Heart of War

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “Kara!”

  “Lannie!”

  Captain Lannie Fulton Love had huge brown eyes that darted from side to side like a hawk’s. She seemed to turn every piece of military clothing she owned into an object of femininity, and her dress blues were no different. She was poured into her tight-fitting jacket, her skirt was hemmed about two inches above regulation, and she was wearing non-military heels.

  Kara sat down, and they exchanged reacquaintance noises. Then Lannie said:

  “I want you to meet Randy. You probably just told him your name. He’s General Beckwith’s aide.”

  “The cute one,” observed Kara.

  “Gorgeous.” Lannie whispered, “He’s my date tonight.” Lannie made a show of looking around the room. “Where’s your date?”

  “I haven’t got one.”

  “Whatever happened to that delicious helicopter jockey you were so crazy about?”

  “He took a walk when I got into it with Aviation Branch over getting a squadron.”

  “A gigantic tower of strength during your time of need.”

  “Like a redwood. He toppled like one too when the pressure got to him.”

  “Typical.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What’s Randy like?”

  “Smart as hell. He graduated, like, third in our class. And just as sweet as the day is long.”

  “You’re not fucking him, I take it.”

  “Not my type.”

  They laughed. “So who is your type, Lannie? I’ve never been able to figure you out.”

  Lannie smiled coyly. “Oh, I don’t know . . .”

  “You’re seeing someone, you devil.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but your eyes did.” Kara whispered: “Who is it? Can you tell me?”

  “Not right now. It’s too early. I want to take my time with this one.”

  “That sounds very serious.”

  Lannie shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  Kara signaled the bartender for another round. As he pushed the glasses across the bar to her, a hand laid a ten on the bar next to them. “Those are on me.”

  “Thank you.” Kara turned. “Frank, do you know Lannie Fulton Love? Lannie, this is Major Frank Hollaway. He’s the deputy provost marshal.”

  “Very nice to meet you,” said Lannie.

  “Same here,” said Hollaway. The bartender poured a glass full of beer and handed it to him.

  “Did you get that list from N.S. Meyer?” Kara asked.

  “Sure did.”

  “You guys are going to talk shop, I think I’ll move along,” said Lannie. “The receiving line is breaking up. I’m going to get Randy.”

  “Bring him back here,” said Kara.

  “Will do,” said Lannie.

  Kara turned to Hollaway. “So? Who’s on it?”

  “Let’s just put it this way. They’re all right here in this room tonight. Every suspect we’ve got.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Twenty-two. Sixteen men and six women.”

  “That narrows it down, doesn’t it?”

  “Neatly.”

  “Anyone stick out prominently on the list? Maybe somebody she worked with?”

  “Six are in Third Army Headquarters. Two are women, a major and a first lieutenant. Among the men there’s a colonel, a major, a brand-new second lieutenant, and . . .” Hollaway looked behind him, then whispered: “General Beckwith himself. He bought a new set of gold insignia earlier this year. Ordered them by mail.”

  “Well? What do you think, Frank? Any ideas?”

  “It could be any one of them, Kara, although the chance that it’s one of the women is slim. I’ve talked to a few of Lieutenant Worthy’s friends. One of them was in ROTC with her. She liked guys.”

  “What’d I tell you, Frank?”

  “You were right. What can I tell you?”

  “Right again, you mean. You’ll never guess what happened to me today.”

  “Lambert called you in and put you on the case.”

  “She told you.”

  “Hell, I recommended you.”

  “Thanks, Frank. I owe you one.”

  “This is a big one, Kara. Commanding generals don’t like it when somebody starts killing female lieutenants. It’s the kind of thing that gets in the papers and makes them look bad.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She looked past Hollaway down the bar. General Beckwith walked up in the middle of a covey of colonels and majors. He signaled the bartender, looked up and down the bar. “The drinks are on me.”

  Kara raised her glass. “To the Corps, sir!”

  Beckwith looked down the bar and smiled. “To the Corps!” He moved down the bar. They touched glasses. Beckwith nodded to Hollaway. “Good evening, Major.”

  “Evening, sir.”

  He turned to Kara. “I understand Lieutenant Colonel Lambert put you on the investigation of Lieutenant Worthy’s death.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Kara. “Major Hollaway and I are working on it together.

  “How’s it coming?”

  “It’s a homicide now, sir,” said Hollaway.

  Beckwith looked surprised. “A homicide? I thought she drowned.”

  “She did, sir. After someone stabbed her in the neck.”

  “Have you informed the parents?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Beckwith’s eyes wandered. The Secretary of Defense had moved into the clutch of officers down the bar. “You’ll have to excuse me.”

  He moved down the bar. The bartender was handing the Secretary a drink. “Put that on my tab, bartender,” Beckwith called loudly. His eyes found Lannie in the crowd, and he reached for her hand. “Mr. Secretary, I’ve got someone I’d like you to meet.”

  The crowd surrounding the Secretary pressed close. Kara and Hollaway grabbed their drinks and drifted away.

  “I didn’t know that you knew the General,” said Hollaway.

  “He was my tac at West Point.”

  “What was he like?”

  Kara thought for a minute. “Just like he is now. Garrulous. Confident. An expert player of the game.”

  The crowd was pushing them past a table full of wives when a hand reached out and touched Kara’s arm. She looked down into the eyes of Mrs. Beckwith.

  “Kara, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Bill was talking about you the other day. Please. Sit down.”

  Kara glanced at Hollaway. He gave a little wave and wandered away. She sat down. Mrs. Beckwith introduced her around the table. They were colonels’ wives except for Mrs. King, who sat across from them. Mrs. Beckwith half turned away from the rest of the table, sipped her drink. “I wonder if you’d come by the house for coffee one morning. There’s something I would like to talk to you about.”

  Kara tried hard not to show her surprise. “I’d be glad to. When would you like me to come?”

  “Tomorrow? Around nine? Would that fit into your schedule?”

  “I’ll make room.”

  Mrs. Beckwith patted Kara’s hand as her eyes found her husband, floating past in a cloud of colonels. “Good. I’ll see you then.” She stood, and the waters parted as she walked regally to her husband’s side.

  Kara glanced across the table. Mrs. King had seen and heard the whole thing.

  Mace was gone back to the barracks by the time she returned home. He had left a note that said he had checked in with his platoon. One of his troops had gotten sick, and he had to go over to the hospital to check up on him.

  It was late, and she was alone, and it was the worst time of the day for her. She wished she had someone to call. She thought about her mother in California, who was probably still awake, but she didn’t feel like talking to her mother. She thought about calling Lannie, but she was probably still partying.

  When she sat right down and really thought it through, she didn’t have anybody to call because she didn’t have many friendships that went much beyon
d the rather insignificant connective tissue of everyday semi-professional, semi-personal chat. It was another of her regrets, that deeper kinds of friendships came so hard to her. She wondered who to blame. Her mother? Her father? Herself? The zeitgeist of modern female life?

  The truth was, she didn’t much like talking to other women. She didn’t like hearing about their trials and tribulations. She didn’t like the tendency some women had to whine with each other. That’s why she found herself alone on this night and many others.

  Except for Mace. She wasn’t truly alone as long as he was somewhere across the post, looking after his troops. She cursed herself for not having simply uttered the words I love you earlier that evening.

  What in God’s name was wrong with her? There she was, with this beautiful man in her bedroom holding her around the waist, looking into her eyes, and all he wanted were three little words, and she couldn’t say them. What did she have to lose? Her pride? He was the most delicious male creature she had ever come across, and she was leaving him dangling out there like she could care less which way the wind blows him? She needed her goddamned head examined, is what.

  She took off her dress blue jacket and poured herself a glass of red wine. Across the room on the kitchen counter, the answering machine red light was blinking. She walked into the kitchen and pressed Play. It beeped twice, then a familiar voice said:

  “You know who this is. Meet me tomorrow afternoon at 1900. There’s a place out on the Macon Road, about ten miles outside of town where Route 80 crosses 96. It’s called Jason’s. You’ll see it on your right.”

  Beckwith.

  She felt a knot in the pit of her stomach. At nine the next morning she was due to have coffee with Mrs. Beckwith, a little get-together about which she was certain the General was unaware. At seven that evening he wanted to meet her in a place well away from prying military eyes. There was a familiarity to these developments that unnerved her.

  But then again, she had spent a lot of time being unnerved lately, enough to cause her to wonder what she was doing wrong.

  Or doing right.

  Chapter Ten

  The Army had finished building the King house just months before they moved in. One of the crazy things about the downsizing that had closed the previous headquarters of the Fifth Army at Fort Jackson was a military fact of life: When you move generals around, you’ve got to have general-type places for them to live. Fort Benning had one set of commanding general’s quarters, currently occupied by General Beckwith. The arrival of the Fifth Army Headquarters and its commander meant a new set of general’s quarters would have to be built all the way across the post from General Beckwith (the Army at least had the good sense to see to it that generals, who were by nature competitive beasts, didn’t have to look at each other across the back fence), and they built a house that was just as large as the one assigned to General Beckwith—even larger, if you counted the partially finished third floor and the servants’ quarters over the detached garage. It was situated on a small hill surrounded by trees overlooking the Chattahoochee. By leaving old-growth trees in place and doing an instant landscaping of the grounds with grass sod and full-grown shrubs, they had managed to make the place look like it had been there forever. It was a neo-Georgian brick mansion with a row of six columns in front. When Dahlia King first laid eyes on it, she thought, Isn’t this perfect? This place looks like some kind of Civil War mansion. But her husband had the last word. The house had been built so close to the Chattahoochee, to get the view of the river, that there were no other military buildings or houses nearby.

  “This must be the new Negro neighborhood,” he had said as they made the drive up to the house for the first time. He laughed so hard, tears came to his eyes.

  Mrs. Bernard King’s given name was Dahlia Toussaint, and she had been born in the New Orleans Seventh Ward, which lay north and east of the city’s French Quarter between Franklin Avenue and Elysian Fields. The Seventh Ward was the city’s unofficial or official Creole neighborhood, depending on who was doing the talking, and the voices talking in the city of New Orleans were loud, because the issues raised by the Seventh Ward and its ways were about shades of color and they were contentious indeed.

  You couldn’t live in the Seventh Ward unless your skin was light, ran one line of talk. You can’t live here unless you have worked long enough and hard enough to afford to live here, ran the line of talk of those who occupied the neat, freshly painted shotguns and Creole cottages that made up most of the dozen-square-block area, along with the usual scattering of po-boy shops and bars and sno-ball stands that inhabited every New Orleans neighborhood.

  The truth probably lay somewhere in between, and to the wife of the commander of the Fifth Army, it hardly mattered anyway, except when her mother came to visit, which because her mother was only an hour away on Delta Airlines had become more frequent than either Dahlia, or her mother, for that matter, probably wished.

  Dahlia’s mother’s name was Eunice Toussaint, and she was something of a grande dame in the Seventh Ward, given the fact that she had started out hiring blues bands and frying chicken and icing down kegs of beer and charging money for the house parties she had given years before Dahlia was born. She had ended up being one of the powers behind SOUL, the ward’s political organization that had helped elect the first black mayor of New Orleans twenty years ago and had kept a light-skinned black man from the Seventh Ward in office ever since.

  Eunice was a tall, light-skinned woman with an unlined face and wavy black hair, and so was Dahlia. She remembered thinking when she was growing up that her mother was the prettiest woman she had ever laid her eyes on, and even though the years had slowed Eunice’s step and caused her bones to creek with arthritis, she was still as beautiful as she had been when Dahlia was a little girl in the blue plaid skirt and white blouse of St. Anthony’s, following her mother as she made her rounds at election time getting out the vote.

  Dahlia King had had a good life in the Army. Her mother had had a good life in the Seventh Ward. What Dahlia wished now was that her mother would leave her alone and stop talking about getting Bernie to retire and bring him back to New Orleans and talk him into running for mayor, like he was some kind of Colin Powell or something. Of course, there was a certain logic to it, because her husband had come from the Seventh Ward too. Or from its edges, just on the other side of Elysian Fields Avenue on Tonti Street, to be precise. And though he was darker than Dahlia, the years he had spent in the Army and the rank he had achieved had softened the distinctions of color that had relegated Bernie into one crowd and Dahlia into another in high school at St. Anthony’s. Power could change people’s perceptions of you, she had learned over the years. And no one had been more instrumental in teaching her about power than her own mother.

  Now that her husband was on the short list for chief of staff, the mayoralty of the city of New Orleans paled in comparison to being the most powerful military figure on the entire planet. Bernie had served thirty years in the United States Army, and she liked to think that she had served her thirty years right alongside him, even though she didn’t wear the uniform and his rank wasn’t hers. But she had learned something important from her mother years and years ago.

  They will treat you right if you act right. And they will treat you with respect if you demand respect, her mother had drilled into her when she was a little girl having a little girl’s problems and heartaches in middle school at St. Anthony’s.

  She and her husband had endeavored to act right in their lives, and for thirty years they had demanded respect, and in the Army, at least, they had gotten it, finally, after a rocky start when he was a junior officer and most black men in the Army wore sergeant’s stripes, not the gold bars of a lieutenant as Bernie had.

  Now he was a four-star general, and she was the four-star general’s wife, and she found herself right where her mother had always told her she would end up: in politics. And to add insult to injury, her mother was in their house
, and she was busy telling Dahlia I told you so along with trying to run every other aspect of her life, just as she had tried to do from a distance as Dahlia and her husband moved from one Army post to another around the world over the years.

  Dahlia poured another cup of coffee and carried it into the den, where her mother was sitting on the sofa near the window. “I don’t care what you think, Momma. I’m going to help that young man. He was found innocent by the court-martial, and he needs some help, and I’m going to make sure he gets it, you hear me?”

  “Dahlia, he’s not our kind. It won’t go over good back home.”

  “My home is right here, Momma. Why can’t you understand that?”

  “You own this house? Tell me. You own it for real?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “Then what have I been telling you.”

  “Momma, just because the Army owns this house and we’re living in it during this duty assignment doesn’t mean it’s not ours. It is.”

  “Show me the papers, Dahlia. Then I will believe you.”

  “There are no papers, Mother. It’s the Army. It’s not like it is in the Seventh Ward.”

  “What have I been saying? In the Army you own nothing. All you’ve got is what they let you have for a year here, a year there. What kind of life is that? You get Bernie to retire and come back to New Orleans, and you’ll have the biggest house on St. Charles Avenue, if that’s what you want, after we elect him mayor.”

  “He’s not going to run for mayor of New Orleans, Mother. He’s going to be the next chief of staff of the Army if I have anything to say about it. And I do.”

  “Dahlia, those men up in Washington, they don’t like black men, and they like pushy black women even less. You better be careful what you say.”

  “I am careful, Mother. Now I want to stop talking about my husband, and I want you to tell me that you will help me get Vernon Richards’ mother out of that damn St. Thomas project and into a decent apartment somewhere. You know you can do it if you put your mind to it.”