Dallas, Texas
James Waldren stared at his phone, pushing at different buttons and shaking his head.
“Want some help?” Rosalyn said from behind the wheel of the car. Her eyes bounced to him and then back to the road.
He squinted to study Rosalyn with her quirky green glasses and dark hair caught up with brightly colored pins in a loose bun. She chewed on a piece of gum with a vengeance.
“Lisa wants me to text her a picture, but I hate this phone.”
“You hate every phone.”
“Not the one at home on the wall.”
“Because the one at home is over two decades old, and you only like technology if you don’t have to learn it, which means no technology. Am I right?”
He chuckled, and she said, “Why are you staring at me?”
“How did you know that?” James had thought almost those exact words. He’d begrudgingly learned how to turn on a computer and how to use e-mail and search engines. They were helpful, he had to admit. But all these text messages and video chats and sending pictures, it was too much. He’d nearly returned a flat-screen TV because of the complicated remote.
“You’re easier to read than you think,” she said with a wink.
No woman had ever said that to James. Not his ex-wife or his daughter or the few women he’d dated after his divorce or his former secretaries, who were now called personal assistants though he never understood why. What was so demeaning about being called a secretary? Now perfectly good positions were renamed. Secretaries were executive assistants, stewardesses were flight attendants, and housewives were homemakers or domestic engineers. He didn’t understand, but perhaps that was why the women in his life claimed he was always disconnected—except for this eccentric woman behind the wheel.
“I’m dying to hear how the call went. Will I be meeting your daughter soon?” Rosalyn asked with her usual inflated enthusiasm.
James shifted in the seat. “Lisa is about to go on vacation. We’ll see what happens . . .” His voice trailed off. He hadn’t told Rosalyn the main reason he wanted Lisa involved—to keep her close. The last time he started digging around about the Benjamin Gray shooting, the threats had pulled him back. Threats had never slowed him down until his daughter was the target.
“I’m sorry, Jimmy. Really. It would’ve been a great way to spend time together.”
“Well . . . that’s not what I was doing,” he mumbled, knowing Rosalyn had envisioned a touching reunion. He did wish to know Lisa better, as long as they could start with a clean slate. Why rehash a past that couldn’t be changed?
“Whatever you say,” she said. “But, hey, before I take you home, I need to stop by the office real fast. I want to show you something.”
James closed his eyes, ready to be in his own abode. He wanted something hot to drink and needed to review something from his files.
“You’ll be glad that we did,” she said slyly, but James wasn’t convinced. For the next twenty minutes, Rosalyn chatted about her car acting up and how the mechanic said a mouse had chewed up the wiring.
“It cost me almost four hundred bucks, and I still might have a mouse running around in here. Why do I have three cats?”
James made the appropriate concerned responses as his mind replayed the conversation he’d had with his daughter.
Rosalyn parked in front of a small office nestled in the back corner of an old brick building. On the door, a sign read “Rosalyn Bloomquist, Private Investigator.” Beneath the words was a caricature of Rosalyn with Texas-sized hair and horn-rimmed glasses, holding a giant magnifying glass.
The first time James had walked into this office after agreeing to a preliminary meeting, he’d been certain he wouldn’t help this amateur. As a retired special agent from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation with awards and commendations and, yes, one black mark on his record, there was no way he’d work as a consultant to this wannabe, no matter how bored he was in retirement.
He had sat across from Rosalyn at her antique white desk wanting to laugh at the absurdity of the moment.
But then Rosalyn had proceeded to impress him. She was quirky, bordering on weird, but she was sharp, understood the law, and had a keen sense of knowing how to get information. Her father had been an agent, her brother was a detective in Chicago, and she had retired from a police force outside of Houston to open her own PI agency.
Now James followed her inside to her office in the very back of the building. She moved around her antique desk, pulling a stack of papers from her overflowing side table. She dropped the papers onto the desk in front of him and waited with an expectant look.
“What are these?” He picked up the stack and flipped through the copies.
“I found it.”
“You’re going to make me guess when I’m this tired?” James asked wearily.
“I won’t make you guess. What have you been searching for?”
James sighed. She was going to make him guess.
“Evidence to free Leonard Dubois.”
“No, not that. The other thing. The historical item?”
James grabbed the pile of papers. “You found the key?”
“No, not the key, but the other half we needed to find. Oh, I’ll just tell you.” Rosalyn shook her head as if completely exasperated with him. “I found the Kennedy cabinet.”
“It’s not at the JFK Presidential Library?”
“No. It’s in a secret vault in Washington, DC. If we can find the key, now you’ll know where to find the cabinet. Then you can open all its secrets.” Rosalyn had a flair for the dramatic.
James flipped through the printouts, then rubbed his forehead. This all sounded like a rabbit trail to him.
“We have no clue where the key is located. And we don’t even know if there’s a connection to the Benjamin Gray case.”
“But once we get the key, we’ll know where to find the JFK cabinet. It’s progress. The key is worthless without the cabinet.”
James grinned at her enthusiasm. “You did good work, you’re right.”
“Darn right I did. What exactly did your daughter tell you after the man was shot?” Rosalyn used her patient voice with him.
“She doesn’t recall much from that day now. But I remember on the day of the incident, she saw my old partner.”
“What exactly did she say?”
James hated to remember this part of the incident, when he’d scooped his little girl into his arms, fearful that he’d feel blood or hear more gunfire. He’d wanted to wrap her safely against his chest where nothing could harm her.
“She pointed behind me and kept calling for Uncle Peter.”
“So Peter was directly in line with where the shooting occurred. Peter told you about the key and the cabinet. Peter could have cleared this all up if he were still alive.”
James didn’t want to talk about Peter. He didn’t want Rosalyn on the train of thought that Peter might be involved in the shooting.
Rosalyn studied him as she spoke.
“We have numerous possibilities here. Benjamin Gray might have been in the center of a shootout between two other people. He might have been shot by mistake. Or he was the intended victim and the shooter was injured or the shooter shot someone else. Or someone protecting Gray was injured. We need to explore all of these.”
James knew she was right, but the effort seemed beyond what was really necessary. Right now they needed to find the evidence to free Leonard Dubois before his execution.
“And then, of course, we need to explore the other element. The key.” Rosalyn sat on the edge of her desk. Her rapid-fire thoughts drove him crazy at times.
“Yes, the key,” James repeated, feeling the weariness of a long day creep over him. Why had he confided so much in Rosalyn? James had never told anyone else about the key or his gut feeling that the shooting of Benjamin Gray had some tie with the Kennedy assassination or Oswald or politics or something much higher up than what was going on in Fort Worth, Texas. He had some leads on it, but they’d been shut down cold.
A strong cup of coffee sounded incredibly desirable at the moment, making him question why he’d given it up. He wondered if he had any at home and what had become of his coffeepot.
“I’ve been doing research on objects owned by JFK and Robert Kennedy, also Jackie and the children in case they inherited something out of the norm. I’ll keep you posted on that.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“Back to the shooting. I highlighted all the places in those newspaper printouts where another shooter was mentioned. All said that he was white. And the white cops ignored them because everyone was black.”
“Sounds like 1965,” James grumbled. “But how does any of this get us hard facts to free Dubois? That’s the important question. I know you’ve picked up a scent in all this, but we’re going in a lot of directions. Everything is hearsay. Why don’t we work the hard evidence?”
“This is how I do it, you know that. I gather all the pieces, even those that don’t appear useful or relevant, and I put the pieces together. That’s why I’m good.” Her grin was laced with both humor and arrogance.
He grimaced. She was good, he had to admit.
“Let me catch up on sleep and read through all of this. Can I please go home now?”
“Yes, just one more thing,” Rosalyn said, sitting in her desk chair instead of heading to the door like he’d hoped.
“What is it?” James said with a sigh.
“I think you’re being followed.”