper. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t shirk her duties. A diabetic, she needed her job so she could pay her doctor bills and buy medicine. She hadn’t always worked. Her husband had made her a good living, but he had passed. Her only regret was having married so young. To her sorrows, she had left school in the ninth grade to be wed.

  However, today a friend had called to report the news that President Kennedy had been shot. Mrs. Roberts thought the woman was pulling her leg. Now, she was trying to clear up the TV reception to find out. She could hear them talking, but couldn’t get the picture to show.

  At one o’clock pm, a boarder entered the residence walking unusually fast. Mrs. Roberts knew him as Mr. O.H. Lee, the name he had registered under five weeks previously. That’s when she’d rented the room to him for eight dollars a week. Although Mrs. Johnson owned the place, Mrs. Roberts kept track of the vacancies and collected rent.

  Funny, Lee had never come home last night, which was unusual. He typically disappeared over the weekends, not on weeknights. She watched him making tracks pretty fast. “Oh, you are in a hurry.”

  The tenant didn’t respond as he scurried into his room, right on the other side of the little wall from the housekeeper’s quarters. She wasn’t muchly surprised. The man wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t say nothing. Sometimes she would say, “Good afternoon,” and he would give her a dirty look.

  Three minutes later, the renter emerged, zipping up a lightweight gray jacket over his brown-collared shirt. He never said a thing; not nothing. He strode out the door and crossed the street. Mrs. Roberts frowned at his rude behavior. It was to her sorrows she had ever rented to him in the first place. She returned her attention to fixing the TV, since they was broadcasting about President Kennedy. She was more interested in that.

  1:11 PM – CST

  J.D. Tippit was coasting along West Jefferson Boulevard, beyond his normal district, number 78. All downtown patrol squads had been ordered to report to the Book Depository at Elm and Houston, code three, meaning lights and sirens. Since the general Oak Cliff area would be drained of officers, the dispatcher had instructed Tippit to cover central Oak Cliff and remain at large for any emergencies.

  Something had gone horribly wrong with the plan to protect the President and First Lady. J.D. moved through the motions of his beat, but felt as if he were surveying his actions from the outside. Had the KGB escaped? Would it have made a difference had he been there?

  With questions flooding his mind, J.D. parked squad car number 10 in an angular space along the Boulevard near the corner of Bishop Avenue. He entered the Top Ten Records Shop. Nodding to owner Dub Stark and clerk Louis Cortinas, he asked if he could make a call. J.D. grabbed the receiver from the phone mounted on the sales counter, dialed seven digits, and waited while it rang. And rang. And rang. Frustrated, he hung up and jogged out of the store without uttering another word.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

  1:12 PM – CST

  Keys crashed to the porch floor as Iggy mishandled them in her haste to enter home base at 429 East Tenth Street. The phone had been ringing, but ceased before she could slot the key into the lock.

  “Dammit!” Dee kicked the door. “That could have been a team member who needed us.”

  Iggy finally managed to open the door.

  “Or maybe it was J.D.” Dread balled up in Dee’s gut. “How are we going to explain this to him?”

  1:13 PM – CST

  Viktor gazed out the window of the Rambler and saw the same dilapidated barbecue joint whiz by as they fled past. He recognized its memorable plastic cow on the roof above a sign advertising Real Pit B-B-Q!

  They were driving in circles.

  Viktor whipped his head toward Kon. “Are you insane? We have to reach the rendezvous point before it’s too late.”

  “In case you hadn’t been paying attention, the Americans are still on our tail.” Kon gestured behind them with a quick upward jerk of his chin. “It wouldn’t be wise to let them know where we are going. We have to shake them first.”

  Viktor braced his hand on the roof as they careened around another corner. “Leonid is a man of
stature. A significant man.” His voice was strained. “He won’t risk exposure by waiting around for a couple of worker drones like us.”

  Kon knew the section chief couldn’t afford to leave any loose ends. “Trust me. He’ll wait.”

  1:14 PM – CST

  Officer Tippit motored east along Tenth Street, a largely residential neighborhood in Oak Cliff, burning for resolution to his questions. He had just reached the cross street of Patton Avenue when he noticed a man stalking ahead of him in the same direction on the right-hand sidewalk. The time-travelers’ residence stood a block down, on the near-left corner of Tenth and Denver. The guy was hurrying along, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. What was his purpose?

  The on-duty cop rolled through the intersection and continued one hundred feet to pull up alongside. He ticked off the subject’s characteristics in his mind: male, slender build, light-colored jacket, Caucasian. As the man stopped to gawk back, J.D. peered at his face. Recognition dawned. Maybe this pathetic miscreant had some information.

  J.D. engaged the parking gear and called out through the open vent window on the passenger side, “Come here, son. I want to have a word with you.”

  Lee Harvey Oswald hesitated, and then approached squad car number 10.

  1:15 PM – CST

  Iggy and Dee returned to the front porch to wait for the reunion of the team. They had come to the conclusion that there was nothing else they could do at the moment.

  Dee glanced to her right. A parked police cruiser faced them down the block near Patton Avenue. Could it be? The cop sat in the driver’s seat while a man leaned onto the passenger doorframe from the outside. They seemed to be having an amicable conversation through the open window. She watched in confusion as the patrolman got out and headed toward the front of the vehicle.

  It was J.D.

  “Look!” Dee pointed to alert Iggy.

  The citizen straightened and moved away from the car. His self-satisfied smirk exposed his identity. Oswald.

  Primal panic consumed Dee. “Granddad!” she shouted, hoarse with terror.

  Startled, J.D. turned toward the sound of her voice as he came abreast of the driver’s-side front tire. His face registered shock, and then realization, followed by pride.

  “No! He’s one of them!”

  J.D. was distracted for a fraction of a second too long. He reached for his firearm, but Oswald had already drawn the revolver from his jacket pocket, giving the policeman scant time to defend himself.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! In a cowardly act of heinous violence, the sociopath shot J.D. point-blank in the chest, shattering the placid calm of the sunlit neighborhood. The thirty-nine-year-old dedicated law enforcement professional clutched his abdomen and crumpled forward, falling to the pavement in a pool of spreading blood. His cap fell and skittered away, landing several feet from his prone body.

  Dee howled in heart-wrenching anguish as Oswald stepped closer and fired once more into the slain officer’s head.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963

  1:16 PM - CST

  Dee gasped. This is not happening. This is not happening. This cannot be happening. She stared down the street as Oswald turned his attention toward her and Iggy, pointing the gun in a menacing fashion. On the far corner of Tenth and Patton, a woman who had witnessed the savage murder began wailing and sobbing in hysterics.

  “Oh, my God.” Iggy grabbed Dee’s arm. No time to think, no time to cry. She hauled her friend off the porch, dragged her over the lawn, and darted straight across Tenth Street. They ran for their lives south down Denver, the road parallel to Patton, attempting to put as much space as possible between themselves and the gunman. He would surely follow.

  1:17 PM – CST

  William Scoggins crouched low outside the driver’s-side door of his taxi in Oak Cliff, trying to hide. A cabbie for less than two years, the forty-nine-year-old had held many jobs since leaving school after the eighth grade. He called it kind of a mixed-up life after having been around quite a while in different places and things. None of it would prove as dangerous as today.

  On lunch break, he had driven to Patton Avenue, where he belonged to a gentlemen’s domino-playing club. He’d had to go plumb up to the corner of Tenth before finding a parking spot, facing north, right close to where the stop sign had been knocked over in a wreck previously. As he passed by the domino parlor, one of the guys had hollered out that the president had been shot. At the time, he’d thought it was some kind of joke. But after entering the establishment, the club member told him the facts about it, and he watched the deal on the television. The deal about the president.

  Returning to his taxi to eat lunch, Scoggins had seen the police car cruising east on Tenth, and the pedestrian with the light-colored jacket. He didn’t pay too much attention. After taking one or two bites of his sandwich and drinking a couple of swallows out of his Coke, he heard the shots—three or four, in that neighborhood. They was fast. He saw the murdered officer fall. Then the killer was coming around, so he decided to get out of sight. Any time that there was something going on, that was the one thing the cab driver wanted to do. Get away from the cab. Because the man was going to try to jump in the cab and ask to be taken somewhere, or even shoot the driver, too. Scoggins got out and started to cross the street, but realized he didn’t have enough time. So that’s how he ended up hunkered down next to the taxi.

  In his whole life, this was the first time he ever seen anything like that happen, and he was pretty well excited and mixed up. Not knowing what to do or what not to do. He peeked through the car windows at the gunman, who cut across a yard on the corner and crashed through an opening in the shrubbery. The criminal held a pistol in his left hand with the barrel straight up, ejecting spent cartridges and reloading bullets with his right hand. He loped forward, kind of trotting closer, not seeming to be in too big of a hurry. Thankfully, he passed the taxi without incident.

  Scoggins jumped back into the cab and radioed his dispatcher to report the violent crime.

  1:18 PM – CST

  When Iggy and Dee reached East Jefferson Boulevard, Iggy pelted toward the right. However, Dee hesitated. That direction led back toward Oswald.

  Iggy stopped to breathlessly explain, “No. Logic dictates he followed us from Tenth and will come south down Denver, just like we did. He’ll expect us to veer left, away from the scene. We’ll outfox him by heading toward the business district. Besides, it will be more crowded, and there’s safety in numbers.”

  Dee nodded uncertainly. They bolted right on Jefferson, charging west past a used-car lot.

  1:19 PM – CST

  At Dootch Motors, 501 East Jefferson Boulevard on the corner of Patton Avenue, used-car salesman Ted Callaway had been standing on the front porch of the office when he heard what sounded like a series of pistol shots. They seemed to have come from the back of the lot over toward Tenth Street. Running out to the sidewalk on Patton, the forty-year-old observed a man in a light gray windbreaker jacket cutting from the east side of Patton to the west. He was coming at a good steady trot, not real fast. He held a gun high in his right hand in a manner Callaway recognized from his years in the Marine Corps—a raised pistol position—with the muzzle pointed upward, and the arm bent at the elbow. The gunman’s face looked pale, deathly white, as he passed Callaway on the opposite sidewalk.

  Perplexed, Callaway hollered, “Hey, man, what the hell is going on?”

  About five-foot, ten-inches with dark hair, the guy slowed his pace and almost halted. He looked right at Callaway and said something unintelligible. Then he kind of shrugged his shoulders and kept on going.

  Callaway turned to find his colleague behind him. “Keep an eye on that guy. Follow him. I am going to go down there and see what is going on.”

  B.D. Searcy could sense the static electricity of danger prickling in the air. “Follow him? Hell, that man will kill you. He has a gun.”

  The salesman shook his head. Wh
y wouldn’t Searcy just follow that man? You could follow fifty yards behind him and keep a guy in sight. Chances are you wouldn’t get killed fifty yards away.

  The simple sanity and common sense in Searcy’s attitude were lost on Callaway.

  As the suspicious individual turned right on Jefferson, Callaway broke into a good, hard run in the other direction, toward the corner of Tenth and Patton.

  1:20 PM – CST

  Kachung! The turquoise Chevy Impala slammed into a pothole on Lemmon Avenue, bottoming out and bouncing Sera and Quin off the three-tone bench seat.

  Sera white-knuckled the steering wheel as they sped back toward downtown again. This endless chase was shredding her nerves. Something had to give. She eased up on the gas pedal and let the green Rambler gain ground.

  Quin leaned forward on the passenger side, using body English to will her to accelerate. “Step on it!”

  Without warning, the KGB made a screeching right onto Wycliff Avenue, while Sera followed at a more moderate pace. When they rounded the corner, their quarry had disappeared. She continued in a straight line, apparently unperturbed.

  Quin swiveled his head wildly at the cross streets on either side. He saw the Rambler’s ass zooming down Rawlins. “That’s them! Go! Turn right!”

  Sera feigned deafness as she sailed past the intersection.

  “You lost them! It is inconceivable you lost them after all this time. What the hell were you thinking?” Quin smacked the dashboard with his open palms. “I told you, you shoulda let me drive.”

  “Will you shut up about who’s driving? I was thinking we can’t circle around Dallas until we run out of fuel. I know what I’m doing. And I’m pretty sure I know where they’re going.”

  “Pretty sure? Pretty sure?”

  “Don’t worry. I have a hunch.” Sera gave him a smug smile. “And my hunches usually turn out to be correct.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX