She sipped at a glass of water we’d provided.
Then she picked up: “Monday night, I got here at my normal time, a quarter till eight, and there were two men waiting at the landing halfway up the stairs. I wasn’t concerned because a lot of times people going to the Colony would wait there for the rest of their party to catch up. As I got to the landing, the taller of the two men stepped forward. He showed me FBI identification. Said, ‘Young lady, we understand you were taking pictures when the President was killed.’ I said, ‘Yes sir, I was.’ Said, ‘Have you had the film developed yet?’ I said, ‘No sir, I haven’t.’ Said, ‘Where’s the film?’ I said, ‘Still in my camera.’ Said, ‘Where is your camera?’ I said, ‘In my makeup kit, right here in my hand.’ It was a train case, and I held it up. He said, ‘Well, we want to take that film and develop it and look at it for evidence, and we’ll get it back to you in a few days.’ That was November 25, of last year, and that’s the last I heard of it.”
Employees of the Colony Club were drifting in—waitresses, bartenders, musicians, a few dancers. The clink of glasses accompanied the lights coming down, transforming the dreary-looking club into the kind of classy venue that Jack Ruby would so dearly love to run.
“That’s an incredible story,” Flo said.
“Really,” Bev said, with a shrug, “it’s simple—I was down there that day standing between twenty and thirty feet from the President when he was shot. I was taking a movie that three days later was confiscated by a man who identified himself as an FBI agent. All there is to it.”
I said, “And you’ve never told anyone before?”
“No,” Bev said. “Mr. Heller, Janet said I could trust you. That you are a good man. And of course I know Miss Kilgore from TV.”
“You could’ve cashed in on the free publicity,” I said.
She gave me a look wiser than her years. “Mr. Heller, if they can kill the President of the United States, they could kill a two-bit songbird like me and it wouldn’t even make the back page of the newspaper.”
CHAPTER
12
Over the next several days, Flo Kilgore and I interviewed a dozen witnesses. I had no part in lining any of them up, nor did she reveal to me how she had done so. I gathered it had been accomplished with the help of her friend Mark Lane and his people, but I didn’t ask. I wasn’t the lead investigator. In fact, I was just a glorified bodyguard.
Toward that end, and properly sobered by the interviews with Janet, Rose, and Beverly of the infamous Carousel Club, I was carrying the nine millimeter again, despite my lack of a concealed weapons permit. This meant, in rather warm Texas weather—did this state know it was goddamn fucking November?—I had to wear a suit, a lightweight tan number courtesy of a Maxwell Street tailor who knew how to allow for a clunky handgun in a shoulder holster under the left arm.
A number of the witnesses went over the same ground, chiefly people present that day in Dealey Plaza who had seen puffs of smoke and other suspicious activities around the picket fence on the grassy knoll.
Like Lee Bowers, a railroad towerman for the Union Terminal Company, who the morning of the murder saw three unauthorized cars enter the parking lot, drive around, and leave. One driver was using a walkie-talkie. Bowers also saw two strangers—one middle-aged and heavyset, in a white shirt and dark trousers, the other in his mid-twenties in a plaid shirt, standing ten or fifteen feet from each other—both near the picket fence around the time of the shooting. He also reported seeing “a flash of light or smoke or something” that caused him to feel that “something out of the ordinary happened by that fence.”
Like building engineer J. C. Price, who was standing on the roof of the Terminal Annex building at the south end of the plaza, opposite the Grassy Knoll, who saw a man running, fast, away from the fence toward the railroad yard, carrying something that looked like a rifle.
Like railroad supervisor S. M. Holland, who saw rising from the knoll “a puff of smoke about six or eight feet above the ground right from under the trees.”
Like Dallas Morning News reporter Mary Woodward, who was standing in front and to the left of the fence and heard a “horrible, ear-shattering noise coming from behind us and a little to the right.”
Two of the interviewees were of particular interest, and import. The first was Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig, who met us at the Statler, where we sat midday at a corner table in the currently underpopulated Coffee House and Grill, an offshoot of the Empire Room.
The off-duty deputy arrived in a light-blue short-sleeve sport shirt and dark-blue slacks. He was tall, slender, dark-haired, probably about thirty. He could easily have played a cop on television, though his Texas near-drawl might have typecast him as the deputy he was. He was fine with being recorded.
Flo ordered a coffee and I had a Coke on ice, but our guest said water would be fine. He had that odd combination of assurance and shyness that you sometimes find in his profession.
“Here I come all the way to Dallas,” Flo said, mildly flirtatious (he was a handsome man), “and the first deputy I meet isn’t in uniform.”
“Well, Miss Kilgore, I’m off-duty for one, and for another, I’m a plainclothes man. A detective, like Mr. Heller here.”
Any civil-service detective who was like me should be watched carefully, but never mind.
“You know how this works, Deputy Craig,” I said. “Just tell us your story.”
He did.
“The morning of November twenty-second,” he said, his voice a warm baritone, “Sheriff Bill Decker called in all his plainclothes men, myself included, and informed us President Kennedy’s motorcade would be coming down Main Street. He wanted us to stand out in front of the courthouse, at 505 Main, to sort of represent the sheriff’s office.”
I said, “Not to aid in security for the President?”
“No. We were told the security had been arranged by the Secret Service and the boys in blue, the Dallas police. We were to take no part in it whatsoever.”
Flo said, “So you were all just standing in front of the courthouse when the assassination took place?”
“That’s right. A bunch of flat feet standing flat-footed.” He frowned and I read embarrassment in it. “There was a lot of stupid animosity toward the President among the sheriff’s men—hell, I may have been the only one who voted for him. I remember around quarter after twelve, just standing there stoked to think I’d be like four feet from the President of the United States, I said to Deputy Sheriff Jim Ramsey that the motorcade was late. And Ramsey said, ‘Maybe somebody shot the son of a bitch.’ That really brought home how all the other men around me resented being there, felt they’d been forced to acknowledge the presence of someone they hated.”
I asked, “Did you sense anything wrong, before the first shot?”
His eyes narrowed. “Well, something was bothering me—like any trained cop, I was just looking around, checking for anything that seemed out of place. That’s when it occurred to me—there weren’t any officers guarding the intersections, or controlling the crowd, either. Not that there was anything I could do about it.”
“This is before the motorcade approached.”
“Right, but then suddenly cheers started and there President Kennedy was, him and his beautiful wife, smiling and waving, and his smile was infectious. Right then, I wasn’t a deputy sheriff, I was just an American citizen getting caught up in the moment. Then the limo made its turn onto Elm Street, and it was only seconds before the first rifle shot.”
For several seconds, nobody said anything.
He swallowed and took a deep breath and let it out. “You know, I’ll take a Coke myself.”
I called the waitress over, ordered it, and when she was gone, said to him, “Once you heard the shot, what did you do?”
His eyebrows flicked up and down. “Well, I ran like hell toward Houston—I was maybe fifteen feet from the corner, but before I got there two more shots rang out. I couldn’t believe it, it couldn’t be ha
ppening, but of course it was, and I kept running, ran across Houston and beside that little pool, on the west side, that reflecting pool, and I knocked a guy out of my way and he splashed in. I ran across the grass between Main and Elm, people scattered on the ground like they were gunshot victims, too—I even stopped and checked a mother and child to see if they were okay. The President was long gone by now … in every sense I guess.”
His Coke arrived and he had a sip.
Flo said, “We’re told the immediate reaction of many was to head for the so-called Grassy Knoll.”
He nodded. “I saw a Dallas Police officer run up the there and go behind the picket fence near the railroad yards. I followed his lead, and, man, behind that fence, that was complete confusion, utter hysteria.”
“So,” I said, “people were behind the fence at this point, and in the parking lot?”
“Oh yeah. I began questioning witnesses, and pitched in to help the Dallas uniformed guys restore order. When things got calmed down some, I started in questioning people who were standing around at the top of the incline, asking if anyone had seen anything strange or unusual before or during the shooting.”
“Had they?”
“Well, a number of people thought the shots came from the area of the Grassy Knoll or from behind the picket fence. But the most interesting, and I think reliable, witness was a Mr. Arnold Rowland. He and his wife were standing toward the top of the knoll on the north side of Elm. Something had caught Mr. Rowland’s attention waiting for the President to arrive. Approximately fifteen minutes before the motorcade got to Dealey Plaza, something caught his eye—a white man standing by the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building in the southeast corner, holding a rifle equipped with a telescopic sight.”
“Did Mr. Rowland alert anyone?”
“No. He thought they were Secret Service agents—a natural enough assumption for a citizen.”
“‘They’?”
“He also saw a darker-complected male—colored, or Latin maybe—pacing back and forth, in the southwest corner window. I passed Mr. and Mrs. Rowland along to another deputy, and I understand the Warren Commission has talked to them, although the wife didn’t see anything.”
He sipped his Coke again, and I sipped mine, letting him take a moment to further gather his thoughts. I could sense Flo’s excitement, which I shared—this felt closer to being there than had our tour on foot the other day.
“Well,” he said, allowing himself a sigh, “traffic was heavy by this point—the patrolman assigned to Elm and Houston had left his post, probably dealing the crowd and the chaos. I made my way over to the south side of Elm, to look for any signs of bullets striking the curb or the street or anything. By now it had been established that the President had been shot … this must have been around twelve-forty … and that’s when I heard a shrill whistle.”
“What kind of whistle?”
He held two fingers near his mouth. “Like a kid whistling, to get your attention. Coming from across the street. I turned and saw a white male in his twenties running down the grass from the direction of the book depository. A light-green Rambler station wagon was coming slowly west on Elm. The driver was a husky-looking Latin, with dark wavy hair, wearing a tan Windbreaker. Driver was looking up and leaning over at the guy running down toward him. The station wagon pulled over and picked him up—guy was wearing a long-sleeve work shirt and faded blue trousers.”
He leaned forward and his eyes moved from Flo to me.
He said, “I didn’t know it at the time, but it was Oswald, or somebody who looked a hell of a lot like him. I tried to cross Elm Street to stop them—the two of ’em were obviously in a hurry, and were the only people not running to the scene. That’s human nature when there’s a shooting or an accident, you know, go check out the scene. But they were heading away, so I immediately tried to cross the street, to take the two into custody. Only traffic was too heavy by now, and I couldn’t get to them before they drove off, going west on Elm.”
“You reported this?”
“You bet. Right away I brought it to the attention of the authorities at the command post at Elm and Houston, in front of the book depository. I told a Secret Service agent, or at least that’s how he identified himself, what I’d seen. He didn’t seem too interested. Sheriff Decker himself heard this exchange, and yanked me to one side and told me the suspect had already left the scene. That’s when I got pulled in on what was the first real search of the depository.”
“Decker led that?”
“No. He left that to me and a couple of other deputies. We went up to the sixth floor, which was very dark and dusty. The south side of the building seemed the logical place to start. Immediately we found three spent rifle shells that struck me as arranged, deliberately placed there, in plain sight on the floor by the window. A small brown paper lunch bag with some chicken bones in it was on the floor, too. I called across the room for Dallas Police ID man, Lieutenant Day, to bring his camera over, which he did. Then we started searching the rest of the floor.”
“The rifle hadn’t been found yet?”
He shook his head. “No. We did find it, but that’s a … story in itself.”
“Oh?”
He was nodding as he sipped Coke again, and for the first time he smiled, a small odd smile that didn’t last. “We neared the northwest corner of the floor when a deputy called out, ‘Here it is.’ I went over. Two rows of boxes were stacked close, but when you looked down between them, there it was, on the floor—a rifle on a strap with a telescopic sight, with the bolt facing upward. Lieutenant Day came over and so did Captain Fritz of Homicide. Day retrieved the rifle, activated the bolt, ejected one live round of ammunition. Day inspected the rifle briefly, then handed it to Fritz, who held it up by the strap and asked if anybody knew what kind of rifle it was. Deputy Weitzman, who knew a lot about weapons, used to run a sporting goods store, gave it a close look and said it was a 7.65 German Mauser.”
“What?” I said, sitting up. “Not Oswald’s famous piece-of-shit Mannlicher-Carcano?”
He shook his head. “No. A Mauser.”
“You’re saying at some point a switch was made?”
“I’m saying a deputy who knew his stuff said it was a Mauser, and a bunch of other law-enforcement officers agreed with him. Right about then, word of Officer Tippit’s shooting came in, and it was chaos again.”
He sighed and the waitress came over and asked if he’d like a refill. He looked up at her, nodded and smiled, his second of the afternoon; she smiled back—yes, he was handsome, all right.
I said, “That’s a hell of a story, Deputy Craig.”
“Oh, there’s more. As the afternoon went on, and information came in, and Oswald was arrested at the Texas Theatre, I became convinced that I had seen the assassin and his driver making their getaway from the scene in that Rambler. They would only have to drive six blocks west on Elm and they’d have been on Beckley Avenue, with a straight shot to Oswald’s rooming house. That might have given Oswald time to kill Tippit, which the official story really doesn’t—him taking a bus, getting stuck in traffic, getting off, catching a cab, and so on.”
“Did you ID Oswald as the guy picked up by the station wagon?”
He nodded and another smile emerged, briefly. “I did. Later that afternoon, I called Captain Fritz at the PD and gave him the description of the guy I saw, who Fritz said sounded like their suspect. He asked me to come take a look at him. I got to Fritz’s office a little after 4:30, was given a peek through the door at Oswald, sitting there by Fritz’s desk.”
Flo was watching and listening with the rapt attention you might give a Hitchcock thriller.
Craig continued: “I made the ID, and Fritz and I went in together. He told Oswald, ‘This officer saw you leave the crime scene,’ and Oswald, real defensive and sullen, said that he’d already told them that. Fritz then said, ‘He saw a Latin fella pick you up in a station wagon,’ and Oswald replied, le
aning forward on Fritz’s desk, forceful as hell, ‘That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine’ … who was apparently a friend of his wife’s, and he didn’t want to see her ‘dragged into this.’ Oswald seemed disgusted, like he’d been let down or even betrayed, and Fritz was sort of playing ‘good cop,’ because he almost seemed like he was consoling Oswald, who said, real depressed, ‘Now everybody will know who I am.’”
That sounded to me like an undercover agent whose cover had been blown.
“Miss Kilgore,” he said, sitting forward, firm but pleasant, “I will be glad to cooperate with you any way I can. This has smelled like a cover-up to me since the day it happened, and because I have refused to be part of it, my career has hit a dead end. I expect any day to be fired over one trumped-up thing or another. Just four years ago, I was named Officer of the Year. I nailed an international jewel thief. Do you know that? Officer of the Year.”
His voice was steady, but his eyes were moist.
* * *
Beyond the Dealey Plaza underpass—through which an assassinated president had been whisked away into history books that would one day be boxed and stacked in the nearby depository—stretched the city-within-the-city known as Oak Cliff. The boardinghouse where Lee Harvey Oswald had roomed, and the street where he possibly shot J. D. Tippit, and the movie theater where he was arrested, were all in Oak Cliff.
Two hundred seventy-five thousand of Dallas’s citizens also lived there, in the small, older homes close to downtown, and newer houses and apartments farther out. Chiefly a blue-collar community, with considerable natural beauty—in particular the woods and hills of Kessler Park—Oak Cliff was convenient for those working downtown. Young men on their way up would have a home in Oak Cliff only temporarily, relocating their families to more status-friendly North Dallas when raises allowed.
On a quiet side street in Oak Cliff’s newer section lived a young woman who was not on her way up, having already realized her dreams. Most likely she owned the modern six-room bungalow. Unlike much of Texas, the oak tree in her modest front yard realized this was autumn and was spilling leaves. A knock at an antique oval front door quickly summoned the lady of the house, petite, curvy, in her thirties, with a pixie-ish reddish-brown hairdo. Her prettiness was on the pixie side, too, heart-shaped face, wide-set brown eyes, pert nose, and dimpling smile.
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