Wherein we learn that the Zapruder Film takes no rest, but only gets better with time… or something like that…
To Dirk Dickerson’s great relief, Jack Step does not run the 26-or-so-second Zapruder Film frame by frame across the big screen on the office wall. He only begins to slow it at the point where Kellerman and Greer both begin turning their heads around from the car’s front seat to look at Kennedy and note that he’d been hurt, no doubt shot, as they’d both heard the booms and blasts of gunfire they’d been expecting.
The higher resolution with which Step has augmented the film indeed appears to enhance and clarify the features of the two ghostly agents as they turn their heads, which is what Step seems to be most interested in.
“But you can’t be serious, Jack? Do you really think the Half Guinea and Josh Davies had anything to do with Kennedy’s assassination?”
“Just look for yourself, Dirk. Right there… at the very frame I have it stopped. Doesn’t Kellerman look like the Half Guinea? Right there, right there – take a good, close look…”
“Well, maybe in a back-of-the-head sort of way, but –”
“But nuts, Dirk. Now take a look at Greer; I mean, precisely at that very same moment. If that isn’t Josh Davies, I don’t know who is…”
“Shit, Jack – we’ve all seen Kellerman’s and Greer’s photos. Why watch a film over and over again to prove or disprove what they looked like? And not only have we seen their photos, we’ve also got photos of the Guinea and Davies – shit-tons! Out the wazoo…”
Step, remaining silent, Dickerson continues:
“I mean, it’s not that there’s no resemblance whatsoever. I’m trying to say here… I’m trying to say! Ah! But, why watch a film, albeit, one not even half-a-minute long, but nevertheless, hundreds of times? This seemingly small and otherwise inert thing; but when you open it up – which you’ve been doing for Lord knows how long, now – it becomes a bottomless pit of… I mean, the rabbit hole never… there’s no end to it, Jack! It’s utter insanity!”
Step still remaining silent, Dickerson continues to continue:
“And all because why?! I don’t understand! To… to… I don’t even know why! I don’t EVEN KNOW WHY!!! To… to… fucking convince yourself that the one secret agent, Kellerman, is the Half Guinea, and the other agent next to him driving the car, Greer, to whom the Half Guinea gives the orders to, is… is… Josh Davies!”
“Precisely! Long have you struggled with this and related questions, Dirk, but you’ve finally hit upon it! Because just take a look for yourself! The very moment! First, it’s Kellerman and Greer, and then suddenly, it’s –”
“The Half Guinea and Josh Davies! Ah, come off it, Jack! What a waste of… I mean, okay, whatever, whatever… But even if you’re right, what does it matter?”
“Oh, I never said it mattered, Dirk. I just get tremendous satisfaction out of…”
Dickerson starts out of a standing reverie he’d been lulled into by Step’s droning on about how much happiness and satisfaction he’s deriving from watching the Zapruder Film and coming to all of his bizarre and universally irrelevant conclusions – shocked awake by coffee mildly scalding his chest through his shirt; at his feet, the shattered cup it had been in; not a minute before, Dickerson holding it to his lips, blowing on it before taking a slurp; the chocolate brownie he believes to have been his, he somehow manages to immediately see far across the room impaled on the out-desk’s paper spike.
To Dickerson, Jack Step sounds like he’s under water, but he can make out enough of the half-heard garble to conclude that his partner is still going on about the JFK assassination, pointing out yet another, and then yet another, instance of interest to him in the Zapruder Film.
Crouching hunch-shouldered on a motionless blade of a ceiling fan, a thuggish rook peers down distrustfully at both detectives, making no sound, but merely bobbing its head sinisterly up and down. Dickerson looks over at his desk. The big, bucket-like bottom drawer is open, and he even manages to see stuck in its rails a few jet-black feathers, which now appear to catch fire and immediately turn to cinder.
“Come to think of it, Dirk,” Dickerson finally hears Step clearly, “I don’t buy the shot from the sewer story at all. In fact, I really do think Greer turned around and shot the president point-blank in the head.”
“But they would never leave that –”
“The hell they wouldn’t! They’re just that arrogant. In your face… like, ‘and what the fuck are you gonna do about it?’ That’s their attitude. In fact, it looks very much like he’s using a pump-action pistol; see… see… as I run that part nice and slow, pay attention; now see, right there! – how Greer pushes the pump up with his right hand before completely turning around and firing the fatal –”
“But that would mean neither hand was on the wheel…”
“Well, he did slow down. I think the narrative we were fed that he actually came to a complete stop is also a load of shit.”
Dickerson looks up at the highly suspicious rook, who is audibly shifting his talons’ grips upon the ceiling fan blade. He doesn’t know what else to do. He feels lost inside the increasingly convoluted and labyrinthine lunacies of his long-time friend’s mind – going… going fast; and he can do nothing to stop it. Furthermore, what utter and outlandish claptrap and bosh!
“Don’t look at that hell-demon, Dirk,” the rook itself seems to say, but it is Step talking. Dickerson sees Step moving his mouth, and it is Step’s voice coming out of it; the words, conforming precisely to the shapes his moving lips are making.
“Pay attention to me:
“For, you see, Dirk, in all his life, nothing would have made Secret Service Agent William Greer, or the Loyalist-Royalist Traitor, Josh Davies, happier than to blow President John F. Kennedy’s head right the hell off his neck. Because Kennedy, like yourself, Dirk, was a Catholic; and so was his wife. But before emigrating to the States from Ireland, Greer-Davies had been a member of the Drumbonaway Lodge of the Orange Order, more formally known as the Loyal Orange Institution, a virulently anti-Catholic fraternity sworn to uphold, defend, and vindicate the Protestant Ascendancy, not just in Ireland, but in the whole of the British Empire, of which the United States is still considered a truant part, absent without leave.”
“What about Zapruder – himself, Abraham… what about him, about him?” from its haughty perch the rook dares blare down at the pair.
“What?!” barks Step. He glares up at the rook that so dares, as though he’s just been hurt and insulted by the rook’s very presumption to blare. Why, the affrontery of it all – being, after all, nothing more than a bird and therefore having no purchase at all in men’s affairs – much like any other bird, rook, or not rook, I do emphatically and with great-big-fat conviction declare!
“AAAAAAAAHHH, huh-huh-huh-oooaaauuuhhh!!!”
“The Jew, Ukrainian-born, caw, American Jew, shot the film, himself, Abraham, himself, Zapruder, himself – who was he… WHO WAS HE?!”
“Well,” starts Step – at first hesitating to talk, but now relenting under the rook’s bully lash – concluding, best he can, his say begun, “he was a Dallas-based clothing manufacturer… a… a… dressmaker, really…”
“Grah!” gratingly gargles the grotesquely gregarious grook. “Shut your trap, Step! Dickerson – you answer! Now – caw!”
Dickerson doesn’t want to answer the rook at all, but the rook is making melted imitation popcorn butter out of Dickerson’s once-iron will. He doesn’t know how he knows what he’s about to say, being compelled by an unseen force from somewhere outside, driving the words he must speak directly into his skull:
“Abraham Zapruder was a 33rd Degree Freemason, an Inspector-General of the Scottish Rite – the highest possible degree attainable within –”
“That’s enough – caw!”
“Really, Dirk?” Jack Step asks in some bemusement. “I didn’t know that. Well, if that’s true, then in a way, that’s truly amazing, seeing as how Zapruder had only received a few years of schooling as a child back here in Ukraine, when it was part of Czarist Russia. And yet, to be able to get that far up in the ranks of the Scottish Rite… Hmmm… I wonder how that fact might play into –”
“I’m telling on you… I’m telling on you! Aargh!”
A cold wet wind blows into the room and the rook blasts clumsily but eruptively out a window that both Step and Dickerson would swear just a second before had been closed. Dickerson slams it shut, but then rams an elbow at the pane to break it.
“Don’t worry Dirk, I know that was unintentional…”
“But Jack – that rook…”
“Oh, spare me this time with that fucking rook, Dirk – would you, please?”
“Ring-ring-ring… Ring-ring-ring…”
Filed by Saint Stephan, December 19, 2025