“How do you read him?”
“I think he’s nuts. He had a USMC tattoo on his forearm, so he’s obviously one of these ex-service guys who can’t adjust. Kind of a shrimp, not physically, but short. Like, five five. How the hell he made the Marine minimum height requirement is a mystery beyond me.”
“You make him as unstable?”
“I do. If this guy doesn’t have a gun collection that would give Hemingway a hard-on, I’ll eat my fuckin’ badge. Nate, I been thinking about this all day. I probably shoulda called it in sooner. But I decided, as soon as my shift was over, to come tell the Secret Service about it, in person. I mean, it’s their job, right?”
“Right.” The manila folder Kennedy had left with me was on the desk-about the only thing other than Moyland’s fedora. “Something I want you to look at, Berk.”
I showed him the photos of the two white suspects, and asked, “Is either one of these guys your boy Vallee?”
“No. Mine has a kind of prominent forehead, and a dimpled chin. Same kind of Marine base haircut, though.”
“Okay.” I tucked the photos away.
His eyes were earnest. This was a hard-bitten, seen-everything copper, but talk of killing presidents got him going. “Do I need to make a formal statement about this? You want to have it taken down by a secretary or something?”
“No. I’ll follow it up myself.”
“I don’t know where this kid lives or anything. I could snoop around for you.”
“No. I’ll do the snooping. You’ve done plenty.”
I walked him out, and along the way we chatted about family and so forth. Shook hands with him, thanked him, and sent him on his way, winked at the receptionist, who pretended not to like it, then reported the conversation to Martineau in his office.
“Why don’t you let me take this,” I said. “I’ll grab some breakfast at the Eat Rite on my way in tomorrow morning.”
Martineau nodded. “Doesn’t seem to be one of our assassination team, though.”
“No, I figure them for imports, even the rednecks, and this guy is local. But somebody’s got to check. Not terribly far from where I live.”
“Do it,” Martineau said. “Young ex-Marine, mentally unstable. Sounds like a dangerous type.”
“Sounds like me in 1943,” I said, and went out.
CHAPTER 12
Wednesday, October 30, 1963
The Eat Rite cafeteria on Wilson was just a couple of miles northwest of my Old Town town house. I took Clark Street through Uptown, its many cemeteries lending a general aura of death to yet another overcast day. This was about where Uptown turned into Ravenswood, or anyway started thinking about it, an area dominated by its tallest building, a looming Sears store. A lot of DPs-that is, displaced persons-lived around here, German and Greek refugees of the Second World War, well-assimilated by now, a very frugal, blue-collar, lower-middle-class bunch.
The cafeteria, on the first floor of an apartment building, was no bigger than your average luncheonette, just a modest food-serving counter with a diner-style window on the kitchen and a cluster of Formica tables on its linoleum floor. A few white-collar workers were mixed in with the blue-collar, more men than women. A bouquet of scrambled eggs and syrup wafted, and the clatter of dishes, silverware, serving containers, and trays mingled with morning conversation to make nonmelodic, percussive music.
I went to the skinny cashier in his white shirt and black bow tie and asked to see the manager, got a bald guy in a brown suit, whispered that I was following up on Lieutenant Moyland’s suspicious character, and got nodded toward a table for four where a pale, muscular little guy with a butch haircut sat solo.
That’s who I’d figured for the role, but confirmation was always appreciated. I slid a tray along the counter, got some scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, and orange juice from unhappy women in hairnets, left a buck with the morticianish cashier, and threaded through the well-populated little place, heading for the butch haircut by the backward EAT RITE painted on the front window.
As I pretended to move past the guy, I paused and noticed the USMC eagle-and-anchor tattoo on his left forearm, the sleeves of his tan work shirt rolled to the elbow.
He was looking at his own plate of eggs and bacon and potatoes and toast, but I grinned at him as if I already had his attention and said, “Semper fi, Mac.”
He glanced up into my waiting smile. His face was oval, but the butch gave it a squared-off look, his eyes big and blue and dull under a shelf of high forehead and cartoonish ink-slash eyebrows, his nose pug, his mouth small and pinched, chin dimpled, ears sticking out like an afterthought. His initially blank expression blossomed into a small smile-small because of the size of his mouth.
“You an ex-Marine, too?” His voice was high-pitched, his words rushed, tumbling onto each other.
“Are you ever really an ex-Marine?” I asked. “Mind if I join you?”
“Not at all! Sit right down. Always up for jawin’ with a fellow jarhead.”
I set my tray down opposite and sat, then extended my hand across our breakfasts. “My name’s Heller. Nate Heller.”
He clasped it. Firm. “Thomas Vallee. Friends call me Tommy. You must be local-I can hear the Chicago in your voice.”
“There’s some in yours, too.”
He shrugged, picked up a piece of bacon, snapped it in two, munched. “I grew up northwest of here. Just moved back from New York after a couple years away.”
“Work in Uptown or maybe Ravenswood?”
“Naw. Downtown, in the Loop. Printing plant. I’m a lithographer. You?”
“I’m in sales.” I nibbled a corner of burnt toast. “So where did you serve?”
Some pride came into his expression. “Korea,” he said, and shoveled some eggs in.
“You don’t look old enough.”
“I’m almost thirty.”
“That’s still not old enough for that war.”
He got a goofy little grin going. “So I lied about my age. I said I was eighteen but I was only fifteen.”
I laughed, sipped some juice. “I lied, too-but I had to shave some years off, to get in. I was in the big one.”
The dullness had left the blue eyes; they glittered with interest now. “Yeah? Where did you serve?”
“The Pacific. Guadalcanal.”
“No shit. You must have seen some real action.”
“Some,” I said, as casual as Audie Murphy trying to impress a starlet. I had a bite of eggs, then added, “I’d be lying if I said I had an easy time of it.”
“Nobody does. You get wounded?”
“Nothing serious, but, uh … they sent me home on a Section Eight. I went a little Asiatic.”
All of that was true, by the way. I’d gone home due to what they used to call shell shock and later termed battle fatigue, but was really just good old-fashioned crazy.
He was nodding. “Yeah, I got discharged, too. Didn’t get a Section Eight, but I talked to my share of Marine Corps shrinks, I’ll tell ya.”
My frankness had opened him up.
He was saying, “See, a mortar went off, right by me, and I got a concussion.” He tapped his head. “Got myself a steel plate in my scalp.”
“That’s rough.”
“You think that’s rough? Right after I get out, I manage to get myself into a damn car crash … not sayin’ I wasn’t partly to blame. I’d knocked back a few, and was out of sorts, ’cause I’d just been in, well, a kind of bar fight. Anyway, I wound up in a coma for three months.”
“You’re kidding. That is rough.”
“Tellin’ me? Hell, I came out of it like a baby. Had to learn to walk, talk…” He held up his knife. “… even how to use a knife and fork. My old man had to teach me every basic skill of livin’, all over again. And you know what? It … it killed him.”