They saw a man ashen with fatigue, slumped in his chair, his nervous fingers tearing at the flesh around his fingernails. Lighting a fresh cigarette, he bent over, head low as he took his first puff, inhaled deeply—“really sucking it in,” L. E. Jones says—and sat like that, head bowed, cigarette still in his mouth, for a long minute, as if to allow the soothing smoke to penetrate as deeply as possible into his body. But the Houston businessmen didn’t see that man. They only heard his voice. As he talked on the phone, the watchers before him saw a body hunched and tense, a face drawn and gaunt
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