about a mile south of the ambush site.”
“And then you continued your E amp;E?”
“That’s right.”
I turned off the tape recorder and shoved my papers back inside the briefcase. Perrite watched this with his deadly little eyes and his taunting grin.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” I said in my most civil tone. “You’ve been extremely helpful.”
“How helpful?” he asked, studying my face.
I shrugged. “Extremely.”
For the first time, he appeared to lose his composure, and I departed with a smug sense of self-satisfaction. The truth was, he hadn’t been the least bit helpful. The bigger truth was that I wanted him to stay awake in his cell all night, worrying that he’d given me some earthshaking revelations.
Chapter 12
Imelda and two of her most homely assistants flew in that afternoon to begin the process of preparing written transcripts of the taped interviews. She booked a room at our hotel that she and her crew turned into a makeshift office.
Delbert and Morrow were not expecting to see her, and both involuntarily gasped when we walked into the room and there sat her two aides deliriously pounding away on their transcribers, with Imelda hunched over behind them.
Imelda glanced up and smacked her lips a few times in anticipation. “Well, well,” she loudly declared, “if it isn’t the yuppie lawyers. Hmmph! You’ve been here two days-three lawyers-and all you’ve got is ten hours of tape. What the hell have you been doin’? Drinkin’ and screwin’ off?”
Morrow shot me a fast, sheepish look, since Imelda obviously had half her story. Too bad about that other half, I thought to myself. Delbert drew himself upright, and a pained expression popped onto his face.
“Look,” he said, bleeding wounded dignity all over the floor, “we’ve been working around the clock. You don’t just walk into interrogatories without preparation. Since you aren’t an attorney, I wouldn’t expect you to know this, but every hour of questions takes at least three hours of preparation.”
Imelda slid her gold-rimmed glasses down to the tip of her short nose, and had I been more merciful, I would’ve found a way to warn Delbert that this apparently innocuous gesture was akin to a gunslinger unclipping his holster. She lowered her head and peered long and hard at Delbert. I edged away from him, because I sure as hell didn’t want to get hit by any stray shots.
“Okay, smarty pants, are you gonna try to tell me you spent twenty hours preparing to ask a few questions? What kind of fool do you take me for?”
“I did,” Delbert staunchly insisted. “And although I certainly don’t have to prove anything to you, I can show you the notes I made to prove it.”
She gave him this careful examining look. “Notes?”
“Yes. That’s right. I always make notes.”
“What’s it say in those notes?”
“I list questions I intend to ask. I draw pert charts… uh, flow diagrams, if you will, of the directions the interrogatory might take, and how I should respond.”
“I know what a damned pert chart is, fancy pants. You actually read those notes when you’re interrogating?”
“Sure. That’s the whole point. That’s how I stay ahead of the man I’m interrogating.”
A huge guffaw exploded from Imelda’s throat, and she wiggled around in her seat and nodded at her two assistants, both of whom chuckled a few times as well.
“What’s so funny?” Delbert demanded.
Imelda shook her head. “Damn, I should have guessed.”
“Guessed what?”
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me,” Delbert beseeched.
“That’s why your tapes sounded that way.”
“Sounded what way? What’s wrong with my tapes?”
Imelda just kept shaking her head in disbelief. Poor Delbert was nervously wringing his hands. Finally he looked over at me.
I shrugged. “Sorry, Delbert, I haven’t listened to your tapes. I haven’t got a clue what you screwed up.”
He spun back to Imelda. “Did I do something wrong in my interrogatories?”
She kept shaking her head. “Notes. I should have guessed. No damn wonder,” was all she said.
Delbert stormed over to the table where his tapes were neatly stacked, grabbed them, and stomped from the room. As soon as he was gone, Imelda cackled a few times, then got up and rejoined her girls, both of whom were quaking with repressed giggles. Morrow and I walked out right after Delbert.
Morrow looked at me in complete confusion. “What the hell was that about?” she asked.
“What? That?” I asked, trying to pretend innocence.
“Tell me. Did Delbert do something wrong?”
“Why? Don’t tell me you prepare notes, too?”
“Of course I do. Is something wrong with that?”
I smirked, but said as sincerely as I could, “No. Nothing. Really. It’s a very admirable trait.”
“Then what was that about?”
“It’s Imelda’s law. She opens every reunion by gnawing your ass for not working hard enough. It only lasts a few seconds, and it’s harmless. The approved response is to wince slightly, nod humbly, and swear to do better. The cardinal sin is to argue, or try to justify.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“What do you think Delbert’s going to do with those tapes?”
“Figure out what he did wrong.”
“Yep. He’s going to stay up all night, listening over and over to those tapes. By morning, he will have dissected his own performance to pieces. He’s going to be a nervous wreck. He’ll be wondering about every question he asked. His confidence will be shot.”
She didn’t believe me. “Imelda’s not that devious, and he’s not that stupid.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I lied. Imelda was beyond devious. The woman could give Machiavelli lessons. What I was interested to see was whether Morrow was going to inform Delbert that Imelda had only been screwing with him.
The three of us got back together at seven and spent three hours reviewing what we’d heard, as well as what we’d learned, which, from my viewpoint anyway, wasn’t anywhere near the same thing as what we’d heard.
Delbert and Morrow’s session with Sergeant Machusco apparently went a lot like my session with Perrite, which is to say that Machusco also proved to be about as charming as a rattlesnake in heat. Morrow described him as a sinister-looking Italian boy from south Brooklyn who, if he wasn’t in the Army, would probably have been back on the streets of New York knocking off hits for the mob. And doing really well at it, too.
A-teams, like most Army units, start with a raw mixture of men who eventually organize themselves into an operating entity. Those men with average talents tend to be made into common riflemen whose sole responsibility is to shuffle along with the flow and act when told. Most freeze with fear the moment the bullets start flying. They contribute nothing to the battle. That’s why, in the old days of Napoleon and Frederick the Great, they used to post all these big, gnarly sergeants in the rear ranks, where their job was to put a musket ball into the back of any man who failed to methodically load and fire his weapon in the face of withering enemy fire. Today’s average soldier knows there’s no bloodthirsty, implacable sergeant in the rear ranks. He also knows somewhere deep inside that he is average, and he isn’t about to risk everything to prove that he is anything more than that.
The most deadly men, the ones who are able to kill with reflexive skill, who are natural woodsmen, who can
