Mortal Allies

CHAPTER 11

I had to wait until eleven o’clock that night to call the chief of the JAG Corps. He wasn’t in, but I got his deputy, a brigadier general named Courtland, which is another fabulous name for a lawyer, if you ask me. I’d worked with Courtland a few times over the years. We didn’t know each other well, but we were on first-name terms. Which, in the Army, meant he called me Sean, and I called him General.

I said, “Good morning, General. I hope it’s a nice day back there.”

“It’s hot and steamy back here. I’ve got a meeting in five minutes. What do you need, Sean?”

“I was wondering if you could tell me who’s been assigned as the prosecutor for the Whitehall case?”

“Uh, yeah sure. Eddie Golden. You know him?”

It was a perfectly duplicitous query because everybody in the JAG Corps knows Eddie Golden. Or at least they know of him.

The Navy and Marine Corps aviation wings have this nifty title they bestow on their most hot-shit fighter pilot, the Top Gun, which everybody in the world now knows about because of the corny movie of the same name. Although the Army JAG Corps doesn’t fly lethal arabesques like fighter pilots, we do have our own silly little version of this badge of honor, and it is known as the Hangman. It goes to the prosecuting attorney who’s put away the most bad guys. For the past six years, Eddie’s been the undisputed Hangman.

Eddie and I had faced off against each other twice in court, and obviously, since Eddie was still the reigning Hangman, I hadn’t made a dent in his record. To my credit, nobody held it against me – except my clients, of course – because both were fairly hopeless cases. But having seen Eddie in action at first hand, I was awed.

He looks more like Robert Redford than Robert Redford looks like Robert Redford, if that can be at all possible. Eddie is boyish, witty, brilliant, and has an assassin’s sense of timing. Women board members are Silly Putty in his hands. But male board members aren’t immune to his charms, either. See, Eddie has what we attorneys call the Pope’s Gift. What this means is that the Pope can walk outside on a perfectly cloudless, sunny day and flap open his umbrella and every Catholic for miles around will crack open theirs, too. After all, the Pope’s supposed to be infallible. Eddie’s like that, too, although only in a courtroom when the show is on.

Now I’m not the vindictive type, but I don’t like losing twice. I can live with an even split, because I’m the kind of guy who figures a draw is damned close to a win. Not everybody loves a winner, but nobody likes a loser, and I’m perfectly content hanging out right in the middle of the pack. The thought of losing three times to Eddie almost made me sick.

That’s because the other thing about Eddie is that he’s not a nice winner. He sends every attorney he beats a baseball bat with a notch carved in it. I know this for a fact since I’ve got two of them stored in my closet at home.

I said, “Shit,” and the general chuckled. “Anything else I can help you with?”

“No, thank you very much.”

We then hung up.

The thing about that phone call was that it inspired me. Maybe I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the truth is, I really don’t like Eddie. No, that’s not true. I detest Eddie.

In Latin, there’s this wonderful phrase: Palmam qui meruit ferat, which, translated, means, “None but himself could be his parallel.” That fairly well describes Eddie. He’s a smug, arrogant, pompous prick who happens to win all the time and never lets anybody forget it.

Vowing not to receive another of his baseball bats, I stayed awake till one o’clock wading through more of the materials in the boxes. I started with Jackson’s initial testimony.

Private Everett Jackson was his full name, twenty years old, from Merryville, Mississippi, and trained by the Army to be an administrative clerk. He’d been in Korea nearly a full year and nothing in his personnel file jumped out at me. He seemed to be just another guy who’d made it through high school, skipped or put off college, and signed up. Maybe he wanted some adventure, maybe he wanted to get away from home, maybe he had nothing better to do. He was bright, though. His GT score, a test administered by the Armed Forces, was 126. That’s roughly comparable to his IQ, so he had brains.

I examined the photo appended to the inside jacket. I tried to overlook that I already knew he was gay, but frankly, he looked it. That’s not easy to accomplish in a black-and-white Army photo, when you’re standing rigidly at attention, in Army greens. But he did. There was an unmistakable willowiness, an effeminate slouch.

Before “don’t ask, don’t tell” came to pass, Everett Jackson would’ve been singled out and discharged ten seconds after he walked through the gate for basic training. Some stiff-necked drill sergeant in a Smokey the Bear hat would’ve taken one look at him, sniffed derisively once or twice, then dragged him into the latrine, rammed his face within two inches of Jackson’s, and fiercely demanded, “Don’t you dare lie to me, boy. You tell me where you like to put that little pecker of yours.”

Moran claimed in his initial statement that he’d invited Jackson to Whitehall’s party because the poor kid was bereft of friends, that he was a barracks rat in need of a reprieve. There was probably some truth in that. The other troops probably despised Jackson. They probably treated him like a leper.

What intrigued me was why Moran plucked Jackson out of the ranks, made him his company clerk, and chose to have an affair with him. Moran was a tough, manly-looking guy, the last man anybody would ever suspect of being gay. Unless, that is, he hung out with a neon gay like Jackson. I was making an assumption here that Moran and Jackson were lovers, but the facts being what they were, that didn’t seem like a real wild leap.

And, since Jackson was so visibly gay, why would Moran take the risk of associating with him?

Anyway, Jackson’s initial testimony tracked closely with Whitehall’s and Moran’s. It did so because he cloaked himself in ignorance. He claimed he drank way too much. He claimed he drank way too fast. He claimed he passed out at 11:45 on the dot. I had some trouble swallowing that one. Not many people check their watches before they lapse into a drunken coma.

The next thing he claimed he remembered was being shaken by someone and told to go to the second bedroom on the left. So he did. He claimed he then slept soundly until Moran awoke him at 5:30 A.M. and told him Lee was dead. He said he got up, walked down the hall, peeked in the room and saw the body, but only got a quick glimpse, because the apartment was instantly flooded with Korean policemen.

I put down his packet and went back to the statement by Sergeant Wilson Blackstone, the first MP to arrive at the scene. According to Blackstone, he and his partner did not arrive at the apartment until 6:08, by which time the Korean police were already there in force. I then checked the statement from the MP shift officer who’d dispatched Blackstone in the first place. The shift officer happened to be the same Captain Bittlesby I’d spoken with to get the humvee and escort to go to the embassy.

According to Bittlesby, he’d taken the call from Moran at 5:29, and, after speaking with his colonel, he’d talked with the Itaewon station commander. The time of that call was 5:45 A.M. Figure it took the Itaewon station commander two or three minutes to call his own shift officer and order him to dispatch an investigating team to the apartment. Itaewon is a fairly compact district. If the traffic was light at that hour of the morning, it might’ve taken another ten to fifteen minutes for the Korean cops to get to Whitehall’s apartment. That meant the Korean cops could not have gotten to the scene before 6:00 A.M. at the earliest, barely ahead of Blackstone.

In other words, Jackson was lying about how much he knew, if he wasn’t lying about everything, which he probably was. Anyway, there was at least a thirty-minute gap between the time Moran woke him and the time when the Korean cops arrived.

It was just a guess, but it seemed a pretty good one that Whitehall, Moran, and Jackson used that thirty minutes to ponder their situation and conspire. Jackson had enough brains to try to cover that up, but not enough sense to get his times correct.

But so what?

The “so what” was that it eliminated any doubt there’d been at least a hurried, halfhearted effort at patching together a common alibi, at devising a common defense to cover one another’s asses.

Something had gone wrong, though. Somehow the scheme had unraveled and Whitehall was hung out to dry. To understand how their plan got deconstructed, I had to first reconstruct it.

I tried to picture how it might’ve gone down. They were all soldiers – a captain, a first sergeant, and a private – and in a pure world, that would’ve dictated a cast-iron pecking order. Whitehall or Moran would’ve devised the scheme, and Jackson, since he was only a private, would’ve dutifully gone along. He was probably scared out of his wits anyway – at being exposed as a homosexual, at being implicated in a murder, at being arrested by foreign police in a strange country. He would’ve been malleable and compliant.

At least that’s how it would’ve gone down under ordinary conditions. These weren’t ordinary conditions, though. These were three gay men who were sexually involved with one another in ways and combinations I couldn’t possibly fathom. Everything was topsy-turvy.

There was too much here I couldn’t begin to comprehend, things that were beyond my ken. Whitehall had smelled me out right away; I knew next to nothing about gays and their peculiar relationships. I knew who did, though.

I therefore left my room, took the elevator down two floors, and walked to room 430. I knocked hard three times, then tried to look perfectly guileless.

A light came on inside the room, the peephole darkened, the bolt slid open, and the door swung inward.

Katherine was wearing a skimpy T-shirt that came a quarter of the way down her thighs. She did have great legs, with long, taut muscles, slender calves, and thin ankles. Her hair was mussed and she looked groggy. She audibly groaned. Delighted to see me she clearly wasn’t.

I tried to hide my rapture at interrupting her sleep. With flawless insouciance, I said, “I’m sorry to awaken you” – which I wasn’t – “but I’ve got a few questions” – which I did.

“Drummond, it’s one o’clock in the morning.”

“Oh, so it is,” I admitted, barging my way past her. “Well, you’re already awake anyway.”

She followed me, quietly cursing. She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms across her chest. “This better be good. Really good.”

“Right,” I said, falling into a chair and kicking up my feet onto her desk, just to be sure she knew I was settling in for the duration. “Start with this. Do you believe Whitehall’s claim that he and Lee were in love?”

She climbed back onto her bed, got under the covers, and hiked them up across her chest. “Drummond, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m an attorney, not a lie detector.”

“Right. But here’s my problem. You’ve got four gay guys at a party. One gets murdered. His corpse contains semen from two different men. One of those men claims he and the deceased were madly in love, an eternal love, the type that comes along only once in a lifetime. See my problem here? Don’t gays get jealous like heteros?”

“Of course they do.”

“Then how does it square? If Whitehall and Lee were an item, something doesn’t fit here. If Moran raped Whitehall’s amour, why in the hell would Whitehall invite him to sleep over?”

“I never assumed Moran raped him,” she said.

“No?”

She gave me an outsize stare. “Do you have any idea how rare homosexual rapes are?”

“Frankly, I don’t,” I admitted. “See, my mind’s all cluttered up with all those useless heterosexual things.”

If she got my taunt, she ignored it. “It’s almost unheard of. At least when the act is between two adults. Homosexuals are not nearly as sexually aggressive as heteros. Even in homosexual pedophilia, forcible rapes are rare, although of course, pedophile cases are automatically classified as statutory rapes because the victims are underage. But actual, forcible rape is almost unheard of. Forget everything you know about hetero rapes.”

“So you’re saying hetero rape and homo rape aren’t the same?”

“Rape’s rape, regardless of the sexual mix. I’m saying that in over half of hetero rapes, the victim and the attacker are at least acquainted with each other. That’s also nearly unheard of in homosexual rape cases. Except in prison, that is. There, all the rules are upended.”

“So what? You never believed Moran raped Lee?”

“You actually want my opinion?” she asked, with only the barest hint of sarcasm or skepticism.

“Why else would I be here?” I asked, failing to mention, of course, the sweet joy of waking her up in the middle of the night.

“Okay. Here’s what I suspect. Moran and Thomas willingly swapped partners.”

“And you believe the partners were willing, too?”

“These are grown men. It would’ve been almost physically impossible without their consent.”

“But why would Whitehall swap a partner he claims he loved?”

“I’m only guessing, okay? I think, though, that you might’ve elicited a motive from Thomas this evening. He and Lee, they both knew their love was doomed. Thomas had only four weeks remaining on his tour. Lee wasn’t going to join him in the States, and maybe Thomas – or Lee – decided the time had come to orchestrate a separation.”

“So you think maybe this partner-swapping thing was an effort to separate? Like some kinky kind of divorce?”

“Maybe, yes. Remember, you’re talking about gays. They were seeking a clean way to emotionally disentangle. Maybe they decided to start by physically disentangling.”

“And they did this by engaging in some kind of switch-hitting orgy?”

“No, Drummond. I’d guess they tried to handle it in a very gentle, discreet way. They probably drank a great deal to deaden their nerves and fortify themselves for something that was emotionally trying. And I’d guess that at some point in the evening, they paired off and went to separate bedrooms.”

“So this was how they chose to separate?”

“It’s possible.”

“Is that common? Is that how gays handle it?”

“Is there a common way heteros handle breakups and divorces?”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t assume there’s a universal way gays handle it, either. Every relationship’s different; every ending’s different.”

“Okay,” I said, “then see if you can figure this out. There was about a thirty-minute gap between the time Lee’s corpse was discovered and the arrival of the police. What did they do during that gap?”

She said, “Who called the police?”

“Moran.”

“Really? And why’d he do that?”

“Huh?”

“Why’d he call the police? Think about it. He awakens to find a corpse in the apartment. Now if he was the murderer, or was implicated in the murder, why would he call the police? Wouldn’t he and Thomas try to work out some way to dispose of the body? Wouldn’t they put their heads together and try to figure out how to sneak the corpse out of the building so they can dump it in the woods someplace where it would never be found? Wouldn’t they?”

“I suppose, yeah.”

“But instead, Moran called the police, right?”

“But was Whitehall aware he was calling the police?”

“Almost certainly, yes.”

“Then let me try a different tack. Whitehall’s upset at Lee. The love of his life has just refused to run off and join him back in the States. He feels jilted, rebuffed.”

“Okay…”

“They agree to try this partner-swapping merry-go-round, only instead of helping Whitehall get over it, it makes him insanely jealous. He gets incensed. They retire to the bedroom together. They start having sex, only Whitehall’s emotions fly out of control. He gets rough. First he punches him silly. Maybe he hits him in the solar plexus and knocks the wind out of him. Then he slings a belt around Lee’s neck, and before he knows it, he’s killed him. Maybe it was deliberate. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was subterranean rage boiling to the surface. He lies awake the rest of the night and tries to sort through what to do next. Act one is to seem like he’s sound asleep when Moran opens his door at five-thirty.”

“Then why would he let Moran call the police? Why wouldn’t he try to talk him out of it?”

“Because that’s act two. He’s smart. If he resists, that would be tantamount to admitting he killed Lee. Instead he says, ‘Geez, gosh, oh my God, look at this! Somebody killed my boyfriend. Quick! Someone call the police!’ ”

“Unless Thomas really was surprised.”

“No. Don’t you see it? By feigning innocence, he’s able to get Moran and Jackson to trust him, to go along with him, to conspire in his alibi. Nobody witnessed him killing Lee. The other two are completely confused, but they’ve got things to hide, too. They give him the benefit of the doubt, and he’s hoping he can at least get them to tell a few fibs to help him with his story. He knows they’ve got things to hide. He decides to exploit their trust and their fears and take his chances.”

“That’s not exactly what I’d call a perfect plan.”

“Yeah, well, you got a guy who just flew into a rage and killed his lover. He’s distraught. He was drunk. He acted impetuously. There are no perfect plans available. He knows he can’t get the body out of the apartment without maybe waking Moran or Jackson. Or without maybe being seen by some Korean as he’s standing in the elevator with a corpse slung over his shoulder. He’s forced to ad-lib.”

She said, “You know what? I’ll bet that’s exactly the case the prosecutor is going to present.”

“It’s sure as hell the case I’d present,” I admitted, without confiding that was exactly what I’d hoped to accomplish that night: to get a handle on what Eddie would argue, so I could figure out a strategy to block him.

Katherine gave me a fairly friendly smile. “You know, Drummond, I hate admitting this, but you’re a pretty good attorney.”

I said, “Me? You’re the one who figured it out,” which actually was true. In fact, she’d had it figured out long before I came to her room, which made me suddenly suspicious about how much else she’d already figured out that she wasn’t sharing with me.

She peered at me over the covers. “Is that a compliment?”

I smiled. “That’s a compliment.”

She stared at the far wall a moment. “I never thought I’d say this, but we make a pretty fair team.”

I reluctantly said, “In some ways, I guess we do.”

Katherine then dropped her covers and climbed out of bed. She pitter-pattered to the bathroom. A moment passed, then I heard water running. She came back in sipping from a tumbler. Maybe I was imagining things, but I could swear she’d brushed her hair, too, because it was no longer disheveled and mussed. It hung down like a long, captivating robe past her waist. She grabbed another chair, dragged it over in front of me, and fell into it. Swinging those delicately shaped legs up, she propped her feet right next to mine.

It was what you might call a very stimulating gesture. I mean, lesbian or not, she really had great legs. And I’m a guy, and even though I knew she was untouchable fruit, there are parts of my body that don’t know the difference between fruit and cannoli. This was also the moment when I noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra under that thin, tiny T-shirt. These two cute little things jiggled about a bit, and the bottom of her T-shirt was hiked up all the way to the tippy-top of her thighs. I guess because she was gay, she was unconscious of the effect all this was having on me.

I began fighting a chivalrous battle to keep my eyeballs pasted on the floor, on the table, on the wall – anywhere but on her. I wasn’t winning, but I swear I put up a hell of a fight.

“All right,” she said, apparently unconscious that Ol’ Humungo really couldn’t care less if she was a raging bull dyke, so long as she had all the right plumbing and equipment. And she did. Believe me, she did.

She asked, “You’re still convinced Whitehall did it?”

“Uh-huh. Very convinced,” I said, rubbing my forehead, so I could shield my eyes, so she couldn’t catch me staring at her cute little feet.

“Do you buy my premise they were trading partners?”

“Uh, yeah, sure. Why not? I mean, it’s not exactly how I’d break off an affair, but I guess it’s plausible.”

She took a sip of water and I could sense, but not see, her studying my face, because my own eyes were busy sliding from her shapely little feet up her velvety smooth shins.

“Humor me some more,” she said. “Go back to what you asked Thomas tonight, about who else might’ve killed Lee. Start with Moran. He’s Whitehall’s friend, right? He knows what Whitehall intends. He obliges him by bringing a consenting partner.”

“A true friend,” I caustically agreed.

Katherine had marvelous kneecaps, too, I’d just noticed. Not too big, not too small, not too bony, not too fleshy. My mother always used to say the only true way to judge a woman is by her kneecaps. Sounds odd, but in a funny way, she’s got a point.

Suddenly Katherine said, “Drummond, you’ve got to stop that.”

“Huh?” I said, thinking I’d just been caught peeping.

“Stop making your hetero judgments. Gays live in a different world with different standards. Particularly gays in the military.”

“Okay, so Moran’s a great guy,” I said, forgetting about her knees and feasting on her thighs. “The kind of noble buddy every man wishes he had. So who’s Jackson? Is he Moran’s steady? Or is he just some willing toady?”

“My guess is he’s nothing more than a compliant partner. Maybe Moran’s slept with him a few times. There’s physical involvement, but they’re emotionally detached.”

In a valiant display of strength, I jerked my eyes up from her legs and looked at her face. Her eyes, I suddenly noticed, were the greenest things I ever saw, utterly infinite pools of grass and forest and shimmering light. There was something odd about the way she was looking at me. But that was all wrong. She’s a lesbian. And we obviously disliked each other intensely. Otherwise, I might’ve sworn she was giving me what we men call the come-hither look.

I mean, we’re in this hotel room, it’s late at night, there’s this big, comfy bed right next to us, she’s damned close to naked, and she’s so close to me I can smell her hair. Smelled damned great, too.

But this was idiotic. Hell, we didn’t even like each other.

Idiotic or not, I decided I’d better leave, and damn quick, too. I mean, there’s something about having a gorgeous, half-naked woman perched within arm’s reach that’s very corrosive to your self-discipline.

I quickly stood up and gave her a lopsided grin. “Hey, I gotta go.”

She seemed momentarily stunned. Then she shot me a look that, had I not known better, seemed ever so slightly peeved. “You’re leaving? But you woke me.”

“I know. Sorry, really. It’s just that… uh, my brain’s fried. I’m, uh, exhausted,” I said, making a brisk retreat.

I got the door open and was halfway out when I heard Katherine grumble, “God, you can be such an ass, Drummond.”

Now where in the hell did that come from? She should’ve been thanking me for letting her get back to sleep. I closed the door and muttered to myself the whole way back to my room.

It took me a while, but I finally got hold of it. Most folks would guess I’d just made a rollicking blunder, that she’d just offered me a ticket to ride, that I’d been a damn fool and walked away. Maybe she wasn’t a purebred lesbian. Maybe she was AC/DC, and I just happened to blunder in on a night when she was in one of those enchanting DC moods.

But then, most folks don’t know Katherine Carlson the way I do. What I guessed was that maybe she wanted to teach me a lesson for waking her in the middle of the night. Or maybe she just wanted to put me in my place on generic principle. Some women can act that way: Please believe me about this. It’s all about power, and the quickest, most surefire way to get it is to flash a little leg, smile a crooked smile, and then act terrifically outraged when the randy bull starts snorting and scratching the ground.

She’d pulled down those covers, and climbed out of that bed, and I nearly fell for it, too. I’d almost made a damned fool out of myself. I didn’t, though. I didn’t give her the chance to mortify me, to coldly order me to stop pawing her and get the hell out of her room. In the battle of the sexes, I’d notched up a victory.

If it was anybody but Katherine Carlson, this would sound too contrived and Machiavellian by half. Only I knew her. I knew her well, too. She was the most vindictive, conniving lawyer I’d ever met. Nobody can build leakproof firewalls; some of that chilling guile has to seep over the edge into her personal life.

At any rate, the shower water was so frigid it was like being scalded by ice cubes. I nearly got frostbite, but I got over it.