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claimed that the flickering lights in the garage where Oswald was shot had triggered an epileptic fit in Ruby. He went through great rolls of encephalograms with the jury. Alexander asked Belli’s expert witness on radiology if all things do not give off radiation. The man said yes. Even the railing around the jury? Yes. Even the wall of the courtroom? Yes. Alexander was delighted to hear from the police guard that when the jury went into its deliberation room that day, some of its members rushed over to the wall and put their ears to it, trying to hear the radiation.
    Alexander knew how to get Belli’s goat. He called the girdled man “Mr. Belly.” When Belli complained to the judge that the prosecutor was mocking him, Alexander sardonically pronounced his name Mr. Bell-EYE. The short Belli wore shoes with uplift heels, which Alexander, talking with reporters, referred to as “fruit boots.” Joe Tonahill, the Texas attorney Belli recruited as his local colleague for the trial, told me that “Mel was at his wit’s end over Bill’s treatment of him.” Tonahill was a study in himself. He had a wheezy Christmas cold and cough when I interviewed him in a coffee shop. Since he had brought no handkerchief with him, he first blew his nose on the paper napkins at the table, then on the doilies placed under our coffee cups, then on the little paper envelopes holding sugar for the coffee, leaving a soggy pile of these materials on the floor beside his chair.
    When the Ruby articles appeared, an editor at New American Library asked me to expand them into a book. But others were not pleased with them. I was threatened with three lawsuits. The first one was silly. I had quoted Ruby’s cleaning lady in a way that suggested he was not planning any great act on the fatal day. A Dallas lawyer, perhaps wanting to discredit exculpatory evidence on Ruby’s part, asked the cleaning lady if she had given me an interview. When she said no, he wrote Esquire to say he was suing me on her behalf. Actually, I had taken her words from the Warren Commission volumes. She had not only said exactly what I quoted, but had said it under oath when testifying before the commission.
    The second suit was pursued further, into the deposition-taking stage, and it was filed by Mel Belli, who claimed that I had defamed him. Everything I had said about him I had on tape, was in the trial record, or was from the Warren testimony. Esquire’ s lawyer asked if I had further derogatory material that I had not used, to prove that I was not just throwing any old charges at him. I said yes. I had got from another of Belli’s lawyers a letter written to the Texas bar by Ruby’s sister, who was supposed to be Belli’s employer. She complained that he would never report to her, or even see her. He was always too busy. Finally, she went to Belli’s hotel during an afternoon break in the trial, knocked on his door, and was admitted on the assumption that she was picking up the room service trays. She found Belli in a circle of reporters, including the famous Dorothy Kilgallen. He was stripped to his jockey shorts, and was taking butter patties from the room service, putting them on a bread knife, and flipping them up to stick on the ceiling. The lawyer said Belli would never go to trial, where that letter could be introduced.
    The third suit came from another lawyer, Mark Lane, the conspiracy theorist who claimed that Ruby was part of a plot to cover up the assassination of President Kennedy by removing any possibility that Oswald could talk of it. One of Lane’s arguments was based on the testimony of a woman to the Warren Commission. Though her testimony was included in the voluminous record, it was not even referred to in the report written as a summary of the commission’s findings. For Lane, that was a proof that the Warren Commission was also party to a cover-up.
    The name of this woman was given by