Murder in the Dog Days (Maggie Ryan)

by P. M. Carlson

  Holly watched the door close before pulling out her notebook to write herself a memo. So Leon Moffatt’s “good business” was maybe on the edge of bankruptcy. As of last fall. And his dad had probably had his fill of bailing out his clumsy son. How convenient for Leon that his stubborn father had checked out just in time for him to inherit what the old man wouldn’t give. And how annoying if a nosy reporter like Dale Colby noticed how convenient it had been.

  Check the country club to see if Leon’s alibi held up.

  Look up the Blankenship case.

  And look up Leon’s rap sheet. He probably had a string of DWI’s besides the crack-up with poor Tracy.

  But right now Holly was only four blocks from the insurance firm where the pilot’s sister worked. Priscilla Lewis. Talk to her next.

  12

  Priscilla Lewis turned out to be a few years older than Holly, with dark wavy hair and smile lines flavoring her eyes. When Holly identified herself she glanced at the big clock high on the wall of the open-plan, beige and buff office. “I was about to go to lunch,” she explained in a pleasant voice.

  “If you’re not meeting anyone, we could go together,” Holly suggested. “I could use a bite myself. I just have a few questions about a reporter named Dale Colby, and about your brother.”

  Priscilla Lewis studied Holly for a moment, then picked up her phone and cancelled her appointment with someone named Ben. She gathered her things and smiled at Holly. “Okay. Let’s go. Is the Rosebud Cafe all right?”

  “Sure.”

  Over tuna salad Holly told Priscilla Lewis about Dale Colby’s death. Priscilla expressed shock and confirmed that Colby had called her several times since the plane crash. “I don’t think I helped him that much, though I wanted to,” she said. “They don’t seem to be making much headway. But it’s probably something political having to do with Knox, don’t you think? I don’t see how it could have been directed at Corky.”

  “A lot of people are angry at Vietnam vets.”

  Priscilla’s eyes were sorrowful. “Some were. I think now most people just want to forget about it.”

  Leave it behind you, right. Holly said, “Your brother had no enemies?”

  “Not that I knew of. Or that he knew of, except maybe himself.”

  “Himself?”

  “He was such a sweet kid.” She glanced apologetically at Holly. “Okay, he was a man, but I’m the older sister. I still remember Corky as a snaggletoothed kid who was fascinated by flying. Only reason he joined the Army was to learn to fly a helicopter. He already had a private pilot’s license but a chopper was a new challenge. He was just nuts about flying.”

  “When did he join the Army?” Holly’s notebook lay on the table beside her iced tea. She picked up her fork left-handed so she could take notes with her right.

  “Let’s see. In 1970, I think. He’d had officer training. He was sent to Vietnam in 1970 as a captain, and he extended his tour. Finally got back late in 1972.” She shook her head sadly at her salad. “He wasn’t the same guy.”

  “Yeah. What did he do then?”

  “Applied to be a civilian pilot, TWA, I think. But he got a look at the regulations and decided he couldn’t take another big organization. He’d been in charge of missions in Vietnam.”

  “I know.” Holly remembered the frustration of nursing after she’d returned. They’d actually told her to get instruction in IV’s—she, who had started hundreds of them, who had even done surgery during pushes. “So he wanted to make his own decisions?”

  “That’s it. Corky signed on with this charter company because there’s a variety of assignments and only a couple of bosses. He was doing okay. As far as the job goes, I mean. But his private life—well, he left his wife and little son. Got a divorce. His wife said he’d been drinking a lot. Seemed depressed all the time. It was true, I could see it. He wasn’t the happy-go-lucky kid I remembered.” Priscilla looked out the window. Cars whirred past a few blocks away on the Dulles access road. “Sometimes we’d be kidding, you know how brothers and sisters are. And he’d just sort of drift away. He got into fights at bars, too. Things he’d never done before.”

  “But he didn’t have enemies?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to ask this too. Was he upset enough that he might have been negligent? Or booby-trapped the plane himself, even?”

  Priscilla smiled patiently. “Don’t apologize, everyone asks that. The investigators, the reporters. I’m sure he didn’t contribute in any way. See, most of the trouble was a couple of years ago. He was doing better by this year.”

  “Better?”

  “Yes. First of all, it never affected his work. I met the guy who runs the charter company, oh, two years ago, maybe. We talked about Corky. He said Corky was moody but he was the best pilot they had. Really praised him. And that was right when Corky was having his roughest patch, right after the divorce and everything.”

  “Okay.”

  “But he got better after that. It’s funny, I just figured out why a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Why?”

  “About a year and a half ago he met another vet who’d been in Vietnam. Guy named Mitchell. Mitch, everyone calls him. He was one of the guys who threw their medals away. Do you remember? Back in 1971?”

  Holly nodded mutely. The scene had shaken her: the angry veterans hurling their bronze and silver stars like grenades at the government that was still sending boys to Nam. The foul odor of the war had filled her nostrils again. She’d flipped off the TV and gulped a double Scotch to send that image too into the set of memories she would ignore.

  “Well,” Priscilla continued in her soft voice, “Mitch belonged to a group when he was in New York. You know, Viet Vets Against the War?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of them.”

  “And they had these rap groups up there. Well, after Mitch moved down here he started a group. They meet over on Ewell Street near the feed store.”

  “And your brother joined them?”

  “Not exactly joined. It’s pretty informal. But he stopped in often, talked to them. And—I don’t know how to explain it. For a while he got worse, it seemed. Angry, disgusted. That’s why I didn’t think it was helping him. But a couple of weeks ago I remembered that he’d said he was finally facing it. Letting it out. And it was such a relief to him to find other guys who were hurting too.” Priscilla’s eyes were damp. “He’d never told me anything about it. I asked him why and he said he didn’t want to drag me into it too.”

  “I see.” Holly’s mouth was dry.

  “He said I couldn’t understand. Maybe—well, I know some things I probably couldn’t understand. I remember one night a new guy had dropped into the rap group. Corky phoned me, very late at night. He was shaky about it. Crying. But he said he had to face it. I don’t know who the guy was. Someone Corky had met in Vietnam soon after he arrived.”

  “What was it about?”

  “I don’t know. I just know Corky was upset. But ready to face it, you know? Not depressed.”

  “When was this meeting?”

  “Maybe around Thanksgiving. At Christmas I asked him if he’d seen the guy again but the other vet never came back.” Priscilla stirred her iced tea and spoke as though reading her thoughts in the ice cubes. “Corky was so hard to talk to after the war. So hard. Maybe he was right, maybe I couldn’t understand him any more.”

  Yep, that happened. Unexpected grief welled up in Holly’s throat at this tiny tragedy of a brother transformed, wrenched from his sister. She swallowed the last of her tuna as soon as she could get her throat to work, sipped some tea, and changed the subject. “What were the terms of your brother’s will?”

  Priscilla shook her head with a sad little smile. “Everything he had was supposed to go to his son. Skipping his ex-wife, you know? But it turned out that after his debts were paid there was only about three hundred bucks.”

  “Can you think of any reason someone woul
d want to kill him?”

  “No. Colby kept asking that too. And of course I wasn’t really communicating with Corky so well. But what could it be? Not money. Not any problem at work. No girlfriends. And he didn’t seem worried.” She shook her head fretfully. “No, that’s wrong. He was always depressed, angry. But it really seemed to be getting better those last months. Like I told Colby, I guess that rap group was—helping.”

  At the little catch in her voice, Holly looked up from her notes. Tears were sliding down Priscilla Lewis’s cheeks. Holly pulled a paper napkin from the container and handed it to her. “Here,” she said gently.

  “Thank you.” Priscilla mopped her face. “I do miss him.”

  “Yeah.”

  Corky Lewis did not seem a likely target for terrorists or any other bombers. It was really more because Priscilla had told Colby about the rap group that Holly decided to take a look at Mitch Mitchell before going to the Sun office. She turned into Ewell Street, in the commercial area around a former railroad spur. There were a few offices, some boarded up, some serving the businesses there. Cement, agricultural supplies, plumbing. One window had two signs: a big white-on-orange Office for Rent and underneath, a hand-scrawled card that said Viet Vets Survival Counseling.

  She was a cop now. It was all behind her, further every day.

  Besides, Mitch probably wouldn’t be in anyway.

  Holly knocked.

  “Come on in!”

  A small room crusted with cream-colored paint, chipped to reveal former days of turquoise or forest green. Gray-green marbled linoleum worn to its black backing along the path from the door. Scarred desk shoved against a wall, covered with leaflets. An oscillating fan. A telephone. A Bob Dylan poster, curled ragged at the edges. With a red marking pen someone had printed “How many times must the cannonballs fly?” across it. A battered brown sofa, several mismatched chairs. A brown metal wastebasket full of cigarette butts sat proudly in the center of the room.

  Two men in jeans and T-shirts lounged on the sofa, both smoking. One was lanky, weak-chinned, with a prominent Adam’s apple. The other was shorter, muscular, with shaggy black hair and a mustache. The thin drawn skin of a burn scar replaced half his left eyebrow and fanned back across his forehead until it disappeared under the long hair. In the back of her mind the blue-green slime oozed, the stench turned her stomach. She blinked it down and forced herself to face him: a man who was healed, healthy, alive. “Hi, babe,” he said cheerfully. “What can we do for you?”

  “Priscilla Lewis said you knew her brother Corky.”

  “God, yes.” Abruptly serious, the scarred man leaned forward, elbows on knees, stubby cigarette dangling from his fingers. “What a waste,” he said bitterly. “It never ends, you know? Good man, Corky.”

  “Did a reporter named Colby call to ask about him recently?”

  “Last week, yeah.” He stretched his arm toward the wastebasket and began to grind out his cigarette against the side. “You from that paper too? Like I said to him, I can only tell you general stuff about how we work here. Everything in the rap group is confidential unless a guy decides to tell someone else himself.”

  “But Corky Lewis is dead now.”

  He looked up at her, right hand still holding the butt against the wastebasket. There was fierceness in his eyes but his voice was mild. “Lady, I don’t betray the dead.”

  She was startled, ashamed and yet strangely joyful. This man was on the same side of the chasm. She said, “I’m not asking you to.”

  “Good.” He leaned back again in the sofa and waved his hand toward the chairs. “Hey, sit down if you want. I’m Mitch and this is Bill.”

  Holly sat on a worn oak desk chair. “I’m Holly Schreiner.”

  “And you’re from that paper?”

  “No. The reporter you talked to—Dale Colby—was killed yesterday. I’m a detective.”

  Very slowly, Mitch crossed his arms. The left one was tautskinned and hairless like his brow. “Shit. A detective. A cop.” His voice had gone cold.

  “Yes. Colby was murdered.”

  “So naturally you look for the nearest Viet vet to pin it on. We’re all killers, right?” He popped his hands suddenly to his head and rayed out wiggling fingers. “And all wacko besides!”

  Bill laughed uneasily.

  “Look, I’m not here to spit on you,” Holly protested. The words brought echoes of last night: nosy Maggie, and herself as prickly as Mitch was now. And Alec calling her a crazy broad. She explained earnestly, “I’m looking for whoever murdered Colby. It’s my job. That’s all.”

  Mitch dropped his hands and studied her a minute. “God, you’re serious, aren’t you? But I still can’t help.”

  Bill stood up nervously and flicked his cigarette into the wastebasket. “Gotta get back to work.”

  “Okay. See you later, hombre.”

  They both watched him leave.

  Holly said, “Priscilla told me Corky was getting a lot from your group. But he was upset by another vet who came once.”

  Mitch shrugged, his expression unreadable.

  “Look,” Holly said, “another man has been killed. If you know anything that’ll help make sense of his death, please tell me.”

  Uneasiness flickered in Mitch’s eyes. “Can’t,” he said.

  “Well, can you tell me what you told Colby?”

  “Sure. Doubt if it’ll help, it was pretty general. No names. Just Intro to Viet Vets Lecture One.”

  Holly fished out her notebook. “I’d like to know what you told him.”

  Mitch stretched across the sofa arm to pull open a desk drawer. Inside was a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Smoke?” he asked.

  “Thanks.”

  He lit both cigarettes, handed her one, then propped a foot on the wastebasket, crossed the other over it, and lounged back on the sofa again. “Okay. About the rap group. It’s just a bunch of guys who went over to Nam because they were about seventeen and they believed in John Wayne, right? Freedom, democracy, truth, helping the underdog, ask not what your country can do for you, you know?”

  “Yeah.” She knew.

  “Okay, about two days after you arrive you find out it’s all a fraud. Freedom and democracy are just not top priorities. Shit, it was our side that cancelled the elections, right? Fraid they’d lose to Ho. The army we’re helping doesn’t want to fight and it’s half Cong anyway. You airlift them to some battle and some of them turn around and fire at our fucking helicopter!”

  “Right,” Holly muttered. She knew that. Why tell anyone? Why couldn’t he forget?

  He went on, “If you take a hill you have to turn it over to ARVN and they lose it. You learn real fast that whatever it is the gooks want, it ain’t us. So okay, forget freedom and democracy and helping the underdog. Now at least you know the truth. But you’ve got to survive to tell it. And help your buddies survive.”

  Should she tell him she was there, stop this gush of painful stories? But she wanted to know what he’d told Dale Colby. She nodded and tapped ash into the wastebasket with a shaky hand.

  “But your buddies get killed,” Mitch continued. “Not for democracy, not for freedom, not even for a piece of territory. But really dead. You’re terrified. You’re full of hate and grief. You want revenge. Kill the enemy, says the brass. Up the body count. They send you into some ville. No Cong. So you start raping and shooting out of pure frustration.” Mitch paused and eyed Holly suspiciously, a little frown contracting his good brow. “Hey, about now women usually start whimpering, no, no, that’s terrible, no decent person would do that.”

  Holly shook her head. “No,” she said hoarsely. “You’re right.”

  “You bet your sweet ass I’m right. In that situation just about anybody would do it. John Wayne himself would do it. I mean, part of you knows it’s wrong but part of you is really enjoying the revenge. Except it’s a phony revenge. You mow down maybe twenty people. And you find no weapons. But you count twenty Cong and no civilians. If t
hey’re dead they’re Cong, right? Keep the brass happy. All dead gooks are Cong.” He leaned forward intently, mismatched arms on his knees, and said softly, “And that’s when you find in your heart that you’ve lost the war. Because you don’t even stand for truth any more. You’ve joined the goddamn fraud.”

  Holly nodded mutely. Why, why, why? Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn. She didn’t want to hear. How many times must the cannonballs fly? She wanted to forget.

  Mitch said, “You okay?”

  “Yes.” Get it together, Schreiner, stay cool. She took a long pull on her cigarette.

  He said, “See, I’ve got to explain where the rap group comes from.”

  “Yeah. Go ahead.”

  He tapped ash into the wastebasket and leaned back again. “Okay. One thing stays real, and that’s dying. So you lock your guilt and pain away in the back rooms of your mind, and concentrate on surviving. You slog on through the swamps, the rats. The jungle rot. The leeches. The terror. You get sick, you get wounded, but you survive. A fantastic achievement. And finally the good old Braniff freedom bird takes you away, back to the land of youth and innocence and John Wayne.”

  “Disney World,” said Holly.

  Mitch laughed, a short bitter burst of appreciation. “You got it, sister. And back in Disney World, well, you don’t expect parades, you know you didn’t liberate France or take Iwo Jima. But you did your best, you survived in a damn tough job. So what happens? You get back and half the country thinks you’re scum because you went. The other half thinks you’re scum because you lost.”

  Holly bowed her head. Mitch’s words hurt, ripping open wounds she’d thought were safely scabbed over. Why wouldn’t he shut up? Nothing to be done about it now. She cleared her throat and asked, “Why not forget it, then? Leave it behind you?”

  “Oh, sure, you try that first. Try to forget. Numb out. But you fail. Of course you fail. How can a human being let his buddies go unremembered? That’s where the rap group comes in. Guys come in here, claim they don’t remember. But they’re having nightmares, or violent outbursts, or flashbacks. Or they’ve built walls to keep away life.” His words pounded at her. “That’s phony forgetting, just as phony as the war. So the rap group is a place to confront reality. It hurts, sure. But we help each other through the pain. Then a guy can move on. Reorder his world. Renew his life.”