Corruption of Blood (22 page)

The room was large, about fifty by thirty feet, and had one wall all of glass, which by night threw back the reflection of the overhead fluorescents and the variously shaded greens of the plants, mingled with the brighter hues of their blossoms. There were large specimens of the usual indoor plants—impatiens and prayer plants and tradescantia—but also more exotic growth. Huge staghorn ferns hung from the sprinkler pipe supports. Ficus and hibiscuses, oleanders and eucalypts grew from pots, and there were tables covered with weird aloes, and euphorbias and other fleshy, striped and waxy-flowered items that Marlene could not identify. A faint scent of jasmine floated over the bass note of the moist earth.

She saw a flash of a remarkable lavender color through the dense branches of a large croton and went around a potting table to see what it was. The plant was in a pot on the floor. It had dark green shiny leaves like a rhodie, but its flowers looked like giant purple pansies. She poked under its branches to see whether there was a label.

Behind her a voice said, “It’s
Brunfelsia floribunda,
from Brazil.”

Marlene jumped back six inches and whirled, startled. Maggie Dobbs was sitting on a low green wooden bench in an alcove made by a pair of potting tables.

“It’s lovely,” said Marlene, recovering her composure. “Do you, um, do all this?” she asked, gesturing to the conservatory.

“Yup. Me and Manuel the gardener. I have a green thump. Thumb.” She held up her hand with the thumb sticking out. The fingers, Marlene saw, were wrapped around a squat brown bottle. Maggie looked at the bottle as if she had just noticed its attachment to her hand. “Want a drink? It’s B and B.”

“Um, I think I had enough already tonight, thanks. As I’m sure you observed. I have to apologize… .”

“Nah! Life of the party. It was worth it to see the expression on that jerk Jim Royce’s face when you started talking about fucking corpses. Oops! Excuse my French!” She placed her hand over her mouth and giggled. Marlene wondered how long she had been hiding from her own party behind the potted plants. Apparently, and contradicting her previous thinking, the ability to give nice parties was not a perfect recipe for the good life.

“Mind if I join you?” Marlene asked.

“Sit,” said Maggie, and she took a swig from her bottle. There were two bars of hectic red across her cheeks and her blue eyes were bleary, but aside from this, she still looked neat and doll-like in her golden hostess costume. Marlene did not want to think about her own appearance; she thought she had removed all of the vomit from her hair. Some people are neat from the core out, she decided, of which happy company Marlene was not a member.

Marlene leaned back against the wall behind the bench, drew out her Marlboros, and lit one.

“Oooh! Ciggies! Thank God!”

“You want one?”

“God, yes! I’m quitting.”

On impulse, Marlene finger-palmed the cigarette and used a standard sleight-of-hand production, seeming to pluck it out of thin air with a snap of her fingers.

“Yikes!” cried Maggie. “Do that again!”

Grinning, Marlene hummed an upbeat version of “Tea for Two” and did a little routine of vanishes, acquitments, and productions using her own lit cigarette.

“That’s terrific!” Maggie screamed. “How did you learn to do that?”

“I had a lot of time to practice. A physical therapist I had after I got blown up thought it was a good way to strengthen my hands.” She held up her hand and wiggled the mutilated fingers.

“Blown up?” Maggie said, her eyes widening.

“Yeah, by a letter bomb.”

“Oh, God, she was blown up, she knows corpse fuckers, she does magic… .” She hung her head and her golden Dutch boy covered her face. “I’m so
dull
I could scream.”

“Well, I’m dull too, now, invisible, in fact, at least according to what’s-his-face—that Royce asshole. Wife-of-hood.”

“Yeah, he treats me like I was Twiggy, only not as socially valuable.”

“Well, at least you’re dull and rich,” said Marlene. “It beats being dull and poor.” It was a cruel thing to say, and Marlene immediately regretted saying it.

Maggie let out a wail. “I
know
! I’m so
ashamed
! I have
everything
and most people have
nothing
and I’m still
miserable.
And, of course, even saying that makes me feel even more ashamed. I have a marvelous husband and two marvelous children. There’s no end to it.” A fat tear plopped onto her cheek.

“Well, I’m miserable too,” said Marlene, thinking once again of the first conversation she had had that day with a cigarette-bumming woman on a bench, and what she had concluded from it, “but I’m damned if I’m going to be maudlin. Come on, fuck ’em all! We’ll join the … Wife-Of Self-Defense Association.”

Maggie gave her a long unfocused look. “Is there one?”

“I think we just formed it. You can be the first president.”

“No,” said Maggie instantly. “
You
be the first president. I have to be the secretary.”

That started them giggling. Marlene exclaimed, “I love it! It’s even got a good acronym. WOSDA.”

“Yeah,” said Maggie, “as in ‘Darling, WOSDA matter with you
now?
”

By the time Karp tracked Marlene down, an hour or so later, they were still laughing like banshees, clinging to each other on the green bench, the empty bottle stashed behind a potted oleander.

Bishop visited the house in Little Havana over the weekend. The thin man was watching golf on television when he strode in.

“Interested in a little work?” Bishop asked.

“No, I like sitting on my ass watching golf,” said the thin man sourly.

“Jerry James Depuy,” said Bishop, “may have become a tiny problem.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“Yeah, he’s dead. His works have apparently outlived him. Apparently some ex-cop was asking questions of the widow. It turns out this guy works for the House committee on contract. She told him that she’d given all his stuff to the AP and they’d given it to Georgetown U. for their Kennedy archive.”

“So? Aside from that bullshit with Ferrie, he didn’t know dick.”

“Yes, well, we always knew Ferrie was one of the weak links. Secrecy was not his strong suit. He liked to brag. The point is, it turns out that among the material passed on to the archive were several spools of eight-millimeter film.”

The thin man looked away from the TV for the first time. He stared straight into Bishop’s eyes. “I got that film, if that’s what you’re thinking. When Ferrie went down.”

“Yes, you did, the original reels. But film can be copied. It’s entirely possible that the little asshole showed the film to Depuy and Depuy copied it. I went to the archive myself the other day and found that the committee staff had already grabbed Depuy’s material.”

“But you don’t know that the film they have is Ferrie’s film.”

“No, I don’t,” Bishop agreed. “But the possibility is extremely disturbing. We’re going to be busy people if a copy survived. And if the people looking at it understand what it means.”

TEN

“What else did you find besides this film?” asked Karp, as V.T. threaded the Moviola editor in the dim room.

“Some notebooks, mainly concerned with Depuy’s coverage of Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw, lots of clippings of same, the original manuscripts of his filed stories, an address book. Notes for a book on Ferrie and the New Orleans right-wing scene that never got past the interview stage. Like that.”

“Anything there?”

“I haven’t really scoured it, to be honest. This film hit me in the eye right away and I’ve been looking at it ever since.”

After threading the film, V.T. cranked the handle for about fifteen seconds, taking up film until a piece of yellow paper popped out of the spool and fluttered to the floor. Then he switched on the screen light.

“It’s show time,” he said, and began to crank the Moviola. Karp leaned forward in his chair and concentrated. The small square screen showed a shadowy landscape, some bushes and trees, then a road. The film was black-and-white and grainy, or perhaps the graininess was just an artifact of the ground-glass screen of the editing machine. In any case, the film seemed to have been shot in bad light, at dusk perhaps, or in moonlight.

The camera panned across dark woods that seemed vaguely tropical—palmettos, Spanish moss, and hanging vines—past an open field, and onto the road again. A line of two-and-a-half-ton military trucks appeared, moving slowly, their headlights cut to thin slits. The trucks stopped and soldiers leaped out and lined up on the road. They were dressed in fatigues and soft caps. Most carried rifles, but there were some with machine guns and mortar components, and Karp spotted one with a folded bazooka.

The film now cut jerkily to maneuvers: the soldiers rushed across the field and flung themselves down, while others provided covering fire. The film was silent, but you could see the pinpoints of fire from the rifles and the shimmering gouts of muzzle blast from the machine guns. It cut to a mortar team firing, dropping the shells in odd silence down the tubes and shielding their ears from the blasts. Karp was no expert, but they seemed well drilled.

“Where is this happening, V.T.? And what’s the point?”

“Patience. Aren’t you interested in how we trained all the brave anticommunist Cubans?”

“Is that what this is? The Bay of Pigs?”

V.T. stopped cranking. “No, they trained those in Guatemala; this is Louisiana, and if we assume that the film was processed shortly after it was taken, from the markings on the leader it’s the early summer of 1963. It’s an illegal operation.”

“How do you know where it is?” Karp asked.

“Watch.”

V.T. started the film moving again. Now the camera was obviously in a vehicle of some kind, an open vehicle because the camera could pan around 360 degrees. A jeep: the well-known square hood flashed by and then the backs of the heads of two men with military caps on. A white road sign loomed up and started to whip by. V.T. stopped the movement again. The road sign had the shape of Louisiana and a number.

“We know just where this is, right by Lake Pontchartrain, near New Orleans. Okay, this part is important.” He cranked slowly. The jeep ride ended and the camera cut to a group of five men standing around a jeep, talking, as troops filed by in the background. V.T. froze a frame and pointed with a pencil.

“Okay, these two guys look like Cubans, we haven’t identified them yet. This stocky guy with the round face is Antonio Veroa, of Brigada Sixty-one fame—the star of document A. The tall, ugly guy here is Gary Becker, the head of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean.”

“Who’s the other guy in civilian clothes?” asked Karp, indicating a tall man with dark hair, a prominent nose, and deeply impressed wrinkles under his eyes. He was turning away from the lens as the shot opened, as if more interested in some background object than in the conversation the men were having; that, or he had a predisposition to avoid being the subject of photography.

V.T. said, “Also a blank. It’s a little hard to ID him because he’s turning away like that. Now watch this.”

He edged the film forward. In the treacly movements of slow motion, the camera’s view moved to another group of men standing by a truck. One of the men in the group turned around and smiled at the camera. It was actually more of a smirk than a smile, the famous smirk.

“Holy shit!” said Karp. “It’s him.”

“So it seems,” said V.T. “Perhaps a sort of private ROTC weekend away from the lovely Marina, or maybe this was during the time he was actually living in New Orleans.”

Karp was looking at the other men in the group around Lee Harvey Oswald. “Who are they?”

“It’d be nice to find out. I’ll have portrait blowups made of every identifiable face in this film and get my people on it. But there’s more.”

He turned more quickly now, the figures moving with the comic velocity of Keystone Kops. The screen brightened. It was full day. Some men were shooting pistols at a crude outdoor firing range, firing at man-shaped targets nailed to trees. Karp recognized Veroa, in civvies this time, holding an army .45 and smiling. The view moved unsteadily back to the shooting; the camera jumped slightly at each soundless explosion. Two men, grinning, held up a well-punctured target. A man in a black T-shirt and ball cap sat at a table loading bullets into pistol magazines. He looked up for an instant, frowned, spoke briefly, and lowered his head again so that the bill of the cap obscured his face. V.T. backed the film to the few frames that showed his face.

“Oswald again,” said Karp.

“Looks like it,” said V.T. “It’s got to be some time later than in the first scenes, because his sideburns’ve grown longer.”

V.T. cranked the film forward for another few seconds. More shooting, men posing with weapons, then a close-up of a round-faced man with a fright wig and patently phony, impossibly thick eyebrows.

“David Ferrie,” said V.T. Unnecessarily: nobody else looked like Ferrie.

The film moved on and then Oswald in his ball cap and black T-shirt returned. The shot was taken from the rear and showed him standing, aiming at a target twenty-five yards downrange and firing off seven shots rapidly. V.T. slowed the film. The thin puffs of smoke from the pistol, his arm moving up in response to the recoil, took on a ghastly slowness. The camera moved in for a close-up of the head of the target silhouette. It was shredded and flapping away from its fiberboard backing.

“Terrific,” said Karp tightly. “It’s like a coming attractions trailer for the Zapruder film.” They looked at the frozen target in silence for a while. V.T. moved the film again through another twenty seconds of paramilitary dullness. He stopped cranking, pulled the film from the viewer, and began to wind back.

“What’s on the front end of the spool?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said V.T. “Home movies. A barbecue somewhere. A Kiwanis award of some kind.”

“Ferrie was in Kiwanis?”

“No, but I doubt the cameraman was Ferrie. Ferrie didn’t own a movie camera that we know of and of course he’s there in the picture.”