Mortal Allies (18 page)

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.”