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I left George Amberson’s real estate persona behind. By the spring of 1959, recessionary times had
come to America. On Florida’s Gulf Coast, everybody was selling and nobody was buying, so George
Amberson became exactly what Al had envisioned: an authorial wannabe whose moderately rich uncle
had left him enough to live on, at least for awhile.
I did write, and not on one project but two. In the mornings, when I was freshest, I began work on
the manuscript you’re now reading (if there ever is a you). In the evenings I worked on a novel that I
tentatively called The Murder Place. The place in question was Derry, of course, although I called it
Dawson in my book. I began it solely as set decoration, so I’d have something to show if I made
friends and one of them asked to see what I was working on (I kept my “morning manuscript” in a
steel lockbox under my bed). Eventually The Murder Place became more than camouflage. I began to
think it was good, and to dream that someday it might even see print.
An hour on the memoir in the morning and an hour on the novel at night still left a lot of time to
be filled. I tried fishing, and there were plenty of fish to be caught, but I didn’t like it and gave it up.
Walking was fine at dawn and sunset, but not in the heat of the day. I became a regular patron of
Sarasota’s one bookstore, and I spent long (and mostly happy) hours at the little libraries in Nokomis
and Osprey.
I read and reread Al’s Oswald stuff, too. Finally I recognized this for the obsessive behavior it was,
and put the notebook in the lockbox with my “morning manuscript.” I have called those notes
exhaustive, and so they seemed to me then, but as time—the conveyor belt on which we all must ride
—brought me closer and closer to the point where my life might converge with that of the young
assassin-to-be, they began to seem less so. There were holes.
Sometimes I cursed Al for forcing me into this mission willy-nilly, but in more clearheaded
moments, I realized that extra time wouldn’t have made any difference. It might have made things
worse, and Al probably knew it. Even if he hadn’t committed suicide, I would only have had a week or
two, and how many books have been written about the chain of events leading up to that day in
Dallas? A hundred? Three hundred? Probably closer to a thousand. Some agreeing with Al’s belief that
Oswald acted alone, some claiming he’d been part of an elaborate conspiracy, some stating with utter
certainty that he hadn’t pulled the trigger at all and was exactly what he called himself after his
arrest, a patsy. By committing suicide, Al had taken away the scholar’s greatest weakness: calling
hesitation research.
3
I made occasional trips to Tampa, where discreet questioning led me to a bookmaker named Eduardo
Gutierrez. Once he was sure I wasn’t a cop, he was delighted to take my action. I first bet the
Minneapolis Lakers to beat the Celtics in the ’59 championship series, thereby establishing my bona
fides as a sucker; the Lakers didn’t win a single game. I also bet four hundred on the Canadians to beat
the Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup Series, and won . . . but that was even money. Chump change, cuz,
my pal Chaz Frati would have said.
My single large strike came in the spring of 1960, when I bet on Venetian Way to beat Bally Ache,
the heavy favorite in the Kentucky Derby. Gutierrez said he’d give me four-to-one on a gee, five-toone
on a double gee. I went for the double after making the appropriate noises of hesitation, and came
away ten thousand richer. He paid off with Frati-esque good cheer, but there was a steely glint in his
eyes that I didn’t care for.
Gutierrez was a Cubano who probably didn’t weigh one-forty soaking wet, but he was also an expat
from the New Orleans Mob, run in those days by a bad boy named Carlos Marcello. I got this bit of