Full Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

Jacey pointed at the first message and clicked. A note from a friend in another regiment popped up. They were making plans for the weekend. She clicked on the next message. It was from a guy in the Fourth Regiment she had met during duty at Beast Barracks, summer training for the new plebe class. He invited her to the Saturday movie. Jacey went to the next message. It had also been sent during Beast Barracks, when Dorothy had been a platoon sergeant on the cadet upperclass detail. The message was directed to a squad leader in another company. Apparently, Dorothy had caught one of his plebes using a pay phone after taps. Jacey clicked on another message. It, too, addressed an issue during Beast Barracks.

  She continued down the list of files, clicking on one after another, until she reached the end. They were all of an incidental nature.

  “You said you found the disk in your box. Did you check any others?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  Carrie opened her bottom desk drawer and brought the file box of floppies to Jacey. It held fifty floppies. About half were labeled. The others, toward the back, were blank. Jacey started going through the blanks, popping each one into the drive and hitting “open file” on the A drive. One after another they turned up blank. She was maybe halfway through the blank floppies when she inserted one in the drive and opened the A drive, and up popped another list of files.

  She started opening the individual files. They were messages that Dorothy had sent to other cadets and to faculty members. Some were replies to messages they had seen on the other disk. Others were chatty notes to friends in other companies and regiments. Jacey quickly made her way to the bottom of the list. There was nothing out of the ordinary in any of the messages. She popped the floppy out of the A drive and fingered it thoughtfully.

  “Why do you think she put her floppies in your box?”

  “I don’t know,” said Carrie.

  “They couldn’t have been misplaced, could they?”

  “I don’t think so. She had her own file box. The CID guys took it when they went through her stuff.”

  “Let’s keep looking.” She grabbed another floppy. Blank. Another and another and another, all blank. She was almost to the end of the blank floppies when she hit “open file” and a new list of files appeared. She studied the list. All of the previous file names had vaguely military acronyms. These were different. She opened the first file. It was a letter from her father thanking her for the weekend her parents had just spent at West Point attending a football game the previous fall. The next file was a letter back to her father, making plans for Thanksgiving. More letters to and from her father followed, leading up to Christmas, and then there were some very depressed-sounding short notes from January and February, lamenting the cold and dark months of “Gloom Period,” the dreaded dead of winter, when it seemed to cadets across the Corps that spring would never come, academics would never let up, and their four years at West Point would never end.

  Carrie stood up and stretched. “I’m going to wash up and get ready for bed.”

  “Okay. This is only going to take another minute or so,” said Jacey.

  Carrie grabbed a towel and headed out the door toward the women’s rest room. Jacey put the pointer on the next file and opened it.

  The message was from Ash to Dorothy, forwarding an E-mail from another cadet, who had lost Dorothy’s E-mail address. Startled to see her boyfriend’s name in Dorothy’s E-mail, she held her breath as she scrolled down to the forwarded message. It was from Rick Favro. He’s apologizing for not writing, he’s been in Airborne School, and they haven’t had five minutes to themselves all month, but he just finished his last jump, and graduation is the next day, and he’s using a lieutenant’s computer, one of the guys from his company who graduated in June and is now down at Benning going through the Infantry Officer Basic Course. Favro’s telling her about their last jump, the night jump, and how cool it was, and how he was thinking about her as his chute opened, and he looked up and saw this big thing that looked like a huge white pillow against the night, and how it reminded him of the big pillows on the king-size bed in the hotel room they shared at a resort in the Catskills just before he left for Benning and she headed for Fort Knox for summer training.

  Jacey took a breath. Where in the hell did this come from? Dorothy and Rick Favro, the Second Regimental Commander and Vice Chairman of the Honor Committee, one of the biggest dudes in the whole damn class? They’re shacking up together, and Dorothy’s not breathing a word of it to Carrie or to any of her other friends?

  She hit the down arrow. Favro is telling her he wants to see her when they get back to West Point, but reorgy week’s gonna be hell, and he’s got rugby practice on Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend, but Labor Day, there’s going to be this party, and some people are going to be there. They’re all big-time guys, every one of them: Norm Reade, the Brigade Adjutant. Andy Lessard, the First Regimental Commander. Glenn Ivar, the star running back on the football team. And Jerry Rose, the Chairman of the Honor Committee. All guys. No females. At least, no cadet females. Then Favro tells her all of the guys are bringing dates, and they’re going to rent a cabin on a lake just west of the Academy, and there’s going to be a couple of kegs, and everybody’s going to go swimming and it’s going to be great and he wants Dorothy to come.

  Jacey tried to imagine Dorothy’s elation. Quickly she went to the next message. It was Dorothy’s reply to Favro. She was trying to contain herself, but she gave it all away when she said their weekend in the Catskills had been the best three days of her life. Of course she’d go with him.

  Damn you, Dorothy! Couldn’t you play just a little hard to get?

  Jacey hurried to the next message. It was from Ash, asking if Dorothy had received the E-mail he forwarded from Favro. Next came Dorothy’s response to Ash. She said she had, and she ended her message with a cheery salutation: “See you at the party on Labor Day!”

  Okay. Okay. Jacey could feel blood rushing to her head. She was trying to get a grip. It was bad enough that her own boyfriend knew that Dorothy had gone to a keg party the day before her death. But her boyfriend had been at the party, and he hadn’t said a word to her about it. Jacey had called the company meeting and she’d asked everyone if they knew anything about Dorothy that could help in the investigation of her death. What had been her mood? How had she been acting that morning? Over the last few days? Ash had been at some lake at a fucking keg party with her, and that wasn’t relevant?

  What the hell was he hiding?

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  BY ANY measure, Colonel T. Clifford Bassett was an unlikely sort of career Army officer. His face was cherubic, almost perfectly round, and his squinty gray eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled, which was often. His torso was similarly rotund and with his short legs, he moved in a kind of truncated scurry. He could often be seen in the lower corridors of Thayer Hall, hustling from one classroom to the next, stepping inside to listen briefly or fire off a question tinged with irony and humor. The sharpness of his intellect could have been frightening were it not for his relaxed, even jovial demeanor.

  He had attended Harvard Law School and had been drafted into the Army during the war in Vietnam. To his great surprise, having completed Army legal training, he found himself assigned to teach law at West Point. From the first, he had intended to resign from the Army when his three-year commitment was up, and he did, taking a job with a white-shoe law firm down in New York. But several years as a junior associate running legal errands and doing back-office research for senior partners who couldn’t have found the Federal District Court House if they were deposited in front of it by a limousine convinced him that the practice of big-time New York corporate law wasn’t really in his blood. He took the shuttle down to Washington and a cab to the Pentagon and stopped in at JAG branch personnel and asked what he had to do to get his commission back. “Sign here,” he had been told, and so he did. He spent a few years in Staff Judge Advoca
te offices at Fort Benning and Fort Leonard Wood, and when a permanent associate professorship opened in the Department of Law at West Point, he jumped at the chance. The Academy welcomed him back eagerly, because even as a junior professor, he had brought to the rather dry West Point law classroom a delicious sense of humor and an infectious love of the law that had energized students and his fellow law professors alike.

  He had been promoted to professor and head of the Department of Law several years previously and was enjoying the golden years of his career overseeing both the department and the overall practice of law at West Point. He was the senior JAG officer at the Academy, and reported directly to the Superintendent. It was an unusual arrangement. Usually, the Staff Judge Advocate was the senior legal officer on an Army post. But as with many other things military, West Point was different.

  It wasn’t the power of the position that made the job satisfying, however. Far more important to him was the sense of being part of a continuum, the yearly passage of knowledge from officer to cadet that had gone on at the Academy for almost two hundred years. Even after all his years teaching law at West Point, there was still a spine-tingling thrill in crossing intellectual swords with young and nimble minds when he taught the occasional class or delivered a lecture and took questions from cadets. They were impatient and curious and eager and edgy and skeptical, and on good days, they could throw off a superheated spark-filled energy that was invigorating and just plain downright fun.

  When he learned that Ry Slaight, his former student and old friend, had been appointed Superintendent, it was a confirmation that he had made the right choice, having returned to the Army and taken the long, slow road that had delivered him to his present job. He knew it wasn’t often in life that things worked out the way they had for him. He and his wife Fran lived in one of the large sets of professors’ quarters along Thayer Road. The fact that West Point was only an hour from New York meant they could partake of the city’s wide variety of cultural institutions they had enjoyed so much when they were living on the Upper West Side. What could be better than a night of Puccini, topped off with a late dinner at Joe’s Shanghai, down on Pell Street, or listening to Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center, followed by a big bowl of bouillabaisse at Perry Bistro, down in the Village? He and his wife both loved great music and great food, and New York provided copious quantities of both.

  Bassett recalled a time when he had invited Slaight and his date over for dinner on a Saturday night sometime during the winter of 1968. It was below-zero weather, and the roads were icy, and they were late, but they made it to the stone barn that Bassett had rented on the grounds of an old farm just north of West Point off Route 9W. Fran had made a huge pot of spaghetti, which everyone had consumed with gusto, and they had sat around the dining-room table talking long after the dessert had been consumed and the coffee had gone cold.

  Along with sharing a love of good restaurants and good food, talk was a thing they had in common. Nothing made T. Clifford Bassett quite as happy as sitting around and throwing ideas back and forth and testing which ones stuck and which didn’t. He had been certain, even then, that the same was true of Slaight.

  Bassett had counseled Slaight during his firstie year, when he was going up against the system at West Point trying to find out who had killed David Hand, and he remembered with great alacrity how the system had almost chewed up Slaight and spit him out before he was able to prove Hand had been murdered by an upperclass cadet, a homosexual lover who was afraid Hand would expose their affair.

  And now that Slaight was Supe, his former student was charged with defending that which he had once challenged with such vehemence. The irony was delicious.

  So when General Slaight walked into Bassett’s office in Building 606 late one afternoon, it hardly surprised him. Many times before, Cadet Slaight had walked into the much smaller windowless office he used to have in the basement of Thayer Hall.

  The Superintendent sat down heavily in the chair facing the desk of the professor of law, and he rubbed his forehead with both hands, as if to remove worry or stimulate thought. Or maybe both.

  “Cliff, I’ve got a problem,” said General Slaight.

  ‘‘The last time you came to my office you were rubbing your forehead the same way.”

  Slaight laughed at the memory. “Yeah. You’re right.”

  “I’ve been watching Lombardi closely. So far, he’s doing all the right things.”

  “It’s not Lombardi. It’s Gibson.”

  “Gibby?”

  Slaight laughed at the sobriquet.

  ‘‘What could possibly be wrong with a perfect specimen of officerly gentlemanhood like Brigadier General Gibson?” asked Bassett with a smile on his face about as wide as his shirt collar.

  “I think he’s having an affair with Helen Messick.”

  Bassett leaned back in his chair and interlaced his fingers across his ample middle. “My wife is of the same opinion.”

  Slaight’s eyes widened. “How so?”

  “Last spring, Fran’s mother called from Ohio and offered to treat her and her sister to a long weekend in the city. They were going to take in some shows and visit the museums and eat at Gotham Bar and Grill and shop at Bergdorf’s and generally indulge themselves. They took connecting rooms at the Plaza, and Fran was returning to her room one night that weekend when she saw Gibby and Mrs. Messick down the hall. He slipped his card into the slot and the two of them stumbled inside. Fran said they were pretty sloshed.”

  “Did he see her?”

  “No. Even if he had, I doubt he would have recognized her. We don’t exactly mix it up with the Gibsons, if you get what I mean.”

  Slaight laughed. “Neither do we.” He looked out the narrow window in Bassett’s office, which provided a sliver of a glimpse of the hills across the Hudson. “Do you have an idea if anyone else knows about them?”

  “Fran running into them down at the Plaza was an odd coincidence. I don’t think many officers or wives here at the Academy spend weekends at the Plaza. Gibson’s in the clear, so far.”

  “Not any longer. I was out jogging the other night and saw them in Messick’s garage. Found out the Colonel was away at some academic conference.”

  “They saw you?”

  “They saw me, but they couldn’t recognize me. It was dark, and I had my hood up.”

  “Interesting.”

  “So the problem is, what do I do with an adulterous brigadier general who also happens to be the Commandant of Cadets?”

  “Well, I can certainly fill you in on the legal aspects of the situation. Even if you wanted to charge Gibson, which I would counsel against anyway, there isn’t enough evidence to sustain a charge of adultery, or even one of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.”

  “I had an idea you were going to say that.”

  “Do you want the details?”

  “May as well hear them. Even if we don’t end up bringing charges against Gibson, something’s going to pop on this thing. I can feel it.”

  “As it stands right now, Gibson is a beneficiary of the UCMJ’s rather strict standards for proving such a charge. Observation of a man entering a hotel room with a woman who is not his wife is insufficient. Seeing them holding hands, or kissing, or embracing won’t do either. In order to make a charge of adultery stick, you’ve got to have proof that intercourse took place. That would mean vaginal penetration by the penis of the offending officer. Not even sodomy would suffice. Absent an admission by one of the parties that this in fact had occurred, there would have to be photographs of the act, or description by a witness to the act. In either case, not very likely at all.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “You could probably bring an Article One-thirty-three conduct-unbecoming charge and make it stick, but I’m not sure you want to jump into that particular vat of tar.”

  “I don’t.”

  “There are other alternatives available to you as Superintendent, of course,” s
aid Bassett, looking pleased with himself.

  “I could have him drive around to my office and brace him and tell him to knock it off, you mean,” Slaight said, chuckling.

  “Yes, you could do that.”

  “You’re giving me one of those looks you used to give me in class, goddamnit.”

  Bassett removed his glasses and began cleaning them with a handkerchief. “There’s something you’ve got to keep in mind when dealing with a man like Brigadier General Gibson. He has friends in high places, and he is not shy about using them.”

  “Yeah, I know about how Cecil Avery has been pushing his career.”

  “Cecil has helped to assemble quite a handy little cheering section at the Pentagon. His support is deep and wide at the crucial deputy-chief level, among lieutenant and major generals.”

  “I understand they’re going to give him the One-oh-first Airborne Division when he leaves here,” said Slaight.

  “Onward and upward is the plan. Three stars, assignment as a corps commander or as troubleshooter in the hot spot of the month, then a cushy political job at NATO, then Chief of Staff or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  “He’s the Al Haig of the nineties, Ry, a very clever, very determined man. Don’t sell him short.”

  Slaight sank back into his chair and rubbed his forehead. “You know what my real problem is? When the Army decided to make the post of Superintendent a five-year slot for a lieutenant general in contemplation of his retirement at the end of his tour of duty, they pretty much made the Supe a lame duck from day one.”

  “That has occurred to me,” said Bassett.

  “The theory was, they’d elevate the Supe to three stars and make him more independent, and it’s worked, more or less. But independence has a steep downside in an institution as hierarchical as the Army. Those above you in the chain of command don’t trust you because they realize if your career is in its final years, you don’t need them. But they maintained the Commandant as a slot for a hard-charger, someone they could depend on.”