Flo and I exchanged glances.
Rose blew out smoke. “When I was in the backseat, sleeping — they thought — they got really loose-lip about it. ‘We’re gonna kill that lying son of a bitch.’ ‘That bastard is gonna pay.’ And do you know who they was talkin’ about? John Kennedy is who! This was... the Wednesday night before it happened.”
I asked, “What did you think about that, Rose?”
“I thought it was fucked up. I thought maybe I should bug out, maybe find a cop or something and try to stop it. They had a fucking rifle with a scope in the trunk, you know. So when we stopped for an overnight, after the three-way and they got drunk and fell asleep, I kinda... well, I didn’t call the cops. See, everybody thought I was clean, I was straight, but really I was still using. I thought a taste might help make this Kennedy thing go away. I had two cardboard boxes of my crap in the trunk, next to that rifle? Clothes of mine and baby clothes and also down in there, hidden away, was my works.”
“Works?” Flo asked.
“Needle and so on,” I said quietly.
Flo mouthed, “Oh,” and nodded.
“So the next morning,” Rose went on, “they saw my works in the john and the geniuses figure out I wasn’t clean and had junk along, and yelled at me and slapped me around and I just kind of took it. I figured they needed me, so they’d get over it. I was the contact for the sailor, you know? We keep driving, and driving, and then we stop in this little shit bump, Eunice — we’re in Louisiana now — and it’s like maybe five thou pop, but they like to party in that little town, and we stopped at the Silver Slipper Lounge, a bar that Ruby had a piece of. Maybe the Cubans were contacting somebody, maybe they were just thirsty, I dunno. I knew the place a little, I tricked there before, they had little trailers out back. Manny was a nice man, Manny Manuel I mean, the manager?”
“Rose,” I said, “can we stay on the subject please?”
She gave me a flirtatious look. “I am on the subject, Handsome. I’m all over the subject.” Then her expression grew serious. She flicked ash into a tray.
“See, I’d been thinking about what they was saying about the President, just kind of getting in a real funk about it. I tried to make myself think they was kidding or something, but they were for real, man. They were part of... part of something bigger than they were, and it excited their asses. This sounds crazy, but it’s almost like they were doing the dope run so that if they got picked up, that would be what it was for.”
As opposed to killing the President.
“So we’re drinking and talking, and I say something like, ‘What do you wanna kill John Kennedy for? What did he ever do to you? He’s got a wife and kids, you know.’ And one of them Cubans says, ‘The Bay of Pigs is what,’ but the other one is already swinging on me. Right there in the damn nightclub. He cold-cocks me and I’m off the chair and on the floor, and when I wake up, Manny is pushing the Cubans through the door and outside, tellin’ ’em he doesn’t run that kind of joint. Manny helps me up and I thank him and I go back outside and they’re waiting, they grab me and they toss me in the backseat and one Cuban crawls in back after me and the other gets behind the wheel and peels out. They’re going maybe fifty and we’re out of town now with nobody around when the Cuban with me in the backseat opens his door and I get kicked out and go rolling. The car screeches to a stop, and then I see them both get out, and one opens the trunk. I try to get to my feet ’cause I think they’re going for that rifle, but they was just after my boxes of stuff, and they tossed them on the roadside and just took off.”
This must have been what Janet meant when she told me Rose said the “shooters who got Kennedy” had tried to kill the woman.
Flo said, “How badly were you hurt?”
She shrugged, spoke through exhaled smoke. “Not serious, bumps and bruises and scrapes, but back at the club, somebody saw those guys grab me and told Manny, and he got concerned, bless him, and drove out looking for me. He found me, all bloody and hitchhiking, and took me to the hospital there in Eunice, to the emergency room. They cleaned me up but said they couldn’t admit me because all I had was bruises and scrapes, and then I told them I was having drug withdrawal and could they help me, and they called the cops. A nice officer I met before... ’cause I worked at the Slipper from time to time and the cops knew all the girls there... anyway, this nice trooper named Fruge — it’s an easy name to remember, ’cause of the dance?”
She did a sad little pumping of both fisted arms, indicating the Frug.
“Trooper Fruge,” she went on, “took me to the little Eunice jail. I said I had something important to tell him but he said I could tell him in the morning, because he had to go to the policeman’s ball that night.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“No, unless maybe he was, but I wasn’t really on top of things, because I was coming down and I was coming down fast... I hadn’t fixed since last night... and they put me in a jail cell and I got awful hot and took off all my clothes and I was really climbing the walls. I don’t mean that as an expression. I was climbing them, trying to, anyway. So they called Fruge, at the dance I guess, do you think maybe he was doing the Frug? Ha. And anyway, he came back with a doctor, the coroner I think, who gave me a sedative and that helped. The next morning Trooper Fruge drove me over to this nuthouse in Jackson, not ’cause I was nuts or anything but they did drug withdrawal there, and on the way I told him about killing Kennedy.”
Flo said, “This was Thursday, the twenty-first.”
“Yeah, I guess it would’ve been. So I told Trooper Fruge, I said, ‘These fucking Cubans are crazy, they’re going to Dallas to kill Kennedy when he comes to town.’ I told him everything, just like I done to you — the drugs, my baby, everything. I wanted help getting my kid back, y’know? Also, I didn’t want to see Kennedy killed. Fruge had this other trooper come and hear my story and I told it again. But that was it. The two troopers just went away, and I told the doctors about Kennedy, and the nurses, and everybody just kind of nodded, ’cause they had committed me for drug withdrawal and thought I was delirious or some shit.”
I asked, “No one else came to talk to you?”
“Not till after the assassination. Jesus, I mean, I was in the hospital rec room, watching TV on Friday, and I see this news thing with people lining the streets in Dallas, and I start screaming, like a crazy person, which there was no shortage of in there, ‘Somebody’s gotta do something! They’re gonna kill the President!’ Nobody paid any attention to me. Then the cars came on the screen, the, uh, what’s it, motorcade, rolling by, and I yell to the nurses and other patients, ‘Watch, you assholes! It’s gonna happen! It’s gonna happen!’ You couldn’t see it on-screen, but there was these pops, and then this commotion, and I said, ‘See! See! I am not nuts!’”
“And then Fruge came back?”
“Not till Monday. Not till after Pinky had shot his girlfriend.”
“Pinky?” I said. “You mean Ruby?”
Flo asked, “What do you mean, ‘girlfriend’?”
“Oh, Pinky and that Oswald character,” Rose said, “they was shacked up off and on for years. I saw those queer sons of bitches sitting together at the Pink Door and later the Carousel, plenty of times.”