Red Sky in Morning A Novel of World War II

by Patrick Culhane

  “Understood, sir.”

  The engine-room trio moved out of Pete’s way as he crossed to the desk and pushed the squawk-box button.

  “Bridge,” came a voice Pete recognized as radarman Frye.

  “This is the XO—where’s Mr. Connor?”

  “Chart room, sir.”

  “Get him.”

  A moment later, a familiar voice came on: “Connor. What’s up, Lieutenant?”

  “We need to shut down the engine so these guys can repair it.”

  “I know all about it, but I can’t find the CO.”

  “I can’t find him, either, and I’ve been looking.” He paused, but only briefly. “Ben, I’m taking full responsibility. We’re shutting down the engine while they make the repairs. Meantime, I’ll find the captain.”

  “Yes, sir,” Connor said, his tone dubious.

  Pete signed off and returned to Griffin, asking him, “Where did you go after you left the engine room, right after Mr. Rosetti got hurt?”

  Griffin frowned. “Sir, shouldn’t I be getting to the engine . . . ?”

  “After this,” Pete said, and repeated the question.

  “Nowhere. Why?”

  “Sailor, you better be more specific than ‘nowhere.’ Somebody’s killed Orville Monroe . . .”

  “What? Fuck, another killing?”

  “Keep it down, will you? Orville got his throat slit, just like Mr. Driscoll . . . and whoever did it knew about Mr. Rosetti’s injury.”

  Griffin’s eyes flared. “What the hell you saying? Think I fuckin’ did it? I wouldn’t get close enough to that little faggot to breathe his air let alone slit his pervo throat.”

  “Thank you for sharing such a touching display of sorrow for the death of a fellow sailor.” Speaking of reason, not impulse, restraining himself and not punching this asshole was a major accomplishment. “Now, answer my goddamned question.”

  “I just went back to my cabin to get ready for my shift.”

  “Anybody see you?”

  He gestured. “Tom, here.”

  Great, Abbott alibiing Costello. “You see anybody else? Talk to anybody else?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “This is a murder inquiry, Mr. Griffin—someone on this ship is killing crew members, and he doesn’t seem to discriminate between black and white. You want to try again?”

  Somewhat agitated now, Griffin stood up for himself. “Nobody but Tom saw me, and I didn’t even talk to him. Look, probably Mr. Driscoll caught Orville sucking off some other nigger, and got killed for his trouble. Then that other nigger killed Orville off, you know, to cut his losses. So why don’t you let me get to something important, sir, like the goddamn engine?”

  Pete gave the sailor a smile that didn’t have much to do with smiling. “If you killed Monroe and Mr. Driscoll, Mr. Griffin, you’ll hang for it. You sure you want to play wise-ass with the man looking into it?”

  Griffin said, “I ain’t playin’ at nothing, sir,” bordering on insolence; but fear danced in his eyes.

  Whitford shouldered over and growled, “Why don’t you let the guy alone?”

  Pete got nose to nose with the lanky Texan. “That’s ‘Why don’t you leave the guy alone, sir.’ ”

  Whitford swallowed and backed off. “Sorry, sir.”

  “Did your buddy here tell you about Mr. Rosetti cutting his hand?”

  “Well, uh . . .”

  “Did he or didn’t he?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess he did.” Whitford’s hands got busy worrying a shop rag. “News travels fast on a ship like this. So what?”

  “So here’s the latest scoop: you’re a suspect, too.”

  Lenny Wallace stepped forward, his manner not at all confrontational. “Mr. Maxwell, sir—they didn’t do it.”

  Mildly shocked by the Negro sticking up for the white non-coms, Pete turned to him with an appraising look. “How do you know?”

  “I saw Orville, alive and well, and then I come down here and saw these two fellas. They couldn’ta done it.”

  “When did you see Orville?”

  “Hell—I musta been with him, right before he got killed. I’m sorry to hear Orv’s dead, sir. I actually liked the little guy. . . .”

  Wondering if he’d found yet another suspect, Pete said, “Go on.”

  “We were talkin’ in the mess, Orv and me, just shooting the breeze—I was tellin’ him how proud we all was about what he done, shooting down that Jap? Then it was time for my shift and, well, I left the mess hall and just come down here. Griffin and Whitford, they already started their shift . . . and, honest, Mr. Maxwell, these two has not left since.”

  “That’s right,” Griffin piped up.

  Wallace went on: “We all been working some odd hours, trying to get this engine problem fixed. Our regular shifts are all screwed up. Orville and me, we were in the mess, going over how the repair was comin’ along? He been in here, workin’—now I was heading in.”

  Pete’s eyes narrowed. “Do you know where Monroe was going, after he talked to you? He say anything?”

  “Didn’t say nothing, but he did leave the mess same time as me.”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t I say that? I saw Orv headin’ up towards the bridge deck. Thought that was kinda odd, but I didn’t say anything. Orville, he was in a funny mood—you’d thought him being a hero would make his damn day. To me, he seemed . . . spooked.”

  “Spooked is right.” Griffin laughed.

  “Shut up,” Pete snapped. To Wallace he said: “What was bothering him?”

  “I got no idea. He didn’t say nothing about anything. Spooked is just how he seemed to me.”

  Pete’s eyes traveled from Wallace to Whitford. “Either of you talk to anybody beside each other?”

  The sailors shook their heads; they seemed to Pete genuinely alarmed that they were suspects.

  The only way the killer was among these three was if they were in it together, and that seemed a ridiculous proposition to Pete.

  Shifting gears, Pete said, “Shut down both sides of the turbine, get this son of a buck fixed and let’s see if we can get the hell out of here.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Wallace said, and the other two chimed in the same.

  Pete observed as the trio shut down the boilers and the turbines. The roar of the engine died slowly, which somehow only emphasized the customary ringing in Pete’s ears after an engine-room visit. He looked across to the hatchway into shaft alley: he hadn’t been in there since the captain assigned him the murder inquiry.

  Not knowing exactly why, he found himself crossing the engine room and opening that hatch. After stepping inside, he was taken by the oppressive silence of the dimly, sporadically lit corridor. Without the engine running, the narrow space was a sort of endless coffin.

  He edged forward until he reached the spot at the far end where he had last seen the body of Richard Driscoll. He stepped over the bloodstained deck and, as he neared the stern, someone dropped out of the escape tunnel and landed with a metallic clomp, maybe three feet from him.

  Now Pete was staring into Captain Egan’s rugged features, the presence of the captain almost as big a surprise as the pistol in Pete’s grasp—he didn’t even remember reaching behind for it.

  Egan held up a single hand, like an Indian chief in the movies saying, “How.”

  But what the captain said was “We need a man-to-man talk.” His hair a trifle mussed, Egan otherwise betrayed no signs of his climb down the tunnel. His uniform looked well-pressed, shipshape.

  “I think we do,” Pete said, “need to talk.”

  “Good. Put that pistol down.”

  “No. We’ll talk all right, but I’ll keep this where it is.”

  “That’s an order, Mr. Maxwell. Lower that weapon!”

  “No, sir. The Navy doesn’t require me to take an order from a murderer.”

  Egan drew in air; the wild eyebrows wiggled and a rumpled smile formed on the weathered face. “Rathe
r than argue that point with you, Mr. Maxwell, let’s go ahead. Go ahead and talk.”

  “You expressed that desire first, Captain. You start.”

  “Ah, that much courtesy you’ll pay your commanding officer? Kind of you.” Egan shifted on his feet, not making a move toward Pete, just getting settled, looking for where to begin, perhaps. “No need at this point to mince words, son. You do know your friend Driscoll was making that little nigger suck his peter.”

  The words struck Pete like a slap; he felt his eyes tighten. “That’s bullshit.”

  “No. It isn’t. I put you in charge of this inquiry, knowing you were a smart college boy and knew how to think, and I’d be shocked if the possibility that Driscoll using that pansy as a catamite hadn’t occurred to you.”

  And it did make sense to Pete, immediate, sudden sense: who was the “big, powerful” man that Orville had been too afraid not to accommodate? Driscoll must have been physically intimidating to the delicate sailor, but also Dick represented the white authority figure—cops in civilian life, officers in the service—that a Negro like Orv, with his terrible secret, feared instinctively.

  Still, Pete heard himself say, “I don’t believe it. Dick was a guy’s guy.”

  “I’ll say! Listen, don’t tear yourself up, son—there’s no doubt about this. Hell, I caught them at it.”

  “If you caught one of your officers doing . . . doing that,” Pete said, gun in his hand leveled at Egan’s chest, “why didn’t you just place him under arrest?”

  Egan shook his head. “Not good enough. Some sins deserve immediate punishment. There are things that cannot be allowed on a ship. What kind of jungle revolt would we have faced, if it became known among these niggers that a white officer was . . . hell, I can’t even say it. Makes me sick. I did what had to be done. For the good of the ship. For the good of the Navy.”

  “What gave you that right?”

  “The United States government. They put me in charge of the Liberty Hill, where I am the law. The captain is the ultimate adjudicator on any ship.” He shook his head. “Goddamn it, Pete. You disappoint me.”

  “You have not fulfilled my every expectation either, sir.”

  Egan shook a massive fist. “Do you think I wanted to kill Driscoll? He was my XO! He could have made a fine officer. But what he was doing—that was unconscionable. And it was my duty, my right, to stop him. Command is about making the hard decisions.”

  “With all due respect, sir, you are out of your fucking mind.”

  He grinned and it was a face out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting. “That is the opinion of a hysterical, wet-behind-theears junior officer.”

  “But it will be backed up by the opinion of a court-martial. . . .”

  Egan shook his head. “Going down that path really isn’t necessary, Mr. Maxwell. Not if you do the right thing.”

  “The right thing.”

  “Stand behind me when I report that Monroe murdered Driscoll and then killed himself out of remorse for his crime.”

  Pete goggled at the demented creature. “Do you really believe the ONI will accept that reading of the evidence?”

  “What evidence? We’ll bury these unfortunates at sea with full Naval honors—even the murderous Mr. Monroe, since an official verdict in the case will be pending.”

  Pete almost laughed, though crying would have been more like it. “And why would I even think about going along with this put-up job?”

  “You should carefully consider it,” Egan said with a kind of warped dignity, “because you have a career to think about, mister. Whether you remain in the Navy or seek your future in civilian life, how you handle yourself in this war will be key. And are you going to let a dead colored cocksucker and a nigger-loving traitor to the white race stand between you and becoming captain of your own ship, one day?”

  Pete didn’t respond right away. He stood in a kind of awe after hearing such a gloriously deranged speech.

  Then he said, “No. Under Article 184, I am placing you under arrest.”

  “On what charge?”

  “What charge? The murder of two men.”

  “Not two men,” Egan said, and that hell-bound smile returned, and the eyebrows wiggled. “Two perverts—one a nigger! You would remove a veteran captain from this war for scum like that? You saw me save this ship in that storm!”

  “Please be quiet, sir. Turn around—we’re going up that escape hatch.”

  Teeth bared, Egan leaned forward. “Do you know what that little nigger had the audacity to say to me? That if I didn’t give him his transfer, he would tell the world what I’d done to Driscoll, when we got to port.”

  “Sir . . .”

  “There are a lot of things a man in my position of leadership must endure. But I was not about to put up with threats from a mincing little nigger. He was a problem, like Driscoll was a problem, and a transfer would only have passed on that problem to another ship. And where I come from, Mr. Maxwell, a captain does not pass his problems on to another ship. He solves them himself !”

  “Fine,” Pete said. “I’m the captain now, and I’m solving this problem. Turn around and march your ass to the brig.”

  Egan’s hand went into his pocket so quickly it had come out again before Pete even knew it, and the straight razor was in a tight fist, raised high with yellowish light from the nearest hanging bulb blinking off its keen edge. Pete had seen that razor before, when he watched the CO shave in his cabin; and he hadn’t been enough of a detective to know that that razor was the very sort of narrow blade that matched the missing weapon in both murders.

  “We have an expression back in Iowa, sir,” Pete said and gave the captain a grin as awful as Egan’s own. “Never bring a knife to a gun fight.”

  But that was when the engine started back up, the drive shaft spinning, the normal roar of shaft alley growing to fill their ears. And as the shaft started, Pete reacted with an involuntary glance its way, a movement that couldn’t have taken more than half a second, but was enough for Egan to lash out.

  The blade slashed through cloth and flesh, not deep, but searing, and Pete’s hand loosened reflexively and the gun slipped from his grasp, clunking to the deck, while the two men wrested for control of the razor, Pete clutching the captain’s wrist, twisting it, trying to shake the blade free.

  With his free hand Egan shoved Pete away, then tried to slice him again, but Pete backed up and the razor cut only air; quickly Pete stepped in and brought an elbow down on Egan’s still-outstretched wrist, the captain’s fist popping open and the knife tumbling from splayed fingers to clatter on the deck somewhere.

  Razorless, Egan counterpunched, his right fist slamming into Pete’s left eye. Rocked, Pete nonetheless managed to respond with a head-butt in the face, flattening a nose that had been broken many times before.

  But the stocky older man seemed barely to notice, pummeling Pete in the torso, bending over bull-like, the cramped quarters no impediment to the captain’s blows, his arms working like pistons from his sides.

  Pete, a human punching bag now, felt his knees go weak but somehow he swung the side of his forearm up and into the captain’s throat, and the man began to choke, the blows stopped, and by all means Egan should have tumbled and maybe would have, if there’d been room.

  Instead the captain managed to shove Pete with both hands, sending the lieutenant staggering backward, and slipped past him, their bodies touching; then the captain was barreling down shaft alley toward the engine room. Pete gave chase, but his balance was off, and he was just catching up when Egan was through the hatch, locking it.

  Pete knew at once how Egan would surely play this, coming through the hatchway and gathering fellow Negro-haters Griffin and Whitford to tell the pair a story they’d be glad to hear, namely that Pete was the killer of Driscoll and Monroe.

  Alone in shaft alley, his mind turned to the only advisor he trusted.

  I’ve done it, baby, I’ve screwed it all up—as a detective, I make a gre
at choir director.

  Stop it! Get a hold of yourself !

  I could have spent the war in San Diego with my beautiful wife, but no, I had to be a hero.

  You are a hero. Now act like one! You know who the killer is—now do something about it!

  Kay was right: he still had one chance.

  In the next thirty seconds, Egan would be on the squawk box, the escape tunnel blocked, and Pete would be trapped. When they reached shore, the bodies would be in Davy Jones’s locker and the frame Pete had been fitted for would be nailed down tight. From shaft alley he would really get the shaft: the brig, then the gallows. . . .

  One chance left—he had to get up that tunnel ladder before anyone else could get there to block it. Charging back to the stern, he swept up the .45 on his way. On the run, he tucked it in his front waistband and soon was flying up the ladder into the tiny black cylinder, just big enough for one man, climbing completely by feel with no light in the tunnel—one hand on a steel rung and then the one above it and trusting that the next one would be there.

  When he reached the top, he swallowed and his gulp might have been comic if his life had not depended on that round hatch not being locked . . .

  . . . which it wasn’t.

  With a shoulder, Pete pushed up, the heavy steel hatch slowly squeaking on its hinges; then he jack-in-the-boxed out, eyes working to adjust to a sun peeking over the eastern horizon at about five o’clock.

  That meant they were traveling northwest, and Connor had them back on course . . . and hopefully headed for Eniwetok.

  On the main deck now—hidden from view of the wheelhouse by the aft five-inch gun platform and the winches for holds four and five—he stopped to get his bearings. The captain would no doubt be painting Pete the madman, poisoning the crew against him, maybe even Connor; right now the only man he could still count on was Sarge Washington. . . .

  Pete had to get to sick bay not only to tell Washington what he’d learned, but to warn him—as the other investigator on the murders, Sarge was in as much danger as Pete.

  He could sprint from his hiding spot, move up the starboard side past holds five and four, then could hide in the shadow of the fresh water tank while his pursuers went aft, to block the tunnel. He could then enter the wheelhouse, next to the galley, and make his way to sick bay. Egan would figure Pete was either trapped in shaft alley or doing his best to hide somewhere, till they reached port.