I asked, “You heard this at a meeting at the Carousel?”
He ignored that. “Why would they need three teams of shooters, Nate? That’s what made it start to smell. If this was just a potshot, if they were just gonna miss the guy and put Castro on the spot... why a military action like that?”
“To guarantee a kill. Triangulation. Snipers from three sides.”
As for the number of teams and the disparate players, that meant each faction within the conspiracy was providing a shooting team, two or three people each. To bind everybody together, to ensure silence by way of shared responsibility.
Or blame.
So you had Nicoletti and Rosselli for the Mob, who maybe also provided the Corsican specialist; the Cubans representing the exile group; Wallace as part of the Big Oil contingent; and other players as yet unnamed. Perhaps never to be named.
“I was in the military like you, Nate. I recognize that kind of thing when I see it. I would never be part of an atrocity such as this. Kill a president? I don’t care if I didn’t vote for the son of a bitch, I don’t care if his brother is Bobby Kennedy and his father is a senile old bootlegger who betrayed us all, kill a president? I am not insane. Do I look insane?”
Was that a trick question?
I asked, “Oswald didn’t know?”
Ruby shrugged. “He may have been putting things together like I did, as things came into play. Who can say?”
In Chicago, in late October, the first warning the Secret Service got of a possible assassination attempt set for JFK’s November 2 visit came from an otherwise anonymous caller identifying himself only as “Lee.”
Ruby sat forward. “But I think when that kid realized that Kennedy had been killed, he knew he was being set up. They’d sent him to work that day with a package of posters for the fake demonstration! That package was too small, but everybody uses it to say, Look! He brought a rifle to work! They told him to tell the guy who drove him there that they were curtain rods.”
Curtain rods was what the hitchhiker told that truck driver was in his brown-paper package.
Ruby’s upper lip curled back over his teeth. “Isn’t it strange that Oswald, who hasn’t worked a lick in most of his life, should be fortunate enough to get a job at the book depository two weeks before the President visits Dallas? Now where would a nebbish like Oswald get that information? Where could the people who put him in that building find out when and what the route would be? Only one person could get that information.”
Flo said, “Who?”
He shifted in his metal chair, his expression coy. “Let’s just say if Adlai Stevenson was vice president, there would never have been an assassination.”
“Spell it out, Jack,” I said.
“Well the answer is that that man is in office now.”
“And that man is Lyndon Johnson?”
He was raving, yet keeping his voice soft enough not to be heard across the room. “And that man is Johnson! Who knew weeks in advance what was going to happen, because he is the one who was going to arrange the trip for the President — this had been planned long before the President himself knew about it. The one who gained the most by the shooting of the President was Johnson, and he was in a car in the rear and safe when the shooting took place. What would the Russians, Castro, or anyone else have to gain by eliminating the President? If Johnson was so heartbroken over Kennedy, why didn’t he do something for Robert Kennedy? All he did was snub him.”
I said, “Did you ever meet Madeleine Brown?”
That slammed his brakes on. He blinked. He shrugged. “Uh, sure. Hot little number, in her day. Johnson has a good eye for talent, although that one was too smart for him. Got herself knocked up, milked him like a cow, money, cars, house. Why?”
“Just wondering,” I said. “What did you mean, when you said Oswald was Marcello’s man?”
“The summer before the assassination, he was a runner for a Marcello bookmaker. His uncle Dutz Murret’s a longtime Marcello man. This is all well-known in New Orleans.”
There it was: Oswald tied directly to the Marcello organization.
Flo said, “That still leaves the big question, Jack. Why did you shoot Oswald?”
He swallowed. “Because, Miss Kilgore, I had to. I got a call, and they told me I had to, and so I did, because I had to.”
“A call from David Ferrie?”
“A call, Miss Kilgore, and I had to.”
I said, “And that’s what you were broken up about. Not Jackie and Caroline.”
“I didn’t want to shoot that kid! He was in so far over his head. He’d have already been dead if...”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Acquila Clemmons was sitting on her porch when she saw Officer Tippit killed. She said two men were involved — the gunman was a “short guy and kind of heavy,” the other man taller and thin in khaki trousers and a white shirt. She had been reluctant to talk to Flo because a Dallas PD officer had warned her to stay quiet, saying she “might get killed on the way to work.”
“You killed Tippit,” I said.
Ruby shook his head. “I didn’t say that.”
“When Kennedy really was shot, you knew both you and Lee Oswald were dupes in this thing — you even went to Parkland Hospital to see if Kennedy would pull through, and when he didn’t, you went looking for Oswald. Tippit died near your apartment, didn’t he? You tried to warn Oswald.”
“He was supposed to die that day,” he said ambiguously.
“Who?” Flo asked.
I said, “Oswald. Jack here screwed this up for everybody. Tippit was supposed to kill Oswald — he was combing Oak Cliff, supposedly for a suspect based on the description over the police radio. He got out of the car to come around and take Oswald out, only Jack here rescued his pal. Didn’t you, Jack?”
“I don’t think... I don’t think I should admit to a murder that maybe I didn’t do.”
I pressed: “Did Ferrie or Marcello suspect you? Is that why they sent you for the job? Or was it just a terrible coincidence? That you, the guy who could come and go as he pleased at the police station, were sent to do the deed.”
“I went to that press conference Friday night,” Ruby said hollowly. “I wanted him to see me. To understand he should keep quiet. But he kept saying over and over he was innocent, he was a ‘patsy.’ I tried to give him a pass.”
“But it was the old, old problem.”
“What?”
“He knew too much.”
Ruby nodded. Sighed. “I guess... I guess that kid and I have that in common.”
I heard footsteps. Tonahill was walking toward us. He paused halfway, looking massive and apologetic, and said, “That’s all the time they’ll give us.”
It had been enough.
Ruby walked us to the gate. Our white-jumpsuited host stayed at Flo’s side, as if he were walking her to the door after the prom and was hoping against hope for a kiss.
“I know you’ll do right by me, Miss Kilgore,” he said. “The sooner you get this out there, the better are my chances. They wouldn’t fool with a famous person like you. Not a journalist.”
That was a naive thing for him to say — not just because Kennedy’s fame hadn’t stopped anybody, but Ruby was an old Chicago boy. He surely remembered the Tribune’s man Jake Lingle getting it in that subway tunnel back in Capone days.
We bid Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer good-bye. We did not discuss anything on our way back to the hotel. I guess we were both trying to absorb it all. The tape was in her purse, and that was what I referred to first: “Get copies of that made when you get back to New York.”