Blame the Dead

by Ed Ruggero

  “Then what?”

  “We send for Captain Adams, bring Ronan back in the morning with her story. Then, whenever the provost gets back from his meeting in Tunisia, we all march in there and present our case.”

  Just talking through it made Harkins’ pulse quicken. The beat cop had accomplished something after all.

  “We all?”

  “Well, me, Adams, and Ronan. Maybe you can go back tomorrow with Captain Adams and get your witness, that old neighbor lady, to identify Boone as the guy she saw pounding on your aunt’s door.”

  “So we get him for Drake’s murder. What about Stephenson?”

  “A lot of suspects, once there’s a crack in their story, the whole thing gives way. I wouldn’t be surprised if Boone confesses to everything.”

  Colianno was silent, and Harkins figured he was unconvinced. But he’d seen this before, heard detectives’ stories of suspects confessing to strings of crimes, one after another, the cops taking notes as fast as they could write.

  “What’s going to happen to you after this is over?”

  “If I don’t go to jail, you mean?” Harkins said.

  He’d thought about this, wondered if going back to breaking up traffic jams was going to be enough for him.

  “I don’t know, to tell you the truth.”

  “What’s going to happen to me?” Colianno asked.

  “Well, I think my brother is trying to arrange it so you can go back to your unit. If that doesn’t work out, maybe Captain Adams and the provost will want you. You seem to have a knack for investigations.”

  In the dim light from dash instruments, Harkins thought he saw Colianno smile.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Me, a copper. Be a big change for my family.”

  “How’s that?”

  “My two older brothers have both spent time in the can. Liked to boost delivery trucks. My mom says they’re the reason she has the white hair.”

  At the entrance to the hospital compound they found themselves behind four or five ambulances jamming the road. Orderlies and nurses hurried about, red-filtered flashlights bobbing at crazy angles, light spilling from blackout curtains as dozens of hands pulled at the ambulance doors. There was a rush to get the stretcher cases out and into the surgical tents, and there were more wounded than there were people to help.

  A woman stepped in front of them and pounded on the hood of their jeep with a closed fist.

  “You two, give us a hand here!”

  Colianno looked over at Harkins.

  “Shit,” Harkins said. He was about to tell the woman they had another mission—he needed to find Kathleen and pinpoint Boone—when the nurse banged on the jeep’s hood again.

  “I said move your asses!”

  “All right,” Harkins said. “Pull over.”

  Colianno squeezed the jeep off the main track and the two men jumped out, Colianno slinging a rifle over his shoulder. Inside the ambulances, stretchers were “racked and stacked” like triple bunk beds on either side of the vehicle’s boxy rear end.

  “Grab this one,” the nurse told Harkins, tapping the handles on a stretcher in the middle of the right stack. He couldn’t see her well in the dark, but he heard her distinct accent, New York, and she was clearly used to being obeyed.

  “And don’t fucking drop anyone.”

  Harkins took the handles and pulled, but nothing happened. Colianno jumped inside, grabbed the other end of the same stretcher, and tried to yank it free of the rack. The wounded soldier, whose entire upper torso was a cocoon of dirty bandages, groaned.

  A feeble voice from a stretcher on the other side of the vehicle said, “You gotta undo the clips, one on each handle.”

  Harkins turned on his own flashlight, found the clips. As he slipped them off, he glanced to his left, where a waif-thin GI held a large compress to his own left ear.

  “Thanks, pal,” Harkins said. The kid smiled on one side of his mouth, then turned his head to look straight up at the stretcher above him, just a few inches away from his face.

  “You got it?” Colianno asked.

  “Yeah, come toward me.”

  Harkins stepped off the back running board, reaching for the ground with his right foot, bending his arms to keep the stretcher level as he descended. Colianno, still inside the cramped ambulance, bent at the waist to lower his end, but the stretcher and patient yawed to the left.

  “Watch it,” Harkins said.

  They were a pair of inept movers, suddenly entrusted with some family’s most valuable possession.

  Harkins was on the ground now, straining to keep his end above his shoulders. He looked behind him, then turned back to see Colianno, and that’s when the blood flowed off the stretcher and onto his face.

  Harkins sputtered, spit, shook his head to clear his eyes, like a swimmer surfacing after a dive. “Jesus!”

  “You drop that stretcher and Jesus won’t be able to save you,” New York Nurse said. “Your ass will be mine.”

  The GI they were carrying was a big man, not Drake-big, but bigger than either Harkins or Colianno. Harkins’ palms were sweaty, slippery. He braced the handles against his leg to tighten his grip.

  There was a scrum of orderlies and nurses, and now what sounded like a few docs, checking patients for what Harkins knew was triage: a grim separating of those who could be saved with immediate help from those who could wait and, finally, from those who probably could not be saved with the resources at hand. He had learned about triage in training, but had never seen it up close.

  “Where do we go?” Harkins asked the crowd.

  New York Nurse appeared at his elbow. “Surgical One, straight ahead.”

  Harkins turned; she did not come up to his shoulder. “We go right inside?”

  “No, wait outside. If no one comes up to you after a minute or so, start hollering for help.”

  Harkins and Colianno dodged forward amid the confusion. The track leading to the surgical tents was mostly blocked by ambulances and other stretcher bearers, every team trying to move quickly. Harkins was in front, and for a few yards he was able to make his way forward by the light from one of the tent entrances as someone held the blackout curtain open. Then the curtain shut and he was back in darkness, blinking his eyes to adjust.

  “You know where we’re going?” Colianno said. Harkins thought he was carrying the man’s feet, Colianno the head.

  “I think so.”

  Harkins’ palms slipped and he fought back, gripping the wooden handles more tightly. He felt a blister on one hand peel away, leaving a patch of raw skin the size of a silver dollar. He squeezed harder.

  Then, bizarrely, an image from his childhood. He and Patrick at a church-run camp in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, canoeing on a lake when a thunderstorm rolled up on them. They had turned back toward the dock—an impossibly long way across—as the sky went purple and rain battered them like thrown gravel and lightning split a tree on the bank behind them. He remembered how the hair on his arms tingled, how the air smelled like steel, how he’d nearly pissed his pants. Behind him, Patrick unable to get past the first line of a desperate prayer: “Hail Mary, full of grace; hail Mary, full of grace; hail Mary, full of grace;” and Harkins, same beat, saying instead, “Don’t stop, never stop. Don’t stop, never stop. Don’t stop, never stop.”

  They made it to the door of Surgical One, but Harkins, hands full, could not open the flap. There was probably something medical people said at this point, a special “open sesame,” but Harkins had no idea what might open the door.

  “Help!”

  Nothing. Behind him, Colianno yelled, “We need help here!”

  The patient had not made a sound since they lifted him from the ambulance.

  Harkins tried balancing the right handle against his leg to see if he could open the tent flap. As soon as he loosed his grip, the stretcher slipped five or six inches. Harkins felt his left shoulder pop, an old boxing injury, like someone was trying to take h
is arm away to use elsewhere.

  Harkins was about to yell again when the blackout curtain parted, and Kathleen Donnelly motioned him in.

  Thank God.

  She did not look at Harkins, but only at the patient.

  “He been triaged?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Harkins said. “No. We brought him straight from the ambulance.”

  Donnelly leaned over the stretcher, was joined a second later by Wilkins. The doctor thrust his hand beneath the cocoon of dirty cotton on the boy’s chest.

  “Outside,” he said, pivoting and hurrying back to the chaos. If Wilkins had recognized Harkins, he gave no sign.

  Donnelly looked at Harkins, all business. “Outside,” she repeated. “To the left. Take him off the stretcher; we have to use that again right away. Wrap him up, though.”

  Harkins did not move immediately. His eyes had fixed on a large metal trash can that sat against the tent wall. A bloody, amputated leg stuck out of the top.

  Donnelly touched his arm, leading him back to the door.

  “Go on, now,” she said, gentleness in her voice. Men dying all around, Donnelly still looking to comfort. Then she turned to the operating tables, the bright lights, the bloody ballet of surgical teams, and in two quick strides was back in her element.

  Outside, Harkins and Colianno found two ranks of bodies, maybe twelve men, lying on the ground, wrapped in GI blankets. They put their burden down, gently rolling him onto a blanket handed them by an orderly. When the body was faceup, Harkins folded the edges of the blanket to the man’s chin.

  “We supposed to do something with the dog tags?” Harkins asked the orderly, who seemed to be in charge of this growing platoon of dead.

  “No,” the man said. “We’ll take care of that.” Then, “You guys all right? You’re not assigned to the hospital, are you?”

  “MPs. Rolling in when the ambulances came. Just lending a hand.”

  “Look,” Colianno said. He had pulled the man’s dog tags from his shirt collar, laid them gently on the bandages around the soldier’s chest. Clipped to the same chain was a silver medal.

  Colianno flipped his lighter to see, fingered the medal, tucked it back inside the man’s blouse. “It’s the Blessed Mother,” he said. “I had one just like it. Lost it in the jump on D-Day.” The paratrooper ran his tongue over his swollen lip. “My mother says the rosary every day. Got a statue of Mary in the front room, practically a shrine. She says Mary listens to mothers’ prayers.”

  Colianno pulled the blanket over the dead man’s face, tucked the corners in gently behind his head. He looked up, tried a limp smile. “Hope my mom is better at praying than this guy’s mom was.”

  Harkins thought about his mother, her unanswered prayers for her youngest, disappeared into a vast ocean. And suddenly he was choking back a sob, and his vision swam in hot tears.

  The orderly was still standing there, Harkins and Colianno kneeling on the ground on either side of the corpse, Harkins with his hands pressed to his face.

  Colianno lifted his hand to the neat rows.

  “You get used to this?” he asked the orderly.

  “God, I fucking hope not.”

  35

  5 August 1943

  0245 hours

  Harkins and Colianno helped move casualties until the hysteria died down and the New York nurse sent them away.

  “Go get some rest,” she said. “And thanks.”

  The two men had not seen Boone during the rush of casualties. They looked in the surgical tents, the wards, his admin tent, and even the mess tent, where a half-dozen coffee-jangled docs and nurses had gathered to talk each other down. No one had seen Boone.

  It was nearly three A.M. when they parked their jeep near the nurses’ admin tent, which had become Harkins’ de facto headquarters. The two men fell asleep sitting up in their respective seats, were still asleep when Captain Adams, the deputy provost, woke them just as the eastern sky showed pink.

  “You two had quite the day yesterday,” Adams said.

  “Helluva night, too,” Harkins managed before he was fully awake.

  “What the hell happened to your face?” Adams asked Colianno. The paratrooper was able to open one eye fully, the swollen one only partially.

  “It’s a long story, sir,” Colianno said.

  Adams shook his head. “I’ll bet,” he said. Then, to Harkins, “Sergeant Sutherland briefed me on Drake’s murder. Said he thought you have a suspect.”

  “Boone,” Harkins said. “Drake found Ronan, and they were inside talking when Boone showed up and started pounding on the door. We have a witness that will put Boone there, by the way. So Drake sends Ronan out the back, and next thing you know, Drake is dead on the floor and Boone is in the wind.”

  “What was Ronan doing out in Palermo?”

  “I stashed her at my aunt’s house,” Colianno said. “So she’d be safe.”

  “Donnelly got assaulted last night,” Harkins added. “I thought the nurses were in danger.”

  “So why didn’t you stash Donnelly, too?”

  “She refused to go,” Harkins said. “But I figured I could at least get Ronan out of here. Boone had started shipping nurses out, every nurse who had stood up to him.”

  “So Ronan is AWOL?”

  “For her own protection. Boone was armed when he followed her. You ever see a doctor wearing a sidearm? I doubt very seriously he went there to shoot Drake. I think he was after Ronan.”

  “Jesus,” Adams said. “You really think he was going to kill one of his own nurses?”

  “There’s something about Boone making a lot of money here in Sicily. Ronan heard something from Whitman, that nurse that maybe choked to death.”

  “Maybe choked to death?” Adams asked.

  “I got some questions about that, too.”

  “So are we talking about the black market? Boone is selling stuff? Is that how Drake wound up dead?”

  “If it’s black market, I doubt Drake was involved. Besides, it looked to me like there was a struggle inside the house. Drake and Boone.”

  “So Ronan saw Boone?” Adams asked.

  “No. She heard him through the door before she went out the back.”

  “So this witness who saw Boone there is also the one who saw that he was armed, that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Harkins knew the next question, knew Adams would not be thrilled with the answer.

  “So who’s the witness?”

  Harkins looked at Colianno, who said, “A neighbor lady of my aunt’s.”

  “Great,” Adams said. “And let me guess—just based on how this is unfolding so far—this is some old lady who doesn’t speak English and has bad eyesight.”

  “I never said she had bad eyesight,” Colianno said.

  Adams sat in the passenger seat of Harkins’ jeep; he looked as tired as Harkins felt.

  “This is one screwed-up hospital,” Adams said.

  All around them, exhausted orderlies and nurses prepared for another day of treating wounded men. Harkins wondered if anyone had moved last night’s dead.

  “Be right back, Lieutenant,” Colianno said, walking in the direction of the latrine.

  When the paratrooper was out of earshot, Adams said, “Do you know your brother has heard rumors that your man there killed another paratrooper on D-Day?”

  “Yeah, Pat told me,” Harkins said. And Colianno confessed, he thought. “Any evidence?”

  “Nothing concrete that I know of,” Adams said. “Sounds like the paratroopers are clamming up. But right now you’ve got another problem. Boone isn’t in the wind, he met the provost at the Palermo airfield this morning. He’s coming here to talk to you.”

  This was not what Harkins wanted to hear.

  “I wanted to talk to the provost before Boone did, but we’ll at least get a chance to brief him, right?” Harkins said.

  “Maybe, maybe not. But you can expect him to play by the rules.”

&nbs
p; “Meaning?”

  “Colonel Meigs is an Old Army guy,” Adams said. “Commanded an infantry company in the last war; does everything by the book.”

  “Drake was like that, a hard-ass. Not quite so old.”

  “Drake was a girl scout compared to Meigs. He’s not just going to take your word over Boone’s; he’ll listen to all sides. And he’s not going to like the fact that your key witness is an AWOL nurse.”

  “What do you think we should do?” Harkins asked.

  “Talk fast and hope for the best, I guess.”

  36

  5 August 1943

  0830 hours

  Wilbur Meigs was a full colonel, like Boone, but nearly old enough to be Boone’s father. Harkins stood at attention in front of Boone’s field table desk when the two senior officers entered, trailed by Adams. Boone had ordered Colianno to wait outside.

  “Lieutenant, I’m Colonel Meigs, and this is a preliminary look at the investigation you’ve been running here, which, in Colonel Boone’s opinion, has been slapdash and even harmful to his command.”

  Meigs sat, put his helmet down, lined it up exactly with the table’s edge. There was a small, framed photo of a younger Boone with a woman. The woman was not pretty, and neither of them smiled. Harkins had seen class pictures with more intimacy. Meigs moved the photo carefully, then looked up. “You may stand at ease.”

  Harkins spread his feet shoulder-width apart, hands clasped in the small of his back.

  Meigs had once been tall, but was now bent over, gnomish, almost. He still had a thick shock of white hair, brush cut. Tobacco-stained fingers turned in toward his palms. Arthritis, maybe. He walked with a cane, his right leg so stiff that Harkins wondered if it were a prosthetic. When he leaned the cane against the field table Harkins glanced down quickly: the knob was a silver lion’s head.

  “Have you determined who killed Captain Stephenson?” Meigs asked.

  “Not yet, sir,” Harkins said. “But—”

  “And you are using as your driver a private from the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, is that right?”