The third bullet : a Bob Lee Swagger novel / Stephen Hunter.
"A reimagining of the events surrounding the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy finds Bob Lee Swagger drawing on old records, intelligence archives, and observations at the infamous site to investigate a new clue about a third bullet that mysteriously exploded."--from NoveList.
Record details
- ISBN: 9781451640205
- Physical Description: 485 pages ; 24 cm
- Publisher: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2013.
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General Note: | Series numeration from NoveList. |
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Genre: | Suspense fiction. Mystery fiction. |
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Available copies
- 56 of 57 copies available at Evergreen Indiana.
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- 0 current holds with 57 total copies.
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Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
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Attica PL - Attica | F HUNTER, STEPHEN (Text) | 74231000104613 | Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Batesville Mem. PL - Batesville | F HUNTER S. (Text) | 34706001358136 | Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Benton Co PL - Fowler | F HUN (Text) | 34044000793370 | Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Bloomfield Eastern Greene Co PL - Bloomfield Main | PAPERBACK FIC HUN (Text) | 36803000918404 | FICTION | Available | - |
Cambridge City PL - Cambridge City | F Hun (Text) | 76893000251129 | Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Carnegie PL of Steuben Co - Angola | FIC MYS HUNTER (Text) | 33118000157438 | Adult: Mystery | Available | - |
Clayton-Liberty Township Public Library - Main | FIC HUN (Text) | 38324000320051 | Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Covington-Veedersburg PL - Veedersburg | FIC HUN Bob Lee Swagger #8 (Text) | 32808000296226 | CVBPLV Adult Fiction | Available | - |
Danville-Center Twp PL - Danville | F HUN (Text) | 32604000212355 | AD Fiction | Available | - |
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Third Bullet
Idaho
In Cascade, everybody goes to Rickâs. Even Swagger.
He showed up every once in a while, maybe three, four times a month, preceded by myth, isolated by reputation, and cloaked in diffidence. He sat alone, if he came, at the counter, and had a couple of cups of coffee, black. Jeans, old boots, some kind of jacket, and a faded red Razorbacks ball cap. He could have been a drifter or a trucker or a rancher or a gunfighter. The body was rangy, without fat, slightly tense, also radiating signals of damage. He always arrived, if he was to arrive at all, at 5 a.m. with the ranchers. It was said he had trouble sleepingâsaid, that is, by Swagger watchers, since the man himself spoke hardly a wordâand if he was still awake when the sun cracked the edge of the world, heâd drive from his place out on 144 to Rickâs, not so much to join in the community but to reassure himself that community was there.
That was pretty much Rickâs purpose in the general scheme of things. The food wasnât muchâit was primarily a breakfast place whose short-order cook knew every way to wreck an egg and had the gift for the right fusion of crunch, grease, and chew to pan-fried potatoesâand the early risersâwho drove the Cascade economy, paid the taxes, hired the Mexicans, guided hunters for a week or so in the fall, and plowed the roadsâalways stopped there to fuel up for whatever the long day of honest labor held in store. Swagger, though no glad-hander, seemed to like the company, to enjoy the ranch badinage and the talk of Boise State football and the weather complaints, because he knew no fool would come up to him with questions or requests or offers, and that these sinewy gentlemen, themselves joshers but not speech givers, always played by the rules.
As for them, they knew only what theyâd heard, though they werenât sure where they heard it. War hero. Retired marine. Lots of deep-grass stuff in a war that we lost. Supposedly the best shot in the West, or at any rate, a hell of a shot. Gun guy, got a lot of stuff from Midway USA and Brownells. A late-arriving daughter, Japanese by birth, who was the twelve-and-under girls roping champ and seemed born to horseback. Beautiful wife, kept to self, running the barns the family owned in three or was it four states. Business success. Knew of the big world and chose to live in this one. Out of a movie, someone said, and someone else said, Except they donât make them kinds of movies no more, and everybody laughed and agreed.
That was the easy truce that reigned at Rickâs, and even Rick and his two gals, Shelly and Sam, seemed okay with it. That is, until the Chinese woman showed up.
Well, possibly she wasnât Chinese. She was Asian, of an indefinite age somewhere between young and not young, with a strong nose and dark, smart eyes that could pierce steel if she so desired. Though she seldom showed it, she had a smile that could break hearts and change minds. She was short, rather busty, and looked pretty damned tough for someone who was probably soft in all the right places.
She showed at 5, took a seat at the counter, ordered coffee, and read something on her Kindle for two hours. At 7, she left. Nice tipper. Pleasant, distant, not an outreacher, but at the same time completely unfazed by the masculine brio of the 5 a.m. ranch crowd at Rickâs.
She came every day for two weeks, never missing, never reaching out, maintaining her silence and her secrecy. It didnât take the fellows long to figure out that none of them was of interest to a crafty, contained beauty, so she had to be there for Swagger. She was stalking him. A reporter, a book writer, a Hollywood agent, somebody who saw a way to make some bucks from whatever secrets Swaggerâs war mask of a face concealed without murmur or tremor. Yet when he came in, she made no move toward him, nor heâhe noticed her instantly, as he noticed everything instantlyâtoward her. They sat with an empty stool between them at the counter, each drinking black coffee, while she read and he ruminated or remembered or whatever it was he did when he came in.
This ritual continued for another week or two, and it consumed the Cascade gossip circuits, such as they were. Finally, almost as if to satisfy the town gabbers instead of any genuine impulse of his own, he walked over to her. âMaâam?â
âYes?â she said, looking up. In the light, he saw that she was quite beautiful.
âMaâam, it seems the fellows here believe youâre in town to have a chat with a man named Swagger. Iâm Swagger.â
âHello, Mr. Swagger.â
âI wanted to spare you any more trouble, because I imagine youâve got better places than Rickâs in Cascade, Idaho, to spend your time. I have essentially retired from the world, and if youâre here to see me, I have to disappoint you. I donât see anyone. My wife, my daughters, and my son, thatâs about it. I just sit on a rocking chair and watch the sun move across the sky. I donât do a thing no more. My wife does the work. So whatever it is you want, Iâm sparing you the time by telling you itâs probably not going to happen. And this is more than Iâve said in a year, so I better stop while Iâm ahead.â
âThatâs fine, Mr. Swagger,â she said. âTime isnât the issue. Iâll stay years if I have to. Iâm in this for the long haul.â
He didnât know what to say in response. He just knew he had no need whatsoever to go back to what he called, in the argot of that war so many years ago, The World. Each time he went, it seemed to cost him. The last time it had cost him a woman heâd allowed himself to care about, and he did not relish a revisit to that grief, at least during waking hours. He had enough to worry about with two daughters and a son, and at sixty-six, with a steel ball for a hip, enough scar tissue across his raggedy old body to show up on satellites, and so many memories of men dying, he needed no more adventures, no more losses, no more grief. He was afraid of them.
Then she said, âI know about you and what you did in the war. It seems to be a profession that prizes patience. You sit, you wait. You wait, you wait, you wait. Isnât that right?â
âWaiting is a part of it, yes maâam.â
âWell, I can do nothing to impress you. I canât shoot, ride, climb, or fight. No book Iâve read would amaze you, no accomplishment Iâve achieved would register on your radar screen. But I will show you patience. I will wait you out. This week, the next, this month, the next, on and on. I will wait you out, Mr. Swagger. I will impress you with my patience.â
It was a terrific answer, one heâd never counted on. He let no emotion cross the Iron Age shield that was his face. Possibly he blinked those lizard eyes, or ran tongue over dried lips, as he was a dry old coot, wary and contained, who made noise when he moved because one adventure or another had left him with a limp, and even if the wind and the sun had turned his face the color of Navajo pottery, his eyes had somehow bled themselves of color and were reptilian irises, untainted by empathy.
âYes maâam,â he said. âSo weâll wait each other out.â
It took over three weeks. Each time he showed, he thought sheâd be gone. But there she was, tucked away in the corner, not looking up, her face illuminated by the glow of the reading machine or whatever it was. He skipped for ten days straight and assumed that would surely drive her away. It did not.
Finally, halfway into the fourth week, she went to her rented car in the general cloud of pickups pulling out for the dayâs first duty station and found his truck, a black Ford F-150, next to hers. He lounged against its fender, ropy and lean in his baseball cap, a high-plains drifter, a Shane, a truck driver off the interstate.
âAll right,â he said. âIf you were in this for money, youâd be long gone. If youâre crazy, the jabbering of those old men in this joint would have sent you off to the nut bin. What Iâm getting is some kind of stubborn in you that usually equals high purpose. You win. Iâll give you what you want, as much as I can and stay my own man.â
âItâs not much,â she said. âNo, no money, no contracts, no angles. Iâm not from a big flashy city, just a blue-collar rust bucket called Baltimore. I want your judgment, thatâs all. You know things I donât. I want to put something before you, and then I want you to tell me if itâs anything or if itâs craziness, coincidence, whatever. Thatâs all, except I forgot the best part: itâs very dull and boring.â
âAll right,â he said, âyou have earned the right to bore me. I can be bored, itâs not a problem. Can you meet me at the T.G.I.F.âs off the interstate in Iron Springs tomorrow at two? Itâs a craphole, but itâs crowded and loud and nobodyâll notice a thing. Weâll drink coffee and talk. I chose that place because I donât want the old goats in this place all giddy over seeing us.â
âFair enough, Mr. Swagger. Iâll see you there.â
She was punctual and found him sitting in a booth in the rear of the gaudy place, whose cheesy cheerfulness seemed in counterpoint to his grave countenance and all the hollows and planes of his tight old face, with its deltas of fissure extending from each eye like the broken cataracts of an ancient river of kings. Or maybe, sans the warrior romance, he was just a beat-to-hell old guy. Meanwhile, the kind of citizen who defines the interstate as freedom and paradise swirled and bobbed through the busy place, raising clamor, eating ice cream, yelling at children, and exhibiting all the discontents of motorized civilization that one can manage.
âMaâam? Say, I donât even have a name for you.â
She sat across from him. âMy name is Jean Marquez. Iâm Filipino by heritage, born and raised here. I am a journalist by profession, though this is not about a story, and Iâm not working for my newspaper. Iâm the daughter of two doctors, fifty-five years old, and a widow.â
âIâm sorry to hear of your loss, Ms. Marquez. Iâve lost some very close people and understand the hurting.â
âI thought you might. Anyhow, you should call me Jean. Everybody does. My husband was named James Aptapton. Does that name mean anything?â
âHmm,â he said, and somehow, yes, it did. His mind and face fogged in search, and finally, he said, âIâm coming up with some kind of writer. Wrote about snipers? Knew guns, is that right? Donât believe I ever met the fellow or read his books, but Iâd run into the name here and there. Iâd get asked, now that I remember, if I was some hero he wrote about, Billy Don Trueheart, something like that?â
âSomething like that. Yes, Jim was a gun guy. He was one of those men who loved guns, and if you lived with him for twenty years, as I did, you got used to guns everywhere. He eventually got wealthy enough to spend seventeen thousand dollars on a Thompson machine gun. If you want to rent a Thompson machine gun, let me know. I can let you have one at an affordable daily rate.â
âIâll bear that in mind, but I hope my Thompson days are long over.â
âAnyhow, the guns everywhere, the gun magazines, the biographies of people like Elmer Keith and John M. Browning, the dead animal heads, all that, that was who he was, and I knew that going in and accepted it. His politics, never, but the gun thing, it was okay because he was also funny about it, as he was funny about everything. He was also kind, and even when he became successful, he never turned into an asshole and stayed true and decent to his kids and my family and his mother and the people he knew. It was never about getting to the table where the cool kids sat. It was about buying guns, drinking vodka, and making people laugh. Everyone who knew him is missing him and will for a long time.â
âIs this about his death?â
âYes. The idiot went to a bar one night and had three instead of the allowed one martini. He walked home, reflexes all messed up, and managed to get himself killed by a hit-and-run driver. It was merciful, they say, he went fast.â
âIâm sorry. Did they catch the driver?â
âNo. Thatâs part of the issue. It seems that over two thousand people a year are killed by hit-and-runs, and about ninety-eight percent of those cases are solved. There are those that arenât, and it is remotely possible that he was murdered. I know, I know, it was probably some kid high on meth in a hopped-up car who saw an old guy staggering down the street and stomped on the pedal. For kicks, for laughs, for the warm and fuzzy memories, I donât know. But . . . maybe not.â
âI have had experience with a man who killed by car. Itâs more than possible. Driven by a professional, it can be a lethal instrument. I suppose youâre going to tell me why this could be a murder.â
âI am. We are at the boring part. Maybe youâd better pour yourself a cup of coffee.â
âI like your husband. I like you. Itâs fine. Go on, try to bore me.â
âAs I say, itâs a story in which almost nothing happens. It has no vivid characters, no sudden turns of fate, no dramatic reversals, no humor, no drama. Itâs about something that happened in a workplace a long time ago.â
âSo far, so good.â
âIt canât be verified. Itâs hazy in parts. It might be a hoax, though itâs so dreary, I canât imagine how anyone could gain anything off it. I donât have the exact dates. It was first told in a letter, then years later in another letter, then years after that in a third letter. Iâve read none of the letters, and the passage of time between each installment suggests the erosion of failing memory. On top of that, my only experience with it was as told to me by my husband, and I must confess I didnât pay much attention, so my own memory is questionable as well. All in all, as evidence of a crime, itâs a pretty pathetic deal.â
âIt must linger?â
âIt does indeed linger. People canât quite put it aside. They think they have, and go about their lives, and then it comes back in the middle of the night and pokes them awake. It did that to the three letter writers and to my late husband. It did it to me enough times that I found out about a Mr. Bob Lee Swagger and tracked him to a flyspeck diner in a dying wide-spot in the road called Cascade, Idaho, and invested close to two months in earning an audience with him.â
âThe lingering part is very interesting. So far, youâve got me hooked.â
âWe start with a young man, a recent graduate of an engineering school in Dallas, Texas. The time is unknown, but Iâm guessing mid-seventies. Heâs smart, ambitious, hardworking, decent. He wants to join a construction firm and engineer giant buildings. The first job he gets is entry-level, for an elevator contractor.â
âElevators?â
âRight. Not exactly the glamour trade. But elevators, which we all take for granted, are heavily engineered. That is, they are overde-signed, overmaintained, overregulated, and no one involved with them takes them for granted. His firm installs them and maintains them on contract so they can pass their yearly examinations and donât drop ten people fifty stories.â
âSounds reasonable.â
âItâs hard, crummy work. The shafts and âengineâ rooms, as they call the motor and pulley devices that make them run, are dark, poorly ventilated, and not air-conditioned. Even more so back then. The space is cramped, and it involves a lot of twisting and bending to get access. The work is intensive and highly pressurized, because the building managers hate it when they have to shut down the elevators and the tenants hate it and everybody hates it. Are you getting a picture?â
âI am.â
âThis young man and his crew are in the engine room on the roof of a particular building, and theyâve set up lights, and theyâre measuring cable wear, gear wear, electrical motor wear, lubricating, trying to work fast so they can get the box, as they call it, back in service. Itâs hot, crowded, and except for the light beams, dark. Not pleasant, not happy, and suddenlyâkaboom.â
âKaboom?â
âOne of the workers, maybe resting, maybe backing away to make room for someone else, maybe doing whatever you do in an elevator engine room, bumps into something on the wall, and thereâs a loud crash and the sound of stuff falling to the ground, a big cloud of acrid dust, everybodyâs coughing and wheezing. All the flashlights go onto it, and they discover that heâs bumped into a shelf on the wall, and for whatever reasonâthe screws rusted or came out, the brick or stucco or whatever gave way, the metal itself shearedâwhen he jostled it, it collapsed, dumping its pile of whatever was stored there to the ground. Thatâs the action scene, by the way. The shelf falling, thatâs as exciting as it gets.â
âMy heartâs beating so fast, I can hardly stand it.â
âHereâs the really boring part. They figure out whatâs wrong with the shelf, and somehow get it remounted, and start restacking the stuff on it. The stuff is carpet remnants. That is, the lobby of the building has a big carpet, and they ended up with remnants that they had to keep around for patching or whatever, so they had a shelf in the engine room and someone decided that would be a good out-of-the-way place to store the remnants.â
âSounds pretty top-secret to me.â
âAnd someone says, âHey, look at this.â Be cool if it was a rifle, huh? Or a box of ammo, a telescopic sight, a spy radio, something really James Bond?â
âThat would be very interesting.â
âSorry. Itâs just a coat. I told you it was a boring story.â
âIt ainât without interest. Please go on.â
âIt turns out to be a manâs overcoat, XL, tan gabardine, fairly high-quality, in extremely good condition. Maybe almost new. It had been methodically folded and slid into the pile of carpet remnants in the engine room sometime in the past. Again, no dates, no specifics, nothing.â
âIâve got it,â said Swagger.
âThey unfold it and immediately make a discovery. It stinks. Unfolding it puts out some kind of chemical stench, very unpleasant. Flashlights go onto it. It seems that the left breast wears a rather gaudy petro or chemical stain, and even now, who knows how many years later, the odor of that stain is powerful. It hasnât gone away. Instead of finding a free coat, theyâve found a fixer-upper, which would involve dry cleaning, which might or might not get the stain and the smell out, and no one is interested, and so it goes into the trash. It is thrown out. It disappears. It is gone forever. End of story. Not much of a story, is it?â
âNo, but I give you itâs got some moments,â Bob said. Somewhere in his rat-pointed tactical brain, he was beginning to play with them. Something had been subtly provoked. Dallas. Abandoned overcoat. Strange smell and stain.
âOkay,â she said. âThe Engineer is promoted, and he leaves the firm and goes to that big construction outfit. Again, he is promoted, because heâs very intelligent and hardworking. Heâs the type that built America. He becomes a partner. He marries his high school girlfriend, they have three beautiful daughters and move to the suburb where partners live. He joins a country club. He becomes venerable. His daughters marry wonderful men. Iâm actually making up the details, but you get the picture. One of the daughters becomes engaged to the son of a rancher, another prosperous fellow. The Rancher and his wife invite the Engineer and the wife out for a get-to-know-you weekend and barbecue. Theyâre sitting there in the big paneled living room looking out the picture window to the swimming pool and the white horse fences and the green meadows, and the Engineer notices something: dead animals all over the place. Turns out the Rancher is a hunter. Heâs been all over the world. Lions and tigers and bears. Ibexes and sables and kudus. Theyâre all drinking highballs and having a good old time and the Rancher says, âSay, Don, care to see the shop?â
âDon nods and off they go. They walk into a big gun place. Guns, heads, safes, benches, targets, photos of men with dead animals, maybe an old Marilyn calendar, tools, all that, the sort of thing my husband had, although Iâm guessing this Rancher kept his a lot neater than my husband did. And whammo, the Engineer is hit by an odor. Itâs an old, old odor. I donât know if you know it, but psychologists consider olfactory cues the strongest reminders. A smell can take you back to a time and place and re-create cues to all the other senses. So suddenly, youâre back where you were when you first hit that smell, and of course, Don is back in the engine room of the elevator in that building in Dallas thirty-odd years ago.â
âGI or Hoppeâs 9?â Bob asked.
âHoppeâs,â she said. âYes. Barrel solvent. Chemical cleaning fluid especially for guns. Been around since the twenties. Thatâs what Don smells in his new palâs shop, and he realizes thatâs what he smelled all those years ago in the building that I of course didnât name.â
âYouâre going to tell me it was the Texas Book Depository?â
âIf only. No, itâs the building across Houston Street from the Texas Book Depository. Itâs called the Dal-Tex Building. It was there in 1963 too. Dal-Tex doesnât mean Dallas, Texas, but Dallas Textiles, as it was the headquarters of the Dallas wholesale garment industry. Actually, Abraham Zapruderâs office was there, along with a hundred other offices. Nothing particularly special except that it did offer close to the same angle and elevation down Elm Street next to Dealey Plaza that our friend Lee Harvey Oswald used. You can see why it lingers.â
âI can,â said Bob, trying to conjure the structure from a rush of image memories of Dealey Plaza, that triangle of grass at the heart of American darkness. He got nothing, no vision, no sense of place.
âItâs figured in a few of the thousand conspiracy theories. I checked into them; none of them are that interesting or convincing. Someone claims that a photo shows a rifle on a tripod on the fireplace, but itâs just shadows. There were some âarrestsâ after the building was closed down a few minutes after the shooting, but nothing came of them. Some people claim without evidence that it was one of the nine or is it twelve shooting sites that the CIA, Sears, Roebuck, the Canadian Air Force, and Proctor and Gamble used in their conspiracy. All in all, itâs not much.â
Bob nodded.
âBut it lingers,â she continued. âFor the Engineer, particularly. He canât get it out of his mind. You see why, donât you?â
âThe Hoppeâs suggests that someone had need to clean a rifle, which suggests the presence of a rifle. And you can assume the juice was somehow spilled or leaked onto the coat during the cleaning process. But the coat was carefully hidden, as if whoever had spilled the Hoppeâs, with its chemical smell, didnât want it exposed to the public eye or nose. Lots of folks in Texas would recognize it right away, including most policemen. It was the universal gun cleaner then. All this could have happened on or around November 22, 1963. Thereâs your lingering. It puts a rifle where there ainât been one. But it is thin. Itâs real thin.â
âIt gets thinner. A few more years pass. The Engineer doesnât know what to do about it. Heâs no dummy; he gets how thin it is too, way too thin to take to law enforcement. Then he reads a book. The book is called Shootout on Pennsylvania. It was written by my husband and a friend. Itâs the story of an assassination attempt on Harry Truman in 1950 that ended up in a gunfight in the middle of the street in the middle of the day in the middle of downtown Washington, right across from the White House. Two men dead, three wounded. Almost totally forgotten. Anyhow, the Engineer reads the book. He reads in particular about a Secret Service agent named Floyd Barring, who was in command of the watch at Blair House, where the fight happened, and was considered the hero. He shot one of the bad guys in the head and took him down and maybe saved Harry Trumanâs life. The Engineer finds from the book that Floyd is still alive and that, thirteen years after being a hero in Washington, he was the agent in charge of the Secret Service advance party for the Dallas trip, and was in Dallas for the assassination and testified before the Warren Commission and all that. The Engineer takes a shine to Floyd, who seems upright, decent, hardworking, committed. Since Floyd is retired yet invested in the assassination, he seems like a candidate to hear the Engineerâs tale. So hereâs the first letter: the Engineer writes to Floyd and details everything I have laid out to you.â
âYou never read the letter, however.â
âNot even close. Iâm telling you more or less what I later heard from Jim when I wasnât listening hard.â
Swagger nodded, seeing the old agent getting the thick packet from an unknown person in Dallas and slowly considering its contents. âWhat did this Secret Service guy do?â
âFor whatever reason, nothing. In fact, he probably threw it out. Crazy Kennedy bullshit, you know the drill. He was sick of it, as heâd figured in some theories too, and he didnât like it. He was also in ill health, living in a geriatric apartment in Silver Spring, mourning the death of his wife, and knew he didnât have much time.â
âI see.â
âYet it lingered. He couldnât put it out of his mind. A few years after that, he writes a letterâhalf a letterâto my husband. He never finishes it. He never sends it. Maybe he thinks better of it. Who knows? Anyway, he dies. And that would seem to be that. No more lingering. The lingering is over. But then: his daughter finds the letter a few years later. So she sends it on to Jim. So years after the coat was found, years after the identity of the smell was discovered, years after it was communicated to a retired Secret Service agent, years after he died, courtesy of his daughter, it was sent to my husband.â
âAnd he sees the possibilities?â
âMore than most. Heâs looking for a project. He has a contract that calls for a book a year, heâs just finished one, but thereâs no rest for the wicked, and when he gets the half-written letter that Floyd almost sent him concerning the lost letter the Engineer sent to Floyd, he sees something. He spends a few days researching, looking at maps, reading books or at least examining them, and then he has some kind of eureka moment. He claims heâs solved the JFK assassination. I suspect vodka played a part. It turns out he means he has an idea no one else has had. And he has to go to Dallas. And so he goes to Dallas.â
âWas he successful?â
âHe talked to a bunch of people, I think he got into Dal-Tex, he came back very excited. He started working like a madman. One day a week later, he goes off to a bar for a drink and ends up with a broken back and pelvis in an alley.â
âYou think he was killed because he was looking into a certain idea about JFKâs death?â
âI havenât said that. Iâve spoken only in facts, and the fact is that now Iâm the worldâs sole possessor of the story. And it lingers. I canât get it out of my head, and the connection between it and Jimâs immediate death by possible homicide wonât let me sleep at night. I have to do every last thing to make sure that the story is properly processed. Someone has to deal with it, judge it, assess it, contextualize it, someone who knows this stuff and has worked in this world. I have nominated you for that high honor. So now I ask the question I came all this way for. Is it anything?â
He let out a large breath.
âWhat does that signify?â she asked. âYou think Iâm an idiot? The whole thing is nonsense? What a colossal waste of time?â
âNo. I can see how it provokes. I ainât denying that. And Iâm not saying Iâm a hundred percent Warren Commission lone-gunman guy. I havenât looked at it hard enough, but I do think, like you, that a lot of the âtheoriesâ are stuff people dreamed up to make a buck. I also think that the thing has been looked at so much by so many people for so long that itâs highly unlikely thereâs anything left unfound.â
âFair enough.â
âLet me put it before you in a different way, all right? I think youâre missing something, and I think your husband missed it and Floyd missed it, all the way back to the Engineer. That thing you all missed is Texas. Texas is gun country. You may have to explain why you have a gun in Baltimore, but you sure donât in Texas. Everyone has a gun in Texas. They have âem to wear to barbecues or the opera or the swim meet. Nobody blinks an eye, and that was especially true down there then, before JFK. Nobody thought a thing about a gun. It just was, thatâs all. The presence of a gun in that building isnât remarkable. In fact, itâs nothing. I can think of a hundred reasons for a gun in that building other than killing a president. Maybe some boys were heading out for deer season straight from work. Save time, get there opening-day morning. They brought their rifles in, and one of them knew his needed cleaning, so he does the job. Nobody says a thing because it ainât remarkable. He leans the gun in a corner and it rubs up against somebodyâs coat. When that guy gets his coat, he sees itâs ruined, it goes into the wastebasket, and later that night the janitor finds it and decides to scavenge it. He hangs it up to dry out, but Hoppeâs being powerful, the stink never does go away. So he stuffs it somewhere, meaning to check it out later, and forgets about it. Years later, the elevator people discover it. That could have happened not just for deer season but in pheasant season too, as they kill a lot of them birds down there, and doves and pigeons and anything that flies. So you have found the suggestion of a gun in a building in Texas, and it surprises you only because you donât know guns or Texas.â
âI see,â she said.
âMaâamâJean, if I mayâyouâve got what the Marine Corps would call intelligence that doesnât rise to the actionable level. It doesnât carry enough meaning to be acted on. There are too many other possibilities here for anyone to do anything about it. My best advice is to congratulate yourself for following up on your duty to your husband and then go back to your life. I think your husband would have found that out in time too. Maybe he could do something with his discovery if it were a fiction book, but I donât see it as having any real meaning in the world, and it sure didnât have anything to do with his death. Sorry to be so blunt, but you didnât come all this way and invest all this time for sugarcoating.â
âNo, I didnât, Mr. Swagger. I believe youâve set me straight.â
âI hope I helped, maâam. And Iâm very sorry about your husband. Maybe by the time you get back, they will have caught the boy.â
âMaybe so.â
âLet me walk you to your car, and weâll get you out of this godforsaken place.â
âThank you.â
They both rose as he peeled off a few bills for the waitress and headed out to her Fusion.
âI guess weâll never know,â she said as she got to her car, âwho ran over the mystery man with a bicycle.â
He was only half listening at this time, trying to sneak a look at his watch to see what time it was and how soon he could get back, because heâd promised to help Miko on her low-roping skills andâ
âIâm sorry,â he said. âWhat did you say?â
âOh, the back of the coat, it had a smear on it that appeared to represent a tread. The Engineer thought it could have been from an English bike, you know, thin-wheeled. It was an impression, about an inch long, where it looked like a tread mark had been printed. Thatâs all. A minor point, I forgot toââ
âDo you have a list of the people your husband visited?â
âI have his notebook. Itâs hard to read, but it does have some names and addresses there. Why, what isââ
âI have to set some things up. Itâll take me a week. I want you to go home and find that notebook and FedEx it to me. If he had computer files on the Dallas trip or notepapers, get me that stuff too. Iâll get down there as soon as Iâm set up.â
âDo you want to borrow the tommy gun?â
âNo, not yet.â
âYouâre not joking, are you?â
âNo maâam.â
âDo you want me to help defray the expenses? I mean, I seem to be wealthy now, and Iââ
âNo maâam,â said Swagger. âThis oneâs on me.â
CHAPTER 2
Idaho
In Cascade, everybody goes to Rickâs. Even Swagger.
He showed up every once in a while, maybe three, four times a month, preceded by myth, isolated by reputation, and cloaked in diffidence. He sat alone, if he came, at the counter, and had a couple of cups of coffee, black. Jeans, old boots, some kind of jacket, and a faded red Razorbacks ball cap. He could have been a drifter or a trucker or a rancher or a gunfighter. The body was rangy, without fat, slightly tense, also radiating signals of damage. He always arrived, if he was to arrive at all, at 5 a.m. with the ranchers. It was said he had trouble sleepingâsaid, that is, by Swagger watchers, since the man himself spoke hardly a wordâand if he was still awake when the sun cracked the edge of the world, heâd drive from his place out on 144 to Rickâs, not so much to join in the community but to reassure himself that community was there.
That was pretty much Rickâs purpose in the general scheme of things. The food wasnât muchâit was primarily a breakfast place whose short-order cook knew every way to wreck an egg and had the gift for the right fusion of crunch, grease, and chew to pan-fried potatoesâand the early risersâwho drove the Cascade economy, paid the taxes, hired the Mexicans, guided hunters for a week or so in the fall, and plowed the roadsâalways stopped there to fuel up for whatever the long day of honest labor held in store. Swagger, though no glad-hander, seemed to like the company, to enjoy the ranch badinage and the talk of Boise State football and the weather complaints, because he knew no fool would come up to him with questions or requests or offers, and that these sinewy gentlemen, themselves joshers but not speech givers, always played by the rules.
As for them, they knew only what theyâd heard, though they werenât sure where they heard it. War hero. Retired marine. Lots of deep-grass stuff in a war that we lost. Supposedly the best shot in the West, or at any rate, a hell of a shot. Gun guy, got a lot of stuff from Midway USA and Brownells. A late-arriving daughter, Japanese by birth, who was the twelve-and-under girls roping champ and seemed born to horseback. Beautiful wife, kept to self, running the barns the family owned in three or was it four states. Business success. Knew of the big world and chose to live in this one. Out of a movie, someone said, and someone else said, Except they donât make them kinds of movies no more, and everybody laughed and agreed.
That was the easy truce that reigned at Rickâs, and even Rick and his two gals, Shelly and Sam, seemed okay with it. That is, until the Chinese woman showed up.
Well, possibly she wasnât Chinese. She was Asian, of an indefinite age somewhere between young and not young, with a strong nose and dark, smart eyes that could pierce steel if she so desired. Though she seldom showed it, she had a smile that could break hearts and change minds. She was short, rather busty, and looked pretty damned tough for someone who was probably soft in all the right places.
She showed at 5, took a seat at the counter, ordered coffee, and read something on her Kindle for two hours. At 7, she left. Nice tipper. Pleasant, distant, not an outreacher, but at the same time completely unfazed by the masculine brio of the 5 a.m. ranch crowd at Rickâs.
She came every day for two weeks, never missing, never reaching out, maintaining her silence and her secrecy. It didnât take the fellows long to figure out that none of them was of interest to a crafty, contained beauty, so she had to be there for Swagger. She was stalking him. A reporter, a book writer, a Hollywood agent, somebody who saw a way to make some bucks from whatever secrets Swaggerâs war mask of a face concealed without murmur or tremor. Yet when he came in, she made no move toward him, nor heâhe noticed her instantly, as he noticed everything instantlyâtoward her. They sat with an empty stool between them at the counter, each drinking black coffee, while she read and he ruminated or remembered or whatever it was he did when he came in.
This ritual continued for another week or two, and it consumed the Cascade gossip circuits, such as they were. Finally, almost as if to satisfy the town gabbers instead of any genuine impulse of his own, he walked over to her. âMaâam?â
âYes?â she said, looking up. In the light, he saw that she was quite beautiful.
âMaâam, it seems the fellows here believe youâre in town to have a chat with a man named Swagger. Iâm Swagger.â
âHello, Mr. Swagger.â
âI wanted to spare you any more trouble, because I imagine youâve got better places than Rickâs in Cascade, Idaho, to spend your time. I have essentially retired from the world, and if youâre here to see me, I have to disappoint you. I donât see anyone. My wife, my daughters, and my son, thatâs about it. I just sit on a rocking chair and watch the sun move across the sky. I donât do a thing no more. My wife does the work. So whatever it is you want, Iâm sparing you the time by telling you itâs probably not going to happen. And this is more than Iâve said in a year, so I better stop while Iâm ahead.â
âThatâs fine, Mr. Swagger,â she said. âTime isnât the issue. Iâll stay years if I have to. Iâm in this for the long haul.â
He didnât know what to say in response. He just knew he had no need whatsoever to go back to what he called, in the argot of that war so many years ago, The World. Each time he went, it seemed to cost him. The last time it had cost him a woman heâd allowed himself to care about, and he did not relish a revisit to that grief, at least during waking hours. He had enough to worry about with two daughters and a son, and at sixty-six, with a steel ball for a hip, enough scar tissue across his raggedy old body to show up on satellites, and so many memories of men dying, he needed no more adventures, no more losses, no more grief. He was afraid of them.
Then she said, âI know about you and what you did in the war. It seems to be a profession that prizes patience. You sit, you wait. You wait, you wait, you wait. Isnât that right?â
âWaiting is a part of it, yes maâam.â
âWell, I can do nothing to impress you. I canât shoot, ride, climb, or fight. No book Iâve read would amaze you, no accomplishment Iâve achieved would register on your radar screen. But I will show you patience. I will wait you out. This week, the next, this month, the next, on and on. I will wait you out, Mr. Swagger. I will impress you with my patience.â
It was a terrific answer, one heâd never counted on. He let no emotion cross the Iron Age shield that was his face. Possibly he blinked those lizard eyes, or ran tongue over dried lips, as he was a dry old coot, wary and contained, who made noise when he moved because one adventure or another had left him with a limp, and even if the wind and the sun had turned his face the color of Navajo pottery, his eyes had somehow bled themselves of color and were reptilian irises, untainted by empathy.
âYes maâam,â he said. âSo weâll wait each other out.â
It took over three weeks. Each time he showed, he thought sheâd be gone. But there she was, tucked away in the corner, not looking up, her face illuminated by the glow of the reading machine or whatever it was. He skipped for ten days straight and assumed that would surely drive her away. It did not.
Finally, halfway into the fourth week, she went to her rented car in the general cloud of pickups pulling out for the dayâs first duty station and found his truck, a black Ford F-150, next to hers. He lounged against its fender, ropy and lean in his baseball cap, a high-plains drifter, a Shane, a truck driver off the interstate.
âAll right,â he said. âIf you were in this for money, youâd be long gone. If youâre crazy, the jabbering of those old men in this joint would have sent you off to the nut bin. What Iâm getting is some kind of stubborn in you that usually equals high purpose. You win. Iâll give you what you want, as much as I can and stay my own man.â
âItâs not much,â she said. âNo, no money, no contracts, no angles. Iâm not from a big flashy city, just a blue-collar rust bucket called Baltimore. I want your judgment, thatâs all. You know things I donât. I want to put something before you, and then I want you to tell me if itâs anything or if itâs craziness, coincidence, whatever. Thatâs all, except I forgot the best part: itâs very dull and boring.â
âAll right,â he said, âyou have earned the right to bore me. I can be bored, itâs not a problem. Can you meet me at the T.G.I.F.âs off the interstate in Iron Springs tomorrow at two? Itâs a craphole, but itâs crowded and loud and nobodyâll notice a thing. Weâll drink coffee and talk. I chose that place because I donât want the old goats in this place all giddy over seeing us.â
âFair enough, Mr. Swagger. Iâll see you there.â
She was punctual and found him sitting in a booth in the rear of the gaudy place, whose cheesy cheerfulness seemed in counterpoint to his grave countenance and all the hollows and planes of his tight old face, with its deltas of fissure extending from each eye like the broken cataracts of an ancient river of kings. Or maybe, sans the warrior romance, he was just a beat-to-hell old guy. Meanwhile, the kind of citizen who defines the interstate as freedom and paradise swirled and bobbed through the busy place, raising clamor, eating ice cream, yelling at children, and exhibiting all the discontents of motorized civilization that one can manage.
âMaâam? Say, I donât even have a name for you.â
She sat across from him. âMy name is Jean Marquez. Iâm Filipino by heritage, born and raised here. I am a journalist by profession, though this is not about a story, and Iâm not working for my newspaper. Iâm the daughter of two doctors, fifty-five years old, and a widow.â
âIâm sorry to hear of your loss, Ms. Marquez. Iâve lost some very close people and understand the hurting.â
âI thought you might. Anyhow, you should call me Jean. Everybody does. My husband was named James Aptapton. Does that name mean anything?â
âHmm,â he said, and somehow, yes, it did. His mind and face fogged in search, and finally, he said, âIâm coming up with some kind of writer. Wrote about snipers? Knew guns, is that right? Donât believe I ever met the fellow or read his books, but Iâd run into the name here and there. Iâd get asked, now that I remember, if I was some hero he wrote about, Billy Don Trueheart, something like that?â
âSomething like that. Yes, Jim was a gun guy. He was one of those men who loved guns, and if you lived with him for twenty years, as I did, you got used to guns everywhere. He eventually got wealthy enough to spend seventeen thousand dollars on a Thompson machine gun. If you want to rent a Thompson machine gun, let me know. I can let you have one at an affordable daily rate.â
âIâll bear that in mind, but I hope my Thompson days are long over.â
âAnyhow, the guns everywhere, the gun magazines, the biographies of people like Elmer Keith and John M. Browning, the dead animal heads, all that, that was who he was, and I knew that going in and accepted it. His politics, never, but the gun thing, it was okay because he was also funny about it, as he was funny about everything. He was also kind, and even when he became successful, he never turned into an asshole and stayed true and decent to his kids and my family and his mother and the people he knew. It was never about getting to the table where the cool kids sat. It was about buying guns, drinking vodka, and making people laugh. Everyone who knew him is missing him and will for a long time.â
âIs this about his death?â
âYes. The idiot went to a bar one night and had three instead of the allowed one martini. He walked home, reflexes all messed up, and managed to get himself killed by a hit-and-run driver. It was merciful, they say, he went fast.â
âIâm sorry. Did they catch the driver?â
âNo. Thatâs part of the issue. It seems that over two thousand people a year are killed by hit-and-runs, and about ninety-eight percent of those cases are solved. There are those that arenât, and it is remotely possible that he was murdered. I know, I know, it was probably some kid high on meth in a hopped-up car who saw an old guy staggering down the street and stomped on the pedal. For kicks, for laughs, for the warm and fuzzy memories, I donât know. But . . . maybe not.â
âI have had experience with a man who killed by car. Itâs more than possible. Driven by a professional, it can be a lethal instrument. I suppose youâre going to tell me why this could be a murder.â
âI am. We are at the boring part. Maybe youâd better pour yourself a cup of coffee.â
âI like your husband. I like you. Itâs fine. Go on, try to bore me.â
âAs I say, itâs a story in which almost nothing happens. It has no vivid characters, no sudden turns of fate, no dramatic reversals, no humor, no drama. Itâs about something that happened in a workplace a long time ago.â
âSo far, so good.â
âIt canât be verified. Itâs hazy in parts. It might be a hoax, though itâs so dreary, I canât imagine how anyone could gain anything off it. I donât have the exact dates. It was first told in a letter, then years later in another letter, then years after that in a third letter. Iâve read none of the letters, and the passage of time between each installment suggests the erosion of failing memory. On top of that, my only experience with it was as told to me by my husband, and I must confess I didnât pay much attention, so my own memory is questionable as well. All in all, as evidence of a crime, itâs a pretty pathetic deal.â
âIt must linger?â
âIt does indeed linger. People canât quite put it aside. They think they have, and go about their lives, and then it comes back in the middle of the night and pokes them awake. It did that to the three letter writers and to my late husband. It did it to me enough times that I found out about a Mr. Bob Lee Swagger and tracked him to a flyspeck diner in a dying wide-spot in the road called Cascade, Idaho, and invested close to two months in earning an audience with him.â
âThe lingering part is very interesting. So far, youâve got me hooked.â
âWe start with a young man, a recent graduate of an engineering school in Dallas, Texas. The time is unknown, but Iâm guessing mid-seventies. Heâs smart, ambitious, hardworking, decent. He wants to join a construction firm and engineer giant buildings. The first job he gets is entry-level, for an elevator contractor.â
âElevators?â
âRight. Not exactly the glamour trade. But elevators, which we all take for granted, are heavily engineered. That is, they are overde-signed, overmaintained, overregulated, and no one involved with them takes them for granted. His firm installs them and maintains them on contract so they can pass their yearly examinations and donât drop ten people fifty stories.â
âSounds reasonable.â
âItâs hard, crummy work. The shafts and âengineâ rooms, as they call the motor and pulley devices that make them run, are dark, poorly ventilated, and not air-conditioned. Even more so back then. The space is cramped, and it involves a lot of twisting and bending to get access. The work is intensive and highly pressurized, because the building managers hate it when they have to shut down the elevators and the tenants hate it and everybody hates it. Are you getting a picture?â
âI am.â
âThis young man and his crew are in the engine room on the roof of a particular building, and theyâve set up lights, and theyâre measuring cable wear, gear wear, electrical motor wear, lubricating, trying to work fast so they can get the box, as they call it, back in service. Itâs hot, crowded, and except for the light beams, dark. Not pleasant, not happy, and suddenlyâkaboom.â
âKaboom?â
âOne of the workers, maybe resting, maybe backing away to make room for someone else, maybe doing whatever you do in an elevator engine room, bumps into something on the wall, and thereâs a loud crash and the sound of stuff falling to the ground, a big cloud of acrid dust, everybodyâs coughing and wheezing. All the flashlights go onto it, and they discover that heâs bumped into a shelf on the wall, and for whatever reasonâthe screws rusted or came out, the brick or stucco or whatever gave way, the metal itself shearedâwhen he jostled it, it collapsed, dumping its pile of whatever was stored there to the ground. Thatâs the action scene, by the way. The shelf falling, thatâs as exciting as it gets.â
âMy heartâs beating so fast, I can hardly stand it.â
âHereâs the really boring part. They figure out whatâs wrong with the shelf, and somehow get it remounted, and start restacking the stuff on it. The stuff is carpet remnants. That is, the lobby of the building has a big carpet, and they ended up with remnants that they had to keep around for patching or whatever, so they had a shelf in the engine room and someone decided that would be a good out-of-the-way place to store the remnants.â
âSounds pretty top-secret to me.â
âAnd someone says, âHey, look at this.â Be cool if it was a rifle, huh? Or a box of ammo, a telescopic sight, a spy radio, something really James Bond?â
âThat would be very interesting.â
âSorry. Itâs just a coat. I told you it was a boring story.â
âIt ainât without interest. Please go on.â
âIt turns out to be a manâs overcoat, XL, tan gabardine, fairly high-quality, in extremely good condition. Maybe almost new. It had been methodically folded and slid into the pile of carpet remnants in the engine room sometime in the past. Again, no dates, no specifics, nothing.â
âIâve got it,â said Swagger.
âThey unfold it and immediately make a discovery. It stinks. Unfolding it puts out some kind of chemical stench, very unpleasant. Flashlights go onto it. It seems that the left breast wears a rather gaudy petro or chemical stain, and even now, who knows how many years later, the odor of that stain is powerful. It hasnât gone away. Instead of finding a free coat, theyâve found a fixer-upper, which would involve dry cleaning, which might or might not get the stain and the smell out, and no one is interested, and so it goes into the trash. It is thrown out. It disappears. It is gone forever. End of story. Not much of a story, is it?â
âNo, but I give you itâs got some moments,â Bob said. Somewhere in his rat-pointed tactical brain, he was beginning to play with them. Something had been subtly provoked. Dallas. Abandoned overcoat. Strange smell and stain.
âOkay,â she said. âThe Engineer is promoted, and he leaves the firm and goes to that big construction outfit. Again, he is promoted, because heâs very intelligent and hardworking. Heâs the type that built America. He becomes a partner. He marries his high school girlfriend, they have three beautiful daughters and move to the suburb where partners live. He joins a country club. He becomes venerable. His daughters marry wonderful men. Iâm actually making up the details, but you get the picture. One of the daughters becomes engaged to the son of a rancher, another prosperous fellow. The Rancher and his wife invite the Engineer and the wife out for a get-to-know-you weekend and barbecue. Theyâre sitting there in the big paneled living room looking out the picture window to the swimming pool and the white horse fences and the green meadows, and the Engineer notices something: dead animals all over the place. Turns out the Rancher is a hunter. Heâs been all over the world. Lions and tigers and bears. Ibexes and sables and kudus. Theyâre all drinking highballs and having a good old time and the Rancher says, âSay, Don, care to see the shop?â
âDon nods and off they go. They walk into a big gun place. Guns, heads, safes, benches, targets, photos of men with dead animals, maybe an old Marilyn calendar, tools, all that, the sort of thing my husband had, although Iâm guessing this Rancher kept his a lot neater than my husband did. And whammo, the Engineer is hit by an odor. Itâs an old, old odor. I donât know if you know it, but psychologists consider olfactory cues the strongest reminders. A smell can take you back to a time and place and re-create cues to all the other senses. So suddenly, youâre back where you were when you first hit that smell, and of course, Don is back in the engine room of the elevator in that building in Dallas thirty-odd years ago.â
âGI or Hoppeâs 9?â Bob asked.
âHoppeâs,â she said. âYes. Barrel solvent. Chemical cleaning fluid especially for guns. Been around since the twenties. Thatâs what Don smells in his new palâs shop, and he realizes thatâs what he smelled all those years ago in the building that I of course didnât name.â
âYouâre going to tell me it was the Texas Book Depository?â
âIf only. No, itâs the building across Houston Street from the Texas Book Depository. Itâs called the Dal-Tex Building. It was there in 1963 too. Dal-Tex doesnât mean Dallas, Texas, but Dallas Textiles, as it was the headquarters of the Dallas wholesale garment industry. Actually, Abraham Zapruderâs office was there, along with a hundred other offices. Nothing particularly special except that it did offer close to the same angle and elevation down Elm Street next to Dealey Plaza that our friend Lee Harvey Oswald used. You can see why it lingers.â
âI can,â said Bob, trying to conjure the structure from a rush of image memories of Dealey Plaza, that triangle of grass at the heart of American darkness. He got nothing, no vision, no sense of place.
âItâs figured in a few of the thousand conspiracy theories. I checked into them; none of them are that interesting or convincing. Someone claims that a photo shows a rifle on a tripod on the fireplace, but itâs just shadows. There were some âarrestsâ after the building was closed down a few minutes after the shooting, but nothing came of them. Some people claim without evidence that it was one of the nine or is it twelve shooting sites that the CIA, Sears, Roebuck, the Canadian Air Force, and Proctor and Gamble used in their conspiracy. All in all, itâs not much.â
Bob nodded.
âBut it lingers,â she continued. âFor the Engineer, particularly. He canât get it out of his mind. You see why, donât you?â
âThe Hoppeâs suggests that someone had need to clean a rifle, which suggests the presence of a rifle. And you can assume the juice was somehow spilled or leaked onto the coat during the cleaning process. But the coat was carefully hidden, as if whoever had spilled the Hoppeâs, with its chemical smell, didnât want it exposed to the public eye or nose. Lots of folks in Texas would recognize it right away, including most policemen. It was the universal gun cleaner then. All this could have happened on or around November 22, 1963. Thereâs your lingering. It puts a rifle where there ainât been one. But it is thin. Itâs real thin.â
âIt gets thinner. A few more years pass. The Engineer doesnât know what to do about it. Heâs no dummy; he gets how thin it is too, way too thin to take to law enforcement. Then he reads a book. The book is called Shootout on Pennsylvania. It was written by my husband and a friend. Itâs the story of an assassination attempt on Harry Truman in 1950 that ended up in a gunfight in the middle of the street in the middle of the day in the middle of downtown Washington, right across from the White House. Two men dead, three wounded. Almost totally forgotten. Anyhow, the Engineer reads the book. He reads in particular about a Secret Service agent named Floyd Barring, who was in command of the watch at Blair House, where the fight happened, and was considered the hero. He shot one of the bad guys in the head and took him down and maybe saved Harry Trumanâs life. The Engineer finds from the book that Floyd is still alive and that, thirteen years after being a hero in Washington, he was the agent in charge of the Secret Service advance party for the Dallas trip, and was in Dallas for the assassination and testified before the Warren Commission and all that. The Engineer takes a shine to Floyd, who seems upright, decent, hardworking, committed. Since Floyd is retired yet invested in the assassination, he seems like a candidate to hear the Engineerâs tale. So hereâs the first letter: the Engineer writes to Floyd and details everything I have laid out to you.â
âYou never read the letter, however.â
âNot even close. Iâm telling you more or less what I later heard from Jim when I wasnât listening hard.â
Swagger nodded, seeing the old agent getting the thick packet from an unknown person in Dallas and slowly considering its contents. âWhat did this Secret Service guy do?â
âFor whatever reason, nothing. In fact, he probably threw it out. Crazy Kennedy bullshit, you know the drill. He was sick of it, as heâd figured in some theories too, and he didnât like it. He was also in ill health, living in a geriatric apartment in Silver Spring, mourning the death of his wife, and knew he didnât have much time.â
âI see.â
âYet it lingered. He couldnât put it out of his mind. A few years after that, he writes a letterâhalf a letterâto my husband. He never finishes it. He never sends it. Maybe he thinks better of it. Who knows? Anyway, he dies. And that would seem to be that. No more lingering. The lingering is over. But then: his daughter finds the letter a few years later. So she sends it on to Jim. So years after the coat was found, years after the identity of the smell was discovered, years after it was communicated to a retired Secret Service agent, years after he died, courtesy of his daughter, it was sent to my husband.â
âAnd he sees the possibilities?â
âMore than most. Heâs looking for a project. He has a contract that calls for a book a year, heâs just finished one, but thereâs no rest for the wicked, and when he gets the half-written letter that Floyd almost sent him concerning the lost letter the Engineer sent to Floyd, he sees something. He spends a few days researching, looking at maps, reading books or at least examining them, and then he has some kind of eureka moment. He claims heâs solved the JFK assassination. I suspect vodka played a part. It turns out he means he has an idea no one else has had. And he has to go to Dallas. And so he goes to Dallas.â
âWas he successful?â
âHe talked to a bunch of people, I think he got into Dal-Tex, he came back very excited. He started working like a madman. One day a week later, he goes off to a bar for a drink and ends up with a broken back and pelvis in an alley.â
âYou think he was killed because he was looking into a certain idea about JFKâs death?â
âI havenât said that. Iâve spoken only in facts, and the fact is that now Iâm the worldâs sole possessor of the story. And it lingers. I canât get it out of my head, and the connection between it and Jimâs immediate death by possible homicide wonât let me sleep at night. I have to do every last thing to make sure that the story is properly processed. Someone has to deal with it, judge it, assess it, contextualize it, someone who knows this stuff and has worked in this world. I have nominated you for that high honor. So now I ask the question I came all this way for. Is it anything?â
He let out a large breath.
âWhat does that signify?â she asked. âYou think Iâm an idiot? The whole thing is nonsense? What a colossal waste of time?â
âNo. I can see how it provokes. I ainât denying that. And Iâm not saying Iâm a hundred percent Warren Commission lone-gunman guy. I havenât looked at it hard enough, but I do think, like you, that a lot of the âtheoriesâ are stuff people dreamed up to make a buck. I also think that the thing has been looked at so much by so many people for so long that itâs highly unlikely thereâs anything left unfound.â
âFair enough.â
âLet me put it before you in a different way, all right? I think youâre missing something, and I think your husband missed it and Floyd missed it, all the way back to the Engineer. That thing you all missed is Texas. Texas is gun country. You may have to explain why you have a gun in Baltimore, but you sure donât in Texas. Everyone has a gun in Texas. They have âem to wear to barbecues or the opera or the swim meet. Nobody blinks an eye, and that was especially true down there then, before JFK. Nobody thought a thing about a gun. It just was, thatâs all. The presence of a gun in that building isnât remarkable. In fact, itâs nothing. I can think of a hundred reasons for a gun in that building other than killing a president. Maybe some boys were heading out for deer season straight from work. Save time, get there opening-day morning. They brought their rifles in, and one of them knew his needed cleaning, so he does the job. Nobody says a thing because it ainât remarkable. He leans the gun in a corner and it rubs up against somebodyâs coat. When that guy gets his coat, he sees itâs ruined, it goes into the wastebasket, and later that night the janitor finds it and decides to scavenge it. He hangs it up to dry out, but Hoppeâs being powerful, the stink never does go away. So he stuffs it somewhere, meaning to check it out later, and forgets about it. Years later, the elevator people discover it. That could have happened not just for deer season but in pheasant season too, as they kill a lot of them birds down there, and doves and pigeons and anything that flies. So you have found the suggestion of a gun in a building in Texas, and it surprises you only because you donât know guns or Texas.â
âI see,â she said.
âMaâamâJean, if I mayâyouâve got what the Marine Corps would call intelligence that doesnât rise to the actionable level. It doesnât carry enough meaning to be acted on. There are too many other possibilities here for anyone to do anything about it. My best advice is to congratulate yourself for following up on your duty to your husband and then go back to your life. I think your husband would have found that out in time too. Maybe he could do something with his discovery if it were a fiction book, but I donât see it as having any real meaning in the world, and it sure didnât have anything to do with his death. Sorry to be so blunt, but you didnât come all this way and invest all this time for sugarcoating.â
âNo, I didnât, Mr. Swagger. I believe youâve set me straight.â
âI hope I helped, maâam. And Iâm very sorry about your husband. Maybe by the time you get back, they will have caught the boy.â
âMaybe so.â
âLet me walk you to your car, and weâll get you out of this godforsaken place.â
âThank you.â
They both rose as he peeled off a few bills for the waitress and headed out to her Fusion.
âI guess weâll never know,â she said as she got to her car, âwho ran over the mystery man with a bicycle.â
He was only half listening at this time, trying to sneak a look at his watch to see what time it was and how soon he could get back, because heâd promised to help Miko on her low-roping skills andâ
âIâm sorry,â he said. âWhat did you say?â
âOh, the back of the coat, it had a smear on it that appeared to represent a tread. The Engineer thought it could have been from an English bike, you know, thin-wheeled. It was an impression, about an inch long, where it looked like a tread mark had been printed. Thatâs all. A minor point, I forgot toââ
âDo you have a list of the people your husband visited?â
âI have his notebook. Itâs hard to read, but it does have some names and addresses there. Why, what isââ
âI have to set some things up. Itâll take me a week. I want you to go home and find that notebook and FedEx it to me. If he had computer files on the Dallas trip or notepapers, get me that stuff too. Iâll get down there as soon as Iâm set up.â
âDo you want to borrow the tommy gun?â
âNo, not yet.â
âYouâre not joking, are you?â
âNo maâam.â
âDo you want me to help defray the expenses? I mean, I seem to be wealthy now, and Iââ
âNo maâam,â said Swagger. âThis oneâs on me.â