Blame the Dead
Page 5
“My brother talked me into taking you on as my driver,” Harkins said. “Against my better judgment.”
Colianno came to attention. In ten minutes he’d already demonstrated more military courtesy than Bobby Ray Thomas had in a year. Of course, Thomas didn’t get into fights with everyone he met.
“At ease,” Harkins said.
Colianno spread his feet and put his hands behind his back. He was about five eight, a couple of inches shorter than Harkins. Skinny—lots of GIs had been fighting dysentery, bad food, nasty water. He had dark hair and delicate, almost feminine features. Not a mark on his face; Weston, the clerk, hadn’t touched him.
“Sir, I’d like to go back to my unit.”
“And I’d like to get to third base with Betty Grable, but that ain’t about to happen either. According to my brother, your unit is going back to North Africa without you, and your choices are me or the repple depple; probably the stockade at some point, the rate you’re going.”
The “repple depple” was GI slang for the replacement detachment, a pool of GIs where commanders found replacements for their dead and wounded. The army actually set them up as pens, complete with barbed-wire fencing. Harkins thought they looked like stockyards, which was both sad and, he often thought, appropriate.
Something passed over Colianno’s eyes. He was hurt, but too proud to show it to Harkins.
“You were in the hospital. Were you wounded or sick?”
“Both. Took some shrapnel in the arm and it got infected. They had to open it up and let it drain. I also got the dysentery in North Africa. Seemed like our whole unit came down with it. It was a mess. Guys lined up at the shitter all day. I got a little better, then got it again after we landed here. Lost a bunch of weight that I really couldn’t afford to lose.”
“You speak the local language?”
“Yes, sir. My parents were born here. I still got relatives here.”
“That why you punch out anybody who says … who insults the locals?”
“Part of it, I guess.”
“What’s the other part?”
Colianno looked at him, considered the question for a moment, then said, “I don’t know, sir.”
“OK, I guess that makes as much sense as anything else I’ve seen in the army.”
“Sir, you don’t mind my asking, what do you do? What outfit you with?”
“Military police. I’m investigating the murder that happened here this morning.”
“You’re the beat cop they put on this case?”
Even the privates were talking about how he was in over his head.
“Looks like the provost is a little shorthanded, so this fell into my lap. The hospital will probably move toward the front lines in a day or two, which will make the investigation harder. I got a snowball’s chance in hell of solving this, and that’s only if I get moving right away, and if I catch a break.”
Colianno was quiet for a moment, studying Harkins. “Maybe I could help you, sir. I mean, if I have to stay behind.”
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“Officers think that enlisted men don’t know what’s going on, or that we only know what they tell us. But the GIs see everything. I can talk to guys who might not want to talk to you.”
“Go on.”
“Permission to speak freely, Lieutenant?”
“Of course.”
“The Stephenson guy was a pig, what I heard. Always grabbing the nurses and stuff. Drank, too.”
“Here at the hospital?”
“He managed to get into Palermo a couple of times, even though the hospital has only been here a few days, a week at the most. Anyway, he came back drunk and the nurses were afraid he was going to try to operate like that. Shit-faced, I mean.”
“Any opinions among the GIs as to who killed him?”
“Not that I heard. I know the first sergeant didn’t like him much.”
“Drake.”
“Right. He’s Regular Army, twelve or thirteen years in. Most of the enlisted guys say he’s hard but fair.”
“You ever dealt with Drake?”
“I stay clear of the guy. I have a reputation, I guess you could say.”
“I’ll bet. Where were you this morning when the air raid hit?”
“I was packing my stuff in my ward tent, ’cause I knew I was being discharged today.”
“Alone?” Harkins asked.
“A few other guys in there.”
Harkins pulled out his notebook. “Names?”
“Guy from the First Division named Marshall. Another paratrooper, an H Company guy named Harris.”
“What air-raid shelter did you use?”
“We didn’t. They’ve had four or five of these alerts without a single Kraut plane showing up. All false alarms. I think the Luftwaffe is finished, so me and the other guys stayed put.”
“What else do you know?”
“Can I get in trouble for talking about officers?”
“Not as much trouble as you can get in for fighting all the time,” Harkins said. “Look,” he went on. “You’re right. The enlisted guys might talk to you more readily than they’ll talk to me. Plus you’ve already been here, what? A few days? If you can find out things that help me in the investigation, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“OK, then,” Colianno said. “The staff says that Colonel Boone, the commander, likes to gamble, but he isn’t very good at it. Some of the other docs wonder how he sends any money home to support his family, given how much he loses at poker.”
“OK,” Harkins said. “Not sure what the connection might be, but most murders are about money, sex, or power. Any talk among the men about how Colonel Boone and Stephenson got along?”
“Some of the guys didn’t like Stephenson, but most of them wished they were the ones scoring with the girls.”
“I’ll have to talk to more nurses.”
“You don’t think a girl could have done this, do you? Shot some guy in the head at close range?” His expression said he thought it a ridiculous idea.
“Doesn’t seem likely, I’ll admit,” Harkins said. “Right now I’m just trying to get a complete picture of what was going on at this hospital.”
“There was a lot going on, all right,” Colianno said.
Harkins heard a commotion in the registration tent. He started walking away and toward his jeep, Colianno following.
“Hold it right there.”
First Sergeant Drake barreled out of the tent, following them. When Harkins and Colianno turned, Drake spoke directly to the paratrooper, ignoring Harkins.
“Did you get in a fight with my clerk, you little sonofabitch?”
Colianno had come to parade rest, the appropriate military courtesy when addressed by a senior noncommissioned officer.
Harkins held up a hand just as Colianno started to speak. “There was a disagreement, First Sergeant. But the chaplain and I took care of it.”
Drake narrowed his eyes, leaned too close, put his hands on his hips. He clearly wished Harkins wasn’t in the way of his chewing out Colianno.
“What chaplain?”
“From this man’s unit. He was visiting, and I was there, too. It’s all taken care of. In fact, Private Colianno has been discharged, so he’s not your problem anymore, First Sergeant. He’s working for me now.”
“Your boy was trouble from the moment he got here. Now I got a busted-up table in there, Lieutenant. Records and papers all over the place. I got a clerk with a fat lip.”
Harkins could play pissed off as well as the next guy. He lowered his voice and said, “Don’t know what to tell you, First Sergeant. Maybe you should take care of your guy and I’ll take care of mine. How about that?”
Drake looked at Colianno, then back at Harkins. “You two will make a great pair.”
“Colianno, go over to the jeep,” Harkins said. When the private was gone, Drake turned as if to walk away.
“Just a second, First Sergeant.”
Rather than test him by telling him to turn around, Harkins walked to Drake’s front. The old noncom had murder in his eyes. Harkins tried a different approach.
“Look, we got off on the wrong foot,” Harkins said. “I’ve only been here a few hours; usually it takes people a day or two to really dislike me.”
The humor didn’t work. Drake managed to look bored and pissed off at the same time.
Harkins looked around. They were surrounded by tents; no one could see them. Would Drake take a swing at him?
“No one is unhappier than I am about catching this case. But I plan to do my job as best I can and as fast as I can. Then I’ll get out of your hair. How does that sound?”
After a few seconds, Drake said, “Anything else?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. From now on I want you to show me the proper military courtesy, and I’ll do the exact same for you.”
“You’ve got to earn respect,” Drake said.
“And I may or may not, based on the job I do. That’s for a future conversation. But we both know you salute the rank, not the person. The army made me a first lieutenant. If nobody asked your opinion about whether I was a good choice, well, I’m sorry about that. But in this thing, at least, your opinion doesn’t really matter, just like my opinion as to whether or not you should be a first sergeant doesn’t matter.”
There was a long pause. Harkins wondered if, in his weakened condition and nearly asleep on his feet, he could take a punch from someone Drake’s size.
“Let me show you something,” Drake said. He motioned for Harkins to follow him, turned in to a tent marked with a white sign: SURGICAL 2.
The walls to this tent were down, probably to keep out the dust. It had to be ninety, a hundred, a hundred and ten degrees in there. There were three electric lights hovering above an operating table—the sound of generators was a constant background noise across the compound. Two surgeons were at work, their arms bloody to the elbows. Two nurses stood close by, one handing instruments from a tray, the other using forceps to hold a large triangle of bloody meat out of the doctors’ way. Harkins looked on for a moment, Drake watching him, then the two men stepped outside.
“That’s the mission, Lieutenant. Those eight hands trying to save one kid, trying to sew him back together so he leaves here on a stretcher, not in a body bag. Everything else—all the shit I do day to day, all the stuff everyone else does—is to support those eight hands.”
Drake, who was already standing close to Harkins, leaned in. “Anybody in this hospital who gets in the way of that performance in there—no, wait—anyone who isn’t contributing to making that performance better, why, I roll over them like a truck. Crush ’em. And I sleep like a fucking baby.”
“Is that what you did to Stephenson? Crush him?”
Drake snorted, a mean laugh. “I’m talking about you and your so-called investigation, which we both know hasn’t got a chance of doing anything worthwhile. Stay the fuck out of my way. Stay out of the way of the hospital staff. You slow us down, and I’ll deal with you myself. Got it?”
“I hear the GIs in the hospital are afraid of you; the officers, too, for that matter.”
Drake wasn’t expecting it, but Harkins stepped closer. He had to look up, but the two men were practically nose to nose. Harkins felt what had to be his last reserves of adrenaline kick in.
“Lot of big guys like you never have to fight, because most people back down. But I will beat your ass if I have to. We can do it here, no rank, or in front of as many people as you want to invite. I know I can take a punch. How about you?”
Drake straightened up, unafraid but uninterested in anything more. “You are something else, Lieutenant,” he said. “Don’t know where they found you, but you are something else.”
Then the first sergeant turned and walked away without looking back.
“At least he called me lieutenant,” Harkins muttered. “We’re practically pals.”
5
2 August 1943
1200 hours
Colonel Walter Boone had a headache.
He went back to his sleeping tent, pulled a bottle of aspirin from his bedroll, and shook a couple into his mouth.
Yesterday his problem had been the nurses, with their complaining, and fucking Stephenson, of course. Even though Stephenson was out of the picture, the nurses were still talking, gabbing endlessly about how bad they had it. Now he had some dumb cop and a pathetic deputy provost snooping around.
He went to the door of his tent closest to the orderly room and yelled for his clerk.
“Whitaker!”
The soldier hustled out of the orderly room tent, pushing his glasses back up his nose. Too smart for his own good, this one; always huddled with the first sergeant, clamming up whenever Boone was around.
They didn’t respect him. Even Whitaker, a goddamn PFC, probably thought he could do a better job. And Drake, with his Old Army attitudes, always complaining about the influx of amateurs. Boone would like to see Drake try to ride herd on a bunch of egotistical surgeons. He’d like to see Drake scrub in when the casualties were rolling in. Seven hours on his feet with his hands inside some kid’s chest, trying to put everything back together. They all thought they knew better.
“Yes, sir?” Whitaker said.
“Any word on when we’re moving forward?”
There were more than twenty hospitals and medical units trailing the fighting units as they pushed east across the island. The bigger ones, like Boone’s Eleventh Field Hospital, were a traveling circus: three platoons, each with a hundred-bed capacity. Scores of tents and sixty-plus vehicles that leapfrogged forward so that a GI wounded at the front could reach the care he needed as quickly as possible. Speed saved lives.
“No, sir. We haven’t heard anything.”
Hospital commanders like Boone weren’t privy to the Allied attack plans, but they were often given a “warning order,” telling them to be prepared to move within twenty-four hours.
“When was the last time you checked?”
Whitaker looked at his wristwatch. “About two hours ago, Colonel.”
“Well, go fucking check again!” Boone said.
It came out more harshly than he’d intended, and Whitaker scampered away.
Screw him, Boone thought. The little bastard thought it was a hard day if he had to type a dozen reports.
Boone was banking that a move forward would throw off the investigation; at least delay it a few days. If that wasn’t in the cards, then the key to getting rid of Harkins was the provost marshal.
Boone knew there’d be a big stink at headquarters because a surgeon had been murdered, and there’d be command pressure to solve the crime. But the attention would fade quickly. There were murders every day: GIs stabbing GIs, soldiers beating up locals and robbing prostitutes. Two Americans and two Brits had been arrested recently for setting fire to a bank in Santa Croce Camerina; the four drunks thought they’d come up with a novel way to stage a robbery. Then there was the awesome scale of the black market and the thousands of tons of supplies and equipment that were being siphoned off by corrupt GIs and their local cronies. As far as the war effort went, surely that problem demanded more attention than the shooting of one pain-in-the-ass captain. Boone just had to persuade the provost to see it that way.
And he could always get rid of the nurses who talked too much, or intimidate them into shutting the hell up. He doubted any one of them had any idea what kind of questions an inquiry or court-martial would throw at them.
His stomach churned. He held his hands in front of him, the right one shaking a bit. A brisk walk around the compound would help. He set his helmet on his head and stepped into the sunshine, walked to where the engineers had cut a perimeter road
for the hospital. He kept looking over his shoulder, suddenly wanting to know where Harkins was, where Drake had gone, where the Bolshevik nurses were.
By the time he looked up, he’d reached the line of pyramidal tents that housed the rest of the officers. With a full complement there would be nine surgeons, a dentist, and three anesthesiologists, along with eighteen nurses. The Eleventh was supposed to have three hundred beds, while the overall Allied invasion plan called for some three thousand beds over multiple facilities, but limited sea and air transport from the staging areas in North Africa meant every medical unit landed in Sicily already short of people and equipment. And in the nearly five weeks since D-Day, they’d continued to lose medical staff to sickness—malaria was rampant—accidents, and transfers to hospitals that were even more short-staffed.
And still the wounded streamed in, day and night, and Boone was somehow supposed to maintain a standard of care. No American mother wanted to hear that her wounded boy had made it to a U.S. Army hospital only to die in a surgery queue.
He’d had a dream the previous week in which he was filling sandbags for an air-raid shelter. He could hear German planes approaching, but he couldn’t move quickly enough, and the sand leaked from the bag faster than he could shovel it in, and all the while the nurses and other docs stood around laughing at his efforts.
It made him want to kill someone.
Boone was already sweating through his shirt, but he continued walking fast, hoping the exercise would take the edge off his anxiety. When he reached Stephenson’s tent, he looked around and found he was alone on the street.
He went inside.
It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The tent was empty of all of Stephenson’s personal gear, uniforms, bedding, and footlocker. Drake had probably been through, collecting stuff, sorting government property from personal, then combing through the personal to make sure they weren’t sending anything embarrassing back to the family. Sometimes the first sergeant found postcards with photos of naked women. No one wanted to send those home to Mother.
Suddenly the thought of Harkins rooting around in whatever detritus Stephenson had left behind made him anxious all over again. He blotted the sweat on his forehead with a sleeve.