Jake Lassiter - 02 - Night Vision

by Paul Levine

  “I saw the picture.”

  He swiveled toward me, glaring. “You were in my house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “It’s my job. Interview persons who might have evidence.”

  “You talked to Prissy?”

  “Sure.”

  “You think I killed Marsha, you crazy bastard?”

  “No. As far as I can tell, you had no motive.”

  He nodded. His face softened just a bit.

  “Of course Priscilla might have,” I added judiciously.

  A fist crashed on the desk, and a file slid to the floor. “Fuck you! And the horse you rode in on! There’s a couple of nuts running around out there and you think my wife killed the babe she fixed me up with.”

  “Just raising possibilities,” I countered. “Charlie Riggs taught me the method.”

  “Then you’re both getting senile!”

  “Two women—your wife and your girlfriend—were fascinated by you,” I said calmly. “And from what I know, Marsha was preoccupied with Vietnam and Lieutenant Ferguson.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Privileged information. Work product. Top secret and for my eyes only. But if you’d open up a little, maybe you could convince me it’s a dead end.”

  Nick Fox was quiet a moment and then blurted it out. “He was the best friend I ever had, the finest man I ever knew. He died in my arms.”

  I stayed quiet. In the corridor I heard the faint sound of laughter. Nick Fox didn’t hear it. He was on another continent in another time.

  “It was January 1968, a month before Tet. Like I told you before, my platoon got pinned down in a village, Dak Sut. Evan called it Duck Soup. No air support, so Evan’s platoon hauled ass to bail us out. Two men, Gallardi and Boyer, dogwood six, killed in the firefight. Four more dogwood eight, wounded. Evan brought his men in like the U.S. Cavalry and Charley beat it. But they grabbed our translator, a Vietnamese girl named Phuong. We licked our wounds, evacuated the dead and wounded by slick—helicopter—and took off after Chuck and the girl.

  “We’d been in the field four days. The men were tired. At least three looked like they had malaria. Two others were popping some pills that had ‘em wired. We’re tramping through rice paddies, staying on top of the dikes, trying to keep dry and keep moving at a decent pace. Evan’s platoon on one dike, ours on another about two thousand meters away, moving parallel to each other, watching the horizon. No sign of Chuck.

  “Except for a couple of water buffalo, we’re the only things moving. A bunch of boys from the south and Midwest, carrying M-16s, playing soldiers, feet bleeding into their boots, diarrhea staining their pants. Just sticking out against the sky.”

  He stopped, his face drained of color. He gave no sign of continuing.

  “Sniper?” I asked.

  “Creature from the Black Lagoon. Came up out of the mud alongside Evan’s platoon. Covered with glop, he goes for the officer first. Suicide mission. Evan takes I don’t know how many rounds. He’s all chopped up. The medic’s right next to him. He gets it in the throat before Evan’s men get off a round. The RTO’s dead, too. I slide down the dike and wade through the water. It’s like slow motion. Running through the muck. I fall flat on my face a couple times. Evan’s still alive, still conscious when I get there, but I knew he wouldn’t make it. Half a dozen sucking chest wounds. He died in my arms.”

  Fox turned back to me. His look said the history lesson was over.

  “Did you tell Marsha?” I asked.

  “I never even told my wife, not the details. Prissy had asked me a few times, tried to convince me it would be good to talk about it. But I’m not one of those guys to go crying to the VA, sit in a circle and spill my guts to a counselor.”

  “No survivor guilt?”

  “Fuck no! Survivor joy. I did my job and got back. Evan wasn’t as lucky. It could have been me but it wasn’t.” He stared at the wall, his eyes unfocused. “But you’re right about one thing…”

  Good, that filled my quota for the month.

  “Marsha kept bugging me about ‘Nam. ‘Talk to me,’ she’d say. ‘Talk so I can understand you, get close.’ All that feminine bullshit.”

  “But you never responded.”

  “Negative. I told her I would talk. Tell her the whole story. But before I could, she . .

  “So you never mentioned Dak Sut to her?”

  “No Dak Sut, no Duck Soup.”

  “Or the sniper?”

  “No.”

  “Evan was killed after the firefight in the village, right?”

  “Of course, right. I just told you—”

  “Evan was still alive when you left the village.”

  “Jake, what’s wrong with you? Of course he was still alive or he couldn’t have been shot by the gook sniper on the dike.”

  I don’t have a polygraph machine in my head, but he looked like a man telling the truth. Of course, I believed Gerald Prince and Tom Carruthers, too. Maybe Nick Fox was right about me. Maybe I’d lost that cynical edge that comes with the territory. Maybe I’d gone soft downtown advising husbands how to avoid alimony and companies how to breach contracts. Maybe billing by the hour fattened the wallet and dulled the instincts. But I could still recognize two stories that didn’t match. There was Nick Fox’s story and there was Marsha Diamond’s printout:

  1. WHO GAVE THE ORDERS TO WALK ALONG THE DIKE PRIOR TO ENTERING THE VILLAGE OF DAK SUT?

  2. AFTER THE MEDIC AND RADIOMAN WERE KILLED, WHAT WAS THE STATE OF DISCIPLINE OF YOUR MEN?

  3. WHEN YOUR PLATOON ENTERED THE VILLAGE OF DAK SUT ON JANUARY 8, 1968, WHAT ORDERS DID YOU GIVE?

  4. WAS THERE EVIDENCE OF NVA OR VC IN THE VILLAGE?

  5. WERE THE VILLAGERS ARMED, AND IF SO, DID THEY THREATEN YOUR PLATOON?

  6. WERE ANY VILLAGERS WOUNDED OR KILLED BY YOUR MEN?

  7. WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR TRANSLATOR?

  8. THE LAST TIME YOU SAW LIEUTENANT FERGUSON ALIVE, WAS HE

  The chronology didn’t match. Nothing added up. And if Fox hadn’t told Marsha about the incident, how did she know enough to ask the questions?

  Nick Fox picked up a file and began reading or pretending to.

  “Tell me more about what happened in Dak Sut,” I said.

  “Look, other than formal reports to command and my personal log, I simply have never…”

  His eyes glazed over, but only for a moment. Then he turned to me, the old Nick Fox, a glint of anger just beneath the surface. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Lassiter, but you’re barking up the wrong tree. How about interviewing Harry Hard Dick, or whatever he calls himself, and get the hell out of here.”

  “I intend to do just that.”

  “And don’t let him bullshit you. Shake him up if you have to. Tell him you’ve got his prints at the scene—”

  “That’s not the way I play the game.”

  “The game,” he said derisively. “I used to watch you play ball, Jake. And you know what I remember? One Sunday against the Cowboys, you were blitzing from the weak side. Staubach rolled your way and tripped. Just stumbled over his own feet and went down. Nobody had touched him, so it was a live ball in the days before quarterbacks wore skirts and the zebras blew the whistle every time a money player got a hangnail. He was down, ribs exposed. Fresh meat, and you had a clean shot. You could have speared him, taken him out. Worth fifteen yards, right? Even a good shoulder might have done it. But you just played tag and hopscotched over him.”

  “I never played to hurt anybody.”

  “You never played to win!” he thundered.

  “I stuck my head in there like everybody else.”

  “Sure, you were physically tough. You threw your body around like it was somebody else’s. But that’s not the point. You played to have fun. I watched you. You’d help the runner up. You laughed out there, always chattering, clapping your hands like a schoolboy. You never knew it was war.”

  “It was
n’t. It was just a game.”

  His laugh was scornful. “You don’t fucking understand, Jake. I’m not talking about football. I’m talking about life. You coast along, just doing your job, making your little jokes. You weren’t committed to winning on the field and you haven’t changed. You’re not serious because you don’t see what’s going on. Well, I’ve seen life up close. In the jungle, on the streets, in the eyes of the scumbags and the faces of their victims. Being a cop is war. Being a prosecutor is war. You think the assholes out there play by the rules? You think the guy who killed Marsha gives a shit what’s in our fancy books? It’s just like in-country. We own the day, Charley owns the night. Only it’s worse now. It’s pitch-black twenty-four hours a day. Damn it, Jake, you got to have night vision. You got to see in the dark.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Quiniela

  The explosive crack of a rifle shot.

  The squeaking of sneakered feet on concrete. Murmurs in Spanish, a low whistle, then applause mixed with groans.

  A haze of cigarette fog hung over the jai alai fronton. Wednesday night and the place half-empty. Some of the regulars slouched in their cushioned seats studying the program, trying to build two bucks into a hundred with a lucky trifecta.

  Henry Travers, aka Harry Hardwick, leaned over the rail at the end of the court near the front wall. He held a stubby pencil and was scribbling in the margins of his program. His stomach ballooned from under a bright aloha shirt. His pants were low slung and drooped over brown loafers with worn heels. His face was creased, his dishwater hair uncombed, and he looked at life through thick, rimless glasses. He appeared to be a man who spent much of his time alone.

  Two new players took the court as I sidled next to Travers at the rail. I studied him close up. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and if he had showered, he should return his deodorant soap for a refund. His taproom pallor was beyond pale; I had seen better suntans on death row.

  At the first crack of pelota against the wall, Travers looked up from his program and toward the court. The player in the red jersey cleanly handled the rebound and, in that peculiar whipping motion, hurled the pelota high against the front wall. The second crack was louder, and there was nothing but a white blur as the player in blue climbed the sidewall, reached high with his cesta, and made the catch. In one motion he pivoted and whirled, rocketing a low screamer toward the front wall. The man in blue tried to short-hop the bounce like Ozzie Smith on a double-play ball, but there’s only one Ozzie Smith, and the pelota dribbled off his cesta into the protective screen.

  “Goddamn Guernica,” Henry Travers muttered.

  “It’s only one point,” I advised.

  He turned toward me. It was just another bettor in a Dolphins jersey. Except mine was real. Travers said, “His confidence goes to shit after he loses the first point. Here, look.”

  He shoved his crumpled program at me. There were handwritten numbers on it. They didn’t mean anything to me.

  “Guernica finishes in the money forty-six percent of the time when he wins the first point, twenty-one percent when he doesn’t.”

  “Like getting on the board first in football,” I said.

  “Same principle. I took Guernica, Maya, and Chucho in the trifecta, then wheeled Guernica in both the quiniela and perfecta.”

  “Good luck.”

  He snorted. “Should just burn my money, be faster.”

  Guernica had already lost the second and third points when I asked Travers if he cared for a beer. He said no thanks and then I opened my wallet and showed him my official, laminated, gold-starred, special-assistant-state-attorney badge signed by the Honorable Nicholas G. Fox. A beer would be just fine, Henry Travers allowed.

  We sat at a dirty plastic table sipping watery American beer from Styrofoam cups. At the next table a couple of retirees in baseball caps nodded to Travers.

  “I couldn’t help noticing you have a slight limp,” I said. “Your right foot drags a bit.”

  “Disc problem. Total disability from the postal service.”

  “Funny how the heels on your shoes are worn evenly. You’d think the left one would deteriorate faster from carrying more weight.”

  Behind the thick glasses, his eyes narrowed. “What’re you trying to prove?”

  “Earlier tonight, when you came out of the head, you were practically skipping so you wouldn’t miss a point. You could have been the drum major for the A-and-M marching band. After I said hello, you were hobbling like a cornerback with a pulled hamstring.”

  He took a long pull on the beer. “Just started acting up. Sometimes it hurts more than others.”

  “I’ll bet. When anybody who smells like government begins asking questions, it must hurt like hell.”

  He got loud. “You trying to fuck with my pension? Look, I walked these streets for twenty-three years. Pavement so hot your shoes stick to the asphalt. Wearing those goddamn knee socks and striped shorts. Little Havana, Overtown, Cables Estates—you name it, I worked there. Don’t know what’s worse, the jungle bunnies in Overtown or the rich bitches in the Gables in their two-hundred-dollar bathrobes, asking me to carry their trash to the curb. Do I look like the sanitation department?”

  “No, you look like a two-bit grifter who plays the angles and loses three out of four.”

  He had the expression of a mutt who’d just been kicked. Sometimes you charm a witness into talking. Other times you hit him over the head with a two-by-four. I went for the whole tree.

  “Travers, you look like a guy who used to have a buddy clock in when you wanted to goof off, if you had a buddy at all. You look like a guy who can’t wait to get rear-ended so you can soak the insurance company for a new paint job and take a month off at full pay ‘cause your neck hurts. You look like a guy who’ll pick up the silverware from the diner and jiggle the pay phone till a quarter comes out. In short, Travers, you look like a small-time sack of shit.”

  He licked his lips and his watery eyes darted back and forth. Other bettors were starting to stare. Maybe I was embarrassing him in front of his cronies.

  “I don’t have to take this,” he said. “I put my time in. Now I got sciatic neuralgia.”

  “You don’t say.”

  He leaned close and let me get a whiff of his sour breath. “Yeah, and I got affidavits from two chiropractors and an osteopath to prove it.

  “I don’t give a shit about your pension. I want to know where you were on the night of July two.”

  He took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. When he put them back on, they were no cleaner. “Like I told the detective, I was right here. Ten o’clock, maybe a little after, I headed home.”

  “What about proof? Who saw you?”

  “Everybody. Sal the beer guy, Dave the Deuce who works the two-dollar window, but they don’t know one day from the next.”

  “You have any tickets from that night?”

  He laughed. “I don’t keep ‘em as souvenirs. I cash ‘em if I win, toss ‘em if I lose.”

  “And when you got home, you went online with Flying Bird, right?”

  “What if I did? I live alone, okay? I bought this computer. I play some games on it. I got a program that handicaps the horses, another that balances my checkbook. I see an ad for this Compu-Mate. Meet your life mate, right? I never been married.”

  I nodded, and he quickly added, “Hey, don’t think I’m one of those. When I was in the army, I got my share when you could still get it for five bucks and a carton of Luckies. And a guy doesn’t deliver the mail all those years without getting invitations for a cold drink or two, if you catch my drift.”

  I nodded again to let him know we were both a couple of regular guys.

  “I mean, times have changed,” he said. “Ten years ago, who’d have thought Henry Travers would be richer than John Connally, holier than Jim Bakker, and get more pussy than Rock Hudson?”

  “Or be more full of shit than Virginia Key.”

  “Hey, what gives? I talked to
a few women on the machine. I went out with four or five. Older ones, you know. Divorcees, widows, hungry for a man. A lot of lonely women out there.”

  “And Flying Bird.”

  “We chatted online. Just a kid. She wanted one of those young lawyers or bankers.”

  “Did you resent that?”

  “What?”

  “That she thought you were too old for her. Not upscale enough.”

  “You think I killed the girl because she wouldn’t go out with me?”

  Behind us, the crowd applauded a winning point. “So that’s what happened,” I said. “Old Harry Hardwick got shot down. A bitter guy on disability, a guy who lives in one room with a leaky window air conditioner—”

  “I got central air!”

  “—A guy who gets pissed off. Who does she think she is? Like those rich bitches in the Gables who think you’re the garbage man. Maybe get even with them, too.”

  “You’re out of your mind!” He started to get up, but I grabbed his forearm and yanked him back into his seat.

  “Maybe she shot you down real good that night, huh? Maybe old Hardwick shoulda changed his name to Droopy. And maybe she’d already given out her address after the invisible man described himself as looking like Tom Selleck, but she found out otherwise. Is that what happened, Travers? You slip over there to teach the bitch a lesson?”

  “Friggin’ crazy! I’m a taxpayer and I’m gonna complain to my congressman. If Claude Pepper was still alive—”

  “She really made you angry, didn’t she?”

  “She wasn’t even my type.”

  That stopped me cold. “How do you know? You’d never seen her. Did you fantasize about her, follow her around? Beats watching TV, staring at the computer all day.”

  “Hey, I don’t even know where she lived.”

  “Right, lived. Most people, they’d say, lives.”

  “What’s the big deal? Your cop friend told me she was dead. I’m sorry for the girl, but I had nothing to do with it.”