CHAPTER 11
I had to wait until eleven o’clock that night to call the chief of the JAG Corps. He wasn’t in, but I got his deputy, a brigadier general named Courtland, which is another fabulous name for a lawyer, if you ask me. I’d worked with Courtland a few times over the years. We didn’t know each other well, but we were on first-name terms. Which, in the Army, meant he called me Sean, and I called him General.
I said, “Good morning, General. I hope it’s a nice day back there.”
“It’s hot and steamy back here. I’ve got a meeting in five minutes. What do you need, Sean?”
“I was wondering if you could tell me who’s been assigned as the prosecutor for the Whitehall case?”
“Uh, yeah sure. Eddie Golden. You know him?”
It was a perfectly duplicitous query because everybody in the JAG Corps knows Eddie Golden. Or at least they know of him.
The Navy and Marine Corps aviation wings have this nifty title they bestow on their most hot-shit fighter pilot, the Top Gun, which everybody in the world now knows about because of the corny movie of the same name. Although the Army JAG Corps doesn’t fly lethal arabesques like fighter pilots, we do have our own silly little version of this badge of honor, and it is known as the Hangman. It goes to the prosecuting attorney who’s put away the most bad guys. For the past six years, Eddie’s been the undisputed Hangman.
Eddie and I had faced off against each other twice in court, and obviously, since Eddie was still the reigning Hangman, I hadn’t made a dent in his record. To my credit, nobody held it against me – except my clients, of course – because both were fairly hopeless cases. But having seen Eddie in action at first hand, I was awed.
He looks more like Robert Redford than Robert Redford looks like Robert Redford, if that can be at all possible. Eddie is boyish, witty, brilliant, and has an assassin’s sense of timing. Women board members are Silly Putty in his hands. But male board members aren’t immune to his charms, either. See, Eddie has what we attorneys call the Pope’s Gift. What this means is that the Pope can walk outside on a perfectly cloudless, sunny day and flap open his umbrella and every Catholic for miles around will crack open theirs, too. After all, the Pope’s supposed to be infallible. Eddie’s like that, too, although only in a courtroom when the show is on.
Now I’m not the vindictive type, but I don’t like losing twice. I can live with an even split, because I’m the kind of guy who figures a draw is damned close to a win. Not everybody loves a winner, but nobody likes a loser, and I’m perfectly content hanging out right in the middle of the pack. The thought of losing three times to Eddie almost made me sick.
That’s because the other thing about Eddie is that he’s not a nice winner. He sends every attorney he beats a baseball bat with a notch carved in it. I know this for a fact since I’ve got two of them stored in my closet at home.
I said, “Shit,” and the general chuckled. “Anything else I can help you with?”
“No, thank you very much.”
We then hung up.
The thing about that phone call was that it inspired me. Maybe I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the truth is, I really don’t like Eddie. No, that’s not true. I detest Eddie.
In Latin, there’s this wonderful phrase:
Vowing not to receive another of his baseball bats, I stayed awake till one o’clock wading through more of the materials in the boxes. I started with Jackson’s initial testimony.
Private Everett Jackson was his full name, twenty years old, from Merryville, Mississippi, and trained by the Army to be an administrative clerk. He’d been in Korea nearly a full year and nothing in his personnel file jumped out at me. He seemed to be just another guy who’d made it through high school, skipped or put off college, and signed up. Maybe he wanted some adventure, maybe he wanted to get away from home, maybe he had nothing better to do. He was bright, though. His GT score, a test administered by the Armed Forces, was 126. That’s roughly comparable to his IQ, so he had brains.
I examined the photo appended to the inside jacket. I tried to overlook that I already knew he was gay, but frankly, he looked it. That’s not easy to accomplish in a black-and-white Army photo, when you’re standing rigidly at attention, in Army greens. But he did. There was an unmistakable willowiness, an effeminate slouch.
Before “don’t ask, don’t tell” came to pass, Everett Jackson would’ve been singled out and discharged ten seconds after he walked through the gate for basic training. Some stiff-necked drill sergeant in a Smokey the Bear hat would’ve taken one look at him, sniffed derisively once or twice, then dragged him into the latrine, rammed his face within two inches of Jackson’s, and fiercely demanded, “Don’t you dare lie to me, boy. You tell me where you like to put that little pecker of yours.”
Moran claimed in his initial statement that he’d invited Jackson to Whitehall’s party because the poor kid was bereft of friends, that he was a barracks rat in need of a reprieve. There was probably some truth in that. The other troops probably despised Jackson. They probably treated him like a leper.
What intrigued me was why Moran plucked Jackson out of the ranks, made him his company clerk, and chose to have an affair with him. Moran was a tough, manly-looking guy, the last man anybody would ever suspect of being gay. Unless, that is, he hung out with a neon gay like Jackson. I was making an assumption here that Moran and Jackson were lovers, but the facts being what they were, that didn’t seem like a real wild leap.
And, since Jackson was so visibly gay, why would Moran take the risk of associating with him?
Anyway, Jackson’s initial testimony tracked closely with Whitehall’s and Moran’s. It did so because he cloaked himself in ignorance. He claimed he drank way too much. He claimed he drank way too fast. He claimed he passed out at 11:45 on the dot. I had some trouble swallowing that one. Not many people check their watches before they lapse into a drunken coma.
The next thing he claimed he remembered was being shaken by someone and told to go to the second bedroom on the left. So he did. He claimed he then slept soundly until Moran awoke him at 5:30 A.M. and told him Lee was dead. He said he got up, walked down the hall, peeked in the room and saw the body, but only got a quick glimpse, because the apartment was instantly flooded with Korean policemen.
I put down his packet and went back to the statement by Sergeant Wilson Blackstone, the first MP to arrive at the scene. According to Blackstone, he and his partner did not arrive at the apartment until 6:08, by which time the Korean police were already there in force. I then checked the statement from the MP shift officer who’d dispatched Blackstone in the first place. The shift officer happened to be the same Captain Bittlesby I’d spoken with to get the humvee and escort to go to the embassy.
According to Bittlesby, he’d taken the call from Moran at 5:29, and, after speaking with his colonel, he’d talked with the Itaewon station commander. The time of that call was 5:45 A.M. Figure it took the Itaewon station commander two or three minutes to call his own shift officer and order him to dispatch an investigating team to the apartment. Itaewon is a fairly compact district. If the traffic was light at that hour of the morning, it might’ve taken another ten to fifteen minutes for the Korean cops to get to Whitehall’s apartment. That meant the Korean cops could not have gotten to the scene before 6:00 A.M. at the earliest, barely ahead of Blackstone.
In other words, Jackson was lying about how much he knew, if he wasn’t lying about everything, which he probably was. Anyway, there was at least a thirty-minute gap between the time Moran woke him and the time when the Korean cops arrived.
It was just a guess, but it seemed a pretty good one that Whitehall, Moran, and Jackson used that thirty minutes to ponder their situation and conspire. Jackson had enough brains to try to cover that up, but not enough sense to get his times correct.
But so what?
The “so what” was that it eliminated any doubt there’d been at least a hurried, halfhearted effort at patching together a common alibi, at devising a common defense to cover one another’s asses.
Something had gone wrong, though. Somehow the scheme had unraveled and Whitehall was hung out to dry. To understand how their plan got deconstructed, I had to first reconstruct it.
I tried to picture how it might’ve gone down. They were all soldiers – a captain, a first sergeant, and a private – and in a pure world, that would’ve dictated a cast-iron pecking order. Whitehall or Moran would’ve devised the
