Ask Not

Chapter 14

The Criminal Courts Building, overlooking Dealey Plaza, stood nine granite-trimmed brick-and-steel stories. The 1913-erected structure housed two Dallas county criminal courts, the offices of the sheriff and DA, and the county jail, which was a building within a building. Jailbreaks were impossible, it was said, until one occurred recently and embarrassed Dallas yet again.

Saturday morning, at ten o’clock, with Flo in the passenger seat, I pulled the rental Galaxie into the shallow basement of the Courts Building, eerily similar to the city jail basement where Ruby had shot Oswald. We got out and headed toward the elevator. We looked spiffy — I was in a gray Botany 500 (not tailored for a shoulder-holstered weapon, which was tucked in the car trunk) and Flo in a pink suit with leopard top and white heels and her usual white gloves. I felt we projected the class with which Ruby was so obsessed.

Joe Tonahill was waiting at the elevator, the only attorney from the murder trial who remained on the current Ruby team. The Stetson-wearing Tonahill (I was bareheaded today) was an aptly named mountain of a man, six four and three hundred pounds easy, with a narrow skull, out-of-control John L. Lewis eyebrows, and a shelf of a second chin that seemed to engulf the almost boyish face.

Tonahill smiled and nodded to Flo, saying, “Always a pleasure, Miss Kilgore. You’re the only reporter Jack will talk to.”

“Well, I’m honored,” she said with a funny smile that added, I guess.

The small head on the huge body swiveled my way. “You’d be Nathan Heller,” he said affably, and we shook hands. “I read about you in the Enquirer.”

“That puts the ‘any PR is good PR’ notion to the test,” I said, as we exchanged smiles. “What’s the drill?”

He gestured toward the elevator. “Jack, as you might expect, is kept separate from the general population. He doesn’t even have a cell of his own.”

“That doesn’t sound like he’s being kept separate.”

“Sorry. I didn’t phrase that as felicitously as I might. He’s camped out in a corridor on the mezzanine level between the sixth and seventh floors. By the chief jailor’s office. There is a little holding cell he can sleep in.”

Tonahill reached suddenly inside his tan suit coat and for a moment I flashed on Lee Harvey getting surprised. But all he withdrew was a folded sheet of paper.

“I’m accompanying you up, but Jack has made it clear I’m not welcome to sit in on the interview. How would you feel about signing a document that has you working for me as an investigator, Mr. Heller? Providing you with the rights of confidentiality that Miss Kilgore enjoys as a member of the Fourth Estate?”

I looked at it. Simple and straightforward, it required my signature and for Tonahill to pay me “the sum of $1 and other good and valuable consideration.” He handed me a pen and I leaned the page against the closed elevator door and signed it.

Handing the contract back to him, with one of my cards, I said, “I’ll want a photostat of that for my files.”

“Certainly,” he said, and his smile was as tiny as he wasn’t. He pressed the elevator button with a forefinger that made it disappear.

“You’re forgetting something,” I said.

His tufted eyebrows rose. “Oh?”

“Where’s my dollar?”

He grinned and got out his wallet and I was slipping the buck in my pocket when the elevator doors dinged open. We got on board and Tonahill pressed 6-M.

Soon we were stepping into a vestibule and facing an office with E.L. HOLMAN, CHIEF JAILOR in black-edged gold on a light-brown door. We did not enter the office. Instead, a deputy at a barred gate at right recognized Tonahill, nodded, and allowed us into a narrow hallway. The deputy stayed at his post while Flo and I followed Tonahill, moving down the straight path to another gate and another deputy. Three more deputies were on the other side, the quartet of deputies the literal guards at Ruby’s gate. Two of them sat at a little metal table in the white-walled windowless end-of-the-corridor space, which opened up into what might have served as a reception area, with another office door at left and a steel door at right. They were playing cards with their charge.

“Gin!” Jack Ruby said, and, hearing the metal grind and whine of the gate opening, threw his cards in and got to his feet with a smile. “Miss Kilgore. Nate Heller! What a pleasure to have such high-class company.”

Ruby came over quickly, his thinning hair slicked back George Raft — style, his face freshly shaved. He looked a little like Uncle Fester, minus the lightbulb in his mouth, the black pajamas traded in for trim white short-sleeve jail coveralls, though his loafers and socks were Addams Family black.

He took Flo by the hand, in a gentlemanly way, as if about to ask her for the first dance. “This is such a rare, wonderful opportunity.”

He didn’t say whether that applied to him or her.

Then Ruby offered me a sweaty hand to shake, and I did, as he said to Flo, “You may not know this, but Nate and me go back to the West Side. We grew up together.”

That was an exaggeration, of course, but not exactly a lie.

“How’s Barney?” he asked, walking us over to the metal table, which the pair of deputies had vacated. They had left the cards behind. Tonahill was still standing near the gate, where all four deputies had now gathered, like flies around offal.

“Barney’s doing fine,” I said. “I’m grateful he arranged this.”

Ruby waved that off. “Anything for Barney. He raised a hell of a lot of dough for my defense.”

“He’s going to do the same for your appeal, he says.”

“What a stand-up guy. What a stand-up guy. Listen.” He leaned in and whispered to me. He smelled of Old Spice. His eyes were like black buttons sewn onto his face, only buttons blinked more. “I can’t let that lawyer sit in. I don’t know if I trust him.”

“You haven’t fired him.”

“Not yet. But this meet is strictly for you and Miss Kilgore. This is a one-of-a-kind interview, Nate. You are about to sit down with history. You want some water? I don’t think I can talk them into coffee or anything, unless you’re still here at lunch.”

“No water, thanks,” I said, and Flo said the same.

Tonahill hunkered in conference with one of the deputies, the oldest of the quartet. Then he came over and towered over us and said, “They’ve arranged for you to use room 7-M upstairs. It’ll be more comfortable.”

There was something accusatory in Ruby’s pasty face as he said, “That’s where Justice Warren interviewed me.” He said this looking at Tonahill, then he turned to me and repeated it.

I said quietly, “I’m ahead of you, Jack. What do you see as our options?”

Ruby had already thought that over. “There’s a visiting room on this floor, but I don’t trust it any more than 7-M. That holding cell over there...”

He nodded toward a cubbyhole with its barred door swung open.

“... is where I sleep and do my personal business.”

He meant piss and shit.

He was shaking his bullet head. “Not appropriate for Miss Kilgore. Crowded and not what I would term pleasant — though I don’t see how they would bug it.”

I nodded. The only bugs in there would be cockroaches. But Jack was right, it wouldn’t do.

Then I turned to Tonahill, who stood anxiously nearby like a guy waiting for an estimate from a shady auto mechanic. “Joe, see if you can get those deputies to stand down the hall a ways, on the other side of that gate. We’re going to have our little talk with Jack right here.”

Tonahill thought about that for maybe two seconds, nodded, said, “Okey dokey,” and went over and ran it past the deputies. One went off to check with the chief jailor, but we went ahead and set up shop. I moved the little metal table flush against the far wall, and arranged Flo’s chair so that her back would be to the deputies and Tonahill. I sat across from Ruby, who gathered the cards and set them to one side.

Tonahill got the okay, and he and the deputies positioned themselves on the other side of the gate, close enough to keep us in sight, far away enough to provide the privacy we needed.

Flo got the portable tape gizmo out and asked Ruby for permission to record him.

“Please,” he said, nodding, so worked up he blinked once or twice. “Be my guest.”

Then he folded his hands before him as if about to say grace and waited for the interview to begin.

Flo had a little notebook she was checking in, to make sure she hit every subject on her mind, and Ruby blurted, “Not everything pertaining to what’s happened has come to the surface, you know.”

“Is that right?” she said, flipping through pages, still getting ready.

“The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives, unless you can get the story out. I trust you, Miss Kilgore. And Nate and me, like I say, we go way back — like me, he’s had dealings with certain kinds of underworld types without ever selling his soul to them.”

With a serious smile, I asked, “You never had to make that bargain, Jack? Isn’t that what brought you here?”

His customary expression was that of a guy who just had water splashed in his face. “You got a point, Nate. I’m not sayin’ you don’t have a point. These people who have so much to gain and such an ulterior motive for... for putting me in the position I’m in, they’d do just about anything to keep the true facts from coming out to the world at large.”

Flo finally jumped in. “Are these people in very high positions, Jack?”

“Yes.” He unfolded his hands and, not hard, pounded a fist on the metal tabletop, making the deck of cards jump a little. “Yes!.. You know, I tried to tell the truth to the Warren Commission.”

She nodded. “Jack, I do know. I got an advance look at your testimony. But you told Justice Warren the same story you’ve been telling — about committing the crime for the sake of Jackie and Caroline Kennedy, to spare them the hardship of a trial.”

A tiny smile flashed. “Don’t you think I would make a good actor?” Now the high forehead clenched and he leaned in. “That was a story, Miss Kilgore, that my first attorney instructed me to tell. From the start, I wanted to tell the truth, but I couldn’t, not here in Dallas. Not in this jail. I told Justice Warren, if they wanted to get the straight story out of me, they had to take me to Washington, D.C.”

I said, “But they refused.”

He gestured with open hands, eyes popping. “They refused! Why? Why? I said if they would take me back to Washington, that very night, and let me talk to the President, then I could prove I’m not guilty, and maybe something could still be salvaged.”

Sitting forward, I said, “Jack, almost everybody in America was watching on that Sunday morning, and the rest have seen the instant replay — you killed Oswald. You can’t be saying you’re innocent of that.”

“No, no, I’m not talking about that. Nate, you’re a Jew — you know that there is no greater weapon you can use than to create this kind of falsehood about someone of the Jewish faith, especially of such a terrible heinous crime as the killing of President Kennedy.”

Flo glanced at me and I at her, and she said to him, gently, “You feel you are being accused of killing the President?”

He nodded vigorously. “Of being part of a conspiracy to kill our beloved President.”

I said, “Jack, you hated the Kennedys.”

He shrugged. “I hate Bobby. I never had a problem with Jack. But if I am eliminated, there won’t be any way of knowing what really happened. The Warren Commission, they muffed it, Nate, they eff you cee kayed it up, if you’ll pardon the crudity, Miss Kilgore. I want to talk to LBJ, who I think has been told, I am certain has been told, I was part of a plot to assassinate the President.”

“Why would Johnson have been told that?”

“Because... because he’s been told. I know he’s been told. By the people who plan to eliminate me.”

Shaking her head, as if to clear cobwebs, Flo asked, “Who is going to try to eliminate you, Jack?

“They won’t try, Miss Kilgore, they will. Maybe if you get out there with your story, I have a chance, but... you see, I have been used for a purpose, and there will be a tragic occurrence if you don’t take my story to the people and somehow vindicate me, so Jews like me don’t have to suffer because of what I have done.”

I said, “That’s what we’re here for, Jack. To get your story, and get it out there.”

“Good, because I may not be around for you to come and talk to again. You know, I told them I’d do a lie detector test, truth serum, anything. And then I could leave this world satisfied. I just don’t want my people to be blamed for something that is untrue, for something that some wrongly claim has happened.”

“Then your account of the Oswald shooting,” I said, “was fabricated for you?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“Then why do you keep repeating it?”

“Because the brave Jew killing the President’s murderer is a good story. And because I have family. I don’t want my brothers to die. I don’t want my sister to die. I don’t want my nieces and nephews to die. I do not want to die. But I am doomed just the same. And I am not insane. I was framed to kill Oswald.”

I held up a calming hand and said, “Okay, okay. But let’s back up. You hated Bobby, you said. You say you didn’t hate the President, but Jack, nobody in mob circles loves either Kennedy.”

He didn’t deny it.

I pressed on: “So why are there so many reports that you were devastated by the President’s death? That you were crying and weeping and wailing?”

“That’s an exaggeration, but...” He gave me a knowing little grin. “... you were always smart, Nate. We’ve come a long way from that union hall in Lawndale, haven’t we?”

Had we? That had involved a killing, too, of Leon Cooke, a former president of a junk-handler’s union. Maybe Ruby had come a long way at that.

Now the stocky little man’s focus was on me, perhaps because he knew I could follow him on the torturous journey ahead in a way that Flo Kilgore might not.

He said, “Maybe you don’t know this, Nate, but back in the fifties, I was big in the Cuban realm, both before and after Castro took over. I made trips for people, I moved some guns, I helped Santo get out of there when they had him locked up. I was valuable, making things happen. But then when Castro threw all the casinos out, my influence, it was gone with the wind and, well, at least I had a life and a business back here in Dallas. I concentrated on that. That became my life and world. I was happy. I am competitive by nature. But you mentioned deals with the devil, Nate, right? And I admit, I like to be important, it’s a weakness, but who doesn’t savor the attention of powerful people?”

I said, “Can you be more specific, Jack?”

“Well, powerful people, they never talk to you direct, do they? So if I said Carlos Marcello, I would be trying to make myself sound more important than I am, and the humbling thing about what I’ve been through, Nate, is that I know I was not important. Now I am important, and that’s the bittersweet taste, huh? Because now I wish I was not so important. I wish I was a small person again, a small successful person with his club and girls and his little dogs. I miss my little dogs, Nate.”

“Jack, you say somebody contacted you on Marcello’s behalf. Who? When?”

“A fella in New Orleans, smart guy, kind of on the weirdo side. We’ll call him the Ferret. He’s a pilot, in fact he and me, we go back a ways ourselves — we owned a plane together, in gunrunning days. I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years, not since the Bay of Pigs went south and all of the Cuba stuff went circling down the porcelain exit. Anyway, the Ferret—”

“David Ferrie,” Flo said with a nod.

That startled Ruby, her knowing that name.

I asked, “What did Ferrie want?”

“He... he wanted some help with some projects the Cubans were working on.”

“Cuban exiles.”

“Yes. There’s a big variety of different groups, but this is a pretty militant bunch, and well, sometimes I work both ends against the middle, and that can be dangerous, but it can also be profitable, and it covers a person’s behind, you know.”

She said, “You were an FBI snitch.”

That startled him, too. And he seemed a little hurt.

“I guess you could state it like that, Miss Kilgore. That’s a terminology that makes me uncomfortable, I would say ‘informant’ is a bit better, but yes. So I figured my FBI contact would not mind knowing what the Cubans were up to, and since casino interests like Mr. Marcello and Mr. Trafficante seemed to think Cuba might be returned to its former profitable glory so to speak, I lent my services, and my club after hours, for meetings and so on.”

Flo asked, “You didn’t hesitate getting involved again with these mobsters?”

“I was having money problems, tax trouble in particular, and anyway, I had business in Cuba with certain of these individuals that... Nate, can we talk about this in front of Miss Kilgore?”

“If you mean Operation Mongoose,” I said, “yes.”

That failed joint effort between the CIA and the Mob to kill Castro. That ridiculous French farce involving exploding cigars and poisoned food and tampered-with wet suits.

I said to him, “Miss Kilgore knows we were both part of that, each in his own small, respective way.”

Dark eyebrows rose above eyes about as expressive as a shark’s. “Does she know that...?”

“That I ran into you in a bar in Chicago, in early November, last year? That you introduced me to your buddy ‘Lee Osborne’? Yes.”

Or, anyway, she did now.

This had taken some of the wind out of his sails, and I had to prompt him: “What mischief were the New Orleans mob and the Cubans up to? Or should I say, what did you think they were up to?”

“... The idea was to embarrass the President,” he said. His hands were folded again and he was looking at them. He seemed smaller suddenly. “Embarrass Kennedy with a phony pro-Castro demonstration when he came to Dallas. I think those oil-money Birchers who were in bed with Marcello and the Cubans were afraid that Kennedy was cozying up to the Beard. But that’s just a small-time nightclub owner putting two and two together.”

And he was getting four, all right: Bobby had told me that secret talks between a Kennedy administration rep and Castro himself were under way the day of the assassination.

Flo asked, “Where did Oswald fit in?”

“He was just a little foot soldier,” Ruby said, “like me. He was an FBI informant, too, you know. And maybe more, maybe a spook — they sent him to Russia, huh? And some of those spooks were really pissed off at Kennedy, because of the Bay of Pigs betrayal, and, well, that should have told me something.”

“A phony pro-Castro demonstration,” I said. “Only it was a front for a presidential assassination.”

Ruby nodded. “You’re right, Nate, only I didn’t know that at the time. The plan as presented was that a shooter would take a kind of potshot at the President, with Castroites catching the blame, which would then shut down any peace talk bull and maybe ignite the shooting war in Cuba that everybody wanted, the Birchers, the spooks, the hoods. Why else would Oswald, who was Marcello’s guy — and maybe a spook or both, too — go around pretending to be a pinko?”

“Because he was being set up as a patsy,” I said.

“I didn’t know that. Believe me, I didn’t try to put any pieces together, Nate, not up front. I just did what they asked, did whatever I was told.”

“By Ferrie?”

“He was one of several. But the day before, that Thursday before, some nasty customers started showing up in town, Nate, from all over, specialized talent, I mean it was a goddamn torpedo convention... and it did start feeling like something else was up. Something big.”

“Who showed up, for instance?”

“Well, for one, our old buddy Chuckie, from back home.”

“Chuckie? You mean Nicoletti?”

Charles “Chuckie” Nicoletti was Sam Giancana’s number one hit man.

Ruby nodded. “Rosselli, too. You know Johnny.”

I knew Johnny.

“But,” Ruby was saying, “he left before the big day, I think — maybe he was just putting things in motion, finishing touches.”

“Who else?”

“Couple of Cuban hard-asses, don’t ask for names, I could never keep track of ’em. Oh, and that creepy guy, Johnson’s hatchet man, used to live here but is out on the West Coast now.”

I exchanged glances with Flo.

I asked, “You mean Mac Wallace?”

Ruby nodded again, even more vigorously. “That freak would give Boris Karloff the heebie-jeebies. And there was this guy, maybe with some Cuban blood, who Oswald didn’t know about but coulda been his brother.”

Flo asked, “A double?”

“Not so close you’d call him an identical twin or anything, but easy enough to mistake for him. Also, some guy from Europe, a Corsican, I think. He was supposed to be a whiz with a rifle, and he was gonna be the one taking the potshot. Needed an expert for that, ’cause it wouldn’t do to accidentally really whack the President, right? So we were told, anyway.”

I asked, “You heard this at a meeting at the Carousel?”

He ignored that. “Why would they need three teams of shooters, Nate? That’s what made it start to smell. If this was just a potshot, if they were just gonna miss the guy and put Castro on the spot... why a military action like that?”

“To guarantee a kill. Triangulation. Snipers from three sides.”

As for the number of teams and the disparate players, that meant each faction within the conspiracy was providing a shooting team, two or three people each. To bind everybody together, to ensure silence by way of shared responsibility.

Or blame.

So you had Nicoletti and Rosselli for the Mob, who maybe also provided the Corsican specialist; the Cubans representing the exile group; Wallace as part of the Big Oil contingent; and other players as yet unnamed. Perhaps never to be named.

“I was in the military like you, Nate. I recognize that kind of thing when I see it. I would never be part of an atrocity such as this. Kill a president? I don’t care if I didn’t vote for the son of a bitch, I don’t care if his brother is Bobby Kennedy and his father is a senile old bootlegger who betrayed us all, kill a president? I am not insane. Do I look insane?”

Was that a trick question?

I asked, “Oswald didn’t know?”

Ruby shrugged. “He may have been putting things together like I did, as things came into play. Who can say?”

In Chicago, in late October, the first warning the Secret Service got of a possible assassination attempt set for JFK’s November 2 visit came from an otherwise anonymous caller identifying himself only as “Lee.”

Ruby sat forward. “But I think when that kid realized that Kennedy had been killed, he knew he was being set up. They’d sent him to work that day with a package of posters for the fake demonstration! That package was too small, but everybody uses it to say, Look! He brought a rifle to work! They told him to tell the guy who drove him there that they were curtain rods.”

Curtain rods was what the hitchhiker told that truck driver was in his brown-paper package.

Ruby’s upper lip curled back over his teeth. “Isn’t it strange that Oswald, who hasn’t worked a lick in most of his life, should be fortunate enough to get a job at the book depository two weeks before the President visits Dallas? Now where would a nebbish like Oswald get that information? Where could the people who put him in that building find out when and what the route would be? Only one person could get that information.”

Flo said, “Who?”

He shifted in his metal chair, his expression coy. “Let’s just say if Adlai Stevenson was vice president, there would never have been an assassination.”

“Spell it out, Jack,” I said.

“Well the answer is that that man is in office now.”

“And that man is Lyndon Johnson?”

He was raving, yet keeping his voice soft enough not to be heard across the room. “And that man is Johnson! Who knew weeks in advance what was going to happen, because he is the one who was going to arrange the trip for the President — this had been planned long before the President himself knew about it. The one who gained the most by the shooting of the President was Johnson, and he was in a car in the rear and safe when the shooting took place. What would the Russians, Castro, or anyone else have to gain by eliminating the President? If Johnson was so heartbroken over Kennedy, why didn’t he do something for Robert Kennedy? All he did was snub him.”

I said, “Did you ever meet Madeleine Brown?”

That slammed his brakes on. He blinked. He shrugged. “Uh, sure. Hot little number, in her day. Johnson has a good eye for talent, although that one was too smart for him. Got herself knocked up, milked him like a cow, money, cars, house. Why?”

“Just wondering,” I said. “What did you mean, when you said Oswald was Marcello’s man?”

“The summer before the assassination, he was a runner for a Marcello bookmaker. His uncle Dutz Murret’s a longtime Marcello man. This is all well-known in New Orleans.”

There it was: Oswald tied directly to the Marcello organization.

Flo said, “That still leaves the big question, Jack. Why did you shoot Oswald?”

He swallowed. “Because, Miss Kilgore, I had to. I got a call, and they told me I had to, and so I did, because I had to.”

“A call from David Ferrie?”

“A call, Miss Kilgore, and I had to.”

I said, “And that’s what you were broken up about. Not Jackie and Caroline.”

“I didn’t want to shoot that kid! He was in so far over his head. He’d have already been dead if...”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Acquila Clemmons was sitting on her porch when she saw Officer Tippit killed. She said two men were involved — the gunman was a “short guy and kind of heavy,” the other man taller and thin in khaki trousers and a white shirt. She had been reluctant to talk to Flo because a Dallas PD officer had warned her to stay quiet, saying she “might get killed on the way to work.”

“You killed Tippit,” I said.

Ruby shook his head. “I didn’t say that.”

“When Kennedy really was shot, you knew both you and Lee Oswald were dupes in this thing — you even went to Parkland Hospital to see if Kennedy would pull through, and when he didn’t, you went looking for Oswald. Tippit died near your apartment, didn’t he? You tried to warn Oswald.”

“He was supposed to die that day,” he said ambiguously.

“Who?” Flo asked.

I said, “Oswald. Jack here screwed this up for everybody. Tippit was supposed to kill Oswald — he was combing Oak Cliff, supposedly for a suspect based on the description over the police radio. He got out of the car to come around and take Oswald out, only Jack here rescued his pal. Didn’t you, Jack?”

“I don’t think... I don’t think I should admit to a murder that maybe I didn’t do.”

I pressed: “Did Ferrie or Marcello suspect you? Is that why they sent you for the job? Or was it just a terrible coincidence? That you, the guy who could come and go as he pleased at the police station, were sent to do the deed.”

“I went to that press conference Friday night,” Ruby said hollowly. “I wanted him to see me. To understand he should keep quiet. But he kept saying over and over he was innocent, he was a ‘patsy.’ I tried to give him a pass.”

“But it was the old, old problem.”

“What?”

“He knew too much.”

Ruby nodded. Sighed. “I guess... I guess that kid and I have that in common.”

I heard footsteps. Tonahill was walking toward us. He paused halfway, looking massive and apologetic, and said, “That’s all the time they’ll give us.”

It had been enough.

Ruby walked us to the gate. Our white-jumpsuited host stayed at Flo’s side, as if he were walking her to the door after the prom and was hoping against hope for a kiss.

“I know you’ll do right by me, Miss Kilgore,” he said. “The sooner you get this out there, the better are my chances. They wouldn’t fool with a famous person like you. Not a journalist.”

That was a naive thing for him to say — not just because Kennedy’s fame hadn’t stopped anybody, but Ruby was an old Chicago boy. He surely remembered the Tribune’s man Jake Lingle getting it in that subway tunnel back in Capone days.

We bid Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer good-bye. We did not discuss anything on our way back to the hotel. I guess we were both trying to absorb it all. The tape was in her purse, and that was what I referred to first: “Get copies of that made when you get back to New York.”

I was dropping her at the Statler. She nodded and went in, while I went and parked.

Shortly thereafter, up in her room, perched side by side on her couch/bed, I said, “Ruby is right — don’t sit on this. Get it written and out there. Once the genie’s out of the bottle, we’ll all be safer.”

She was having a gin and tonic and I sipped at a bottle of Coke.

“I don’t know, Nate,” she said, frowning in thought, looking as cute as she was famous. “I owe Bennett a book. That’s much bigger than a story.”

“Doesn’t it take a year or more for one to come out?”

“Not with a hot topic like this. They’ll rush it — three months maybe, no more than five.”

“That’s a long time in Dallas. What about the Johnson stuff?”

“Think I should hold that back?”

“Probably. It’s beyond the pale, Ruby’s just speculating, and anyway that might get the whole project spiked. Remember what happened with the Marilyn story.”

“I’ll use my head.” She took my hand and squeezed. “This isn’t over, Nate.”

“Sure it is. Go home. Write your story or your book, whichever suits you. And go back to covering Liz and Dick, and what does and doesn’t flop on Broadway this season.”

She touched my chest with a gloved finger. “We’re going to New Orleans next.”

“No we aren’t.”

She nodded firmly, and her big blue eyes locked onto me. “Yes we are. Unless you want to send me there by myself.”

Fuck.

“Fuck,” I said. “All right. When?”

“I want to get my thoughts down in chapter form. Or maybe it’ll be an article, but anyway written. I’ll send you a copy, plus a dupe of the tape, and arrange for an interview with that Ferrie character. And maybe a few others in the ol’ Big Easy. Make it... two weeks from next Monday. I’ll book us a suite at the Roosevelt near the French Quarter. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I mean, we’ll talk on the phone, before then, but... when’s your plane?”

“Three hours.”

“Mine’s in two.” She gave me her sexiest smile, which was fairly sexy. “Did you know that there’s nothing more erotic to a girl reporter than a scoop?”

“I’ll take two scoops,” I said, and put my hands on her breasts.