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CHAPTER 29
1
I wasn’t exactly arrested, but I was taken into custody and driven to the Dallas police station in a
squad car. On the last block of the ride, people—some of them reporters, most of them ordinary
citizens—pounded on the windows and peered inside. In a clinical, distant way, I wondered if I would
perhaps be dragged from the car and lynched for attempting to murder the president. I didn’t care.
What concerned me most was my bloodstained shirt. I wanted it off; I also wanted to wear it forever.
It was Sadie’s blood.
Neither of the cops in the front seat asked me any questions. I suppose someone had told them not
to. If they had asked any, I wouldn’t have replied. I was thinking. I could do that because the coldness
was creeping over me again. I put it on like a suit of armor. I could fix this. I would fix this. But first I
had some talking to do.
2
They put me in a room that was as white as ice. There was a table and three hard chairs. I sat in one of
them. Outside, telephones rang and a Teletype chattered. People went back and forth talking in loud
voices, sometimes shouting, sometimes laughing. The laughter had a hysterical sound. It was how
men laugh when they know they’ve had a narrow escape. Dodged a bullet, so to speak. Perhaps Edwin
Walker had laughed like that on the night of April tenth, as he talked to reporters and brushed
broken glass from his hair.
The same two cops who brought me from the Book Depository searched me and took my things. I
asked if I could have my last two packets of Goody’s. The two cops conferred, then tore them open and
poured them out on the table, which was engraved with initials and scarred with cigarette burns. One
of them wetted a finger, tasted the powder, and nodded. “Do you want water?”
“No.” I scooped up the powder and poured it into my mouth. It was bitter. That was fine with me.
One of the cops left. The other asked for my bloody shirt, which I reluctantly took off and handed
over. Then I pointed at him. “I know it’s evidence, but you treat it with respect. The blood on it came
from the woman I loved. That might not mean much to you, but it’s also from the woman who helped
to stop the murder of President Kennedy, and that should.”
“We only want it for blood-typing.”
“Fine. But it goes on my receipt of personal belongings. I’ll want it back.”
“Sure.”
The cop who’d left came back with a plain white undershirt. It looked like the one Oswald had
been wearing—or would have been wearing—in the mugshot taken shortly after his arrest at the Texas
Theatre.
3
I arrived in the little white interview room at twenty past one. About an hour later (I can’t say with