The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  “So you got to the top. You made it.”

  “Damn straight. They moved me to the middle six years after I got to the joint, and then to the top three years after that. Was there for ten years. It was the good life in the joint.”

  “What happened?”

  Gilmartin rubbed an invisible blemish from his naked thigh, trying to erase a stain as indelible as time. He didn’t speak for a long while.

  “I got stupid. Back in ‘Sixty-seven, some punks on my steam crew wanted to make a run for it. Had a plan and everything. They busted some heater pipes, and then hid out in the repairman’s van. He drove ‘em out the front gate. Fuckin’ clean getaway.”

  “Why didn’t you go with them?”

  “First, I was gonna go with them, but I got hinky. I was up for parole in a year. I stayed behind, but I kept my mouth shut. The Man caught one of ‘em in a few days, but the other two was never caught, not to this day. Goddam, I coulda been with ‘em. Been free.”

  Freedom had its cost, Morgan knew, even for a man who’d steal it.

  “So how’d you get moved off the top tier?”

  “The kid snitched after they caught him. The little fucker,” Gilmartin spewed. “Said I was in on the escape plan all the way. Fuck, the worst thing I did was keep my trap shut. I fought like hell, but the warden busted me back to the bottom anyhow. Worse than that, I lost my chance for parole. Nineteen years, I kept my nose clean, then I’m back at the bottom with the Ice Men, frozen in my time like a dead man.”

  Morgan remembered what the parole director had told him, perhaps telegraphing Gilmartin’s difficulty: Under Wyoming law, an escape attempt renders an inmate ineligible for parole during his natural sentence. In Gilmartin’s case, that was the rest of his life.

  He thought it was ironic that Neeley Gilmartin, who had avoided the lethal heat of the electric chair, was instead condemned to life in a frigid abyss. Worse, the old man’s idea of freedom was dying alone in a whorehouse trailer, no needles, no tubes. His only nurse was a Mexican maid who brought him food and sometimes made him feel like a man again.

  “Did you ever try to tell anybody at the prison what you’ve told me?”

  “Shit, paper boy, nobody in the joint ever did the crime. Everybody’s innocent, to hear them tell it. Sure I told some people, but nobody listens. After eight or ten years of tellin’ the same story, you just stop. You don’t even bother tryin’ anymore. You just focus on stayin’ alive.”

  “When they let you out, why’d you come back here?” Morgan wanted to know.

  “No place else to go. Lived here most of my life, except for the war and the joint. And you were here.”

  “Me?”

  “I saw in the paper at the prison library, before I got out. That’s how I taught myself to read in the joint, readin’ the newspapers. Short words and lots of pictures. I saw the story about you bein’ the new editor, and I knew you would help me.”

  “Why me?”

  “I don’t know. Your picture looked honest maybe. You ain’t one of them, you didn’t know. Or maybe because you come back here, too. We both come back here to save ourselves, didn’t we? Huh?”

  Morgan was still wary. He’d been used by cons almost from the first week on the cop beat in Chicago. Gilmartin, a tough jailhouse veteran who was by turns threatening and vulnerable, now seemed genuinely desperate. But Morgan still believed they were far from kindred spirits.

  The old man’s pain-dulled eyes were fixed on the television’s flickering screen, sometimes rolling upward as the drugs began seeping through his veins. Grenades exploded and machine guns roared noiselessly in a dissonant war. Van Johnson was still fighting his way across some Jap-infested island, making the world safe for democracy and, eventually, cheap electronics.

  “Tell me about the war. Where did you serve?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, paper boy. You ask too many questions.”

  Morgan put away his notebook.

  “You mentioned it a couple times before. It sounds like you saw some action.”

  Gilmartin huffed. His speech began to sound sedated, soft.

  “Shit, I saw action all right.”

  “Where?”

  “Goddammit, you’re a pesterin’ son of a bitch. A fuckin’ nosey reporter. Why don’t you go bug somebody else to find who killed that little girl?”

  Morgan shrugged. He’d encountered a lot of veterans who claimed they never told war stories, then with a little prodding, filled the air with their tales. So he clicked his ballpoint pen and slid it back into his shirt pocket, a deliberate indication that he was finished with his questions. He stood, smoothing his slacks where they’d rumpled around his hips, ready to leave.

  “Hey, if you don’t want to talk about it, fine. Some other time, huh?”

  A war story couldn’t be shut away so easily. Gilmartin’s shoulders slumped, relaxed by the Demerol, but he motioned Morgan to sit back down. Morgan waited for him to begin.

  “I was Navy, okay? A gunner’s mate on a minelayer. Saw the fuckin’ world before I was twenty, and saw too goddam much. First tour, we laid down mines in Casablanca and then we laid down women in Norfolk. Good duty, huh? By ‘Forty-four, we was sent to the other side of the world, to Guadalcanal, the Carolines, the Marshalls and Tarawa ...”

  Gilmartin drifted with his memories, as if the story continued silently in his head. A cigarette burned down between his fingers as he sat there, slack-jawed. His speech was slow and fatigued.

  “Those were some pretty hot spots,” Morgan prompted him.

  “Not like Iwo.”

  “You were at Iwo Jima?”

  “Yeah. What a crap hole. We anchored in the harbor of a little island called Kerama Retto, on the south tip of Iwo. We was the flagship for the Pacific mine fleet, and we took all the wounded from other ships. My job was shootin’ a forty-millimeter gun, keepin’ an eye out for kamikazes. Fuckin’ Japs was everywhere. Shit, after a couple months, we seen it all: Suicide swimmers, kamikaze boats and planes. In April of ‘Forty-five we went to general quarters ninety-three times. Can you believe that shit? Every time you closed your eyes, some peckerhead Jap was trying to kill us. I had a good job. I shot back.”

  “Hit any?”

  Smoke wreathed Gilmartin’s squinted face.

  “Sure. It was my job. Had a good eye, too. Always had good eyes. Expert shooter, and that’s no shit. Daddy taught me on the rabbits. I didn’t have no problems killin’ them bastards. The Japs.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s ancient history, paper boy.”

  “I’d still like to know.”

  A cigarette haze enveloped him as he collected his thoughts. He looked down at the floor as he spoke, transported back to another time.

  “It was May Day in ‘Forty-five and my early-morning watch was almost over. The smoking lamp wasn’t even lit, so it was before oh-four-hundred. The smoking lamp come on when you could smoke. It was my twenty-second birthday. The sun wasn’t up, but the light was starting to seep through the smoke screen we laid down. Man, I was needin’ some serious rack time. Dead tired. Then all of a sudden, four Jap planes come out of the smoke.”

  Slowly, Gilmartin’s hands glided through the thick air, retracing the kamikaze’s flight path. His sluggish, rheumy eyes followed them as if they were real, then he squinted as he got them in his imaginary sights again.

  “It all happened so fuckin’ fast I was the only gun that got off a shot. I kept my crosshairs on them and splashed that first motherfucker a hundred yards off the starboard bow.

  “The next two come down from the stern, and I swung around on ‘em. I musta hit the bomb on one and he lit up the sky in an orange fireball. The third one I hit and he veered off back into the smoke and I heard him hit the water somewheres out there.

  “The last one, he come in on the port beam behind me, banked around the stern and come straight at me on the starboard side. It was misty gray, before dawn, but I swear I could see th
at fucker’s slope-eyes as he flew in. Just me and him, like old-time gunfighters. I poured everything I had at that prick. If I hit him, it didn’t do no good. Went through him like he was a goddam ghost.

  “He slammed into the communications deck. He hit so hard his goddam engine pierced through the steel bulkheads and landed in the wardroom. Killed a bunch of guys eating breakfast. The rest of his plane sheared off and hit the fifty-two turret, and that’s when his bomb exploded.”

  Gilmartin’s right hand smacked into his left, his fingers splaying grotesquely. He drew a deep breath and hacked a couple times.

  “Them boys inside never had a chance,” he said, licking his dry lips. “Six of ‘em in that closed-up turret. Never got off a shot. Fuckin’ shielded mounts on them five-inch guns never was meant to take a direct hit. The crash crumpled it like a tin can so’s the door wouldn’t open, and they couldn’t get out.”

  The old man showed Morgan a burn scar on the inside of his arm, a long, liquefied swatch of skin from his wrist to the inside of his elbow that looked barely congealed.

  “I tried to lever the steel door open, but the fire flared up and burned my arm and my hands. We could hear them screaming in there. They screamed going on fifteen minutes, then they stopped before we got the fire out and the wreckage cleared. Them boys ...”

  A rattle shuddered in his collapsed chest. He cleared his constricted throat.

  “... them boys cooked to death inside.”

  Gilmartin’s hands began to shake. His brow tensed and his chin pressed his lips together hard. He closed his eyes and wiped his forearm across his mouth.

  “After the fire was out, I was detailed to help clean out that gun mount. We pried open the door and found them. Their blistery faces were roasted brown and leathery, like the skin of an overcooked turkey. Where they touched the hot steel, their hands were almost melted away like wax. When we picked ‘em up, their skin would just slip off the muscle. You’d be standin’ there, holdin’ this patch of a man’s hide in your hands. And the stink of it can’t ever be washed off. I smell it in my sleep.”

  “I’m sorry ...” Morgan started to say.

  “You think I should be sorry, too, don’t you? Fuck that. I done what I could for them. They was my buddies, too. I spent that night puking over the rail. I was twenty-two, a grown man compared to those dead boys. But I never saw nothin’ like that in my life, these boys’ meat all cooked, their eyeballs exploded, their fingers reaching out to me. Their mouths ... oh, God ... their mouths screaming but nothin’ coming out.”

  Gilmartin was agitated now, more angry at himself and at the dead than at Morgan.

  “Goddammit, I did everything I could. I tried to splash that last fuckin’ Jap. I tried. I got the other three, didn’t I? Why didn’t they shoot, too? They gave me that fuckin’ medal, didn’t they? I did my part. I tried to save them. It was like they was screaming to me while they cooked. Their skin just come off ... But it wasn’t my fault. Those poor fuckers could have shot --” his throat suffocated his words, even as he determined to speak them — “I ... tried.”

  Gilmartin wept.

  His memories and his cancer choked him. The fire had burned him up inside, too. It consumed his forgiveness and his spirit, and welded a hard core at the center of him. Neeley Gilmartin’s war wound was deep within him where it couldn’t be seen.

  For one single, sad moment, Morgan pitied Gilmartin.

  Maybe the old man really did kill Aimee Little Spotted Horse and only confessed to avoid the electric chair. But now there was an alternate, but equally plausible, explanation: He so feared dying that way, he’d say anything to avoid it.

  Maybe even take the fall for a crime he didn’t commit.

  If his story was true, it could answer the question that nagged Morgan the most, why Gilmartin had pleaded guilty if he didn’t kill the girl. It would also mean something that few people — perhaps even Gilmartin himself — knew: Guilty or not, the convicted child-killer Gilmartin might have been a genuine war hero.

  Morgan stood and touched Gilmartin’s heaving shoulder. He knew he’d still have to check out the old man’s story, but he believed it because his cynical gut told him to believe it.

  Gilmartin looked up with sad, red eyes. He was fighting off his narcotic haze, his hands floating out of rhythm with his words.

  “I didn’t kill that little girl, so help me God,” he said. “You gotta help me. I don’t want to die with it hanging over my head. That would be worse than dyin’ in the chair.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Mr. Gilmartin. I promise. Is there anything else I can get you for now?”

  Gilmartin swiped the back of his hand across his eyes, gamely trying to wipe away most traces of his misery. He grunted a little, breathed deeply and regained his familiar, steely composure.

  “Yeah, paper boy,” he said. “If you see Celestina, tell her to come see me tomorrow. I got something she needs to handle.”

  “I’ll do that,” Morgan said, smiling for the first time since he’d arrived.

  He patted Gilmartin’s shoulder and headed toward the door. It wouldn’t take long to investigate Gilmartin’s military background, if he got lucky and had the right information. Halfway out the door, one last question stopped him.

  “Mr. Gilmartin, it would help me if I knew what ship you served on.”

  The old man hunched forward on his couch and raised his tee-shirt’s short sleeve over his gaunt, left shoulder, proudly bearing his tattoo.

  “The USS Terror,” he said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A plump clerk named Ellen, whose discount-store bifocals hung around her thick neck on a chain of yellowish faux pearls, led him into the county records vault. It was a sort of governmental library, four long walls lined with cumbersome, leather-bound deed books. They encircled a row of thick-legged work tables, built to bear the weight of the vast history surrounding them.

  “Here they are,” Ellen said, drawing her hand efficiently across the spines of four small volumes. “They’re in order, from the First World War to the Gulf War, although there’s not too many of those. These are all certified copies, some of the old ones made by hand. We file them for free in case the originals are ever lost. Let me know if I can help you find anything else.”

  Few people, even veteran courthouse reporters, know county clerks routinely register soldiers’ discharge papers as a permanent record of their service. Morgan had stumbled on the documents years ago while researching a Vietnam veteran’s murder case, and found them to be a wealth of biographical and military data taken directly from official records.

  If Gilmartin’s tattoo wasn’t a symbol of an evil disposition, but of his patriotism, then Morgan’s gut wasn’t failsafe. He came to the courthouse to find out.

  The clerk left Morgan alone in the vault’s dead air. Volume Three, the thickest, contained records from World War Two. Scanning through the hand-written cross-index, he quickly found Neeley Gilmartin’s discharge papers.

  The pertinent, provable facts of his life were all there, in the government’s orderly, detail-obsessed shorthand:

  Neeley Gilmartin had been born May 1, 1923, in Sand Flats, Wyoming, a railroad enclave long gone from any map. He attended school through the eighth grade, not uncommon for rural children in the Depression. He joined the Navy in 1942 at the Naval Recruiting Station in Cheyenne, then was sent to basic training in San Diego. After a short stint in gunnery school, he was assigned to the USS Terror (CM5), a minelayer home-ported at Norfolk. A few years later, he spent some time in the U.S. Naval Hospital in Aiea Heights in Hawaii — to be treated for the severe burn on his arm after the kamikaze attack, Morgan surmised — then was discharged in February 1946 by the Navy’s processing center in Bremerton, Washington. According to his discharge papers, he’d served four years, one month and twelve days in a war that would haunt him forever.

  He left the service with a Good Conduct Medal, medals for serving in both the European and Pacific theaters, the
World War Two Victory medal and a Purple Heart.

  And the Navy Cross. It was the service’s highest honor for heroism, second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  Morgan could hardly believe it. Gilmartin was a bona fide hero. Alone in the gathering light of dawn on his twenty-second birthday, he’d shot down three kamikazes, saving not only dozens of lives, but perhaps his ship, the USS Terror, itself. For that, he got a handful of precious scrap iron hung from pretty ribbons.

  Perhaps more important to Gilmartin at the time, the Navy also gave him one hundred dollars for bus fare after mustering out, according to his discharge records.

  In the winter of 1946, Neeley Gilmartin disembarked from the USS Terror for the last time. She was berthed in San Francisco for repairs when he was discharged. Within a month, he was back in Perry County, according to the filing date stamped on the document. A long bus ride or a long drunk, Morgan thought. Maybe both.

  A few numbered boxes at the bottom of the faded page suggested somebody cared what he’d do after he left the service. Under two questions about his future job preferences and plans for further training, he responded “None.”

  The government’s records reflected that Gunner’s Mate Second Class Neeley Gilmartin had served his country honorably. They didn’t say, however, that he left the Navy with little more than a handful of medals and scars, inside and out, that would never heal properly.

  He was a hero without hope, on a bus to oblivion.

  When Jefferson Morgan returned to The Bullet late Thursday afternoon, the mayor had already called to complain about his dog-pound editorial, someone had stolen all the papers from five of his twelve newsstands, and Bob Buck of Bob Buck Buick had refused to pay for his ad because he claimed the picture in it made him look fat.

  “Do we ever do anything right?” Morgan asked Crystal as she handed him a small stack of pink phone messages. There were at least a dozen.