“Yeah.” Someday I’ll come back and emasculate you.
“But otherwise, I mean there was not much to her. Nothing else to get your hands on, huh? Anyway, you never can tell what you’re gonna catch from one of them navy hookers, huh?”
“So you let her walk?”
“No choice.”
“Too bad.” I was about to ask him for the name of the assistant district attorney.
“Well.” He belched again, massively. “She must have figured she was guilty anyway. Elsewise, why would she kill herself, huh?”
“Kill herself?” I felt as if I had walked into a meat freezer.
“Yeah, sure. Didn’t you know that part of it? Took a walk in the Pacific Ocean, with her clothes on, and forgot to come back. One of the guys from the apartment building saw her, same fucking marine. Right straight out into the ocean, late in the afternoon, lemme see, of April 10. Body only washed up last month.”
“You’re sure?”
“Fuck, I don’t know. We couldn’t get any prints off the body. No one knows where she’s from, so we can’t look at her teeth. Anyway, who the fuck cares? It closes the file and that’s that.”
“I see.”
With enormous effort, suggesting a man lifting a huge weight, he heaved himself to his feet and extended his hand. “Nice to talk to you.”
“Did you send the body home?”
“Home?” he sneered. “Those fucking navy bitches don’t come from anywhere. We released it to that CPO and his wife. What’s their name?”
“Weaver,” I said automatically.
“Yeah, they identified her. You wanna find out where it is, ask them. Course the Catholic Church wouldn’t let them bury her in one of our cemeteries. Suicides can’t be buried in consecrated ground, you know?”
“Really?”
Maggie Ward was dead. And buried in unconsecrated ground.
How then had I made love with her in the shadow of Picketpost Mountain?
CHAPTER 27
“YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN HER, SIR,” CPO FRED WEAVER said as he pounded the table. “Her face was swollen, both of her eyes were black, and her throat was raw from where he was choking her.”
“And her poor little body was covered with black and blue marks,” Magda Weaver chirped sympathetically, “from where he had beaten her before that day.”
“I should have gone to his CO.” The Chief shook his head sadly. “The Navy has enough trouble in this town without having a rating kill his wife.”
“Or the other way around,” I exhaled softly.
“Well.” Magda refilled my teacup. “Once the young district attorney saw what she looked like he knew he didn’t have a case, no matter what that fat stupid lieutenant said.”
“Your testimony was a big help too, I’m sure.”
Fred Weaver, in neatly pressed khakis and with a soft Texas drawl, was the kind of noncommissioned officer who holds any military unit together. A man of medium height with a thin face, sea-blue eyes close together, crew cut with a twinge of gray in it, Fred and his ilk helped win the war by guiding twenty-year-old ensigns and jaygees through their first months of command. When you called him “Chief,” you knew he really was the chief. Magda was a few years younger, perhaps late twenties, a pretty little canary person. Their two girls, middle years of grammar school, had obediently left the clean and orderly apartment when I arrived.
“I always said to Fred,” Magda said as she settled herself in a wicker chair (in those days wicker was inexpensive furniture, the kind NCOs were likely to find in the semi-slum furnished apartments available to them off-base), “I always said I hope our girls grow up to be as sweet as poor Maggie. She was such a lovely girl, and so good with the baby, sometimes like she was a doll and other times like a little sister, but always so careful. And little Andrea was such a good, happy little girl.” She dabbed at her eyes with the tissue she had clenched in her tiny fist since we had begun to talk about Maggie Ward. “Poor children, they never had a chance.”
“He wasn’t a bad young man.” The chief frowned, drawing his eyes even closer together, like the bright lights on a car. I wouldn’t want to be a rating of whom he was suspicious. “Must have been smart or they wouldn’t have sent him to radar school. But he wasn’t, well, how should I say it, Commander, not too …”
“Quick?”
“That’s it exactly.” Chief Weaver nodded vigorously. “And always kind of suspicious, like he thought everyone was trying to trick him and so he couldn’t really trust anyone.”
“Not even his poor little wife, who tried so hard to make him happy when he came home in September.”
“He decided to stay in,” her husband continued. “Become career Navy. Not a bad deal. I’ve been in almost nine years now. In 1957 I’m only forty-two and I retire on half pay. What about you, sir? Are you going to try for regular Navy?”
“I don’t think so,” I laughed. “Crazy fighter pilots are not much use in peacetime, especially when they don’t have a class ring from the Academy or anywhere else … you were saying, about Technician/First Andrew John Koenig …”
“I was about to say”—the chief smiled at his wife as she refilled his teacup—”that I’m not sure he would have made it in career Navy. If I had to do a fitness report on him, even before the trouble, I would have been obliged to say that a lot of the time he was surly and uncommunicative. Would do his job, but you could never tell when he’d come up with some crazy complaint about what the other men in his outfit were trying to do to him.”
“Why, he was even suspicious of the poor little tyke when he came home.” Magda clasped her hands angrily. “As if she wasn’t his child and had no right to be in their apartment.”
“Well, now, Mother, fair is fair.” The chief raised his hand as if he were a judge passing sentence. “He turned around on that pretty quick.”
“She turned him around,” his wife fired back, “she was so pretty and so winning and worked so hard to please him. He even began to smile. But he never was very friendly with any of the neighbors, especially when we all had to move over here when they tore the old building down.”
Thirty-year-old wooden apartment buildings, housing mostly navy personnel, were becoming a wasteful use of land on the harbor.
“I’m afraid”—the Chief bit his lip—”that he thought the move was part of a plot to get rid of him. It really wasn’t, but since he didn’t talk much to any of us, we never had a chance to tell him about this housing. I got him in here, in the apartment next door, when someone else canceled out. Otherwise he’d have had to move way out toward Chula Vista, and he didn’t have a car either.”
“He never even said thanks.” His wife drew her lips in a tight line. “It was like we owed him an apartment.”
The Weavers were practiced at telling the story. All I had to do was listen.
And resist the urge to weep with Magda.
“If she had more time, I don’t know,” the chief took over narration, “maybe she could have turned him around on a lot of things. She sure did have her work cut out for her, though.”
“Babies die in cribs for no reason. They just stop breathing.” Magda was wringing her hand at the terrible prospect. “You keep watching your baby to make sure she’s still breathing, even though you know there’s nothing you can do if she stops. You just want to tell yourself that it hasn’t happened to you.”
“Yet,” I said quietly.
Magda smiled at me. “You do understand, don’t you, Commander?”
“If I heard him say it once, I heard him say it to her a hundred times. ‘If only you had been watching the baby …’ ”
“He never called her by her name, even though she was named after him,” his wife jumped in. “Like that was some kind of trick too.”
“ ‘If only you had been watching the baby,’ ” her husband persisted, “ ‘she’d still be alive.’ ”
“The doctor at the navy hospital where we rushed them did everything he could,
but he said when little kids stop breathing like that, there’s nothing you can do.”
“He almost hit her when he finally came up from the Yards to the hospital.” The chief shook his head sadly. “First thing he could think of when he rushed into the emergency room was to take a swing at her. Would have knocked her down, if I hadn’t stopped him.”
“Poor man.” I didn’t know why I said that. I hated the bastard. “Poor bastard” might have been better.
“He did hit her that night. We could hear him shouting and her whimpering. She never complained.”
“The walls are pretty thin in these quarters.” The chief blushed at the thought that they might have been eavesdropping. “You can’t help but hear.”
“And that terrible fat police officer who came around the next day asking his snide questions even though the doctor told him it was death from natural causes and there wasn’t a mark on the baby.”
“His exact words to me”—the Chief’s knuckles were white—” ‘if you navy shit want to kill your own kids, I don’t give a shit.’ ”
“Charming man.”
“The Navy has enough trouble in this town. Even then it was all I could do not to slug him in his big fat belly.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Another cup of tea, Commander?”
“Thank you, Miz Weaver, I have a weakness for Earl Grey.”
“That’s funny.” She filled my cup for the third time. “Have another cookie too, you look thin. Like I say, that’s funny, poor little Maggie liked Earl Grey too.”
“I know.”
“You knew her before this all happened?” The Chief cocked an eyebrow, a slight hint of suspicion.
The only completely honest answer was that I’d met her a month ago, long after she was dead. Obviously that wouldn’t do.
“I knew her a long time ago. In Philadelphia, where she came from. I’m from Chicago, like I said, but our families were distantly related. My grandmother was a Maggie too.”
Maybe my Maggie was right when she insisted that I ought to write stories.
“Oh, that makes it worse, doesn’t it, poor man.” Both Magda and Fred bought my tall tale. “Well, anyway, it was really bad for a while.” Magda continued breathlessly, “He wouldn’t let her talk to anyone and would come home drunk every night and beat her. During the day she’d sneak over to talk to me. The poor little thing was a wreck. She tried to pretend he wasn’t hitting her. I don’t think it made much difference, she was so worried that it was her fault the baby died. I mean, I guess I’d feel that way too, but …”
“Mothers worry,” I said simply.
“Then it seemed to get a little better.” The chief took up the story. “He didn’t drink so much, except on weekends and the noise next door wasn’t so bad. But, damn it”—he pounded the unsteady table again, shaking the artificial flowers on it—”if I’d only followed my instincts and talked to his CO or to the chaplain at the Yards …”
“Now, Fred.” His wife raised a warning finger. “Don’t go blaming yourself. You don’t know whether it would have done any good. Probably wouldn’t have.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he said with a sigh. “You know what happened that night, don’t you, sir?”
“Most of it.”
“Things had been good next door for a week, maybe more. He even said good morning to me. Something went wrong at the Yard that day, I guess. He tied on a big one and came home roaring drunk. We all heard him in the hallway outside their apartment. He screamed that she was a killer and that he was going to kill her.”
“He tried hard enough.” Magda sniffed. “No fault of his that he didn’t.”
“Fortunately, sir, the man who saw what happened outside is a clerk at the judge advocate’s office at the USMC Training Center. He tried to tell Lieutenant Manzell that Koenig was pushing her out the window, already had her halfway out. Then she squirmed away, he lost his balance and fell. Cracked his head like an eggshell.”
We were all reverently silent.
“He wouldn’t believe it.”
“Wouldn’t even listen. So Gunnery Sergeant Wendel found a really good lawyer that used to be in their office, a major, top flight. He talked to the assistant district attorney.…”
“A very nice young man …” Magda observed.
“Well, at least a man who seemed to be interested in justice. They let Maggie out after two days and dropped the charges the next day.”
“I think that terrible man hurt her,” Magda asserted. “Something ought to be done about him.”
“I’m sure, Miz Weaver, that your husband and I can easily think of several appropriate measures. We live under the rule of law. Perhaps unfortunately.”
I’d heard my father mumble that on more than one occasion.
“We buried Technician/First Koenig in the Catholic cemetery next to the little girl. The chaplain at the Yards said a nice Mass and preached a fine sermon. It seemed to pick the poor kid up for a day or two. Then she went into a stall. Like those zombies they’re supposed to have in … where’s the place, sir?”
“Haiti. Then, a couple of weeks later, she tried to get her old job at the Del Coronado back?”
“Heaven forgive me for it.” Magda Weaver had abandoned her attempt to control her tears. “I told her she needed something to take her mind off her problems. And the pension money was held up, though the lawyer that Sergeant Wendel had found was working on that, too. So she needed money. When they turned her down it was like someone put out the last candle. If you understand what I mean.”
“I do.”
“The man over there told her he’d try to find another job for her, but … I don’t know … it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“She cried herself to sleep that night.” Magda wiped away her own tears, which were quickly replaced by others. “I held her in my arms, just like she was one of my own daughters, till she was sound asleep. I thought she’d be all right.”
“Sergeant Wendel was driving up to the Marine Training Center early the next morning. There was a lot of fog but he thought he saw her walking along the bay by 8th Street.”
“No place for a girl to be that hour.”
“So he backed up and followed her. She just walked right into the bay. He shouted at her; she didn’t seem to hear. He pulled off his shirt and trousers and went in after her. He lost her in the fog.”
The Chief’s voice began to crack. How much they had all loved my Maggie.
“We called the police and the Coast Guard.” His wife saved him embarrassment. “They thought the bay would wash her up in a day or two. When that didn’t happen, the Coast Guard said she’d probably drifted out to sea and we’d never recover the body.”
“Then, when we’d given up hope,” the Chief said, when he was in control of his emotions again, “Lieutenant Manzell called my wife; when was it, dear …?”
“Five weeks ago. He said we could have our friend if we wanted her.”
“His exact words, mind you, sir, to my wife, were that she wasn’t very pretty anymore because the fish had made a meal out of her. Sergeant Wendel and I identified the body.”
“You could be sure after all those weeks in the ocean?”
“As best as we could tell it was her, sir. It looked like her. Who else might it have been? Same height and shape and age. Borne at least one child. All the details fit.”
“We wanted to bury her with her husband and daughter; she had paid for the lot with her own money, saved from when she was working before the baby came.” Magda Weaver sounded very tired. “The Catholic Church forbade the burial because the priest told us that suicides can’t be buried in consecrated ground. So we chipped in and bought her a lot at the city cemetery up there by Balboa Park. Sergeant Wendel said that when the insurance money comes through we’ll be reimbursed. Not that it makes any difference.”
“The priest from the Navy Yard”—Chief Weaver spoke in hollow tones, as if the final
words of the story were being uttered—”said some prayers at the undertakering parlor and gave a little talk at the grave. He seemed much more sympathetic than the San Diego priests.”
There was not much more to say.
“When was the funeral?” I asked, not because I cared, but to ease the pain and the tension.
“Just a month ago,” Magda Weaver said promptly. “July 21, 1946.”
The next morning, Maggie Ward, using her daughter’s name, had walked into my life in Tucson, Arizona.
CHAPTER 28
IT WAS A SIMPLE INSCRIPTION ON THE SIMPLER TOMBSTONE:
MARGARET WARD KOENIG
MARCH 15, 1928—APRIL 23, 1946
MAY SHE REST IN PEACE
The late-afternoon trade winds were cooling San Diego and wafting in streamers of fog. In the distance, beyond the elegant greenery of Balboa Park, there stretched the blue waters of the bay and, disappearing in the fog and then briefly reappearing, the low-slung shape of Coronado Island.
A lovely view for my Maggie’s last resting place, in its stark unpretentiousness; not quite a potter’s field, but surely right next to it.
I was too shattered by the sight of that headstone to weep, to pray, to ponder. I knelt in the grass next to it and remained in a kneeling posture for a long time.
Why?
Why such a senseless life? Why such a terrible waste of talent? Why such a futile death?
Then I was angry at the Church. How could they know the state of Maggie’s soul? Could they not have at least given her the benefit of the doubt?
In Chicago they would have, I told myself—a conclusion that Packy later confirmed. “Around here we figure that anyone who is so troubled that they would end their own life has to be incapable of serious moral reflection. That’s the way the Romans figured, too.”
But the biggest question of all: Why had this body, corrupted by many weeks in the ocean, appeared to me, alive and attractive, the day after it was laid to rest in this far end of the Municipal Cemetery?
Was it the same person? Was Andrea King truly Maggie Ward?
Who else could she be? Did not all the clues confirm that, even the Earl Grey tea?
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 29
