The Man On The Grassy Knoll: The Assassins (Book One) - A Novel

The Man On The Grassy Knoll

- A Novel –

(The Assassins)

Book One

By

Jerry Gallagher

Copyright 2013

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Chapter 1

Unhappiness surrounded him.

It hung like a shroud around his head and shoulders, seeping into his brain and his soul.

One thing was for sure. This was going to be a very bad day. That was very easy to see.

He couldn’t tell from the weather how bad this day was bound to be. In fact, when he stepped outside onto his trailer steps that Monday morning and walked to his lusterless Ford Taurus Station Wagon the sky seemed to be sending him the opposite message. It was a bright blue sky with scarcely a cloud to be seen. It was, in all respects, from all appearances, a beautiful morning. But not for the Lot Man.

It had been a perfectly wonderful weekend up to the point on Saturday night when the Lot Man’s girlfriend dropped the bombshell. They had gone to the movies Saturday Night at the Roxy Theater in Northampton, Pennsylvania, not too far down the road from the Lot Man’s Trailer Park. They had even gone out to eat on Saturday Night. It was only burgers at McDonalds. That was all they could afford but it was something special to both of them. And they had talked. The Lot Man and his girlfriend, Margie. They had talked much more than they had in months .

That was what started it. All that talking. All that Goddamned Dangerous Communication that Margie was dying to get started. Then just when the Lot Man thought he had made it. That he had really won her back again. Margie went over the communication boundry line and never came back. She told the Lot Man what she had been dying to tell him for months but just didn’t have the guts to.

On Saturday Night, with a little white wine in her system, Margie finally found the courage to tell him what she wanted the Lot Man to know.

She told him that she didn’t love him. And then she told him that she was having an affair and who it was with.

It was a big mistake. This level of communication. The Lot Man didn’t take it well. He pretended to take it well until they returned to the Trailer after the Movie and McDonalds.

Margie never knew what hit her. The Lot Man simply took a butcher knife out of the knife drawer in the kitchen , walked up to her and grabbed her from behind and sliced her neck. As she gasped for air and tried unsuccessfully to speak she turned and looked at the Lot Man. A Look of unspeakable terror was on her face.

The Lot Man’s eyes were cold and unmoved by Margie’s desperate last breaths and the blood that quickly covered the trailer’s living room floor. He dragged her silent but shaking body into the bathroom and threw her bodily into the tub like she was a bag of unwanted trash. Then as she silently tried to scream while making her last attempts at breathing, the Lot Man walked out of the bathroom and down the hall to the bloody living room and sat down on the couch to watch television.

Saturday Night Live was just coming on. He always enjoyed that show almost as much as Margie. She always seemed to get the SNL humor easier than the Lot Man. She wouldn’t be getting the humor tonight, though, thought the Lot Man and he chuckled to himself. Tonight was one joke that would be only his, thought the Lot Man and he laughed out loud to himself.

Chapter 2

The Lot Man had been living in Pennsylvania for nearly two years now. He had come to this state to escape from many things that had gone wrong in his life. He found Eastern Pennsylvania to be a relatively easy place to get along. The native Pennsylvanian’s where he lived tended to mind their own business, a trait that the Lot Man appreciated.

When he had first come to Pennsylvania he had rented a cottage in an area called Harvey’s Lake in Northeastern Pennsylvania, not too far from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. The Lot Man thought that his new lakeside home was isolated enough to keep his past demons and his neighbors at bay. Harvey’s Lake didn’t work out, though, largely because his neighbors and residents of the surrounding Luzerne County area were all coal crackers who had a reputation for being very friendly. Although for most people that would have been a good reason to stay at Harvey’s Lake, for the Lot Man it was a reason to get the hell out fast.

When he left Harvey’s Lake he moved to Laurys Station, Pennsylvania, which was just a few miles north of Allentown, Pennsylvania. He tried like hell to find work in Allentown but didn’t have much luck. He found a carpet cleaning job that didn’t pay much and he lasted for about a week before he got into a fist fight with his supervisor and broke the man’s jaw.

The Lot Man had worked as a Lot Man on car lots before in several cities and tried applying to a few new and used car lots but was not able to get hired. He tried getting in at Rothrock’s large new and used Nissan car lot that spread out along the 15th Street Exit of Route 22 on The north side of the main highway running through Allentown. A supervisor at Rothrock’s named Danny seemed interested in hiring the Lot Man but in the end didn’t have an opening for him. Danny did do The Lot Man a favor, though and called a friend of his named Angelo Caruso, who was a supervisor at Cranford Motors, which was another Nissan

Dealer about 25 miles down Route 22 heading west toward Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. On the basis of Danny’s recommendation Angelo hired The Lot Man, sight unseen and the Lot Man had been working for Cranford Motors now for quite awhile.

It wasn’t a bad job. It wasn’t great either but it was something that the Lot Man could do easily. All his job really entailed was driving the new and used cars around the lot, lining them up on the lot so they looked organized and okay after customers and salesmen brought them back to the lot after test drives. The Lot man also had to make sure the cars were washed often enough to keep them looking sharp so that on those few occasions when customers arrived at the Cranford Motors lot the vehicles would be looking good. The Lot Man didn’t even have to be the one doing the car washing. He just drove the cars back to the garage area where the car washing machines and their operators would do the rest.

Cranford, Pennsylvania, where Cranford Motors was located, didn’t seem to have much going on in the little town along Route 22, with the exception of Cranford Motors. According to The Lot Man’s supervisor, Angelo Caruso, Cranford Motors competed fiercely with Rothrock’s but the Lot Man didn’t see much competition at all between Cranford and Rothrock’s. From all indications that the Lot Man could see Rothrock’s seemed to have more business than they could handle over there in Allentown and Cranford Motors seemed to have almost no business at all. The Lot Man thought that it was strange but he also thought that whatever the reason was for this discrepancy it didn’t have anything to do with him and it was none of his business that his employer looked as though he was losing his shirt but obviously he must have been doing well enough to keep the business going and since the Lot Man was still receiving a pay check he was more than satisfied with the Cranford Motors business plan.

On this dreadfully sunny Monday morning as the Lot Man drove to work with Margie’s body still undisposed of in the trailer’s bathtub the Lot Man thought back to that day more than two years ago when he walked into the Cranford Motors showroom and saw Margie for the first time. She had been sitting at her receptionist’s desk in the showroom. The Lot Man remembered her stunningly beautiful face and figure taking his breath away as he glanced at her for the first time. His first thought that day was that he didn’t have a snowballs chance in hell to score with her. Her beauty, he thought, was entirely out of his league.

The Lot Man recalled just how great a receptionist Margie had been. She had a kind of Marilyn Monroe breathlessness to her voice that had caused him to be tongue tied for a long time around her until he eventually got to know her. The truth was that Margie loved to play the role of beauty queen, which she had played for a long time. She had actually been a beauty contest winner in her teenage years and early twenties. She had participated in many beauty pageants and had done well enough to come close to being Miss Pennsylvania.

As thoughts of Margie continued to occupy his mind The Lot Man thought about some of what Margie had told him about her life before him. Margie was honest, the Lot Man had to give her that. She had talked to him very early on in their relationship about her formative years and the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her stepfather and stepbrother. Margie had explained to the Lot Man that her real father had left so early in her life that she barely remembered him. When she was a teenager and began asking questions of her mother about their father Margie’s mother had explained to her that her father had some problems. According to Margie’s mother, among those problems that Margie’s father had was that he drank too much, which caused him to get fired from every job he ever had, of which there were very few. Margie’s dad fully expected his wife to work and take care of him, not the other way around. Naturally enough, since Margie’s mother had Margie’s older brother, as well as Margie to take care of life was not easy for Margie and her family.

Margie had explained to the Lot Man that when she was 10 years old and her mother remarried a man named Bart, who had a good job, a nice car and a son her brother’s age who lived with him, she had been thrilled at first. Something that Margie found out shortly after Bart came to stay, though, was that he had been married before and that his wife had committed suicide. Although Margie at 10 years of age did not exactly see that as a good sign, the truth was that she was not all that understanding of what suicide was and was simply thrilled to finally have a father who seemed to truly love her and care about her.

Margie had never discussed the details of how the sexual abuse by Bart had actually started. To hear her discuss it, however, the Lot Man got the impression that it must have started early on after Bart married Margie’s mom and continued on throughout the time that they were married until Margie was able to get a job and move out on her own when she was twenty.

Margie didn’t talk about it often but when she did her eyes looked disturbingly sad and if the Lot Man had been a person capable of empathy he would have felt bad for her. As it was, though, on those few occasions when Margie did open up about the sexual abuse by her father and stepbrother the Lot Man made it clear to her that he was not interested in hearing about it. The Lot Man did not admit, of course, that he did not want to hear about it because he didn’t care about what had happened to her. He simply gave Margie the impression that he didn’t want to hear about it because it hurt him too much to know what her stepfather and stepbrother had done to her. It wasn’t exactly the truth but the Lot Man was a man who never had much of a commitment to the truth at any time in his life.

Margie was truly a beauty, the Lot Man, thought on this day two days after he had killed her. Maybe he had overreacted to the news of her infidelity and her plans to leave him, thought the Lot Man. The truth was that he was going to miss her but as he thought about it and his plans for the day, he realized that wherever her spirit was today following her death, he would probably be joining her sometime later on as he carried out his dangerous plan at Cranford Motors.

Yes, the Lot Man now realized that as much of a slut and a nymphomaniac as Margie was, he was truly going to miss her. She had been a great friend and companion. When the Lot Man and Margie began to get serious with one another the Lot Man confronted Margie with the stories he had heard from Angelo regarding her reputation of having screwed nearly every Salesman, Mechanic and Customer who ever walked in the door at Cranford Motors. To her credit, the Lot Man thought, she had admitted that, Yes she had been sexually active with a lot of Cranford Motors employees, as well as many others. She didn’t apologize for her sexual activities. She merely admitted to what she had done but assured the Lot Man when she moved in with him that those days would be behind her and he would not have to worry about her being unfaithful to him. She had been lonely and confused and simply loved sex, she had explained to him about her reputation. To her sex was somewhat of a recreational activity she had advised the Lot Man. He could see that in their life together sex had always been a stress reliever for Margie. The Lot Man had accepted that in their life together. At least he had accepted it prior to Margie’s Saturday night admissions.

Now it was too late, though. Their life together was over. Margie was no longer among the living and soon, thought the Lot Man, he would be joining her in the realm of the dead. It was only a matter of time. His plans for the day did not really allow for the fact that he might still be alive after this otherwise bright and sunny Monday.

A lot had happened for the Lot Man over the course of the past couple of years and most of what did happen was in connection to Margie. She had been a calming influence on the Lot Man. He was still a very unconnected person, for the most part, but Margie had taught him that he could at least seem connected at times. Margie had a lot of good points the Lot Man learned over time. She thoroughly enjoyed sex so there was rarely any problem in that area. Those few times that there were problems was primarily due to Margie and the Lot Man having a verbal fight in which they both stubbornly advocated for one another’s position and by so doing continued the arguments, whatever they were. While these arguments would have been considered frightening to anyone observing them there was rarely any physical violence other than a couple of instances in which the Lot Man pushed Margie. She never pushed him back, however. She had been smart enough to know that pushing him back would have been a very bad idea, indeed.

The Lot man had been able to push thoughts about Margie out of his mind for most of the preceding weekend, except for thoughts about how he planned to get rid of her body. He now realized, however, that disposing of Margie’s body was a moot point. The Lot Man didn’t plan to be alive after today, so really what in the hell did he care about what happened to her body, or his, for that matter.

The Lot Man was getting closer and closer to his workplace now and his thoughts transferred over from Margie to his best friend and his supervisor at Cranford Motors, Angelo Caruso. Angelo had, indeed, proved to be a good friend, as well as a good boss to the Lot Man. Angelo had taken a chance in revealing to the Lot Man just what kind of an operation both Angelo and the Lot Man were working for. Sleazy was the word Angelo used. After listening to everything that Angelo had told him, the Lot Man had to agree that sleazy was certainly the appropriate term for Cranford Motors.

Angelo had told the Lot Man in confidence that while Cranford Motors did, indeed, sell cars, that selling cars was secondary and not the prime purpose for the existence of Cranford Motors. The prime purpose of the business, according to Angelo, was laundering money.

Why are they laundering money, the Lot Man asked naively.

They’re laundering money for the mob, Angelo whispered to the Lot Man as they sat drinking cold beers together in a booth at Rookies Sports Bar in Allentown one Friday after work.

What mob, the Lot Man asked Angelo, still not apparently understanding what Angelo was telling him.

The Mob. The Mafia, Angelo told the Lot Man.

Angelo was beginning to sound frustrated and annoyed with the conversation at this point.

Oh, said the Lot Man finally seeming to get it. That Mob.

Yes, whispered Angelo smiling now. That Mob.

Understood, said the Lot Man.

After that Angelo and the Lot Man talked very little about the Mob or the Mafia. They simply drank