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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.
3
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