Idol Chatter
Issue 27

In the Santa Monica Masonic Hospital, Agent Graves is visiting a man whose head is wrapped in bandages. Graves tells the man that what happened to him was no accident and gives the bandaged figure an attaché case.

As Graves leaves he is recognised by an old man with a walking frame. The man is a patient at the hospital. He follows Graves to the lift and asks if Graves remembers him. Graves recites the man's baseball career statistics, the statistics of a legend. This isn't what the old man meant, as Graves knows only too well.

We go back nearly forty years. The ball player stands beside the grave of his ex-wife, laying red roses. She was a beautiful movie star, loved by millions. Graves arrives and the two men talk about her and her troubled life. The ball player suggests that ultimately it wasn't the overdose of sleeping pills that killed her. Graves agrees, she was murdered. He offers the ball player an attaché case containing the proof, and the identity of the man responsible.

Back in the present the two men talk about the death of that man. How there was more than one assassin present that day. How three men were hit by bullets causing a total of nine separate wounds. How only three shots were reported to be fired although a fourth was possible. Dallas, Texas, November 22nd 1963. Graves tells the ball player that the only magic bullet fired that day was his. Whether that bullet ever hit its intended target is lost to history. The old man asks Graves for a favour and so it is that the story closes with Graves laying red roses on a grave "from your biggest fan..."

Comments