Full Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “Was it straight, or all poofed up?”

  “It looked straight, about shoulder-length.”

  “That’s Helen. She’s been a bottle blonde at least since Leavenworth. Remember?” She finished brushing her teeth and moved aside so he could brush his.

  “Yeah, I remember. Well, it sure wasn’t a good-night peck on the cheek. When they heard me, they turned off the garage light and ducked out of sight. It was real obvious they didn’t want anyone seeing them together.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He had a mouthful of toothpaste and pondered her question for a moment. He rinsed his mouth with water and quickly swirled water around the basin, wiping it clean, a habit he had picked up as a cadet and never dropped. “I feel kind of funny about it. I almost feel like I was invading their privacy. If I hadn’t happened to be running down that alley, they would have done whatever they were doing, and nobody but them would know a thing about it.”

  “That’s the nature of adultery, dear heart. It’s supposed to be a secret. It’s not just the sex. It’s the feeling of getting away with it.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Trust me. I am right. The problem is, now it’s not a secret anymore. You know, and I know.”

  “Jeez, Sam, I’m not even really sure who I saw out there tonight.”

  She held out one hand, pointing into her palm with a finger. “A break, please? Could you give me a break and put it right here?”

  He laughed. His wife was a piece of work.

  She continued: “You’re looking at Gibson’s Porsche parked in Messick’s garage, and you see a guy who looks like Jack Gibson, and a woman who looks like Helen Messick. Her husband’s out of town, and all of their kids are grown up and out on their own. I’ll make a bet with you. If Gibson and Helen Messick weren’t doing the horizontal mambo in Quarters One-twenty-five tonight, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “You don’t even own a hat,” he laughed.

  “So I’ll drive down to New York and buy one, and I’ll come home and fry it up with some butter and onions and sit down at the kitchen counter and chew it up.”

  “Sounds like you don’t think you’re in much danger of losing the bet. What if I lose? What’s my cost?”

  “You take me to a romantic dinner at Cellar in the Sky.”

  “That place is expensive.”

  She poked him playfully in the shoulder. “What’s the matter? Scared you’ll lose?”

  “I am, actually. But not of paying for the dinner. Hell, I’ll take you down there this weekend, win or lose. I’ve been wanting to go there ever since I saw it written up in Gourmet last year, remember?”

  She got up on her tiptoes and kissed him. “You mean that? We can go this weekend?”

  “It’s a date.” He splashed water on his face and looked in the mirror. “If you’re right, and Gibson and Helen Messick are having an affair, I’ve got one hell of a problem on my hands.”

  “Oh, come on, Ry. You’re not going to play morality police and throw the book at him, are you?”

  “Not right now, I’m not. But what happens if he’s stupid enough to keep it up? This is a very small post, Sam. They’ll get stupid and somebody will see them.”

  “Somebody already did. You.”

  “It’s hard for me to believe Gibson’s stupid enough to throw his career in the toilet over Helen Messick. He is the single most ambitious officer in the Army.”

  “Well, he’s messing around with Helen Messick.”

  He laughed. “Messing around with Messick. That’s a good one.”

  “Freudian slip.” She shrugged off her robe, stepped out of her slippers, sat down on the edge of the bed, and began brushing her hair, moving the brush slowly, a ritual she had gone through every night of their lives together. The look on her face was blissful. Her eyes were closed, and without makeup, her face had a soft glow of health and contentment. She was an amazingly beautiful woman, and as he watched her, he wondered what it would be like to be in a marriage that was so weak and troubled that you’d take a stupid chance like Gibson was taking. He felt like the luckiest man in the world.

  He had run into Samantha Hand four years after graduating from West Point in a supermarket in New Orleans. She had been standing at the fish counter, buying soft-shell crabs, and had stood there for several moments watching her before he walked up, surprising her. They had lingered in the supermarket talking about food and wine and the restaurants they’d been to before each of them realized, practically at the same time, that an hour had passed. It had seemed the logical thing to do to go home with her and fry up the soft-shells and make a pan of dirty rice and a salad and share a nice bottle of Bordeaux, and later, when they had found themselves in her bed together, it seemed the logical thing to do to fall in love and get married, which they did just three months later. Everything was so damned easy with her. Being married to her was like the feeling you got when you slipped into an old and very comfortable pair of loafers. You hardly knew you were wearing them, and being with Sam, the feeling was so natural and instinctive, you hardly knew you were married. He had once heard a good friend describe his own marriage as a third person in the room. When Slaight expressed confusion, his friend had explained: “You know, there’s you, and there’s your wife, and over there, sitting in the corner watching everything you do, is the marriage.” It was anything but that with Samantha. In the room of their marriage, all there was was the two of them.

  “Speaking of slips,” he said, walking around the end of the bed, “whatever happened to the little number with the leopard print you used to wear every once in a while? What’s that you’ve got on tonight? All I can see is, it says GAP on the front of your shirt.”

  “Shut up,” she said softly. “It wasn’t a slip, it was a camisole, and at age fifty-one the days of getting dressed up in teeny little things to attract the attentions of my husband are well behind me. Or they should be, anyway.” She grinned at him from beneath the covers, which were pulled up to her chin.

  He climbed in next to her and snaked his leg across the bed, his ankle finding hers. He slipped a hand beneath the curve of her waist and pulled her to him. His lips found hers, and he kissed her eagerly.

  She broke away and nibbled his neck as she felt his hands gently massage her. If there was anything that felt better than the way she felt at this moment—right here, right now—she didn’t know what it was.

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  MAJOR VERNON pulled into the lot next to the Provost Marshal’s office and sat in her car for several moments pondering her dilemma. She had blood-test results but they were inconclusive as to the cause of Dorothy Hamner’s death. DNA results on the vaginal sample were needed before she could request a cross-check against the West Point DNA database. She wondered if she should tell Percival about the vaginal sample and the DNA tests that were being run.

  Almost as quickly as she’d asked herself the question, she settled on its answer. No. There was always a chance that Percival would write up a report of their meeting and forward it through administrative channels. Her military experience told her that was a sure way to produce a leak. If the multiple sex partners of Dorothy Hamner were cadets, she didn’t want them to learn their identities were in danger of being found out, so she decided to stay quiet about the DNA evidence until it was in hand.

  Percival’s office was at the end of the hall. She announced herself to his secretary and waited. Soon the secretary ushered her into his office.

  In a military way, Percival’s office looked like it belonged to a cop. There was an MP helmet sitting on an end table next to the sofa, and a photo on the wall of Percival as a captain at the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin, before the Wall came down. He rose to greet her, walking around his desk. She snapped a salute, which he returned haphazardly. “Major Vernon, good to see you. You’ve got your autopsy finished, I presume.”

  “Partially, sir.”

  Percival looked briefly
puzzled and then motioned for her to take a seat. He relaxed on a sofa as she fingered the clasp of her briefcase. “I’ve got initial results from Walter Reed, sir. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. It turns out that Cadet Hamner had a respiratory condition, sir. Her lungs shut down.”

  “I see.”

  “We don’t know what caused the failure of her lungs, sir. But we do know that she was treating herself with a very powerful drug that she had to have been obtaining from a civilian doctor, because no medical records at the Academy reflect either her pathology or treatment.”

  “What kind of drug was she taking?”

  “A corticosteroid, sir. Most probably prednisone. In large doses. Her blood cortisol level was off the chart.”

  “It sounds to me like the young woman took unauthorized drugs, and they killed her.”

  “That’s the odd thing about this case. The drugs were keeping her alive, sir. She was successfully treating her disease, whatever it was, until the day she died.”

  “Then what killed her, Major?”

  “We don’t know yet, sir.”

  “Tell me what you do know. In detail, please.”

  “Sir, we know that the prednisone she took was controlling an inflammation in her lungs which was basically trying to shut down her lung function. We know that the drug was working, because everything we have learned about her behavior in the days and hours leading up to her death tells us that her breathing and lung function was normal. What we do not know is why on the morning of her death the drug failed to control her inflammation, which appears to have flared out of control and killed her.”

  “You must have some idea of what might have happened,” Percival said, shifting uneasily on the sofa.

  “Yes sir. I believe something else was introduced into her system and interacted with the prednisone and caused it to lose its efficacy and fail.”

  “Do you have any idea what it was?”

  “No sir. But we’re working on it.”

  “What does your instinct tell you, Major?”

  “She could have taken a nonprescription medication which didn’t show up in her blood the next day. She could have been drinking to excess . . .”

  “Did you find a high blood-alcohol level?”

  “No sir, but as you know, alcohol passes rather rapidly from the bloodstream . . .”

  “Then how could booze have killed her the next day?”

  “Because its interaction with the corticosteroids in her blood the day before her death may have been what reduced or destroyed their efficacy, sir.”

  “I’m going to have to report this news to the SJA.” He reached for a phone and told his secretary to get him Colonel Lombardi. He spoke in low tones to Lombardi for a moment and hung up. “I’m going to send you over to see the SJA. Colonel Lombardi wants to be briefed on the results you’ve got so far.”

  Major Vernon snapped her briefcase shut and saluted.

  Percival waited until he heard the door to the outer office close before he walked over and called to his secretary. “Mary? Why don’t you take your coffee break now.” He watched as she picked up her purse and left. Then he closed the door to his office, picked up his desk phone, punched an open line, and dialed.

  “Sir? It’s Percival. There’s something I’ve got to tell you right away.” He fiddled with some pencils on his desk, lining them in a neat row. He checked his watch. “Yes sir. Ten minutes, sir.” He hung up the phone and, spying the raindrops on his window, grabbed his overcoat and the plastic cover for his cap on his way out the door.

  BRIGADIER GENERAL Gibson had turned his chair around and was gazing out his window at the rain-swept Plain as Lieutenant Colonel Percival detailed his meeting with Major Vernon. When Percival finished, Gibson got up and walked over to a large chart on the wall, tapping it with his forefinger. “You see these numbers? They are up in every single measurable category there is at West Point. Overall grade point average? Up. Retention of new cadets in Beast Barracks? Up. Number of high-school honor society members in the new class? Up. Average SAT in the last two classes? Up. Attendance at Sunday services at all three chapels? Up. Donations to the United Fund? Up. Volunteers at cadet-run charities? Up.” He stood gazing at the chart for a moment, then he did a slow about-face. “This investigation is turning into a goddamned joke! She’s got more than enough evidence to close out her autopsy and issue a cause of death! The damn girl was taking drugs! Without authorization! I don’t give a good goddamn if they call it suicide or not, but that young woman killed herself!”

  Percival didn’t respond. He didn’t even nod. He knew enough to know that some of the time—in fact, a lot of the time—generals weren’t looking for a response.

  Slowly, Gibson walked back to his desk and sat down. “You said you sent her over to see Lombardi?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And Lombardi will make a report to Slaight?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You’re close to Lombardi. Find out what Slaight’s reaction is.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You realize we wouldn’t even be sitting here having this conversation if it was a male cadet who died out there on the Plain.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Every goddamned pain-in-the-ass thing that happens around here is because some goddamn female thinks she’s been harassed, or charges some poor doofus with date rape, or calls her goddamned congressman because they’re not selling her brand of tampon in the PX.”

  Percival had heard Gibson complain privately about women at West Point before. He put on a show in public, but behind closed doors, no one hated the presence of women at the Academy as much as Gibson.

  Gibson swiveled his chair to face the Plain. “You’re my point man on this thing, Percival. I’m depending on you.” He raised his right hand, making a salutelike movement over his head.

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  JACEY SLAIGHT was sitting in the half-darkness of her room staring at the screen saver scrolling across her computer monitor. Some guy over in the Fourth Regiment wrote the program and sold it on a 3.5-inch disk for ten dollars. The image was an animation of several cadets in dress gray uniform, walking punishment tours back and forth across the screen with M-14 rifles on their shoulders. Having walked more than a few such punishment tours herself, the screen saver made her laugh every time she saw it. Even though it was rumored that punishment tours were about to suffer the same fate as reveille and be ended, leave it to a cadet to figure out a way to plumb nostalgia, poke fun at the Academy, and make a few bucks, too. Absentmindedly, she tapped the “enter” key. The screen saver blinked off, bringing up her desktop. She clicked on WP NET, logged on to mail exchange, and quickly typed in her password. Nothing much happening in her mailbox. There was a message from a friend over in the First Regiment, asking if they were still on for volleyball the next day, and a note from Ash telling her he had borrowed her Mudhoney CD and would bring it back after band practice that night.

  There was a computer on each and every cadet desk at West Point, and the inter-Corps net called “exchange mail” linked cadet computers with those in the academic departments and the Tactical Department. Exchange mail was private, in that you needed a password to access any cadet’s E-mail. But like many limited nets, the inter-Corps net was overseen by the Academy and monitored by the “Goldcoats,” a group of U.S. Army sergeants who actually wore gold lab coats, and who were responsible for installing and repairing cadet computers. It was also their job to randomly access cadet E-mail through the mail-exchange server and check its content for use of foul language, sexual harassment, and the like. Monitoring of inter-Corps E-mail had a predictable consequence. It drove those seeking privacy to the Internet, a means of communication that cadets could access and was not monitored by snooping Goldcoats.

  Jacey turned off the computer and was about to go to bed when she heard a gentle knock at the door. A voice whispered, “Jacey, are you awake?”

  “Sure. Com
e in.”

  The door opened. Carrie Tannenbaum, who had been Dorothy’s roommate, stepped inside. “I didn’t mean to disturb you, Jacey,” she said.

  “That’s okay. I was just sitting here daydreaming.”

  Carrie closed the door softly behind her. She walked over to Jacey’s desk. She was holding a 3.5-inch floppy. “I was going to save a letter I’d been working on tonight when I found this. It was in my box of blank floppies. I grabbed it and stuck it in the drive, and I went to hit ‘save,’ and this whole list of files came up. They’re Dorothy’s. They look like her E-mail files. She must have put it there.”

  “Let’s go over to your room. Is that okay?” Jacey asked.

  “Sure.”

  They walked down the hall to Carrie’s room. Two weeks after Dorothy’s death, she was still living alone. Dorothy’s bed was a bare mattress, and her side of the closet was empty. The only thing that remained in the room that had been hers was her cadet-issue computer, still on her desk. Jacey flipped on the desk lamp and turned on the computer. In a moment, Windows booted, and Dorothy’s desktop glowed on the monitor. It was standard: a word processor, Netscape, some proprietary engineering programs they had used Cow Year, and Norton Utilities. Jacey turned to Carrie. “What did you use to open the files?”

  “Exchange mail.”

  Jacey loaded exchange mail and stuck the floppy in the 3.5-inch drive. She hit the “open file” icon and hit the A drive button. A password dialogue box appeared.

  “Do you know her password?”

  “Yeah. We traded passwords last year so we could check each other’s E-mail if one of us was gone. It’s . . . uh . . . was ‘Catch-22.’ She just loved that book.”

  Jacey typed in the password and Dorothy’s mail files appeared. She quickly scanned the list of files. You couldn’t tell much about them, because the file names were in a kind of truncated code.