Bassett signaled for Slaight to be seated. He spread a small hole in the poop-sheets on his desk, withdrew a yellow legal pad from some secret stash, pulled out a black army pen, and peered over the top edge of his army-issue glasses, perched on the end of his nose, used only for reading.
“So. Mr. Slaight. I never thought I’d see you again. What seems to be the hurry?”
“I’ve got to go see the com today at five forty-five. I’m going to need some legal advice. One way or another, I’ve gotten myself neck-deep in shit, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I’m going to have to give it to you quick, sir, and you’re going to have to keep what I tell you to yourself. In total confidence.”
“You want this to be an official legal counseling session then?”
“Official?”
“Yes. In that way, it’s covered by lawyer-client privilege. I am bound by law not to divulge anything you tell me, not even before a court of law, not even under the orders of the general himself.”
“That’s good enough.”
“Now, what’s this about, Slaight?”
“The cadet they found drowned up in Popolopen last May, Captain Bassett, kid by the name of David Hand.”
“Ah yes. I saw the report when it came though here. An accidental drowning, as I recall.”
“It wasn’t any accidental drowning. The kid was murdered. By another cadet. The kid, David Hand, was a homosexual. He got himself fucked in the ass just before he drowned. The guy who fucked him killed him. I have very good reason to believe the murderer was another cadet. I’ve done some pretty extensive research on the death of David Hand, sir. I’ve got it narrowed down. It was one of three cadets … perhaps one of six … who were on a recruiting trip to New Orleans in 1966. Hand was recruited by one of the cadets. He had an affair with the cadet at that time. The affair continued here at the academy. I’m pretty sure the guy Hand made it with in New Orleans was the guy who killed him up at Popolopen.”
“Yes. Indeed. But one of three—maybe six—cadet recruiters … that’s still a rather broad area of suspects, isn’t it? And isn’t there a chance that it could have been another cadet entirely?”
“There’s always a chance, sir. But it gets narrower. I’ve got a guy I think can identify the cadet Hand had the affair with. If we can link Hand directly to one guy, one cadet, I think we’ve got him. Even if the odds are against us, and it’s not him, I think the pressure will be great enough that the guy will come clean. He’ll help flush out the murderer. Any way you cut it, Hand was murdered. It wouldn’t take much police work to figure out who did it. But the thing is … nothing is happening. Nothing is being done. The commandant knows Hand was killed. But he hasn’t done a goddamn thing. He called me off leave in June to talk to me about it. I tried to come see you then, but you were on leave, too.”
“Yes. I got a note from my secretary that you’d called.”
“Well, here’s the thing. The com tried to make a deal with me. Keep quiet, and he’d make me a battalion commander. Now, sir. I stand dead in the middle fifth of the class in Aptitude, about six hundred in General Order of Merit. I’m about as much of a battalion commander as you are Infantry.” Bassett laughed. “He knows it, and I know it. But when I left his office in June, the offer still stood. Now, today, in about an hour, I’ve got to go see him again. And I want to know what I should do. I want to know my legal obligations, insofar as having knowledge of the commission of a felony is concerned. And I want to know my rights—what protection I have under the UCMJ, whatever USMA regulations are involved. Basically, I want total legal advice, as fast and complete as you can give it to me.”
“Hmmmmmm.” Bassett leaned back in his chair, stuck the pen in his mouth, and chewed quietly. “You have got yourself a problem here. Open the door, will you?” Slaight opened the door behind him.
“Adrian? Adrian?” Bassett’s secretary looked up from her typing. “You can go home now. I won’t be needing you any more today.”
“Thanks, Captain,” the secretary said. She stood up, preparing to leave.
“Close the door, Slaight. Now. I want you to start at the beginning.” Bassett had a smile on his face. It was an odd smile, and with his big nose and glasses perched there, his eyes squinting, his big eyebrows dancing on his forehead like a couple of caterpillars, he looked owlish. Slaight liked Bassett. He knew Bassett was going to enjoy this. He was going to fuckin’ eat it up.
“I want you to give me the whole story, Slaight. All the information you’ve got. Every last single solitary scrap. Every tiny detail. You may not know what’s important. You let me decide what’s important, and what’s not, okay?”
“Yessir.”
“And stop calling me sir. I want all the information on this Hand matter you’ve got, and I want to know where you got it. In what form—written, verbal, firsthand, secondhand. I want to know the names of the people you’ve talked to, so I can get some idea of their veracity. As closely, and as quickly as you can, I want you to reconstruct your entire involvement in this matter. I want to know what transpired between you and the commandant in June. Exactly. And I want to know by what miracle or act of God you think you’ve narrowed down the list of people, or cadets, who may have murdered this young man, Hand, to three, or six. And why. I want to know your reasoning behind every last thing you tell me.”
Bassett rocked forward in his chair, took pen in hand, and peered over his glasses. The smile was gone.
“Now. Give it to me straight. We haven’t got much time.”
Slaight ran it down, the whole thing, from the first day he saw Hand in Beast back in ʼ67, right through his conversation with the kid in blue in New Orleans, through his phone calls to the sergeant major out in Santa Fe. The sergeant major had touched a friend in the Registrar’s Office for the names of the cadets who had made the recruiting trip to New Orleans in 1966: two firsties, ʼ67; two cows, ʼ68; two yearlings, ʼ69. Slaight’s class. Three of them, the sergeant major learned, had been scheduled to speak at Hand’s school—one cow and two yearlings. The two firsties had spent that day with local civic groups. But there were no records on file at the academy listing who actually made the appearance at Hand’s school that day. The records showed the schedule, but there had been no after-action report, army lingo for a record of what actually happened. So there it was. Slaight gave Bassett the names, he had them memorized. Bassett nodded and scribbled, nodded and scribbled, stopping only to push his glasses back up on his nose.
Only once during the entire course of Slaight’s story did Bassett stop writing, looking startled:
“William Beatty, huh?” he asked, obviously recognizing the name from somewhere. “I wonder what in hell he’s doing in on all this?” He scribbled Beatty’s name, put a circle around it, and nodded for Slaight to go on.
Slaight spat out the story rapidly, reflexively. To his surprise, he found himself tiring of the subject. It seemed so long ago that day on the area back in May. In June he had a file going. By the time he left New Orleans, the file had turned into files. Now, after a month at Fort Leonard Wood, pondering the facts, making phone calls, filling in the gaps, staying up late at night thinking and drinking and talking to Irit on the phone, the files filled a one-cubic-foot-square Sears and Roebuck file box. Page after page after page of notes, nearly verbatim transcripts of phone calls, ideas jotted down, things which he recollected, sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night. The facts. A separate file folder for each person involved. Another folder for each fact unattachable to a specific person. A folder containing notes on each significant meeting—Hedges, the sergeant major, the kid in blue. And a crude cross-referencing system, annotating people, places, conversations, facts, ideas, conjecture, conclusions. The Sears and Roebuck box weighed thirty pounds now. He knew. They weighed it at the St. Louis airport when he flew back to New York.
Yes, he was tired of the whole thing, as he rattled off the details fr
om memory, tired, but still determined. Now, after his confrontation with Grimshaw, whom he’d expected to have vanished into thin air, or perhaps another tour in Vietnam, coming back to West Point and finding Grimshaw still riding herd over D-3 after listening to Hedges castigate him for “weakness,” Slaight didn’t know what to think. He didn’t know what to expect. He was scared. The summer was over. They had him back at West Point now. Grimshaw—all that diddlyshit crap about the sick-call report and haircut and shine—Jesus! The meeting with Grimshaw meant nothing had changed. They were playing for keeps.
As he recounted the details of the Hand case to Bassett, the whole business seemed like a war story or something. Listening to himself talk was like sitting around the mess hall out in Leonard Wood, listening to a bunch of dufus sergeants talking about what it was like “back in Nam … in the bush,” thinking up detail after detail, day after day, contact after contact, killin’ fuckin’ gooks, man, that’s where it’s fuckin’ at. You ain’t been there till you seen them fuckin’ dinks, man, dinks coming out of the woodline, coming atchew through the wire, man, trip flares going off all over the fuckin’ place, man, whole fuckin’ night lit up like Times fuckin’ Square, man, tracers and mo-gas and shit going off all around you, and dinks, fuckin’ dinks….
They were never the enemy. Always “dinks” or “gooks” or “Charlie,” like the war wasn’t being fought against an enemy as much as it was being fought against an idea—something none of them could grasp, so they pulled names out of their asses and threw them around trying to describe the undescribable. Sitting there in Bassett’s office, Slaight felt the same way, helpless, like he was trying to overcome some huge doubt with a flood, a goddamn torrent of details, facts, names—throwing all this shit at Bassett, just sitting there in that tiny office throwing everything he knew at Bassett like a desperate fool, so strung out, there was nothing left to do but talk. Talk. Talk. Hoping somebody would fuckin’ understand. Now he knew what they meant when they said been there. How could you describe what it was like to have been there to somebody who hadn’t been there?
Slaight spewed data, checking the time, and slowly he began to realize why his old man had always refused to talk about the war when he’d been growing up. As a kid, he knew his father had fought in the war—World War II—because his mother told him. She’d let it out every once in a while. That was when “your father was gone.” Gone. The word she used to describe it, the war. Gone. And Slaight would ask his father about the war, from when he was just a little kid; maybe he’d been to the Saturday matinee, and maybe he’d seen To Hell and Back, or some other glory-hole war movie, and he’d come home and ask his father about the war, and always it was the same. His father would say: I’ll tell you about it, son, when you’re old enough. When’s that, Dad? he’d ask. When you’re old enough to understand, son, his father would say, sitting on the screen porch, drinking his martinis. When you’re old enough to understand. Slaight never got old enough to understand.
He left for West Point in June of 1965 with his mother’s blessing and his father’s unspoken disapproval. Now he knew why. Sitting there in Bassett’s office, talking about his own version of been there, man, he knew why. His father had entertained the hope of all fathers—that somehow things would be better for their sons and daughters, somehow the world would become a better place, a place where you didn’t need to understand, because there just wasn’t anything that was necessary to understand in the way you had to understand a war, understand the reasons men went out and killed other men. His father had known if Slaight went to West Point, the day would come when he’d have to understand. The notion so saddened him, so depressed him, that he couldn’t have made the world a better place or something—a bottomless fatherly depression…. He almost hated his son for going to West Point. Consciously or unconsciously, it didn’t really matter. The fact remained the same. His son would understand. He’d become one of them. Slaight could almost see his father in his mind’s eye, sitting there on the porch in the late afternoon, sipping his martinis and smoking his cigarettes with his back to the boy. He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—face him, because he was helpless.
When he was finished, Captain T. Clifford Bassett leaned back in his chair, let his glasses slip down to the tip of his nose, stuck the end of the army pen back in his mouth.
“Well,” he said. “As you said. Deep shit. And getting deeper. When are you scheduled to see Hedges?”
“Five forty-five.”
“Ten minutes. Okay. Legally—let me emphasize this—legally this is where you stand. You have no firsthand knowledge of the commission of a felony. You certainly have reason to believe a felony was committed, but you do not have firsthand knowledge. Therefore, you are under no legal obligation to report anything to the authorities. You see?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Okay. Morally. You can do as you damn well please. You can spill your guts to Hedges, if it will make you feel any better. You can keep your mouth shut if that would make a difference. Morally, it’s open field running, Slaight. You go in any direction you want. Just between you and me, however, between lawyer and client. I would not advise telling Hedges any more than you have to. From what you’ve told me, he has not exactly shown himself to be eager to roll back the rock. If you ask me, Hedges would just as soon see you going out with the tide. You represent, shall we say, a threat.”
“A threat?”
“Indeed, Slaight. There was never an Article 32 investigation run on this Hand thing. You recall the Article 32 investigation from your Military Law studies with me, no doubt—the military equivalent of a grand jury. An investigation to determine whether or not, in fact, a crime has been committed. If there had been an Article 32, I’d know about it. They all come through the Post JAG office, and at West Point, the Department of Law is the Post JAG office. No Article 32. No crime. Except for you, Slaight. You and your knowledge of the autopsy. Hedges doesn’t know anything else, does he?”
“No. All he knows is, I talked to Consor.”
“Good. Keep it that way. Now. How to handle Hedges today? I’d go in there and keep my trap shut, if I were you. But don’t forget. You are bound by the Honor Code, which puts you in a, shall we say, class apart, insofar as the UCMJ is concerned. In other words, Hedges has the Honor Code as an extra little cannon in his arsenal. And don’t put it past him to use it, Slaight.”
“Don’t worry about that, sir. I’ve heard all the stories.”
“Indeed. Then you see what I’m driving at. If he asks you a question, you are honor-bound to answer the question truthfully. If you don’t, he’ll bounce you out of here on an honor violation, which is probably exactly what he’d like to do with you. Get rid of you. ASAP. So answer his questions, and answer them truthfully. To the letter, and not beyond. The trick is, of course, to divert him—keep him from asking questions, as much as that’s possible. Having never met the man, I am uncertain as to how you should proceed in that direction, Slaight. My advice is … watch your step.”
Slaight was just sitting there, listening to him, this round little captain, sitting in his tiny office, boiling it all down.
“Captain Bassett, I really appreciate this. I mean, I really appreciate what you’re doing for me, giving me all this advice. I’ve been looking for advice like this for weeks. But I’ve got to ask you something. What the fuck is going on?”
Bassett sat there looking at Slaight.
“Mr. Slaight. You’d better get yourself over to the commandant’s office. You’ve got only—let me see—four minutes.”
“But, sir, I wanna know. What’s going on? I wanna know.”
“Slaight. On your feet. Out. You’ve got only a couple of minutes before you see the com. I’ll wait for you here in my office. Come on over when you’re finished seeing the com. We’ll talk. I want to hear what he has to say.”
Slaight standing up and grabbing his cap, mumbling thanks, feeling for the doorknob, heading down the hall and up the stairs, b
ack across Thayer Road, into the area of barracks, up to the corn’s office. Old Bassett. What a guy! He just sat there in that little office of his and took it all in. Then he just boils it right down. It’s all so logical. You go in, and you see the com. You step here. You don’t step there. You watch your step. It’s all so fuckin’ logical. Jesus. You go to West Point, and they pump you full of logic, you study law, you study math, higher math, higher and higher math until finally you’re up there with integral calculus and differential equations, statistics and probability, sliding into applied sciences and engineering … they’ve given you the key, the goddamn language of logic, and what they’re telling you is … take this logic, kid, and apply it. Use it. Believe it. Logic as science. Logic as The Answer. Logic with all its logical ends to mysteries of life. Logic as religion. You get down in there so deep, so deep in the math and the science and law and tactics and shit, and finally you’re inside the logic. You look around, and there are all these facts, all this information, all these formulas and ways to deal with information, ways to filter it, ways to make information work for you. But between you and the logic is empty space. You’re in a hole, nothing around you really, just space, air … no map, no boundaries, no edge to the logic. The logic is a dream, one of those quick ones, thirty-minute nap, a whole week goes by in thirty minutes, but when you wake up, you can remember only the last five minutes of the week, and man, they sucked….
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