Jake Lassiter - 02 - Night Vision

by Paul Levine

  Carruthers sat on the sofa, smiling, if that’s what it was, under a towel of ice cubes fastened to his mouth. I surveyed the damage. Shards of ceramic pottery covered the floor, ink prints dangled at crazy angles on the living-room wall, and the tearoom was a shambles of splintered wood and ripped walls. In about three minutes, we had transformed Cindy’s townhouse from Oriental Moderne to post-Apocalypse.

  “I was trying to save your life. I thought Davy Crockett here—”

  “You thought! You might have killed him.”

  “Sorry, I’m not used to seeing strange men brandish knives at my lady friends.”

  “Humghfeeldauhdeer,” came a sound from under the icy towel.

  “What?”

  “He was showing me how to field-dress a deer,” Pam explained helpfully.

  “Is that different than city-dressing one?” I asked.

  Carruthers dropped the towel. His face was not a pretty sight. “I was advising against making the incision between the hind legs. Cut into the sternum and go back toward the pelvis. It’s not a bad job if you don’t mind being up to your ears in blood and offal.” His voice was thickened by a swollen tongue.

  Pam said, “And I told him how barbarous and cruel it was, hunting those fine animals. And then you came in and…and pounced.”

  I turned to Carruthers. “What the hell were you doing here?”

  “I was in town and stopped over to see Cindy. The door was open, so I—”

  “You know Cindy?”

  “Sure. Barely Legal. We don’t go out that often, what with her import-export friend and my living so far away. But she’s the first down-to-earth woman I’ve met in Mia-muh town.”

  “Cindy? My Cindy?”

  CHAPTER 31

  Mercy

  My foot was propped on the phone directory and swaddled in ice. Elevation and cold. Every team trainer worth his smelling salts knows that.

  My ribs were swathed in Ace wrap. They only hurt when I breathed.

  My head was bobbing on ocean swells. Two Darvons and a grapefruit juice with Finlandia, a linebacker’s Sunday-night beddy-bye cocktail.

  I was dreaming of sunny days and force-four winds, watching a nine-foot sliver of fiberglass jumping three-foot chop. I looked around inside the dream and couldn’t find Pam Maxson or anyone else. A lousy, no-bikini dream. I looked at the sailboard, but I wasn’t there. It was a board without a sailor, skimming the waves, darting on a broad reach along a rocky coast. The board jibed, its inside rail digging hard, the tail shooting a plume of water. Then, like a riderless horse, it sped toward open sea.

  Someone called my name.

  It didn’t sound like Pam.

  I reached across the bed. Empty. The sheets cool.

  “She ain’t here, Jake.”

  Funny how dreams can seem so real. I smelled a cigarette and I don’t smoke.

  I opened my eyes. The paddle fan clocked its slow turns above my head. A toxic green glow filled the room, my neighbor’s mercury-vapor, anticrime light, seeping through open shutters, mixing with the smoke. So I was in my bed in my house. All alone. Except for the voice.

  “Got trouble keeping them in bed, do you, Jakie?”

  I tried lifting my head. It weighed a ton. Someone was standing by the window, looking out, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. I saw him in silhouette, a strong, bulky shadow in the noxious haze. “Nick?”

  “Who’d you expect? Felix Frankfurter?”

  I lifted myself to an elbow. “What’d you do to her, Nick?”

  “Her?”

  “Pam. She doesn’t know anything. You didn’t have to—”

  “Easy, Jake. You’ve had a hard night.” He exhaled a trail of smoke, iridescent and willowy in the gaseous light. “You know, I made a real mistake appointing you.”

  “Yeah. I saw right through you.”

  He inhaled and the red ash of cigarette flared. “No. You fucked everything up.”

  I tried to sit up straight, but the pain kept me stretched out. “What do you want?”

  “To take back something of mine. Something you stole. Breaking and entering, Jake. Trespassing. Larceny. Maybe obstruction of justice, too. I got good neighbors, Jake. One of them spots a guy get out of an old convertible and go into my garage the hard way.”

  I kept quiet. He could be wired.

  Nick continued. “When I get to the house, only thing missing is an old memory.” He watched me, waiting for a response.

  Despite my better judgment, I opened my mouth. “Why not cut the bullshit? You’re not going to press charges. You can’t stand the heat. If the papers got hold of what’s in the log, you’d—”

  “What is in the log?”

  I knew the important stuff by heart:

  1330—VC ambush on dike. Gallardi, Boyer, dogwood 6.

  Rosen, Williams, Colgan, Miciak, dogwood 8.

  1800—Dak Sut. Firefight. 3 VC greased. Zippo approx.

  20 hooches. Phuong MIA. Lt. E. Ferguson. Rest in peace.

  May the Lord have mercy.

  “Evan Ferguson wasn’t killed on the dike. He was killed in the village after the sniper attack. In your own words, Nick.”

  “So what? What’s it prove?”

  I didn’t know so what, and he knew I didn’t know so what.

  He dropped the stub of his cigarette into the neck of a half-empty beer bottle on the dresser. “Do you want me to tell you what happened on a rainy, shit-eating, bloodsucking day in-country in 1968?”

  Not if it’s going to get me killed, I thought. “Sure, Nick, tell me all—”

  “I was fighting for my country, Jakie. What were you doing that day—getting a hand job from some pom-pom girl under the bleachers?”

  “Most likely a majorette,” I said. “Great hands.”

  “My men were exhausted, wet, cold, hungry, and scared of being scared. Some of them were popping pills and smoking weed like there was no tomorrow. ‘Cause maybe there wasn’t. But most of all they were mean and angry. There were two ways to get to our objective, Dak Sut, where there was supposed to be VC activity. They didn’t want to go either way. They didn’t want to meet the enemy or do anything but go home. The long way was through forest. Some danger of snipers, but there was cover, too. Evan wanted to go that route with his platoon, but I talked him out of it.”

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

  “We went across the paddies, the men sinking into the mud, cursing the war, cursing LBJ, cursing me. Some of them were sick, three later came down with malaria. We took the men onto the dikes that run through the paddies, Evan’s platoon and ours, moving parallel. Evan didn’t like it, out in the open like that. There was cover maybe three hundred meters away. Evan thought Charley could be laying low there, waiting for us to come up on the dikes.”

  “Was he right?”

  “Yeah. But first, just like I told you, some naked kid comes up out of the mud with an AK-47 on Evan’s dike. At the same time, an RPD opens up from the cover. I lose Gallardi and Boyer, plus four wounded. Evan’s men kill the sniper. The machine-gun fire stops, probably a fifteen-year-old with a hundred rounds total, and we’re lying there, facedown in the mud, pissing our pants.”

  “So Evan wasn’t killed?”

  He lit another cigarette, inhaled once, then dropped it in the beer bottle. “No. Never touched. We radio for a dust-off, evacuation of the dead and wounded by slick. By the time we gather and get to Dak Sut, it’s just after dark, and the men are jumpy, mean, and trigger-happy.”

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

  “Like I told you before, Charley owns the night. The place is deserted except for three old ladies, some babies, and a few water buffalo. There’s no moon and it’s the blackest night you’ve ever seen. It’s raining and it’s cold. People in the world didn’t realize how cold it got there. The men, both Evan’s and mine, are near mutiny. They get Phuong, our translator, t
o interrogate the old women. ‘Yankees numbah one, VC numbah ten.’ The usual bullshit. So one of my men hits the old lady with his rifle butt. Really bashed her. Opened a gash in her forehead that bled like a son of a bitch.”

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

  “Phuong gets upset. Starts chattering in Vietnamese and the women start running. They didn’t get twenty yards.”

  WERE ANY VILLAGERS WOUNDED OR KILLED BY YOUR MEN?

  “Who shot them?”

  “Who cares who? A farm kid from Indiana who a year before played high-school basketball, a street kid from the Bronx who enlisted for the GI benefits. Red-blooded American boys with M-16s who were tired and scared and a little crazy and would have shot Westy and LBJ and me, too, if they had the chance. So instead they shot three old women.”

  “So your log is false. There was no firefight in the village. There was no enemy in Dak Sut.”

  He sat down on the bed and leaned his elbows on his knees. Somewhere in Coconut Grove, a police siren wailed, then grew softer. Inside the house, the only sound was the gentle whir of the paddle fan. “No enemy? Who was the enemy? The old women hated us, maybe fed breakfast to the poor son of a bitch who spent all day in the mud waiting for us.”

  “And your translator wasn’t kidnapped?”

  “Not by the enemy,” Nick said softly.

  I waited. He was staring at the wall. He lit another cigarette. “Haven’t smoked since I was discharged.” He inhaled, sucking it in, holding it, then emptied his lungs. “Phuong knew. The second she saw the women shot, she knew. She turned to me. Her eyes were pleading. A corporal who had twelve days left in-country called to the others, ‘Let’s get the gook cunt.’”

  WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR TRANSLATOR?

  “Phuong started running. He chased her, tackled her, dragged her off. Four or five others followed him. When they were done with her, they each shot her. They’d made a pact. Then a few others started a Zippo raid, burning down every hooch. A few other women scrambled out, girls really. My men, Evan’s men, went after them. Got them.”

  “You were in command. You could have stopped them.”

  He laughed. There was no pleasure in the sound. Outside, a neighborhood wren sang its early-morning song in a Poinciana tree. “You think it’s like a football team, Jake. The coach blows the whistle, everybody listens up, slaps each other’s ass.”

  He turned and looked straight at me. “They would have killed me. My own men. Evan’s men. I saw it in their eyes. A sergeant comes up to me and says, ‘Stay out of this, sir.’ He didn’t do any of the killing, but he knew when to turn his head.”

  “And Evan?”

  “He was outraged. You’d have to know him. Eagle Scout, Sunday School Evan. Straight as an arrow, tough as nails. I admired him. Hell, I loved him, and if you’d have been in combat instead of playing ball, you’d know what that means. It’s the purest, deepest kinship, something you can’t have with a woman.”

  THE LAST TIME YOU SAW LIEUTENANT FERGUSON ALIVE, WAS HE

  “Was he trying to stop the raping and the burning and the killing?”

  “He ordered his men to drop their weapons. They laughed at him. One of my grunts raised his rifle. Evan drew his sidearm. He tried to arrest them. He looked to me for help.”

  Nick Fox was silent again.

  “But you turned away,” I said. “You let them kill your best friend.”

  He dropped his head between his knees.

  “Nick?”

  His broad shoulders quaked and he stared at the floor.

  “Nick? What happened to Evan Ferguson?”

  When he finally lifted his head, the eyes were blank and his voice was choked. “I pulled my .45, and I told Evan to forget it, to look the other way, that we could file reports that would dovetail and no one would ever know. ‘I’ll know,’ he said. I argued with him, begged him. We stood there in the dark with the rain coming down, and I was shivering and scared and crying, because I knew what I had to do.”

  He stopped, but now I knew, too. I knew the secret he carried for so long. I knew the darkest part of Nick Fox’s soul, the shining life built on a lie. Behind the medals, the hero was worse than a coward. He had committed the most unpardonable sin.

  “You pulled the trigger,” I said. “You joined the pact. Because you were afraid they’d frag you and say you stepped on a mine or got it in a firefight. You didn’t even try to stop them.”

  “They were going to kill Evan, and they wouldn’t trust me to keep quiet. I had to do it. It was the only way to get out of there. Evan was a dead man either way.”

  “Keep telling yourself that and maybe you can live with it.”

  “I shot him in the chest. It knocked him down. I stood over him, and he looked at me, just looked at me, this incredible hurt in his eyes. I shot him twice more, and there isn’t a day that’s gone by since that I haven’t seen that face, that look. It’s there when I sleep and when I wake. It’s always there.”

  Lt. E. Ferguson. Rest in peace. May the Lord have mercy.

  Now it all made sense. May the Lord have mercy, Nick Fox prayed, on his own godforsaken soul.

  CHAPTER 32

  Shades of Gray

  An orange glow from the east summoned a new day. During the night the wind had shifted. In the summer our weather comes from the southeast, light breezes carrying the heat and moisture from the Caribbean. But sometime during the night the wind clocked around— southwest, northwest, north, finally northeast—at a steady fifteen knots. An unusual front for this time of year, a breath of air nearly cool.

  My kitchen window was open to the breeze. I wore canvas shorts and an old jersey, number fifty-eight. Nick Fox wore his navy-blue suit. You never know when the TV boys will show up. I poured coffee, then sat at the table, my leg supported by a chair.

  “I want something from you,” I said.

  “Yeah, what?” Suspicion knotted his forehead. Nick’s mood had changed with the morning light. Blustery again.

  “Your blood. Rodriguez’s too.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Nick Fox said.

  “Sperm samples, if you want some fun.”

  “Up your ass, Lassiter.”

  “No, in a little glass bottle. If you want, you can jerk each other off.”

  He lit a cigarette, changed his mind, crushed it into a priceless saucer with an illustration of Larry Csonka’s face. If I hadn’t broken the Jim Kiick dish, I could’ve auctioned the set at Sotheby’s for six figures.

  “What’s this bullshit about Rodriguez?” he asked.

  I told him that Biggus Dickus was trying to diddle every woman in town with a working modem.

  “I asked him to do it,” Fox said.

  That didn’t make any sense to me, and my blank look must have said so.

  “I asked Rodriguez to join the damn club, to talk with Marsha and Prissy, scope them out.”

  “And his dating Priscilla…?”

  “Same thing, I asked him to.”

  “Why?”

  He looked at me, took a sip of the coffee, and said, “You really don’t know, do you? That’s the problem with you. You see a slice of the moon and think you’ve got night vision. But you’ve got to spend time in the jungle, Jakie, before you can see in the dark.”

  He turned away and looked like he was deciding how much more to say. “Once you had the log, I knew you’d jump to the wrong conclusion.”

  I wanted to laugh but didn’t. “No wrong conclusion could be worse than the truth.”

  “No? What about your deciding I had Rodriguez kill Marsha and Priscilla?”

  Suddenly the room was stifling despite the breeze. “I figure you’ll have an excuse for those, too. It was them or you, right?”

  “Damn you! I knew you’d fuck it up. I’ve got an excuse, all right. I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know who killed them, but I know where you’ve been and what you’re trying to prove. I know you were at Compu-Mate and copied a bunch
of records that Rodriguez already had. I know you played some scam in the property room, and I know your English girlfriend signed up at the horny women’s club. I know you got busted up by some cowboy who drives a Jeep, and I know who sneaked out of here about an hour before I showed up. Jakie, I know when you piss and when you shit, and when you step in it.”

  It made me smile, the irony of it. I was investigating him, and he had me under surveillance. “Look, Nick, what am I supposed to think? Especially now. You’ve just admitted the motive. I don’t know how much Marsha knew, but it was enough to make you nervous.”

  “Everything. She knew everything. Priscilla told her.”

  “What? You told me you never talked about it.”

  “She was my wife. When I got back, I was a mess. They were pinning medals on me, and I was dying inside. She took care of me. I told her. She said it would go away, she would make it better, and she did.”

  “Until you left her.”

  He picked up the mug of coffee, then put it down again. “She set me up. She pretended she didn’t care, that she’d get along without me, but she wanted me back. If she couldn’t have me, she’d get even. She made friends with Marsha, up-and-coming TV personality, told her everything she knew. It wasn’t enough for a story, no confirming sources, but Prissy figured a journalist could do some research, put it together. Prissy could ruin me, Marsha would get a promotion. They’d both be happy.”

  “So you planted Rodriguez in their little garden. Like I said, you’re the guy with the motive.”

  He looked at me straight on. “Listen, you thick-skulled, lead-footed linebacker. Would I tell you this if I had anything to do with the killings?”

  “Sure, ‘cause you’re so much smarter than me—”

  “Cut the crap. I told you the truth to get you on track. We’ve got to work together. You, me, Rodriguez. These cases are making too many headlines.”