This Enemy Town (20 page)

Five seconds later the EMTs eased through the door with the stretcher, followed by someone I recognized: Professor Medwin Black. Before I could even begin to wonder what he was doing at the hospital instead of overseeing the musical at Mahan Hall, Dorothy screamed. I turned my head and watched as her eyes rolled back in their sockets and she fainted dead away. “Dorothy? What the hell?”

The form on the stretcher stirred. The left side of his face was covered by a bandage that wrapped completely around his head, and his neck was encased in a brace. “Mother? What are you doing here?” he slurred, before he, too, lost consciousness.

The casualty was Midshipman Kevin Hart.

How we all fit into the private treatment room
without a shoehorn, I'll never know.

Kevin lay on the gurney, woozy but conscious, and Dorothy sat in a chair—a regular one, without wheels—appearing more alert than I'd seen her in weeks.

“How are you feeling, Kev? Can I get you anything?” Dorothy shot up and down from her chair like a jack-in-a-box, with Medwin Black and me running interference to keep her from actually climbing up onto the gurney with her son.

Kevin's left eye was turning black and he'd been X-rayed. No broken bones, thank heaven. We were awaiting the arrival of a plastic surgeon who'd been called in for consultation about the nasty gash on his cheek.

“What happened?” I asked Kevin after doctor number one came and went.

“I crashed my car,” he replied, squinting at me through his one good eye. “I was moving it from in front of Mahan to a space along the seawall.” He paused, as if trying to piece it all together. “I remember feeling groggy. Then
wham
!”

“He missed the ninety-degree turn at the end of McNair and drove head-on into the seawall,” Professor Black explained. “He was driving slowly, thank goodness, but the air bag deployed, hitting him square in the face.”

“Oh, his face, his poor face,” Dorothy crooned. “It'll be all right, Kev. Of course it will be all right. Don't you worry about a thing.”

To my way of thinking, Kevin had plenty to worry about. The results of his blood test, for one thing, if, as I suspected, he'd been driving under the influence. The penalties for that are severe, especially on a federal reservation.

His eye, for another. I cringed at the sight of the bruise that was blossoming around his eye socket. Hopefully it was simple, just a humdinger of a shiner. If Kevin's vision were impaired, that would shelve any plans he had of becoming a pilot.

He turned his head, and winced in pain. “I tried to call you, Mom. I didn't want you to miss me.”

“Miss you? What do you mean?”

Medwin Black smiled. “Adam Monroe, our Beadle, was just diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis. The doctors grew concerned about his liver, so Kevin was slated to go on.” Professor Black turned to his student. “But you'll get your chance next year, Kevin. I'm sure of it.”

“Tough break, Kevin,” I said with a smile. I turned to Professor Black. “So who ended up playing the Beadle?”

“And someone had to sub for Jonas Fogg, too.” Professor Black twiddled with his beard. “Never happened before, to be two actors down. It was a bit of musical chairs,” he said, finally getting around to answering my question, “but we got it covered. One of the grave diggers had played Beadle Bamford in high school, and we sent Dean Kelchner in for Fogg.”

“Kelchner?” Kevin erupted, groaned, pressed his palm flat against his temple. “Kelchner couldn't act his way out of a wet paper bag.”

Professor Black grinned mischievously. “There is that,” he said. “But we wrote his speech down and pinned it to the back of one of the lunatics. Kelchner managed fairly well.”

“The show must go on,” Dorothy said in a small, sad
voice just as the plastic surgeon blew into the room, his lab coat flapping. He shooed everyone out except Kevin and his mother.

“Just a few stitches,” Kevin told us after the surgeon was done and the nurse allowed us back into the treatment room. A small, neat bandage covered the wound under Kevin's impressively bruised eye.

Dorothy hunched in a corner, arms folded across her chest. “You need to see a specialist.”

“They have fine plastic surgeons at Bethesda, Mother. Some of the best in the country.”

“They just don't want to pay for proper specialists, is all. Damn the military.”

I could understand her point of view. First her husband, now her son, was getting, in her words, royally screwed by the military.

A few minutes later doctor number one returned and cleared us all out again. I leaned against the wall outside the door to Kevin's room, engaged in some serious multi-tasking. With my right ear, I listened to Medwin Black tell about the cruise he took to the Greek isles the previous summer. My left ear stayed glued to the door, trying to overhear what the doctor inside the treatment room was saying.

“What were you taking, young man?”

There was a pause, during which time Medwin was dancing to the music of bouzoukis on Rhodes late into the summer night; meanwhile, I imagined Kevin's brows lifting in surprise. “Taking? I wasn't taking anything! Glucosamine for my knee. That's all I can think of.”

“Were you nervous? Stressed out? You exhibit all the symptoms of an overdose of tranquilizers.”

“Kev?” Dorothy again, playing the mother card. “Did you drink anything before the show?”

“Jeeze! I ate lunch. Drank milk with that. When I got to Mahan, I had a Dr Pepper. That's it. Say, Doc, you don't think I was
drinking,
do you?”

Next to me Medwin snorted, and I realized he had finished his travelogue and was listening to the conversation, too. “Hah!” he grunted. “I've seen midshipmen go on stage so pickled that even if you shot them, they wouldn't fall down.”

“No, no,” the doctor on the other side of the door hastened to add. “There's absolutely no trace of alcohol in your blood.”

“Of course there isn't,” Dorothy chimed in. “He's an actor. He had a show to do.”

“Did you find traces of tranquilizers, then?” Kevin asked with a tinge of panic.

“No, and I wouldn't expect to. Most tranquilizers are completely metabolized by the body.”

“I can't explain it, then,” Kevin said.

“A mistake,” said his mother.

Ten minutes later Kevin was released. Over the tearful protestations of his mother, Professor Black drove the midshipman back to the Academy.

I chauffeured Dorothy to her home in Davidsonville, settled her into a chair in front of the TV, fixed her a cup of tea and a bowl of hot oatmeal with butter and brown sugar, and waited with her until I was sure she would keep it down.

It was nearly seven before I returned home to Paul. He'd gone ahead and fixed dinner, the sweetheart, although about the only good thing you can say about Paul's five-alarm chili is that it clears your sinuses.

I was applying a medicinal glass of red wine directly to the inferno raging in my stomach when Murray Simon called. “Paul, pick up!” I yelled.

When Paul joined us on the line, Murray said, “Hannah, I have good news and bad news.”

“Oh for heaven's sake, Murray, get on with it! Please!”

“The good news is that the FBI is dropping the case against you,” Murray said. “Seems they picked it up under pressure from NCIS, and now that the sting operation
is over, they don't think there's enough evidence to convict you.”

“I'm so relieved.” I could actually feel my blood pressure going down.

“The bad news is that NCIS isn't similarly inclined. They may be taking the case forward on their own.”

I was speechless, gasping for air.

Paul filled in the blank. “If there isn't enough evidence for the FBI, why is there enough for NCIS?”

“Well, there is that other matter.”

“Murray!” I'd found my voice at last. I actually screamed into the phone. “Sometimes you can be the most
infuriating
man!”

“What other matter?” Paul was spitting nails.

“We know who NCIS's key witness is, the person who saw Hannah leaving Mahan Hall the day Jennifer Goodall was murdered.”

I gripped the arm of my chair so tightly that I must have left my fingerprints embedded in the varnish. “Who?”

“Are you sitting down?”

“I'm sitting down.”

Murray cleared his throat. “It was Dorothy Hart.”

That night I lay in bed, numbly studying the
shifting shadows cast on the wall by the light of the full moon shining through the branches of the tree outside my window.

For a long while Paul lay awake beside me, trying out possible scenarios, but after a particularly lengthy lull in the conversation, followed by regular snuffling sounds, I turned my head to find that he'd drifted off to sleep.

I'd thought Dorothy was my friend. We'd worked together, laughed together, cried together. How could she betray me with such a monstrous lie?

I knew I had been nowhere near the back of Nimitz Library on the day Jennifer Goodall died. Dorothy had to know it, too.

Was she simply mistaken? That hardly seemed likely.

Was she purposely trying to frame me? As strange as her behavior had been in recent days, I couldn't believe that either.

My bet, after staring at the ceiling for quite some time, was that in pointing the finger at me, Dorothy believed she was diverting suspicion from somebody else, somebody far more important to her than I was.

There were only two people on that list: her husband and her son.

Kevin, I knew from Emma, had an ironclad alibi. He'd been doing a Physical Readiness Test at the time of the crime. The PRT was a killer of another kind: sixty-five situps, forty push-ups, run a mile and a half in ten minutes or less, or a midshipman doesn't graduate. Kevin's PRT had been monitored by a couple of straight-arrow firsties.

Ted Hart had an ironclad alibi, too. He'd been briefing the Joint Chiefs.

When I asked him to, Murray Simon had confirmed both alibis.

For a change of scenery, I turned over in bed and watched the digital clock cycle from 12:01 to 12:02 to …

Three!

Hannah, you idiot!
There were
three
people on Dorothy's short list. Her husband, her son, and
herself.

I'd always discounted Dorothy as a suspect. She was too frail to overpower a healthy young woman like Jennifer Goodall. Besides, Jennifer's body had been found in Sweeney Todd's trunk. There was no way Dorothy, in her weakened condition, could have moved her body from …

I sat up straight in bed. I switched on the bedside lamp. I pounded Paul on the back until he groaned and opened one bleary eye.

“Dorothy did it!” I shouted, slapping him lightly on the thigh to emphasize each syllable. “I'm not sure how, but she did it. She got Jennifer to come to Mahan Hall on some pretext, lured her up to Sweeney's tonsorial parlor, then clobbered her with the hammer and pushed her into the trunk.”

I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back against the headboard. “I've been working on the assumption that Jennifer had been killed elsewhere and her body moved to the trunk because Dorothy told me that's what happened. But I just this minute realized that I only have Dorothy's word that it happened that way.”

Next to me, Paul fluffed up his pillow, folded it in half
and stuffed it between his back and the headboard. “I thought Dorothy had an alibi. Didn't you tell me she was getting a manicure?”

“According to Dorothy.” I slapped myself on the forehead. “Damn! Why didn't I ask Murray to check that one out, too?”

Paul rolled over on his side to face me. “Don't be so hard on yourself, Hannah.” He stroked my arm. “Okay. Let's assume for a minute that you're right and that Dorothy is the killer. What's her motive?”

“Try this. Somehow Dorothy found out that Jennifer Goodall was blackmailing her former boss, Hart, over that contract business. Either Hart himself told Dorothy or Dorothy figured it out. Maybe she ran across her husband's checkbook or something. So, Dorothy killed Jennifer to shut her up, in order to salvage her husband's career.”

“Works for me.”

“Or, Dorothy really believed her husband was having an affair with Jennifer Goodall and killed her in a fit of jealous rage.”

“That works for me, too.”

“Or both of the above,” I finished triumphantly.

“What I really don't understand is what happened to Kevin,” Paul mused. “Here he's all set to go on for the ailing star, it's his big break, and he blows it all by taking some sort of tranquilizer. That just doesn't wash, does it?”

“Okay, let's think about that.” I gnawed thoughtfully on my thumbnail. “If Kevin didn't take the tranquilizers on purpose, where did he get them from?”

“It couldn't have been from the dining hall,” Paul said, gently pulling my hand away from my mouth. “That food comes directly from the kitchen in family-style serving dishes, and gets passed around the table. Everyone at Kevin's table would have been whoozy.”

“Kevin said he picked up a Dr Pepper when he got to Mahan.”

“Then Kevin's lying, Hannah. There aren't any soft drink machines in Mahan.”

“He didn't have to go to a soft drink machine. The cast and crew have a refrigerator in a little room backstage. We keep a supply of soft drinks in there. You drop a couple of quarters in a coffee can….” My voice trailed off.

I could see myself—was it only three weeks ago?—sitting in the tech room listening to Gadget as he helpfully explained the rules of the fridge. “And I think I know how Kevin ingested the tranquilizer! I just have to prove it! I'll need to have another look at Mahan Hall.”

“Hannah?”

“Huh?”

“Can't it wait until morning?”

I burrowed under the covers and wiggled closer to my husband, resting my head in the crook of his arm. “Professor Ives, are you trying to distract me?”

“I certainly am,” he whispered, his breath warm against my hair.