“General Walker, boy! Someone almost splattered his Negro-hating brains all over his office wall at that house of his on Turtle Creek. You mean you didn’t know?”
“I haven’t been reading the papers just lately.”
“Oh?” Jeanne said. “Don’t I see the
“I mean I don’t read the news. Too depressing. Just the funnypages and the want-ads. Big Brother says get a job or the baby starves.”
“So you weren’t the one who took that potshot, huh?” de Mohrenschildt asked.
Teasing him.
The question was why. Because de Mohrenschildt would never in his wildest dreams have believed a pipsqueak like Ozzie Rabbit was the shooter last Wednesday night… or because he knew that Lee was? Maybe because Jeanne had noticed the rifle? I wished with all my heart that the women weren’t there. Given a chance to listen to Lee and his peculiar amigo talk man-to-man, my questions might have been answered. As it was, I still could not be sure.
“You think I’d be crazy enough to shoot at someone with J. Edgar Hoover looking over my shoulder?” Lee sounded like he was trying to get into the spirit of the thing, Josh Along with George instead of Sing Along with Mitch, but he wasn’t doing a very good job.
“Nobody thinks you shot at anybody, Lee,” Jeanne said in a placating voice. “Just promise that when your baby starts to walk, you find a safer place than the closet for that rifle of yours.”
Marina replied to this in Russian, but I’d glimpsed the baby in the side yard from time to time and knew what she was saying — that June was walking already.
“Junie will enjoy the nice present,” Lee said, “but we don’t celebrate Easter. We’re atheists.”
Maybe
“So are we,” de Mohrenschildt said. “That’s why we celebrate the Easter Bunny!” He had moved closer to the lamp, and his roar of laughter half-deafened me.
They talked for another ten minutes, mixing English and Russian. Then Jeanne said, “We’ll leave you in peace now. I think we turned you out of bed.”
“No, no, we were up,” Lee said. “Thanks for dropping by.”
George said, “We’ll talk soon, Lee, eh? You can come to the country club. We’ll organize the waiters into a collective!”
“Sure, sure.” They were moving toward the door now.
De Mohrenschildt said something else, but it was too low for me to catch more than a few words. They might have been
When did you get it back? Was that what he said? As in
I replayed the tape half a dozen times, but at super-slow speed, there was just no way to tell. I lay awake long after the Oswalds had gone to sleep; I was still awake at two in the morning, when June cried briefly and was soothed back to dreamland by her mother. I thought of Sadie, sleeping the unrestful sleep of morphine at Parkland Hospital. The room was ugly and the bed was narrow, but I would have been able to sleep there, I was sure of it.
I thought about de Mohrenschildt, that manic shirt-ripping stage actor.
At last I slept. And dreamed I was at a carnival with Sadie. We came to a shooting gallery where Lee stood with his rifle socked into the hollow of his shoulder. The guy behind the counter was George de Mohrenschildt. Lee fired three times and didn’t hit a single target.
“Sorry, son,” de Mohrenschildt said, “no prizes for guys who shoot Maggie’s Drawers.”
Then he turned to me and grinned.
“Step right up, son, you may have better luck.
I woke with a start in the first weak light of day. Above me, the Oswalds slept on.
Easter Sunday afternoon found me back in Dealey Plaza, sitting on a park bench, looking at the forbidding brick cube of the School Book Depository, and wondering what to do next.
In ten days, Lee was going to leave Dallas for New Orleans, the city of his birth. He would get a job greasing machinery at a coffee company and rent the apartment on Magazine Street. After spending two weeks or so with Ruth Paine and her children in Irving, Marina and June would join him. I wouldn’t follow. Not with Sadie facing a long period of recovery and an uncertain future.
