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 happening, 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.”