“If you’re not, I’m going to break some heads tomorrow.”
“Just keep cool, man. This is a chess game now, not a street fight.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
Dennis hangs up.
I start to walk back into Annie’s bedroom, but as I slip my burn phone back into my pocket, it bumps my BlackBerry, and I decide to check my e-mail. There’s some risk in doing it, but I want to know if Rose has answered my query about the Fairlane.
As soon as I open my inbox, I find her reply.
In 1957, Ford made several models of Fairlane, and the price would depend on various options. But if the car wasn’t a convertible, figure $2,000 being the minimum price. If it was a ’58, up to $2,500 is possible for a nonconvertible sedan. Hope that helps. If you give me more specific details, I can get closer to the actual price.
Two thousand dollars, I think, switching off my BlackBerry. On a salary of fifteen dollars per week? My mother was teaching then, but by her own admission she knew nothing about the car, so she wasn’t helping save for it. Some very quick math tells me that, even allowing for some depreciation, it would be like buying a forty-thousand-dollar car on a salary of a thousand dollars per month. That’s a serious stretch, especially given the proposition that Dad somehow saved up that money without Mom feeling the pinch and realizing he was up to something. And I know from my father’s stories that none of my grandparents ever helped them buy a car or home.
With a queasy feeling in my belly, I walk up to the second-floor bathroom and sit on the commode. Where could Dad have gotten the money to buy a two-thousand-dollar car in 1959? I know how John Kaiser would answer that question.
Taking my tape recorder from my pocket, I look at the tiny reels behind its plastic window. After Caitlin interrupted me at her office, I never listened to the final minutes of the hotel conversation. I don’t want to hear my farewell to Stone, but the denouement of the assassination plot still haunts me. It’s got nothing to do with my parents’ Ford Fairlane—nothing overt, anyway—but the implications of that final act weigh upon me like a funeral shroud. When I press PLAY, Dwight Stone’s weary voice echoes through the tiled room like a voice from the grave. I turn the volume wheel to 1, then hold the little speaker to my right ear.
STONE: Carlos’s deportation trial was winding down fast. The lawyers were set to make closing arguments on the morning of November twenty-second. On that day in Washington, Bobby Kennedy was chairing a meeting of district attorneys from around the country. They were strategizing in their war against organized crime. Bobby hoped to come back from lunch and announce the conviction and imminent deportation of Carlos Marcello. Instead, a bailiff walked into the federal court in New Orleans and gave the judge a note. Judge Christenberry then announced that President Kennedy had been shot. Less than an hour later, the jury acquitted Carlos Marcello on all charges and allowed him to stay in America.
ME: Jesus.
STONE: Do you know who was sitting at the defendant’s table with Carlos and his lawyer? Guy Banister. I’ve got the pictures to prove it.
ME: Where was David Ferrie?
KAISER: About to leave for Houston, which was five hours from New Orleans, in the middle of a heavy thunderstorm. Supposedly to go ice skating.
ME: I remember that from the movie.
STONE: He went to a skating rink but didn’t skate at all. He spent the whole time on a pay phone. Calls untraceable. He died in New Orleans four years later, within days of Jim Garrison’s JFK investigation being made public. He may have died of a berry aneurysm, but we can’t rule out murder. In any case, although he told Garrison there was a conspiracy, there’s no question why he would have remained silent about the details while pushing the DA toward the CIA. No one alive knew better than David Ferrie that the price of betraying Marcello was death.
Here I said nothing. What could I say?
STONE: The last tragic act on November twenty-second was that Robert Kennedy canceled the afternoon session of his anti-crime unit, and it never met again. Once JFK’s funeral was over, J. Edgar Hoover never spoke to Bobby again in his capacity as attorney general. Not once. Robert Kennedy might as well have been a janitor at the Justice Department. His anti-mob crusade went nowhere. He’d lost all his fire, and he had no backing from the Bureau.
KAISER: Carlos’s strategy had proved sound. He’d cut the head off the dog, and the tail was dead forever after. At least until Bobby announced for president in 1968.
STONE: Without that second Carcano being found—which meant no link between Dealey Plaza, Eladio Cruz, and Castro—the picture that emerged of Oswald became the lone-nut theory. If that rifle had been found—a direct link to a Cuban agent—I think LBJ would have invaded Cuba within sixty days.
ME: You’re saying we might owe Frank Knox for saving us from nuclear war?
STONE: We just might.
I click off the recorder to avoid the final exchange. Dwight asked me once more to press my mother to reveal any line of communication she might have with Dad. If she denied it, he said, would I consider allowing either him or Kaiser to question her? I gave him a flat no, and he did his best to hide his disappointment. As I walk back to Annie’s room, Kaiser’s final words play in my mind. I had dropped Stone’s feverish hand and started for the door, and Kaiser said, “What about tomorrow? The Double Eagles coming in for questioning. What are you going to do?”
I stopped at the mouth of the little passage that led to the door, turned back, and said in a low voice: “I’m going to pin those bastards to the wall and squeeze their balls until they beg for mercy. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”