The Devil in Gray

by Graham Masterton

  He took hold of her and held her close, but they both knew that their affair was finished. After a while she wiped her eyes with her fingers and attempted a smile.

  “He would have been a great little guy,” Decker said. He punched his fists in the air as if he were having a playful fight with a five-year-old. “I would’ve called him Decker Martin Junior. Have to carry on the great family name.”

  Mayzie kissed his cheek and then walked away across the parking lot. Quite unexpectedly, Decker found it difficult to swallow.

  He collected Hicks by the front entrance and they drove to 4140 Davis Street, where the Maitland house was cordoned off by yellow police tape wound around the front railings. They let themselves in and walked into the gradually darkening hallway. The floors and walls were still stained with Alison Maitland’s blood, and the air was filled with a thick, sweet stench like rotten chicken. Blowflies were crawling up the windows and buzzing around the ceiling, and Hicks had to bat one away from his mouth.

  “Jesus,” he spat. “When are they going to clean this place up?”

  “When we’ve found what we’re looking for,” Decker said. He went through to the breakfast area and looked around. “I don’t know what the hell we’re trying to find, but let’s try to think backward.”

  Hicks covered his nose and his mouth with his hand. “Wish I hadn’t eaten those breakfast links this morning. After seeing that poor guy hanging by his guts …”

  “I never knew that intestines were so strong, did you?” Decker remarked. He opened the glass doors in the hutch and looked inside. “Then again, when you think about it, you have to boil tripe for hours.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Lieutenant.”

  Decker opened all the kitchen drawers and closed them again. He even peered into the ovens.

  “We looked there,” Hicks said, his voice muffled behind his hand. “We looked everywhere.”

  “I know, sport. And you couldn’t find the evidence that you were looking for. But maybe you were looking for the wrong kind of evidence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well … Mayzie just gave me a hard time, you know? She made me understand how bad I was making her feel … when all the time I was only worried about me, and the way I felt. Maybe we ought to be thinking about our perpetrator, and what it was about the Maitlands that annoyed him enough to murder them.”

  “Come on, they were two ordinary, harmless people.”

  “That’s the way we see them. But maybe the perpetrator saw them different.”

  He went back into the hallway, still looking around. A large oil-painted landscape in a heavy gilt frame was hanging by the front door. He lifted it away from the wall so that he could check behind it.

  “Already did that,” Hicks said.

  Decker mounted the stairs. Over a dozen paintings were arranged on the wall—views of Richmond and Mechanicsville and Newport News, as well as portraits of smiling children and dogs. There were some photographs, too: sepia pictures of houses and gardens, and group portraits of the Maitland family in the nineteenth century, all in their frock coats and stovepipe hats and crinolines.

  Decker reached a group portrait on the turn of the stairs. He examined it very closely, and then he unhooked it and took it down from the wall. “Look at this,” he told Hicks. “First Army Corps at Richard’s Shop on Catharpin Road, May fifth, 1864, Major General M.L. Maitland commanding.”

  He took the picture up to the landing and switched on the light so that he could see it more clearly. It showed about twenty-five Confederate officers and men, stiffly posed on a plank road, with a wooden store in the background and overhanging trees. Two of the officers were holding horses, one of which had moved while the photograph was being taken, so that it appeared blurred and ghostly. One of the officers had moved, too: a tall man who was standing a little apart from the others on the right-hand side, at the back of the group. Unlike the others, who were dressed in tunics, he wore a greatcoat. He also wore a slouch hat, which appeared to have a black and ragged cloth knotted around it. Decker could see that he was heavily bearded, but because he had turned his head away during the exposure, it looked as if his face had melted.

  “Jerry Maitland told me that Sandra’s drawing of the So-Scary Man reminded him of somebody, but he couldn’t think who. But look at this guy … what do you think?”

  Hicks frowned at the photograph with his hand still clamped over his nose and his mouth. “I see what you mean. But this picture was taken over 140 years ago.”

  “Of course it was. I’m not suggesting that any of these people are still alive. But something lives on, doesn’t it? The spirit of the Old South.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Maybe the So-Scary Man has been dressing up as an officer in the First Army Corps and killing people who were connected with the Civil War in some way.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “How the hell should I know? But it’s possible that he’s deluded himself into believing that he is an officer in the First Army Corps. Some of these Civil War nuts—well, they’re nuts. Look at Billy Joe Bennett. I was talking to him once and he was getting all worked up about different sorts of frogs.”

  “Frogs?”

  “No, I didn’t know either. Frogs are those loops they use to hang their bayonets from their belts. I mean, we’re talking about obsession here. These people dress up in uniform and they stage mock battles, with carbines and everything. They trade cap badges and medals and cooking pots and all kinds of junk. We’re only talking about one step away from full-blown lunacy.”

  “Well … I guess you could have something there. After all, George Drewry was an army man. He might have had ancestors in the Civil War, too. But what about Alison Maitland?”

  “Let’s see if we can check her family tree, too. Meanwhile, let’s get this photograph back to the lab. I want it blown up and enhanced. And let’s put a couple of guys on the Internet … let’s see if they can log on to any Civil War Web sites and chat rooms. Maybe they can come up with some kind of pattern of behavior, or even some names.”

  They searched the rest of the house, but after an hour Decker concluded that they weren’t going to find anything else of any interest. He stood in the Maitlands’ bedroom while the last light of the day gradually faded, and thought that there was nothing so sad as a once-happy house where people had been violently killed. Even Alison Maitland’s pink satin nightdress was still there, neatly folded on her pillow.

  “Come on, Hicks,” he said. “Only ghosts here now.”

  They went out and closed the front door behind them. Hicks stood on the porch, held onto the railings, and took in three deep breaths. “That smell … I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”

  Decker slapped him on the back. “The day you get used to it is the day you’re ready to quit.”

  On the way home, Decker called in to see Eunice and Sandra Plummer. They lived downtown on Twenty-seventh Street, at the top of a shabby old brown-brick apartment block that was scheduled for redevelopment. Inside the lobby the building smelled strongly of wax polish and dead flowers. The elevator clanked and rattled like a medieval instrument of torture.

  Eunice let him in. “Thank you for stopping by, Lieutenant,” she said, tightly, although it was clear that she wasn’t very pleased to see him. “Sandra’s having her supper right now.”

  She led him through to the living room, which was crowded with antique furniture. The mustard-colored wallpaper was fading, and the rugs were worn through to the strings, but the apartment had high ceilings and original cast-iron fireplaces and there was a view over the neighboring rooftops toward the sparkling lights along the waterfront. The window was ajar so that Decker could hear the traffic and the chugging of a tugboat.

  Sandra was in the kitchen in a pink robe and slippers, eating cereal. Decker gave her a finger wave through the open door and she waved back at him and flushed in embarrassment.

  “How is she?”
Decker asked Eunice.

  “She’s fine. She didn’t see anything, thank God, and she didn’t realize that poor man was killed.”

  “I came to apologize for involving her, and you too. Believe me, if I’d had any idea what was going to happen—”

  “Well, fortunately no harm was done. But don’t expect us to help you again. Sandra is far too precious to me.”

  “There’s no question of it,” Decker reassured her. “I’ve arranged to have your close protection reinstated. I just hope it won’t be necessary for very much longer.”

  “Do you think you’re going to be able to catch this man?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so. This is the first time I’ve ever gone looking for somebody I couldn’t see.”

  “He does have a physical presence, though, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh, you bet. He threw Gerald Maitland out of the window, and I felt him myself when he pushed me over. And if he has physical presence, that means we can restrain him. Theoretically, anyhow.”

  “It’s a trick, isn’t it? Like conjurors do.”

  “Yes, I think it is. All we have to do now is find out what kind of a trick.”

  Sandra called out from the kitchen and Eunice said, “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” and went to see what she wanted. Decker looked around the room, picking up a silver-framed photograph of Sandra when she was a baby, and another photograph of a brown-haired man with a rather baffled-looking George W. Bush–type squint. Sandra’s father, maybe.

  Seven or eight of Sandra’s sketches and watercolors were arranged on either side of the fireplace. Decker found her work unexpectedly moving—every drawing done with such atmosphere, and such attention to detail—and what a sadness it was that she probably wouldn’t live beyond her twenties. Her most striking picture was a fine colored crayon drawing of Main Street Station, with its Beaux Arts balconies, its orange roof tiles and its fairy-tale dormer windows.

  Oddly, though, Sandra had drawn a heavily shaded cloud over its clock tower, more like a mass of writhing black serpents than a cloud.

  “Interesting picture,” he remarked, as Eunice came back into the living room.

  “Yes. For some reason she calls it the Fun House.”

  “The Fun House, huh? What’s that cloud hanging over it?”

  “I’m not sure. I remember her drawing it and the weather was perfect.”

  “Strange, isn’t it? Very, very good. But definitely strange.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The next morning Decker drove the ninety miles southeastward to Fort Monroe, headquarters of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, where Major Drewry had served in the military history section. It was a sunny day, but a fine warm rain was falling, so that the Mercury’s windshield glittered and its tires sizzled on the highway.

  Fort Monroe was situated on a spit of land in Chesapeake Bay. When Decker opened his car window to show his badge to the sentry at the gate, he could smell the ocean, like freshly opened oysters.

  “I have a twelve o’clock meeting with Captain Tony Morello. Want to tell me where I can find him?”

  “That’s Toni with an i, sir. She’s over in archives, right across there.”

  Decker parked his car in the visitors’ space and walked across the parade ground. A squad of pink-faced cadets in full dress uniform were practicing formation marching, their shiny boots splashing in the puddles. Decker climbed the steps, pushed his way through the double swing doors and followed the signs that said OFFICE OF THE COMMAND HISTORIAN.

  He found Captain Morello in the library, leaning over a desk with a computer in front of her. She was almost as tall as he was, with short black hair that was slashed straight back from her forehead. When she turned around, Decker saw that she was also strikingly attractive, in a 1960s Italian-actress way, with a heart-shaped face and vixenish eyes. Her immaculately pressed uniform only emphasized her very full breasts, and even in a midlength skirt her legs looked unnervingly long.

  “Lieutenant Martin,” Decker said, showing his badge. “But, you know, don’t let’s stand on ceremony. All my friends call me Decker.”

  “Captain Morello,” Toni Morello said, with a tight little smile. “All my friends call me sir.”

  Decker looked around at the floor-to-ceiling shelving. Each shelf was filled with hundreds of gray-backed files, and each file was identified by a neat white label—Armored Maneuvers in Italy, Spring 1945; Airborne Assault Forces in Cambodia, 1971; Logistical Operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1994. The library was more than 150 feet long, with a yellow-tinted clerestory window to filter the sunlight.

  “Hell of a library,” Decker remarked, although he was really thinking, Hell of a librarian.

  “I won’t keep you a moment, Lieutenant.” Toni Morello tapped out a few more lines on her computer and then switched it off. “I understand you wanted to talk to me about Major Drewry. We were all deeply distressed about that.”

  “Well, yes. It was a pretty goddamned horrible way to go. I’m going to be talking to Mrs. Drewry again, but I don’t want to upset her more than I have to and I was wondering if you could help me at all.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “What I need to know is, were any of Major Drewry’s ancestors connected with the army?”

  “Oh yes. George was very proud of his family history. His great-great-grandfather fought with Robert E. Lee, and his grandfather was out in the Philippines with Teddy Roosevelt. He was always bitterly sorry that he never saw active service himself.”

  “Would you have any information here about his great-great-grandfather?”

  “Of course. George used our archives to research his family tree, and he managed to find a whole lot more original material besides. Diaries, letters, that kind of thing. I don’t think he’d even gotten around to cataloguing everything. Do you want to take a look?”

  Decker followed her along the lines of shelving. She had a fluid way of walking that reminded him of a wildlife documentary that he had been watching on television that morning, nyala gazelles loping across the African bush. They reached a section at the far end of the library marked ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA, 1861–1865, and Toni Morello took out a box file with a label that said Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–May 7, 1864: Maj. Gen. Maitland’s brigade.

  She carried the file over to a reading table and opened it. Inside it was packed with original letters, dispatches, maps, and photographs. “Here,” she said. “This is a picture of Major General Maitland’s brigade at dawn on the morning of May sixth, just before they were sent up the Orange Plank Road to attack the advancing Federal army.”

  The photograph was remarkably similar to the one that Decker had taken from 4140 Davis Street. About a dozen bearded men in slouch hats and képis, some of them in tunics and others in nothing more than dirty shirts and muddied pants. A typed caption underneath identified the third mounted officer on the left as Lieutenant Colonel Henry Drewry.

  Toni Morello was about to tuck the photograph back in the file when Decker said, “Wait up a moment. Let me look at that again.”

  He took off his glasses and studied the group as closely as he could. At the back of the group stood three men, well apart from the rest, and although they were deep in shadow, Decker could see that at least two of them were wearing greatcoats. All three of them had slouch hats, and their hats were all decorated with black ragged plumes.

  “Have you ever heard of the Devil’s Brigade?” he asked.

  “I’ve heard it mentioned, of course. It was a myth, as far as I know. Propaganda, put out by the Federal generals to excuse themselves for being driven back by an army that had forty thousand fewer men than they did—not to mention being much more tired and hungry and very short on ammunition.”

  “Do you have any records about it?”

  “I don’t know offhand, but I could check for you.”

  Decker put his glasses back on. “I’d really appreciate it. Meanwhile—what time do you break for lunch?”


  As he drove back toward Richmond with the steering wheel in one hand and a double cheeseburger in the other, his cell phone rang.

  “Lieutenant? Hicks here. It looks like we’ve got ourselves another one.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  He turned into Sixth Street and was waved through the crowds of sightseers. The entire front window of Jimmy the Rib’s Soul Food Restaurant had been smashed and the sidewalk was strewn with sun-glittering glass. Seven squad cars were parked higgledy-piggledy across the street with flashing lights, as well as an ambulance and two khaki station wagons from the coroner’s department.

  As he pushed his way past the crowd, Decker saw somebody he recognized—a lanky young man with a straight-nosed profile like a pharaoh from one of the pyramids. He wore a jazzy red and white shirt and huge hoop earrings and a sharks’ tooth necklace, as well as a floppy red crochet beret that was decorated with feathers and antique keys and fishing flies.

  “Hi, Jonah. What’s happening?”

  “Deck-ah! How should I know, man? I only just got here.”

  “Junior Abraham’s been wasted, that’s what I hear.”

  “Had it coming, man. Junior Abraham was a liar and a blowhard and if anybody needs financial reimbursement for the bullet they bought to give him a premature funeral, then all they have to do is pass the hat around and I’ll be the first to contribute.”

  “You have any idea who did it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Come on, Jonah, give me a clue. You know this termites’ nest better than anybody.”

  “Deck-ah, even if I knew something I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “What? This is African-American omerta, is it?”

  “No, this is Jonah Jones thinking about his self-preservation. Whoever whacked a heavy-duty dude like Junior Abraham wouldn’t have no compunction about swatting a mosquito like me. I’ll tell you something, Deckah, even if I knew for sure who done this deed, which I don’t, I wouldn’t tell you who done it even if you rubbed my nuts with marrowbone and let two hungry Dobermans loose in the room.”