At about noon a third bass boat raced up to the fishing spot, and Dickie started hollering like a madman. “Goddammit, stop the tape! Stop the tape!” He hopped up and down on the bow and shook his fist at the man in the other boat. “Hey, can’t you see we’re filming a goddamn TV show here? You got the whole frigging lake but you gotta stop here and wreck the tape!” Then he saw that the other angler was Ozzie Rundell, Culver’s brother, so Dickie stopped shouting. He didn’t apologize, but he did pipe down.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt,” Ozzie said. He was a mumbler. Dickie Lockhart told him to speak up.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt!” Ozzie said, a bit louder. In his entire life he had never boated a bass over four pounds, and was in awe of Dickie Lockhart.
“Well?” Dickie said.
“I thought you’d want to know.”
Dickie shook his head. He kicked a button on the bow and used the trolling motor to steer his boat closer to Ozzie’s. When the two were side by side, Dickie said impatiently, “Now start over.”
“I thought you’d want to know. They found Bobby Clinch.”
“Where?”
“Dead.”
Ozzie would get around to answering the questions, but not in the order he was asked. His mind worked that way.
“How?” Dickie said.
“In Lake Harney.”
“When?”
“Flipped his boat and drowned,” Ozzie said.
“Goddamn,” said Dickie Lockhart. “I’m sorry.”
“Yesterday,” Ozzie said in conclusion.
Dickie turned to the cameraman and said, “Well, that’s it for the day.”
Ozzie seemed thrilled just to be able to touch the deck of the champion’s boat. He gazed at Dickie Lockhart’s fishing gear the way a Little Leaguer might stare at Ted Williams’ bat. “Well, sorry to interrupt,” he mumbled.
“Don’t worry about it,” Dickie Lockhart said. “They stopped biting two hours ago.”
“What plug you usin’?” Ozzie inquired.
“My special baby,” Dickie said, “the Double Whammy.”
The Double Whammy was the hottest lure on the pro bass circuit, thanks in large measure to Dickie Lockhart. For the last eight tournaments he’d won, Dickie had declared it was the amazing Double Whammy that had tricked the trophy fish. His phenomenal success with the lure—a skirted spinnerbait with twin silver spoons—had not been duplicated by any other professional angler, though all had tried, filling their tackleboxes with elaborate variations and imitations. Most of the bassers caught big fish on the Double Whammy, but none caught as many, or at such opportune times, as Dickie Lockhart.
“It’s a real killer, huh?” Ozzie said.
“You betcha,” Dickie said. He took the fishing line in his front teeth and bit through, freeing the jangling lure. “You want it?” he asked.
Ozzie Rundell beamed like a kid on Christmas morning. “Shoot yeah!”
Dickie Lockhart tossed the lure toward Ozzie’s boat. In his giddiness Ozzie actually tried to catch the thing in his bare hands. He missed, of course, and the Double Whammy embedded its needle-sharp hook firmly in the poor man’s cheek. Ozzie didn’t seem to feel a thing; didn’t seem to notice the blood dripping down his jawline.
“Thanks!” he shouted as Dickie Lockhart started up his boat. “Thanks a million!”
“Don’t mention it,” the champion replied, leaning on the throttle.
R. J. Decker had been born in Texas. His father had been an FBI man, and the family had lived in Dallas until December of 1963. Two weeks after Kennedy was shot, Decker’s father was transferred to Miami and assigned to a crack squad whose task was to ensure that no pals of Fidel Castro took a shot at LBJ. It was a tense and exciting time, but it passed. Decker’s father eventually wound up in a typically stupefying FBI desk job, got fat, and died of clogged arteries at age forty-nine. One of Decker’s older brothers grew up to be a cop in Minneapolis. The other sold Porsches to cocaine dealers in San Francisco.
A good athlete and a fair student in college, R. J. Decker surprised all his classmates by becoming a professional photographer. Cameras were his private passion; he was fascinated with the art of freezing time in the eye. He never told anyone but it was the Zapruder film that had done it. When Life magazine had come out with those grainy movie pictures of the assassination, R. J. Decker was only eight years old. Still he was transfixed by the frames of the wounded president and his wife. The pink of her dress, the black blur of the Lincoln—horrific images, yet magnetic. The boy never imagined such a moment could be captured and kept for history. Soon afterward he got his first camera.