by Ed Ruggero
“What do you want?” Drake said to Harkins. “Nobody asked for you to be here.”
Harkins headed for what he assumed was Boone’s workspace in the back. Drake stood, tried to grab his arm as he went by, cursed when he missed.
Harkins pushed back the canvas flap and stepped through. The back wall of the tent, behind Boone’s desk, was rolled up, so the space was flooded with light. Boone sat at a small field table with some papers in his hand; his admin clerk, a PFC, stood looking over his shoulder. When Boone looked up, Harkins stopped, brought his heels together, and saluted. “Lieutenant Harkins, military police.”
Boone did not return the salute, but he dismissed the clerk with a wave of his hand. Harkins let his arm come back to his side.
“Colonel, I’m sure you know that I’m investigating the murder of Captain Stephenson. I’ve learned some things that I want to bring to your attention.”
“I’m well aware of your activities, Lieutenant, as well as your lack of qualifications for the job. I’ve contacted the provost marshal and requested that you be relieved of your duties. Soon you’ll be back doing whatever important work you were doing in support of the war effort.”
So much for Adams’s theory that Boone might be an ally.
“Yes, well, that may happen, sir. Until then, you’re stuck with me.”
Harkins turned. Ronan and Donnelly were in the front part of the tent with Drake. When Harkins motioned them into Boone’s section, the first sergeant followed and stood to one side of the door.
“Why are you two here?” Boone said to Harkins and Donnelly.
“Lieutenant Ronan wants to lodge a complaint against Captain Stephenson, something you should be aware of.”
“I thought we established, thanks to your keen detective work, that Captain Stephenson is deceased. Why are we bringing a complaint against him?”
“It’s part of a larger pattern of behavior that involves other doctors on staff,” Harkins said. “Part of my investigation.”
Boone considered this for a moment, then said, “Lieutenant Donnelly, why are you here?”
“Lieutenant Ronan is in my section sir, since Nurse Felton, uh, left. I’m here to give her moral support.”
Boone studied her for a moment, tapped a finger on his field desk. “You’re dismissed,” he said.
Donnelly, surprised but without recourse that kept her on the right side of military courtesy, turned and left.
“You, too,” Boone said to Harkins.
“No, sir. This is still my investigation.”
“I could have First Sergeant Drake remove you.”
This wasn’t how Harkins had expected things to play out, but he wasn’t about to back down, either.
“He could try,” Harkins said.
Boone smiled, as if he might enjoy having the big first sergeant toss Harkins.
“Lieutenant Ronan,” Boone said at last. “Where are my manners? Have a seat, please.”
Ronan sat in a folding chair in front of Boone’s field desk. She looked like she was about to vomit. Harkins stood beside her.
“First of all, we’re all terribly upset by what happened to Captain Stephenson,” Boone said, his tone syrup sweet and insincere. “But I know you must be especially upset, since you and he were friends. Close friends.”
Harkins was caught off guard. Did Boone really believe that?
Ronan stiffened. “We were not friends, sir. We were work colleagues.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Boone said. “I was under the impression that you and Captain Stephenson had a relationship. Were lovers, in fact.”
Ronan looked like she’d been slapped. “Absolutely not.”
“Hmmm,” Boone said, putting a finger to his lips. Smug. “That’s not what he led me to believe.”
Harkins tried redirecting the conversation. “A number of the nurses told me that Stephenson forced himself on them. Tried to take advantage of them.”
“That’s Captain Stephenson, or, if you prefer, Doctor Stephenson,” Boone corrected him. “And of course we can’t hear Captain Stephenson’s side, or is that unimportant to you, Lieutenant Harkins? How about you, Lieutenant Ronan?”
“No, sir,” Ronan said, flustered. “I mean, yes, sir. But the doctors, some of the doctors are pigs and…”
She paused, and Boone asked, “And what?”
“And you let it go on. You take their side any time one of the nurses complains.”
“Well, perhaps that’s the way you see it. But there’s more to the story, and I have a different point of view. I’m responsible for running an entire hospital, you see. If I spent my time worrying about every little lovers’ spat, we’d get no work done around here.”
“We weren’t lovers,” Ronan said, her voice cracking a bit.
“So you’ve said,” Boone said.
“Stephenson said you’d never do anything to him,” Ronan said. “Like he had something on you.”
For the first time since they stepped into the tent, Boone looked surprised. Just a little, Harkins noticed, but for a moment he was off balance.
Atta-girl, Harkins thought.
“Any idea what he might have been talking about, Colonel?” Harkins asked. “Was there some arrangement between you and Stephenson?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Boone said. “How would I know what Stephenson was talking about? Or if he even said such a thing?”
Boone turned on Ronan. “What do you think will happen if you go around defaming all these people? Defaming dead men who can’t defend their reputations?”
“You ordered her to come here, sir,” Harkins said. “She wasn’t going around bad-mouthing Stephenson. Doctor Stephenson.”
“So she didn’t talk to you, Lieutenant? She didn’t make accusations about Stephenson? You aren’t spreading rumors you’ve heard from other nurses?”
“I’m conducting an investigation,” Harkins said. “My questions were in the normal course of things.”
“Your questions have been out of line,” Boone said, his voice rising. “I think you’re an irresponsible gossip and part of the problem.”
Boone stood suddenly and walked around to the front of the field table. Ronan flinched, had to bend her neck backwards to look him in the eye.
“I’ll tell you what will happen if you keep spreading these stories, Lieutenant Ronan. You’ll be dragged in front of an investigating board. All men, maybe one token nurse. And they’ll start firing questions at you.”
Boone waited a beat before asking, “Did you ever flirt with Captain Stephenson?”
“No,” Ronan said, wilting a little more. “I try to be friendly with everyone, get along.”
“Did you ever have a drink with him?”
“Some of the nurses did when he offered. Nurse Whitman.”
Harkins thought he saw Boone’s right eyelid twitch, barely a tell.
“Let’s keep poor Nurse Whitman out of this, all right? I asked if you drank with Doctor Stephenson. Did you ever go to him for help or advice?”
“Just to talk about medical procedures.”
“Colonel,” Harkins said, trying to intervene, “the nurses’ complaints will all be part of my report to the provost.”
“The allegations, you mean,” Boone said. He turned back to Ronan. “How many sexual partners have you had in your life, Lieutenant?”
Ronan flinched, like Boone had taken a swing at her.
“How many sexual partners have you had since joining the army? How many encounters with each man? Feel free to approximate if you’ve lost track.”
“Let’s go, Moira,” Harkins said.
When she began to stand, Boone snapped, “Sit down, Lieutenant.”
Ronan sat.
“You know it’s against regulations for you to have sexual relations with a superior officer, don’t you?”
“I didn’t have relations—”
Boone cut her off. “I asked if you were aware of the regulations, Lieutenant.”
; Ronan squeezed her fists, looked down into her lap. Harkins thought he saw a tear spot her trousers.
“Let’s see, what else will a board of officers, a board of male officers, likely ask you? How about, ‘What did you expect would happen, working side by side with men in the prime of life, in a war zone, under tremendous pressure? Didn’t you think they would want to have sex with you?’”
“That’s enough, Colonel!” Harkins said. It came out sounding like an order, but one that Boone was not obliged to obey.
“How about, ‘Do you wear the government-issued underwear, or do you wear personal items you brought from home?’”
Boone went on. “Did you tell him to stop? Did you fight him? Scream?”
Harkins stepped around Boone and took Ronan’s arm, helping her to her feet. She wobbled a bit as he walked her to the door of the small office section.
“Were you a virgin when you joined the army?” Boone said to her back.
Drake stood by the door, looking embarrassed. The first sergeant held the flap open for them as Harkins helped Ronan through. Drake followed them. When they were outside, Harkins turned on the first sergeant.
“You tell that cocksucker that I am not fucking going away. I may be a traffic cop, but I will burn this fucking place down, and him with it.”
Harkins turned away and so did not hear Drake say, “Yes, sir.”
15
3 August 1943
0730 hours
Colianno and Donnelly were outside, waiting in the jeep. Harkins helped Ronan into the back and the four rode in tense silence back to the nurses’ tent. Harkins got out when the women did.
“You did a good job back there,” Harkins said to Ronan. “I know that was tough.”
Ronan brought her right fist up in a roundhouse punch that caught Harkins just above the left eye. He was so surprised that he didn’t even turn his head.
“You don’t know shit about what I went through back there, or what I went through with that bastard Stephenson!” She strained, red-faced, spittle flying from her mouth. “He pushed my face into the dirt! Nearly broke my arm pulling it backwards! Kicked me from behind to get my legs apart! And after … after he asked me if I fucking liked it!
“You walked me right into that ambush back there. ‘Maybe it will help,’ you said. As if he would fucking help. He hasn’t done a single thing, hasn’t lifted a finger to help one nurse. What the hell was I thinking?”
She threw another punch, a weak jab. Harkins leaned back so that she barely connected. When Ronan turned away, Colianno got out of the jeep to walk her to her tent, but she waved him off and hurried away, head down.
Donnelly approached Harkins and looked at the cut above his eye. He dabbed at it with his fingers, which came away bloody.
“I ought to punch you in the other eye,” she said. “Why did you let Boone get away with that? I told you to be careful.”
“You heard all that?”
“You’re goddamned right I did. I listened from the other side of that door.” Donnelly studied him, eyes narrowed. “You knew that was going to happen. You had to, since you asked essentially the same stupid questions.”
“No,” Harkins said. “I tried to warn her.”
He wanted to mention Adams, the instructions from the provost to seek Boone’s cooperation, but he knew it would sound like an excuse.
“But I have seen defense attorneys, even detectives, ask those questions of rape victims. She has to be ready for that, and worse.”
“But now you know what your questions sounded like to her,” Donnelly said. “You and Boone were reading from the same hymnal, it’s just that he was more outrageous.”
“Boone had to be told to his face if anything is going to change around here.”
“You got more than that,” Donnelly said. “Maybe you wanted to poke the bear. Maybe you wanted to see what Boone would do when confronted, what you were up against. Maybe see if Boone should be on your list of suspects.”
Harkins looked at her, and for a moment, in spite of the surroundings and her uniform and her knife-cut hair, he saw a seventeen-year-old girl in a pleated skirt who’d stood up to a bully, a priest who wanted to use a switch on her little brother’s backside.
“You used her to bait him, Eddie.”
“Jesus, Kathleen. I didn’t use her as bait. Somebody had to speak up. It can’t just be a bunch of nurses sitting around and bitching into their coffee cups. I had to ask the questions I did.”
“You keep telling yourself that.”
“I just wasn’t ready for Boone to go on the offensive.”
“Well, you better be ready from now on, pal,” Donnelly said. She poked him in the chest with each word of her next sentence. “I don’t want her exposed to any more of his shit.”
“OK, I’m sorry,” Harkins said. “I really am. He caught me off guard.”
“I will beat your ass, Eddie Harkins; don’t think I won’t.”
Donnelly stepped back, drew a long breath, let it out. “You got my Irish up, boy-o.”
“I see that. What about your friend?” he asked, touching his eyebrow again. “She’s got a temper. Is she capable of violence?”
“You mean did she shoot Stephenson?”
Harkins stayed quiet.
“If she did, it’s only what he deserved.”
“Maybe,” Harkins said.
“Did you deliberately provoke her?” Donnelly asked. “With that stupid comment about you knowing how hard that interview was? Were you trying to see if she’d lose it?”
“No,” Harkins said.
Donnelly didn’t respond to that.
“She said that Stephenson maybe had something on Boone,” Harkins said. “And that’s why Boone let him get away with so much bullshit. Any idea what she was talking about? What Stephenson had on Boone?”
“None,” Donnelly said.
“Ask her, would you?”
“OK, but give her a little time,” Donnelly said.
“She going to be all right?”
Donnelly gave out a sad little laugh, looked around at the rows of tents, with their bandaged and drugged residents visible through the open side walls, the broken bones and gunshot faces and missing limbs. “Any of us going to be all right after all this?”
She turned and walked toward the nurses’ tent. Colianno, who’d been standing nearby, listening, came up beside Harkins.
“Slugging you isn’t the same thing as shooting someone at close range,” the paratrooper said. “Believe me, I know. Anyway, I don’t think Lieutenant Ronan could do that.”
“You’re probably right,” Harkins said.
“You need to get that cut checked, Lieutenant.”
When Harkins didn’t respond, the paratrooper pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “OK if I go grab my gear? I’d like to keep it with me in the jeep.”
Harkins nodded, glad to be left alone for a moment.
It had been a classic screwup. The questions he thought were reasonable were not; it’s just that he’d heard them so many times before that they seemed normal. It was only when Boone turned the same questions into an assault that he saw what he had done to Ronan. What he would never do again, he promised himself, if he lived long enough to become a detective.
He put his hand to his eyebrow; it was still bleeding.
“Well, guess I deserved that.”
He wondered if this made any sense at all. He was trying to pin a rape on a dead guy. Would bringing all that out in the open help Ronan? Would it make things better for the other nurses if Boone’s terrible leadership were exposed? It sure looked like Stephenson had already been dealt rough justice.
“Justice,” an old cop had told him when he was an unspoiled new hire at the Philadelphia PD, “don’t always look like what you expect.”
He stepped into a slice of shade beside one of the tents, took a pull of warm water from his canteen, remembered when he figured out what the old guy meant.
On foot pat
rol, a summer night, using his shoulder to bust open a locked door, crashing into the vestibule of an apartment building. A man, middle-aged, skinny, sweating through a stained undershirt, pants around his ankles, turning toward Harkins and away from a girl on the floor, who immediately pulled herself into a tight ball.
She was fourteen, they learned later, at the hospital. Had wandered into the wrong building looking for a friend’s apartment. The cops—Harkins, another patrolman, and a sergeant named Healy—told the girl’s father that the suspect had fled up the stairs, that he’d fallen from the roof while trying to escape. Six stories. Hit the concrete like a ripe pumpkin.
But the man had not run. He was drunk, for one thing. When the cops busted in, he tried to get away, stumbling up the stairs and holding his pants as he climbed.
Sergeant Healy had watched him from the first floor, one hand on his pistol, the other on the bannister, before turning to Harkins and the other patrolman, both of them rookies.
“Which one of you has a sister?” the sergeant asked.
“I do,” Harkins said.
“Find something to cover her up,” Healy told the other cop, then motioned Harkins to follow.
They caught up with him easily on the second floor, still fumbling with his pants. Harkins yanked up the man’s trousers, held them as the two cops, one on each arm, kept climbing, the man dragging his feet, not realizing what was happening until the fourth or fifth floor, even then too drunk to resist.
Harkins figured they were going to beat him, maybe with their fists, maybe with the nightsticks they were carrying.
When they reached the roof and Healy kept going toward the edge, Harkins finally asked, “What are we going to do, Sarge?”
“Shut up, kid,” Healy said.
And Harkins kept walking, matching Healy stride for stride, unable to stop himself, the drunk in between them, blubbering some apology.
At the edge of the roof, Harkins simply let go of the man’s arm as Healy pulled him free and shoved him over the edge. Then they turned back to the stairwell, and Harkins saw a woman watching them from an apartment window in a taller building next door. She nodded at him, retreated back into the gloom. After his shift, Harkins, his shoulder a knot of pain, went to his parents’ house and hugged his sisters, wordless.
