11/22/63: A Novel (46 page)

“So you can’t help me?”

“Whattaya, kiddin? Sure I can. Silent Mike McEachern’s always happy to help fill a customer’s electronic needs. But it’ll cost.”

“I’d be willing to pay quite a bit. It could save me even more when I get that cheating bitch into divorce court.”

“Uh-huh. Wait here a minute while I get something out of the back. And turn that sign in the door over to CLOSED, wouldja? I’m going to show you something that’s probably not . . . well, maybe it
is
legal, but who knows? Is Silent Mike McEachern an attorney?”

“I’m guessing not.”

My guide to sixties-era electronica reappeared with a weird-looking gadget in one hand and a small cardboard box in the other. The printing on the box was
in Japanese. The gadget looked like a dildo for pixie chicks, mounted on a black plastic disc. The disc was three inches thick and about the diameter of a quarter, with a spray of wires coming out of it. He put it on the counter.

“This is an Echo. Manufactured right here in town, son. If anyone can beat the sons of Nippon at their own game, it’s us. Electronics is gonna replace banking in Dallas by 1970. Mark my words.” He crossed himself, pointed skyward, and added, “God bless Texas.”

I picked the gadget up. “What exactly is an Echo when it’s at home with its feet up on the hassock?”

“The closest thing to the kind of bug you described to me that you’re gonna get. It’s small because it doesn’t have any vacuum tubes and doesn’t run on batteries. It runs on ordinary AC house current.”

“You plug it into the wall?”

“Sure, why not? Your wife and her boyfriend can look at it and say, ‘How nice, someone bugged the place while we were out, let’s have a nice noisy shag, then talk over all our private business.’”

He was a geek, all right. Still, patience is a virtue. And I needed what I needed.

“What do you do with it, then?”

He tapped the disc. “This goes inside the base of a lamp. Not a floor lamp, unless you’re interested in recording the mice running around inside the baseboards, you dig? A table lamp, so it’s up where people talk.” He brushed the wires. “The red and yellow ones connect to the lamp cord, lamp cord’s plugged into the wall. The bug’s dead until someone turns on the lamp. When they do, bingo, you’re off to the races.”

“This other thing is the mike?”

“Yep, and for American-made it’s a good one. Now—you see the other two wires? The blue and green ones?”

“Uh-huh.”

He opened the cardboard box with the Japanese writing on it, and took out a reel-to-reel recorder. It was bigger than a pack of Sadie’s Winstons, but not by much.

“Those wires hook up to this. Base
unit goes in the lamp, recorder goes in a bureau drawer, maybe under your wife’s scanties. Or drill a little hole in the wall and put it in the closet.”

“The recorder also draws power from the lamp cord.”

“Naturally.”

“Could I get two of these Echoes?”

“I could get you four, if you wanted. Might take a week, though.”

“Two will be fine. How much?”

“Stuff like this ain’t cheap. A pair’d run you a hundred and forty. Best I can do. And it would have to be a cash deal.” He spoke with a regret that suggested we had been having a nice little techno-dream for ourselves, but now the dream was almost over.

“How much more would it cost me to have you do the installation?” I saw his alarm and hastened to dispel it. “I don’t mean the actual black-bag job, nothing like that. Just to put the bugs in a couple of lamps and hook up the tape recorders—could you do that?”

“Of course I could, Mr.—”

“Let’s say Mr. Doe. John Doe.”

His eyes sparkled as I imagine E. Howard Hunt’s would when he first beheld the challenge that was the Watergate Hotel. “Good name.”

“Thanks. And it would be good to have a couple of options with the wires. Something short, if I can place it close by, something longer if I need to hide it in a closet or on the other side of a wall.”

“I can do that, but you don’t want more than ten feet or the sound turns to mud. Also, the more wire you use, the greater the chance that someone’ll find it.”

Even an English teacher could understand that.

“How much for the whole deal?”

“Mmm . . . hundred and eighty?”

He looked ready to haggle, but I didn’t have the time or the inclination. I put five twenties down on the counter and said, “You get the rest when I pick them up. But first we test them out and make sure they work, agreed?”

“Yeah, fine.”

“One other thing. Get used lamps. Kind of grungy.”

“Grungy?”

“Like they were picked up at a yard sale or a flea market for a
quarter apiece.” After you direct a few plays—counting the ones I’d worked on at LHS,
Of Mice and Men
had been my fifth—you learn a few things about set decoration. The last thing I wanted was someone stealing a bug-loaded lamp from a semi-furnished apartment.

For a moment he looked puzzled, then a complicitous smile dawned on his face. “
I
get it. Realism.”

“That’s the plan, Stan.” I started for the door, then came back, leaned my forearms on the transistor radio display case, and looked into his eyes. I can’t swear that he saw the man who had killed Frank Dunning, but I can’t say for sure that he didn’t, either. “You’re not going to talk about this, are you?”

“No! Course not!” He zipped two fingers across his lips.

“That’s the way,” I said. “When?”

“Give me a few days.”

“I’ll come back next Monday. What time do you close?”

“Five.”

I calculated the distance from Jodie to Dallas and said, “An extra twenty if you stay open until seven. It’s the soonest I can make it. That work for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Have everything ready.”

“I will. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Why the hell do they call you Silent Mike?”

I was hoping he’d say
Because I can keep a secret,
but he didn’t. “When I was a kid, I thought that Christmas carol was about me. It just kind of stuck.”

I didn’t ask, but halfway back to my car it came to me, and I started to laugh.

Silent Mike, holy Mike.

Sometimes the world we live in is a truly weird place.

When Lee and Marina returned
to the United States, they’d live in a sad procession of low-rent apartments, including the one in New Orleans I’d already visited, but based on Al’s notes, I thought there were only two I needed to focus on. One was at 214 West Neely Street, in Dallas. The other was in Fort Worth, and that was where I went after my visit to Silent Mike’s.

I had a map of the city, but still had to ask directions three times. In the end it was an elderly black woman clerking at a mom-n-pop who pointed me the right way. When I finally found what I was looking for, I wasn’t surprised that it had been hard to locate. The ass end of Mercedes Street was unpaved hardpan lined with crumbling houses little better than sharecroppers’ shacks. It spilled into a huge, mostly empty parking lot where tumbleweeds blew across the crumbling asphalt. Beyond the lot was the back of a cinderblock warehouse. Printed on it in whitewashed letters ten feet tall was PROPERTY OF MONTGOMERY WARD and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED and POLICE TAKE NOTE.

The air stank of cracked petroleum from the direction of Odessa-Midland, and raw sewage much closer at hand. The sound of rock and roll spilled from open windows. I heard the Dovells, Johnny Burnette, Lee Dorsey, Chubby Checker . . . and that was in the first forty yards or so. Women were hanging clothes on rusty whirligigs. They were all wearing smocks that had probably been purchased at Zayre’s or Mammoth Mart, and they all appeared to be pregnant. A filthy little boy and an equally filthy little girl stood on a cracked clay driveway and watched me go by. They were holding hands and looked too much alike not to be twins. The boy, naked except for a single sock, was holding a cap pistol. The girl was wearing a saggy diaper below a Mickey Mouse Club tee-shirt. She was clutching a plastic babydoll as filthy as she was. Two bare-chested men were throwing a football back and forth between their respective yards, both of them with cigarettes hanging
from the corners of their mouths. Beyond them, a rooster and two bedraggled chickens pecked in the dust near a scrawny dog that was either sleeping or dead.

I pulled up in front of 2703, the place to which Lee would bring his wife and daughter when he could no longer stand Marguerite Oswald’s pernicious brand of smotherlove. Two concrete strips led up to a bald patch of oil-stained ground where there would have been a garage in a better part of town. The wasteland of crabgrass that passed for a lawn was littered with cheap plastic toys. A little girl in ragged pink shorts was kicking a soccer ball repeatedly against the side of the house. Each time it hit the wooden siding, she said,
“Chumbah!”

A woman with her hair in large blue rollers and a cigarette plugged in her gob shoved her head out the window and shouted, “You keep doin that, Rosette, I’m gone come out n beat you snotty!” Then she saw me. “Wha’
choo
want? If it’s a bill, I cain’t hep you. My husband does all that. He got work today.”

“It’s not a bill,” I said. Rosette kicked the soccer ball at me with a snarl that became a reluctant smile when I caught it with the side of my foot and booted it gently back. “I just wanted to speak to you for a second.”

“Y’all gotta wait, then. I ain’t decent.”

Her head disappeared. I waited. Rosette kicked the soccer ball high and wide this time (
“Chumbah!”
), but I managed to catch it on one palm before it hit the house.

“Ain’t s’pozed to use your hands, dirty old sumbitch,” she said. “That’s a penalty.”

“Rosette, what I told you about that goddam mouth?” Moms came out on the stoop, securing a filmy yellow scarf over her rollers. It made them look like cocooned insects, the kind that might be poisonous when they hatched.

“Dirty old
fucking
sumbitch!” Rosette shrieked, and then scampered up Mercedes Street in the direction of the Monkey Ward warehouse, kicking her soccer ball and laughing maniacally.

“Wha’ choo want?” Moms was twenty-two going on
fifty. Several of her teeth were gone, and she had the fading remains of a black eye.

“Want to ask you some questions,” I said.

“What makes my bi’ness your bi’ness?”

I took out my wallet and offered her a five-dollar bill. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

“You ain’t from around here. Soun like a Yankee.”

“Do you want this money or not, Missus?”

“Depends on the questions. I ain’t tellin you my goddam bra-size.”

“I want to know how long you’ve been here, for a start.”

“This place? Six weeks, I guess. Harry thought he might catch on at the Monkey Ward warehouse, but they ain’t hiring. So he went on over to Manpower. You know what that is?”

“Day-labor?”

“Yeah, n he workin with a bunch of niggers.” Only it wasn’t
workin,
it was
woikin.
“Nine dollars a day workin with a bunch of goddam niggers side a the road. He says it’s like bein at West Texas Correctional again.”

“How much rent do you pay?”

“Fifty a month.”

“Furnished?”

“Semi. Well, you
could
say. Got a goddam bed and a goddam gas stove gone kill us all, most likely. And I ain’t takin you in, so don’t ax. I don’t know you from goddam Adam.”

“Did it come with lamps and such?”

“You’re crazy, mister.”

“Did it?”

“Yeah, couple. One that works and one that duddn’t. I ain’t stayin here, be goddamned if I will. He tell how he don’t want to move back in with my mama down Mozelle, but tough titty said the kitty. I ain’t stayin here. You smell this place?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That ain’t nothin but shit, sonny jim. Not catshit, not dogshit, that’s peopleshit. Work with niggers, that’s
one thing, but live like one? Nosir. You done?”

I wasn’t, quite, although I wished I were. I was disgusted by her, and disgusted with myself for daring to judge. She was a prisoner of her time, her choices, and this shit-smelling street. But it was the rollers under the yellow headscarf that I kept looking at. Fat blue bugs waiting to hatch.

“Nobody stays here for long, I guess?”

“On ’Cedes Street?” She waved her cigarette at the hardpan leading to the deserted parking lot and the vast warehouse filled with nice things she would never own. At the elbow-to-elbow shacks with their steps of crumbling cinderblock and their broken windows blocked up with pieces of cardboard. At the roiling kids. At the old, rust-eaten Fords and Hudsons and Studebaker Larks. At the unforgiving Texas sky. Then she uttered a terrible laugh filled with amusement and despair.

“Mister, this is a bus stop on the road to nowhere. Me’n Bratty Sue’s sailin back to Mozelle. If Harry won’t go with us, we’ll sail without him.”

I took the map out of my hip pocket, tore off a strip, and scribbled my Jodie telephone number on it. Then I added another five-dollar bill. I held them out to her. She looked but didn’t take.

“What I want your telephone number for? I ain’t got no goddam phone. That there ain’t no DFW ’shange, anyway. That’s goddam long distance.”

“Call me when you get ready to move out. That’s all I want. You call me and say, ‘Mister, this is Rosette’s mama, and we’re moving.’ That’s all it is.”

I could see her calculating. It didn’t take her long. Ten dollars was more than her husband would make working all day in the hot Texas sun. Because Manpower knew from nothing about time-and-a-half on holidays. And this would be ten dollars
he
knew from nothing about.

“Gimme another semny-fi cent,” she said. “For the long distance.”

“Here, take a buck. Live a little.
And don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

“No, you don’t want to. Because if you forgot, I might just be apt to find my way to your husband and tattle. This is important business, Missus. To me it is. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Ivy Templeton.”

I stood there in the dirt and the weeds, smelling shit, half-cooked oil, and the big farty aroma of natural gas.