Reclaiming History (64 page)

After leaving Sol’s Turf Bar around three o’clock, Ruby drives over to Dealey Plaza, where he looks at all the wreaths there for the president and talks to a police officer he knows, James Chaney, about the “tragedy” of what had happened. Ruby walks off because he starts to choke up and doesn’t want Chaney to see him crying. When Ruby sees Wes Wise, a newsman at KRLD in town whom he also knows, parked in his car near the Book Depository Building (Wise was calling back to his station that he couldn’t gain entrance into the building), he knocks on the window of Wise’s car, and when Wise rolls it down, they talk for around ten minutes about the tragedy. When Wise tells Ruby that he had been at the Trade Mart waiting for the president’s arrival the previous day and had seen in the president’s waiting room two large presents meant for Caroline and John Jr.—western saddles—that were going to be given to the president to give to his children, Wise notices tears in Ruby’s eyes, and Ruby walks away. But he returns to Wise’s car shortly thereafter to give him a tip, that Captain Fritz and Chief Curry were “over there looking at the flowers” for the president and hints that Wise should go and take their picture. Wise is grateful to Jack and he does just that.

Ruby then walks the short distance over to the entrance to the county jail on Houston between Elm and Main, where a large crowd has gathered in anticipation of Oswald’s arrival at four o’clock, but the transfer doesn’t take place and Ruby drives off for his home, leaving shortly thereafter for his sister Eva’s apartment.
¹²⁴²

Ruby stays at his sister Eva Grant’s apartment “for a good four hours.” Eva, who herself feels like “the world was coming to an end” with the president’s murder, feels for her brother, “sitting like a broken man crying.” Jack starts up again on the Weissman ad, and Eva senses that Jack feels that “Bernard Weissman” may very well be a gentile using a Jewish name trying to get Jews in trouble. He’s also still upset about the Earl Warren sign, and he calls Russ Knight over at KLIF and asks him, “Who is Earl Warren?”
¹²⁴³
reflecting that Ruby had only known that the billboard words were an attack on a high official of the U.S. government, a government Ruby honored and was protective of. In the late afternoon at his sister’s apartment Ruby calls Stanley Kaufman, a lawyer friend of his, brings up the Weissman ad with which he has become obsessed, and suggests to Kaufman that the black border of the ad was a tipoff that Weissman knew the president was going to be assassinated. He asks Kaufman if Kaufman knows how he, Ruby, could locate Weissman, but Kaufman has no idea. He tells Kaufman that he “doesn’t know why” he wants to “connect” the ad and the Warren sign “with Oswald, but I do.” He leaves no doubt in Kaufman’s mind that he sees a connection between the ad and the assassination. Though Kaufman has known Ruby for almost ten years, and knows how very quick-tempered he is, Kaufman has never seen Jack so upset.
¹²⁴⁴

Jack asks Eva if she feels up to going to Officer Tippit’s funeral with him. It doesn’t surprise her. Other than the wife of an officer, she feels that no one in Dallas loves the police more than her brother Jack. He goes to the funerals of all Dallas police officers who die in the line of duty, and if he knows an officer personally, even to the funerals of their loved ones. In fact, when one officer, Johnny Sides, was killed in the line of duty a while back, Ruby held a benefit at his club and turned the proceeds over to Sides’s family. But Eva is still weak and sick from her recent surgery and tells him she won’t be up to it.
¹²⁴⁵

Ruby leaves Eva’s apartment and returns home to his apartment five miles away around 8:30 p.m. Around 9:30 he receives a call from one of his strippers, Karen Bennett “Little Lynn” Carlin. Little Lynn and her husband, not getting the message that the Carousel was closed, find it locked when they arrive. She calls Jack from the Colony Club next door to find out if he’s going to open the club, and Jack erupts. “Don’t you have any respect for the president?” he barks at her. “Don’t you know he’s dead?” He adds, “I don’t know when I will open. I don’t know if I will ever open.” Little Lynn feels Jack is “very hateful” to her, but since she and her out-of-work husband only have forty to fifty cents on their person together, she still asks him if he could pay her an advance on her salary so they can get back home to Fort Worth. He tells her he’ll be down to the club in an hour to help her, but he doesn’t show up, so her husband calls back from the garage next to the Carousel. Jack gets the garage attendant on the phone and gets him to give Little Lynn five dollars, which he’ll reimburse him for, and when Lynn gets back on the phone and tells him she’ll need rent money tomorrow, he tells her to call him.
¹²⁴⁶

Ruby places a few calls from his apartment that night, including to a friend from Chicago, Lawrence Meyers, who is in town. Ruby talks of the “terrible, terrible thing” that has happened and is very critical of his main competitors, Abe and Barney Weinstein, whom he refers to as “money-hungry Jews,” for keeping their clubs (the Theatre Lounge and the Colony Club) open, and tells Meyers he’s “going to do something” about it. Meyers, also Jewish, feels there are just as many “money-hungry Christians,” but now was not the time to argue with his old friend, who kept repeating, to the point of almost being incoherent, “these poor people, these poor people, I feel so sorry for them,” referring to Jackie and her two children. Meyers has never seen his old friend anywhere near like this before, and feels like Jack has “flipped his lid.” When Ruby invites Meyers to join him for a cup of coffee, Meyers declines, saying he didn’t want to get up and get dressed, but tells Jack that if he wants to talk, to come over to his motel for a cup of coffee, but Jack also declines, and they agree to meet the following evening for dinner.
¹²⁴⁷

Shortly after 11:00 p.m., after repaying the five dollars the garage attendant had given Little Lynn,
¹²⁴⁸
he goes to his office at the Carousel and makes some more calls, among them to his friend Ralph Paul in Forth Worth, and Breck Wall, an entertainer friend of Jack’s who had gone to Galveston to visit a friend when his show in Dallas suspended its performance out of respect for the president. Wall had just been elected president of the Dallas branch of the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), and Ruby wants to know if AGVA, which includes among its members striptease dancers, had met to discuss his beef with the union—their failure to enforce AGVA’s ban on “striptease contests” and performances by “amateurs,” both of which the Weinsteins were guilty of—but AGVA hadn’t met yet on the issue. Ruby, Wall can tell, is “very upset” about the assassination and curses the Weinsteins for not having the decency to close their two clubs out of respect for the dead president.
¹²⁴⁹

Ruby caps his evening around midnight at the Pago Club, about ten minutes from the Carousel, where he orders a Coke (Ruby rarely drinks alcohol) and asks the waitress in a very disapproving tone, “Why are you open?” “Ask my employer,” she says, and leaves Ruby’s table. The manager of the club, Robert Norton, knows Jack, and when he sees him sitting alone he joins him to chat. He tells Jack he doesn’t know whether he should keep his club open and Ruby tells him he has closed his. During their short visit Norton brought up the assassination, saying “it was terrible” and “an insult to our country,” adding that “we couldn’t do enough to the person that had done this sort of thing.” For once, Ruby, apparently already all talked out for the day about the assassination, shows no emotion and says nothing except he was “tired” and was “going home.”
¹²⁵⁰
Ruby then heads home and goes to bed around 1:30 a.m.
¹²⁵¹

J
ack’s ugly mood when he awakens worsens when he sees in the Sunday morning’s
Times Herald
a heartbreaking letter to “My Dear Caroline” dated two days earlier from a Dallas resident who tells her that “even as I write, you probably have not yet received” the news of her father’s death. “This news is now being transmitted to all parts of the world…In all of this, my thoughts turn to you.” Saying that though she was “old enough to feel the awful pain” but not yet “mature enough to understand this sorrow,” he tells her he is a man of forty with two young daughters whom he had taken out of school “in order that they might get to see your mother and daddy” when they visited Dallas. From a position on the street not too far from Love Field, he said Caroline’s mother and father looked “so very nice and appeared so happy.” He said when the limousine passed by, “your daddy…did something that made me love him very much. It seemed like such a little thing, but it made me appreciate him the more for it. He looked at the grownups for just a second, and then he looked squarely at my youngest and then my eldest daughter. He smiled broadly and waved just to them in his warm way. Caroline, it was then I first thought of you. I thought your daddy must love little boys and little girls very much. Only one who loves and understands little children would realize just how much it would mean to them to be noticed in the presence of so many adults. I thought then how much he must love you.”

He goes on to conclude, “No one can erase this day…You will cry. (My children did, my wife did, and I did). You will miss him. (We will). You will be lonely for him…You will want to know why anyone would do a thing like this to your father.” Telling her he wished there was something he could do to help her, he says that she would be given strength and help and love by her mother and friends. “Most of all, God will help you. You see, God loves little girls, too,” and closes by praying that Caroline would “be cradled in God’s love.”
¹²⁵²
*

The letter has a devastating effect on Ruby. He also reads in another article in the
Times Herald
, captioned “State’s Biggest Trial Expected,” that when asked about “the possibility of Jacqueline Kennedy” being used as a witness at the trial of Oswald, DA Henry Wade said, “We will try to avoid [issuing a] subpoena” for Mrs. Kennedy, that she wouldn’t “necessarily” have to come to Dallas to testify.
¹²⁵³
Ruby seethes. If something happened to the president’s killer, his jumbled mind thinks, then Mrs. Kennedy won’t have to come back for the trial. He decides that he just
has
to kill Oswald. He suddenly gets this tremendously emotional feeling that someone owes a debt to the slain president to spare his wife the ordeal of coming back to Dallas. He doesn’t know what the connection is, but he also has this feeling about wanting to show his love for his Jewish faith and demonstrate to the world that a Jew has guts. In the welter of emotions is his hatred for the SOB who had killed his president. If he had confessed, then Jack could know he’d get what was coming to him. But he hasn’t and there apparently is going to be a trial. Jack recalls that hotel guy who killed a Dallas police officer a while back and he beat the rap and got away with the killing. It’s possible Oswald could get turned loose too.
¹²⁵⁴
†

He knows there are people going about their regular activities, out dancing at the clubs and having a good time, not suffering the way he is. The civic leaders of Dallas are probably sincere in their sorrow, but they’re helpless to overcome the everlasting stain on the reputation of Dallas, a city he loves and is proud of. The officers of the Dallas Police Department are helpless to do anything to Oswald for killing the president and one of their own. He saw Bobby Kennedy on television, saw how much he loved his brother, and thought how much Bobby would like to do something to Oswald, but of course he can’t do anything either. Somebody ought to do something, something that no one else can apparently do. Though Jack is not insane, most people know he’s not all there either, and his limited intellect gets carried away emotionally by the power of his thought to kill Oswald, though he has no idea exactly when or where he will attempt to do this.
¹²⁵⁵

Jack is in another world when Elnora Pitts, the aging, colored maid, calls to see whether Jack wants her to come clean the apartment, as she has for the past eight months or so. He paid her $7.50 the first time she came, because it was pretty dirty. The next time it was $4.00 and bus fare, and then one day he said, “Well, it’s getting pretty dirty, I’m going to give you a little raise today,” and from then on he paid her $5.50 for a half day’s work. She came Tuesdays first, then on Saturday, but eventually they settled on Sunday, because Jack liked to have it clean in case he had guests that day.

Jack sounds very strange to Elnora on the phone. “What do you want?” he asks.

“This is Elnora.”

“Yes, well, what? You need some money?”

“No,” Elnora says, puzzled. “I was coming to clean today.”

“Well, what do you want?” Jack kind of hollers.

“I was coming to clean today.” She doesn’t think she should have to tell him that, much less repeat it.

“You coming now?”

“No.”

“When?”

She says she’ll try to be there before two.

“Why so late?”

“I have to go to the store, and I have got some things to do. You seem so funny to me,” Elnora says. “Do you want me to come today?”

“Well, yes, you can come,” Jack says, “but you call me.”

“That’s what I’m doing now, calling you so I won’t have to call you again.”

“Are you coming to clean today?”

“Who am I talking to? Is this Mr. Jack Ruby?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Oh, nothing,” she says. Jack is sounding terribly strange to Elnora, doesn’t sound like himself, so she says, “Well, I’ll call you.”

“Yes, so I can tell you where the key will be and the money,” he says.

“Okay,” Elnora says, completely bewildered, and she hangs up.

Elnora thinks there is something wrong with Jack, wrong enough to scare her, wrong enough for her to call her daughter, who asks, “Well, are you going over there now?”

“No, he don’t sound right to me over the phone,” Elnora tells her daughter. “I am going to wait.”
¹²⁵⁶

P
ostal Inspector Holmes hurries up the steps at City Hall and takes the elevator to the third floor. Holmes spots Captain Fritz standing in the corridor just outside the Homicide and Robbery Bureau. Fritz motions to him.