four

We went back across the road to the motel and made the kid tell the story all over again. He was surly and he wasn’t talkative, but he made a good witness. Unhelpful people often do. They’re not trying to please you. They’re not trying to impress you. They’re not making all kinds of stuff up, trying to tell you what you want to hear.

He said he was sitting in the office, alone, doing nothing, and at about eleven twenty-five in the evening he heard a vehicle door slam and then a big turbodiesel start up. He described sounds that must have been a gearbox slamming into reverse and a four-wheel-drive transfer case locking up. Then there was tire noise and engine noise and gravel noise and something very large and heavy sped away in a big hurry. He said he got off his stool and went outside to look. Didn’t see the vehicle.

“Why did you check the room?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I thought maybe it was on fire.”

“On fire?”

“People do stuff like that, in a place like this. They set the room on fire. And then hightail out. For kicks. Or something. I don’t know. It was unusual.”

“How did you know which room to check?”

He went very quiet at that point. Summer pressed him for an answer. Then I did. We did the good cop, bad cop thing. Eventually he admitted it was the only room rented for the whole night. All the others were renting by the hour, and were being serviced by foot traffic from across the street, not by vehicles. He said that was how he had been so sure there was never a hooker in Kramer’s room. It was his responsibility to check them in and out. He took the money and issued the keys. Kept track of the comings and the goings. So he always knew for sure who was where. It was a part of his function. A part he was supposed to keep very quiet about.

“I’ll lose my job now,” he said.

He got worried to the point of tears and Summer had to calm him down. Then he told us he had found Kramer’s body and called the cops and cleared all the hourly renters out for safety’s sake. Then Deputy Chief Stockton had shown up within about fifteen minutes. Then I had shown up, and when I left sometime later the kid recognized the same vehicle sounds he had heard before. Same engine noise, same drivetrain noises, same tire whine. He was convincing. He had already admitted that hookers used the place all the time, so he had no more reason to lie. And Humvees were still relatively new. Still relatively rare. And they made a distinctive noise. So I believed him. We left him there on his stool and stepped outside into the cold red glow of the Coke machine.

“No hooker,” Summer said. “A woman from the base instead.”

“A woman officer,” I said. “Maybe fairly senior. Someone with permanent access to her own Humvee. Nobody signs out a pool vehicle for an assignation like that. And she’s got his briefcase. She must have.”

“She’ll be easy to find. She’ll be in the gate log, time out, time in.”

“I might have even passed her on the road. If she left here at eleven twenty-five she wasn’t back at Bird before twelve-fifteen. I was leaving around then.”

“If she went straight back to the post.”

“Yes,” I said. “If.”

“Did you see another Humvee?”

“Don’t think so,” I said.

“Who do you think she is?”

I shrugged. “Like we figured about the phantom hooker. Someone he met somewhere. Irwin, probably, but it could have been anywhere.”

I stared across at the gas station. Watched cars go by on the road.

“Vassell and Coomer might know her,” Summer said. “You know, if it was a long-term thing between her and Kramer.”

“Yes, they might.”

“Where do you think they are?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m sure I’ll find them if I need them.”

 

I didn’t find them. They found me. They were waiting for me in my borrowed office when we got back. Summer dropped me at my door and went to park the car. I walked past the outer desk. The night-shift sergeant was back. The mountain woman, with the baby son and the paycheck worries. She gestured at the inner door in a way that told me someone was in there. Someone that ranked a lot higher than either of us.

“Got coffee?” I said.

“The machine is on,” she said.

I took some with me. My coat was still unbuttoned. My hair was a mess. I looked exactly like a guy who had been brawling in a parking lot. I walked straight to the desk. Put my coffee down. There were two guys in upright visitor chairs against the wall, facing me. They were both in woodland BDUs. One had a Brigadier General’s star on his collar and the other had a colonel’s eagle. The general had Vassell on his nametape and the colonel had Coomer. Vassell was bald and Coomer wore eyeglasses and they were both pompous enough and old enough and short and soft and pink enough to look vaguely ridiculous in BDUs. They looked like Rotary Club members on their way to a fancy dress ball. First impression, I didn’t like them very much.

I sat down in my chair and saw two slips of paper stacked square in the center of the blotter. The first was a note that said: Your brother called again. Urgent. This time there was a phone number with it. It had a 202 area code. Washington D.C.

“Don’t you salute senior officers?” Vassell said, from his chair.

The second note said: Col. Garber called. Green Valley PD calculates Mrs. K died approx. 0200. I folded both notes separately and tucked them side by side under the base of my telephone. Adjusted them so I could see exactly half of each one. Looked up in time to see Vassell glaring at me. His naked scalp was going red.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What was the question?”

“Don’t you salute senior officers when you enter a room?”

“If they’re in my chain of command,” I said. “You’re not.”

“I don’t consider that an answer,” he said.

“Look it up,” I said. “I’m with the 110th Special Unit. We’re separate. Structurally we’re parallel to the rest of the army. We have to be, if you think about it. We can’t police you if we’re in your chain of command ourselves.”

“I’m not here to be policed, son,” Vassell said.

“So why are you here? It’s kind of late for a social visit.”

“I’m here to ask some questions.”

“Ask away,” I said. “Then I’ll ask some of my own. And you know what the difference will be?”

He said nothing.

“I’ll be answering out of courtesy,” I said. “You’ll be answering because the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires you to.”

Vassell said nothing. Just glared at me. Then he glanced at Coomer. Coomer looked back at him, and then at me.

“We’re here about General Kramer,” he said. “We’re his senior staff.”

“I know who you are,” I said.

“Tell us about the general.”

“He’s dead,” I said.

“We’re aware of that. We’d like to know the circumstances.”

“He had a heart attack.”

“Where?”

“Inside his chest cavity.”

Vassell glowered.

“Where did he die?” Coomer said.

“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “It’s germane to an ongoing inquiry.”

“In what way?” Vassell said.

“In a confidential way.”

“It was around here somewhere,” he said. “That much is already common knowledge.”

“Well, there you go,” I said. “What’s the conference at Irwin about?”

“What?”

“The conference at Irwin,” I said again. “Where you were all headed.”

“What about it?”

“I need to know the agenda.”

Vassell looked at Coomer and Coomer opened his mouth to start telling me something when my phone rang. It was my desk sergeant. She had Summer out there with her. She was unsure whether to send her in. I told her to go right ahead. So there was a tap on the door and Summer came in. I introduced her all around and she pulled a spare chair over to my desk and sat down, alongside me, facing them. Two against two. I pulled the second note out from under the telephone and passed it to her: Col. Garber called. Green Valley PD calculates Mrs. K died approx. 0200. She unfolded it and read it and refolded it and passed it back to me. I put it back under the phone. Then I asked Vassell and Coomer about the Irwin agenda again, and watched their attitudes change. They didn’t get any more helpful. It was more of a sideways move than an improvement. But because there was now a woman in the room they dialed down the overt hostility and replaced it with smug patronizing civility. They came from that kind of a background and that kind of a generation. They hated MPs and I was sure they hated women officers, but all of a sudden they felt they had to be polite.

“It was going to be purely routine,” Coomer said. “Just a regular powwow. Nothing of any great importance.”

“Which explains why you didn’t actually go,” I said.

“Naturally. It seemed much more appropriate to remain here. You know, under the circumstances.”

“How did you find out about Kramer?”

“XII Corps called us.”

“From Germany?”

“That’s where XII Corps is, son,” Vassell said.

“Where did you stay last night?”

“In a hotel,” Coomer said.

“Which one?”

“The Jefferson. In D.C.”

“Private or on a DoD ticket?”

“That hotel is authorized for senior officers.”

“Why didn’t General Kramer stay there?”

“Because he made alternative arrangements.”

“When?”

“When what?” Coomer said.

“When did he make these alternative arrangements?”

“Some days ago.”

“So it wasn’t a spur of the moment thing?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Do you know what those arrangements were?”

“Obviously not,” Vassell said. “Or we wouldn’t be asking you where he died.”

“You didn’t think he was maybe visiting with his wife?”

“Was he?”

“No,” I said. “Why do you need to know where he died?”

There was a long pause. Their attitudes changed again. The smugness fell away and they replaced it with a kind of winsome frankness.

“We don’t really need to know,” Vassell said. He leaned forward and glanced at Summer like he wished she weren’t there. Like he wanted this new intimacy to be purely man-to-man with me. “And we have no specific information or direct knowledge at all, but we’re worried that General Kramer’s private arrangements could lead to the potential for embarrassment, in light of the circumstances.”

“How well did you know him?”

“On a professional level, very well indeed. On a personal level, about as well as anyone knows his brother officer. Which is to say, perhaps not well enough.”

“But you suspect in general terms what his arrangements might have been.”

“Yes,” he said. “We have our suspicions.”

“So it wasn’t a surprise to you that he didn’t bunk at the hotel.”

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

“And it wasn’t a surprise when I told you he wasn’t visiting with his wife.”

“Not entirely, no.”

“So you suspected roughly what he might be doing, but you didn’t know where.”

Vassell nodded his head. “Roughly.”

“Did you know with whom he might have been doing it?”

Vassell shook his head.

“We have no specific information,” he said.

“OK,” I said. “Doesn’t really matter. I’m sure you know the army well enough to realize that if we discover a potential for embarrassment, we’ll cover it up.”

There was a long pause.

“Have all traces been removed?” Coomer asked. “From wherever it was?”

I nodded. “We took his stuff.”

“Good.”

“I need the Irwin conference agenda,” I said.

There was another pause.

“There wasn’t one,” Vassell said.

“I’m sure there was,” I said. “This is the army. It’s not the Actors Studio. We don’t do free improvisation sessions.”

There was a pause.

“There was nothing on paper,” Coomer said. “I told you, Major, it was no big deal.”

“How did you spend your day today?”

“Chasing rumors about the general.”

“How did you get down here from D.C.?”

“We have a car and a driver on loan from the Pentagon.”

“You checked out of the Jefferson?”

“Yes, we did.”

“So your bags are in the Pentagon car?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Where is the car?”

“Waiting outside your post headquarters.”

“It’s not my post headquarters,” I said. “I’m here on temporary detachment.”

I turned to Summer and told her to go fetch their briefcases from the car. They got all outraged, but they knew they couldn’t stop me doing it. Civilian notions about unreasonable search and seizure and warrants and probable cause stop at an army post main gate. I watched their eyes while Summer was gone. They were annoyed, but they weren’t worried. So either they were telling the truth about the Irwin conference or they had already ditched the relevant paperwork. But I went through the motions anyway. Summer got back carrying two identical briefcases. They were exactly like the one Kramer had in his silver-framed photographs. Staffers kiss up in all kinds of ways.

I searched through them on my desk. I found passports, plane tickets, travel vouchers, and itineraries in both of them. But no agendas for Fort Irwin.

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” I said.

“Happy now, son?” Vassell said.

“Kramer’s wife is dead too,” I said. “Did you know that?”

I watched them carefully, and I saw that they didn’t know. They stared at me and stared at each other and started to get pale and upset.

“How?” Vassell said.

“When?” Coomer said.

“Last night,” I said. “She was a homicide victim.”

“Where?”

“In her house. There was an intruder.”

“Do we know who it was?”

“No, we don’t. It’s not our case. It’s a civilian jurisdiction.”

“What was it? A burglary?”

“It maybe started out that way.”

They said nothing more. Summer and I walked them out to the sidewalk in front of post headquarters and watched them climb into their Pentagon car. It was a Mercury Grand Marquis, a couple of model years newer than Mrs. Kramer’s big old boat, and black rather than green. Their driver was a tall guy in BDUs. He had subdued-order badges on and I couldn’t make out his name or his rank in the dark. But he didn’t look like an enlisted man. He U-turned smoothly across the empty road and drove Vassell and Coomer away. We watched his taillights disappear north, through the main gate, and away into the darkness beyond.

“What do you think?” Summer said.

“I think they’re full of shit,” I said.

“Important shit or regular flag-rank shit?”

“They’re lying,” I said. “They’re uptight, they’re lying, and they’re stupid. Why am I worried about Kramer’s briefcase?”

“Sensitive paperwork,” she said. “Whatever he was carrying to California.”

I nodded. “They just defined it for me. It’s the conference agenda itself.”

“You’re sure there was one?”

“There’s always an agenda. And it’s always on paper. There’s a paper agenda for everything. You want to change the dog food in the K-9 kennels, you need forty-seven separate meetings with forty-seven separate paper agendas. So there was one for Irwin, that’s for damn sure. It was completely stupid to say there wasn’t. If they’ve got something to hide, they should have just said it’s too secret for me to see.”

“Maybe the conference really wasn’t important.”

“That’s bullshit too. It was very important.”

“Why?”

“Because a two-star general was going. And a one-star. And because it was New Year’s Eve, Summer. Who flies on New Year’s Eve and spends the night in a lousy stopover hotel? And this year in Germany was a big deal. The Wall is coming down. We won, after forty-five years. The parties must have been incredible. Who would miss them for something unimportant? To have gotten those three guys on a plane on New Year’s Eve, this Irwin thing had to be some kind of a very big deal.”

“They were upset about Mrs. Kramer. More than about Kramer himself.”

I nodded. “Maybe they liked her.”

“They must have liked Kramer too.”

“No, he’s just a tactical problem for them. It’s an unsentimental business, up there at their level. They hitched themselves to him, and now he’s dead, and they’re worrying about where that leaves them.”

“Ready for promotion, maybe.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But if Kramer turns out to be an embarrassment, they could go down with him.”

“Then they should be reassured. You promised them a cover-up.”

There was something prim in her voice. Like she was suggesting I shouldn’t have promised them any such thing.

“We protect the army, Summer,” I said. “Like family. That’s what we’re for.” Then I paused. “But did you notice they didn’t shut up after that? They should have taken the hint. Cover-up requested, cover-up promised. Asked and answered, mission accomplished.”

“They wanted to know where his stuff was.”

“Yes,” I said. “They did. And you know what that means? It means they’re looking for Kramer’s briefcase too. Because of the agenda. Kramer’s copy is the only one still outside of their direct control. They came down here to check if I had it.”

Summer looked in the direction their car had gone. I could still smell its exhaust in the air. An acid tang from the catalyst.

“How do civilian medics work?” I asked her. “Suppose you’re my wife, and I go down with a heart attack? What do you do?”

“I call 911.”

“And then what happens?”

“The ambulance shows up. Takes you to the emergency room.”

“And let’s say I’m DOA when I get there. Where would you be?”

“I would have ridden to the hospital with you.”

“And where would my briefcase be?”

“At home,” she said. “Wherever you left it.” Then she paused. “What? You think someone went to Mrs. Kramer’s house last night looking for the briefcase?”

“It’s a plausible sequence,” I said. “Someone hears that he’s dead from a heart attack, assumes he was pronounced in the ambulance or the emergency room, assumes whoever he was with would have accompanied him, goes down there expecting to find an empty house with a briefcase in it.”

“But Kramer was never there.”

“It was a reasonable first try.”

“You think it was Vassell and Coomer?”

I said nothing.

“That’s crazy,” Summer said. “They don’t look the type.”

“Don’t let looks fool you. They’re Armored Branch. They’ve trained all their lives to roll right over anything that gets in their way. But I don’t think the timing works for them. Let’s say Garber called XII Corps in Germany at twelve-fifteen, earliest. Then let’s say XII Corps called the hotel back here in the States at twelve-thirty, earliest. Green Valley is seventy minutes from D.C. and Mrs. Kramer died at two o’clock. That would have given them a twenty-minute margin to react, maximum. They were just in from the airport, so they didn’t have a car with them, and it would have taken time to get hold of one. And they certainly didn’t have a crowbar with them. Nobody travels with a crowbar in their luggage, just in case. And I doubt if the Home Depot was open, after midnight on New Year’s Eve.”

“So someone else is out there looking?”

“We need to find that agenda,” I said. “We need to nail this thing down.”

 

I sent Summer away to do three things: first, list all female personnel at Fort Bird with access to their own Humvees, and second, list any of them who might have met Kramer at Fort Irwin in California, and third, contact the Jefferson Hotel in D.C. and get Vassell and Coomer’s exact check-in and checkout times, plus details on all their incoming and outgoing phone calls. I went back to my office and filed the note from Garber and spread the note from my brother on the blotter and dialed the number. He picked up on the first ring.

“Hey, Joe,” I said.

“Jack?”

“What?”

“I got a call.”

“Who from?”

“Mom’s doctor,” he said.

“About what?”

“She’s dying.”