Reclaiming History (47 page)

When Ruby heard of Officer Tippit’s murder, his grief was intensified, believing it’s the Officer Tippit he knows, though he will later learn it’s a different Tippit. Ruby knew Dallas police detective Gayle M. Tippit, who worked in the Special Services Bureau, and who on numerous occasions had stopped by the Vegas and Carousel clubs on official business.
⁹¹⁴
After leaving the Carousel Club in midafternoon, Ruby goes to his sister Eva’s apartment to lament and cry over the president’s death, and talks about sending flowers to the place right off Elm Street near the spot where the president was shot. It was the first of three visits to her apartment that day, and he called her eight times on the phone.
⁹¹⁵

Though his financial condition was such that he could ill afford to do it, he made the decision at Eva’s place to close his two clubs for not just one but three days, the first time the Carousel had ever been dark.
*
Ruby had first told Don Safran, the entertainment columnist for the city’s evening paper, the
Dallas Times Herald
, that his club would be closed that evening as well as the entire weekend. He then tried to cancel his ads at the
Dallas Morning News
for the weekend, and when he was told that his space had already been reserved for him, he told the paper to just say in the ads that his Vegas and Carousel clubs would be closed for the weekend.
⁹¹⁶
Eva had asked Jack to bring some food over when he came, but he brought enough “to feed twelve people,” Eva explaining that Jack was so out of it “he didn’t know what he was doing then.” She said her brother was so upset over what happened that he only took one “spoonful or forkful,” then started making more phone calls. At one point, he was sick in the stomach enough to go into the bathroom, but he did not vomit. “Someone tore my heart out,” he told Eva, who herself was experiencing great grief, literally screaming over the telephone to a friend earlier that “the president is dead.” Jack told Eva, “I didn’t even feel so bad when Pops died because Papa was an old man. He was close to ninety.” Eva looked at her brother sitting in front of her and got the sense that he felt life wasn’t worth it anymore, “like he thought they were out to get the world, and this was part of it.” “This man,” Jack said to Eva about Kennedy and his efforts with his brother Bobby toward integration in the South, was “greater than Lincoln.” When Jack left her apartment in the early evening “he looked pretty bad, a broken man.”
⁹¹⁷

At the Shearith Israel Synagogue, where he went to pray for the fallen president, arriving near the end of a two-hour service that had started at 8:00 p.m., the day’s events preyed on his mind. When a friend, Leona Lane, remarked to him after the services “how terrible” the assassination of President Kennedy had been, Ruby said, “It is worse than that.”
⁹¹⁸
The rabbi, Hillel Silverman, noticed that Ruby appeared to be “in shock” and in a daze, though Ruby didn’t mention the assassination to him, merely thanking him for visiting Eva at the hospital a few days earlier.
⁹¹⁹
When he left the synagogue for the parking lot, he got his pistol, a .38 caliber Colt Cobra, out of the trunk and slipped it into his right front trouser pocket. It’s a lightweight revolver with a two-inch barrel, and a shroud over the hammer makes it easy to carry in his pocket without snagging the cloth.
⁹²⁰
He wouldn’t take it into the synagogue, but he usually carries the pistol when he has a lot of cash on him from the Carousel, which he does tonight.
⁹²¹

Now, around 10:15 in the evening, he’s worried about the other Dallas clubs and whether they are properly respecting the death of the president, so he makes a point of driving by the Bali-Hai Restaurant, and notes grimly that it is open. He drives past the Gay Nineties too. It is closed.

As he goes on down Preston Road, he listens to the car radio, hungry for any new information about the assassination. He hears that the police are working overtime, and is overcome by a feeling of respect and admiration for them. He has always felt close to the police department—he doesn’t even know why—and believes Dallas has the greatest police force in the world. He has many friends on the force and often visits the police at the station, encouraging them to come to his clubs when they are off duty. Jack gives them the cut rate on drinks he normally reserves for newsmen, hotel receptionists, bellboys, and others who might help to generate business.
⁹²²
And if all an officer wanted was a snack, “Jack kept coffee and sandwiches in the back for the police.”
⁹²³

On an impulse he stops at Phil’s Delicatessen on Oak Lawn Avenue and tells the counterman, John Frickstad, to cut him ten corned beef sandwiches with mustard. And ten soft drinks—eight black cherries and two celery tonics. He chats a bit with the owner, Phil Miller.

He goes to the phone, calls police headquarters, and gets Detective Sims, a fifteen-year acquaintance.

“I hear you guys are still working,” he says. “I want to bring you some sandwiches.”

“Jack, we wound up our work already. We finished what we were doing. I’ll tell the boys about your thoughtfulness. Thank you.”
⁹²⁴

Those sandwiches are already being made, and it’s a shame to let them go to waste. Ruby remembers Gordon McLendon, and how good McLendon has always been to him, giving him a lot of free plugs for his clubs on his Dallas radio station. McLendon owns many radio stations, including KLIF in Dallas, the one Ruby had been listening to in the car. One of the disk jockeys, Joe Long, is down at the police station, phoning information to the station as it comes in, and others are working late too—the guy on the air and the engineers at the station. He tries calling KLIF, but because it’s after six no one answers. He knows there is a hotline right into the control room, but he doesn’t know the number.

He calls out to Frickstad, “These sandwiches are going to KLIF, and I want you to make them real good.”

There’s another disk jockey he knows at KLIF, Russ Knight, big with the kids in the late-afternoon hot spot, but he can’t get his home number from information. He tries Gordon McLendon, who lives out near the synagogue and whose number he does know. A little girl answers. Maybe her name is Christine, Jack thinks.

“Anyone home?”

“No.”

“Is your daddy or mommy home? I would like to get the number of the station, so I can get in the building at this time.” The little girl leaves the phone and comes back with a number in the Riverside exchange.

Jack dials the Riverside number but it has been disconnected. He calls Eva, tells her he’s at Phil’s getting sandwiches and is going to the station, and if she needs him, she can reach him there, though he still doesn’t have the station’s number. The sandwich bill only comes to $9.50 plus tax—Frickstad made only eight sandwiches instead of the ten Jack ordered. Frickstad helps Jack with the sandwiches out to his car and receives Jack’s customary tip, a free pass to the Carousel or Vegas, for his pains.
⁹²⁵

It’s four or five miles from Phil’s to downtown, and Ruby still doesn’t know how he’s going to get into KLIF to bring the sandwiches to the gang on duty. He drives up McKinney Avenue to check on some more clubs, and finds more open. Jack simply can’t understand how they would remain open at such a tragic time. Jack proceeds to the KLIF station, near City Hall. He knew the front door would be locked, of course, but he hopes his knocking is loud enough for them to hear him, but because of the long distance between the bottom of the flight of stairs and the studio, no one does, so he proceeds to City Hall to look for KLIF reporter Joe Long to get the control-room phone number.
⁹²⁶

It’s about eleven in the evening when he parks at Commerce and Harwood, leaving the sandwiches and his dog Sheba in the car, and goes to the police department, taking the elevator to the second floor. Ruby’s an experienced gatecrasher, he can get in anywhere by putting on a busy, peremptory manner, “taking,” as he puts it in his weirdly mangled way of talking, “a domineering part about me.”

“Where is Joe Long?” he speaks assertively to the officer at the desk. “Can I go look for him?” The officer lets him in.

Emerging from the elevator on the third floor into a throng of reporters, Ruby asks everyone, cops and reporters, if they know where he can find Joe Long, determined to find Long so he can deliver his load of sandwiches out at KLIF. He even has an officer page Long, but with no luck. He knows a lot of the officers, and stops to chat with Lieutenant Leonard and Detective Cal Jones. Roy Standifer, the desk officer in the Burglary and Theft Bureau, calls out, “Hi, Jack,” and Jack calls out, “Hi, Sandy”—he calls Roy that, short for Standifer. No one else, Standifer notes wryly, ever does. Standifer, who has known Jack for thirteen years, recognizes Ruby’s use of a first name as one of his tricks. On Jack’s frequent visits to police headquarters, Standifer has seen him ask someone for the first name of an officer he doesn’t know and then greet the man by his first name like an old friend.
⁹²⁷

Ruby sticks his head in the Burglary and Theft door and is delighted to spot Detective A. M. Eberhardt. The detective’s work on the vice squad used to bring him to the Carousel regularly a few years back, and he even brought his wife there once on a night off. Ruby gave “Michael”—for some reason he uses Eberhardt’s middle name—a couple of tips too. He reported one of his own girls when he discovered she was forging checks and using drugs, and Eberhardt busted her right there in the club. Another time Ruby heard from some parking-lot boys that a guy under indictment for white slavery was in town and staying at the Baker, half a block down the street from the Carousel, and Eberhardt went in with a squad and made the collar. Later, when Eberhardt was transferred to burglary, he managed to run down a couple of burglars Ruby surprised in the Carousel. Eberhardt always lent a sympathetic ear to Ruby’s complaints about his competition, those damned Weinsteins. He knows Jack usually carries a large sum of money in his pocket and worries about Jack leaving the club at two or three in the morning with the night’s take in a bag. They are old friends.

Ruby shakes hands, asks, as he always does, about Eberhardt’s wife and kids, and tells him he’s there as a “translator for the newspapers,” brandishing a little notebook. “I’m a reporter,” Jack says, tapping something in his lapel (had he purloined a press badge?) with the notebook. The only foreign language Eberhardt knows that Jack speaks is Yiddish, but the corridor outside is crammed with foreigners, shouting in languages he never heard before. Ruby tells him about the sandwiches he made up for the radio reporters, corned beef. “Nothing,” Jack boasts, “but kosher stuff is all I bring.”

Jack starts talking about how terrible it is for the assassination to have happened in the city. “It’s hard to realize that a complete nothing, a zero like that,
*
could kill a man like President Kennedy was.”

Eberhardt is busy. Even though he is only on standby, he’s using the opportunity to catch up on his paperwork. So, after a few minutes, Ruby plunges back into the hubbub in the hall, and situates himself where the height of the activity is, right outside Captain Fritz’s office door. Oswald, of course, is being interrogated inside. Ruby proceeds to put his hand on the door knob, turn it, and starts to step into the room when two officers stop him. “You can’t go in there, Jack,” one says. No problem. Ruby is content to be close to the action, right outside the door.

You have to shout to be heard in that corridor, but Ruby enjoys being able to provide information to the reporters, many of them bewildered out-of-towners, about everyone who was coming in or out of the door. “No, that’s not Sheriff Decker, that’s Chief Curry, C-u-r-r-y,” or “That’s Captain Fritz, Will Fritz. He’s the homicide captain.” He really likes to be helpful, particularly to important people like reporters. A detective who recognizes him bellows at the top of his voice over the heads of the reporters, “Hey Jack, what are you doing here?”

Ruby manages to get one arm free to wave to his friend. “I’m helping all these fellows,” he shouts back, pointing to the foreigners.

Jack’s activity is taking his mind off the tragedy and he is feeling a little better than he has all day. In a way, he feels he is being temporarily deputized as a reporter. He is, he realizes, “being carried away by the excitement of history.”
⁹²⁸

10:30 p.m.

Robert Oswald crosses the lobby of the Statler Hilton Hotel across the street from Dallas police headquarters. For a moment, he considers registering under a false name, to keep reporters at bay, but then decides he isn’t going to start hiding. No matter, the desk clerk doesn’t seem to pay any attention to the name on the registration card. When he arrives on the sixteenth floor, Robert finds a small, rather drab room with two chairs, a small table, and a sofa bed. Unable to face the depressing room, he returns to the hotel coffee shop and nibbles on a ham sandwich.
⁹²⁹

H
enry Wade is returning home after dining with his wife and some friends when he hears a report on the radio that Oswald is going to be charged with being part of an international Communist conspiracy to murder the president.
⁹³⁰
Wade, the Dallas DA since 1951, can barely believe his ears. There is no such law on the Texas books, and anyone familiar with Texas law knows that if you allege anything in an indictment, you have the burden of proving it.
⁹³¹

Wade barely gets in the door when the telephone rings. The caller is Waggoner Carr, attorney general for the state of Texas. He had just received a long-distance call from someone in the White House who had heard a similar report. Carr wants to know if Wade has any knowledge of it. Wade said he didn’t.
⁹³²

“You know,” Carr says, “this is going to create a hell of a bad situation if you allege that he’s part of a Communist conspiracy. It’s going to affect international relations and a lot of things with this country.”

“I don’t know where the rumor got started,” Wade says, “but even if we could prove he was part of an international conspiracy, I wouldn’t allege it because there’s no such charge in Texas.”
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