Then I shot myself in the foot. Right then and there, I simply pointed my rifle at my shoe and fired three shots.”
Being cute, I said, “That must’ve hurt like hell, Ed.”
“Want to hear the funny part?”
“I didn’t know there was a funny part,” I said. I thoroughly disliked this man.
“I got a Distinguished Service Cross for my valorous actions. And I got a Purple Heart, and a trip home for the wounded foot.”
I don’t often go speechless, but I did. I was dumbfounded.
A Distinguished Service Cross is only a tiny sliver below the Medal of Honor. Edward Gilderstone was a war hero. A thoroughly flawed, conflicted, self-loathing one, but a genuine hero nonetheless. But hero or not, he was the kind of guy who was so puffed up on his own sanitized sense of self-worth that the realization he could be as ordinary, as feral, as murderous as the next guy drove him to self-mutilation. That’s pretty nasty stuff, in my book.
More perplexing than that, though, here was a guy who’d earned his country’s second highest decoration for valor, and he was too chickenshit to help an old student stay out of the electric chair. Some hero.
Thinking I was being sarcastic, I finally said, “Gee, Ed, that must’ve been some rage you flew into.”
Still ignoring me, he replied in a very dry tone, “Thomas Whitehall’s not like you, Drummond. He’s like me. He could snap and kill somebody, but afterward he’d show horrific effects from it. His conscience would eviscerate his whole being. So how does he appear to you? Like a man who’s still coping with himself? Or a man who wants to shoot himself in the foot?”
This was the moment when I decided I’d had enough of Edwin Gilderstone and his bitter, sanctimonious words. I abruptly thanked him and hung up. I poured another cup of coffee and stood looking out the window, trying to piece all this together.
Neither Whitehall’s college roommate nor his college mentor had hesitated or equivocated a bit – yes, Thomas Whitehall could easily kill somebody. That obviously wasn’t what I’d hoped to hear. On the other hand, how good was their judgment?
Ernie Walters had the New Yorker’s gift of gab, which always entails a degree of exaggeration. He wasn’t lying, he was taking forty-five seconds and making it sound like a minute. But he’d lived with Whitehall two years, been his close personal friend for twelve, described him as virtually a brother, yet had never suspected his homosexuality. That’s a fairly gaping miscalculation. A man’s sexual character is an integral part of his larger character, of his earthly essence. Ernie Walters never had a clue.
Gilderstone had known about the homosexuality, but his misjudgments, if anything, went closer to the bone than Walters’s. What I figured was that like lots of older men, Gilderstone saw Whitehall as a younger figure he wanted to transform into a burnished, tidier image of himself. That’s what lay behind all that gibberish about untapped talents and Rhodes Scholarships. He wanted Whitehall to be his shadow, to follow in his footsteps. Maybe because he was gay and would have no children, he wished to sculpt one. He wanted Whitehall to be something more than a typical soldier, fighting and garrisoning his life away. Only Whitehall said no.
One thing I was learning about the world inhabited by military gays was that it could make for some fairly confused bedfellows. I mean, here was Ernie Walters, a thoroughly decent but straight guy who was getting his balls clipped every day because he’d once roomed with a gay. Still, he’d volunteered to step up and trade his career to help Whitehall. Then here was Ed Gilderstone, a gay man himself, who maybe loved Whitehall, who should’ve been sympathetic as hell, a fifty-three-year-old major whose military career was already a shambling wreck, who wasn’t willing to make any effort to help his old student.
Maybe Gilderstone was the scarred product of the old days and the old system. He’d been a teenager in the fifties and served in the Army of the sixties; back in the days when “gay” still meant joyful, and “homosexual” meant ridicule, disgrace, and ostracism. When a man is forced to hide in a closet that long, I guess it can get pretty dark and lonely.
It’s what writers term an appalling irony. I call it frustrating as hell.
But the most surprising thing I’d learned was that Whitehall was actually a pretty good guy. Actually, unless Ernie Walters was a complete fool, Whitehall was a great guy. And if Gilderstone was right, then Whitehall should be showing terrific emotional effects from the murder. I’d seen no signs of that.
Too bad I’d also learned my client was a boxer with concrete fists driven by powerful pistons, and with a psychic trigger that could drive him over the edge. He had the kind of power to shatter jaws and noses – certainly enough to cause the hideous bruising I’d seen on Lee’s body.
CHAPTER 13
The sign over the door read HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, YONGSAN GARRISON. There was nothing distinctive about the building. It was just a musty old red-brick barracks built by the Japanese back when the Korean peninsula was a colony they’d collected from the Russo-Japanese War.
The Japanese had not been generous or merciful rulers. In fact, they’d been boneheadedly cruel, plundering Korea’s resources and treating its people like slave laborers. They had even drafted a few thousand young Korean girls and shipped them off to troop brothels all over Asia, where they forced them to perform as sex slaves for the emperor’s warriors. As insults to other cultures go, that’s pretty vile. The Koreans remembered it, too. Vividly, in fact.
I walked through the entrance and asked the first soldier I saw to direct me to the first sergeant’s office. He gave this quick, fleeting look of disbelief and then pointed me to the third door down on the left, where a big green sign that read FIRST SERGEANT stuck out into the hallway.
And you wonder why enlisted troops think officers are such dopes.
When I entered the office, I found myself standing directly in front of a dark-haired specialist four. She was seated behind a gray metal desk and talking on the phone, shamelessly flirting with somebody on the other end. She got my attention right away. She was a bit too fleshy and her features were too big for her to be considered real attractive, but she’d make heads swivel; no doubt about that. One look and you got this instant vision of bedsheets and heavy breathing.
The Army’s got fairly stiff rules against female soldiers making themselves too alluring and seductive. This woman didn’t just violate them, she knocked them miles out of the ballpark with her puffed-up bouffant hairdo, a pair of big, flashy gold hoops that hung from her earlobes, and enough blush, lipstick, and rouge to paint the Berlin Wall. She was ferociously chewing what seemed to be a gigantic wad of gum.
“Hey, wait a moment,” she mumbled, putting a hand over the mouthpiece, then skillfully using her tongue to wedge the gum to the side of her mouth.
I gave her a nice, warm, cheery smile. “I’d like to speak with your first sergeant, please.”
She didn’t reply. Or she
Having gotten my attention, she smiled a bit more encouragingly. “And could I know the nature of your business, Major?”
“I’m the attorney for Captain Whitehall.”
“Captain Whitehall?”
“Yeah, Whitehall,” I said, looking around like maybe I’d wandered into the wrong unit. “Isn’t he the guy who used to command this company?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, hanging up the phone without saying good-bye and then standing up. “Well, I’m sorry. The first sergeant’s not in.”
“Uh, okay. Thanks,” I told her, getting ready to depart.
Then I changed my mind.
“Wait a moment, Specialist, uh…” To check her nametag, I had no choice but to gaze once again at that huge chest of hers, an act she made all too easy by very generously pushing it even closer to my face.
