by Ed Ruggero
The three women traded looks again. Harkins took a breath. As a young patrolman taking witness statements, he’d been swayed several times by what the older detectives called “fucking sob stories.”
“Somebody is always going to try to sell you some bullshit story that makes them look better,” a twenty-year veteran named Tenneato had warned him. They’d been standing beside a gut-slashed corpse that lay in an icy gutter, stomping their feet and trying to keep warm while they waited for a captain.
“Or they’ll see the cops around and think, ‘This is when I get back at my prick of a neighbor,’ and you’ll hear all kinds of stuff that’ll get your investigation absolutely nowhere. Stuff that’ll just waste your time. Gotta take all that shit with a grain of salt.”
Harkins didn’t have enough time on the force to become as cynical as Tenneato had been, but he was wary of being led down some sidetrack that would do nothing but make this case more complicated. He wondered for a moment if Adams would really look for a replacement investigator, or if that was a load of crap, too.
“Stephenson do those things?” Harkins asked.
“Yeah,” Melbourne said. “Captain Meyers Stephenson. Talented surgeon; big jock at Cornell; fancy New York family; regimental boxing team, if you can believe that. And a first-class sonofabitch. Thought we were all here, the nurses that is, for his amusement.”
“Satisfaction,” Felton said.
“Gratification,” Savio said.
Harkins had heard stories about what went on between doctors and nurses at these hospitals. The only American women in theater were nurses and Red Cross Donut Dollies. Tens of thousands of GIs fantasizing about a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty women scattered among a score of medical units and hospitals across the whole island. Most of the GIs would never even see an American woman, much less meet one; the odds were terrible. Unless you were a doctor. It was an unchallenged truism among the sex-starved soldiers that doctors lived hedonistic lives, kept harems dressed in olive drab.
“So Stephenson was the one pushing people, uh, pushing women up against cabinets and stuff?”
“He was one of them,” Savio said.
“The worst one,” Melbourne said.
“How many women did he do this to?”
“Half a dozen, easy,” Felton answered, stabbing her cigarette into the pile of butts.
Harkins looked up from his notes. “How many nurses you have here?”
“Eighteen when we’re at full strength.”
“Stephenson cut a wide swath, huh?” Harkins said. “He bother Whitman?”
“Don’t know. It looked like she went to his tent willingly,” Felton said.
“Or was too drunk to resist,” Melbourne said. She and Felton looked angry; Savio looked fragile.
“He do it to you?” Harkins asked Felton.
“Once,” she said. “I told him that if he did it again or if I heard of him doing it to another nurse, I’d cut off his dick with a dull knife.”
“That’s what you felt like doing to him?” Harkins asked.
Felton gave a little snort. “Come on, Lieutenant. If you’re any kind of investigator you’re going to find out I said exactly that in front of ten people. I told you to save your skinny Irish ass from getting all excited, thinking you caught the murderer in the first hour.”
Harkins rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. Drake had said almost exactly the same thing to him.
Still not a detective, he thought.
Felton leaned forward, jabbed an index finger onto his notebook. Falling ash from her cigarette stuck to the damp page. “I didn’t shoot him. Write that down.”
“Was anyone else angry enough to do this?”
Felton lit another cigarette, one-handing a lighter. She said, “Who knows what people are capable of when they’re pushed?”
Harkins was having a hard time getting from what sounded like predictable grab-ass—not pretty, but nothing that struck him as criminal—to motivation to shoot a man in the head at close range.
And then Savio started to cry. Her lips didn’t tremble, her breathing didn’t change, but fat silver tears rolled from the bottoms of her eyes. Melbourne put an arm around the smaller woman and the two of them got up and walked out of the tent.
Harkins watched them go, realized that he’d been hoping to run into a dead end, or that some clear reason for Stephenson’s murder—along with a killer—would just drop into his lap and he could go back to his platoon.
So far, the nurses’ story was all he had. He’d never been that cop who cut corners, so he had to follow it.
He stood, pulled his canteen cup from his pistol belt, and walked to a row of big pots sitting atop gas burners. Squinting against the steam, he scooped a helping of coffee and grounds, sat down again.
“Any of the other docs do this kind of stuff to the women, the nurses?” he asked Felton.
“Stephenson was the worst, but there are a couple of others who’ve behaved badly at some point or other.”
“Colonel Boone know about this?”
Felton took a long pull on her cigarette, then exhaled in a slow sigh.
“People complained,” she said. “Nurses complained. He knew. Palmer knew.”
“And Boone never did anything?”
“Oh, yeah, he did plenty. Lectured us on how we shouldn’t wear our uniforms too tight and how we should and shouldn’t spend our free time and even whether we walked someplace alone at night. He thought everything that was happening was our fault. He always took the doctors’ side, like he was afraid to call them on this shit.”
The handful of commanders Harkins had worked for in his time in uniform had various levels of ability—one was a certifiable idiot, he thought—but most of them had taken care of their people, their soldiers. If anything, he thought commanders might be more inclined to look out for women.
“So Boone wouldn’t do anything to stop them, even though he’s the commander?”
“He probably thought he was only going to be commander for a short time. The hospital commander we had when we landed, guy named Logan, got pretty sick by D-plus-three or -four and had to be evac’d to North Africa. Boone was the senior surgeon on the aux team, so they stuck him with the job.”
“What’s an aux team?” Harkins asked.
“Auxiliary team,” Felton said. She leaned forward and pushed the ashtray to one side. “This is your field hospital, right? That’s a couple hundred people. Orderlies, cooks, drivers, all kinds of folks who support the mission.” She pushed her pack of cigarettes in front of her. “Then you have these teams—auxiliary teams: surgeons and surgical nurses, anesthetists, specialists—and they’re assigned to various hospitals on an as-needed basis.”
“Okay,” Harkins said.
“The army is still trying to figure out the best way to structure all this, to tell you the truth, and I don’t think we got it yet.”
She took another pull at the cigarette, one eye winking closed at the drifting smoke.
“Anyway, Boone was in charge of one of the aux teams, but when Logan got sick, the Second Corps surgeon—he’s the big boss one level up—he came down and put Boone in charge of the whole field hospital. He’s been floundering since day one, especially with the surgeons. He wasn’t really in their club. They didn’t respect him.”
“What do you mean?” Harkins asked. “He’s a surgeon, right? The commander and the highest-ranking guy.”
“Yeah, but he’s from Iowa, Indiana, some cornfield state. The other docs called him ‘country boy’ behind his back. Shit like that. They weren’t openly disrespectful, not all of them, but Boone had to know they thought he was kind of a bumpkin. Stephenson wasn’t the only Ivy League asshole around here.”
Harkins scribbled in his notebook, then stopped, his pencil poised above the damp page as he tried to remember other questions the detectives typically asked. There was an insistent pain that seemed centered right behind his eyes, like someone was using a sledgeh
ammer to break out of his skull. He needed water, chow, sleep.
“So Captain Stephenson was a problem for Colonel Boone?”
“I know where you’re going,” Felton said. “Boone cleaning house by getting rid of Stephenson. I don’t see it.”
“Why not?”
“Boone didn’t think Stephenson was the problem. To Boone, to Palmer, to the other docs, the nurses were the problem. When a nurse complained, she got marked as a troublemaker, a Bolshevik. Boone sent one girl to a theater hospital in North Africa; another one got shipped back to the States.”
Harkins pictured an assignment stateside. Someplace with shade and cold beer after hours. “That doesn’t sound too bad,” he said. Immediately regretted it.
Felton narrowed her eyes, snuffed her cigarette in the ashtray, and leaned closer. “This may surprise you, Lieutenant, but we have a pretty important job here. I didn’t volunteer because I like the clothes, or because I wanted to see every shithole in Europe.”
Two men carrying mess tins and wearing stethoscopes began to sit at the next table but moved when they heard the edge in Felton’s voice.
“I’m a great surgical nurse. These women are great nurses. We volunteered to do a job that needs doing. We shouldn’t have to go through an extra layer of difficulty—a layer of overgrown, oversexed frat boys—just to do our work.”
“Right,” Harkins said. “Yeah, of course you’re right.”
Felton leaned back, calming quickly. One corner of her mouth turned up in what might have been a smile.
“Didn’t mean to jump on my soapbox, but I am sorely tired of this bullshit. And frankly, that’s the only reason I’m talking to you. Hope I’m not wasting my time.”
She yawned, which made Harkins yawn, too.
“Did you work last night?”
“Coming off twenty-four hours,” Harkins said. “Had to chase down a jeep stolen by some locals, then break up a fight in a whore … a brothel.”
“I’m not made of porcelain,” Felton said. “You can’t use a cuss word I haven’t heard or said myself.”
“What about First Sergeant Drake?”
“What about him?”
“He seemed pretty pissed off this morning. Not very cooperative.”
“Oh, he’s okay. He just thinks all these new people who’ve come into the army—excuse me, his army—are screwing things up. We’re all just civilians playing at being soldiers.”
“Actually, that pretty much describes me,” Harkins said.
“You and ninety-nine percent of us, I’d say,” Felton said. “Anyway, he doesn’t hate you or anything. He’s just not a friendly guy.”
“Maybe he doesn’t hate me in particular. Maybe it’s all lieutenants. Or all MPs.”
“Nah, if he really hated you, he’d adopt this real exaggerated military courtesy. Absolute kiss-ass. ‘Yes, SIR! No, SIR!’ Like some cheesy movie about fucking West Point. Also, the man had his sense of humor surgically removed.”
“Yeah?”
Felton smiled. “One time he came into the admin tent, where the nurses keep the records. This was after our orderlies started visiting the whorehouses. He asked me, ‘Lieutenant, where do we stand on VD?’ So I said, ‘We’re against it, First Sergeant.’ He didn’t even crack a smile.”
Harkins laughed. “How do I get him to cooperate?” he asked.
“When he sees that you know what you’re doing and that you’re trying to do the right thing, he’ll be less of a pain in the ass, but that’s the best you can hope for.”
“Great.”
“By the way,” Felton said. “You can add him to the list of people who hated—I mean hated—Stephenson.”
“Really?”
“He had Stephenson figured out from the start. And I’m pretty sure he tried to talk some sense into Boone. Tried to get Boone to transfer Stephenson, or at least rein him in. But for all that Stephenson was a pain in the ass, he was actually a good surgeon, and we need all hands, you know?”
“You think Drake was capable of killing Stephenson?”
Felton thought for a moment. “If you’d have asked me yesterday if he was capable of murder, I’d have said no, because he’s a by-the-book guy. Today I’m not so sure.”
“What happened to make you reconsider?”
“Well, there was an actual murder. It seems pretty clear that one of our people shot another one of our people. Stephenson’s jackass nature aside, it’s pretty shocking, don’t you think?”
Harkins did not think that at all. He’d seen worse among blood relatives, between people who’d promised to love, honor, and cherish ’til death do us part.
Felton stood, stretched her arms overhead. There was a dark stain on the front of her blouse. More dried blood. “What a morning, huh?”
She leaned over and pointed at Harkins’ notebook, which lay open on the mess table. “You’re going to want to talk to a doc named Wilkins, one of Stephenson’s piggy friends. And Boone, of course. A nurse named Ronan, and her friend, Donnelly.”
Harkins stopped scribbling. “Donnelly?” he asked. “Any chance that’s Kathleen Donnelly, from Philadelphia?”
“Yeah. You know her from back in the States?”
“I’m hoping it’s the same one.”
“Ronan’s first name is Moira,” Felton said. “But she probably won’t want to talk to you. She’s had a rough time, so you be sweet with her.”
Felton patted Harkins on the shoulder as she walked past him and toward the tent flap. “Good luck. You’re going to need it.”
After Felton pushed through the door, Bobby Ray Thomas stuck his head inside.
“I thought you were dead,” Harkins said. “Didn’t they admit you?”
“Yeah. Gave me some fluids through a needle in my arm. I feel a lot better, so I checked myself out.”
“You checked out? This isn’t a hotel.”
“Okay, I walked out. I feel fine. Got some sleep.”
“You passed out. I’m not sure that counts as sleep.”
“Well, I couldn’t leave you stranded here.”
“I have the jeep; I was going to leave you stranded.”
Harkins stepped through the door, blinking in the bright sun. He could see inside a couple of the big tents, their sides rolled up in hopes of a breeze. Wounded men lay on cots, some with limbs wrapped in thick casts and strung to overhead frames.
He was bent over, peering into one of the wards, when he heard Thomas say, “Morning, ma’am.”
Harkins turned to see Thomas saluting a captain, the woman who’d been with Boone when he first saw Stephenson’s body. Phyllis Palmer was the head nurse; Savio had been afraid of getting into trouble with her by talking to Harkins.
“Morning, ma’am,” Harkins said, pulling himself up straight, fingertips touching his eyebrow. It was the first time he’d ever saluted a woman.
“Good morning,” Palmer said, returning the salute.
Her uniform and hands were clean, Harkins noticed, and the captain’s insignia on her right collar point was crooked. He guessed that she was not, like First Sergeant Drake, Regular Army. She had a prim little mouth, brown hair pinned in place.
Palmer said to Thomas, “Run along, young man.”
“It’s Harkins, isn’t it?” she said when Thomas had gone.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m sure you would have gotten around to talking to me,” she said, sarcastic. “But I thought I’d just come and find you. You’ve spoken to some of the nurses already.”
Harkins wondered if she’d been listening in on his conversation in the mess tent. “Yes, ma’am. A few. There are more I want to talk to.”
“Be careful about putting too much faith in what you hear. Everyone is upset, of course, by this awful crime, and some of the nurses were already, well, let’s just say some of these young girls can be a bit hysterical.”
“Hysterical?”
“Just like other soldiers, they spend a lot of time waiting around, and
to pass the time they make up stories, or exaggerate things that may have happened, or that they imagine happened.”
Harkins studied the captain, who looked forty, old for her rank. She had a small white scar on her chin, something from childhood. He wondered for a second if Palmer was a Detective Tenneato, who was either, depending on where you stood, too jaded to care or too smart to let people waste his time.
Harkins expected Boone to take care of all his soldiers; Palmer, the head nurse, should be even more rabid about taking care of the women.
“I see,” Harkins said, which was a lie; he was as clueless as he’d been while standing over Stephenson’s body.
“So I should discount, say, stories about doctors grabbing women?”
“Look, Lieutenant, I’m not saying that stuff doesn’t happen. But most of our doctors are terrific, and we’re doing important work here. Saving lives. And while I’m sure some of the nurses were genuinely upset that the doctors could be a bit—let’s say aggressive, other nurses thrive on the drama.”
He supposed it could be true that some nurses actually liked the attention, and others liked the fact that it gave them something to bitch about. But the stuff Felton and Melbourne told him? They had a right to be pissed off about the groping and pawing, if that’s what was happening. But even that—bad as it sounded—was that enough to get a man murdered?
“The real problem is that they talk about it nonstop, and that’s what interferes with their work,” Palmer said. “And the more they talk about it, the worse that interference gets.”
“So they shouldn’t complain?”
Palmer closed her eyes, took a breath, sighed it out, exasperated with Harkins. “Look, there have been a lot of changes because of this war. How many women have you worked with in the past? Worked alongside? And I’m not talking about teachers and secretaries.”
“None.”
“Exactly. And while our doctors have worked with nurses back in their stateside hospitals—well, there’s just a pecking order, that’s all I’m saying. Heck, in the last war, women stayed home rolling bandages. There’s a price we pay to serve out here, in such close quarters with all these men. Sometimes the girls have to put up with certain kinds of, uh, attention. But making a big deal out of it makes it worse for everyone. Better to just ignore it and focus on the work at hand.”