by Chuck Logan
“Define ‘certain personnel,’” said Broker.
“Once you’re in, and you’re an officer type and you’re eligible for a pension, you’re never really out. There’s precedent. I ran it kind of obliquely by a JAG guy I know. They reactivated a retired colonel in the seventies and tried him for misappropriating canteen funds in Vietnam in nineteen sixty-six.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“That’s my point. I didn’t underline that. Jimmy Tuna did. It was in the package he left the day he stood me up at prison. That note and the Newsweek page were folded, marking the section.”
Broker was impressed. It suggested another level to the thing.
Her eyes sharpened to pencil points. “So you’re a cop. Solve me a bank robbery.”
She was working on a full body flush of anticipation. Broker leaned away from her infectious excitement. “You got stars in your eyes. We need evidence,” he cautioned.
“Why would Jimmy give me the UCMJ unless he had evidence? But I need you to find him.”
“Before God does,” said Broker. “And we could still come up empty. And if you really want to nail LaPorte, it may not happen in the strict legal sense.”
“No. You can get the pieces any way you want, but I do it by the book. He gets tried. It gets on the record. My dad gets his name cleared.” Very serious, she planted her knuckles on her hips.
He reappraised Nina Pryce again. This time with pure intuition. She thought LaPorte’s head on a platter could pave her way back into the army. So she had a little Pluto in her, too. And stars in her eyes. Two, at least. One for each shoulder. He said, “I’m going to get some of it—”
“That’s your business.” She looked away. “I won’t help you steal. But what I don’t see, I don’t know.”
“This will go down in Vietnam. No sense letting the Communists have it.”
“It,” said Nina coolly.
He gazed across the turbulent plain of Lake Superior. There were three of them now. The third being a tangible presence that neither he nor Nina would invite out of the silence. The faint, dry rustle crept down the centuries, twisted serpentine through the bones of Cortés and Pizarro and Sir Francis Drake, and whispered in his ear.
22
NINA WENT INTO THE CABIN AND CAME OUT stripped down to a pair of shorts, a running bra, and an old pair of Reeboks. She tied the red bandanna around her forehead and collected a pick and shovel and walked toward the lodge. Broker could see his dad sitting at the kitchen table, in a rectangle of yellow light that was framed in the shadow of the house under the darkening sky. Mike cupped his chin in his hands and stared out over the lake.
Broker climbed to the end of his promontory and watched while Irene and Mike showed Nina where they wanted the hole dug, in a rocky cleft overlooking the shore. Nina spread her feet and hefted the pick in her hands. Then she set to work with a slow, powerful rhythm. Fifty yards away and above her, Broker watched the flat muscles of her back and shoulders swing smoothly and oil with sweat.
She put down the pick and started with the shovel, difficult going because she lacked the proper footwear, but she didn’t flinch and soon a dark ring of sweat soaked into her shorts. Then she went back to the pick and swung it to the fitful smash of waves breaking against the tiers of stone. Last night the Big Water lay placid under a “Bali H’ai” sunset. Today whitecaps rode the north wind and it looked like Victory at Sea out there.
Broker was not prone to admitting it, but he added up to more than just a set of balls and fast-twitch muscles. Once, back when he still showed up for evaluations at the BCA, he’d taken a routine MMPI psychological profile. He was graded by an uptight office guy who told Broker he tested out with a deviant male identity.
Broker took the test results to a lady he was dating who did profiles for the FBI. After much teasing she interpreted the grade and, that night, staring at her bedroom ceiling, she told him that the MMPI was culture-bound and dated. “Your sensitivity range graphs out within normal parameters for a woman. Off the charts for a male. That must have freaked out the guy who graded it.”
Broker had intuition.
With his eyes he saw a young woman digging on the rocky beach; bandanna fluttering in a rising wind, she looked like a slender buccaneer. But his intuition was starting to fathom that she was a new kind of woman for a new century. And she had the spirit to march into the spooky old woods with the U.S. Code and drag LaPorte out like a gutted deer and face down the U.S. Army. She would use her dad, who was dead, and Broker, who was living right now, to do it. Goddamn. She probably would be the first woman to get the CIB.
He visualized the crossed bones below the skull tattoo on her glistening shoulder. She’d want to get her way. So did he…
He’d known ambitious women. But Nina was the first one who came utterly without insecurity. She didn’t crave power. She had it already, inside her. Call it charisma. Leadership. It was power. He sure felt it start to pop when their fingers touched. But she was young and she hadn’t mastered the voltage. He could wind up electrocuted if he got too close.
And gold didn’t tempt her. She demanded justice, but she also figured she was owed advancement and silver. She would trade a treasure for vindication, for LaPorte’s scalp, for reinstatement in the army, and eventually for a tiny drop of silver, fashioned in the shape of the five-pointed star that brigadier generals wear on their shoulders.
And he reflected that the search for Jimmy Tuna would be fraught with puzzles and traps and it was poetic justice that the game might end in Vietnam where the ambush was invented.
Down on the beach the hole was chest deep. Nina climbed out and lowered in the lump of tarp, and, without pausing, hurrying now, with sidelong glances at the roiling sky, she filled in the grave.
Then, as it began to sprinkle, she patted the mounded dirt and laid down the shovel and carried a towel and soap down the granite polyps to the water’s edge. She stripped off her work-fouled clothes and waded up to her thighs in the crashing surf and scrubbed as lightning scurried across the horizon. Thunder banged the bedrock and the first fat raindrops sizzled around her. It was magic light. The sun hid. Storm charge and ozone shook the air like a shaman’s rattle. Untextured by shadow, every surface—the rocks, her skin, the heaving water—shone with its own luminous electricity.
She rinsed her hard arms and reached up to embrace the furious sky and the gray wall of rain that dashed across Superior, like the hooves of running ponies, straight for her.
Broker didn’t know if Amazon hoplites really fought on the plains of Troy, and he didn’t know if America was ready for them now. He knew he wasn’t. But goddamn, man…
There it is.
23
BROKER WAS HAPPY. IT WAS STORMING. HE HAD A building crisis on his hands. He got on the phone and enlisted Tom Jeffords to expedite a charter flight to Ann Arbor while he called the warden’s office at Milan Federal Prison. He introduced himself as Det. Lt. Phillip Broker of the Minnesota BCA and set up an interview with Waldo Jenke for late afternoon.
Tuna had made a point of soliciting money he didn’t need. So follow the money Jimmy did have. It took longer to find out how Tuna handled his finances. His case manager was off for the weekend. After hopping around the prison switchboard Broker finally schmoozed a supervisor, who checked the computer. Tuna had given power of attorney to a banker in Ann Arbor. The Liberty State Bank on Michigan Street.
“I know where that is,” said Nina.
“We have a problem, there’s this thing called the Right to Financial Privacy Act. We’d need a subpoena, a search warrant. I could start that rolling if I had an open case going…”
He reached for the phone again and called a college friend in Stillwater who ran a travel agency and who owed him a few favors. Broker explained to Don Larson at Larson’s Travel that he might be needing some tap-dancing on the scheduling computer.
Larson asked was it national or international.
Broker winked at Nin
a and pulled his passport from his back jeans pocket and slapped it down on the table. Casually he told Don to check on two round trips to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Nina laughed and held up her palm for a high five.
Larson reminded him to make sure that his passport was current, to contact the Vietnamese embassy for visas, and to check with the travel clinic at Ramsey Hospital in St. Paul for recommended shots.
Then Broker had him book a Northwest flight to New Orleans from Detroit early tomorrow morning and a return trip to Minneapolis the following morning. He left it to Don to find him a room. And another flight from Detroit back to the Twin Cities for Nina. She could grab a room at the airport Holiday Inn and wait until he returned from New Orleans. Then he asked Larson to expedite two visas. They’d mail the applications to his office. Larson groaned.
Nina checked the slim local yellow pages and found a photo shop that took passport photos. They needed two each for the visa forms. They both sat down and filled out the paperwork.
“Port of entry?” asked Nina.
“Hanoi. Never been there.”
“Purpose of visit?” asked Nina straight-faced.
“Vacation,” said Broker, just as straight-faced.
He winced at his thumb, which ached, and went back to the phone and checked with Tom again. Two more calls had come into the switchboard at the Best Western for Bevode Fret from LaPorte’s number in New Orleans. And Fret had used a police phone to call LaPorte before they took him to the county jail.
Then Broker dug in his closet and dressed casually in a light sports coat, jeans, loafers, and a summer shirt. He tossed an extra shirt, a change of underwear, and a travel kit in his overnight bag and retaped his thumb. He changed from his hideout holster to a break-away shoulder rig that fit neatly under his left armpit and stuffed in the Colt .45.
Nina watched him pack in silence. He set his bag aside and rummaged in his dresser drawers and became agitated. Christ. Did I lose it? Ha. He took out a pendant on a fine yellow chain. She held out her hand to inspect it.
The tiger tooth was tipped and mounted in yellow metal and discolored from years in the drawer. She pressed her thumbnail into the metal and made a slight dent.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
“Luck.” Broker hung it around his neck and tucked it into his shirt. Then he took out his wallet and unfolded the note with Tuna’s scrawled handwriting. He pointed to Trin’s name. “He gave it to me.”
On the way to the airstrip, they stopped at the photo shop, had pictures made, checked in with Jeffords, and left Tuna’s note and LaPorte’s original map and sonar graphic in his safe in a plain envelope. Next they stopped at the post office, where they express mailed the visa forms with their passports to the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, D.C. Broker wanted to stop for a quick haircut but Nina counseled against it. Keep the ponytail. It would fit in better with the New Orleans scene. An hour later they were winging east, skirting the storm over Superior in a Cessna.
It was raining when they landed in Ann Arbor and continued to rain as they cabbed into town. From Nina’s cramped student apartment, Broker reconfirmed his appointment with the warden’s office at Milan. Nina drove her Volkswagen Horizon over the familiar route to the prison. Broker toyed with the tiger tooth through his shirt.
Milan was a three-story brick structure and could have been a big trade school except for the apron of concertina gleaming in the rain on the chain link outer fence and the rifle towers dotting the inner walls.
They signed in at the bubble, a guard station walled by thick bullet-proof glass. Broker showed his badge and checked his weapon. Access into the visitors’ area was regulated from the bubble through a heavy-barred electrically controlled door. Waldo would be escorted through this sally port and patted down by the guards. After the interview he would be strip searched.
Beyond the sally port, Broker detected the low grumble of institutional uneasiness. He believed that a prison was a thousand-eyed animal that could intuit a cop through steel walls. He imagined the malice beading and starting to drip.
Broker had requested extra privacy, so they were led down a corridor past the regular visitors’ rooms. The guard walked them through another locked door and out onto a patio that was like an aviary, surrounded on three sides and partially roofed beyond the overhang with chain link fencing.
The guard jerked his head. “How’s this for out of earshot?”
Broker nodded. The guard pointed to a small table with several chairs in a dry spot out of the rain under an overhang. They walked to the table and waited. Out in the mist, cars with their low beams on slowly traveled a slick black road in the emerald gloom of the Michigan countryside.
24
WALDO JENKE’S STIFF WHITE BRUSHCUT SCRAPED the top of the door frame and he oozed toward them with the Silly Putty gait of a Don Martin cartoon from old Mad magazine in size-sixteen tennis shoes. Somewhere around 350 pounds, Broker’s head would just reach and fit into the hollow of the convict’s massive armpit. He wore a freshly laundered baby blue sweatsuit. He had showered recently and Broker could clearly smell corn starch on his skin in the damp air.
He had mild pink eyes and very white skin, a killer albino rabbit who could bench press six hundred pounds. His doughy face was blank. “What’s this about?” he rasped.
Then he saw Nina and his eyes eloquently explored her face and roved her body. She had put on khaki slacks, a Madras blouse, sandals, and a scarf that matched the blouse to conceal the bruises on her throat. Jenke’s eyes stopped on the bruises on her forearms, then they slid down her body and fixed on the hard flesh of her bare ankles. He motioned to the guard watching through the window in the door. The guard entered. Jenke whispered to him. The guard turned to Broker.
“He’s got a book in his cell he wants to give the girl. What do you think?”
“Fine,” said Broker.
The guard nodded. “Take a few minutes to fetch it.” He went to the door. They heard him speak to someone in the hall.
Jenke’s watery eyes finished their rove over Nina and then fixed on Broker and stopped at his taped thumb. He studied the discolored, stitched flesh with interest. His blunt rabbit nose nuzzled the scent of the wound.
He smiled slightly. His yellow baby teeth were imbedded in massive gums, like crooked kernels of new corn stuck in a cob of bubble gum.
“You know what this is about,” stated Broker.
“I ain’t saying shit,” Jenke replied with great deliberation. Then, in a display of elaborately guarded reflexes, he removed a single cigarette from the pack in the kangaroo pocket of his sweats and lit it with a plain matchbook. His big white fingers fluttered. Elegantly long, the fingernails were manicured and dusted with talc.
Minutes passed. Nina untied the scarf and retied it. Jenke showed two inches of gum in a horrible grin when he saw the bruises on her throat.
Then he crushed out his smoke and lit another and leaned back, a torpid mountain of flesh. His lips puckered and his chest jerked. Wreaths of smoke rings floated on the damp air and softly tore apart in front of Nina’s face.
“You notice how I talk funny?” he asked her.
“I noticed,” she said evenly.
“Reason is, when I was a kid Andy Devine was my favorite actor. He talked like that because when he was a kid he got stabbed in the throat with a fork.” He grinned. “So I stabbed myself in the throat with a fork.”
The door opened and the guard came through. He had a battered, water-damaged, blue softcover book in his hand. Broker saw the embossed crucifix on the cover and recognized it as an old Armed Forces New Testament. Jenke took the book and said to Broker in a gravel whisper, “Get the screw out of here.”
Broker jerked his head at the guard, who nodded and went through the door and watched through a heavy glass window reinforced with mesh. They were alone on the patio.
As if conveying an object of ceremony, Jenke placed the Bible in the middle of the table. He opened it and po
inted to the faded name written on the flyleaf: S. Sgt. James Tarantuna. Again the inquisitive gaze, prompting. Broker nodded.
Jenke opened the Bible to the place marked with the photograph of Nina. Her college graduation picture. He removed the picture and held it face up in his palm. Then he leaned forward.
Jenke smiled and flicked the picture in his long fingers, turning it over with almost magical speed. They both read the note printed on the back in blocky ballpoint pen: If he stole it, why’s he buried with it?
Nina drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Porcupine sweat stabbed the muscles of Broker’s chest where the cool, gold-tipped arc lay, prodding his banging heart.
Buried implied dig as in dry land. That’s what Tuna’s grave-digger fixation was about.
He glanced at Nina and saw the same thought ignite in her eyes. They both crouched forward, ready to race from the prison like it had just caught on fire.
“We’re cool,” said Broker, dry-mouthed.
“Absolutely,” said Nina in a steady voice.
Jenke watched their reaction, not particularly impressed, and then prompted with his eyes. You got it. Broker nodded. Yes. Jenke withdrew the picture and artfully, beyond the guard’s line of sight, tore it into quarters, which he hid in his spacious palm as he raised his cigarette to his lips. Quick as a snake he fingered the pieces into his mouth and methodically chewed and then swallowed. Then he nodded a final time. Their business was concluded. His favor to Jimmy Tuna was discharged. Broker didn’t care to think about how it had been incurred.