Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  Harkins looked up from his notes. “You sure?”

  “Hard to get that one wrong, him being the only Kraut doctor here. The driver said they went together, described the same place. Stephenson got piss-drunk, the Kraut stayed sober. But he did go inside.”

  “That’s strange,” Harkins said. “The nurses describe Lindner as a gentleman. Kind of straitlaced. What’s he doing hanging out with a piece of shit like Stephenson? The driver say what the two docs talked about during the ride?”

  “Guy said they talked German; can you believe that?” Colianno said.

  The driver stepped into the tent, pulled up a wooden crate stenciled 11TH FH.

  “OK if I sit down, Lieutenant?”

  Harkins nodded and Colianno sat, held the tommy gun between his knees and pointed safely upward. Harkins noticed there was no magazine in the weapon.

  “What kind of place is this, where this POW runs around like some fancy-ass American colonel?” Colianno asked. “Everybody talking fucking German. You ask me, this is where you should be looking. Lindner and Stephenson.”

  “And not at Lieutenant Ronan?”

  Colianno didn’t take the bait. Probably figured his feelings for Ronan were already pretty clear.

  “Maybe Lindner’s a fairy. Maybe he made a pass at Stephenson and, when he got turned down, killed him to keep it from coming out.”

  “That’s quite a theory,” Harkins said. He couldn’t suppress a smile. “Anything to make you think that? Lindner flirting with any of the enlisted men?”

  “No, but he’s really neat, you know. How he dresses, I mean. Plus, he’s a dick doctor, right?”

  Harkins chuckled, went back to typing.

  Colianno put the tommy gun across his lap and used a rag to wipe some dust off the slide.

  “You know what I can’t figure out?” Colianno said. “Guy like Stephenson, obviously a grade A asshole, and the most people want to say about him is that he got fresh with the nurses. Those other docs this morning, the only complaint they had was that he tried to use a stolen paten instead of cash in a card game.”

  “So?”

  “There had to be other stuff, don’t you think? Like, I don’t know, he treated the orderlies like shit, or stole stuff?”

  Harkins stopped typing.

  “Yeah, I’ve thought about that,” Harkins said. “Though the only thing we’ve found—besides the paten—is that no one wanted to share a tent with him.”

  “Just seems strange, is all I’m saying.”

  “There was this trial in Philly three, four years ago,” Harkins said. “Guy was a principal of a school, a deacon in his church, president of his local American Legion. Married, two or three kids.”

  Colianno was still absentmindedly wiping down the weapon, but his eyes were on Harkins.

  “Turns out he was a killer. Picked up working girls, murdered them, buried them over in Jersey, the Pine Barrens.”

  “So, you think Stephenson might have been doing other stuff, stuff he hid?”

  “Maybe,” Harkins said. “Could be that the other docs didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, the worst that Stephenson was capable of. Could be that they saw it and just didn’t think it was all that bad.”

  Harkins looked back down at his notes, pencil scribbles on sweat-stained paper. “One thing’s for sure,” he said. “Something he did pissed somebody off.”

  20

  3 August 1943

  2100 hours

  It was full dark when Harkins went looking for Donnelly in the nurses’ sleeping tent. He knocked on the pole by the door and waited like a suitor until a nurse came out and told him Kathleen wasn’t there. He returned to admin, by the church wall, asked Colianno to wait, and walked the last few yards from the compound’s main street. When he passed the tent where he and Donnelly had spent the previous night, he noticed that all the tent’s flaps were down again, and there was a dim glow from a kerosene lamp visible at the doorway seam. He wasn’t proud of the impulse, but he wanted to call her name at the doorway, see if she was in there. He even stopped for a moment. Then he walked to the admin tent, where Donnelly and a clerk were transferring information from casualty tags to larger forms.

  “Take a smoke break, Dale,” Donnelly said to the clerk.

  The soldier left the tent, and Harkins checked to make sure he wasn’t close by and eavesdropping. When he turned back to Donnelly, she was massaging her neck muscles. There were four piles of the large tags on the table. Medics at the forward aid stations tied them to wounded GIs; there were notes about the treatment and drugs the wounded men had received. A number of the tags had blood on them.

  “How long you been doing that?”

  “Since 1935, feels like.”

  “You going to finish soon?”

  Donnelly smiled. “Sorry, the supply tent is in use. Besides, you’re still in the doghouse.”

  “I meant so you could get some rest.”

  “Sure you did.” She stood, stretched, leaning backward, then sat down again and put her feet on the clerk’s chair. She was wearing men’s shoes.

  “Nice,” Harkins said.

  “Yeah, aren’t they? The quartermaster doesn’t stock women’s shoes or even shoe sizes. These are the smallest men’s shoes, and I have to stuff the toes with cotton bandages.”

  She pressed her feet together, side by side, moved them back and forth like windshield wipers.

  “I can’t believe how much time I used to spend thinking about clothes, buying clothes, ironing clothes, washing my hair, putting on makeup, fussing with my hair. Now a sponge bath out of a helmet is a luxury.”

  “Certainly is,” Harkins agreed.

  “Enough. Have a seat,” she said, indicating a crate marked with a caduceus and a large US.

  “I hear you got in a tussle with a doc named Wilkins,” she said. “That right?”

  “He had it coming.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Harkins was silent. Donnelly sat with her arms folded, obviously waiting for him to go on.

  “What?” he said.

  “Want to tell me what it was about?”

  “A couple of them were bad-mouthing the nurses.”

  “Any nurse in particular?”

  “Whitman.”

  “Don’t be coy, Eddie. There are no secrets around here. I knew when we shacked up that word would get around.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  “Apparently not as much as it bothers you.”

  Harkins wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

  “Eddie, it’s sweet that you care. Really. But this isn’t high school, and it certainly isn’t the neighborhood. You and I aren’t going to see each other in church. My dad and brothers aren’t going to come looking for you.”

  She leaned forward, touched his knee, smiling the way you might smile at a kid brother who hadn’t yet made sense of the world.

  “Is that what we did?” he said. “Shacked up?”

  “Well, we’re not engaged. If we were going to be located close to each other, if we could see each other—which I would enjoy—it would be different,” she said. “Of course, I’d have gone about it in a completely different way. I wouldn’t have hopped into the sack with you a few hours after seeing you for the first time in years.”

  “I just don’t want to be responsible for you getting a bad reputation,” Harkins said.

  Donnelly laughed. “All the shit that’s going on here and you’re worried some asshat doctor thinks I’m a floozy?”

  “So I shouldn’t worry about it?”

  “You’re a great guy, Eddie, always have been. But I don’t need a boyfriend right now. I had two patients die on me today, right on the operating table. I got bigger fish to fry.”

  “What did you want, then?” Harkins asked.

  “I just wanted to be held for an hour or two. Like you.”

  For many people, the war had broken strictures that had been in place for a long time. Single women like his sis
ters were working in factories, driving trucks, living on their own. Probably half the guys in uniform had told some woman a version of “I’m shipping out and want something to remember you by.”

  “Look, even if I didn’t do what I wanted,” Donnelly said, “even if the nurses didn’t fool around, the same docs would just make stuff up anyway. At least I got to have fun. OK?”

  “OK,” Harkins said again, though he wasn’t sure he was OK with it at all.

  “So what have you done today to win the war?”

  Harkins leaned back, stretched his tired legs in front of him. “Colianno found out that your Kraut doctor friend went to the bordello with Stephenson.”

  “That’s an odd pair.”

  “That’s what I thought. Is Lindner friends with any of the other docs?”

  “I don’t really know. I know he talks to absolutely everyone. He’s always in there chatting with the GIs who come in. Says he wants to practice his English, plus he’s just friendly.”

  “Mind keeping an eye on him for me?”

  Donnelly smiled. “Sure. I bet we could get Alice to move into his tent.”

  “I’ll bet we could.”

  Harkins paused, then said, “You know, I was kind of surprised to hear you guys talk about him like you do. Like he’s a friend.”

  “I knew you found that strange, the way you reacted when you saw him in the mess tent,” Donnelly said. “I guess we just think of him as a surgeon first. He’s kind of powerless since he’s a POW. Maybe he figures if he gets shipped back to the States he won’t get to do surgery, so he’s careful not to attract too much attention.”

  “You know anything about him, other than the professional stuff?” Harkins asked.

  “You mean like family? Not really. Although…”

  “Although?”

  “Now that you mention it,” Donnelly said, “besides you, he’s the only other person I’ve told about wanting to go to medical school. Maybe a nurse or two, but Lindner and you are the only men.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well, if he thought it far-fetched he didn’t say anything to me. But now that I think about it, it’s strange that I feel more comfortable telling a so-called enemy than telling my own male colleagues.”

  “Doesn’t say much for your colleagues, I guess,” Harkins said.

  “I can’t figure out why he’d go anywhere with Stephenson, especially to a bordello.”

  “Colianno thinks the Kraut is a fairy, and that he killed Stephenson when Stephenson turned down his advances.”

  “Well, I don’t know about him being a fairy, but if he isn’t, he certainly doesn’t need to go to a bordello. Half the nurses here would sleep with him if he asked.”

  “Has he? Asked, I mean.”

  “If he has, the nurses aren’t talking about it. But it’s pretty hard to keep secrets around here.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” Harkins said. “Anyway, I’d just like to know what he’s up to, what connections, if any, he’s made. He seems to have a lot of freedom.”

  “Yeah, he does come and go as he pleases,” Donnelly said. “Even I think that’s a bit odd. Maybe he gets special privileges because of what he can do in surgery. He’s a whiz on the whizzer.”

  “You definitely need some sleep.”

  “There’s something else you should know about all the shit that’s been going on here,” Donnelly said. “Though I’m not sure you can do anything with it, and you have to promise me you’ll keep it to yourself unless we agree otherwise, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Whitman didn’t choke to death, like everybody thinks. I’m not sure exactly what killed her, or who killed her, but I think Boone was somehow involved.”

  “Go on,” Harkins said.

  Donnelly took a deep breath. “I did an autopsy on her before they took her to the cemetery.”

  Donnelly said it like it was a momentous announcement.

  “Isn’t that routine in something like this?”

  “A healthy young woman dies back in Philly? Yeah, maybe they do an autopsy,” Donnelly said. “Not here. We’re not really equipped for forensic pathology. Most of our deaths, it’s pretty obvious what killed them.”

  “OK, so you did an autopsy.”

  “I did a half-assed autopsy, a field-expedient autopsy.”

  “OK.”

  “Eddie, I’m not authorized to do anything like that. I’m not a doctor, and someone in authority would have to order an autopsy.”

  “All right, I see. So you could get in trouble.”

  “Exactly. Which is why you have to keep this to yourself.”

  “What did you find?”

  “No vomitus in her trachea.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she didn’t choke on her own vomit. But that’s what Boone wrote on her chart, which is the closest thing we have to a death certificate.”

  “Is it possible that the first people to find her jumped to that conclusion, and then it caught on?”

  “Yes, of course that’s possible. But Boone is supposed to know better. He’s not supposed to just go by what a bunch of medical orderlies tell him, or even what some nurses tell him.”

  “If Boone knew that she didn’t choke but that’s what he put on the chart, what? You think he’s trying to hide what really happened?” Harkins asked. “She was drinking with Stephenson that night. Maybe Boone was trying to cover something Stephenson did.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe Boone was the father of her baby, and for some reason he didn’t want that coming out. He’s married, I think.”

  “Whitman threaten to expose him? Everything I heard about her, she was too nice for that kind of game.”

  “Look,” Donnelly said. “I’m sorry this leaves us with more unanswered questions, but I wanted you to know. I wanted someone besides me to know.”

  Harkins reached across and squeezed her knee. He knew what it was like to carry secrets.

  “OK,” he said, standing. “Colianno and I are headed back into the city. Talk to the madam again. So, you’ll ask around about Lindner?”

  “OK, chief, I’m on the case,” Donnelly said, bringing her fingers to her eyebrow for a mock salute. “Tell me, Lieutenant Harkins, is there a reward involved?”

  Harkins was operating on about eight hours of sleep in the last seventy-two. It was, he thought, a testimony to the glories of nature that he still felt a stirring at Donnelly’s teasing.

  “I guess we’ll have to see how you perform. I’ll stop back later if you think you’ll be awake.”

  “Yes, unfortunately.” She patted the pile of casualty tags.

  “Don’t you have clerks to help with that?”

  “Yeah, but a nurse has to check, make sure the information is transferred to the patient chart correctly. I sent the last clerk away after he’d been at it for seventeen hours and was drooling on the pages. The guy outside on a smoke break has been at it for ten hours.”

  She lifted a pile of tags, straightened the strings on the ends.

  “And there are always more coming in.”

  21

  3 August 1943

  2200 hours

  Harkins and Colianno went into the bordello behind three noncoms wearing the shoulder patch of the Forty-Fifth Division. The madam gave the three a coy smile—hustling men was her business—but when she saw Colianno she beamed. She ignored Harkins completely.

  After a few minutes of rapid-fire conversation, Colianno kissed her hand and gave her a musette bag. When the two GIs walked outside, Harkins asked, “What was in the bag?”

  “Cigarettes, chocolate, that kind of stuff.”

  “Ready for anything, aren’t you?”

  Colianno shrugged. “You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that these people are glad to have a few luxuries. I could probably conquer the island with a couple dozen pairs of silk stockings.”

  “So what did you find out?”

  “Lindner was here. Came with Stephens
on two nights before he was killed. Stephenson was drinking, was drunk when he arrived, and he went upstairs with two girls. Lindner didn’t go up.”

  “Is that why you think he’s a fairy?”

  “I asked Senora Pescetelli, ’cause she provides, you know, that service, too. Guys who like guys. She doesn’t think so. Maybe he was afraid of getting the clap. Anyway, Lindner had a medical bag and he treated some of the women for some minor stuff. The senora was very grateful. I asked if she knew he was a Kraut, and she said it didn’t matter to her. He and Stephenson left within an hour.”

  Harkins walked outside, Colianno following. They paused on the narrow step at the front door.

  “I still can’t figure out why a proper German doctor is hanging around with an ass like Stephenson.”

  “Maybe he caught a ride here to treat the girls,” Colianno said.

  “Maybe,” Harkins said. “You know, I wasn’t expecting a connection between Lindner and Stephenson. But now that we’ve found one, I wonder who else Stephenson was connected to. Boone has been pulling strings to keep Lindner at the hospital, instead of letting him get shipped out with the other POWs. I wonder if the three of them are connected.”

  “Well, Colonel Boone sure ain’t going to answer any questions for you, but the Kraut will. I mean, he has to, right?”

  “Yeah,” Harkins said. “He doesn’t have much choice, although he could lie about his connection to Stephenson.”

  On the street beside the brothel, the same two boys Colianno had hired to guard the jeep the day before sat in it. Three GIs stood close by, identifiable in the weak moonlight by the silhouettes of their helmets.

  The boys started talking to Colianno immediately, sounding nervous. Colianno calmed them, handed over a GI sock filled with C-ration cans. The boys scattered into the darkness.

  “Help you find something?” Harkins asked the figure standing closest. He was shorter than the other two, and even in the dark he looked like the leader.

  “Who’re you?” the man asked.

  “Lieutenant Harkins, military police. Who are you?”

  The street was empty, the shops closed up for the night, no one visible in the second- and third-story windows. Harkins and Colianno were alone with three shadows.