Ask Not

Chapter 19

The district attorney of Orleans Parish sat at a surprisingly small, uncluttered desk, though a table behind him was piled with law books, notebooks, files, yellow pads, and assorted other evidence that work went on in this office of dark wood paneling opulent enough to date back to Huey Long’s era.

Or perhaps the desk seemed small because the man behind it was so big: Jim Garrison (that was the name on the door — not James) had stood to shake my hand, and I’d got a good intimidating look at the man. Six foot six, somewhat heavy-set, he cut an almost dapper figure in a light-blue three-piece suit with a dark-blue-red-and-white striped tie. He had handsome if slightly cow-eyed features with a high forehead and short, dark, well-barbered hair.

I was in one of several visitor’s chairs across from him as he leaned back in a high-backed swivel chair and puffed on a pipe, its smoke nicely fragrant.

“Mr. Heller, I’m happy to report,” he said, in a sonorous baritone, the words coming slowly yet distinctly, with only the faintest Southern accent, “that we have found your stolen rental car.”

“Well, that’s good news,” I said. “Of course, your two investigators could have just told me that at my hotel.”

He shrugged, as if that were of no import, but his eyes were hard and he seemed to blink only when he had to. “Well, there’s some red tape to burn through. I hope to arrange it so you don’t have to stay in town any longer than necessary.”

Was I being asked to leave by the morning stage?

“Not sure I follow, Mr. Garrison.”

Another shrug. “It’s just with a stolen vehicle, you might expect to be involved with various legal formalities. But the car wasn’t stolen from you, Mr. Heller — technically it was stolen from the rental company.”

“Well, all right.”

For this I’d been taken to the district attorney’s office? Had the unlikely happened, and Orleans and Jefferson Parishes linked that Galaxie to the Mac Wallace fatality?

He swung halfway around to the table behind him and reached for an item, then swiveled back and tossed a Life magazine on the desktop. From 1958, it had Kim Novak on the cover posing as a pretty witch with a cat. I knew this issue well, because it also featured an article called “Chicago Private Eye Goes Hollywood.”

“I had one of my people,” he said with a tight, sleepy smile, “go pick this up at the library this morning.”

It was only ten-thirty now. What the hell?

He laid the magazine out flat and flipped it to the article and the pictures of me, mostly with celebrity clients. “I was familiar with your name, Mr. Heller. Vaguely familiar, but familiar. This isn’t the only article covering your... exploits.”

“I don’t really think of them as exploits.”

He chuckled deep in his chest, but his eyes weren’t laughing at all. “This meeting isn’t really about your rental vehicle, Mr. Heller. That was in part a courtesy to you... to indeed tell you we’d found the car... but primarily as an excuse for you and me to have a friendly talk.”

“Okay.”

“One of my investigators spotted you last night at the Sho-Bar, talking to one of our more colorful citizens — Mr. David Ferrie. And in Nawlins, Mr. Heller, being one of its most colorful citizens is something of an accomplishment.”

“I’ll bet.” I shifted in my chair, which was wood and not near as comfy as the DA’s padded leather number. “How is it a New Orleans cop would recognize me? That issue of Life hasn’t been on the stands for some time.”

“Oh, he didn’t recognize you, Mr. Heller. And he wasn’t a cop — he was one of my staff investigators. We keep a close eye on the Bourbon Street establishments. Our city depends on tourism, and B-girls running badger games only breeds ill will.”

“Bourbon Street sells sin. That brings tourists.”

“Oh, I’m no prude, Mr. Heller. Gracious, no. I got myself in a jam not long ago when I refused to prosecute an exotic dancer who had stepped over the line... The girls are not allowed to touch their vaginas, you see.”

“I assume you mean onstage. And I bet the boys aren’t allowed to, either.”

That got a genuine smile out of him and his eyes sparked. He rested his pipe in an ashtray, tenting his fingers on his vested belly as he rocked back. “I should explain how you caught my investigator’s attention.”

“Please do.”

“Mr. Ferrie is an individual who we keep something of an eye on. He’s a predatory pedophile, for one thing.”

“Did your investigator think I was under eighteen?”

He ignored that. “My investigator noted you were in a rather... intense discussion with Mr. Ferrie, and he inquired of the manager of the establishment, Frank Ferrara, and he knew who you were. That’s how your name came to my attention... that and this morning’s report of a stolen car.”

“So I got on your radar twice. But there’s nothing to it.”

“We brought Mr. Ferrie in,” Garrison said, relighting his pipe, puffing it till its bowl’s contents glowed orange, “just four days after the President’s assassination.”

The back of my neck prickled.

“We had a tip from an ex — CIA man that Ferrie — he’s a pilot, you know, a disgraced one, fired by Eastern Airlines on moral grounds — had been hired to fly some of the assassins out of Dallas.”

“Assassins?”

“There are those, Mr. Heller, who don’t accept the government’s lone gunman assessment. You think a man with a bolt-action rifle, with a loose telescopic sight and a tree in the way, could have done that crime alone?”

I shrugged. “Ferrie was in court in New Orleans on November twenty-second last year. With Carlos Marcello.”

The DA of Orleans Parish surely knew all about Carlos Marcello. Hell, he was probably on Uncle Carlos’s payroll... which meant I needed to take care with what I said.

“That was in the early afternoon,” Garrison said, “and we understand Ferrie left for Texas by car later in the day. Frankly, all we did was pick Ferrie up, question him some, and hand him over to the FBI... who promptly sprung him.”

“Maybe they didn’t have anything on him.”

“Well, we have since learned that Lee Harvey Oswald and Ferrie were in the Civil Air Patrol together... and Oswald was not yet eighteen, to pick up that thread again.”

“What makes this your concern, Mr. Garrison?”

“It’s my jurisdiction. Should I ignore the possibility that the men who planned the murder of the President did so right here in New Orleans? Understand, the extent to which Lee Harvey Oswald was involved in certain questionable activities locally is extremely interesting.”

“I suppose so, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“What was your business with Ferrie at the Sho-Bar, Mr. Heller?”

“It’s as you say, Mr. Garrison — it’s my business.”

The prosecutor pressed. “You must have known the man Ferrie used to work for... Guy Banister? He headed up the Chicago FBI a decade ago, I understand.”

“I knew him. He was a drunk and a bigot.”

“That’s what got him fired as police chief down here. We understand also that he was active with the John Birch Society and collected and stored weapons at his address on Lafayette Street for anti-Castro Cuban exiles.”

“Sounds about right.”

“And here’s another interesting fact — Lee Harvey Oswald was a frequent caller at Banister’s office, and apparently worked out of there when he was distributing pro-Castro leaflets on Canal Street.”

“Sounds like typical spook stuff.”

“As well it might. Banister’s address is in the thick of Intelligence Central here in New Orleans — offices of FBI, CIA, and Naval Intelligence, easy walking distance. Banister died the night before the Warren Commission interviewed Jack Ruby in his jail cell, by the way. What do you make of that, Mr. Heller?”

“Why should I make anything of it?”

He sat puffing on his pipe, leaning back, his manner casual, almost lazy, his eyes hard and alert. “You were on the rackets committee with John and Robert Kennedy.”

“That’s right. I don’t remember that being mentioned in the Life article, though.”

“I said I’d read about you elsewhere. So you knew Jack, and you know Bobby.”

“I knew Jack a little. I worked for Bobby.”

“Robert Kennedy’s made public statements backing this lone assassin conclusion. Is that what he really thinks, Mr. Heller?”

“I can’t speak for him.”

“Well, you might mention to him that you and I spoke, and that I would be pleased to speak with him. That I have a strong feeling that New Orleans might be the key to his brother’s murder.”

“You do know he’s not attorney general anymore, right?”

He nodded slowly in that irritating way wise men do.

“I don’t think I have anything for you, Mr. Garrison. Am I free to go?”

“Certainly, Mr. Heller. Just leave your full contact information with my secretary, so we can deal with your rental car theft properly. You know there was some slight damage to it — I hope you picked up the optional insurance.”

“I’m covered.”

“Pleased to hear it.”

At the door, I paused and turned to him. “What if I said I suspected significant mob involvement in the assassination?”

“I would not be surprised.”

“Would it be a conflict of interest?”

The cow eyes tightened. “I’ll choose not to take that as an insult, Mr. Heller.”

“Fine. Then I’ll say this. Never mind Bobby. You’re in a unique position to get to bottom of this. You can subpoena people. A lot of the principal players involved hung around New Orleans. You can ask questions. You can do something.”

He was sitting there, pulling on the pipe, rocking gently, thinking about that, when I went out.

Shep Shepherd had again managed the small miracle of putting an empty booth on either side of us in the VIP Room at the Chicago Playboy Club. We had enjoyed a late supper and were on to drinks, the hour approaching midnight. The CIA security chief was in a gray Brooks Brothers and I was in a gray Botany 500, the major difference being I had more color in my necktie. He was finishing up his third Gibson and I was downing my second vodka gimlet. The jazz combo was playing “What Kind of Fool Am I?”

“There’s no way I can give you an absolute assurance,” he said, “that the Company was blameless in the Kilgore matter.”

“Not ‘matter,’ Shep. Murder.”

“Maybe murder,” he said with a gap-toothed smile, as inappropriate as it was boyish. “You said yourself it might have been accidental.”

“Then where are the tapes?” I asked. “Her notes?”

“Who knows? As for murder, do you rule out the husband?”

“Not entirely. Frank Felton is a washed-up radio star, a failed producer, who single-handedly lost that breakfast show of theirs while Flo was away. Now he’s inherited that town house, which is already on the market for two hundred grand, plus whatever insurance money and retirement funds come in.”

“But you don’t think he did it?”

“No. Somebody said to me, rightly, that Felton didn’t have the balls. And I also think he still loved her.”

His shrug accompanied a shake of the head. “Men have been known to kill women they loved. Perhaps more than any other kind. And then there’s that young reporter from Indianapolis.”

Our Bunny stopped by, bringing a fresh round; she was a golden blonde named Connie who’d been a Playmate last year.

“Mark Revell is no murderer,” I said. “He’s just a Midwestern kid with stars in his eyes. A nobody who likes to get next to somebodies. A fan. And basically a decent enough kid, if I read him right.”

“So he’s off the suspect list.”

I sipped the gimlet. “Actually, no. There’s a way he could be involved.”

“How is that?”

“What if he were one of your assets?”

“My assets?”

“Well, the Company’s. I mean, he’s a reporter for an Indiana newspaper, but he globe-hops. Rome, Paris, London. Where does he get the money? Yeah, sometimes those junkets are paid for by movie studios, but not usually for a smaller market like Indianapolis. He was in a perfect position to do minor international courier jobs for Uncle Sam.”

“This is getting a little far-fetched, Nate. Surely you can do better.”

“Not so far-fetched. He denies having an affair with Flo, but she made it clear to me, and others, that she was sleeping with the kid. Why would he deny it? What better result for a star fucker than fucking a star?”

“Well, she was married.”

“In a famously open relationship. I think the Company hired this kid to get close to her, to keep an eye on her developing Kennedy story. To seduce her, if necessary, to gain her trust. But here things get murky. What if Revell were asked to lift her assassination notes and her tapes, particularly the Ruby one? The kid worked with her, assisted her, and would know right where she kept such things.”

“I’ll bite. Suppose he did get that assignment. How would he pull it off?”

“With the Company’s help. Dr. Gottlieb or one of your other resident mad scientists cooks up a mickey for Revell to slip Flo, which he does at the Regency piano bar, after the TV broadcast. She gets understandably woozy and he escorts her home. She flops onto her little bed in her office, going to sleep, while her protégé filches the JFK materials. But the mickey the kid has slipped her reacts badly with the booze and the Seconal already in her system — or maybe she wakes up and takes the Seconal, that’s hard to say — and then? That’s all she wrote. Literally.”

“Even that would be an accidental death.”

“Yeah, I guess. A manslaughter-ish kind of accident, though. Or... maybe Gottlieb or one of his cronies had given Revell something lethal to dose her drink with, almost certainly without the kid’s knowledge. My little girl reporter had found out more on her own than the Warren Commission and all its investigators. So maybe it was decided that she had to go.”

“She didn’t do her investigating entirely on her own.”

“No, Mark Lane was there for some of it, but he’s already being discredited as a kook, despite his impressive credentials. But I was there, wasn’t I? Which is why you happen to be in Chicago again, so soon, isn’t it?”

A smile flickered on the boyish face. “Not necessarily. But there is a rumor that, uh... Flo Kilgore gave you a duplicate of the Ruby tape.”

Looked like Uncle Carlos was spreading the word.

“Suppose she did?” I said. “What would it be worth to the Company for me not to come forward with it? To leave buried it and any copies I might have?”

“What would that be worth?”

The jazz combo started in on “I Wanna Be Around.”

I said, “How about a simple assurance from those representing the country that I fought for? An assurance that my life, and my son’s life — and my ex-wife’s life, too, what the hell — are no longer on the line.”

“... That sounds reasonable.”

“And I’ll even throw in my own assurance that I have no intention of taking the assassination investigation any further. I was only sniffing around the edges, after all. I never even met Billie Sol Estes, let alone LBJ.”

But others would pick up those threads. And I would in fact share what I’d discovered with Bobby Kennedy. Then there were the dozen signed statements in a dozen safety-deposit boxes scattered around the country, detailing that Jack Ruby interview, my substitute for the imaginary duplicate tapes with which I’d threatened Marcello.

“Of course,” Shep said lightly, “this is all hypothetical.”

“Of course.”

“Hypothetically speaking, you would have a deal. Would you like to shake hands on it?”

“I don’t think so. I’ll also pass on signing anything in blood, if you don’t mind.” I slid out of the booth. I leaned in like a Bunny doing her trademark dip. “Don’t contact me again, old buddy. We’re done, you and I. I wish you and your family and Uncle Sam well. But we are done.”

“All right, Nate. Consider yourself off the Christmas card list.”

I straightened and nodded and was about to go when I felt his hand on my sleeve.

“One thing, Nate,” he said, giving me that Bobby Morse smile. “Be aware that the Company is very grateful to you for your service in New Orleans.”

“What service is that?”

“Why, tying off any number of inconvenient loose ends for us... Oh, and I’ll get the check.”

The Warren Commission’s final 889-page report was submitted to President Lyndon Baines Johnson on September 24, 1964, concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy (and wounding Texas governor John Connally). It also found that Jack Ruby acted alone killing Oswald.

Bobby Kennedy nearly lost his Senate bid, his grief and general disengagement in the process costing him dearly. But late in September, his opponent — the normally likable Senator Kenneth Keating — made a bid for the Jewish vote by accusing Bobby of settling a World War II — era case in favor of a company with Nazi ties. Supposedly RFK had done this just to please old Joe Kennedy, whose reputation as a Nazi appeaser still haunted the family. The charge infuriated Bobby, who before had considered Keating benign, and he struck back hard — he had lost one brother to a war, he reminded voters, and another to an assassin’s bullet. It energized his campaign. He won in a landslide, and his path to the presidency seemed clear.

On October 5, 1966, Jack Ruby’s conviction was overturned on technicalities and his death sentence set aside. Around this time, Ruby complained that a “mysterious visiting physician” had given him a series of injections; he also claimed to have received numerous chest X-rays, one lasting upwards of an hour. He succumbed to lung cancer on January 3, 1967, at Parkland Hospital, where both Jack Kennedy and Lee Oswald had died.

While I apparently removed one “cleanup crew,” assassination witnesses continued to occasionally meet premature fates over the next few years. Albert Bogard, the car salesman who gave the Oswald look-alike a test-drive, committed suicide, in February 1966. Lee Bowers, the railroad towerman who saw unusual activity behind the Grassy Knoll fence, perished in a suspicious single-car accident, in August 1966. But most of those Flo and I interviewed survived — S. M. Holland, Mary Woodward, J. C. Price, among others. Witnesses who waited years, or in some cases decades, to come forward fared better.

Madeleine Brown did not go public about her long relationship with LBJ until 1997, revealing that her son Steven was sired by the late president. Steven, whose physical resemblance to his famous father was striking, filed a $10.5 million lawsuit against Lady Bird, Johnson’s widow; but Steven died of cancer before the case was settled. Madeleine wrote a tell-all book that combined rapturous descriptions of lovemaking with Lyndon with revelations about her lover’s cold-blooded role in the assassination, but the book did not receive widespread distribution or attention.

In 1970, Beverly Oliver came forward as the so-called “Babushka Lady” evident in photos and films of the Dealey Plaza tragedy, and published a memoir in 1994 that also received little attention. The 8 mm film she shot has never been found, though the House Assassinations Committee made the attempt.

Jim Garrison’s investigation into the Kennedy assassination remains a source of controversy — Bobby Kennedy, initially supportive, later came to call the larger-than-life prosecutor a fraud. Bobby’s reaction did not surprise me — Garrison’s primary line of inquiry was CIA involvement, which might have brought Operation Mongoose to light, tarnishing JFK’s memory and RFK’s political future.

Garrison might have convicted David Ferrie as a JFK assassination conspirator, had the pederast pilot not died a mysterious suicide himself in 1967, leaving two unsigned notes (cause of death: a supposed brain hemorrhage). The crusading DA had to settle for tangential figure Clay Shaw, New Orleans business executive, who was acquitted in 1969, after the only criminal trial to grow out of the assassination to date. Notably, Garrison used his subpoena power to show the Zapruder film in public for the first time. His investigation inspired director Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, which fictionalized Garrison much as The Untouchables television series and movie did Eliot Ness. But Stone’s film, as controversial as Garrison himself, led to the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the year of Garrison’s death) and the formation of the US Assassination Records Review Board, making available to the public previously classified documents.

The groundbreaking work of Flo Kilgore and Mark Lane opened a floodgate of conspiracy research and theorizing, with a conspiracy cottage industry rising up to produce hundreds of books on the assassination, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime. Defenders of the Warren Commission Report did their best to trivialize all such researchers into “conspiracy nuts,” much like Lee Harvey Oswald himself had been deemed a crank with a gun. Even before Oliver Stone, however, the public remained largely skeptical of the Warren Commission.

In the wake of Watergate, and with the Zapruder film in wider circulation, the Gallup Poll reported that 81 percent of the American public considered the JFK assassination the result of a conspiracy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the shooting of Alabama governor George Wallace. The Committee issued its final report in 1978, concluding that a conspiracy was responsible for the assassination of JFK.

The two-year span of the House investigation sparked another round of witness deaths, some mysterious, others blatant.

Roger Craig, the former Dallas County sheriff deputy, continued to speak out about what he’d witnessed surrounding the assassination. Returning from a meeting with Jim Garrison, Craig was shot at, his head grazed. His car was forced off the road in 1973, resulting in a debilitating back injury that ended his law-enforcement career. In 1974, Craig answered a knock at his door and was struck by a shotgun blast, wounding his shoulder. In 1975, he died of a rifle wound in his father’s home, a supposed suicide at thirty-nine.

A key Oswald associate, George De Mohrenschildt, was being sought by the House for testimony when he presumably blew off his own head with a shotgun, a shooting termed “very strange” by the Palm County, Florida, sheriff’s office.

Mobsters called to testify at the House Assassination hearings had a particularly tough go of it. In 1975, Sam Giancana, while frying up peppers and sausages at home, was shot six times in the back of the head with a .22 automatic, and several more in the mouth — a mob message that a squealer had been silenced. In 1976, Johnny Rosselli turned up in an oil drum in a bay near Miami, strangled, shot, and dismembered. In 1977, Chuckie Nicoletti, sitting in his car in a suburban Chicago restaurant parking lot, was shot in the head three times, gangland-style, and the vehicle set afire.

No such abrupt fate awaited Carlos Marcello. While serving the last of several prison sentences, he suffered a series of strokes, became seriously disabled, and began showing signs of dementia. He lost the power of speech and any sense of who he was, finally reverting to infancy, dying in 1993.

Clint Peoples, promoted to Senior Captain in 1969, left the Rangers in 1974 and became US Marshal for the Northern District of Texas. Even after retiring, he continued to investigate Henry Marshall’s murder, pressuring an imprisoned Billie Sol Estes to set the record straight. In 1983, a recently released Estes appeared before a grand jury and testified that LBJ has sent Mac Wallace to dispose of whistle-blower Marshall. With both Johnson and Wallace deceased — and the reputation of a US President to consider — the jury did not act upon these accusations; but they did officially change Henry Marshall’s suicide to death by gunshot. Peoples, working to prove Mac Wallace’s role in the assassination, died in an automobile accident in 1992, although his last words indicated he’d been run off the road.

In January 1971, Frank Felton was found dead in the same bed where his wife Flo had been found. At first called a heart attack, the death was deemed an intentional drug overdose — a real suicide in a case riddled with fake ones.

Mark Revell continued as the entertainment writer on the Indianapolis News into the early 1980s. He went on to work as a photographer of art studies, later receiving a master’s degree in Christian Counseling from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

I saw Janet Adams a number of times in Chicago over the next ten years, though Jada’s Carousel fame soon faded, just as her extreme sexpot style receded in the popular culture. We were never really an item but had a great time whenever we got together, though I was never tempted to become her fifth or sixth husband, or whatever number was next. She died in 1980, and some have made her death out as another mysterious one. It wasn’t. Riding a motorcycle, she turned in front of a school bus, which was unable to stop. Nothing mysterious about that, just sad as hell.

LBJ stepped down from the presidency, a man defeated by Vietnam and the dire popularity polls it engendered. He seemed to be making way for Bobby Kennedy’s candidacy. It’s just possible Bobby had something on Lyndon that helped the President make that tough call. Undoubtedly Jack Kennedy’s successor did some great things, but he was also a political animal capable of doing anything for power. Fighting depression, in poor health after severe heart problems, he died in 1973, two days after his second term would have ended.

No one from the House Committee approached me to testify, by the way, and I didn’t come forward. Most of what I’d discovered was secondhand or old news by that point, and certain things I could not reveal, as there’s no statute of limitations on murder. That’s the reason this particular memoir could not be published until after my death.

On a less somber note, my son Sam did take over the family business. His flirtation with rock ’n’ roll ended after he got kicked out of Gary Lewis and the Playboys when Jerry’s kid signed a national recording contract. Like Jerry’s kid, Sam wound up in Vietnam, much to my dismay, which is one of the reasons LBJ should be burning in Hell, and I don’t mean Bourbon Street. Sam survived the experience, but like his old man, war left its mark.

In August 1966, in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, the Beatles gave their last live performance. The Colony Club closed its doors in April 1972. The Chicago Playboy Club, once the world’s most popular nightspot, shut its doors in the summer of 1986. The Sho-Bar is still open for business in New Orleans (although in a different location).

In 1998, a Texas-based assassination research group presented evidence that a fingerprint, unidentified since its discovery in 1963, had at last been positively ID’d. The unknown print came from one of the boxes making up the so-called “sniper’s nest” on the Texas School Book Depository’s sixth floor. A certified fingerprint examiner, unaware of the context, made a fourteen-point match with a print from a long-suspected participant in the assassination — a print made when that suspect had been booked on a murder charge in 1951.

I can’t tell you whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald ever knelt at that window in the book depository sniper’s nest.

But Mac Wallace did.