This Enemy Town

CHAPTER 21

By the time I got home, it was after eight. I tossed my keys on the table in the entrance hall, peeled off my coat and scarf and called out the proverbial, “Hello, honey, I’m home!”

Paul returned my greeting from the living room, where I found him reading the latest Robert Parker crime novel. He’d propped his stocking feet up on an ottoman and aimed them at a fire that flickered in the fireplace, more for ambience than for warmth. He closed the book and let it drop from his fingers to the carpet, then patted the arm of his chair, inviting me to join him. “Successful day?”

I crossed the room, kicking off my shoes as I went. I perched on the chair next to him, kissed the top of his head. “You won’t believe it when I tell you.”

“Try me.”

“Chris Donovan tells me that Jennifer was blackmailing the admiral. She’d discovered some gross irregularities in the contracts coming out of his office and she was using that information to get money out of him. But then, he discovered-how, I don’t know, Chris didn’t say-that Jennifer Goodall is, or was, gay, so there went Jennifer’s leverage.”

Paul’s eyebrows shot up. “Gay? Now that’s a surprise.”

“I got it straight from Chris Donovan, and she had no reason to lie about it. At one time she and Jennifer were lovers.”

“I never would have guessed, not with the way she came on to me.” Paul captured my hand in both of his and squeezed it reassuringly. “I wasn’t the only faculty member she singled out for special attention, of course.”

“That’s because you’re so devilishly handsome,” I quipped. After a moment of silence, I added, “Of course, it’s perfectly possible that Jennifer swung both ways.”

An equal opportunity sexual predator, I thought maliciously.

“We need to call Murray.” Paul reached for the portable phone sitting on the end table.

I took the receiver from his hand. “No need, he already knows. Chris said he’d interviewed her about it.”

Paul’s eyes narrowed. “Funny he didn’t mention it.”

“My thoughts exactly,” I said. “But then I ran into Special Agent Crisp at the Metro.”

Paul turned in the chair to face me. “Ran into? As in ‘What a coincidence seeing you here, Special Agent Crisp?’”

He had such a goofy grin on his face that I had to laugh. “More like, ‘Agent Crisp, we can’t go on meeting this way.’” Skipping the part about my embarrassing karate demonstration, I forged on. “That phantom Taurus we’ve been seeing lately? I think it’s for real. The FBI has been keeping tabs on me, it seems, and Crisp wanted to rap my knuckles for messing about in her investigation.”

“If you won’t listen to me, Hannah, and you won’t listen to your lawyer, I don’t know why she thinks you’ll listen to the FBI.”

“But Paul, that’s just it! It’s not my case she’s afraid I’m messing with. The FBI is part of some multiagency sting operation that’s focused on Admiral Hart.”

“Damn!”

“And it gets better. In warning me off, Crisp practically admitted that she doesn’t think I had anything to do with Jennifer Goodall’s murder.”

“Now we definitely call Murray.”

I handed him the phone. “You dial,” I said.

We got Murray out of the bath. After Paul had passed on what I’d told him about the sting operation, he handed the phone to me. “Agent Crisp is right, Hannah, you need to stay out of it. Let me and my staff do the work.”

I asked Murray why he hadn’t told us about his interview with Chris Donovan, but he brushed me off with a simple, “I’m interviewing dozens of people, Hannah. When I know what’s important and what’s not, then I tell you. That’s what you pay me for.”

On the other end of the phone, I heard water running and realized that Murray must still be in the tub. No wonder he was being crabby. “And leave the government watchdogs alone,” he was saying. “It could very well turn out that Hart’s activities are directly related to whomever killed Jennifer Goodall. If so, the last thing we need is for you to stick your nose in and blow the case they’re carefully building against him. Let the feds do their job.”

I scowled into the phone. “If we leave it to the feds, Murray, I might never have my name cleared. Bureaucracies move with the speed of a glacier.”

But as I handed the phone back to Paul, I had to admit there was logic in what he was telling me, so I decided that like B’rer Fox, I’d lay low.

Sunday night I slept more soundly than I had in weeks. Paul awoke early. While he puttered quietly around our bedroom dressing for his Monday morning class and humming off-tune, I lay absolutely still, with my eyes closed, thinking how much I loved him.

After he left, I fell into an uneasy sleep. I dreamed I was riding on a merry-go-round with Agents Crisp and Taylor seated on the horses just behind. Next to me, Paul rode a swan-up and down, up and down-turning to grin at me from time to time as he leaned out, hand extended, to snag one ring, then two, then three. Ted Hart was there, too. Framed by lightbulbs that flashed in sequence like a Times Square marquee, the admiral stood at the carousel’s center, dazzling in his dress whites, one hand on the stick, pushing it forward, laughing, as we revolved. I looked around, calling frantically, “Dorothy, Dorothy,” knowing she must be there, but not seeing her anywhere. Faster and faster we whirled, until the scenery became a blur. Faster still, with Hart pushing on the stick, laughing maniacally, until I spun off my horse and went flying, flying over the bumper cars, over the Ferris wheel… and awoke, heart racing and out of breath.

I lay in bed with the covers up to my chin, quietly fuming. I certainly didn’t need Sigmund Freud to tell me the meaning of that.

Even after two cups of coffee I was still steaming. Something about the database search I had begun the previous day at the Arlington Library was nagging at me. I trotted down to the basement and powered up the computer.

I was back at Defenselink, engrossed in a complicated Boolean search strategy, when a voice from the top of the stairs called, “Hannah?”

I got up from my chair and stuck my head around the door frame. Emma Kirby stood there, neat, fresh-faced, and cheerful, each crease in her black uniform pants and long-sleeve shirt perfectly aligned.

“Emma! Come on down.”

She clumped down the stairs, her black shoes so well-polished that they flashed even in the subdued lighting of my basement hallway. She was carrying a small bag that I recognized. It contained her dirty laundry. “Sorry to bother you, Hannah. I rang and rang but nobody answered, so I just let myself in. I put the key back.”

“Thanks, Emma.” All my midshipmen knew where we kept the spare house key, in a secret compartment in a fairly convincing plastic rock that I’d tucked into the flower bed to the left of our front stoop.

Emma dropped her laundry bag in the hallway, then made a pit stop at the basement refrigerator, where she helped herself to a Diet Coke. “I just came over to see how you were doing,” she called over the pfssssst of the tab being popped.

“I’m fine, more or less. Thanks.”

Emma wandered into my office, swigging from the soda as she came. She leaned over my shoulder and studied the monitor. “Government contracts. Ugh! I thought I’d find you relaxing. Reading or watching TV or something.”

“I’m still trying to recover from last week,” I told her.

Emma plopped down on a tufted bean bag chair that had once been in our daughter Emily’s room. “Nobody believes you killed Lieutenant Goodall, Hannah. Nobody!” She split the word into two syllables-No Body-and I had to smile.

“That’s reassuring, Emma, my dear, but I may be a very old woman before the FBI calls to tell me they’ve made a terrible mistake.” I pointed at the computer. “That’s what I’m working on here. I’m looking for people other than me who might have wanted to make Jennifer disappear permanently.”

“But why government contracts?” Emma wanted to know.

“My husband and I talked to a former mid, one of his students, who used to know Jennifer.” I was purposely vague, not wanting to mention Kevin’s father. “This guy told us that before Goodall came to the Academy, she was working at the Pentagon in an office that handles big Navy contracts. I’m probably just spinning my wheels,” I continued, “but I thought if I could connect the particular office she worked in with contracts-particularly large ones-that were awarded disproportionately to one company over another-”

“Jeeze, Hannah, that’ll take forever. Do you have any proof that she was fiddling around with the contracts she was supposed to be working on?”

“Not really. Just speculation.”

“If you ask me-which you didn’t, but I’ll tell you anyway-it’s a big waste of time.”

“You’re probably right,” I said, thinking so many contracts, so many databases, so little time. “But you know what, Emma, at least I’m doing something!”

“I should have figured you wouldn’t sit still and wait around for other people to do the legwork.”

While Emma was talking, I moused over to Start and shut the computer down. “I did find out something interesting yesterday,” I told her as the blue screen on the monitor turned to black.

“What was that?”

I swiveled my desk chair around, wondering whether I should tell Emma or not, but figured that it couldn’t be a sin to out a dead person. “Lieutenant Goodall was gay.”

Emma smiled. “I know.”

“You know?”

“Uh-huh. She came out to me maybe the second or third time I went to see her for help about the harassment.”

I felt like I’d gone out for popcorn and missed part of the movie. “Emma! What harassment? You didn’t tell me you were being harassed.”

Emma lobbed her empty soda can into the trash can. “Some firstie in Sixteenth Company. I think. Can’t be one hundred percent sure. Anyway, this guy, he kept asking me out and I kept turning him down. I guess he couldn’t figure out why I kept rejecting such a burning, burning hunk of love as him, so he started a rumor that I was a lesbian.”

“That’s despicable.”

Emma puffed air out through her lips. “If not dating is proof positive of homosexuality, then fifty percent of the brigade must be gay.”

“So, what did this guy do?”

“I’d get hate mails from anonymous Yahoo and Hotmail accounts. And I’d come back from PT to find notes on my bed, like go home dyke. D-I-K-E. Jackass couldn’t even spell.”

“Did Lieutenant Goodall put you in contact with anybody who could help?”

“Oh, sure. She got me with an outfit called the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.”

I nodded, thinking five points for Jennifer for hooking Emma up with Chris Donovan, one of the few people in all this mess who I felt I could trust.

“And?” I prodded.

“One of their counselors explained that harassment of gays is not allowed and that the Pentagon even put out regs about it. Problem is, nobody in the Navy’s ever heard of the regs, at least not so far as I can discover, so nobody knows what to do. And there sure as hell hasn’t been any training.”

“It seems to me that harassment of any kind shouldn’t be tolerated, it doesn’t matter what that harassment is about.”

“Well, right.”

“Can’t you complain about the harassment without admitting anything about your sexual preference?”

“Well, sure, but who’s gonna believe that?” She scrunched farther down into the doughnut-shaped cushion. “‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’” she singsonged. “That’s what they’ll think.”

I wanted to reassure the young woman, but I knew, too well, that what she was saying was true. People in the military were notoriously hard to turn. See an opening, they’d drive a wedge into it, and keep pounding and pounding and pounding until you broke, or simply gave up and went away. I’d seen it too many times before.

Then Emma surprised me again. “Lieutenant Goodall wanted me to be some sort of test case about the whole harassment issue, but I didn’t want to rock the boat any more than it’d already been rocked. I told her to forget it.”

Emma drew her legs up, wrapped her arms around them and rested her chin on her knees. “So, I decided to create a diversion. That’s where Kevin came in.” She looked up at me and beamed. “You know what he did?”

I shook my head.

“He cornered the firstie in the basement of Bancroft and beat the shit out of him. Told him to leave his girlfriend alone or else he’d cut off his balls and… well, never mind. It was pretty graphic.”

Normally I don’t condone resorting to violence to solve problems, but the way things were going for me lately, violence was looking like an attractive alternative. “Good for Kevin,” I said with some conviction.

“Now Kevin is stuck with taking me to the Ring Dance.” She smiled. “But I told him I’d step aside if the right girl came along. That goes for me, too, of course.”

I laughed, then helped Emma load her laundry into the washing machine. Shortly afterward, I sent her back to Bancroft Hall with a Ziploc bag full of cookies.

After she left, I began to wonder. Had the seed Chris Donovan planted in Jennifer’s mind taken root, grown and blossomed? If Jennifer Goodall had been on a mission, looking for cases to test the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, perhaps another one of her clients hadn’t been so sanguine about it.

In his landmark study, Alfred Kinsey claimed that homosexuals make up ten percent of the population. The Academy has four thousand students. If we believe Alfred Kinsey-and who am I to argue with an expert?-the list of suspects in Jennifer Goodall’s murder had just grown by another four hundred. Pretty soon we’d need Alumni Hall to hold them all.