Top Down (7 page)

“He’s gone … to bed,” her mother said to Marti when she emerged from the bathroom. “Hard day.”

All days were hard days for Van.

“Kansas City? Do we
have
to go to Kansas City?” Marti asked her mother. It was one of the most direct and real questions she had asked aloud since the night of the assassination.

Rosemary didn’t answer directly but said in a mumble, “No telling where we’re going next—and next, next, and next. They want to get rid of Van and all the others. Nobody even wants to see them.”

Rosemary had said it more than once, and Marti certainly knew that to lose a president was the cardinal failure for anyone in the Secret Service. But clearly there was much more to it than that. Still, what exactly? She remained haunted by that
first overheard conversation between her parents, when Van had described the day in such horrific detail. But there was not even one mention of her dad in the assassination investigation stories she scoured in the Dallas newspapers every day. If he had really been responsible for Kennedy’s death, wouldn’t somebody be saying so in public?

Rosemary Walters left the room mumbling in her distant way, “The sooner we get out of Dallas, the better it will be for us all.”

But Marti loved Dallas even if Lee Harvey Oswald had shot the president there. She loved Dealey High School. She loved the Cowboys. And she loved Eddie LeBaron.

S
HE SAID THE
house in East Dallas was not sold until nine weeks after they had moved to Kansas City. But the Secret Service granted “assassination-associated” agents financial courtesies that included a “special advance payment” to Van Walters for the Kansas City rent deposit. Back in Dallas, a Realtor had stuck a fifty-one-thousand-dollar asking price on the Crestmont Street house, which was great considering they had bought it on Van’s GI Bill for forty-five thousand barely two years before.

The Walterses, despite the DC-to-Minneapolis-to-Charlotte-to-Dallas kind of moving around that went with working for the Secret Service, had always bought rather than rented their homes. Van told Marti more than once that it was all about equity, equity, equity, and someday that equity would put her through college.

But this time, a small two-bedroom rental apartment on a street south of downtown Kansas City called The Paseo was just fine. In fact, as far as Marti could tell, there wasn’t even any serious talk of buying a house in Kansas City. Her mother did the finding and renting and her dad mostly just shrugged and nodded when told anything about it.

For Marti, the move to Kansas City was just the latest terrible thing to happen in her rapidly deteriorating life. Kansas City had a pro football team called the Chiefs; they’d been the Dallas Texans until they moved to Kansas City last spring. It was something, but they weren’t the Cowboys. Marti told her dad, on one of the few times he was home in Kansas City, there was no way she could ever root for the Chiefs. Van Walters, again, barely tossed a shoulder in reaction. It seemed to Marti all he did now when she or Mother spoke, and sometimes he didn’t even do that.

Not only did she miss Dallas and the Cowboys, but the move also meant going cold into another strange school, now for the fifth time. This one was at least named for a writer, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, rather than a newspaper publisher like that one in Dallas.

As she walked into the first classroom on her schedule, her English teacher asked without preamble, “Are you a reader?”

In the most superior and snotty manner she could muster, Marti snapped, “Yes, I can read.” She wasn’t sure what had gotten into her but so what? “I can write, too,” she added. “I can even add and subtract.”

Miss DeShirley was the teacher’s name. She was tall and
heavyset, an ugly woman with black hair wrapped in a bun at the back of her head. “How anecdotal,” she replied in an even voice without a hint of annoyance or so much as the blink of an eye. “I find that students who can read and write, add and subtract sometimes tend to learn more quickly than those who cannot. But that is not always the case. That, of course, is why I used the term
anecdotal
. I suppose then, in your case, it remains to be seen.”

Teacher and student were standing across from each other in the front of the classroom, just out of hearing range of the thirty-plus students sitting at desks, a few of whom were eyeing the new midterm arrival while the rest mostly talked among themselves. It was eight thirty in the morning, with the bell for first period only minutes away.

“Can you stand on your head?” Miss DeShirley asked.

“No, not really,” Marti said, her confidence now disappearing along with her attitude.

“Can you fly?” asked Miss DeShirley.

“No, ma’am,” said Marti, her face red, chest warm—grin beginning.

“Have you read any short stories by Guy de Maupassant?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. ‘The Necklace’ is the only one of Maupassant’s …”

“Always use the
de
. His full name is
de
Maupassant.”

“Yes, ma’am. I thought the ending—when it turns out the necklace was a fake one to begin with—is too tricky.”

“I agree,” said Miss DeShirley.

“But Shirley Jackson is my
real
favorite,” Marti said. “There are no tricks in ‘The Lottery.’ ”

“No indeed,” said the teacher. Miss DeShirley was now in a full smile herself and no longer seemed so ugly.

“Maybe it’s because she’s a female writer,” Marti said. “They don’t use a lot of tricks like the men seem to do.”

Marti, desperate for human contact, was on to the other subject in her life, besides Cowboys football, that truly excited her.

“Maybe so, maybe so.” Miss DeShirley was now beaming—and even kind of pretty. “Now, that truly is anecdotal.”

After moving a few steps toward the front of the classroom, she asked for the class’s attention.

“Please welcome Miss Marti Walters to our eleventh-grade class and to Longfellow School,” she said in a voice of command and presence. “She comes to us from Dallas …”

“They killed Kennedy there!” some boy yelled from the back.

“Kill the Cowboys!” shouted another.

Suddenly several others were yelling things about the Cowboys and murdering the president.

“We’ll have none of that kind of talk,” Miss DeShirley said sternly. “Marti is one of us and you will treat her as such.”

Marti managed only a half smile and a nod before the bell rang and Miss DeShirley began her lesson. The rest of her first day remained uneventful after that.

B
Y
M
ARTI
’
S PRECISE
count, Van Walters was only physically in Kansas City for twenty-two days over the next six months. Only five years later did she find out that the rest of the time he was away mostly testifying, preparing to testify, or waiting to testify. That was mostly in Washington, before Secret Service inspectors, FBI agents, and a wide variety of Warren Commission investigators, lawyers, and finally two of the important commissioners themselves—the diplomat John J. McCloy and the minority leader of the House of Representatives, Gerald R. Ford, a Republican from Michigan.

As predicted, with an even greater push after Ruby shot Oswald, the Kennedy assassination was turned into a federal case. And Hoover and the FBI did, in fact, go after the Secret Service. Her dad said not a word to Marti about any of his testimony, of course. And her mother also barely mentioned what Van was doing all the time he was away. Most of what Marti knew about the investigations came, as in Dallas, from her own eager attention to stories in the newspapers and on radio and television.

With Van gone so many days at a time, there was also seldom anything for Marti to overhear except through the occasional phone exchanges between her parents about logistics and travel plans. When Dad was home the conversation only covered how long he might stay this time and how many pairs of underwear, shirts, and ties he would need.

The liquor-smell count on her mother went up into the high forties. And while she never witnessed or heard him, red eyes suggested crying by her father at least half a dozen times.

There was one hushed conversation she caught just the barest of clues from. She knew it was important when she heard it but she couldn’t find anything in the dictionary at the school library that helped her understand. “Sodium something or other that could be administered through a needle …” That was what Marti heard Van say to her mother.

T
HEN, AFTER ONLY
six months, came Portland—in some ways so wonderful and in some others so awful.

Within hours after his official assassination testimony ended, Van Walters was sent from Kansas City 1,805 miles west to the field office in Portland, Oregon. Again, he was sent as a regular agent—not as a special agent in charge or an assistant. Again, there was no warning and not even, to Marti’s knowledge, an attempt at a placating explanation.

The message from Washington or wherever was just,
Go away, Agent Walters. Go! Now!
That was how Marti saw it, at least.

But the Walterses did arrive in Portland with money in their pockets. Because Rosemary hadn’t ever tried seriously to buy a house in Kansas City, they still had fifty-four hundred dollars in cash left over from the sale of the Dallas house. Combined with a GI Bill mortgage, that down payment bought them a nice two-bedroom brick house in the Stardust section of Portland. Equity, equity, equity.

Rosemary immediately landed a job as a teller at Stardust Savings and Loan in a shopping center just a short four-block walk from the house. There was no question that her husband’s
being a Secret Service agent helped her get the banking jobs, including earlier ones in Kansas City, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and Dallas. Bankers couldn’t help but react favorably to “U.S. Secret Service agent” cited in a job application or brought up in an interview as her spouse’s occupation. Secret Service were the good guys. They were the ones who caught counterfeiters and other money-related crooks.

And Marti hadn’t really minded going to Portland—taking another hike into the unknown. Marti’s school life at Longfellow High in Kansas City turned out to be empty and boring. Miss DeShirley’s English class was her only respite. Otherwise, it was not a great fit. The boys seemed rougher and dumber, the girls prettier and sillier than those in Dallas.

Marti’s escape to Portland had an unpleasant beginning at Sunset High School. First, while being introduced to the entire student body at lunchtime, the principal made her say “Let us pray” out loud to everyone in the lunchroom before eating. The principal said it was a terrific way to introduce new students—by having their voices heard right away by everyone. Marti was mortified but then she felt pretty good about how she had been somebody special, at least for a few brief moments.

But beyond the prayer thing, something else happened that made Marti’s first day at Sunset different from other first days. After Marti sat down at a table for lunch, one of the girls predictably asked what kind of work her father did here in Portland. Always,
always
in the past, Marti had replied proudly as
a great icebreaker that he was a Secret Service agent. This time she said, almost off-handedly, “Oh, he does some stuff for the government.”

Marti hadn’t realized until then how much her father and her feelings about him had changed.

T
HREE MONTHS LATER
Marti experienced the worst day of her life.

One afternoon a sudden stomachache brought her running home right after school instead of to a school choir practice, where she was trying to make it as a contralto.

She’d assumed she was returning to an empty house because her mother worked until five, and her dad, sickly or not, would be either at his office in the downtown federal building or in the field on a case.

Marti raced through the front door and directly to the downstairs bathroom, which was near her parents’ bedroom.

With one hand she grabbed and pushed the knob on the closed bathroom door.

And there on the closed toilet sat Marti’s dad. He was shoving something into his mouth.

A pistol! A .38! Dad’s gun!

“No!” Marti screamed and, powered probably by the
Steve of the Secret Service
comic books, she threw her body forward with her arms and legs spread-eagle out like a bird.

The force of the collision sent the unfired pistol sailing out of Van’s mouth and hard onto the floor while father and
daughter slammed together against the white porcelain toilet tank.

They lay where they fell on the bathroom tile floor, both sobbing. Marti had no idea for how long. At the time, it seemed like it might be forever.

A
FEW WEEKS
went by before she saw her father again. Her mother finally took her through a hospital’s main entrance and then down a series of corridors and elevators to a corner room that seemed very far and very out of the way.

She had expected to see iron bars on the windows or something similarly grim but there was nothing like that. There was only, at the end of a silent hallway, a small suite that was tastefully painted in light grays and furnished in blond modern. It seemed more like a room at an upscale Hilton Inn than a hospital.