False Witness (7 page)

On Saturday Andrews had a visitor. R. M. Davis, U.S. Army Sgt. retired, worked as an investigator for Andrews in his New Orleans law practice, later described by the forty-three-year-old Davis as “a Damon Runyon-type operation” made up of “pimps, prostitutes, and two-bit hustlers.” Andrews slept on and off, and the main topic of their discussion was the progress of his political campaign. Andrews, a part-time assistant district attorney in neighboring Jefferson Parish, was running for a judgeship there and the election was only two weeks away. The visit was quiet and uneventful and Davis left sometime between 3:30 and 4:00
P.M
.
²⁶

Shortly after that the phone rang, waking Andrews from a sound sleep. The caller, another man with the surname “Davis,” Eugene C. Davis, was the thirty-eight-year-old part-owner of a bar in the French Quarter. He and Andrews had known each other for some fifteen years, having met while Andrews was still a student. Davis had sent Andrews clients from the gay community, and Andrews had represented Davis in some minor legal matters. His call that Saturday dealt with the sale of an automobile.
²⁷

Before long the conversation turned to the tragedy being piped into Andrews's room on television. That's when Andrews indulged in the fantasy that would alter his life. He said to Gene Davis, “Man, I would be famous if I could go to Dallas and defend Lee Harvey Oswald; whoever
gets that job is going to be a famous lawyer.”
²⁸
For Andrews that idea proved to be irresistible. He locked onto it like an iron filing onto a magnet. The world's spotlight was focused on Dallas, just 500 miles away, where that “gravy train” was waiting for some lucky lawyer to “hop aboard” and ride it to fame and fortune.

At this point, the notion of representing Oswald was only a fanciful idea mentioned to an old friend who understood and sympathized with Andrews's yearning for attention and riches. Gene Davis dropped the matter after he hung up the telephone. Andrews concentrated on it. Almost immediately the idea mutated into a
possibility
. Perhaps it was the fever that did it, or the bug in his system, or the oxygen, the medication, or the excitement pulsating from the proximity of Dallas. For the idea was basically absurd—no reasonable person would have considered Andrews for the job. No one facing even an ordinary murder charge (much less the assassination of the president) would have sought out this small-time, jive-talking attorney with a clientele of “pimps, prostitutes, and two-bit hustlers.” Accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was trying to contact New York attorney John Abt, who represented American Communist party chiefs Gus Hall and John Davis, to act in his defense.
²⁹
Unaware of that, Andrews's imagination took flight on the telephone. He was under such heavy sedation that his doctor later said he did not believe Andrews “capable of using the telephone” that weekend.
³⁰
The doctor was wrong.

To implement his plan, Andrews had to inform his secretary, Eva Springer. She was the first person he telephoned. It was about four o'clock and Springer had just returned from doing her marketing. She was surprised to hear from Andrews; he didn't ordinarily call her at home. His news was astonishing: “I'm representing Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas,” he said. Her response was immediate and unequivocal. “I'm not going to Dallas with you. I want nothing to do with the case.” Then she asked the logical question, the one that would bring on disaster. “Who hired you?” The question put Andrews in a bind. No one had hired him, but he couldn't tell Springer that. So he blurted out a one-word fictitious name. “Bertrand,” he said. Bertrand? The name meant nothing to Eva Springer and she quickly ended the conversation.
³¹

Her reaction temporarily halted his telephoning. For the rest of the
evening, his physical condition and the routine of the hospital took over. At six he “was treated with nose drops and cough medicine.” At eight he was given a sedative and “complained of pains in the chest.” At nine he received antibiotics. At ten he was “quiet again.” Quiet but not entirely idle. Watching television that evening, he learned about Oswald's life: his defection to Russia, his Russian wife, his return to America, and the fact that Oswald was born in New Orleans and had lived there the previous summer while engaging in pro-Castro activity. Andrews heard too that Oswald was upset about his undesirable discharge from the Marine Corps and wanted it changed.
³²

Andrews awoke Sunday morning with his scheme to finagle a piece of the Dallas action still percolating. The Bertrand story he had told his secretary the day before was taking on a life of its own. In his feverish and doped-up condition, as he later said, “I might have believed it myself.”
³³
The idea had obvious flaws—logistics, for instance. In his incapacitated state he needed help, someone he trusted to go to Dallas and act in his stead. He knew the man to ask, a local attorney and close personal friend named Sam “Monk” Zelden. Andrews also knew where to find him—the posh New Orleans Athletic Club where the two usually played racquetball Sunday mornings.

He reached Zelden there about eleven and nudged the Bertrand fantasy a notch further. “I've been approached to defend Oswald,” Andrews said. Zelden, too, was surprised, but unlike Eva Springer he didn't ask any questions. “Would you be interested in helping in Oswald's defense?” Andrews asked. The idea didn't appeal to Zelden. “I'll have to think about it,” he replied. Zelden's lack of enthusiasm didn't matter. While the two men were speaking on the phone, Dallas night club owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas County Jail, an event Zelden and much of the country witnessed live on television. Said Zelden, “Don't worry about it. Your client just got shot.”
³⁴

In Dallas the spotlight Andrews sought had gone out.

But the shooting of Oswald that Sunday was for Andrews both good news and bad news. The bad news was the “client” was dead and Andrews had no one to defend. The good news was the “client” was dead and Andrews could fabricate any story and Lee Harvey Oswald
couldn't deny it.
³⁵
The next day, which was President Kennedy's funeral, the faithful R. M. Davis again visited the hospital. He found Andrews “disturbed” about a news report that Oswald had fired three shots in three seconds from a bolt action rifle, a feat Andrews understandably believed was impossible. He wanted to call the FBI and Secret Service and give them his opinion but Davis talked him out of it. Andrews also wanted to call a local television station to make some “announcement.” Davis dissuaded him from that as well. But eventually Davis left.

Andrews then placed calls to the local offices of the FBI and Secret Service. He didn't talk about Oswald's marksmanship, however, but the scenario evolving in his imagination. To his Bertrand story, he now added what might be called
an earlier act
. Andrews said that Lee Harvey Oswald had actually visited his office on three occasions the previous summer seeking legal advice. Drawing on information from local television reports, Andrews told the government agents that Oswald had consulted him about reversing his undesirable discharge, the immigration status of his wife, and whether he had lost his American citizenship while in Russia.
³⁶
*
The Oswald visits, Andrews said, began “late in the month of June” and continued in July. Oswald was accompanied by “approximately five persons,” all of them homosexual. Twice Oswald was with a young man “of Mexican extraction.”
³⁷
Andrews claimed he never opened a file on Oswald because he never provided the necessary information, or a fee for Andrews's services. Andrews had mentioned none of this to anyone until
after
Oswald was shot and killed. Nevertheless, this earlier act gave his Bertrand story
legs
.
³⁸

Andrews told the FBI and Secret Service agents about that call as well, and provided his caller with a first name, “
Clay
.” This Clay Bertrand might have contacted him previously on another matter, Andrews said, and Bertrand could have been one of those who accompanied Oswald to his office, but Andrews could provide no information to help locate his mysterious caller. Andrews described Bertrand as “youthful,” twenty-two to twenty-three years of age, five feet seven inches tall, weighing 160 pounds, with blonde crew cut hair, and said he “believed that
Bertrand was homosexual.” Even that first day, what Andrews told the two agencies was contradictory in some ways.
³⁹

After he hung up the phone, Andrews dozed off, only to be awakened a short time later by FBI Agent Regis Kennedy standing at his bedside. Agent Kennedy “appeared before me like a myth,” Andrews later said. The pressure was on. The FBI agents, in particular, became a thorn in Andrews's side. Over the next ten days they would interview him five times, the Secret Service agents three. They also interviewed his friends and employees and contacted all agencies that might have provided a lead to the mysterious Clay Bertrand, launching an all-out effort to find the man. Andrews, using only his telephone and operating from a hospital bed, diverted FBI and Secret Services agents in the midst of the most important investigation of the century. Their search yielded nothing. They could find no Clay Bertrand.

The day after Andrews returned to work, FBI agent Kennedy visited him at his office. In this session, the first conducted when Andrews was free of medication, he didn't recall telephoning the FBI or Secret Service, and said that “since leaving the hospital” the call from Bertrand “seems like a dream.”
⁴⁰

Andrews made his final statement to the FBI two days later, and it was a clear-cut
mea culpa
. Maneuvering skillfully to extricate himself, Andrews said he had no memory of calling his secretary and was “unable to account for the name ‘Bertrand,' ” which he used in their conversation. He ticked off numerous shortcomings of the story, and pointed out that it lacked the basic details he would have obtained from any prospective client. These defects led Andrews to conclude that the Bertrand call “was a figment of his imagination.”

This allowed Andrews a graceful withdrawal from an embarrassing situation. In wriggling off the hook, Andrews even managed to salvage a bit of self-respect by retaining the part about Oswald visiting his office. Admitting the truth about the call from Bertrand was necessary to dislodge the FBI from his doorstep. But he had no reason to admit he fabricated this other complex back-story with its elaborate supporting cast. No one could refute him and it no doubt seemed harmless enough. It also softened the humiliation by lending some face-saving substance to the whole god-awful mess. So Andrews
repudiated Bertrand but clung to
the earlier act
.
*

That should have been the end of it.

But then the Warren Commission, appointed by President Johnson to investigate President Kennedy's assassination, issued Andrews a subpoena. The spotlight was back and Andrews was in it. A command performance ordered by the United States government. The compulsive talker was compelled to talk.

Warren Commission Assistant Counsel Wesley Liebeler conducted the interview in the Old Civil Courts Building in New Orleans on July 21, 1964. Andrews arrived sporting his trademark dark glasses. As irrepressible as ever, he immediately embellished further the Oswald visits and exhumed the Bertrand story. Responding irreverently to Liebeler's pointed questions, Andrews referred to all the “gay kids” who accompanied Oswald to his office on the first visit as “Mexicanos,” and he said they were “swishers”; “what they call here queens.”
⁴¹

Andrews referred to Bertrand as “a lawyer without a brief case” and a bisexual, “what they call a swinging cat.” He said that prior to the call he had seen Bertrand “probably a couple of years [ago]” and had seen him again more recently, or as Andrews put it: “Oh, I ran up on that rat about 6 weeks ago and he spooked, ran in[to] the street. I would have beat him with a chain if I had caught him.” Andrews provided a third physical description of Bertrand, which resembled the other two in gender only. He wasn't trying to mislead anyone. He simply didn't remember what he had said previously. Over time he complained bitterly that the FBI and Secret Service agents refused to provide him with any information about his first statements to them.
⁴²

Liebeler walked Andrews through the numerous conflicts in his various interviews but Andrews blithely waved them off or explained them away. When asked about his statement to the FBI that the Bertrand phone call was a figment of his imagination, he said, they wrote that did they? Well he knew that the “Feebees” [FBI] were “going to put
these people on the street looking, and I can't find the guy, and I am not going to tie up all the agents on something that isn't that solid.” Then, reacting to his recent less-than-felicitous experience with that agency (in remarks that will later be used against him by Oliver Stone), Andrews pursued the thought further in his own special way. “They were running on the time factor, and the hills were shook up plenty to get it, get it, get it. I couldn't give it to them. I have been playing cops and robbers with them. You can tell when the steam is on. They are on you like the plague. They never leave. They are like cancer. Eternal.”
⁴³

Andrews was a complex man, deliberately outrageous, funny and fun-loving, unusually verbal and imaginative, and desperate for attention. But the last word anyone would associate with him is
malevolent
. One who knew Andrews would later write that he seemed to view the world “as a huge joke.” In New Orleans his name usually evokes a smile. Everyone, they say, liked him, even Garrison, who became his nemesis. In his last two interviews with the FBI, Andrews had managed to bury his Bertrand tale and escape with a modicum of dignity. Yet seven months later, performing for the Warren Commission, he resurrected it. He couldn't resist being a player, albeit a minor one, in this national drama, which anointed him with a kind of celebrity status.
⁴⁴
That compulsion would bring about more than his own downfall.