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“We know what we’re doing!” Sadie called. I hoped she was right. We made our way through the
packed cars, Sadie in the lead. I twisted and flailed with my crutch, trying to avoid jutting outside
mirrors and keep up with her. Now I could hear locomotives and clanging freight cars in the trainyard
behind the Book Depository.
“Jake, we’re leaving a trail a mile wide.”
“I know. I’ve got a plan.” A gigantic overstatement, but it sounded good.
We came out on Elm, and I pointed at the building across the street two blocks down. “There.
That’s where he is.”
She looked at the squat red cube with the peering windows, then turned a dismayed, wide-eyed face
to me. I observed—with something like clinical interest—that large white goosebumps had broken
out on her neck. “Jake, it’s horrible!”
“I know.”
“But . . . what’s wrong with it?”
“Everything. Sadie, we have to hurry. We’re nearly out of time.”
12
We crossed Elm on a diagonal, me crutching along at a near run. The biggest portion of the crowd
was on Main Street, but more people filled Dealey Plaza and lined Elm in front of the Book
Depository. They crowded the curb all the way down to the Triple Underpass. Girls sat on their
boyfriends’ shoulders. Children who might soon be screaming in panic happily smeared their faces
with ice cream. I saw a man selling Sno-Cones and a woman with a huge bouffant hairdo hawking
dollar photos of Jack and Jackie in evening wear.
By the time we reached the shadow of the Depository, I was sweating, my armpit was hollering
from the constant pressure of the crutch cradle, and my left knee had been cinched in a fiery belt. I
could barely bend it. I looked up and saw Depository employees leaning from some of the windows. I
couldn’t see anyone in the one at the southeast corner of the sixth floor, but Lee would be there.
I looked at my watch. Twelve-twenty. We could track the motorcade’s progress by the rising roar
on Lower Main Street.
Sadie tried the door, then gave me an anguished glare. “Locked!”
Inside, I saw a black man wearing a poorboy cap tilted at a jaunty angle. He was smoking a
cigarette. Al had been a great one for marginalia in his notebook, and near the end—casually jotted,
almost doodled—he had written the names of several of Lee’s co-workers. I’d made no effort to study
these, because I didn’t see what earthly use I could put them to. Next to one of those names—the one
belonging to the guy in the poorboy cap, I had no doubt—Al had written: First one they suspected
(probably because black). It had been an unusual name, but I still couldn’t remember it, either because
Roth and his goons had beaten it out of my head (along with all sorts of other stuff) or because I
hadn’t paid enough attention in the first place.
Or just because the past was obdurate. And did it matter? It just wouldn’t come. The name was
nowhere.
Sadie hammered on the door. The black man in the poorboy cap stood watching her impassively.
He took a drag on his cigarette and then waved the back of his hand at her: go on, lady, go on.
“Jake, think of something! PLEASE!”
Twelve twenty-one.
An unusual name, yes, but why had it been unusual? I was surprised to find this was something I
actually knew.