“Well, turns out he was working on a third story, too. He was trying to uncover some neo-Nazi, white supremacist ring.”
All three of them were now bent forward, their hands poised on their chins, their eyes wide, and their mouths were hanging open a little. It made a lovely picture.
I added, “It seems a source told Berkowitz that a soldier stationed here might have been implicated in the Black church burnings that happened about a year back.”
Martie said, “How do you know this?”
“I have my sources, too.”
He started to say something and I cut him off at the post. “Don’t even think about it, Martie. I’m an attorney, remember? I can play attorney-client privilege games until we’re both toothless old farts.”
“So the killer contacted you and asked you to negotiate with us?” he guessed.
“Wrong. But I’m pretty sure I know who the killer is. Even if he didn’t do it himself, I’d bet anything he was at least implicated.”
Martie turned to Wolky. “You aware of any white supremacist activity here?”
Wolky shrugged his big shoulders and said, “Nope.”
This was no surprise because Tuzla was a temporary operational base. The MPs did not have the kind of grip on their population they would have at a permanent installation. Here, units floated in and out on a rotational basis, and their troublemakers passed in and out with them. Still, I was glad Martie asked. Now they knew they needed me.
I said, “Are you ready to hear my deal?”
“Deal? What do you mean, deal?” David asked. It was nice to see he had a voice too.
I leaned back in my chair, locked my hands behind my neck, and plopped my feet onto the table. “Well, for various reasons, your chief suspect is going to require special handling.”
David asked, “What reasons? What kind of special handling?”
“You can make the arrest. You will then lock him up in a quarantined cell, and nobody will be allowed to go near him. Someone will be here within a day to take him into custody. He’ll be whisked out of here, and aside from whatever assistance you may be required to provide to the people who take him, your relationship with this case will be over. You’ll forget all about it.”
All three of them were looking at me like I was nuts.
Martie said, “I never heard anything so weird.”
I said, “Take it or leave it. If you can’t live with it, I’ll get someone else to handle it.”
“What’s so special about this guy?” Wolky asked.
“I’m sorry, Wolky. I can’t tell you.”
“Who’s gonna take him into custody?”
“Guys in dark suits. They’ll have special orders signed by the Secretary of Defense. That’s all you need to know.”
You see, the truth was that the real reason Clapper had once been so agreeable about sending me to law school was because it solved a delicate problem for the Army. The outfit was only one of several “black units” on the Army’s rolls. Altogether there are several thousand secret warriors roaming around out there, and anywhere there are thousands of soldiers, guess what you get: troublemakers.
In fact, as you might imagine, that kind of duty attracts some real rogues. You could screen as hard as you wanted, but a few murderers, rapists, thieves, and sundry other lawbreakers always slipped through. When they did a crime and were apprehended, your standard-fare, open court-martial would have exposed not only them, but also the existence of their units. The Army’s answer to this ticklish conundrum was to convene a permanent “black court,” located at a tiny, secret base in northern Virginia. The military judge who sat over that court had a special clearance. The lawyers all had special clearances. The court was guided by military law, but its existence and its proceedings were every bit as closely guarded as the outfit or any other black unit. There was even a special “black review court,” to handle appeals. This, of course, was my unit, where I worked until I was yanked out to conduct this investigation.
Williams, because of his history with the outfit, was going to have to be tried by us. The trail of his crime reached back to the days when he served in the outfit. In any case, he would no doubt threaten to publicly divulge the existence of the outfit, if he thought that would offer him some leverage. It was one of the first resorts of nearly every “black world” rascal who got caught. I could not allow that to happen.
It did not take Martie and David and Wolky long to realize their hands were tied. They talked and argued and bitched for a while, and I deferred every question they asked. Then I explained that, if necessary, I could always get on a phone, and they’d get a call from a four-star officer back in Washington ordering them to obey my instructions. In the end, they took the only recourse that would allow them to end this case and to get some rest. They caved in.
Only we now had to prove Williams did it. I was sure he was our man. Too many angles fit together. The court systems, however, have all those discommoding rules about evidence, and right at the moment that was the one thing we sorely lacked.
I explained as much about Sergeant Major Williams as they needed to know and nothing more. I asked Martie to call the lab in Heidelberg and have them immediately transmit the largest shoeprint that had been collected at the crime scene. Williams was a big boy, about six foot three, and, oddly enough, I had once spent about two weeks staring at his feet. One of his interrogation techniques was to order me to keep my eyes focused on the floor, like a repentant monk. Every time I made the mistake of lifting my eyes, he hammered me on the back of the head. I remembered that he had very big feet. Big hands, too. Big, hurtful hands.
The shoeprint came across the wire, marked and labeled with the size, shoe type, and manufacturer. The size was thirteen, double E. It was an Adidas running shoe, style name Excelsior. Martie told me there was a reporter from the Los Angeles Times staying at the Visiting Journalists’ Quarters the night of the murder who also wore size thirteen shoes and they had all assumed this was his shoeprint. Since the L.A. reporter was a civilian, they had no jurisdiction to question him or take his shoeprint, and he had returned to L.A. a day later. Martie pointed to where the reporter’s name was written into one of the little possible suspect blocks on their jigsaw puzzle. He told me he’d even wired the LAPD and asked if they had any background on the reporter. He was still awaiting a response.
I told him to get on the phone and ask the jurisdictional military judge to issue us a search order to get into Sergeant Major Williams’s room so we could get a pair of his shoes. I wasn’t hopeful, though. Williams was no dummy. If he’d worn his running shoes into the latrine that night, there was a good chance they would’ve gotten splattered with blood, and surely he would’ve been clever enough to dispose of them. We’d at least get his shoe size, though. That was a step in the right direction. Figuratively speaking, of course.
This led naturally to trying to figure out how Williams knew that Berkowitz was on to him.
David suggested, “Maybe Berkowitz’s source was double-dealing and put Williams on to it.”
This might’ve happened, but we quickly agreed it didn’t seem likely. Why would a source rat Williams out to Berkowitz, then Berkowitz out to Williams?
Wolky suggested, “Maybe Berkowitz actually met with Williams. Maybe he threatened to expose him.”
This seemed much more likely. I said, “Was there no mention of Sergeant Major Williams in Berkowitz’s notebook?”
Martie said, “None. We’ve been through every page two dozen times. And every little note in his room. Never saw that name.”
I turned to David. “Call the operations officer. Find out if Williams was on duty at the ops center that night.”
He ran out, and we bantered about the weather until he returned. The weather was nice, we all agreed. A little hot, but nice. David returned.
“He was on day shift,” he said a little breathlessly. “He was in the ops center from six in the morning till six at night, except from noon till one for lunch.”
So he was off duty when Berkowitz was murdered. That much fit. There was a knock at the door, then an MP entered carrying a pair of real big running shoes. They looked brand-new, which made it easy to read the shoe size, which was stamped in black letters on the inside of the shoe’s tongue. Thirteen, double E’s. We all nodded sagely. Brand-new shoes. Um-hummm, we all murmured. And the same size as the mold. Now we were getting
