“No.”
Not today.
I said, “I just want to get the hell out of this government job and back into the private sector. But enough of that horseshit just
might
be true, Dick, that I don’t think I ever want to see you again.”
“Nate…”
“Stay away from me and the people I care about, amigo, and I will cut you a wide swath. We were friends long enough that I owe you that much.”
Like hell.
“All right, Nate.” He gave up an easygoing shrug. “You and I, we’ll keep our distance. For now, anyway. But here’s what I would say to you, if that fever dream you shared happened to have any truth in it—stay on the sidelines, and I give you my word, no reprisals. You’ve never been a political animal, and there are changes coming that are way out of your league. Nothing you can understand, or do anything about. If a guy wants to die, that can always be arranged. If a guy just wants to be ignored, that can be arranged, too.”
Then he was gone, and I settled back in my chair and I was shaking.
Fucking shaking.
We had been friends for many years, we had done each other favors, and I had relished his loose way with the rules, always a plus in a friend in law enforcement, but now I realized, not too late I hoped, that I was Abel in this relationship and that bastard was Cain.
When I felt like myself again, I looked around this office I’d inhabited since Tuesday and realized it bore no traces of my presence whatsoever. Nothing to pack. Nothing of me in here at all.
This time Martineau’s door was closed. I knocked, got permission to enter and did.
“Marty,” I said from the doorway, “consider this my resignation from the Secret Service.”
He smiled. “I’m glad the AG assigned you here for this case. And I appreciate everything you did for us.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Would you do me a small favor? Use your influence to make your pals in the Service keep a very damn sharp eye out on these upcoming presidential trips.”
“Nate, we always do.”
“I know, I know. But this isn’t just the messed-up likes of Vallee anymore. Four gunmen, Marty, that’s a full-blown conspiracy. And you’ll be cutting two of the players loose this afternoon.”
“I hear you.”
“Good.”
“Listen, Nate, you’ll still need to come in on Monday to sit down with Charlotte and dictate your report. You know, for me to include in the overview I’ll be doing for Chief Rowley.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t make it.”
“You need to try. I’m sure, after almost a week away, you have matters at the A-1 that needed tending to … but we need to wrap this up, officially.”
“Marty, I won’t be in,” I said. “I’m sorry, but it really doesn’t matter.”
“Why is that, Nate?”
“Marty, don’t you know? I was never here.”
CHAPTER
21
Do you remember where you were when President Kennedy was killed? Even if you weren’t alive at the time, you surely know that a sniper in a high window was waiting for JFK to ride by on that infamous day in November.
In Dallas.
Friday, November 29, 1963
In Chicago, around ten
P.M.
, after a long day of work and a quick bite to eat, I got on the El in the Loop, taking the subway south to Thirty-fifth and Wabash. At the White Sox stop, I got off in what used to be called the Section, where colored folk had wound up, coming to Chicago in that first big northward swing after World War I. Jazz had got its start in the Section, Chicago-style anyway, and the area was still rife with filthy streets, broken-down buildings, and greasy spoons. Walking east on Thirty-fifth, the only honky around, I might have felt scared if the nine-mil wasn’t under my arm.
Since last Friday, I hadn’t gone anywhere unarmed.
In my experience, you avoided trouble in Bronzeville by not looking for it. Move easy, cool, confident. No eye contact, not even with those two high-yellow gals in tight dresses striding your way, emphasizing their hip sway and wearing grins half come-on, half dare. If you hear footsteps on the sidewalk behind you, too fast for your taste, just half turn and walk sideways a few steps. Hardly anything really to worry about.
At Thirty-fifth and State—heart of the Section—were the dives where Jelly Roll Morton once played. At Thirty-fifth and Indiana, I wondered if I’d missed the place; but there it was on the northwest corner, a brick storefront with a Schlitz saloon sign and a banner that boldly announced
MUDDY WATERS & BAND—FRI, SAT, SUN.
Inside, Smitty’s was dark, crowded, and smoky. Moving through the loud bar into the club area, where the brown walls peeled paint and a sign advertised
CHEEBURGERS
, I spotted Eben Boldt and a good-looking Negro woman, both dressed casually but nice—dark suit, light blue dress—seated toward the front among quiet couples at checker-clothed, postage-stamp tables.
Joining Eben, I was introduced to his friendly wife, Barbara, a schoolteacher pretty enough to worry Diahann Carroll.
The show hadn’t started yet, but the drums, piano, several guitars on stands, and several amplifiers were waiting up on the small stage.
“You will dig this, Nate,” Eben said. “You really will.”
“What’s it like around the office these days?”
“A morgue, only more depressing. Martineau’s had three meetings so far, reminding us to stay mum about that week you were with us.”
I shook my head. “First time I saw those Dallas cops dragging Oswald through that police station, I thought he was Vallee. My God they look alike.”
And when I’d been watching Sunday morning and saw the stocky figure in the fedora lurch forward and fire his gun into Lee Harvey Oswald, I knew it was Ruby. Didn’t have to see his face. Just the shape of him.
“Here’s some more cheap irony you’ll enjoy,” Eben said. “Mayor Daley got the city council today to rename the Northwest Expressway the Kennedy Expressway.”
“Yeah, I saw. They should have the ribbon cutting at the West Jackson exit.”
“Actually, they are.”
“Aw, please.…”
“Swear to God, Nate. Next week. There’ll be a ceremony with more Irish politicians than an alderman’s wake. Bobby Kennedy was invited, but declined.”
“Yeah, he’s keeping his head pulled in. I don’t think you’ll see him doing much traveling in the foreseeable future.”
I had warned him. We had a talk, a late-night phone call, from “a secure line” Bobby said, Saturday, November second. I hadn’t told him chapter and verse—I’d left out specific names, like Richard Cain and Jack Ruby—but I did tell him what had really happened at IPP, and that I believed Operation Mongoose was riddled with cancer cells.
“I know, Nate. We’re looking into it. We’re all over it.”
“Bob, do me one small favor. Convince your brother to stay out of open cars for a while.”
“Can’t do it, Nate. You try telling him. We have an election to win. We’re okay. We know what we’re dealing with.”
“Do you?”
Eben said, “Something else I heard, and this you will simply
not
believe.”
“Pretty sure I will. I have a low disbelief threshold these days.”
Even though nobody in this mostly Negro crowd gave two diddleys what we were saying, Eben leaned in and damn near whispered.
“On the Monday before the assassination,” Eben said, “the eighteenth? The Service was dealing with a serious threat in Tampa for the President’s visit. An FBI source indicated an unidentified sniper in a high window in a tall building, with a high-power rifle with scope, would try to take JFK out.”
I noticed Barbara had a rather long-suffering look on her lovely face. Who could blame her?
“They even had a suspect,” her husband was saying, “a former defector named Lopez. Part of the Tampa Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Sound familiar?”
“That’s who Oswald was with in New Orleans, it’s claimed. So they had an Oswald … a Vallee … ready to go in Tampa, too?”
“Nate, they were stalking the President all month. All damn month.”
“I figured that we’d shut the thing down,” I said, with an Atlas-worthy sigh. “But Chicago was just Plan A. There was a Plan B in Tampa, and Plan C in Dallas.”
Barbara said, “Third time’s a charm.”
A cute waitress came and took our orders; she seemed fascinated by me, like a Martian had walked in the place. I couldn’t quite tell if she was flirting or afraid. We all had beer, and that was the last JFK talk for a while, unless you counted Muddy Waters singing “Sad, Sad Day.”
When the band took its break, I said, “I dig this electrified blues. I think it could give rock ’n’ roll a run for the money.”
“When the white kids hear it,” Barbara said, “they’ll steal it.”
Eben said, “Nate, I don’t care what Martineau says. I’m going to testify at the Warren Commission.”
The papers and TV had been full of that all day—LBJ establishing the President’s Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy.
“Ebe, don’t even think about it. Allen Dulles is on that damn thing—former CIA director? It’s a dog and pony show, full of people who hated Kennedy. Stay away from it.”
“Somebody’s got to come forward. What can they do to me?”
“Fire you,” Barbara said.
Ebe smiled at her and patted her hand. “Honey, I can always get a job with Nate Heller.”
* * *
If only it had been that easy.
The winter day in 1964 when Eben Boldt went to Washington, D.C., to testify to the Warren Commission, both about the covered-up Chicago plot and the misconduct he’d witnessed on the President’s protection detail—the drinking, the carousing, the racism—he was arrested and sent back to Chicago. The accusation? He had supposedly tried to extort $50,000 out of a counterfeiter by sharing a secret file with him.
This book would be at least one-hundred pages longer if I were to share with you the work the A-1 did pro bono for Ebe’s various attorneys over the years. Even when I was able to get the counterfeiter to recant, to admit having perjured himself on the stand, Eben Boldt remained behind bars. Despite the Supreme Court reviewing the serious misconduct of a judge who’d advised the jury that the defendant seemed guilty, behind bars Eben remained. The counterfeiter, by the way, was a close associate of Mad Sam DeStefano. I always suspected Dick Cain of being behind the frame-up.
When he was paroled in 1969, Eben did not return to law enforcement. He didn’t even want the job I offered him. Instead he became a quality-control supervisor in the automobile industry. For forty years, he has attempted to clear his name. Documents at the Chicago Secret Service Office that might have cleared him—concerning, among other things, the Chicago assassination plot—were “routinely” destroyed in 1995. His efforts and those of others to get Congress and/or the President to restore his good name have also failed. To date.
I like to think Marty Martineau didn’t have anything to do with the railroading of Eben Boldt. He continued his distinguished government service for many years, but when asked about the four-man assassination squad—or about the lone nut, Vallee—he was vague and even evasive. Still, he was one of the few Secret Service agents willing to go on record saying that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy. He died at ninety-five.
On December 3, 1963, Thomas Arthur Vallee briefly surfaced in Chicago newspapers covering the brave cops who had seized the “Gun-Toting Kennedy Foe.” Charges against him were never pressed. On the rare occasions when Vallee was tracked down by a journalist—fascinated by such details as Oswald having also served at a U-2 base in Japan—the interview subject insisted he’d been framed by his CIA handlers, and seemed to realize that he’d narrowly escaped the role that Lee Harvey Oswald played in history. Still working as a printer, Vallee died in 1988 in Houston, where he lived in a ramshackle trailer with a well-oiled M-1 propped near his bedside.
Berkeley Moyland, the honest Chicago police lieutenant who alerted the Secret Service to Vallee, was instructed by the Secret Service in late 1963 never to share his knowledge of the Chicago assassination attempt. But in his final years, he told his son the story, adding that Vallee had later sent him a thank-you card. Apparently the ex-Marine believed Moyland had saved his life.
The two cops who had been so highly recommended by Sheriff’s Chief Investigator Richard Cain gained notoriety in a later case. In December 1969, the pair—acting as state’s attorney raiders—burst into black activist Fred Hampton’s apartment, kicking the door down, showering the place with bullets, and killing Hampton and another Black Panther leader. The detectives spent years in and out of court, fighting claims that they were CIA or FBI agents on a “black op,” an ironically apt euphemism for this incident, widely termed a massacre. Whether they are alive or dead, I couldn’t tell you. But the last time I saw Gross, he was gray and nervous, his family life ruined under a crush of massive legal bills.
The gangsters met various well-deserved deaths: Mad Sam DeStefano, shotgunned in his garage, 1973; Sam Giancana, shot in the head while frying sausage and peppers, 1975; Jimmy Hoffa, disappeared, 1975; Johnny Rosselli, strangled, shot, dismembered, 1976; Chuckie Nicoletti, shot in the head three times, 1977.
Santo Trafficante died by the knife in 1987—the surgeon’s scalpel, on an operating table at the end of a long battle with heart disease and other ailments. Carlos Marcello died in 1993, a hopeless imbecile thanks to Alzheimer’s; when still of sound mind, he confessed a major role in the JFK assassination to his attorney, Frank Ragano, and also implicated Hoffa.
Awaiting a new trial, Jack Ruby died of cancer at Parkland Hospital, where JFK had been pronounced dead. Ruby felt he’d been poisoned, and during his incarceration became increasingly bold about denying full culpability in the shooting of everybody’s favorite lone-nut assassin, saying shortly before his death, “I was framed to kill Oswald.”
Sally Rand had a very successful engagement at the Silver Frolics in January 1964, though shortly thereafter the place was indeed shut down, then torn down, in its place a parking ramp erected for employees of the nearby
Chicago Sun-Times
. Helen gained national prominence that same year when she was invited to perform for the astronauts at the Astrodome in Houston, with new President Lyndon Johnson hosting. The event was given a certain inaccurate permanence in the Academy Award–winning 1983 film
The Right Stuff,
whose soft-focus gaze implied a much younger fan dancer. She’d have loved that.