The Bone Tree (39 page)

“No. I have a line on the place where Pooky Wilson’s body may have been dumped. And maybe Frank and Snake Knox’s father’s as well.”

All the levity went out of Tom’s face. “Elam Knox? Where’s that?”

She thought about holding her silence, but Tom couldn’t betray her secret to anyone. “Have you ever heard of something called the Bone Tree? Before reading my newspaper story, I mean?”

Tom focused somewhere in the space between them, like an old man looking deep into the past. “Ray Presley once told me he’d heard that story about the Wilson boy being crucified out there.”

Caitlin wasn’t surprised. “Did he know
where
the tree was?”

“No. But he spoke of it like a real place.”

“Is that all you know?”

Tom sat on a bar stool and drank some of the tea she and Melba had made. “It’s gone cold.”

“Tom . . . come on.”

He set down the cup and looked steadily at her. “I once treated a young woman from Athens Point, Mississippi. That’s Lusahatcha County. She looked white, but she was African-American. Her mother-in-law brought her in. The woman had some female trouble, but her real problem was psychiatric. She refused to see a psychiatrist, but I managed to get a few things out of her.”

“Such as?”

“Her husband had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan down that way. And she’d been assaulted the same night. Just as Viola had—a gang rape. Her recollections weren’t very coherent. She and her husband were taken to the crime scene by boat.” Tom closed his eyes as if to see the past more clearly. “But she did describe a tree. A cypress tree with chains hanging from it. And either she or her mother-in-law used the term ‘Bone Tree.’”

“Was that crime ever reported to the police?”

“I’m pretty sure they told the FBI about it. But they never found the husband’s body. The tree, either. The local police down there took the position that it was all a lie made up to cover the fact that the husband had run off with another woman.”

“Christ.”

“That’s the way it was back then, Cait. I wish I had more details, but I don’t.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I’m going down there tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see if I can find that woman.”

Tom’s expression made plain what he thought of this idea.

“Do you remember her name?”

“No. And I don’t have records of it, either. This was thirty-five years ago.” Tom looked over his shoulder at the patio door. “Let’s get Melba. She’s gone far beyond the call of duty tonight.”

Caitlin nodded, but she didn’t go to the door. She looked up at Tom and said, “You are loved by more people than you’ll ever know. By me, by your family, by thousands of patients you’ve taken care of. Can’t you trust us to take care of you this time?”

Tom’s knees creaked like horsehair ropes as he slid off the bar stool and stood erect. When he took Caitlin in his arms, the familiar smell of cigars seemed to come from his pores. “They can’t help me now,” he said. “I told you how you could, but you can’t go against your nature, any more than I can go against mine.”

She tried to pull away, but he held her tight.

“The past is always with us, darling,” Tom went on. “Sometimes we carry it lightly, but other times it’s like dragging a wounded brother behind you. I’ve got a debt to pay, and nobody can pay it but me.”

Caitlin’s throat ached like it had when she was a little girl and her father told her he was moving out of their house.

“Forget what I asked you to do,” Tom said. “Print anything you want, except that you found me. Just give me time to do what I must for our family.”

She thought about Penn’s desperate worry for his father. Keeping Tom’s location from him seemed unthinkable, and yet both Drew and Melba had done it. Their actions—and her own quandary—were testament to how much belief Tom inspired in people. She thought of Jamie and Keisha and all the reporters working practically around the clock to find the truth at the bottom of the Double Eagle murders. If she granted Tom’s request, she would be betraying both their faith and their work. But after weighing all in the balance, she realized she had no choice.

“Twenty-four hours?” she asked into his chest.

“Yes.”

“One minute longer and I’m calling in the Marines.”

Tom squeezed her once more, then kissed her forehead, walked to the patio door, and rapped on its glass.

Three seconds later, Melba slid open the door and walked in shivering.

“I’m sorry, Mel,” Tom said, lifting an afghan off the back of the couch and draping it around her shoulders.

“I’m fine,” the nurse said. “You two get this mess straightened out?”

At the same moment Tom said, “I think we did,” Caitlin said, “I’m afraid not.” Melba heard both answers and realized the situation had not improved.

Caitlin looked at the nurse. “Are you going to stay the night with him?”

“I’m going to stay until Mr. Garrity gets back.”

Caitlin nodded gratefully. “I hope that’s sooner rather than later.”

A shadow had fallen over Tom’s face. “I do, too.”

“I’m heading back to the paper. If you change your mind about anything we said, you call me, and I’ll send the cavalry.”

Tom managed a smile. He’d always loved western metaphors.

Caitlin kissed him on the cheek, then turned and walked to the side door. Only when she reached it did she realize that Melba had followed her. The black nurse’s large brown eyes had fear in them, she realized.

“How badly is he hurt?” Caitlin whispered.

Melba sucked her lips between her teeth and shook her head. “Dr. Elliott did a good job on the wound. But Dr. Cage has so many co-morbid conditions, it’s a miracle he’s alive on a normal day, much less under these circumstances. He needs a week in the hospital.”

“I tried, but he won’t listen to me.”

“He don’t listen to nobody,” Melba said bitterly. “Sometimes that’s good, but not now.”

“I promised him that I wouldn’t tell Penn where he was. Do you think I should break that promise?”

“I can’t answer that. I swore to Penn that I’d tell him if Doc called back, and I haven’t. I guess that’s partly because Doc asked me not to. But I’m not sure Penn could really do much to fix things now.”

Caitlin squeezed the nurse’s forearm. “Do you have any idea what Tom is really up to?”

“I don’t. All I know is, he’s hurting in a way I’ve never seen before. Deep down in his soul, he’s sick like. It hurts me to see it.”

Caitlin nodded in commiseration.

“How much danger do you figure we’re in?” Melba asked.

Caitlin spared her nothing. “If the police find Tom, they’ll kill him unless he surrenders. And if those old Klansmen find him, they’ll kill him no matter what he does. And you with him.”

Melba nodded soberly. “That’s no news to me, baby. But Doc’s pulled me through some tough times, and I aim to stick by him. I just hope Mr. Garrity gets back soon.” The nurse sighed with a resignation that sounded as if it had been inherited over dozens of generations. “But I’ve made my peace with Jesus, and if it’s my time . . . I’m ready.”

Tom’s voice boomed across the room. “What kind of plot are you two hatching over there?”

“Mind your own business!” Melba snapped back.

Caitlin hugged the nurse, who felt as solid and strong as any man. “Thank you, Melba.”

“You be careful. And don’t waste no more time. You and Penn go down to the courthouse tomorrow and tie the knot. Life don’t wait around for people. Get on with it while you can. Don’t worry about us old folks.”

“You’re not old,” Caitlin said, forcing a laugh.

But as she slipped through the door and hurried out to her car, she heard the bolt snap shut, and she felt a chilling certainty that a door had slammed between her fate and those of the two people hiding in the house behind her.

WHEN I WALKED
out of the hotel by the river, I stepped into a different world than the one I’d left upon entering. It wasn’t merely that I’d been converted from a lone-gunman disciple to a believer in the possibility that John Kennedy had been murdered as a result of a conspiracy—and an eminently rational one. No, what shattered me was something personal. After ninety minutes of cagey give-and-take, Stone and Kaiser finally revealed their hole card: something that convinced me that for most of my life, my father hasn’t merely been hiding an extramarital affair (and its unintended offspring), or even information about a murder he happened to learn about by accident. If Stone and Kaiser are right, then Dad not only played a role in the Kennedy assassination, but he knew it and kept silent about it.

Now I’m sitting alone in Caitlin’s office at the
Examiner,
wondering where the hell she could be. No one on her staff will admit to knowing where she is, not even Jamie Lewis, her managing editor. And something tells me she’s somewhere she shouldn’t be.

With nothing to do but wait, I dig in Caitlin’s desk until I find a pair of earbuds, then plug them into my tape recorder. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but as convincing as Stone’s and Kaiser’s spin on the Lee Harvey Oswald story was, something about it rang false. I don’t feel like they lied to me, but rather like they might be missing something themselves.

Leaning back in Caitlin’s chair, I kick my feet up on her desk, I press
PLAY
and close my eyes. The voices instantly take me back to the hotel room beside the river, with my juvenile-sounding voice trying—and failing—to poke holes in the assertions of the two older men. As their words drift around me like smoke, I recall the smoldering eyes and sallow skin of Dwight Stone, a man intent on uncovering the truth before tomorrow afternoon, when death will hover watchfully above his OR table in Denver.

STONE
: Carlos’s deportation trial was set for November of ’63 in New Orleans Federal Court. It began on November first, and believe it or not, closing arguments would begin and end on November twenty-second.

ME:
Is that true?

STONE:
Yes. And let’s stipulate that by, or during, the summer of 1963, Carlos had spoken to Frank Knox about killing Kennedy in the event that nothing else could be done to prevent his deportation in the fall.

ME:
Fine. How does Oswald come into it?

STONE:
A man named David Ferrie was the link between Marcello and Oswald, and we owe John for figuring out how. A few people suspected the nature of the link, but it was practically impossible to pursue as a lead.

KAISER:
Remember I told you that Carlos had a New Orleans immigration lawyer on his payroll? His name was G. Wray Gill. Gill is only important because of two men he had listed on his payroll as investigators for the Marcello trial. One was a private detective named Guy Banister. The other was a former Eastern Air Lines pilot named—

ME:
David Ferrie.

STONE:
Do you know anything about Ferrie?

ME:
Joe Pesci played him in the movie.

STONE:
People who knew Ferrie say Pesci actually did an uncanny job, though Ferrie was tall and gangly in real life. Next to David Ferrie, Joe Pesci was a male model. Ferrie suffered from alopecia, and he wore the most horrible pasted-on eyebrows along with his hairpiece. Anybody who saw Ferrie never forgot him.

KAISER:
That’s for sure. The Bureau has a surveillance photo of Ferrie leaning against a Ford Fairlane. I’m telling you, leaning against those big tail fins, he looks like the forward scout for an alien invasion of hairless Martians.

I bolt forward and hit
STOP
on the recorder, my heart clenching like a fist in my chest.
That’s
what I missed the first time I heard it. My parents owned a Ford Fairlane back in the early 1960s, a red-on-white behemoth with long tail fins like something out of Flash Gordon. I only know this because I’ve seen the car in very old family pictures, my parents looking young and carefree on a vacation, my older sister cradling me in front of it. They sold the flashy Fairlane around 1964 or ’65, I believe, so I don’t remember riding in it. But something about that car itches at my brain, like a thought trying to find its voice. There’s no way David Ferrie would have been in or near my parents’ Fairlane, of course. I don’t think they even got it until after they got back from Germany in 1961, and they never lived in New Orleans after that. But there’s something . . .

Unable to make the connection, I press
PLAY
again and lean back in Caitlin’s chair.

STONE:
Ferrie was a crackpot in a lot of ways, but one thing he wasn’t was dumb. He’d worked as a contract pilot for the CIA, running guns into various countries and narcotics out. He ran guns to Castro before Fidel declared himself an ally of the Soviet Union. But at that point Ferrie became Castro’s mortal enemy.

KAISER:
Without that angle, Ferrie wouldn’t have been allowed within a mile of Carlos Marcello. He was an aggressive and unstable homosexual who’d been fired from Eastern Air Lines for giving young men free rides on Eastern planes in exchange for sexual favors. Also for molesting young men within the company. It’s difficult to imagine any less useful assistant on an immigration case than David Ferrie. He had no legal training whatever, yet Marcello admitted under oath he’d made at least one payment of over seven thousand dollars to him in November of 1963, for what he called “paralegal services.”

STONE:
It was Guy Banister who brought Ferrie into Marcello’s orbit. Banister was a shady bastard. I’m embarrassed to say that he was the former special agent-in-charge of the Chicago FBI field office, the second largest in the country. I met him when I first joined the Bureau. He liked to tell you how he’d been present at the shooting of John Dillinger. He was a rabid anti-Communist. John Birch Society, the Minutemen, you name it. A real hater.

ME:
How did a former FBI SAC wind up working for Marcello?

STONE:
After Banister retired from the Bureau, he moved to New Orleans and became assistant superintendent of the NOPD. In 1955, you didn’t get that job without kissing Carlos’s ring. Banister was dismissed from the force for violent instability, and that’s when he opened his private detective shop at 544 Camp. It didn’t take him long to get into the anti-Castro business.

ME:
What were Banister and Ferrie really doing for Marcello’s lawyer?

STONE:
Managing Carlos’s illegal effort to beat the deportation case. Specifically, working to bribe judges and prosecutors, intimidate jury members, negotiate with crooked politicians in South America, et cetera. Carlos had Jack Wasserman for the actual legal work, but not even Wasserman could turn water into wine.

KAISER:
That’s why Frank Knox was on tap. Frank was the court of last resort—the final solution, should all other efforts fail.

STONE:
I doubt Ferrie or Banister knew that in the summer of ’63, although both men would have known Knox from the Bay of Pigs training camps. And neither Ferrie nor Banister was stupid. Sooner or later, they would have realized that their boss wanted Kennedy dead.

ME:
So they approached Lee Harvey Oswald? That’s absurd.

KAISER:
It’s not as crazy as you think.

At this point Kaiser gave Stone the floor. The old man paused as though to gather all he’d learned over decades and distill it to the most comprehensible narrative he could. His entire affect changed, as well. Talking about “Lee” seemed to bring him fully to life, and nowhere was this more evident than in his voice, which grew in both volume and power.

STONE:
Lee Harvey Oswald was a creature of New Orleans. He was born there and raised there for the most part. He had the archetypal troubled childhood. Lee’s father was his mother’s second husband, and he died while Lee was still in his mother’s womb. Lee was largely raised by his aunt Lillian and uncle Dutz Murret. Now, Dutz Murret was a runner for a Marcello bookmaking operation. He worked for Sam Saia, out of Felix’s Oyster Bar in the French Quarter.

The mention of Felix’s hurled me back to last night, when my mother told me about my father and her meeting Carlos Marcello there (a meeting I did not mention to Stone and Kaiser).

KAISER:
What is it, Penn?

ME:
Nothing. I’ve been to Felix’s before, that’s all.

KAISER:
Some people argue that Oswald didn’t see his uncle much, or that he, Ferrie, and Banister wouldn’t have known one another. But if you know anything about New Orleans back then, you know that’s ridiculous. The French Quarter was a village within a small town. Everybody knew everybody. Metairie was the same way. Oswald’s own mother, Marguerite, dated two different men who worked for Marcello. One was a lawyer who arranged for Lee to join the Marines while still underage. Bottom line, Marcello himself would have known all about Dutz Murret’s skinny, mixed-up nephew who spouted Marxism and then joined the Marines.

ME:
But did Oswald know David Ferrie? Isn’t that the question?

KAISER:
Yes. And that’s what brought me into this case. Back in the early nineties, I was consulting with Dwight about an old murder in Louisiana. We got to talking about criminal psychology, and he figured out pretty quick that I had special knowledge, based on the years I’d spent in the Behavioral Science Unit. During our third conversation, he told me about the Working Group, and he asked whether I’d be willing to make use of my presence in New Orleans to do some work for them, off the books.

STONE:
And thank God we did. Because John’s behavioral science experience is what broke the case for us.

KAISER:
They wanted me to try to prove a connection between David Ferrie and Lee Oswald in the summer of ’63. There’d been dozens of reports of the two men being seen together. For example, Guy Banister’s secretary claimed Lee had worked out of Banister’s office with Ferrie and Banister. But after exhaustive work, I found that nearly all those reports either had been discredited, were unprovable, or came from unreliable witnesses.

STONE:
We desperately needed that link. I’d studied Ferrie and Oswald like a goddamned biographer—especially Lee, all the way from childhood—but I couldn’t find it. Lee always had difficulty in school. When he was twelve years old, his mother moved him from New Orleans up to the Bronx to live with his half brother. He caused havoc there and had to be psychologically evaluated. A reformatory psychiatrist described Lee as immersed in a “vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which he tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations.” She diagnosed a “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies” and recommended continued treatment. Needless to say, he never got it. Mama took him straight back home to New Orleans.

KAISER:
Which eventually delivered him into the grasp of David Ferrie. I started looking into Ferrie’s life as a favor, but the more I did, the more the case began to consume me. The only provable
link between Ferrie and Oswald dated to 1955 and ’56, when Oswald was sixteen and a member of the Civil Air Patrol at Moisant International Airport. Ferrie had been the commander of that unit for some time. In
Case Closed,
Gerald Posner wrote that Ferrie and Oswald couldn’t have known each other, because they were never in the CAP unit at the same time—that Ferrie had been removed from his position prior to Oswald’s entry. But the very year Posner’s book was published, a photo surfaced that showed Ferrie and Oswald in a small, relaxed gathering around a CAP cookout fire.

STONE:
Ferrie lost his job as CAP chief, for molesting young cadets. We’ve verified that. He was a documented pedophile. Ferrie had initially hoped to be a priest, but he was kicked out of seminary for the same kind of nocturnal recreation—teenage boys. He almost certainly took that CAP job because hundreds of teenage boys came through the program.

ME:
You believe Ferrie molested Oswald as a teenager.

STONE:
Yes.

KAISER:
In 1963, David Ferrie told Jim Garrison that he’d never met Oswald. After being confronted with the Civil Air Patrol link, he backed off and said he simply didn’t remember him. Penn, I’m sure you had plenty of experience with pedophiles in the Houston DA’s office. Do you think a predator like David Ferrie didn’t remember every boy who came through his unit? Especially a vulnerable kid like Oswald? No father, insecure, confused sexuality, so desperate to be different that he’s spouting Marxist theory at sixteen?

ME:
Ferrie would have zeroed right in on him, no question. But you don’t have any objective evidence? No witness statements? Nothing?

KAISER:
Only deduction. I had to ask myself what kind of relationship could have—or would have, by necessity—remained secret for years. Like you, I’ve worked more murder cases than I
can count, and that experience taught me that illicit sex is the one thing people will stay silent about, if they possibly can. Especially molestation of a minor. And remember, this was the 1950s. There were no cell phones, no text messages, no e-mail, none of the crap that traps people nowadays.

STONE:
Oswald sure wasn’t going to tell anybody about it. He took a lot of teasing from guys saying he was queer, all the way through the Marine Corps.

KAISER:
Neither was Ferrie. The stigma from a homosexual relationship could be lethal back then, even in New Orleans. More telling still, if you look at Oswald’s life after the summer that CAP photo with Ferrie was taken, the kid’s downward spiral really accelerated. He couldn’t do his schoolwork the following fall, and he dropped out of the tenth grade.

ME:
Hmm.

KAISER:
Trying to emulate his big brother, Lee tried to join the Marines at sixteen, but they turned him down. He then went to work at a dental lab. He remained in New Orleans until the following July, when his mother moved him back to Fort Worth, Texas. Obviously, Ferrie could have been having sexual liaisons with Lee throughout the period prior to this move, or only sporadically, or not at all. We just don’t know. But that next fall, at Arlington Heights High School in Texas, Lee only made it to the end of September before dropping out. Does that not sound like a kid who might have experienced something too big to process? Like an affair with an older man?