Full Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  Slaight ran his fingers along one of the elegant blue veins that showed through the skin of her forearm. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t really know my own daughter.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Sam.

  “I didn’t get to see her half as much as you did when she was growing up. I was always working long Army hours, and there were those times when I was overseas in Korea, or gone for six months on some damn temporary duty. Even when I was home for a stretch, I didn’t do the stuff you did, like drive her to soccer, or pick her up from ballet lessons, or go shopping with her at the mall. I think I missed out on a lot.”

  “Well, you’re not a mother, you’re a father. But we had vacations, and you used to take her on those long drives between duty stations. Remember? You insisted that I fly and get there early and do the whole quarters thing. I always thought you wanted that time to yourself with her.”

  “I did.”

  “You’re a good father. She loves you very much, Ry.”

  “I know, but I still feel like there’s something missing between us. I don’t think she feels like she can talk to me the way she talks to you.”

  “Trust me. It’s a girl thing.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “You know I am.” She rolled off his lap and stood up. “Are you interested in sautéing some scallops and peas while I boil us up some pasta?”

  “You bet I am.”

  “Do you think we should call Jacey and see if she wants to come over?”

  Following behind her, he reached up and grabbed her ass. “Nope. I want you all to myself.” She laughed and ran ahead of him into the kitchen. He stopped at the screen door and stood there for a moment, watching her lean over to reach for a pot at the back of a cabinet. He’d seen her do it literally thousands of times in kitchens big and small, in quarters they had lived in quite literally all over the world, and it was like he could remember every time she had ever opened a cabinet and reached for a pot. There was one thing you could say about the kind of long-term marriage they had. The years piled memory atop memory until finally you found yourself standing there on a hill and the view you had was of your life together. He knew that in cities like New York and Los Angeles, people paid millions of dollars to live in penthouses or houses in the Hollywood Hills with views of the city.

  Suddenly, he felt lucky. The price he’d paid for his view could only be measured in years, and he was thankful for every one of them.

  CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  ON THE afternoon after the meeting at the organ-practice room, Rose called the office of the Commandant and requested a meeting. Gibson instructed his secretary to tell Rose to meet at his office after supper the next day. The Com had a suspicion this was not going to turn out to be one of their regular meetings about the Honor Committee.

  Rose entered the Corn’s office, snapped a salute, and sat down stiffly in a chair across the desk from the Com.

  “What’s on your mind, Jerry?”

  “Sir, we’ve got a problem. Jacey Slaight found out Dorothy Ham-ner was at our Labor Day party.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Prudhomme, sir. He was at the party, too.”

  “Who brought Hamner to the party?”

  “Favro, sir.”

  “So she went to your party. I don’t see the problem, Rose.”

  “Three of us had sex with her, sir.”

  “You idiots gang-banged Hamner? What in hell were you thinking?”

  “We didn’t gang-bang her, sir.”

  “So who fucked her?”

  “Sir, it was me and Favro and Ivar.”

  Gibson rolled his eyes. “Did she put up any resistance?”

  “No sir.”

  “So none of you forced yourself on the girl, is that correct?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Gibson leaned back in his desk chair. ‘‘You realize what you little bastards have done? You let your dicks do your thinking for you, and you put everything we have worked for in jeopardy.”

  “Sir, I realize we made a mistake, but I think there’s a way we can recover from it.”

  An odd, guttural sound surged from somewhere deep in Gibson’s chest, startling Rose. The Commandant’s eyes bulged, his upper body jerked forward, and when he pointed his cigar at Rose, it was shaking. “You think you can handle this, do you, Mr. Rose?”

  “Uh, yes sir . . .”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking when I hand-picked you for Honor Chairman. It’s a goddamned miracle you can find your way back to your own room at night.”

  Rose stared at the Com, eyes unblinking. He’d never seen Gibson explode like this before. He sat there considering his options. Neither of them were particularly savory. He could take the position that a West Point sexual group-grope was nothing new at the Academy and would fall into the wastebasket of “What else is new?” But he knew well the downside. Politically correct feminists at the Academy would call for their scalps.

  His other option was to apply some pressure of his own to Gibson. There was a strange thing about ranking cadets and officers at West Point. They needed each other, and often it was difficult for either side to know how much.

  Rose chose the second option. What did he have to lose? His career hadn’t even really begun. Gibson, on the other hand, was what the Army called a “fast-burner,” a man in a hurry. For this reason Rose felt he held the upper hand by the thinnest of margins.

  He began slowly and deliberately: “General Gibson, I came here this evening to tell you that several of us have made a mistake. We can deal with the mistake we made, but I’m not sure West Point can handle this thing if it gets out of hand.”

  Gibson snarled, “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Sir, if it’s revealed that we had a party and that several of us had sex with Dorothy Hamner, it will be damaging, but not fatally. The fact she didn’t charge anyone with date rape is evidence enough that the sex was consensual. The wild card in this thing is Jacey Slaight. She’s got Dorothy Hamner’s E-mail, and I am not certain what it contains.”

  “You mean there were messages to this girl from some of our people?”

  “Favro sent her E-mail messages, sir, and Jacey Slaight has them. She knows who was at the party. She’s getting too close to us, sir. I know she’s not going to stop with Dorothy Hamner. She’ll keep digging and digging. She’s going to figure out everyone at the party was on the Honor Committee, and if she starts snooping around and discovers that we’ve been using the committee to cleanse the Corps of unworthy people, we’ve got a problem that I know I cannot handle.”

  “Listen to me, Rose, and listen good. Slaight’s daughter won’t find out a thing if you keep our people lined up on this thing. Do you hear me? This calls for airtight discipline. Everything we did with the committee was done to reestablish the warrior culture here at West Point. The committee did its duty when it sent those who did not measure up to our standards back to civilian life where they belonged. You and the others are to be commended, Rose. You have upheld the ancient warrior values of West Point. You have helped to turn us back from the dangerous slide West Point was making into weakness and disorder. Do you understand me, Rose? You’ve got to get our people to stand together!”

  “Sir, I can assure you that we’ll stand up and do everything we can to stop her, but she’s the Supe’s daughter, sir. She’s got a direct line straight to the top. If it were anyone else in the Corps, I could give you an ironclad guarantee that we could handle it. But not Jacey Slaight, sir. This Dorothy Hamner thing has driven her crazy. She’s out of control.”

  “You’re telling me because this goddamned female dropped dead out on the Plain, everything we’ve worked for is in jeopardy.”

  “Sir, what I’m saying is we can shut this thing down, but we’re going to need some help. I will talk to Jacey Slaight, but I am not certain I will be able to convince her to pull in her horns.”

  “So you want me to do it fo
r you.”

  “Sir, you’re the Commandant. You have resources we don’t have.”

  Gibson swiveled his desk chair around, facing the windows. He lit a cigar and remained in that position for what seemed to Rose like several moments. When he turned back around and spoke, his voice was steady but half an octave lower. It was clear to Rose that Gibson didn’t know where this was taking him, and it made him nervous.

  “I’m going to need something on Slaight’s daughter. I want you to handle it yourself. Favro is a hothead, and Ivar is good for only one thing: yardage. Lessard’s too easily frightened, and Reade is a pompous, strutting peacock. That’s why I made him Adjutant. What about Prudhomme? How much does he know about us?”

  “He doesn’t know anything, sir.”

  “Are you certain of that?”

  “Positive, sir.”

  “What’s his relationship with Slaight’s daughter?”

  “She broke up with him, sir. He’s pretty angry at her right now.”

  “Pump him for everything you can get on her. You’ve got to come up with some dirt on her that I can use against that SOB Slaight over in the Headquarters Building. He’s the one we’ve got to worry about. I’ve heard he’s going to appoint a female dean. He’s fixing to turn this place over to a bunch of politically correct pantywaists, and I’m going to stop him.”

  “Yes sir.” Rose relaxed. His ploy had worked. The Com thought that he, Rose, was carrying water for the Commandant, when in fact it was the other way around. Gibson was going at Slaight through his daughter, and he needed Rose to do it for him.

  “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that Slaight’s daughter has injected herself into the middle of this thing. It puts her right in our crosshairs. If we can bring down his daughter, we can bring him down. And not so incidentally, everything we’ve worked to accomplish here at West Point will be protected as well.”

  “Sir, you can trust me to get Jacey Slaight for you.”

  Gibson took a satisfying pull on his cigar. He was pleased with the Chairman of the Honor Committee. He was indeed a cadet in his own image: cunning, ruthless, and smart. “I’m counting on you, Jerry.”

  Rose saluted General Gibson, picked up his cap, and left. The moment Gibson heard Rose descending the stairs, he picked up the Phone and dialed the number in Washington, D.C., belonging to his friend and mentor, Cecil Avery.

  “Cecil? It’s Jack Gibson. I need you to get a message to Congressman Thrunstone for me. He’s coming up to the Point this weekend for the game with Southern Illinois. I want Thrunstone to know that I don’t trust Slaight and neither should he. Slaight’s carrying water for that piece of shit Meuller. He’s on the wrong side of every issue we care about. Tell Thrunstone I believe Slaight is a danger to our Army and a danger to our nation. He’s hell-bent on moving females into every nook and cranny of the Army. I want Thrunstone to understand that Slaight is one of the politically correct assholes who are weakening our standards, weakening our Army, and weakening our national defense. Thanks, Cecil.”

  Gibson hung up the phone and allowed himself a satisfied smile. The Superintendent’s visit with the Chairman of the House National Security Committee would be spun in a way he was certain that Slaight would never expect.

  BOOK

  * * *

  TWO

  * * *

  CHAPTER 20

  * * *

  THERE WAS no direct route to take from West Point to Oneonta, so Jacey decided on Route 28 west out of Kingston through the Catskills. She hadn’t made that drive since the previous winter, when, as a member of the Ski Patrol, she used to take weekend trips up to Belleayre or Hunter Mountain for training. She passed through the familiar little towns of Mount Tremper and Phoenicia and Highmount, and from there journeyed into an even more sparsely populated area of the state. Ten or fifteen miles would pass before the next little town emerged from within the trees. Finally she drove beneath the 1-88 underpass into Oneonta.

  It was a college town with a state university and a private liberal-arts school located a few miles from one another. Leafy streets were lined with turn-of-the-century houses, and the downtown business district was still intact, not having been seriously challenged by a mall sited in a field on the edge of town. Oneonta reminded her of the towns outside the gates of the Army posts on which she had grown up. Like an Army town, it was a one-industry kind of place. You could drive its streets and imagine pipe-smoking English professors behind every fifth door.

  She found the Hamner house on a cul-de-sac near the state university. It was a split-level that had probably been built sometime in the early 1960s in the spasm of domestic-dwelling modernity that somehow concluded that houses should have both a “family” room and a “living” room, that these two spaces should be on separate floors, and that the main entrance to the home should provide you with your choice of rooms. You could descend the half-stairs into the “family” room or ascend similar stairs into the “living” room. Jacey had lived in a split-level when she was in high school and her father had been stationed in the D.C. area, and she had concluded that its architectural style had probably reflected the state of the American family when the house was built. Houses were split and families were split and kids were confronted every day with choices of families and lifestyles and a dozen other decisions that should never have been theirs to make in the first place. The second half of the twentieth century had been a schizophrenic age, and even the dwellings in which families as well as floor space were split reflected this.

  She parked on the street and knocked at the side door under the carport. Mrs. Hamner answered. Jacey had met her several times over the years. The last time had been when the Hamners came to the Academy to claim Dorothy’s body, and Jacey’s company had provided the honor guard that carried the casket to the hearse. Mrs. Hamner looked younger than the mothers of the other cadets Jacey knew. She had thought maybe Dorothy had been born when her mother was about seventeen or eighteen. But the youthful glow Mrs. Hamner had shown before was gone now. She had lost weight. Her face was thin and drawn, and there were lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there last year.

  “Jacey, please, come in. It was good of you to call.” Mrs. Hamner gave her a clinging hug. When she pulled away, she turned quickly toward the kitchen sink. “Would you like a cup of coffee, or maybe some tea?”

  “Yes ma’am, tea would be great,” Jacey said.

  When Jacey had found Dorothy’s private E-mail on floppy disks that she had hidden in her roommate’s file box, she wondered if there weren’t more disks that Dorothy had taken home. She had called Mrs. Hamner and asked if she could drive up and bring a few things of Dorothy’s that had been inadvertently left behind. On the phone, Mrs. Hamner had seemed eager to see her. Dorothy had been an only child. Jacey could only imagine her loneliness and depth of loss.

  As Mrs. Hamner busied herself making tea, they chatted awkwardly about West Point football. The Hamners were big fans and had attended every game while Dorothy was alive. The victory over UVA last Saturday had been a delightful surprise, Mrs. Hamner said. They had wished the game had been televised. She guessed they’d have to wait for the Army–Navy game to see the cadets play again. They wouldn’t be attending any more games at Michie Stadium. The memories were too painful. Her voice caught and she leaned both hands against the sink. For a moment, Jacey thought she was going to cry and moved to comfort her. But Mrs. Hamner recovered her composure and poured two cups of tea, and they sat down at the kitchen table.

  Jacey had spent the drive to Oneonta trying to figure out the best way to handle the situation, but there wasn’t a best way, or even a better way. She reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope containing the E-mail disks and put it on the table. “Carrie found these in one of her storage files, Mrs. Hamner. They are floppy disks that contain Dorothy’s private E-mail. We thought you might like to have them, since some of them are letters she wrote home, and letters she received from you and her fat
her.”

  Mrs. Hamner took a deep breath, her eyes wide. Then she held up her hands defensively. “It’s . . . it’s too painful. You keep them. Her father and I have our memories. That’s all we want . . . our memories.”

  Jacey picked up the envelope and was going to put it back into her purse when she thought better of it and placed the envelope back on the table. “Mrs. Hamner, I wasn’t exactly straight with you on the phone when I called from West Point. Returning these private E-mail disks isn’t the only reason I wanted to come up here and talk to you. There is a third disk we found that may be important in finding out why Dorothy died. We found messages about a party she attended the day before she died. I think something may have happened to Dorothy at the party which contributed to her death.”

  Mrs. Hamner folded her hands in her lap and looked out the kitchen window. “Dorothy told me about the party. She was so excited. She had a new boyfriend. She was just beginning her senior year. She had her whole life in front of her . . .” Mrs. Hamner’s voice trailed away, and she raised her hands to her lips as if in prayer. “She took such delight in her life at West Point. It’s hard for me to believe that she won’t ever walk through the door again with a big smile on her face carrying a bag of laundry for me to do for her.”

  Jacey took a sip of tea and waited. Mrs. Hamner reached for the envelope and the floppies spilled out onto the table. She looked over at Jacey, a great sadness seeming to deepen and darken her eyes. “Dorothy’s computer is upstairs in her room. Neither her father or I have touched anything of hers since she died.”

  “Ma’am, I can hardly imagine how painful this is for you, but I’d like to have a look at Dorothy’s computer. It’s important to me, Mrs. Hamner, because she was my friend, and I need to know what happened to her. Do you understand? I promise you nothing is going to happen that will harm Dorothy’s reputation. I promise you that, Mrs. Hamner.”