Man of Steel

by Dave Conifer

“So tell us,” Reno said.

  He removed his glasses and rubbed the two red indentations they’d left on his nose. “A local boy was kilt servin’ on that boat. Norwood Strunk. That boy was just three months out of school. It was Kennedy’s boat.” He slipped his glasses back on and paused to adjust them. “It happened at night, over somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Kennedy wasn’t payin’ no attention. Next thing anybody knew, a Jap ship rammed it. Cut that little boat clean in half,” the old man railed. “Damn Japs never even knew they done it. Strunk and one other boy were kilt.”

  He removed his glasses a second time. “The boy’s mama was so upset when they told her that she couldn’t get hold of herself. Wudn’t long before she took her own life. Hung herself right on her own front porch.”

  “That’s so sad,” Reno said. “Was it her only son?”

  “It was,” he said. “When the story came out it was all Kennedy, the he-ro,” he said in a voice dripping with spite. “The boy’s mama couldn’t get a straight answer about what happened. The local folks started callin’ and writin’ letters tryin’ to get the truth, and get the boy’s body back. Nothin’ but a damn shame. That damn Kennedy didn’t even know there was a Jap ship there at all. He wasn’t payin’ no attention. But it didn’t matter. They pinned a big medal on him. We didn’t even get the boy’s body back.”

  “I never knew any of this,” Jonas said.

  “Damn right you didn’t,” Gerson said. “Nobody cares that some hillbilly got kilt. That’s why we don’t like the Kennedys in this county. Even General Douglas MacArthur wanted him court-martialed. Now there’s a war he-ro. Too bad that piss ant Harry Truman got too big for his britches.”

  “Was Kent Castle living here at the time?” Reno asked.

  “Damn right he did! Norwood Strunk was Castle’s kin! That was his sister that hung herself while Kennedy was gettin’ that medal!”

  “Jesus!” Reno said before clapping her hand over mouth.

  “I knew all about it even over there in Scoop,” Gerson said. “Folks say Kent Castle was the type that got mad real easy. It just didn’t sit right with him, seeing that damn Kennedy paradin’ around when he lost his sister and the boy. He wrote him up a long story about what really happened on that boat. Most papers and magazines didn’t want nothin’ to do with it. But finally, he got Reader’s Digest to take it. Well, ole’ Joe Kennedy must have heard about it. That’s Kennedy’s moonshinin’ daddy. Reader’s Digest did finally come up with a PT 109 story. A different one. It was nothin’ but another he-ro story. His daddy probably paid for it. So Kent Castle finally gave up. He just plum gave up.”

  That’s what you think, Jonas thought. Before he was able to ask another question a middle-aged man slammed the door open and barreled into the room. “Who are you? Why are you badgering my father? Who said you could come in here? People like you, all you want to do is stir up trouble.”

  “We’re in the middle of interview,” Reno snapped. “We were invited in.”

  “The interview is over,” he said. “I know what you’re up to. You’re some of those Kennedy lovers from back east trying to make us look bad. Well Kent Castle’s maybe the best thing that ever came out of this town. Picked hisself up by his own bootstraps. We don’t need no more New York troublemakers coming in here and tearing him down.”

  Jonas looked the man over. His polyester clothes were from another time, although they were in good repair. Something isn’t right with him. We don’t want anything to do with this guy. He could feel it. “It’s not that at all,” he heard Reno say.

  “Don’t come in here trying to take advantage of my father,” the intruder continued, cutting her off. “You’re just waiting for him to shoot his mouth off so you can make everybody laugh. ‘Look at these toothless mountaineers who don’t know shee-it!’ We seen it all before. Now get out of here. My dad’s done talking to you.”

  “We’ll leave,” Jonas said. “Come on, Abby.”

  “Could we have your name, sir?” Reno asked.

  “Hail no!”

  “Come on, Abby. Thank you for your time,” he said to Clyde Gerson. He eased off his stool and headed back the way they’d come in. When he reached the door he looked back without stopping and saw that Reno hadn’t moved, but was perched on her stool glaring at him. She caught up with him outside.

  When they were in the car she turned angrily to him. “Why’d you let that guy push us around?” she demanded. “We had every right to that interview, even if it is his father. I hate how you always back down.”

  Jonas maneuvered the car back onto the main road before answering. “Get off it. We already had everything we were getting from him. I’m not going to sit in there fighting with some lunatic. He was wearing leftovers from the seventies. Sometimes you’ve got to know when to quit. That guy was about to flip out on us if he didn’t have a heart attack first.”

  They drove without talking. He didn’t know her well enough to handle her when she was this angry, even after all the time they’d spent together. And he was as upset about what happened as she was. By default he steered the car out of town and back towards Interstate 77. He waited for Reno to protest but she didn’t, so he found himself merging onto the highway, heading north in the direction of Morgantown.

  -- Chapter 19 --

  It wasn’t until they were twenty miles out of Becton that a word was spoken. “I guess we’re driving all the way to Morgantown now, huh?” Jonas asked, trying to jump start a conversation and test Reno’s mood at the same time. A few minutes later he broke the silence again. “What do you think? Morgantown?” That time she tilted her seat all the way back and rested her forearm across her eyes as if she was going to sleep.

  “Any idea what Mrs. Pomeroy wants to talk about?” he asked ten miles later. When she failed to respond again he slapped the dashboard as hard as he could. “Next exit we’re turning around and going back to Becton. We’ll chase after anybody you want to.”

  “Just keep going,” she mumbled without opening her eyes. “We have a lot to do in Morgantown.”

  The car climbed and plummeted through the mountains of southern West Virginia. Jonas stopped trying to figure his partner out and instead tried to make sense of what they’d just heard in Becton. He wanted to discuss it but Reno was still pretending to sleep. As far as he was concerned, the PT 109 story was all they needed when it came to a motive for Kent Castle, if they could confirm it.

  “That was pretty amazing,” Jonas said later after Reno returned her seat to the upright position.

  “What was?” Reno answered bluntly.

  “That stuff the old guy was telling us about Kennedy,” Jonas said. “If Castle thought Kennedy was behind the death of his sister and nephew, even if it wasn’t true, that’s way more of a motive then what happened to Eastern Steel. It explains a lot. Don’t you think?”

  “We’ll have to check the facts out,” she said flatly.

  “No shit. Come on, Abby. Give me a break. We got a lot out of that interview. Probably as much as we were going to get.”

  “That guy did look like some kind of weirdo,” she said, her lips fighting a smile.

  “What about the PT 109 thing? Even after everything that’s happened I was still skeptical, but this is a clincher for me.”

  “Let’s think about this,” Reno said. “If we confirm the facts about the PT 109, where does it get us? We can’t know what Castle was thinking for the next twenty years.”

  “We have a pretty good idea, I think. His sister killed herself. Then you throw in the nephew. Case closed, in my book. It’s a slam dunk. We can assume it was on his mind when he walked in on Kennedy at the White House to shove the price hike up his presidential ass. I think that’s why he challenged him over the steel prices. He probably thought that after twenty years, or whatever it was, he’d finally gotten his revenge. When it turned out that he hadn’t, well, we know what happened.”

  “Maybe,” she allowed. “At least what we think could have hap
pened. Are we going all the way to Morgantown now?”

  “I’ve been asking you that for two hours. We don’t have anywhere else to go. We may as well go there.”

  “Well, we can check his story out pretty easily once we get there,” she said. “I also need to call Mrs. Pomeroy back. Have you been watching to see if we have company?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “There’s nobody following us. Not yesterday either. I think we’ve lost them. For now, at least.”

  “How far is Morgantown?” she asked.

  “I think we’re three hours away,” he said. He was watching the wind expose the silvery underside of the leaves on the trees along the highway. A storm was coming.

  “It’ll be pretty late to go see that professor. Let’s just shack up tonight once we get to Morgantown and be ready tomorrow. We can check the geezer’s story and talk to the professor. I’ll call Mrs. Pomeroy tonight.”

  “That’s a plan,” Jonas said, relieved that she was talking again.

  ~~~

  It was early evening when they reached Morgantown. As they drove along High Street, which appeared to be the heart of downtown, they watched clusters of students moving along the sidewalks. “Brings back memories,” Jonas said. “This reminds me of Raleigh, except for the hills.”

  “I was kind of thinking the same thing,” Reno said. “Except that there are more trees than where I went to school. Where’d you go again?”

  “NC State. How about you?”

  “UTEP. Texas El-Paso.”

  “They usually make it into the NCAAs,” Jonas remarked.

  “Life was simpler back then, huh?” she said as she watched three young men standing in the rain outside a pub. “Those guys don’t have a care in the world.”

  “I never thought anybody would try to kill me over a story, that’s for sure. Otherwise I’d have chosen a different major.”

  “That’s a hotel right there,” Reno said, pointing at a cream-colored stone building next to an old-fashioned theater. “I bet it’s nice, since it’s right in the middle of town. Should we stay there?”

  “Yeah, let’s,” he agreed. “The sooner I get out of this car, the better.”

  ~~~

  “It won’t be much longer before I’m out of cash,” Reno said after paying for the room.

  “I guess that means we shouldn’t eat there, then,” Jonas said, pointing to the lavish restaurant across the lobby.

  “We better do fast food.”

  “Let’s at least go where I can get a beer. I’m buying,” he said with an impish smile.

  “With what, your charm and good looks?” she asked. “I’ll just put it on your tab.” They left the hotel and walked around a few corners until they found a sandwich shop with neon beer signs in the windows. They agreed on foot-long hoagies and a pitcher of beer that came with a pair of mason jars to drink it from.

  “Here’s what worries me about PT 109,” Jonas said after the sandwiches came. “It’s the same kind of thing I’ve been worried about all along. It’s an incredible story. If it all checks out, it’s a perfect motive. So don’t you think somebody else would already have figured it out as a motive for Castle?”

  “Not necessarily,” Reno answered. “You have to be looking at Castle in the first place or the PT 109 story means nothing. To come up with Castle, you have to go through Pomeroy. That’s what you keep forgetting. We have Pomeroy. I don’t think anybody else ever knew about him.”

  “Speaking of Pomeroy, I thought of something earlier. I don’t think you should call Mrs. Pomeroy,” Jonas said. “Remember what happened last time we called? Somebody will be listening this time too.”

  “True,” Reno said. She bit off a hunk of roast beef and turkey, then washed it down with what was left in her jar. “So what do we do? I definitely want to hear what she called about.”

  “I have an idea,” he said. By then a steady trickle of students were filling the nearby tables. They looked genuinely disinterested but Jonas lowered his voice anyway. “The last thing Pomeroy told me was that they always attended Saturday night mass. I’ll bet she still goes. That’s the day after tomorrow. How about we drive up and stake out her house and follow her there? We could corner her in the church where nobody would bother us.”

  “Sanctuary in the church?” Reno asked. “I like it. And that would give us all day tomorrow to pump the Professor for anything useful about Castle. And I can’t wait to check out the PT 109 angle.” She stopped talking and jerked her head down towards her empty beer jar. “Don’t look over yet,” she said. “But there’s somebody over in the corner by the pinball machines that I don’t feel good about. They look too old to be college students and they’re staring at us now.”

  “Tell me when I can look,” Jonas whispered back.

  “Okay, but be careful. Now.”

  He looked at them briefly before turning the other way as if he was looking for somebody. “I can’t tell,” he finally said. “Maybe they’re just grad students.”

  “After we finish let’s stop off in another bar and see if they follow us.” Before they could, however, the group at the table got up and left.

  “False alarm?”

  “I’m not so sure,” Reno said. “The guy with the long face caught me staring a few times. Maybe they knew I was on to them so they left.” She shrugged. “Or it could be nothing.”

  ~~~

  They both slept well that night at the Hotel Morgan, which was as plush as Reno had hoped. They rode down on the elevator the next morning after hammering out a plan. Instead of working together they would split up. Reno, who loved the painstaking task of collecting information, would head to the library to research the PT 109 incident. Jonas had already called ahead to firm up a meeting with Professor Van Scoy to talk about Kent Castle. They agreed to meet for dinner at the Mountain Lair, the student union building at the center of campus. “Be careful,” Jonas said as they walked out of the hotel. “Don’t forget about that crew you saw last night.”

  “Relax, Joe. You worry too much. The only thing I’m worried about is getting into a library without an ID.”

  If I hadn’t said it you’d have been pissed,” he said with a grin.

  Reno turned left out of the hotel, up High Street towards the main campus where she knew she could find libraries. For Jonas, getting to where he needed to be wouldn’t be as simple. Professor Van Scoy’s office was on the Evansdale Campus, a few miles away. To get there he would ride the PRT, West Virginia University’s subway-tram transportation system that he’d read about the night before. Following the city map he found on a counter in the hotel lobby he walked three blocks to the Walnut Street station.

  He climbed the austere concrete steps and found the station platform crowded with riders. While moving towards the turnstile he fished for change in his pockets. When he reached the turnstile a freckle-faced student reached over the gate, inserted a card, and waved Jonas through. “Nobody pays,” he said simply.

  “Thanks,” Jonas said. “Now I just need to figure which train to get on.”

  “Where are you going?” the student asked.

  “Bailey Hall. I think it’s near the football stadium.”

  “It is. Go over to that gate. It’s express. It’s a long ride but you won’t have any stops.”

  A horde of riders appeared behind Jonas shortly after he moved to the proper line. When the door of the tiny PRT car opened he boarded just ahead of a crowd of students and found himself pressed against the window. That turned out to have its advantages. He watched the scenery as the subway car whizzed silently across Beechurst Avenue and then hovered along the shoreline of the Monongahela. He recognized the green river from the recent visit to Pittsburgh, where it came to an end at the Golden Triangle. As they traced a bend in the river Morgantown faded from view. The blue and gold car sped past a basketball arena and a concert hall before weaving through some sand-colored towers that Jonas guessed were dormitories. He knew the ride was nearing an end when the h
uge empty football stadium appeared from behind a ridge. As he followed the crowd through the station platform he looked forward to the ride back.

  Ten minutes later he was standing outside Professor Van Scoy’s office in Bailey Hall. He knew he was early so he sat down to wait. Eventually a woman came out of the office to greet him. “Good morning, Mr. Jonas. I’m Liz Van Scoy.”

  She looked like many of the earthy-crunchy professors from his own college days. Although her straight hair had gone gray, she left it long as a younger woman would. She wore wire glasses that framed her plump face. Her most distinguishing feature was her enthusiasm. It was clear that she was somebody who hadn’t grown tired of her work.

  Instead of going into her office she led him down a short corridor and around a corner to a lounge and took a seat on a threadbare brown couch. “Have a seat,” she said. “Anyplace that looks comfortable.” The only place he saw that wasn’t covered with books was the other end of the couch, so he dropped himself there and twisted to face her. “So what can I do for a reporter who came all the way from Charlotte?” she asked.

  “I read that you’re working on the biography of Kent Castle,” he said as he pulled a small notepad from his back pocket. “I’m especially interested in his years at Eastern Steel for a story I’m working on.”

  “What’s the story about?” she asked as she drummed her fingers on a thigh.

  “I’m writing about his relationship with the Kennedy Administration,” Jonas said, thankful that Reno had reminded him to be ready for that question.

  “They weren’t exactly comrades-in-arms. But I guess you know that.”

  “I know you’re an expert on the steel industry. Is that why you’re doing the biography?”

  “The short answer is that I’m doing it because ERC commissioned it. But they wouldn’t have picked me except for my background. You know Eastern Steel became ERC, of course.”