Caitlin spared her nothing. “If the police find Tom, they’ll kill him unless he surrenders. And if those old Klansmen find him, they’ll kill him no matter what he does. And you with him.”
Melba nodded soberly. “That’s no news to me, baby. But Doc’s pulled me through some tough times, and I aim to stick by him. I just hope Mr. Garrity gets back soon.” The nurse sighed with a resignation that sounded as if it had been inherited over dozens of generations. “But I’ve made my peace with Jesus, and if it’s my time . . . I’m ready.”
Tom’s voice boomed across the room. “What kind of plot are you two hatching over there?”
“Mind your own business!” Melba snapped back.
Caitlin hugged the nurse, who felt as solid and strong as any man. “Thank you, Melba.”
“You be careful. And don’t waste no more time. You and Penn go down to the courthouse tomorrow and tie the knot. Life don’t wait around for people. Get on with it while you can. Don’t worry about us old folks.”
“You’re not old,” Caitlin said, forcing a laugh.
But as she slipped through the door and hurried out to her car, she heard the bolt snap shut, and she felt a chilling certainty that a door had slammed between her fate and those of the two people hiding in the house behind her.
CHAPTER 38
WHEN I WALKED out of the hotel by the river, I stepped into a different world than the one I’d left upon entering. It wasn’t merely that I’d been converted from a lone-gunman disciple to a believer in the possibility that John Kennedy had been murdered as a result of a conspiracy—and an eminently rational one. No, what shattered me was something personal. After ninety minutes of cagey give-and-take, Stone and Kaiser finally revealed their hole card: something that convinced me that for most of my life, my father hasn’t merely been hiding an extramarital affair (and its unintended offspring), or even information about a murder he happened to learn about by accident. If Stone and Kaiser are right, then Dad not only played a role in the Kennedy assassination, but he knew it and kept silent about it.
Now I’m sitting alone in Caitlin’s office at the Examiner, wondering where the hell she could be. No one on her staff will admit to knowing where she is, not even Jamie Lewis, her managing editor. And something tells me she’s somewhere she shouldn’t be.
With nothing to do but wait, I dig in Caitlin’s desk until I find a pair of earbuds, then plug them into my tape recorder. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but as convincing as Stone’s and Kaiser’s spin on the Lee Harvey Oswald story was, something about it rang false. I don’t feel like they lied to me, but rather like they might be missing something themselves.
Leaning back in Caitlin’s chair, I kick my feet up on her desk, I press PLAY and close my eyes. The voices instantly take me back to the hotel room beside the river, with my juvenile-sounding voice trying—and failing—to poke holes in the assertions of the two older men. As their words drift around me like smoke, I recall the smoldering eyes and sallow skin of Dwight Stone, a man intent on uncovering the truth before tomorrow afternoon, when death will hover watchfully above his OR table in Denver.
STONE: Carlos’s deportation trial was set for November of ’63 in New Orleans Federal Court. It began on November first, and believe it or not, closing arguments would begin and end on November twenty-second.
ME: Is that true?
STONE: Yes. And let’s stipulate that by, or during, the summer of 1963, Carlos had spoken to Frank Knox about killing Kennedy in the event that nothing else could be done to prevent his deportation in the fall.
ME: Fine. How does Oswald come into it?
STONE: A man named David Ferrie was the link between Marcello and Oswald, and we owe John for figuring out how. A few people suspected the nature of the link, but it was practically impossible to pursue as a lead.
KAISER: Remember I told you that Carlos had a New Orleans immigration lawyer on his payroll? His name was G. Wray Gill. Gill is only important because of two men he had listed on his payroll as investigators for the Marcello trial. One was a private detective named Guy Banister. The other was a former Eastern Air Lines pilot named—
ME: David Ferrie.
STONE: Do you know anything about Ferrie?
ME: Joe Pesci played him in the movie.
STONE: People who knew Ferrie say Pesci actually did an uncanny job, though Ferrie was tall and gangly in real life. Next to David Ferrie, Joe Pesci was a male model. Ferrie suffered from alopecia, and he wore the most horrible pasted-on eyebrows along with his hairpiece. Anybody who saw Ferrie never forgot him.
KAISER: That’s for sure. The Bureau has a surveillance photo of Ferrie leaning against a Ford Fairlane. I’m telling you, leaning against those big tail fins, he looks like the forward scout for an alien invasion of hairless Martians.
I bolt forward and hit STOP on the recorder, my heart clenching like a fist in my chest. That’s what I missed the first time I heard it. My parents owned a Ford Fairlane back in the early 1960s, a red-on-white behemoth with long tail fins like something out of Flash Gordon. I only know this because I’ve seen the car in very old family pictures, my parents looking young and carefree on a vacation, my older sister cradling me in front of it. They sold the flashy Fairlane around 1964 or ’65, I believe, so I don’t remember riding in it. But something about that car itches at my brain, like a thought trying to find its voice. There’s no way David Ferrie would have been in or near my parents’ Fairlane, of course. I don’t think they even got it until after they got back from Germany in 1961, and they never lived in New Orleans after that. But there’s something . . .