“That’s an exaggeration, but...” He gave me a knowing little grin. “... you were always smart, Nate. We’ve come a long way from that union hall in Lawndale, haven’t we?”
Had we? That had involved a killing, too, of Leon Cooke, a former president of a junk-handler’s union. Maybe Ruby had come a long way at that.
Now the stocky little man’s focus was on me, perhaps because he knew I could follow him on the torturous journey ahead in a way that Flo Kilgore might not.
He said, “Maybe you don’t know this, Nate, but back in the fifties, I was big in the Cuban realm, both before and after Castro took over. I made trips for people, I moved some guns, I helped Santo get out of there when they had him locked up. I was valuable, making things happen. But then when Castro threw all the casinos out, my influence, it was gone with the wind and, well, at least I had a life and a business back here in Dallas. I concentrated on that. That became my life and world. I was happy. I am competitive by nature. But you mentioned deals with the devil, Nate, right? And I admit, I like to be important, it’s a weakness, but who doesn’t savor the attention of powerful people?”
I said, “Can you be more specific, Jack?”
“Well, powerful people, they never talk to you direct, do they? So if I said Carlos Marcello, I would be trying to make myself sound more important than I am, and the humbling thing about what I’ve been through, Nate, is that I know I was not important. Now I am important, and that’s the bittersweet taste, huh? Because now I wish I was not so important. I wish I was a small person again, a small successful person with his club and girls and his little dogs. I miss my little dogs, Nate.”
“Jack, you say somebody contacted you on Marcello’s behalf. Who? When?”
“A fella in New Orleans, smart guy, kind of on the weirdo side. We’ll call him the Ferret. He’s a pilot, in fact he and me, we go back a ways ourselves — we owned a plane together, in gunrunning days. I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years, not since the Bay of Pigs went south and all of the Cuba stuff went circling down the porcelain exit. Anyway, the Ferret—”
“David Ferrie,” Flo said with a nod.
That startled Ruby, her knowing that name.
I asked, “What did Ferrie want?”
“He... he wanted some help with some projects the Cubans were working on.”
“Cuban exiles.”
“Yes. There’s a big variety of different groups, but this is a pretty militant bunch, and well, sometimes I work both ends against the middle, and that can be dangerous, but it can also be profitable, and it covers a person’s behind, you know.”
She said, “You were an FBI snitch.”
That startled him, too. And he seemed a little hurt.
“I guess you could state it like that, Miss Kilgore. That’s a terminology that makes me uncomfortable, I would say ‘informant’ is a bit better, but yes. So I figured my FBI contact would not mind knowing what the Cubans were up to, and since casino interests like Mr. Marcello and Mr. Trafficante seemed to think Cuba might be returned to its former profitable glory so to speak, I lent my services, and my club after hours, for meetings and so on.”
Flo asked, “You didn’t hesitate getting involved again with these mobsters?”
“I was having money problems, tax trouble in particular, and anyway, I had business in Cuba with certain of these individuals that... Nate, can we talk about this in front of Miss Kilgore?”
“If you mean Operation Mongoose,” I said, “yes.”
That failed joint effort between the CIA and the Mob to kill Castro. That ridiculous French farce involving exploding cigars and poisoned food and tampered-with wet suits.
I said to him, “Miss Kilgore knows we were both part of that, each in his own small, respective way.”
Dark eyebrows rose above eyes about as expressive as a shark’s. “Does she know that...?”
“That I ran into you in a bar in Chicago, in early November, last year? That you introduced me to your buddy ‘Lee Osborne’? Yes.”
Or, anyway, she did now.
This had taken some of the wind out of his sails, and I had to prompt him: “What mischief were the New Orleans mob and the Cubans up to? Or should I say, what did you think they were up to?”
“... The idea was to embarrass the President,” he said. His hands were folded again and he was looking at them. He seemed smaller suddenly. “Embarrass Kennedy with a phony pro-Castro demonstration when he came to Dallas. I think those oil-money Birchers who were in bed with Marcello and the Cubans were afraid that Kennedy was cozying up to the Beard. But that’s just a small-time nightclub owner putting two and two together.”
And he was getting four, all right: Bobby had told me that secret talks between a Kennedy administration rep and Castro himself were under way the day of the assassination.
Flo asked, “Where did Oswald fit in?”
“He was just a little foot soldier,” Ruby said, “like me. He was an FBI informant, too, you know. And maybe more, maybe a spook — they sent him to Russia, huh? And some of those spooks were really pissed off at Kennedy, because of the Bay of Pigs betrayal, and, well, that should have told me something.”
“A phony pro-Castro demonstration,” I said. “Only it was a front for a presidential assassination.”
Ruby nodded. “You’re right, Nate, only I didn’t know that at the time. The plan as presented was that a shooter would take a kind of potshot at the President, with Castroites catching the blame, which would then shut down any peace talk bull and maybe ignite the shooting war in Cuba that everybody wanted, the Birchers, the spooks, the hoods. Why else would Oswald, who was Marcello’s guy — and maybe a spook or both, too — go around pretending to be a pinko?”
“Because he was being set up as a patsy,” I said.
“I didn’t know that. Believe me, I didn’t try to put any pieces together, Nate, not up front. I just did what they asked, did whatever I was told.”
“By Ferrie?”
“He was one of several. But the day before, that Thursday before, some nasty customers started showing up in town, Nate, from all over, specialized talent, I mean it was a goddamn torpedo convention... and it did start feeling like something else was up. Something big.”
“Who showed up, for instance?”
“Well, for one, our old buddy Chuckie, from back home.”
“Chuckie? You mean Nicoletti?”
Charles “Chuckie” Nicoletti was Sam Giancana’s number one hit man.
Ruby nodded. “Rosselli, too. You know Johnny.”
I knew Johnny.
“But,” Ruby was saying, “he left before the big day, I think — maybe he was just putting things in motion, finishing touches.”
“Who else?”
“Couple of Cuban hard-asses, don’t ask for names, I could never keep track of ’em. Oh, and that creepy guy, Johnson’s hatchet man, used to live here but is out on the West Coast now.”
I exchanged glances with Flo.
I asked, “You mean Mac Wallace?”
Ruby nodded again, even more vigorously. “That freak would give Boris Karloff the heebie-jeebies. And there was this guy, maybe with some Cuban blood, who Oswald didn’t know about but coulda been his brother.”
Flo asked, “A double?”
“Not so close you’d call him an identical twin or anything, but easy enough to mistake for him. Also, some guy from Europe, a Corsican, I think. He was supposed to be a whiz with a rifle, and he was gonna be the one taking the potshot. Needed an expert for that, ’cause it wouldn’t do to accidentally really whack the President, right? So we were told, anyway.”