'Sir,' Sam explained, 'I am not here to bring you any trouble. I am not here about any aspect of your past except that you might have a line on a man named David Stone. I don't even care where or when you met him, and this is not a deposition. It has no legal meaning whatsoever. I'm just asking a favor.'
Duprey sat, caught in his own private agony. Finally he said, 'I have built a good life down here. I am sorry for what happened and for my failures in the other life and for my father's rage and my brother's contempt. But I am proud of what I have done down here and the kids I have helped and I do not mean to lose that.'
'I absolutely represent no threat to you. I will take no notes. I will declare under oath that I have never met you. This is not in regard to a legal matter and no court case is in the offering, nor any testimony of any kind. Give me the benefit of your memories, and I will never see you again.'
'It was very long ago and I have forgotten much.'
'Yet you did, in fact, know him.'
'He was a friend. Briefly. I don't know why. Insanely ambitious, very hard worker. Maybe he scented in me what he was, and that is a son bending under a mantle of family expectations. In my case, it broke me; in his, I suppose, it made him a saint.'
'He was a saint?'
'In that, unlike the others, he was not interested in money. He had a genuine interest in doing good. I think his rebellion against his father was different than mine. Mine was to destroy the life my father had planned for me, which not incidentally killed my father and estranged my brother. David's was to be everything his father wasn't; that is, not a society gynecologist, but a great researcher. Not a Jewish outsider trying to make it in the cosmopolitan town, and proud when he did, but someone known far and wide for his goodness. He was obsessed with ',' somehow.'
'He sounds dangerous.'
'See, that's your cynicism. You're a prosecutor; you think everyone is guilty of something, even if only in their minds. But I don't think David was like that. He took great pleasure in his goodness, almost sensuous pleasure.'
'I see. Well, he lived a hero's life, he died a hero's death. But there are some things about him I thought maybe you'd have some insight into.'
'Insight? Boy, that's a word you don't hear much in New Braunfels.
Sure, yeah, try me.'
'Ah, I visited his home and his widow. And found that he had secrets.
Odd that he should have secrets, such a good man. Do you have a comment?
I also found that the body reported to be his after his death in nineteen forty-five was not. It was some other man's.'
The man's stony face met Sam's. In a time, he said, 'You know, he was a good man. Why are you doing this?'
It was Sam's first true inkling that he was onto something.
'It's not about him. It's about what happened to him in the war. I have to find out his involvement in something in the war that may have led to something going on now.'
'But you can't tell me what?'
'I have confidences to keep, too.'
'Then you certainly understand that I must keep mine as well, if only out of respect to the dead.'
'Well then, what about the fact that his wife was infected with syphilis in the mid thirties, and could have no children. Now, again you'll think it's my cynicism, but suppose she got that disease from him in the first place, he knew it but could not face her knowing of a secret life. So he had her raped, so that the syphilis was thought to come from the rapists. Does that strike you as a possibility?'
'Good Lord, man, have you no decency?'
'His subsequent actions are consistent with incredible shame. He suffered what can only be termed a serious attack of nerves, maybe even a breakdown, immediately prior to what was called his death. But it gets stranger yet. There still seems to be, at some high level, some sort of government involvement in the program that he founded in Mississippi.
And someone is extremely interested in keeping it secret.
It's a fine kettle of fish this saint has gotten himself into.'
Jerry Duprey just shook his head.
'And finally this. He published for years, very aggressively, very dynamically, very brilliantly, in a number of prestigious medical journals. Then, in 1936, nothing. That would have to be about the time his wife was raped and lost the capacity to have children. He ceased to exist.
H Yet he didn't die until 1945. Or so it's alleged. But whatever, he ceased publishing. Do you know why?'
'Well, you are a clever man, aren't you, Mr. Vincent? You have uncovered a great deal. Is it that important? He meant well, he did well, he really did help the world. The sick, the poor, the victimized. He believed in them. Yes, I suppose he had some human appetites. Who doesn't? Don't you?' Sam thought of the woman he loved more than his wife, with whom he would never sleep nor live, who would leave, eventually, and he would then wallow in his bitter destiny.
'Of course I do. But I'm not here to judge him. That's for someone else.
Not me. And one last thing. Can you think of anything that might connect him to the Plutonium Laboratory at Los Alamos, or some issue of nuclear medicine, and thence to a government installation in Maryland called Fort Dietrich? I know that seems?'
'You've been seeing too many movies.'
'I haven't seen a movie since nineteen forty-six.'
'As for the other three questions, I happen to know the answer to all of them. It's really the same answer. But I'm not going to give it to you.
Because I don't like your certitude. You are a man who has never made a mistake, and it annoys me, a man who's made many mistakes.'
'Sir, take it from me, I have made some lulus.'
'Well, then, I will give you one clue, for your lulus. One clue alone.
If you are as smart as you seem, you will have no trouble figuring it out and all your questions will be solved.'
'Fair enough.'
'Maybe when he finally decided where his career had to go, he could no longer publish under his own name. For certain reasons. So maybe he published under another name.'
'That's very interesting,' said Sam, and thought immediately of that letter from Harold E. Perkins, about a bill of lading being cc-ed to another doctor in Thebes, Mississippi, years after the alleged death of David Stone whose name he could not remember but who he knew was not named Stone.
'I only know this because he was the one guy from Harvard who kept in touch with me and dropped me a card or two every year. He even offered to loan me some dough when I was kicked out. He was good, you know.'
'I believe that.'
'So he made a joke about what he was doing, and what it linked up to in his private personality that I knew about when I was close to him, and what he had to do to preserve the name of the ' doctor' he had become.'
Sam's eyes bored into him intently, the old prosecutor's trick. It had no effect. Jerry Duprey told him because Jerry Duprey wanted to, and for no other reason.
'His middle name was Goodwin. Remember that, Mr. Vincent. His middle name was Goodwin.' dark of the moon was just a few days off. The most important thing, Earl knew, was to let them get used to each other, or as used to each other as such a confabulation of ornery, egotistical old cusses could manage.
Audie seemed to settle them down, though each little clique sought him out to join up. But Audie was too much his own man, and Earl was happy to see the youngest man avoid the pitfalls of siding with one or the other, and instead work hard to keep on the best of terms with them all.
He was also, though he could find no words to express this, happy to see that no little puppy love thing sprung up between Sally and Audie.
