Second Watch (8 page)

“Treasure,” Donnie said.

“Money.” That was from Frankie.

They were two similar answers, but not quite the same. Not identical, as it were, and it made me wonder why. Treasure is something you keep; money is something you spend. What neither of them had anticipated finding in the barrel was what was actually there—the horrifying naked body of a murdered young woman.

“You said this all happened after midnight? Isn’t that kind of late for you to be out of the house and unsupervised?”

“It was the weekend,” Donnie said. “We didn’t have to get up for school.”

“Where was your mom?”

Donnie glanced in Sister Mary Katherine’s direction. “She was busy,” he said.

Remembering what Mrs. Fisk had told me, I could well imagine that the boys’ mother had been busy with something other than her sons on a Saturday night.

“And how did you get out of the house without your mother knowing you were gone?”

“We go out through the window in our room,” he said.

“I was by your house the other day,” I said. “I seem to remember seeing streetlights. Are you sure it was too dark for you to see that truck? After all, if you were close enough to see the barrel get pushed over the edge of the yard, you must have been close enough to see more of the truck than you’re telling us.”

“I already said,” Donnie insisted. “It was a Ford. And it was dark. Maybe it was black, or it could have been blue. And it was real loud.”

“Is it possible it belonged to one of your mother’s friends?”

“No!” Donnie said heatedly, unconsciously balling his fists. “And don’t talk about my mother.”

Obviously my comment about his mother’s friends had come a little too close to the truth of the matter. I had no doubt that Donnie had, on occasion, resorted to blows in defense of his mother’s somewhat questionable honor. The look Sister Mary Katherine leveled at me said that this wasn’t news to her, either.

“Is that all?” she asked. Her question was aimed at Detective Watkins, but we both nodded.

“For the time being,” Watty replied.

“All right then,” she said to the boys. “You may go back to your classrooms. And, Donnie,” she added. “You’d better schedule a time to see Father Hennessey.”

“You mean, like, for confession?”

Sister Mary Katherine nodded. “What do you think?” she replied.

“Yes, sister,” he replied. Then, biting his lip, Donnie followed his brother from the room.

“They may look identical,” Sister Mary Katherine observed, watching the two boys hustle from the room. “But there are definitely some differences, especially when it comes to brains. Frankie got held back last year. He’s doing fourth grade for the second time. Donnie is in fifth.”

“And you know about their mother?” I asked.

“Detective . . .”

“Beaumont,” I supplied.

“Detective Beaumont, we’re in the business of hating the sin and loving the sinner. Someone is paying for the boys to attend this school in the firm hope that we’re preparing them to make better choices with their lives. For all I know, what they witnessed over the weekend may well be part of God’s plan for keeping them on the right path. They did call the incident in, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“So they acted responsibly, correct? If it hadn’t been for them, the body of that poor girl might never have been found. Right?”

It was my turn to nod. Sister Mary Katherine seemed to have that effect on everyone—striking people dumb and turning them into complacent nodders, Detective Watkins and myself included.

“Being raised without a father, those boys have a hard enough time holding their heads up in polite society, so I’m asking that you give them a break. Their mother has been known to overreact on occasion. As far as I can see, they’re not suspects, are they?”

“No, but they might lead us to a suspect,” Watty objected. “If they could give us a better description of the vehicle involved . . .”

“If!” Sister Mary Katherine said derisively. “Let me tell you something for certain. If you rile up their mother about their sneaking out of the house and smoking cigarettes, she’s liable to take after both of them with a belt, because it’s happened before. I don’t know if the mother was the one who did the beating or if someone else did, but the point is, unless you want to accept the responsibility for that—for those two boys being beaten to within an inch of their lives—I suggest you leave Donnie and Frankie out of your crime-fighting equation.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Detective Watkins said, getting up and heading for the door. “Thank you for your help.”

His immediate unconditional surrender surprised me, but I waited until we were outside before I said anything.

“What happened in there?” I asked.

“Donnie and Frankie are off-limits,” he said tersely. “Either we’ll find our killer without their help or we won’t find him.”

“But—” I began.

“I had a stepfather with a belt once,” Watty said. “Been there, done that. If those two boys end up getting into trouble with their mother or with one of her johns, it won’t be on my account, or yours, either. End of story.”

And that was the end of the story, at least as far as Donnie and Frankie Dodd were concerned. Watty and I never interviewed those kids again, and by the time I was assigned to my new partner, Milton Gurkey, the Dodd family had left town.

Just for the hell of it, I picked up my iPad now and tried googling them. Donald Dodd. Frank Dodd. Nothing came of it. Not a single link.

While I was doing my computer search, time had passed. When Nurse Jackie hustled into the room a few minutes later, I was surprised to realize that it was already late afternoon. The sun was going down outside. I looked toward the window Lieutenant Davis had peered out of, expecting to see the Space Needle rising in the distance. Except it wasn’t there. The window was, but the Space Needle wasn’t. The window faced east, not west. There was no view of the Space Needle there in real life, only in my dream.

“I’m working this floor today. Now, what’s wrong with your phone?” Nurse Jackie wanted to know, jarring me out of my window problem. “Your wife’s on the line, and she won’t take no for an answer.”

Examining the phone on the bedside table, Nurse Jackie quickly discovered it was unplugged. As soon as she rectified that situation, the phone began to ring. She handed it over, and Mel was already talking by the time I lifted the phone to my ear.

“When you didn’t answer, I was worried. I was afraid something bad had happened, that there had been some kind of complication.”

“Sorry,” I muttered guiltily. “No complication. I must have pulled the plug on the phone without realizing it. What’s up?”

“All hell has broken out,” Mel replied. “One of the protesters from last week—one who got Tasered—was found unresponsive in his apartment earlier this morning. An ambulance crew was summoned. They tried to get his heart going again, but it didn’t work. He was DOA by the time they got him to the hospital. So now it’s gone from being voluntary S.H.I.T. squad involvement to compulsory involvement. In other words, I won’t be home tonight. Do you want me to call Kelly and see if she can come up from Ashland?”

“Don’t call anyone,” I told her. “I’m fine. They had me up and walking twice today. The physical therapist says I’m doing great.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. You’ve got a job to do, now do it.”

It was easy to give her a pep talk, but I knew that there was just a tiny hint of jealousy behind my words. Because I was feeling left behind. Mel was out doing what I usually did—what I would have been doing if my knees hadn’t betrayed me and put me on the disabled list.

“I’ll call you,” she said. “Don’t unplug your phone again, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “I promise. You take care.”

Good to my word, I turned on my cell phone. I had a number of missed calls and six messages. All of the messages were from Kelly, and they all said the same thing: “Call me.”

I did. The relief in her voice as she answered pressed my guilt button in a big way. “Sorry,” I said. “I was sleeping.”

“It’s a good thing you called,” she groused. “I was about to throw the kids in the car and head north to see you.”

“You don’t need to do any such thing. I’m fine, really. They’ve already had me up and walking around. The nurse is here right now, waiting to take me on another stroll. Right?”

“If you’re up for it, I am,” Nurse Jackie said.

“Where’s Mel?” Kelly asked. “I thought she was going to be at the hospital with you.”

Having women fussing and clucking over me tends to get my back up.

“Mel is out working. Somebody has to, you know.”

“If you decide you want me to come up, I will.”

“I’m fine. I’ll be here in the hospital for at least several more days. Mel might want some help after I get home, but for now I’ve got it covered.”

“
We’ve
got it covered,” Nurse Jackie corrected. She was standing with her hands on her hips, tapping her toes with impatience. “Now are we doing that walk or not? If not, I have other patients to see.”

“I’ve got to go,” I told Kelly with no small amount of relief. “Duty calls.”

CHAPTER 7

A
fter our measured stroll—there’s no such thing as racewalking when you’re using a walker—I came back to my room to a stream of visitors. Evidently Mel’s one-day moratorium had been lifted, and visitors came in droves to see me.

People from work stopped by, including Squad B’s secretary, Barbara Galvin, who arrived armed with a box of chocolates, and Harry I. Ball, who came prepared to eat them. Two of the ladies from Belltown Terrace showed up. One of them was a knee-replacement veteran and the other was a knee-replacement candidate, so their visit was really more of a recon expedition than it was a cheerleading session.

So pardon me if I’m not all cheery about having people sitting around on uncomfortable chairs, staring at me while I’m only half dressed and lying in bed, especially when the one person I would have liked to have had there was off in the wilds of Bellingham chasing bad guys.

I was glad when the last of the visitors finally got shooed out and Nurse Jackie showed up for her last set of vitals and meds.

“How are you on pain meds?” she asked as she fastened the blood pressure cuff around my arm.

“Fine,” I said.

She glowered at me. “So you’re Superman?” she demanded. “You’re telling me you don’t need any pain meds?”

“They give me weird dreams,” I admitted. “I’d like to back off on them some.”

“Let me tell you something,” she said. “You’re not the first tough guy who’s been wheeled onto this floor. If you want those fine new knees of yours to work, you need to do the rehab. If you don’t take the pain meds, you won’t sleep and you won’t do the rehab, and if you don’t do the rehab . . . In other words, dreams don’t kill you, but don’t waste my time by not doing the rehab. Get my drift?”

I nodded. Nurse Jackie was about five feet nothing and as round as she was tall, but she had a glare that would have set that long-ago nun, Sister Mary Katherine, back on her heels. I got the message.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Give me the damn pills.”

She gave them to me, along with my blood thinners and antibiotics and stool softeners, and stood right there watching until I had downed them all.

“Good boy,” she said with a grin and a pat on the shoulder before she turned down the lights and hustled out of the room.

I lay there in the semidarkness, still thinking about my earlier visitors and wondering where the drugs would take me that night. It was a little like standing in line at a roller coaster when you already have your ticket and you’re just waiting for the attendant to lock you into your car. You more or less know what’s coming, but you don’t know how bad it’s going to be.

It still bothered me that in my dream, Lieutenant Davis had been standing in front of a window view that didn’t exist, but since he didn’t exist either, it seemed odd to find that odd. What really surprised me was how much his appearance had triggered my memories of that time. Usually I keep them locked away in a tight little box—boxes, actually: a literal one, a cigar box inside a banker’s box, and a mental one. It was that one I scrolled through as the hospital corridor went still and silent outside my room.

It was close to fifty years later, but I still had vivid memories of my first day in country. It was hot that Friday afternoon. I had expected hot; it was the jungle, after all. What I hadn’t expected was the hot red dust that got into everything. I had some chow and had settled into my bunk when Lieutenant Davis came looking for me. I leaped to attention, but he put me at ease.

“Time for your official welcome to C Company,” he said. “I came to give you your cards.”

“Cards?” I asked, thinking he was talking about some kind of required ID card that hadn’t been made known to me. “What cards?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a box of playing cards. Counting out four of them, he handed them over to me. “These,” he said.

They were crisply brand new, with no ground-in red dust, but otherwise they were ordinary in every way—with one notable exception.

“These are all the same card,” I pointed out, looking down at a handful of matching aces of spades. “Shouldn’t they all be different?”

“Welcome to ’Nam,” Lieutenant Davis said. “And to the world of modern warfare. Here in C Company, we’re playing head games with Charlie, a form of psychological warfare. He’s a superstitious kind of guy, so when we take someone out, we leave a little message—a calling card, if you will—as though the card we left on him had his name on it. Like he was marked for death.”

Lieutenant Davis closed the box and put the rest of the deck back in his pocket. “I gave you four,” he said. “If you’re a good shot and need more, you know where to find them. Oh, and something else.”

He reached inside his shirt and pulled out the copy of
The Rise and Fall
I had seen him reading earlier that afternoon
.
It was frayed and tattered, and the pages were stained reddish brown from the dust. It was also thick—sixteen hundred pages’ worth.

“It’s not mine,” he told me. “I borrowed it from Lieutenant Fowler, one of the other lieutenants. I decided not to finish it this time through. As I said, I already know how it ends, so I told Lieutenant Fowler I was lending it to you. This will give you something to read in your spare time, and when you finish, there’ll be a pop quiz.”

With that he turned and sauntered away. I was surprised to see what looked like a long sword hanging on his back. I turned to one of the guys in the tent, Corporal Lara.

“Is he serious? He’s going to give me a test on this?”

“That’s just Lennie D.’s way of keeping us all engaged,” Lara assured me. “He’ll expect you to read the book, and he’ll talk to you about it, but there won’t be an actual test.”

“And he’s serious about the cards?”

“Dead serious,” Lara told me. “In fact, he and the other three lieutenants wrote to the card company, and they sent them back packs of cards that are full of nothing but aces of spades. I saw a copy of the letter. They said they were glad to do their part to win the war. And that’s what C Company is called—ace of spades.”

“So what is he, some kind of card shark?”

“No, Lennie D.’s a West Pointer. A good guy, too. He’s been in country a long time—going on seven months. He’s a born leader, and he’s turned C Company into the best there is. He’s been scheduled to go on R and R several times, but they keep putting it off. Heard he’s got a girlfriend, a flight attendant, who’s supposed to meet up with him in Tokyo. Somebody was saying they might get married while he’s there on leave.”

I thought about Karen. What if I didn’t come home? Would she marry someone else? Would her old boyfriend, Maxwell Cole, the guy I’d stolen her from, come nosing back around? But we had talked it over before I left and we’d both decided we’d be better off waiting until I came home before scheduling a wedding. Now I wasn’t so sure.

I held up the book. “He really expects me to read this whole damned thing?”

“The whole damned thing,” Corporal Lara agreed. “And believe me, you’ll make a better impression on Lennie D. if you do it immediately, if not sooner.”

“What’s the deal with the knife?”

“It’s not a knife,” Lara corrected. “It’s a Montagnard sword. There’s probably a story behind it, but it goes with him everywhere. Everybody else complains about carrying their packs. He carries his pack and the sword, and never gripes about it, either.”

That Friday was my first night in camp, fresh from basic training, scared to death, and more than a little jet-lagged, so they gave me time to get settled in. Since I had nothing better to do, I started reading the book that very night on a cot in a four-man tent where it was far too hot to sleep anyway.

I have never been a history buff. Mr. Gleason’s American history class at Ballard High School was beyond boring. I sat in the back row and fell asleep at my desk almost every day while he droned on and on from a wooden desk at the front of the classroom. Believe me, I wasn’t the only one of my classmates who dozed his way through the Gettysburg Address and the bombing of Hiroshima.

But somehow,
The Rise and Fall
grabbed me, from the very first words, because I could see that this was an evil that had been allowed to grow and fester. When the people who should have been paying attention didn’t, the Third Reich had come very close to taking over the world.

Saturday during the day I went out on patrol for the first time, accompanied by Corporal Lara and two other guys, Mike and Moe. Their last names are lost to memory now, but they both hailed from West Virginia, where they had grown up hunting and fishing. Both of them were said to be crack shots. All three of the other guys on patrol that day were younger than I was, but they had all been in the service and in country for several months. The truth is, I was scared as hell, but I tried not to let on. I also figured that since I was going out with some of C Company’s most experienced soldiers, I was probably in fairly good hands.

We came back in without any of us having fired a shot. We were in the chow line when Lieutenant Davis showed up. He made straight for me.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“There wasn’t much happening out there today,” I told him.

He grinned. He had a funny, lopsided grin that made you feel comfortable around him—as long as you hadn’t screwed up. If you had screwed up, he’d read you the riot act with enough cuss words to turn the air blue, and when he was finished with you, it was clear that whatever mistake you might have made, you wouldn’t be making that one again.

I was standing there, holding my plate and my silverware.

“Sit,” he said, motioning me toward a table. “Eat. Don’t let me stop you.”

I sat. He settled down on the camp stool across from me.

“You’re from Seattle.”

It was a statement, not a question. Obviously he’d been going through my file. “Yes, sir.”

“Always wanted to go there,” he said. “My girlfriend is living in Florida at the moment, but that’s where some of her family lives now—the Seattle area. I’m hoping they’ll send me to Fort Lewis, south of there, when I get back stateside.”

He paused for a moment and seemed to be examining a mental list of things he wanted to discuss.

“I understand your BA is in Criminal Justice?” he asked.

“That’s right,” I said with a nod. “I want to be a cop. That’s what I’m hoping anyway.”

“Do you have a girl waiting for you?”

“Fiancée,” I said. “Karen. We decided not to get married until I get home.”

“Probably a good idea,” he said. “Your paperwork says your name is Jonas. Unusual name. Is that what you go by?”

Jonas is an odd name, unless maybe you’re busy curing polio. As a little kid growing up with that none-too-common name, I hated it as soon as I learned to write it. I would have loved to be a Jimmy, or a Johnny, or even a Richard. So Jonas was bad, but once you combined it with my middle name, Piedmont, and tacked a Beaumont on the end, it became that much worse.

Year after year, in grade school and later in high school, I had to do battle with new teachers and explain that the name in their grade books wasn’t the name I wanted to be called. I was happy for them to use my initials, J.P., in class, while most of the kids I grew up with called me Beau. The fact that the lieutenant had bothered asking if I had a preference about what people called me made Lennie D. an exception to every possible army rule.

“My friends call me Beau,” I said.

“Okay then,” Lieutenant Davis said, clapping me on the shoulder. “We’re all friends here. Beau it is. How’s that book going?”

“Slowly,” I said. “I’m not a fast reader.”

“Ever hear of Evelyn Wood?”

“Who?”

“It’s a class in speed reading. You might look into it sometime. But I’m glad you’re reading it. Like I told you yesterday, when you finish, you can give me a report.”

“You mean like an actual book report? In writing?”

He looked at me with that funny crooked grin of his. “Do I look like an English teacher to you? No, when you finish the book, bring it back to me and we’ll talk about it. Man to man.”

I wanted to ask if he always gave new arrivals reading assignments, but I didn’t. He stood up then and sauntered off to talk to someone else.

Other than our first meeting when I arrived at C Company, that was the only conversation I ever had with the man. A few days later things really started heating up in the highlands. By the end of July I had gone from being a green newbie to being an experienced fighter. I actually ended up using one of my aces, but mostly we were too busy staying alive to think about psychological warfare. I never got around to asking for a replacement.

On the morning of August second, A Company came through, hot on the trail of what they thought to be a vulnerable band of North Vietnamese. It turned out to be a well-laid trap. By the time their platoon leaders realized what was happening, it was too late. Within minutes, their lieutenant and their sergeant were both dead, and C Company was summoned to come to their rescue.

We went into the fight with Lieutenant Davis leading the way. I was in the thick of it when something hit me in the chest and knocked me on my butt. When I fell, I must have hit my head on something. By the time I got my wits back, all hell had broken loose. A corpsman found me and dragged me back to camp, where I spent two days in the hospital tent being treated for a concussion and a broken rib. When I came back around, I learned that Lennie D. was dead. He had been hit in the back by shrapnel from a mortar round while trying to drag two injured soldiers to safety.

Lieutenant Davis was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his bravery that day, bravery that cost him his life, fighting a war the politicians were busy deciding not to win. He didn’t receive an award for saving my life, but he should have, because he did.

I remember something hitting me in the chest during the firefight. It hit me hard enough that it knocked the wind out of me and put me on the ground. I was unconscious for a while. I don’t remember the guy who picked me up and helped me back to camp, where the medics were amazed to discover that where there should have been a bloody, gaping wound on my chest there was nothing but some serious bruising. It wasn’t until they brought me back my stuff that I found out what had happened. I had been carrying
The Rise and Fall
inside my shirt, the same way Lennie D. had been carrying it when he handed it to me. The jagged pieces of metal that otherwise would have taken my life only made it as far as page 1,562. If William Shirer had taken forty fewer pages to tell his story, or if I had been a faster reader and had already finished the book and returned it, there’s no telling what would have happened, but I’m guessing there’s a good possibility that I wouldn’t be here today.