Before the gin took her away, I said, “You’ll go home. I’ll go home. You’ll write your story, and maybe win a Pulitzer. But that’s all.”
“What do you mean... that’s all?”
“I mean the investigation ends here. You write your story, enjoy your accolades, and you can prime the pump for other investigators, whether cops or reporters, and let them follow your lead, and them take the heat. We don’t get anybody else killed, understand? Not you. Not me.”
She toasted her glass with mine. I’d sent down for some Captain Morgan.
“Okay, big boy,” she said.
Her tiny, curvy body snuggled next to me in the twin bed, and with her in my arms, I remembered how much fun we’d had together in years gone by, which is what years do.
An insistent ringing turned out to be the phone again. My eyes somehow came open and I realized sunlight was streaming in. Our respective plane reservations weren’t till the early afternoon, so we hadn’t overslept, at least not dangerously. There was no reason to get up, or hadn’t been till the phone started in.
She stirred, and I whispered, “Probably Captain Peoples again. Just go back to sleep.”
She did, and I got the phone. I had a brief conversation, hung up, and came back and shook her gently awake. Her eyes were wide in a face that was pretty despite the smeared makeup and weak chin.
“That was Barney,” I said.
“Who?”
“We got the Ruby interview.”
Chapter 14
The Criminal Courts Building, overlooking Dealey Plaza, stood nine granite-trimmed brick-and-steel stories. The 1913-erected structure housed two Dallas county criminal courts, the offices of the sheriff and DA, and the county jail, which was a building within a building. Jailbreaks were impossible, it was said, until one occurred recently and embarrassed Dallas yet again.
Saturday morning, at ten o’clock, with Flo in the passenger seat, I pulled the rental Galaxie into the shallow basement of the Courts Building, eerily similar to the city jail basement where Ruby had shot Oswald. We got out and headed toward the elevator. We looked spiffy — I was in a gray Botany 500 (not tailored for a shoulder-holstered weapon, which was tucked in the car trunk) and Flo in a pink suit with leopard top and white heels and her usual white gloves. I felt we projected the class with which Ruby was so obsessed.
Joe Tonahill was waiting at the elevator, the only attorney from the murder trial who remained on the current Ruby team. The Stetson-wearing Tonahill (I was bareheaded today) was an aptly named mountain of a man, six four and three hundred pounds easy, with a narrow skull, out-of-control John L. Lewis eyebrows, and a shelf of a second chin that seemed to engulf the almost boyish face.
Tonahill smiled and nodded to Flo, saying, “Always a pleasure, Miss Kilgore. You’re the only reporter Jack will talk to.”
“Well, I’m honored,” she said with a funny smile that added, I guess.
The small head on the huge body swiveled my way. “You’d be Nathan Heller,” he said affably, and we shook hands. “I read about you in the Enquirer.”
“That puts the ‘any PR is good PR’ notion to the test,” I said, as we exchanged smiles. “What’s the drill?”
He gestured toward the elevator. “Jack, as you might expect, is kept separate from the general population. He doesn’t even have a cell of his own.”
“That doesn’t sound like he’s being kept separate.”
“Sorry. I didn’t phrase that as felicitously as I might. He’s camped out in a corridor on the mezzanine level between the sixth and seventh floors. By the chief jailor’s office. There is a little holding cell he can sleep in.”
Tonahill reached suddenly inside his tan suit coat and for a moment I flashed on Lee Harvey getting surprised. But all he withdrew was a folded sheet of paper.
“I’m accompanying you up, but Jack has made it clear I’m not welcome to sit in on the interview. How would you feel about signing a document that has you working for me as an investigator, Mr. Heller? Providing you with the rights of confidentiality that Miss Kilgore enjoys as a member of the Fourth Estate?”
I looked at it. Simple and straightforward, it required my signature and for Tonahill to pay me “the sum of $1 and other good and valuable consideration.” He handed me a pen and I leaned the page against the closed elevator door and signed it.
Handing the contract back to him, with one of my cards, I said, “I’ll want a photostat of that for my files.”
“Certainly,” he said, and his smile was as tiny as he wasn’t. He pressed the elevator button with a forefinger that made it disappear.
“You’re forgetting something,” I said.
His tufted eyebrows rose. “Oh?”
“Where’s my dollar?”
He grinned and got out his wallet and I was slipping the buck in my pocket when the elevator doors dinged open. We got on board and Tonahill pressed 6-M.
Soon we were stepping into a vestibule and facing an office with E.L. HOLMAN, CHIEF JAILOR in black-edged gold on a light-brown door. We did not enter the office. Instead, a deputy at a barred gate at right recognized Tonahill, nodded, and allowed us into a narrow hallway. The deputy stayed at his post while Flo and I followed Tonahill, moving down the straight path to another gate and another deputy. Three more deputies were on the other side, the quartet of deputies the literal guards at Ruby’s gate. Two of them sat at a little metal table in the white-walled windowless end-of-the-corridor space, which opened up into what might have served as a reception area, with another office door at left and a steel door at right. They were playing cards with their charge.
“Gin!” Jack Ruby said, and, hearing the metal grind and whine of the gate opening, threw his cards in and got to his feet with a smile. “Miss Kilgore. Nate Heller! What a pleasure to have such high-class company.”
Ruby came over quickly, his thinning hair slicked back George Raft — style, his face freshly shaved. He looked a little like Uncle Fester, minus the lightbulb in his mouth, the black pajamas traded in for trim white short-sleeve jail coveralls, though his loafers and socks were Addams Family black.
He took Flo by the hand, in a gentlemanly way, as if about to ask her for the first dance. “This is such a rare, wonderful opportunity.”
He didn’t say whether that applied to him or her.
Then Ruby offered me a sweaty hand to shake, and I did, as he said to Flo, “You may not know this, but Nate and me go back to the West Side. We grew up together.”
That was an exaggeration, of course, but not exactly a lie.
“How’s Barney?” he asked, walking us over to the metal table, which the pair of deputies had vacated. They had left the cards behind. Tonahill was still standing near the gate, where all four deputies had now gathered, like flies around offal.
“Barney’s doing fine,” I said. “I’m grateful he arranged this.”
Ruby waved that off. “Anything for Barney. He raised a hell of a lot of dough for my defense.”
“He’s going to do the same for your appeal, he says.”
“What a stand-up guy. What a stand-up guy. Listen.” He leaned in and whispered to me. He smelled of Old Spice. His eyes were like black buttons sewn onto his face, only buttons blinked more. “I can’t let that lawyer sit in. I don’t know if I trust him.”
“You haven’t fired him.”
“Not yet. But this meet is strictly for you and Miss Kilgore. This is a one-of-a-kind interview, Nate. You are about to sit down with history. You want some water? I don’t think I can talk them into coffee or anything, unless you’re still here at lunch.”