This Enemy Town

by Marcia Talley

  “I guess my sense of humor has gone AWOL along with everything else.”

  He kissed my lower lip, which was protruding petulantly. “No need to ask what you’ve been doing all day, then.”

  “No.”

  I should have told him right then about my little expedition to Chesapeake Harbour, but I opened the fridge and pulled out a chilled bottle of Pinot Grigio instead. “Here,” I said, handing him the bottle. “Make yourself useful.”

  While Paul coaxed the cork out of the bottle using a state-of-the-art corkscrew with ears like the Energizer Bunny, I popped my casserole into the oven, feeling more than a wee bit guilty. Paul and I had a relationship built on trust; I knew I should have consulted him before I went nosing about Goodall’s apartment complex and her gym, but he would have been furious. I’d floated that balloon over the weekend, but he’d quickly shot it down. “Leave all that to Murray,” he had cautioned. “He has an investigator working on it.”

  Paul had a point, I supposed. The last time I’d gone off half cocked, I’d ended up getting kidnapped, along with my eighty-something mystery writer friend, Nadine Gray, a.k.a. L. K. Bromley. But this time there were no high-speed chases, no broken bones, no harm done. I was home, safe and sound, Domestic Diva on Duty. No need to endure one of Paul’s silent, wounded I-told-you-so looks.

  After dinner, while Paul the Penitent cleaned up the kitchen, I carried my second glass of wine down to the basement office and powered up the computer. I checked my e-mail, but there was nothing but a Thinking of You e-card from Emily and the usual trash caught up in my spam filter.

  After I emptied the trash, I clicked on Google, dug the While You Were Out slips out of my pocket and typed the 443 number that belonged to the caller named Chris on the query line. As I anticipated, there was no phonebook listing. If, as I suspected, the number was a cell phone, it wouldn’t be listed in any telephone directory, AT&T, Google, or otherwise.

  Surprisingly, however, Google found quite a few hits for the number on standard Web pages, some going back as far as three years. At one time the 443 number belonged to someone selling used cars on the Internet, but his name was Ed, not Chris. Maybe there had been a typo in the number; or perhaps the number had once belonged to Krazy Ed’s Kleen Kars before it was reassigned to Chris. I moved on, paging through the truncated entries, clicking on each for details.

  It’s amazing what ends up on the Internet, I thought, as I Googled around. (I’d Googled myself once and found minutes of a meeting I’d attended years ago at Whitworth and Sullivan. In the year 3000, colonists on Mars, if they should care to do so, will be able to determine exactly how I felt about hiring a stress management consultant back on Earth in 1998.)

  Chris’s full name, I learned from Google, was Chris Donovan, and his 443 number showed up in the telephone lists of several church and gay rights organizations. If Google was correct, Chris Donovan attended St. George’s Episcopal Church in Arlington, Virginia, served in a financial capacity on its fifteen member vestry, and in his spare time did volunteer work for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and Lambda Legal Defense Fund.

  Well, well, well, I thought. Maybe in her position as SAVI officer, Jennifer Goodall had contacted this Chris Donovan for help in advising Emma Kirby about issues related to her sexual orientation; perhaps she’d even arranged for Emma to talk to Chris Donovan or someone at SLDN or Lambda Legal.

  I jumped from my chair and ran to the foot of the stairs. “Paul! Come here a minute! There’s something I want to show you.”

  When Paul joined me, I filled him in briefly on Chris Donovan, telling him that I’d gotten Chris’s name from one of Jennifer’s neighbors, which was true, as far as it went.

  “Marisa thought Chris might be a boyfriend,” I told my husband, “but now I think he’s someone Jennifer consulted with.”

  I pointed to the website for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. “It says here,” I read, “that SLDN is a ‘national, nonprofit legal services, watchdog, and policy organization dedicated to ending discrimination against and harassment of military personnel affected by Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and related forms of intolerance.’”

  “A noble endeavor,” Paul commented, “but what does SLDN have to do with you, unless there’s something you’ve been meaning to tell me?”

  “I’m thinking,” I said, backpedaling as fast as I could in an attempt to protect Emma’s privacy, “that in her position as SAVI officer, Jennifer might have contacted this Chris person about one of her cases. If Jennifer had been advised to report someone up the chain of command for being homosexual, or for harassing a homosexual, that might have been a strong motive for that somebody to kill her. Other than me, I mean.”

  “But DOD has an antiharassment action plan.” Paul flashed a crooked smile. “The faculty’s had its consciousness raised several times about this plan since it first came out in 2000. As I recall, military chaplains and health care providers etcetera are given clear instructions not to ‘out’ service members who come to them for help.”

  “Tell that to Marine Lance Corporal Blessing,” I said, tapping the monitor with my finger. “He was discharged for asking a military psychologist questions about sexual orientation. The psychologist, it says here somewhere, was just following the guidelines in the Navy’s General Medical Officer Manual.”

  “That’s the Marine Corps, Hannah, not the Naval Academy.”

  “I know that, but something must have been going on with Chris Donovan in relation to the Academy.” I clicked the back button a few times. “Here it is: Donovan’s also associated with—at least electronically—a group called USNA Out. It’s a Naval Academy alumni group—not sanctioned by the Academy, no surprise—whose mission is to mentor gay midshipmen still bound by Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

  “And this, too.” I followed another link. “Someone named Chris Donovan is also loosely connected with an outfit called PlanetOut, which helps LGBT military personnel protect their online communications from Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell discharges.”

  Paul frowned. “What’s LGBT?”

  “Lesbian, Gay Men, Bisexual, and Transgendered People.”

  “Well, excepting for animal husbandry, that should about cover it.”

  “Paul, do be serious!”

  “Sorry.” He rested a hand lightly on my shoulder. “It’s just that I can’t tell you how much I don’t care about someone’s sexual orientation. It’s simply not on my radar screen. And as for gays in the military, was it Barry Goldwater who said, ‘You don’t have to be straight to shoot straight.’”

  “Couldn’t agree with you more,” I said. “Gay soldiers are fighting and dying in Iraq right this minute, and keeping mum about their sexual orientation in order to do it.”

  I stared at the monitor for a moment, trying to organize the thoughts caroming around in my head. “But it’s entirely possible that I’m barking up the wrong tree by pursuing the gay angle. Someone suggested to me that this fellow, Chris, is a friend or former colleague of Jennifer Goodall.”

  Paul scowled. “Someone?”

  “Never mind, just wait!” I typed St. George and Arlington into Google and instantly found myself back at the Web page for St. George’s Episcopal Church. A few clicks later I sat back and pointed to the monitor in triumph. “There!”

  Paul leaned forward. His ear brushed my cheek and his breath blew warm across my neck as he read aloud from the brief bio Chris had posted when he ran for his position on the St. George vestry. Then he whistled. “So, when he’s not working with gay rights organizations, Chris is a civilian personnel specialist working at the Pentagon.”

  “Interesting, no?”

  “Very.”

  “So if Chris Donovan is, or was, a civilian working at the Pentagon about the same time as Jennifer Goodall, he might have known her.”

  “Hannah, the Pentagon is a huge place. I’ll bet you twenty-five or twenty-six thousand people work there. That’s bigger than half of the cities in Amer
ica.”

  “Yes, but if you read that bio carefully, Mr. Ives, you’ll see that at one time or another, both Chris Donovan and Jennifer Goodall appear to have worked in the Navy’s office of Weapons Acquisition and Management, the same department that’s now headed up by a certain Admiral Theodore E. Hart. From the dates, I’d guess that their time in that office didn’t overlap, but still, I think that’s interesting, don’t you?”

  Paul pulled up a chair and sat down on it, hard. I had him completely on board. “Type this in,” he instructed. He gave me the URL for a Web page accessible to Academy staff and alumni only. I did as I was told and found myself at a page where I could type in the name and/or class year of any Naval Academy grad.

  “We know Jennifer Goodall graduated with the class of 1999,” Paul said. “So, type in ‘Donovan.’”

  My fingers flew over the keys, I hit Return, and in less than a second there he was, Lieutenant Chris Donovan, Class of 1999, near the bottom of a list of thirty-seven Donovans who had attended the Naval Academy since Robert Donovan graduated in 1877.

  I fell back in my chair. “Holy moly! Jennifer Goodall and Chris Donovan were classmates!”

  “Now that, I’d say, takes it completely out of the realm of coincidence,” Paul said. “We must call Murray.” He reached for the telephone.

  “Do you have any connections at the Pentagon these days?” I forged on. “Someone I could talk to?”

  “Hannah, as I told you this weekend, I think it’s risky for you to go poking around.” He started punching numbers. “Please, let’s just make sure to pass on to Murray any information you turn up and let him and his highly trained staff handle it.” He covered the mouthpiece of the receiver with his hand. “He’s getting paid for this, remember.”

  As if I could forget. Our vacations for the next ten years were bankrolling Murray and his highly trained staff. Goodbye fifteenth century villas in the gently rolling hills of Tuscany. Hello to tours of Maryland’s scenic Eastern Shore at the wheel of our Volvo.

  “Good grief, Paul,” I chided. “Nobody could be more involved than me. It’s my life that’s on the line. If Chris Donovan is a spurned boyfriend who murdered Jennifer, asking him questions will only put him on his guard. Or, consider this,” I said as a new thought occurred to me. “What if Chris Donovan is gay, and Jennifer was running true to form and threatened to ‘out’ him?”

  Paul shook his head. “Donovan’s a civilian, remember? He must have served the five years he owed the Navy, then got out. The Pentagon doesn’t discriminate against gays, as long as they have the good sense to remain civilians.”

  “I’d still like to poke around and find out a little more about Donovan. I can ask Dorothy Hart about him, for one thing. If Chris Donovan worked for her husband, she might know something.”

  “I can see that I’m not going to change your mind.” Paul reached out and squeezed my hand. “Talk to Dorothy, but for the love of God, Hannah, please, be careful.”

  I kissed the tip of his nose. “Of course I will.”

  While Paul left a message on Murray’s home answering machine, I clicked the Print button and watched the printer spew out several pages of information about the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network and USNA Out.

  After Paul hung up, I said, “But you didn’t answer my question. Do you have any connections at the Pentagon?”

  Paul leaned back in the chair with his hands behind his head. “Jack Turley might still be there.”

  “That gawky redhead who used to play basketball for Navy?”

  Paul grinned. “‘That gawky redhead,’ as you so eloquently put it, is now a captain in the United States Navy working for one of the Under Secretaries of the Navy for Something or Other. The last time I saw him was at Homecoming for his twentieth class reunion.”

  I groaned. “That makes me feel positively ancient.”

  Paul stood up and patted my head affectionately. “We are ancient, my dear.” He bent down and kissed my cheek. “Jack gave me his business card at the game. I have it at the office somewhere. I’ll try to reach him in the morning. Coming to bed?”

  “In a minute. Your decrepit old wife needs to shut down her computer.”

  “No last minute games of solitaire?”

  “No solitaire. Promise.” I grinned up at him. “It’s no fun playing with myself.”

  Paul’s fingers trailed lightly down the length of my arm, lingering briefly on my fingertips. “That’s just what I was hoping you’d say.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The next day was Friday. While I waited for Paul to locate Captain Turley’s business card and engineer an invitation from his former student for me to visit the Pentagon, I made it a point to track Dorothy down. I found her at the Academy, curled up in a chair in the Hart Room—no relation!—drinking coffee from a paper cup and reading a book.

  I hadn’t seen Dorothy since my arrest—hadn’t seen much of anybody, really—so I was relieved when she shot out of her chair and embraced me like a long lost twin, separated at birth. “Hannah,” she gushed. “I’m so, so sorry!”

  “So am I!” I stepped back from her embrace and studied her face for any sign of suspicion or mistrust. “I didn’t do it, you know.”

  Her cheeks flushed. “Of course you didn’t, silly! Everyone knows that.”

  “Not the FBI, apparently.”

  She waved a hand dismissively. “They’ll figure that out. Ted says that the evidence against you is circumstantial at best.” She seized my hand and dragged me toward a chair. “Sit. Tell me about it.”

  I settled into the upholstered chair next to the one she had been sitting in and tucked my feet comfortably under me. The last thing I wanted was to relive the horror and embarrassment of the worst week, bar none, of my life to date, so I said, “I’ll spare you the gory details. Suffice it to say that I’m out on bail and that my lawyer is, as we speak, working his tail off on my behalf.”

  “He’s good?”

  “Very good.”

  Dorothy sipped her coffee, her amber eyes serious over the plastic lid that covered her cup. “I just can’t imagine what evidence they can have against you, Hannah.”

  “I only know what I read in the papers, Dorothy. The Sun said that Jennifer was killed with the hammer I’d been using to build the sets for Sweeney Todd. It did occur to the reporter, at least, that perhaps that would explain why my fingerprints were all over it.”

  “If that’s all there is, it’s pretty lame,” Dorothy remarked.

  I nodded. I considered telling my friend about the bloody sweatshirt and the witness who had supposedly seen me behind Mahan Hall on the day of the murder, but I could hear Murray Simon’s voice rasping in my ear, cautioning me to trust no one, and for once I erred on the side of caution and listened. “My lawyer’s talking to the U.S. Attorney in charge of my case,” I explained. “Sooner or later they’ll have to share whatever evidence they have against me, but I must say, they seem to be dragging their feet.”

  “Frankly,” Dorothy said, “I didn’t expect to see you here today.”

  “What else am I going to do? Stay at home and pull the covers over my head?” I paused and pressed my fingertips against my eyelids, suddenly overwhelmed by a strong wave of déjà vu.

  “Hannah? Are you all right?” Dorothy’s voice seemed to be spiraling down a long tunnel.

  I opened my eyes. “I’ve never been arrested before, Dorothy, but I was just thinking that it doesn’t feel that much different from being diagnosed with cancer.”

  Dorothy sucked in her lower lip and nodded. Clearly I was speaking a language that she could understand.

  “What I mean is, in either case, there’s the very real possibility that I’ll lose my freedom at the end of it, by incarceration on the one hand, or death on the other.”

  Dorothy’s eyes grew wide. “Cut it out, Hannah, you’re scaring me.”

  “Sometimes I scare myself.” I patted her knee reassuringly. “What I’m trying to say is that in bot
h cases I feel such a lack of control, that I’m compelled …” I paused to reflect for a moment. “… no, I’m driven to do something, anything, because standing still is, at least for me, simply too frightening and painful.” I forced a smile. “Usually I try to keep myself so busy solving other people’s problems that I don’t have time to worry about my own.”

  A single tear rolled down Dorothy’s cheek. “I can’t tell you how helpful you’ve been to me. The sets, the hats …” She waved her hand in a circular motion. “I don’t know how I’ll ever pay you back.”

  “Not necessary,” I said, thinking that this was the time if ever there was one to call in that particular IOU, but I didn’t want to jump on it too soon. Dorothy seemed particularly fragile that afternoon; she needed propping up. “I’m sure the time will come when you’ll be a great help to me, too,” I continued, “not to mention all the other breast cancer survivors you’re bound to come into contact with. As an admiral’s wife, you’ll be able to play a particularly influential role in getting the word out about the importance of breast self-exams, early detection—”

  Dorothy startled me by cutting me off in mid-sentence. “Why did you come this afternoon, Hannah?”

  “I knew you had chemo tomorrow, so I wasn’t sure if you’d be up to checking the set. I left a message on your cell phone—”

  “Go home and relax, Hannah,” she interrupted again, drawing on some inner strength hidden well within to pull herself upright. “I can take care of checking the set tonight.”

  “That’s all I’ve been doing lately, sitting home and … well, not relaxing, exactly. Obsessing would be more like it. We can check the set together, then.”

  “Ted says … well, never mind what Ted says. Sometimes he’s such a know-it-all that it makes me want to scream. I swear to God, if I said ‘Knit one, purl two,’ he’d say, ‘No, Dorothy, think about it for a minute. It’s “‘Knit two, purl one.”’ And he doesn’t know a goddamn thing about knitting.”