Corruption of Blood (23 page)

“So who took the film and how did Ferrie get hold of it?”

“This we don’t know,” said V.T. with a sigh. “In fact, we don’t know its provenance at all: who took it, why they took it, or how it got from whoever took it, to Ferrie, to Depuy, or why.” He grinned without humor. “In short, it’s just like all the other fucking evidence in this case.”

Karp rose stiffly and wiggled his bad knee. “But it’s great stuff. It puts Oswald with the Cubans.”

“Assuming it’s Oswald. Assuming it’s real.”

“We could show it to Veroa,” said Karp.

“We have Veroa?”

“Yeah, I didn’t tell you. It was no big thing—he was in the book. Al Sangredo, Fulton’s guy in Miami, just talked to him in Little Havana. I’m going to get Clay to go down there and pick him up.”

“He’ll cooperate?” asked V.T., surprise in his voice.

Karp shrugged. “He’s on parole on a federal drug charge. You have to assume he’s interested in helping the government.”

V.T. let out a bitter laugh. “Yes, he would be—in real life. In this investigation, on the other hand, it might be just as well to assume the opposite.”

“That’s a point,” said Karp. “We’ll have to see. Meanwhile, and in the same vein, make a copy of that film and bury it. And V.T.? Don’t show it to anyone else but Clay. Oh, yeah, and I guess Ziller too. He’s a spy for Dobbs, but, hell, if Dobbs is bent we might as well pack it in anyway. He’s the only friend we got on the committee.”

“Are you serious about restricting access? I mean I’m paranoid too, but that’s a little extreme.”

“Yeah, I’m serious. Have blowups made at a private lab, and you can show those to your photo-analysis people, but keep the actual film to yourself.”

“Can we afford a private lab?”

“You
can,” said Karp.

“Still no budget, huh?”

“Afraid not.”

V.T. switched on the lights and collected the film. “You going to see Crane? Yeah? Ask him if we can have a bake sale and a dance at the gym. I mean, this sucks!”

When Karp arrived for his regular Monday meeting, Crane was talking to Bea Sondergard. They both froze for an instant and stared at him, as if they had been deep in conspiracy against the Republic. Sondergard’s face seemed drawn, and her eyes lacked their usual tolerant good humor.

Karp hesitated in the doorway and said, “Sorry—I’ll come back later… .”

But Crane waved him in. “No, we were just finishing up. Come in and sit down.” To Sondergard he said, in a lower tone, “Stop worrying—we’ll be fine.”

The woman sighed and said, “ ‘We’ is not the problem, Bert. As far as I’m concerned they can all kiss my sweet patootie. It’s you I’m scared for.”

“What was that about?” Karp asked when Sondergard had gone out.

“Oh, administrative horseshit, the usual crying and moaning,” Crane said, waving his hand in a limp circle to indicate the triviality of it all.

“I heard it was more serious than that.”

Crane gave a snort of derision. “You and Bea both. Am I going to have to hold
your
hand too? Look—what it is, there was a piece in the
Post
today. Flores sent me a letter citing irregularities in staff expenditures and of course the son of a bitch leaked it simultaneously to the press. He told me I am to incur absolutely no further expenses until this issue has been resolved by the committee. According to him, I’m encouraging some kind of sybaritic lifestyle off the public fisc without doing a damn thing to earn it.” He smiled and tapped his desk. “This desk was specifically mentioned along with its cost. I guess I thought when they hired me that I’d have a desk, but I guess I was wrong. So Bea’s pretty upset. She feels responsible for her usual efficiency. And then there’s this.”

Crane reached into his wastebasket and pulled out a folded newspaper and waved it. “Have you seen this piece of shit yet?”

Karp had not, but of course he knew what it was.

“Philadelphia,” he said.

“You read it?”

“I heard about it. You’re in with the Mob.”

“Trash, a total lie. I’m going to bring a libel suit that’ll kick their teeth in. My only worry is that this and the budget thing are going to occupy the caucus and the press so much that they’ll totally forget why they got me here in the first place.”

“You’re not still going to the caucus?” Karp had blurted it out without thought and he was dismayed when Crane gave him a searching look.

“Yeah, I’m still going,” he snapped. “Why the devil shouldn’t I? I haven’t done anything wrong. If I lie low, it’ll just give them something else to yap about.”

Karp nodded and held his tongue. He knew Crane was wrong and that Harrison had been right. The man was doomed. The worst thing he could possibly do now was to continue his defiance of Flores. He should have canceled his appearance before the Democratic caucus, should have apologized to Flores, should have sucked ass for all he was worth, so that they would let him alone. He should have then proceeded with the investigation, in secrecy, covering the real work with a cloak of supine amiability until he had some politically potent findings, preferably some that implicated Flores or his cronies, or that were so explosive that they couldn’t be suppressed. But Crane, it seemed, was just like Karp. That was the problem. And nothing could be done.

After a brief, empty silence, Karp rattled his notes, cleared his throat, and launched into his briefing. Most of it was concerned with the film V.T. had found, the Cuban connection, and the proposal to have the CIA man Paul A. David testify.

“When is he scheduled?” asked Crane.

“Wednesday, day after tomorrow.”

“Any problems?”

“No, except for the usual CIA stuff about not violating secrecy.”

“Mmm. On that score—he’ll be our first major witness. Do you think it’s a good idea to start out with the CIA?”

This startled Karp. “Bert, we had this discussion. You said we should bear down on Langley, and that’s what I’m doing. I didn’t think good idea or bad idea. Our only new material—the documents from Schaller, the letter from Hoover, and now this film—all suggest CIA connections, and participation in suppressing evidence. It makes sense to start off with a senior CIA guy who might have been directly involved with concocting a phony story.”

“I take your point,” said Crane, “but I’ve been thinking about it some more. It’s starting to strike me as, well, backward. It might make more sense to start with the assassination proper: the shots, the trajectories, the witnesses, the evidence inculpating Oswald, the autopsy …”

“You mean present it like Warren,” Karp said, and when Crane nodded, he continued, “No, the problem with that is that there’s no point at all in most of the forensic stuff. It’s all corrupt. Every piece of it. We don’t have reliable chains of evidence for anything. The bullets, the photographs, the X rays—God knows where they came from or who handled them. The autopsy was totally fucked. We have no access to the body. The tissue slides are missing. The witnesses? All interrogated originally by people we know had some sort of ax to grind—the FBI or the Dallas cops or the Warren people—oh, yeah, and the assassination buffs, of course. The surviving witnesses have told their story so many times that any connection between what they’re saying and what actually happened is probably coincidental. So, absent actual, legally probative evidence, we have to rely exclusively on experts, which means, as you know as well as I do, that for any three experts saying one thing, I can get three other experts to say the opposite. Even so, ninety percent of Warren and ninety percent of the anti-Warren writing has focused on the minutiae surrounding a single question: Did the shots that killed Kennedy come from a single known rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository? That question is a waste of time. Oh, yeah, we’ll go through the motions, but it’s going to be essentially a dead end, and irrelevant. Any real advances we make will be made through completely fresh material, stuff that hasn’t been totally mangled, like the evidence I just mentioned. It tells us two things: one, the CIA was actively involved in stonewalling on this case; and two, Oswald was definitely involved with anti-Castro Cubans and with the CIA. Whether Oswald killed Kennedy alone, or with help, or was just a patsy is something that can’t ever be established from the existing Dallas evidence. But there’s at least a slight chance that if we follow up this new stuff we’ll find something that’ll give us the real story.”

Crane was silent for a long while after this. He swiveled his chair around to stare out the window, at the rail yards, or perhaps at nothing. Finally, he said, “You’re right, of course. But …” Crane looked directly at him. “I don’t want this degenerating into a Jim Garrison circus. I won’t have that.”

“No, of course not,” said Karp vehemently. “Garrison’s problem was the fact that he
didn’t
have anything documentary like we have now. He had to rely on testimony from sleazebags against the word of Clay Shaw, who, whatever his sexual predilections, presented himself as a solid citizen. Garrison’s star witness was a petty hustler and known perjurer. Another one was a known crackpot. And he was trying to prove Clay Shaw’s involvement in a conspiracy, which is always a hard case to prove. Okay, so what if Shaw knew Oswald and Ferrie and denied it? It doesn’t generate guilty knowledge of, or participation in, the assassination, which is one reason Garrison’s case collapsed. One thing, though: Garrison was right on about the importance of the New Orleans connection. Something
was
going on in New Orleans in the late summer of 1963, even if Garrison got sidetracked about what it really was. If there was a plot at all, it was hatched there, because Oswald was there and active, and guilty or innocent, Oswald is
involved.
He’s still the key to everything.”

Crane nodded distractedly. His mind seemed to have passed over to some other subject. “Okay, do what you have to and let me know as soon as anything breaks. But, Butch? Don’t spend any money.”

After his meeting with Crane, Karp walked over to Independence Avenue and spent money. He bought two hot dogs, an egg roll, and a root beer from one of the trucks that parked in the driveway in front of the Civil War Memorial. It was long past the tourist season, but the sun was out, and it had turned into the sort of fairly pleasant late-autumn day Washington sometimes gets. The trucks still came at noon, their immigrant drivers hoping that hungry people with slender means and no fear of stomach cancer would show up in sufficient numbers to pay for the daily rental.

As Karp was entering his building, a small man in a red stocking cap and a shopping bag darted out from the cover of one of the marble lamp supports and accosted him. Karp shied away and kept moving. The man followed him into the building, waving a ragged pack of Xeroxed sheets and raving his assassination theory. The security guard at the desk inside rose to intercept him.

“You’re making a big mistake,” the man shouted. “I have the evidence right here… .”

Karp moved toward the elevator. Red Hat was a well-known figure around the building. He believed that Kennedy had not been assassinated at all, that only a double had been killed in Dallas, and that the former president was now living in Georgia. It was, oddly enough, not the least-plausible story Karp had heard while at this job; it did not, for example, involve beings from other planets.

He was at his desk, eating his egg roll, with his head down over a paper napkin placed on the desk to catch the falling debris, when Clay Fulton came in and sat down on a side chair.

“Is that good?” Fulton asked, curling his lip in distaste.

“It sucks.”

“How come you don’t get none of these fancy lobbyist lunches I keep hearing about?”

“I don’t know,” said Karp through egg roll, “but it’s a real disappointment. I mean, I’m a Washington lawyer, right? Maybe those guys you hear about with the big lunches are just bragging. Maybe they’re really grabbing franks off the hot trucks.”

“Could be,” said Fulton, chuckling. “I saw that movie V.T. got. That’s some interesting movie.”

“Yeah. He pointed out Veroa? Good. Now you know what he looks like, you can go down there and get him.”

“I
should get him? Why don’t we just have Al Sangredo bring him up?”

“Because you’re the official investigator and Al isn’t, one, and two, I got something else I want Al to follow up on. I think it’d be a good idea if Al used his contacts to see exactly how this drug beef that Veroa’s got hanging actually went down—how dirty is he, is it a legit beef—like that.”

Fulton chewed his mustache, ruminating. “You think it might’ve been a setup?”

“I don’t know, but I make it a point that when I talk to a guy I want information out of, I know where and how hard he can be squeezed.”

The detective rose and went toward the door. “Okay. I’ll get Bea to cut some travel.”

“No, you can’t do that. No further expenditure. Apparently we’re under investigation.”

Fulton stared at him in disbelief. “
We’re
being investigated? I thought we’re the investigators.”

“Yeah, but they’re on our ass for spending money that Congress hasn’t appropriated—I forget what it’s called, but it’s a big deal. Put it on your card. Don’t worry—you’ll get it back.”

“I got to fly to Miami and pick up your Cuban on
my own card?
”

“You got it, chief. Consider it a little vacation. Take a few days. Play the ponies. Eat some stone crabs.”

“Yeah, right,” said Fulton sourly. “And I’ll work on my tan.”

Marlene and her daughter looked through dusty blinds out at the courtyard of Federal Gardens, watching a small woman being dragged across the dead grass by a big black dog. The woman was their neighbor, the one Marlene called the Dwarf. Mrs. Thug. She was not, of course, an actual dwarf, merely a small, thin woman, too small and light to control an athletic and untrained dog that was delirious with joy at this brief respite from its nearly perpetual confinement.

“That lady is yelling bad words at her dog, Mommy,” observed Lucy.

“Yeah, I hear,” said Marlene. The woman had tripped over a grass hummock and gone down and the dog was racing around her, capering and barking. The woman and the dog ran around in circles for a while until she managed to snag the dog’s lead, after which she dragged it back into her apartment. The cute puppy had become an unmanageable adolescent. A common tale, and Marlene thought it was just as well that they hadn’t tried the same script with a human child. A door slammed, and Dwarf strode across Marlene’s field of view, with a purple car coat thrown over her aqua-colored supermarket checker’s uniform. The dog had already started its endless whining. The dramatic high point of my day, thought Marlene, that and,
I have to get out of the house.