“That’s it?” asked Jonathan, hoping for a lot more and suddenly feeling an uncontrollable rush of frustration take hold of him. Come on, spit it out! His patience with everything was wearing thin because he was exhausted. He wanted things to be so much simpler, with far more clarity, requiring less of an arduous mental crawl, which he would have to muster in his sad state.
“Yep, and a phone number,” the jerk replied efficiently. “Oh, there’s more: five calls on her voice mail from other people also claiming to have been there, and they left their contact info.”
Jonathan wrote down the numbers and hung up.
It was still difficult to believe Linda had done such an incredibly selfless act. Sure, it was thoughtful. But now she was paying a heavy price for her on-the-air query. The troubling thoughts prompted Jonathan to call the hospital. He spoke with the head nurse. Linda was stable, asleep, but still in a grave condition. He would be with her soon. But it was late and he first had to make his calls before doing so would be rude.
By ten-thirty, Jonathan had called all those who had left a message with Linda, with the exception of Sammy Dupree, who he thought might take longer than the others. But none of their accounts appeared useful. Either they had served on the mainland, in bases located in Germany or the Netherlands, or they had been in the Baltic during periods that were irrelevant to Jonathan’s case. Perhaps Dupree will be more useful, he thought.
The phone rang a couple times before Dupree answered, and Jonathan explained who he was.
“Man, I’m sure sorry ’bout cho wife,” Dupree said, his voice deep and sedate. Jonathan felt a comforting sincerity in the man’s words.
“So, you were in northern Europe?” Jonathan asked.
“Sure was,” Dupree said and then a long breath caught Jonathan’s ear, as if the man was smoking. “Now, I don’t want no trouble, you know. And I don’t want to go to court, or nothin’ like that.”
“You don’t have to,” lied Jonathan. “I’m only looking for leads.”
There was silence on the other end for several seconds—enough hesitation for Jonathan to tell himself not to be too pushy.
“I was there, around the middle of March, 1989,” Dupree said. “I ’member real well, cuz som’ strange happened. I didn’t even know the details until days later, when my shipmates told me. What I know is just what I hear. I didn’t see nothin’ from down there.”
“Down where?”
“The galley.”
Jonathan didn’t understand. “Galley?”
“In the sub,” said Dupree as if Jonathan should have known. “I was chief cook on a submarine.”
“Which one?”
“I’d rather not say on the phone,” Dupree replied, his voice withdrawing, followed by a long exhale telling Jonathan he was nearing the butt of his cigarette. “I’m a simple man and don’t want no problems, you know.”
“I promise,” assured Jonathan. “I can keep everything you tell me confidential. And if it’s helpful, I’ll gladly pay you for your trouble.”
“Well, okay then. Can we meet tomorrow?”
They arranged the rendezvous for the next morning.
Jonathan left his office and headed out through the side door of the building, hopping into a waiting cab in the dark alley. Every move he made was designed to minimize exposure to those who wanted him dead.
During the five-minute drive to Charity Hospital, Jonathan replayed Dupree’s words. He did this again on his walk from the lobby to the elevator and to the ICU. Every word. He was excited. With luck, whatever Dupree would have to say would have some link with the USS Meecham or the plane crash. But his excitement quickly vanished when he saw the cop standing outside Linda’s door. The seriousness of the moment had set in, even more so when he entered the cold room and stepped to her side. He gazed at her blank expression, her eyes closed, her body silently struggling to survive. It’ll be another long night, he told himself.
* * *
The next morning, using Allen’s car as a precaution, Jonathan left for his meeting with Dupree, taking a lengthy, convoluted route to make sure he wasn’t followed.
He spotted the hangar-shaped bus maintenance depot on Magazine Street and parked in the adjacent alley. He walked to the corner and waited by the storefront of a tobacco shop, as Dupree had asked.
There were few cars on the street. The sidewalks were vacant. The desolation made him nervous—more than he already was. And after all that had happened, he wasn’t about to blindly trust anyone, not even Dupree, no matter how sincere he had sounded on the phone. Jonathan gazed at his car, calculating the seconds it would take to run to it, unlock the door, jump in, start the engine and bolt out of there, if something went wrong.
At eleven, nothing had happened. Eleven-fifteen the same. By eleven-twenty, Jonathan was convinced the man would not show up. He glanced westward. Not a soul in sight. And then he glanced toward the east, where a man headed his way waved from a block away, on the other side of the street. He was black, wearing a long white apron, jeans and a dark T-shirt. Jonathan suspected he was employed in a nearby restaurant. The man casually waved again at the suited lawyer as he began crossing the street.
“You’re Dupree?” asked Jonathan not yet letting go of his nervousness. He felt better when the man nodded and returned a wide, gap toothed smile.
They shook hands. Dupree’s was warm and felt coarse.
“Call me Sammy.” He checked his wristwatch, then eyed each end of the street and turned to the alleyway. “Let’s walk over there, outta the spotlight.”
“Can I drive you somewhere and buy you a coffee?” Jonathan asked, hoping it was a better option than to walk down a small side-street with a total stranger. “My car’s right here.”
Dupree walked ahead of Jonathan. “No, I’m on break and need to get back in a few minutes.”
Jonathan didn’t insist and simply accompanied the man to the narrow street behind the bus depot. Dupree, seeming quite at ease, patted Jonathan’s shoulder and said, “So you a lawyer, huh?”
“That’s right. That should make me a good listener.”
“That’s not what I hear ’bout them lawyers.”Jonathan chuckled, “Whatever you’ve heard is probably true—good and bad.”
“I thought so, and mostly bad,” said Dupree with a deep laugh. He stopped and leaned against a stack of wooden crates.
“This lawyer is all ears. Tell me what happened.”
“What I got may be completely useless to you, so I ain’t promising nothin’.”
“Understood.”
“I served on the USS Bergall, a Sturgeon Class nuclear-powered fast attack submarine. We were on a Northern Run—what we call our deployments in the North Atlantic and Arctic. We sailed from Norfolk to Europe and stayed submerged for about forty days with very little action. But then, I remember sometime in the middle of March, something horrible happened. I was in the galley preparing meals for the crew when all of a sudden the lights started flashing—the signal for going all-quiet.”
“All quiet?”
“Yeah, when a Soviet vessel was in the area, we needed all hands to stop making noise. So the lights were the signal for us to clamp down. In the galley, that meant turning off the ovens, securing the pans and cookware, putting everything back in the refrigerators. And, of course, the guys in the dining area headed to their stations.”
Jonathan didn’t think this too unusual, given what he had read about the cat and mouse games between NATO and the Soviets.
Dupree rubbed his curly, graying hair and added, “We stayed like that for about an hour and then we surfaced—something a sub on patrol only does if it’s on fire or it’s reaching port. We were neither. I knew something was wrong. But it was later that I discovered how wrong.”
“Where were you then?”
“In the Baltic—that too I found out later. Keep in mind, a cook always finds out—just not right away.”
Jonathan crossed his arms. “What happened?”
Before a
nswering, Dupree looked over his shoulder, gazed at the other end of the alley and then stared at Jonathan with his large close-set eyes. “We surfaced so we could shoot down a plane. We had two sailors with Stinger missiles combing the sky in the pitch black night looking for the damn thing and, if that wasn’t weird enough, we also had a radio operator trying to contact the aircraft.”
“What?” asked Jonathan, finding that awfully contradictory. “To tell the plane what? That you were about to destroy it?”
“No,” Dupree uttered, shaking his head. “To make sure they were American.”
Jonathan was shocked. What he’d just heard brought some sense to the picture he’d painted in his mind from the moment Tantina had made her farfetched claim. An American crew blown out of the sky. It was still baffling, but beginning to sound more believable.
“We were about to shoot down one of our own.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“You bet I am,” Dupree said, pushing himself away from the crates. “Half the crew knew about it before breakfast. Worse yet, at first the captain refused the shoot-down order when he found out it was an American plane.”
“But they did shoot it down, right?”
Dupree rubbed his jaw and shook his head. “They sure did,” he said solemnly. “They blew it out of the sky. I also heard that the officers on bridge had picked up the pilot’s distress call. Let me tell you, there were some confused faces on board. They were just kids, you know. Most of them eighteen, nineteen. Kids from Iowa, from small towns in Kansas and Georgia, where you still worship the Star Spangled Banner, eat apple pie and trust your government. So for all of us, weird stuff like that is hard to swallow. Things got worse. About a week later we surfaced again, in the middle of the Atlantic and the captain was replaced.”
“Replaced?”
“Yeah, for initially refusing the attack order. I heard it first in the officer’s mess. A helicopter came by, plucked the guy out and dropped off a new asshole. That’s how screwed up it got, man. When we returned to Norfolk ’bout a month later, a Navy lawyer and another mean-looking guy in a suit questioned us—the whole crew, one by one—and made each of us sign a paper that said we wouldn’t talk about the incident, or else we’d go to jail.”
“A confidentiality agreement.”
“Whatever you call it,” Dupree said, shaking his head. “Them bastards. They knew they’d done something real bad.”
Jonathan’s thoughts were scattered by the complexity of Dupree’s revelation. If there was anyone who’d corroborate Dupree it was Erland, back in Sweden.
* * *
Not far from the French Quarter, on Broad Street, Jonathan pulled into the parking lot of a small office building. It was the location of AGI Forensics, the private company Derek had recommended as the city’s most reliable independent lab to perform tests on remains.
Jonathan sighed as he gazed out the windshield at the entrance and then looked down at the front passenger seat, where lay a red baseball cap. It was Matt’s from high school. Derek had found it among his things years ago, after Matt’s death. The lab had told Jonathan to bring anything that could still have Matt’s hair fibers. And since nothing had survived in Jonathan’s burnt home, he was especially thankful that Derek had kept the cap.
The technicians took the hat and then asked to take samples from Jonathan. They drew his blood, plucked some hair fibers and took a swab from his mouth. The whole thing was done in less than twenty minutes, but everything seemed to pass slowly. Jonathan was overwhelmed with grief and stress. Mundane things had morphed into colossal challenges. And there was nothing he could do about it except to be brave and pursue the truth.
As Jonathan headed back to the hospital, he answered his cell phone. “Who did you say you were?” he asked, barely able to hear the voice through the poor signal.
“Michael with AGI. We’re here at your brother’s grave, sir. We just wanted to let you know we’re about to load the remains and should have them at our lab in the next hour or so. Someone will contact you as soon as we know something.”
Jonathan acknowledged the man and hung up. He took a deep breath and rested his head back. “I just want to know the truth,” he whispered to himself. “Forgive me, Matt, if I’ve made a mistake.” His eyes began to water, and the entire drive to Linda’s hospital was filled with memories.
12
Unless you are ill, hospitals are awful places to sleep. If it’s not the smell of disinfectants, it’s the bright lights or the crappy attitudes of overworked, underpaid and underappreciated nurses and nurse’s aides. For Jonathan, the horribly uncomfortable old chair was another reason. And for the price of medical care nowadays, he ought to have been laying on a bed of ivory, padded with ostrich feather pillows and the finest Egyptian cotton. Jonathan had just woken up when the door opened.
“I’m Officer Gantreau,” whispered the uniformed woman, peaking her head into the room. “I’m the new shift and just wanted to say a quick hello.”
He nodded and smiled and then gazed back at Linda, his guilt setting in again. She was asleep, the serenity of her face immediately warming his heart. She had made it through another night. The battle wasn’t over, but she was winning.
Jonathan had turned on the television, but left it muted as the local morning news played. He gazed at the screen, his mind drowning in the morsels of traumatic emotions that seemed to take up every part of his cranial cavity.
Suddenly, a grainy picture popped up over the shoulder of the anchorman—a picture that looked awfully familiar.
Oh, no! Sammy! Jonathan jumped to his feet and turned up the volume. He stood in disbelief, his chest seizing as if it had been instantly frozen. Dupree was dead, his body discovered floating in a canal under the Filmore Avenue bridge, on the city’s north side. It wasn’t Dupree’s neighborhood. He’d told Jonathan he lived in Gretna, on the south side of the river.
“Police are investigating the cause of death,” the anchorman said before switching to another story.
Jonathan turned off the television. He hurriedly dialed Derek at his precinct and counted the seconds before his brother-in-law picked up the phone. In the most abbreviated way possible, Jonathan explained to Derek what he knew about Dupree and that they had met to discuss evidence linked to the Victory Lines case.
“This is getting completely out of hand,” Derek said loudly. The empathetic tone he’d had a day earlier was gone. “Meet me right now at the crime lab.” He gave Jonathan directions to the Scientific Criminal Investigation Division, as the new facility was officially called. It had opened just two months earlier.
Jonathan had arrived as quickly as he could, about twenty minutes after his call to Derek. He’d never set foot in such a place. As he headed through the lobby of the lab, he conjured up scenes from movies and television shows.
Derek was standing against the wall in the lobby, and he greeted Jonathan with a concerned gaze. “Come with me.” Derek led Jonathan through a set of double-doors and down a long hallway. “I already spoke with the supervising deputy coroner. The autopsy will take place in the next day or two.”
“But we—”
“Hear me out,” Derek said, interrupting his brother-in-law. “But I’ve arranged for another of the coroner’s staff to take an initial look at the body right now. It’s not as thorough as the autopsy, but it will give us some clues on the cause of death.”
“Good.”
“Are you sure about your suspicions? I mean, people die every day and—”
“I promise I’m not making this up. Just like Linda has been targeted, so was this man. Someone has gone to great lengths to silence him.”
Derek introduced Jonathan to Tony Molina, deputy coroner and toxicology analyst. If it weren’t for Molina’s lab coat, his unshaven face and disheveled hair made him look more like a car mechanic.
“You’re here for the guy brought in early this morning, right? Dupree, that’s his name, right?
“Yes,
yes,” Jonathan said, trying to conceal his eagerness to get things rolling. “This is important.”
“Uh-huh.” Molina checked his watch, his jaw contorting with his steady gum-chewing. He seemed unfazed by Jonathan’s sense of urgency. “All right, come with me.” The deputy coroner led his guests through another set of doors, at which point the temperature dropped significantly.
They entered a large room with six metal tables evenly spaced in the center, three of them topped with supine cadavers—one black man, shirtless, with what looked like a huge gash in his chest, and a black woman, still clothed. Dupree’s body lay on his back on the farthest table. On shelves along the wall were two other cadavers, Caucasians—one fairly bloodied—wrapped in see-through plastic, tied at their feet with white string.
Dupree was naked. The skin of his face was shrunken, his eyes taped shut. A white tag with his name scribbled in black marker ink hung by a string tied to his big toe.
“He was murdered,” Jonathan declared, gazing at Molina and then at Dupree. “I’m sure of it.”
“Well, it would be just one of ten murders this week, and, hell, over three hundred so far this year,” Molina replied with a grin, seeming rather blasé about Jonathan’s claim.
Molina put on examination gloves and picked up a chart on the wall behind Dupree and returned to the body. “71 inches, 189 pounds, black male, aged 41.”
“The decedent was found partially floating on the banks of the canal,” said Derek. “I guess he’d been dead a few hours.”
“I know,” Molina said. He raised Dupree’s left arm. “Other than this small abrasion on his palm, there are no other abrasions or bruises anywhere else on the body. No puncture wounds either, or any signs of blunt trauma.” Molina lowered Dupree’s arm and met Jonathan’s gaze. “It doesn’t appear like a murder to me. The decedent’s clothing was not damaged, and x-rays revealed no broken bones or other internal injuries. Body surface and discoloration of the skin is consistent with drowning.”
“Didn’t the paramedics report an odor of alcohol?” asked Derek.
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