Frame 232

by Wil Mara

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll call back shortly,” he was told, and the line went dead.

  That’ll make four calls since the woman got home, Birk noted.

  Rydell emerged from his private bathroom a moment later. He got behind his computer and tried to refocus on his formal duties, but it was proving increasingly difficult. He opened a password-protected file—one of hundreds—stored in a hidden folder that would be automatically deleted if anyone else tried to access it.

  The file was an ordinary Microsoft Word document. It contained a simple list of names, all female. There were forty-two in total, and thirty-seven had been crossed out using the strikethrough feature, like completed items on a to-do list. Margaret Baker was one of the remaining five.

  Rydell had compiled the list—local women who fit the description and lived in the area—not long after the legend of the Babushka Lady had begun to take shape. He had scrutinized the few photos from Dealey Plaza where she was visible and built up a profile. He had certain advantages that the conspiracists did not, such as images that had been quietly confiscated through the years. As more criteria were applied, the list got smaller.

  Of course, the methodology was far from exact; the subject could have been from out of town, for example. But he had to try. He had each of the forty-two women monitored over the years and did not cross out their names until they were dead or until he was absolutely convinced of their noncomplicity. By the time the list had shrunk to five—number six had been a retired schoolteacher from West Plano who died in a head-on collision on Interstate 635 seven months ago—he seriously doubted the mythical Babushka Lady, or her film, would ever be found. And with his escape drawing closer every day, he had found it increasingly harder to care . . . until now.

  He scrolled down the list until he got to Baker. The indisputable evidence wasn’t there yet, but Rydell could feel it. After more than half a century in this game, his instincts were animal-sharp. She’s the one.

  If this was correct, then she had been clever. She had sensed the potential dangers and had acted accordingly. The safe-deposit box registered to and maintained by the law firm had been a shrewd move, very shrewd. Keeping her mouth shut had been smart too. Rydell knew all about keeping secrets. It required a brand of discipline most people didn’t possess. Margaret Baker had known the bad guys were out there, waiting in the shadows. The liberals didn’t want to believe that. They bandied the word paranoid about like it was a trait of which one should be ashamed. But Rydell knew better. A little paranoia went a long way in this world. Margaret Baker certainly recognized this fact. A part of Rydell admired her for that. But a larger part was irritated at having been outsmarted. There was no way he was going to let this dead woman take him down now.

  The Kennedy affair was ancient history in his mind, and he had dealt with it long enough.

  7

  SHEILA WENT into the basement and found the old projector. It was in a storage area near the furnace, in a cardboard box among dozens of others. There were other reels with it, all in the same little yellow cases. Each one had the subject printed in pen on the spine—Trip to Organ Pipe Nat’l Park or Vegas, 1971. The one that had been waiting for her at the bank didn’t have any such labeling.

  There was a room away from the furnace that featured faux-walnut paneling, a ratty carpet, cheap furniture, and fluorescent lights. When Sheila was a child, this had been her playroom. Her parents had given her piles of toys, crayons, markers, paints, coloring books, stuffed animals, and so on and told her to make as much of a mess as she pleased—just leave the rest of the house in order. She remembered having friends down here who thought it was the coolest thing in the world to have a room where you could do anything you wanted. Sheila soon became the most popular kid in the neighborhood. As a teenager, she transformed it into a hangout, replacing the stuffed animals and coloring books with a stereo, black-and-white TV, yard-sale coffee table, and her parents’ old couch and love seat. The Eagles and Peter Frampton were favorites, and she had a Paul McCartney & Wings poster on the wall. The poster and TV set were gone now, but the couches, table, and stereo were still there, collecting dust.

  She plugged the projector into an extension cord and switched it on. The fan started blowing, and a large rectangle of light appeared on the wall. Satisfied that it was in working order, she turned it off again and, with surgical delicacy, fed the film through the gears.

  Maybe it’s deteriorated and this’ll all be moot, she thought—even hoped a little. Unlikely, but there was always a chance.

  She turned the projector on again, and the reel began turning. At first there was nothing but flecks and scratches and a sideways scrawl of benign characters. Then the first images appeared.

  Dealey Plaza on a clear autumn day. People everywhere, lining the streets, creating a human hallway. Some are clapping, pointing, waving flags. They are eager to see their popular young president and his pretty wife. Some female spectators are already wearing their hair like Jackie’s. A white pergola is visible in the left side of the frame. A man in a dark suit is standing atop one of its pedestals, holding a movie camera.

  The first of three officers on motorcycles appears, hugging the inside curve that connects Houston to Elm. His uniform is navy blue, offset by the white helmet and the white hardware of his bike. Two other officers follow, covering the middle and far side of Elm.

  Then the limousine, with a pair of small flags flapping from the front corners. It is crawling along at maybe ten miles per hour. As it comes into full view, so do the six passengers. President Kennedy and the First Lady are in the back. He is wearing a simple gray suit and a blue tie. Her Chanel outfit is pink wool with a matching pillbox hat. The president seems relaxed, upbeat. As he and his wife wave to the crowd, three more motorcycle patrolmen take up the rear.

  Up to this point, Sheila had not been able to spot the evidence her mother had cited as proof that Oswald had not acted alone. But now she did.

  There, in the Elm Street storm drain, the head of a man appears. He has very dark, bushy hair and eyes that seem even darker.

  For a flicker of an instant, Sheila wondered if perhaps he was just another Secret Service agent, one who had simply escaped notice until now. But then . . .

  The man’s arms come up. He is holding what appears to be a rifle. He turns once, aware of the limousine’s approach. Then the limo rolls into view and eclipses him. The storm drain will not be visible again.

  Sheila watched the remainder of the film in silent astonishment.

  A firecracker pop! pierces the air, and the president lurches forward and to his left, covering his throat with clenched fists. His puzzled wife puts an arm around him, perhaps thinking he is choking. Governor Connally, sitting in front of the president, turns away from the camera and back to Kennedy, barely aware that he, too, has been hit. One of the agents riding on the running board of the car trailing the limousine is among the first to react. He leaps off and starts forward.

  A second shot comes. The president does not react to it. The First Lady is leaning down, trying to communicate with him. At the same time, Nellie Connally is pulling her own husband into her lap. The sprinting agent has yet to reach the vehicle.

  The third shot arrives, traveling roughly 1,300 miles per hour and striking the president on the side of his head opposite Margaret Baker’s vantage point. A horrid pink spray of blood, bone, and tissue cascades into the air, and Kennedy slumps over.

  The First Lady climbs from the backseat and picks a piece of her husband’s head off the trunk. She will later claim to have no memory of performing this ghastly act. The Secret Service agent from the car behind the president’s finally arrives, stepping up onto the rear bumper and pushing Jackie back while screaming something to the driver. The vehicle’s speed increases as it heads beneath the triple overpass.

  Many spectators have dropped to the ground, including several parents covering small children. The limousine disappears, and the camera view turns
crazily to one side for a moment before the film comes to an end.

  Sheila sat there for a long time, lost in thought as the humming projector cast a bright square on the wall. The unimaginable realities of the situation swam through her mind like tiny, psychotic fish—My mother really was there. . . . And she captured a second assassin on film . . . a film no one else has ever seen . . . and that some people would probably kill for.

  She had what she considered an average awareness of the assassination. She knew the date, the location, a little bit about Oswald, and the fact that there were about a hundred conspiracy theories. She knew they ranged from reasonable to ridiculous, but she didn’t know many of the details. She thought she’d also heard something about a government committee in the seventies declaring that there probably was a conspiracy, meaning the government officially believed Oswald hadn’t acted alone. But she didn’t know much beyond that.

  She went upstairs again, to the little room at the back of the house where her parents would sit on Tuesday evenings and pay their bills. It was the closest thing to an office they had. In a temporary spurt of modernistic euphoria, her mother had purchased a computer and tried her best to join the cybergeneration. In the end, she got the hang of e-mail and found a few online games she liked, but she still paid the electric and phone companies by putting a check in an envelope each month.

  Sheila went to Google and searched for details about what she’d just seen.

  She discovered that the man standing on the pergola was Abraham Zapruder, the guy who’d shot the shaky film of the assassination that everyone had seen in movies, in documentaries, and on YouTube. The younger woman standing behind him was his receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman. She was there to steady him because he suffered from vertigo.

  Sheila found another website that had all sorts of information about Kennedy’s limousine. It was a customized midnight-blue 1961 Lincoln, and its plastic bubble had been removed and the bulletproof windows rolled down due to the warm weather. The president had been advised not to allow this because the Secret Service considered Dallas a “hot” city—too hostile, too many potential enemies. But he didn’t want to appear too much like a royal, separate from and superior to his subjects. The man driving the limousine was agent William Greer, and sitting next to him was fellow agent Roy Kellerman. Sheila already knew former Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, in the seats behind them.

  She next went to Google Images and typed in babushka lady kennedy assassination. This produced more than 3,500 results, but there were only six different shots from Dealey Plaza in total. She went numb when she saw the woman in the photos—it was, without question, her mother. In spite of the fact that none of the shots displayed any distinguishing features, Sheila knew it was her. It was those subtleties, recognizable only by those who knew a person best—the way her mom had planted her feet well apart in order to steady herself and, in another photo, how she kept her head slightly bowed as she crossed to the other side of Elm.

  Now it all became real—it became there. Something right in front of her that could no longer be doubted or denied.

  The film was a big thing. No, more than big—enormous. Evidence of a second shooter . . . the proof conspiracy theorists have been seeking for a generation. A bona fide piece of history. Just the thought of it made her feel weak and vulnerable. This was miles out of her league, well beyond anything she could handle. She was smart and tough and shrewd, like her mother and father. But this was something on an altogether different level.

  Her mother had been right—she couldn’t turn to either the media or the government. The former would have a field day. They’d parade her around, expose and stain her mama’s memory, and cultivate the story into forty others. They had columns to write and space to fill. People would be knocking on her door around the clock. And the government . . . Sheila still believed there were good people in power, but to disregard the corruption and self-aggrandizement was to be chronically naive. The film would be used as political hay for both sides, serving every purpose but the right one. Maybe the final pieces to the puzzle really were somewhere within those several minutes of celluloid. But would the salient facts ever reach the surface?

  Yet she couldn’t destroy it. A part of her wanted to. Then it would be gone and no one would be any the wiser—problem solved. But what about the truth? What about justice? Some of the people who’d perpetrated this crime might still be out there, enjoying their freedom. Wasn’t it about time they received the wages of their sins? And what of the surviving Kennedys? How much suffering had the family endured? How many tragic deaths? What about the president’s daughter Caroline, just five years old at the time? What must it have been like for her, being told her father was gone and never coming back? Did she wonder, even now, who was responsible? From her point of view, the politics didn’t matter. She was simply another child who’d lost a loving parent. In a strange way, Sheila felt some kind of connection to her at that moment. I can’t destroy the film. It might hold the answer. Something has to be done . . . but what?

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to mentally step back from the situation. It needed to be viewed from a pragmatic and unemotional perspective. I need help was the first thought that surfaced. There’s no way I can handle this alone. Then she followed the same logical pathway her mother had all those years ago. The government . . . no. It was just too fraught with uncertainty and danger. Too many variables. Too many people with their own agendas, and the corruption was so out of control these days. The media . . . also no. There were so few unbiased journalistic outlets now. When she wanted to keep up with current events, she went to the Lehrer site on PBS. That was about as close to objective as it got. But even there . . . This is a trust issue, she realized. It’s about that one word—trust. Whom can I actually trust?

  “I need someone powerful,” she said out loud, “yet completely trustworthy.” Then she added bitterly, “Yeah, no problem.”

  She turned back to the computer and started a fresh Google search. She typed in most trustworthy powerful people. Ironically, Walter Cronkite came up on the first page. He would’ve been perfect, she thought, but since he’s no longer with us . . .

  Former president Jimmy Carter also appeared on the list, and for a long moment Sheila seriously considered him. He was long out of office now and wouldn’t have any political ambitions. He had also, in her opinion, proven himself to be a man of outstanding character; his tireless humanitarian efforts had defined his postpresidential career. But he’s really getting up there in years, and how would I go about contacting him in the first place? Who among his staff would give me the time of day if I approached them with this? She kept trolling through the search results, discarding one after another.

  Then she came to a link that brought her to a halt. It was a young billionaire from New Hampshire. She did a new search with only his name and got more than 4,500 hits. He was considered an adventurer of sorts who specialized in unsolved mysteries. He financed his activities out of his own pocket and, according to one article, never asked for any kind of compensation from those he helped. One blogger referred to him as a “modern-day cross between Robin Hood and Jack Webb from Dragnet.” Another site described him in less-than-glowing terms as a bored rich kid who stuck his nose in places where it didn’t belong. It wasn’t until the fourteenth page—a reprinted article from a CNN archive—that Sheila made up her mind. According to the piece, this man had lost more than a hundred million dollars in assets when a foreign government seized one of his company’s factories in retaliation for refusing to reveal the identity of the citizen who had aided him in his search for Michael Rockefeller.

  The man’s name was Jason Hammond.

  8

  HAMMOND’S GULFSTREAM G550 soared northward over Pennsylvania, two thousand feet above a cloud field and surrounded by a shimmering blue that stretched into eternity. Inside the cabin, Hammond sat at a tiny table with an executive telephone that had about a hundred bu
ttons on it.

  “So you would say the TIGHAR people cooperated with you at every stage?” the caller asked through the speaker. This was Reuters journalist David Weldon, and the acronym referred to The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.

  “They were great,” Hammond said. “Just terrific. As you might imagine, they wanted to get this mystery solved as much as I did. It really was an honor to be a part of it.”

  “But they worked on Earhart’s disappearance for years, some of them for decades. And here you come along, more or less a stranger, with your money and your connections. Don’t you think a little jealousy and resentment are to be expected?” Weldon added quickly, “I’m not trying to be, you know, a jerk or anything. I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”

  “Sure, I understand. I didn’t sense any of that. I didn’t see myself as some kind of savior to the project, but rather someone helping to find the last few pieces of the puzzle. They would’ve found those pieces whether I was there or not.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “I am. It was funding they lacked most of all, David, and I was happy to provide it.”

  David Weldon was the only member of the media Hammond would speak with. Weldon was in his midtwenties and technically still just a junior reporter, years away from veteran status. But Hammond liked the way he approached his work. He asked good questions, and he didn’t waste time on nonsensical stuff. In Weldon’s last position, he was fired because he refused to dig into the private life of a Hollywood celebrity to find out if the man’s ten-year-old daughter was really dying of an inoperable brain tumor. Hammond was impressed by that kind of integrity.

  “Incredible. Okay, well, I think I’ve got everything I need.”

  “Good. If you have any other questions, feel free to give me a call. And I’ll send you my notes as soon as I’ve had the chance to transcribe them out of my indecipherable script and onto a computer screen.”