The Day Kennedy Was Shot (59 page)

Rose said, “Thank you,” and hung up. He phoned Irving police headquarters. Rose said he was working on the Kennedy thing and he thought that there was a wanted man in the Irving Professional Center. He was put on the phone with Detective J. A. McCabe, who said he would go out to the clinic at once and try to pick up Wesley Frazier. “We understand that this boy brought our suspect to work this morning—drove him in,” Rose said.

“Call me back in fifteen minutes,” Detective McCabe said. Guy Rose agreed. “Just take him into custody,” he said. “If you get him, we'll send a man out right away.”

The ambulance and its entourage of cars moved out Massachusetts Avenue in the dark of night, but there was a feeling in Washington that the lights were on; the people were present, but there was a mood of solemn meditation. The ambulance drew abreast of slow-moving cars. Greer tapped the siren lightly, and the cars moved to the side. The movie marquees proclaimed their wares, but few Washingtonians looked for entertainment. The meat markets, the supermarkets were open with Friday night sales on hams and loins of pork. Few automobiles cooled in the parking lots.

The ambulance passed Woodley. In the dark hush, the tall and dignified stone of Washington Cathedral rolled by. Inside, Woodrow Wilson lay in a crypt. He, too, had had lofty ideals.
In death, two Democratic Presidents were close, and then the distance opened up. No bullet had cut Wilson down; the assassins of the United States Senate had sabotaged his dreams for a League of Nations and he had died slowly, defeated. The car followed Wisconsin Avenue and Route 240.

In the back, Robert Kennedy tried to console his sister-in-law. At one point, he had pulled back the glass partition which separated them from the driver's section and he asked Roy Kellerman if any of them knew that a suspect had been arrested in Dallas. Kellerman said no. “They think he's a communist,” the Attorney General said. The widow was shocked. To be killed by a Red seemed, to her, to rob her husband's demise of significance. She thought he had been killed by a white supremacist; she had been sure he had given his life for civil rights. The martyr Abraham Lincoln had been cut down by a Southern sympathizer; the Negroes, free and slave, had wept. A warped, misguided communist could, in her mind, rob her husband's death of meaning.

The ambulance barely rocked. The highway was flat and smooth, and Chevy Chase slid by the big windows as a series of flashing lights through the curtains. The darkness of the hummocks of trees came again, and the two who loved this man so fervently stared at each other in the barely perceptible gloom. It was a macabre scene—morbid indeed—and yet they understood, without mentioning it, that they must be as close to Jack as possible; the hours were numbered. General McHugh sat with them, but he could not be a member of this triumvirate. Like a good soldier, he sat quietly, trying not to listen unless a remark was addressed to him. The Attorney General said that everything would be done as she wished it. He would help in every possible manner; right now Sarge was in the White House drawing up preliminary plans and he had a sizable team working with him.

She had time to tell her brother-in-law about the triumphal motorcade, the happy faces in bright channels of sunlight.
She had time, if she chose, to tell the brother of her cherished husband about the sharp, clear crack of the shots; the dreamy expression on Jack's face as he slowly leaned toward her; the spasm of the body as the back of his head flew off. There was time to tell the one man to whom she could bare her feelings. The interminable whipping speed of that car to Parkland; the bloody roses; the strange, cold faces of doctors and nurses and the long fight for something already lost.

That man, that execrable man who wanted to confiscate her Jack; the running flight to cars to the airport. The agony, the horrifying, lonely agony of it and then to find that the President had hardly died before the Johnsons were there in
Air Force One
—no privacy, no respect—waiting for a judge to swear him in and then asking her, actually asking her, to step forward to be photographed with him. There were things that Jacqueline Kennedy would never forget or, for that matter, understand. A kindred mind across the curving lid absorbed her words, her shock, her spite. Robert Kennedy, tense, taut, could sympathize with her position, feelings of grief, and rancor. He could husband a hate for a long time.

At Glenbrook the ambulance slowed. Three thousand people leaned on the double-railed fence around the huge skyscraper and adjacent hospital buildings. This was the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland. The people were quiet. They saw the ambulance. There was no movement toward it. The faces watched the vehicle with that speculative look which said: “Up to now, I didn't believe it happened.” Greer moved the vehicle toward the main entrance.

The commander of the institution, Captain Canada, was in uniform silhouetted against the lights of the main entrance. Admiral Calvin Galloway was at his side. For the United States Navy, the situation was sensitive. It would be dangerous to say or do the wrong thing. Canada had been wrong inadvertently all along, so far. He had sent the ambulance and cardiologist in
case Lyndon Johnson had a heart attack. The bus was returning to the curving driveway with a dead President.

The captain had been advised that Kennedy would arrive by helicopter. He had placed an honor guard at the helipad; two helicopters arrived, but they carried the Andrews Air Force Base honor guard, which wanted to be on hand at Bethesda when the body arrived. Both honor guards were standing at attention at the pads. Canada had been told about the crowd collecting around the big institution. A short fence made of two rows of pipe would not keep them off the grounds. He had called General Philip Wehle of the Military District of Washington, asking for soldiers. The general was still at Andrews.

Smartly, Canada, accompanied by Admiral Galloway and junior officers, stepped down and approached the three cars. They helped the people to alight. Captain Canada had a chaplain with him in case Mrs. Kennedy needed comforting. She didn't. Her brother-in-law took her arm and led the group toward the towering entrance. They may have appeared to be reasonable people, but Canada soon learned that the Kennedys were in no mood to dicker.

General McHugh told Galloway that the Kennedys were here for an autopsy and embalming. The admiral said that Bethesda did not have the means of embalming a body. Godfrey was adamant. He demanded to know if the admiral was telling him that it was impossible. Galloway kept his temper. It was not impossible; it might be unsatisfactory work, which could be worse. McHugh called up his reserves. O'Donnell and O'Brien were flagged to his side. The general said that the Navy did not want to do the embalming—the admiral had recommended a funeral director. “You heard the general's decision,” Kenny O'Donnell snapped. The admiral and the captain stood as O'Donnell and the general left for a sixteenth floor.

In a moment, McHugh was back. Most of the others, except for Roy Kellerman and his Secret Service group, had gone up
in the elevators. The body was driven to a rear entrance. It was taken out of the ambulance and placed in an empty and well-lighted corridor. There it reposed. McHugh stood by it and wondered what had happened. Kellerman and Greer stood looking around. No one spoke. No one appeared. They waited.

The headlights of the solitary car lit the quiet street momentarily and the low branches of the trees looked greener. The car turned into the driveway of a Walnut Hills home, and Dr. Malcolm Perry turned the ignition off and went into his house. His day's work at Parkland Hospital was done. The thoughtful face, wiped clean of expression, brightened when he saw his daughter, Jolene, and his son, Malcolm.

Malcolm was three and chattered his joy at the sight of his father. Jolene held out her school work for approval. There were some papers covered with large printed letters. “Say,” he said, “that's good work.” Dr. Perry brought the school papers up for one more look, and his world shattered into fragments.

The papers dropped from his hand. “I'm tired,” he said to Mrs. Perry. “I've never been this tired in all my life.”

The coffee machine ran out. Policemen dropped coins in it, held paper cups under a spout barely dripping, and kicked the automatic vendor. This was supper time for the Dallas department and there would be no supper tonight. Almost all of the personnel had worked all day and only a few were permitted to leave at 4
P.M.
when the next shift arrived. Two deputy chiefs sat in front offices handling phone calls from all over the world. There were newspaper editors, police officers, statesmen, diplomats, and the civic-minded.

Some wanted inside information about the crime and the suspect. Some asked for official statements. Many offered suggestions. One woman, excited, phoned and said: “Part of a chicken sandwich was found on the sixth floor—right? Well, all you have to do is pump Lee Harvey Oswald's stomach. If chicken comes up, he's your man.” Some were disturbed. They had seen visions and could solve the crime at once if they could be flown to Dallas. A few excoriated the city and the police department. “If you had properly protected Mr. Kennedy, he wouldn't be dead.” “You know who killed him—you did.” “Dallas should hang its head in shame.”

On the several floors of police headquarters, men worked harder than ever in the history of the department. Uniformed men and detectives breasted the crowds in the halls to run down a tip, find a witness, do an errand, pick up an item of evidence, or they were en route back into headquarters, bucking the same crowds, reporting in, and getting a fresh assignment which could not be delayed a minute. There was no time to buy
a sandwich; it could have been chewed hurriedly if someone had brought it in. The Dallas Police Department was operating like a tentacled octopus with no body; all the legs were waving and threshing, but the effort appeared to be without direction.

The chief sat in his office at the head of the third-floor T. He was a man alone, as though he were too aloof to seek his men or they were too aloof to consult him. He “assumed” that Captain Talbert had the people in the building under control, but no one saw Talbert running to Curry's office with reports. Will Fritz handled the case as though Homicide were divorced from the rest of the department. Between the interrogations he did not report to the chief with progress or problems. On the fourth floor, Lieutenant Day of the Crime Laboratory had examined the rifle, the bullets, the revolver, the cardboard boxes found adjacent to the sixth-floor window, the blanket which had just arrived from Mrs. Paine's house, but Chief Curry had very little firsthand knowledge of the findings. Lieutenant Revill of Intelligence had handed in a quick report on FBI Agent Hosty, stating that Hosty admitted knowing about Lee Harvey Oswald as a communist and potential assassin, and Curry had read it through his rimless glasses in silence and locked it in his desk.

Curry left his office and walked back down the corridor to Homicide. The reporters, as always, pressed him for a statement. He offered none. It was barely possible that anyone who was watching all the angles of this case on television might know more about it than the chief. He inched through the taut, sweaty faces and the klieg lights and turned into the glassy section marked Homicide. He could see the prisoner, lips pursed, listening to the questions of Will Fritz, and he could see the other officers, some standing, some sitting, staring at the prisoner waiting for an answer.

Fritz came into the outer office to talk to the chief in private. Curry wanted to know how it was going. At times, the captain of Homicide would blink those eyes like an uncommunicative frog.
He was a big man, bigger in his Texas hat. It was apparent to Curry that he was not going to get a detailed report. The captain said he thought he had enough evidence on Oswald to “file on him for the murder of Tippit.” Curry nodded. That would hold the man for a long time. There would be no bail in a first degree murder charge. This would give the Homicide division plenty of time to build a solid case. Fritz may have felt that he owed a little more to the chief. “I strongly suspect,” he said, “that he was the assassin of the President.” This was information which had been imparted to the world hours ago. The conference between the chief and the captain was brief and guarded, almost formal.

Across the hall in Forgery, Detective Rose was on the phone. He was talking to Detective McCabe of the Irving Police Department. “We have Wesley Frazier right here,” said McCabe. “He was found at the Irving Professional Center visiting his father.” Detective Rose was grateful. This kid could be a missing link in the case. McCabe said that Frazier had been arrested. The word hurt. Frazier should have been picked up, or apprehended, but hardly arrested. No one could think of a charge on which to hold him, unless the great big legal basket called “material witness” could be used.

“I'll leave here right away,” Rose said. “I'm taking Detective Stovall with me.” McCabe told him that the prisoner would be waiting. The two left their office, fighting their way toward the press room and the back elevator, as Curry stalked his way coldly in the opposite direction. In the county building, off Dealey Plaza, one of Sheriff Bill Decker's deputies noticed a Negro boy standing in the outer office. He asked Amos Lee Euins if he had signed an affidavit. The sixteen-year-old said yes. It was he who had watched the execution of President Kennedy from one of the vantage points in the plaza.

The deputy asked if anyone wanted this boy to remain in the sheriff's office. Deputies looked around and said no. Typists sat intently behind their machines, taking down the oral testimony
of scores of witnesses. Some had seen something. Some thought they had seen something. Day had passed into night and a few refused to sign if a word or a phrase was not quite in context in the affidavit. Copies of the approved affidavits were being delivered to Captain Fritz regularly. His men sorted them and acquainted the captain with a digest of the important ones. Hour by hour, the case against Lee Harvey Oswald began to congeal. If Fritz did not share all of his findings with his superior officer, it is also true that he did not confront the prisoner with them. He might have dealt a more slashing attack on his man, causing him to retreat, to admit, to concede here and there, but the interrogation continued with repetitious questions and, whenever the prisoner felt sensitive to them, he refused to answer and sat staring at the hound dogs who stalked him.