by Dave Conifer
“Yes. In 1974, right? How much has been written?”
“Not much. We haven’t had full access to his papers and I refuse to work until we have access to everything.”
“Where are the papers?”
“They’re here on campus. But I’m not allowed to see them yet. There’s a court order.”
“A court order?”
“Long story,” she said. “ERC contacted me a few years ago when Castle died. I told them I’d love to take the project on. We agreed on a contract that was very generous. It would have kept my grad students busy for years.But then we hit a snag. It turns out that one hand of ERC doesn’t know what the other is doing. Their Community Relations people were anxious to get the project underway and shipped the entire set of papers down. It filled up one of those little trucks, like the ones that deliver newspapers in the morning. But ERC also has some kind of security department up there that doesn’t want me looking at anything they haven’t combed through first. As soon as they heard I had the Papers they were all over me.”
“But what did the other department say about it?” Jonas asked. “The one that gave you the Papers in the first place, I mean? I don’t understand.”
“They clammed right up. As soon as the security folks pushed, the other group backed off. I worked them hard over the phone for weeks. Eventually they wouldn’t even answer my calls.”
“But the Papers are here?”
“Sure, they’re here. But they’re sealed. To me that just means the tape is still on the boxes but it means a whole lot more to the lawyers. I’d be violating a court order if I opened them up. An injunction,” she said, drawing the last word out with a flourish.
“But didn’t the ERC security guys want them back?”
“You bet your buttons they did. So we filed a counter-injunction, or maybe they called it something else, so we wouldn’t have to give them back until the case is completely resolved. They were aggressive so I was too. ERC sent a truck down to pick the Papers up. They thought I’d let them pat me on the head and take my project away. But because we had our counter-injunction those trucks went back to Pittsburgh empty,” she said with obvious pride.
“You didn’t give them back?” Jonas asked.
“No way,” she said firmly. “A deal’s a deal. I have the signed contracts. According to the deal those Papers are mine until I’m done with them. I called a university lawyer as soon as it started getting nasty. He had the boxes moved to a safe location, and filed another bunch of paperwork. That’s where it stands as of now.”
“Is the safe location somewhere on campus?”
“There’s a document storage vault in the engineering tower. If you rode the PRT you went right past it. It’s a tall gray building. I don’t know if it’s really a vault, like in a bank. I’ve never seen it but my Papers are taking up a lot of space there.”
“So you’ve never seen the Papers?”
“I’ve seen the boxes they’re in, but that’s it.”
“And nothing’s been written?” Jonas asked, still finding it hard to believe.
“Almost nothing was written. We received some private material directly from Castle’s son Christopher,” she explained. “We got through some basic biographical sections based on that. It wasn’t covered by the court order. ERC tried to have it included but that didn’t fly. But it doesn’t matter. As soon as the injunction came in we shut the project down.”
“I wonder why ERC is being so stubborn,” he said, hoping to find out what the professor knew about it.
“The security branch, you mean,” said Van Scoy. “The Community Relations branch was very cooperative. They still are. In fact, they’re still funding us fully even though they know we’re not working on it.”
“That’s odd,” Jonas said.
“Not really,” she said. “It’s not much money for them. It’s not worth the paperwork they’d have to go through to cut it off. It’s a big help to us. Corporations are always throwing money away. Why shouldn’t we accept it?”
“So do you think there’s anything interesting about Kennedy in the Papers?” Jonas asked.
“Well, that’s a very broad question, but sure,” she replied. “We know he strongly disliked the president, and the feeling was mutual. I’m sure we’d find evidence of that.”
“How long have the Papers been here?” he asked.
She got up motioned for him to follow her around the corner to where they’d initially met. They walked into her office to a bank of filing cabinets just inside the door. She studied the labels on each drawer before pulling one open. After extracting a manila folder she walked around behind a desk and sat.
“Let’s see,” she said as she pulled pages from the folder. “The shipment arrived on December 12, 1979. There were nineteen cartons of documents. That’s a lot of paper.”
“And they’ve been sitting here untouched ever since then?” Jonas asked. “That’s almost four years.”
“Except for being moved once or twice.” She put down the folder and looked out the window. “The first class of grad students I recruited to work on the Papers have come and gone now. I feel like I betrayed them. Or let them down, at least.”
“How long after the Papers arrived did all this legal mumbo-jumbo start?”
Her eyes returned to the document in her hand. “It all happened within two days,” she said after studying it. “December fourteenth. At least that’s according to the court record. Really, though, it was all on the same day.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“We’ll win,” she said firmly. “Until then I’m standing on principle and not looking at any of the Papers. If we lose it’ll be a different story. I’ll probably photocopy all nineteen boxes before giving them back.”
Jonas couldn’t tell if she was serious but it didn’t matter to him anyway. They talked for a few minutes more but there wasn’t much more to say. After promising to keep in touch, Jonas said goodbye and left the building. Disappointed that the Papers were off-limits for the time being, he didn’t enjoy the ride back downtown as much as he’d been expecting to.
-- Chapter 20 --
Frank Marino could tell something was seriously wrong as soon as he heard the terse phone message from Braden. As he walked along Heinz Street towards The Point, where Braden had told him they would meet, he knew there was only one thing it could be about. It had to be something extremely sensitive to draw the two men out of their offices in the Steel Building to a park that was a dozen blocks away.
He spotted Braden next to the fountain, exactly where he said he would be. “Let’s take a walk,” Braden suggested. They strolled toward the stone markers that outlined the site where the French Fort Duquesne and later the British Fort Pitt once stood in unspoiled wilderness. Marino knew to wait for Braden to explain rather than ask why they were there. The answer came soon enough.
“Remember the reporters?” Braden said after glancing around to make sure nobody was close enough to hear. “The ones you had responsibility for handling? Well, it turns out they’re not as dead as we hoped.”
Marino’s mouth fell open. “Are you sure? We had an eyewitness confirmation on that.”
“Was the eyewitness confirmation from the two clowns with the pipe?” Braden asked. “Anyway, the reporters are in West Virginia. They’re poking around in Becton. That’s Castle’s hometown. So not only are they alive, they’re still digging.”
“But how did you know they were there?”
“We operate on a ‘need to know’ basis, even at your level,” Braden said. “I shouldn’t have to remind you of that. What I need you to do is find out what they’re up to, where they’re headed and what they know.”
“I will, sir, believe me.” They walked to the tip of the Point and stopped. “I didn’t know we had anybody in West Virginia, sir,” Marino remarked.
“Don’t you think there are people in Becton that want secrets to stay secret? Think about it.”
�
�Sir, I accept complete responsibility for this,” Marino said.
“Cut it out, Marino. Just get on it. We can’t afford to lose them again.”
-- Chapter 21 --
It took several passes through the crowded snack bar tables before Reno found Jonas in the Mountain Lair. She finally spotted him leaning against the wall sipping a cup of coffee and reading a newspaper. “Didn’t you see me? I’ve been walking up and down here for twenty minutes!”
“Sorry. Hey, check out the student newspaper,” he said, holding up a copy of The Daily Athenaeum. “They do a pretty good job.”
“There’s no place to sit,” Reno said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay by me. How’d the research go? Was the Becton guy full of it?” Jonas asked as they headed for an exit.
“He left out a few parts but most of it checked out.”
“You’re kidding! That old coot? He was on the money?”
“In a way. Where are we going?”
“How about back to the hotel?” he suggested when they were outside.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“Yeah, I am. Let’s go in there,” he said, pointing to a tiny Greek eatery. ”I haven’t had a gyro in years.”
“Okay. By the looks of it I’d say we can afford it.”
The smell of well-seasoned lamb washed over them over as they walked inside. They found an empty booth by the window and slid in on opposite sides. A heavily-accented teen immediately appeared at the table with menus. They both ordered the Number Ten platter, which featured the “Big Fat Gyro.” After the waitress disappeared Reno started talking about what she’d found at the library.
“I feel kind of bad about all the copies I made. They were all on the house,” she said as she pulled out stacks of paper. “It was ten cents a page but they used the honor system. I just couldn’t be bothered.”
“We’ll pay them back with our Pulitzer money,” Jonas deadpanned.
“I couldn’t believe how much has been written about this PT-109 thing. Everybody has their own take on it. Some people think Kennedy is the greatest hero of all time and some think he was just a rich guy who crashed a boat. They’re still fighting about it today. I’m still not completely sure what to make of it. I just didn’t have enough time.”
“It’s a big deal to Gerson, that’s for sure.”
“The way I look at it is this. I know Gerson thinks Kennedy screwed up. It’s not our job to decide what really happened. We’re just trying to find a motive for Castle. So while I was looking, I concentrated on what the Gersons of the day were saying. And still are saying.”
“Makes sense.”
“Okay. Here’s what I found. Kennedy commanded a boat called PT 109. A PT boat is a little thing. They didn’t even get names. They got numbers. They were little wooden boats with a few guns bolted on. They could also shoot torpedoes. PT boats weren’t the greatest weapon on the ocean because the bigger steel ships could knock them out from long range.”
“Nice boat,” Jonas said.
“Some of the sailors called them ‘plywood coffins.’ But they were good for sneaking around because they were so small and easy to maneuver, especially in the dark.”
“Sounds more like a little sailboat.”
“It had three engines. Sometimes if they were trying to hide they only ran the center one. That one had a deep propeller so it didn’t kick up as big a wake so it was harder to spot from the sky. That’s important. They ran on that single engine a lot for just that reason.”
They took a break to devour the gyros that had arrived. “Yow! That stuff’s hot!” Jonas said as white sauce dribbled down his chin. “At any rate, those little boats seem pretty useless. But I guess that doesn’t matter for us.”
“They had their purpose. But yeah, let’s not get bogged down with that. So his boat was sent to the Solomon Islands. They were supposed to harass Japanese ships that were carrying supplies.” She continued to flip and sort the documents on the table, reading from them whenever she needed to. “You know, the PT boats weren’t as helpless as I’m making it sound. They could skip and dodge around, and surprise the bigger ships. Plenty of big Japanese ships were torpedoed by PT boats.”
Jonas nodded as he wiped more sauce from his chin after his first bite. He knew the taste of gyros would always remind him of PT 109 from that moment on.
“Okay. It’s two in the morning on August 2, 1943. There are Japanese warships all over the place. They’d just gotten shot at by Japanese planes the previous day, so Kennedy was running just the one engine. That’s one of the complaints by the Gerson types. I don’t understand why he was worried about a wake because it was dark with no moon, but what do I know?”
Jonas nodded. “You better eat. I’ll be done before you even start.”
Reno took a healthy bite from her sandwich before continuing with her mouth full. “Now, all of a sudden this Japanese destroyer, the Amagiri, appears out of nowhere.” She paused to dab at her face with a napkin. “It was right on top of them. It rammed the PT boat. It either broke in two, or a big chunk was sliced off, or something pretty drastic. Everybody said something different but we don’t care. Some say the crew of the Amagiri never even knew it had happened because their wake put the fire out real quick. They just kept on going. Of course, the commander of the Amagiri said later that he saw the PT 109 the whole time.”
“A destroyer is huge. It’s hard to imagine Kennedy’s guys not seeing a destroyer. They didn’t even hear it?”
“Easy for us to say,” Reno said. “Remember, it was pitch-black out there.”
“Have you ever seen a destroyer?”
“Are you saying Kennedy got hit on purpose?” she asked.
“Well, no. Good point.”
“It gets hairier. A lot of the PT boats had search radar on board. I didn’t have time to check for sure if PT 109 did. But if it did, and somebody had been using it the way they should have, they’d have known the destroyer was there no matter how dark it was. Plus, with only one engine he might not have been able to move out of the way fast enough anyway, even if he did see it. I got the feeling he was violating a lot of regulations but it sounded like all the PT boats did. They were new boats and the sailors were learning as they went along. But it looks like all these things added up and may have cost him his boat that night.”
“And it cost Kent Castle his nephew, assuming that part’s true.”
“It is. There were eleven on the boat including Kennedy. Two of them were killed. One was from Massachusetts. The other was Norwood Strunk, from Granville, West Virginia. I’m guessing that’s near Becton. He was Torpedoman’s Mate.”
“So the old fellow had it right. So far, at least.”
A tiny bell on the door tinkled as somebody entered the restaurant, startling Jonas. It reminded him that anybody around them could be watching. It hadn’t been very long since somebody had blown up his car. He took a quick look around the restaurant. Even if nobody looked suspicious, he wanted to know it if any of these people showed up somewhere else later.
“It doesn’t sound that bad to me,” he argued. “It sounds like he had a reason for everything he did. Easy for us to sit here and criticize. He was driving a boat through the middle of a war.”
“That’s not the point. What matters is what people like Gerson think about it. And would you stick up for Kennedy if it had been your sister who hung herself?”
“Fair enough.”
“Gerson said that Douglas MacArthur wanted Kennedy court-martialed. I couldn’t find that directly, just some hearsay about it. The closest I found was that he did say a boat like that should have been able to get out of the way of a destroyer.”
“I think if somebody got a medal for crashing a boat and killing my nephew I’d be pissed too,” Jonas conceded. “If that’s how he sees it.”
“That’s not what the medal was for. The medal was for what he did after the boat sank.”
“Which was?” Jonas asked.
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“Before I get to that, you have to understand that the Navy investigates anytime any boat goes down. I found a summary of court-martial preliminary hearings.”
“And that’s where Kennedy’s dad comes in, if I’m channeling Gerson correctly?”
“Supposedly,” she said. “I wouldn’t doubt it, but of course nothing’s on the record. Joe Kennedy was close with President Roosevelt. He was Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then Ambassador to England,” she said as she looked up and down from her copied pages. “But the most important thing about him was that he was loaded. That helped FDR when he was campaigning.”
“Some things never change.”
“So the Navy investigation goes nowhere. It just never gets mentioned again. And then, of course, Lieutenant Kennedy ends up getting the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, and a Purple Heart too.”
“What happened after the crash that was so great?”
“It was pretty heroic,” Reno said. “There’s no denying it, even for Gerson. He led his men to a nearby island. He actually swam while pulling an injured man by a strap he held in his teeth. Pretty cool. They swam for miles. After he got his men onto the island he carved a note on a coconut and gave it to a native to deliver to some American forces that were in the area. Next thing they knew they were rescued. He probably saved their lives.”
“Except for the Castle kid.”
