by Robert Greer
Scooping up the errant quarters and dropping them into the jar, he peered beyond the backyard toward a marshy strip of land that paralleled the yard’s eastern border. W had always called the cattail-filled strip the bog. Antoine remembered W once telling him, when he was a youngster, that the bog stretched all the way from their backyard to the New England cranberry bogs of Massachusetts. He’d even spent time reading up on cranberry bogs, and he’d been devastated to learn, when he’d finally screwed up the courage to venture out and inspect the bog and assess its cranberry-producing capabilities for himself, that the mysterious bog was no more than a mosquito-infested marsh with a three-foot-wide meandering seasonal creek at its center. A virtual foggy bottom that because of the lay of the land and frequent temperature inversions emitted a low-level ground fog that on the most mystical of occasions had the power to engulf their entire backyard.
Mason jar swinging from his right hand, his mind temporarily clear of Ornasetti, Antoine was a few feet from the house’s partially screened-in back porch when Willette, looking horrified, arms extended skyward, both hands shaking, hobbled down the three wide-plank steps and screamed, “Kennedy’s been shot! Somebody tried to kill the president!”
They nearly collided as Willette, her normally ruddy complected face drained pale from shock, shouted, desperation ringing in each word, “The world’s gone stark ravin’ crazy!”
Eyes narrowed, Antoine draped an arm over his mother’s shoulders and drew her to him. “When did it happen?”
“I … I really don’t know. Somewhere around noon, I think.” A lifelong Democrat and staunch Kennedy supporter, Willette had on more than one occasion felt the painful thud of a policeman’s baton during her efforts to register Negro voters in Mississippi three years earlier.
“Where was he when he got shot?” Antoine asked calmly.
“Dallas. He was ridin’ around in an open-topped car. Would you believe it?” Willette’s eyes glazed over. “Now, who on earth but Jack Kennedy would do somethin’ like that?” She uttered the president’s nickname as if they’d been lifelong friends. “I can’t believe it. Don’t wanna believe it.”
Antoine walked his mother back up the steps, searching for what to do or say next. They took seats on the top step, the same way they always had when seemingly insurmountable problems had surfaced for one or both of them during their lives. Unmindful of Antoine’s less-than-perturbed demeanor, Willette continued to shake. A tear worked its way down one cheek. “The world’s a terrible, unforgiving, treacherous place, Sugar Sweet,” she muttered. “As long as you live, don’t you ever forget that. Things are never exactly what they look like or as peaceful as they seem.”
Remaining silent, Antoine swallowed hard. He glanced back toward the bog that he’d once thought was an endless expanse of marshland and said, “Yeah.” Nodding and embracing Willette, he added, “Can I get you some water, W? Maybe some whiskey?”
“Nope. Holding me’s just fine.”
Aware that W was hurting viscerally, Antoine had the strange sudden sense, although he didn’t fully understand why, that every mother, father, and child in America must be hurting. Their otherwise substantially predictable lives had suddenly been inverted. He had no way of knowing exactly how people in Natchez or Chicago or Boise or even Iowa City really felt about their president being gunned down. Caring about someone, except of course W, wasn’t an emotion he’d ever been much afflicted with. But he could clearly imagine other people’s pain, recognize the hurt suffered by faceless strangers, because he could see that pain crushing his mother.
Drying her eyes with a palm, Willette said, “Let’s go inside and turn on the TV. I wanna see for myself exactly what happened.”
Antoine rose and helped his mother to her feet. “Okay.” His response was matter-of-fact and hollow.
As they turned to go inside, Willette said, “You know, Sugar Sweet, I’m almost afraid to turn on the TV.”
Antoine nodded without answering as he led W, hobbling and shivering, across the porch and toward the back door.
“It’s gonna get worse, Sugar Sweet. I know it. I can feel it in my marrow.”
“Things’ll be okay, W,” Antoine said reassuringly, as his own thoughts galloped miles ahead of America’s gathering tragic story.
“Hope so,” said Willette nodding, and walked through the open back door, aware for the first time how calm and rock-steady Sugar Sweet, the wellspring of her life, seemed to be.
The world learned two hours later that John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the United States and America’s shining Camelot prince, had died in Dallas, Texas, at Parkland Hospital, at 1 p.m. News about the assassination trickled in slowly as for hours Willette watched Walter Cronkite speak in fatherly tones to a doleful America from the glare of her nineteen-inch black-and-white Philco TV, then switched channels to watch Chet Huntley, in his attempt to dampen the nation’s sorrow, talk to the viewing audience as if he were the nation’s bereaved and ever-thoughtful eldest son.
By 7 p.m. Eastern time, the whole world knew that Kennedy’s probable assassin was a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, and when Huntley introduced the audio portion of an August 21, 1963, Oswald interview with WDSU television in New Orleans, the country had been told by every talking head on television that John F. Kennedy’s killer was in custody in Dallas. NBC ran the video portions of the Oswald interview within the hour, and the world watched Oswald, three months before the assassination, meek-looking and pale and appearing as if he were being teleprompted, admit to being a Marxist and a supporter of the pro–Fidel Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Less than six hours after JFK had been pronounced dead, Lee Harvey Oswald had stepped center stage, there for America and all the world to see him as the lone assassin of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The bullet that had killed the president, every news channel was reporting, had also wounded Texas governor John Connally, penetrating his back, spiraling around his rib cage, exiting his chest, and striking him in the right wrist before angling down into his left thigh. All told, the world would later learn, the two men had seven bullet wounds between them.
It was almost 10 p.m. in New Iberia and miserably muggy and hot when Willette Ducane, unwilling to watch the television coverage any longer, rose from her uncomfortable kitchen seat, eyed a somber and strangely puzzled-looking Antoine, who’d stayed through the marathon TV watch with her, and, oblivious to the pain in her toe, said, “I can’t stomach it anymore. I’m goin’ to bed.”
“I can turn it off,” said Antoine. “We can play cards, or go out for something to eat, or maybe just talk.”
“I don’t have the strength,” Willette said, her tone a deep hollow of sadness. “Keep watchin’. You can tell me what else happens.”
“It’s already happened,” Antoine said, recognizing that his mother, captured by some strange sense of denial, wasn’t ready to fully accept the fact that John F. Kennedy was dead and Camelot had ended.
Without responding, Willette moved slowly from the kitchen. Hunched over and burdened with pain, she limped down the short, dim hallway off the kitchen, entered her bedroom, and closed the door.
As the bedroom door clicked shut, Antoine glanced around the kitchen, taking inventory of the seven empty highball glasses that dotted the countertops. Only one of the glasses was his. He’d watched W nervously extract a fresh glass from a cabinet each of the six times she’d mixed herself a rum and Coke during their nine-hour vigil.
Alone and no longer obliged to discuss the sad state of the world, or Cuban dissidents, or Italian rifles, or Dallas police procedure, or the presidential motorcade route with W, Antoine could finally think. The news that Kennedy had been murdered hadn’t fazed him; after all, had things gone as planned in Chicago, he would have been the one occupying the high-shooter catbird seat in an abandoned Chicago warehouse, the Windy City’s equivalent of the Texas School Book Depository. Aside from having news-speak overload, he was as calm as when he’d first encountered his mot
her at close to one o’clock. Forcing back a thoughtful smile, he found himself thinking about something an old running buddy, a man who was now serving out his time on Louisiana’s death row, had once told him: News is only news when you don’t already know the outcome to a story. On that score, at least, his friend, ever the loser, had been right. After all, he’d just sat through nine hours of listening to a news story whose outcome he’d known for weeks.
Even so, there was still something that bothered him. Although he probably knew the intricate details of the Kennedy assassination plot better than anyone—the players, the ruses, the planners, and the roles of the diversionary rogues, right down to the well-calculated trigger time and escape plan—he only knew the details for Chicago.
Kennedy, however, had been killed in Dallas, and there were differences. Huge differences. Differences that didn’t make sense. The assassination had come down in far different fashion from the way it had been mapped in Chicago, and it was that fact that had kept his insides churning for the better part of nine hours.
In Dallas, everything pointed to there being just one shooter, a nutcase named Oswald. The Chicago configuration, on the other hand, had called for a second, ground-level shooter, and so far—though it was early in the investigative process to be sure—there was no hint of such a person. A chill knifed its way from the base of his neck to the tip of his tailbone as he considered the possibility that in the Chicago assassination model, absent a second shooter, he would have been the world’s Lee Harvey Oswald. Breaking into a cold sweat, he rose from his chair, walked over to the sink, turned on the faucet, and drew a glass of water. He drank half the glass before pouring the rest of the water into his palms and splashing it on his face. As water trickled off the tip of his chin and down onto his T-shirt, he had the sudden feeling that he was absolutely, even in his own home, and with W there with him, alone.
He glanced toward his mother’s bedroom, knowing that for once it wasn’t W he needed to be concerned about, or, for that matter, probing policemen or FBI types or newspapermen or even TV talking heads. Who and what he needed to concern himself with that very second, when all was said and done, was Rollie Ornasetti and the money the half-stepping would-be Denver mobster owed him. In the wake of the Kennedy killing and with a little intervening Texas fate, he found himself holding what some Louisiana country folk would define as a virtually unbeatable high hand. He, Sugar Sweet Ducane, had an insider’s knowledge about the crime of the century, and if he played his cards right, he’d milk that knowledge for a lot more than what had started out as a mere $25,000.
Chapter 7
November 24, 1963
Antoine Ducane had never met Jack Ruby, small-time thug, wannabe important Dallas nightclub owner, and former Cuban gun runner with loose ties to the mafia and Santo Trafficante Jr., but the two men, eons apart in most ways that mattered, had two important things in common. In their worlds, both liked the limelight and notoriety of being center stage, and, more importantly in their lines of work, both men could be counted on to keep their mouths shut.
Something of a clotheshorse and jewelry hog, Ruby, decked out in a fourteen-carat gold, diamond-studded LeCoultre watch, a flashy silk necktie, and a gold-plated tie clasp, had used his Dallas Police Department connections to worm his way to within a block of Dallas police headquarters some forty-six hours after JFK’s death as Lee Harvey Oswald, a man now pegged as the president’s killer by nearly everyone in the United States and the world, was being transferred from headquarters to the county jail. It was almost 11 a.m. straight up.
Sugar Sweet Ducane had spent the greater portion of those same forty-six hours comforting his still shaken mother and intermittently jotting pages of notes and sketches into a spiral-bound notebook—notes that capsulized, in a rambling and diagrammatic fashion, his role in the scrubbed JFK assassination plot in Chicago.
After analyzing the composite picture of the Dallas assassination, one that he still couldn’t quite match up with the one in Chicago, he’d decided hours earlier to confront Rollie Ornasetti and run a bluff that might earn him double what he should’ve earned in Chicago. An hour earlier he had grabbed a suitcase out of his closet and packed a week’s worth of clothes. He’d decided not to tell W he was leaving until the last minute because he didn’t want her to have to deal for too long with the fact that he was leaving so soon again, especially in her grief-stricken stage. But he had to go. Had to come to terms with someone who’d reneged on a promise. In his world, standing center stage, never playing second fiddle, and being flush with money were pretty much equivalent, and Ornasetti had scammed him on all three. Besides, Ornasetti needed to be taught that one never welshes on a contract. Welshing was bad for business all around, and “pulling the juice,” as it was referred to in Antoine’s circle of independent contractors, simply wasn’t done.
He knew he’d be up against a call on his own life if he handled Ornasetti the wrong way. Ornasetti after all was family, and he was just country boy Sugar Sweet Ducane, an outside jobber looking to be reimbursed for a hit that had never gone down. He had a hard sell, any way you sliced it, so he couldn’t expect help with getting his money or support from organizational higher ground. He’d simply have to come to terms with Ornasetti on his own.
He did have one hole card. It was a card he wasn’t sure he could count on, and he’d never tip that hand to Ornasetti, but W, ever reluctant to admit it, had known Carlos Marcello, some said intimately, for years. He had never mentioned that fact to anyone when he was in Chicago—there would have been no point to it. It never paid for people who weren’t family, especially contractors, to try to worm their way uninvited inside a closed circle by dropping names. It was a cardinal rule. Marcello would have mentioned knowing W to Ornasetti if the need had arisen, and he hadn’t.
Now, as Antoine sat across the table from W, watching an endless stream of black-and-white, mind-numbing assassination images on the kitchen TV, he paused briefly from jotting notes into the notebook he slipped between the pages of a newspaper and turned his attention to the TV.
“You think that Oswald guy really killed Kennedy?” Willette asked, buttering a slice of toaster-charred Jewish rye.
“Everybody’s saying he did.”
“I didn’t ask you what everyone else is sayin’, Sugar Sweet. I asked you if you thought he did.” Willette studied Antoine curiously. “You’ve been soundin’ real strange all mornin’, honey, kinda evasive, if you get my drift. And here you been all mornin’ watchin’ TV and writin’ and drawin’ in that notebook.” She eyed the notebook and newspaper suspiciously. “I ask you a question about the shootin’ and you punt. I ask you how someone could get to the sixth floor of that book depository buildin’ reporters keep talking about, totin’ a rifle no less, and shoot the president of the United States, and you practically clam up. I say to you, did this guy Oswald pull the trigger or not, and you pass the buck. You got some kinda pipeline on this thing you ain’t tellin’ me about, Sugar Sweet?”
“No.”
“Good.” Willette sounded relieved. “So the next time I ask you a question about this assassination thing, you’ll fork up your opinion right off?”
Antoine smiled. “Sure will.”
Taking a bite of toast and trying her best to curb her suspicion, Willette said, “Fine. ’Cause I’ll have one or two comin’ at ya right up.”
Jack Ruby entered the basement of the Dallas police headquarters by way of the alley that separated the building from the Western Union building just across from it. Near the alley’s midpoint, the door to the first floor of the police building offered ready inside access. Ruby entered the door nonchalantly and, breathing heavily, made his way to the basement via a fire stairway. The stairway door was supposed to be secured, but it wasn’t. Jack Ruby had fully expected that.
Willette paused from looking at TV and glanced across the kitchen table at Antoine. Emotionally drained, her voice was sorrowfully deep. “They’re moving that bastard, Oswald.
Right on television for all the world to see,” she said, her eyes glued back on the TV screen.
Seconds later, a gaunt-looking Lee Harvey Oswald, the man purported to have killed John F. Kennedy, appeared on the screen. His left arm was held by a detective later identified as L. C. Graves. To Oswald’s right was Detective J. R. Leavelle. A third Dallas police detective walked just behind Oswald. As television cameras showed Oswald moving into the wall of spectators that stood about twelve feet from the jail office door, Jack Ruby stepped out from behind a newsman and a cop, extended his right hand, in which he held a .38-caliber revolver, and fired point-blank at Oswald.
“What the shit?” screamed Willette, watching Oswald grimace and clutch at his stomach. With TV cameras rolling and with the nation watching, the same way as a less-sorrowful nation had been watching two days before, Jack Ruby, with the camera lens of history focused his way, had fired a fatal shot, not at the president this time but at the president’s purported assassin. Ruby was immediately wrestled to the floor by Graves, disarmed, and subdued by other officers. “I think somebody shot him!” Willette screamed. “Somebody in the crowd just shot Oswald.”
Dumbfounded, Antoine sat forward in his seat, eyes burning, his insides suddenly on fire.
Oswald, lying on the floor, badly wounded and in obvious agony, was asked by someone who appeared out of nowhere with a microphone if he wanted to make a statement. He shook his head no.
“They shot him, they shot him!” Willette continued screaming, as if Antoine hadn’t just witnessed the very same thing.
“I’ll be damned.” Antoine’s words, rather than being capped with surprise, were words of simple recognition.