This Enemy Town

by Marcia Talley

  Again, Dorothy had given me an opening to ask about her husband, and this time I leapt in with both feet. “It’s actually your husband that I wanted to ask you a question about.”

  “Yes?”

  “Were you aware that before she came to the Academy, Jennifer Goodall worked in the Pentagon for Navy Weapons Acquisition and Management?”

  Dorothy’s skin was already pale as a result of her chemotherapy. I didn’t think it was possible for it to get any more so, but I was wrong. She collapsed into the upholstery, and whatever color remained in her face drained away, leaving it a chalky white, only serving to emphasize the bags, dark as bruises, under her eyes. The hand holding her coffee cup began to shake.

  I took the cup and set it on the table. “Dorothy! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She laced her fingers together, squeezing until the knuckles grew white, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I guess you’re bound to find out anyway, you or that lawyer of yours.”

  “Find out what?”

  “That Ted and Jennifer Goodall were having an affair.”

  “What?” Dorothy’s news hit me like a two-by-four between the eyes. But as I sat there, trying to catch my breath, pieces of the puzzle began falling into place. Admiral Hart’s unscheduled visits to the Academy, visits that surprised his wife as well as his son. Jennifer Goodall’s persistent presence in Mahan Hall. I added the admiral’s name to my growing list of suspects, right at the top of the list. I shivered, recalling the inside knowledge he seemed to have about my case. What was the sonofabitch up to, anyway? Was he planning to frame me?

  “Had, actually,” Dorothy continued, twisting her hands. “Ted had broken it off. He told me that Jennifer was too needy.” She turned her wretched face to me. “As if I didn’t have needs, too.”

  “Do you think that’s why your husband kept showing up at the Academy?”

  “He was trying to work it out,” she sniffed, “but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She kept threatening to turn him in for conduct unbecoming.” Using her fingertips, she massaged her temples in little circles. “Whatever some high-level government muckety-mucks have been able to get away with, I can tell you that the Navy still frowns on officers having sex with their subordinates.”

  “Even when it’s consensual? You said they were having an affair.”

  “Well that’s it, then, isn’t it? Jennifer claimed it wasn’t consensual.”

  Where had I heard that before?

  I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees. “Dorothy, you read what the newspaper said about my case, didn’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you know that Jennifer has tried this trick before. With my husband!”

  “Looks like we both had a reason to wish her dead.” She dredged up a smile from somewhere and pasted it, lopsided, on her face.

  “You and me, and how many others?” I wondered aloud.

  Dorothy sat silently for a while, staring over my shoulder. “Ted, for instance,” she said dreamily, still staring at the wall.

  Ted, indeed. Interesting how often the good admiral’s name kept coming up.

  “Dorothy, look at me! You’ve been worrying about this, haven’t you? Losing sleep over it?”

  She nodded.

  “Your job—your only job—is to concentrate on getting well.”

  “I know,” she squeaked, meek as a kitten.

  “As much as I’d like someone else to be in the frame for Jennifer’s murder, if the FBI had evidence against Ted, surely they’d have arrested him by now, and not me.”

  A tear rolled down one cheek and dripped, unheeded, onto her sweater. “I suppose.”

  Hoping to steer the conversation in a less stressful direction, I said, “Dorothy, do you remember anybody who worked with your husband named Chris Donovan? A civilian?”

  Dorothy had found a crumpled tissue in her pocket and was dabbing at her nose. “I don’t think so,” she said, giving her nose a good blow. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just someone whose name keeps coming up in connection with Jennifer Goodall,” I told her.

  A shadow passed over Dorothy’s face, but just as quickly, it was gone. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Never heard of a Chris, but then, Ted works with hundreds and hundreds of people, all the world over.”

  “I know,” I said. “And so did Lieutenant Jennifer Goodall, USN.” I sighed. “Seems to me that our pool of suspects just keeps expanding. Pretty soon we’ll need a stadium to hold them all.”

  Dorothy stuffed her used tissue into the liquid still remaining in her coffee cup, straightened her shoulders and smiled a crooked but unconvincing smile. “I’ll ask Ted about Chris Donovan,” she offered. “If I find out anything, I’ll let you know. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  As we left the Hart Room together, my arm around her shoulders, Dorothy turned to ask, “Hannah, can you do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tomorrow I have my chemo, as you know, so I probably won’t be up to much on Sunday. Could you check the sets before the matinee?”

  “Of course,” I said as we started down the elegant marble staircase, side by side. “Consider it done.”

  “Thanks.”

  At the bottom of the stairs I turned to face her. “Dorothy, go home. Get some rest.”

  She wrapped her arms around me in a brief hug. “Ditto ditto, Hannah.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Paul is one of those professors former students go out of their way to visit whenever they return to Annapolis. It’s the rare individual who can take a subject like advanced mathematics and make it interesting, let alone comprehensible, yet Paul manages to do it, year after year. His students have gone on to win Rhodes scholarships, reading “maths” at Oxford, where they dig into such fascinating topics as recursive Bayesian estimation or topological manifolds, none of which makes the least bit of sense to me, but then, I majored in French.

  Paul’s students are so grateful, some enormously so, that they donate money to the Academy in his name. One former student, now a honcho at Dell, endowed the Ives Prize in Mathematics, given to the graduate each year who makes the most significant use of computing in his or her work.

  And there are name plates in Paul’s honor, two affixed to chairs in Alumni Hall and one on a seat in the “Club Level” section of the refurbished Naval Academy stadium. Some grateful grad with a sense of humor even shelled out $1,000 to name a locker after Paul in the Roger Staubach Locker Room at Rickett’s Hall. Paul, ever modest, takes it in stride. When I tease him about his memorial locker, he smiles. “In my honor, Hannah, in my honor. When they start giving money in my memory, that’s when you start to worry.”

  Captain Jack Turley, it turned out, was one of these grateful students. Two decades ago, Paul had coached him to a solid A in Double E—Electrical Engineering—and there was nothing Turley wouldn’t do for Paul, including inviting me to tour the Pentagon and allowing me to pick his brain, on short notice, too. Incredibly, we were on for Saturday, the following day. Naturally, Paul would be coming along, too. (Naturally.) And how about lunch? (How very kind.)

  Since the senseless terrorist acts of September 11, parking at the Pentagon, always a problem, had become ill-advised, so we piled into the Volvo and drove to New Carrollton, where we planned to catch the Orange Line train into Washington, D.C. As Paul pulled into the long-term parking garage, I caught a flash of green in my side-view mirror. I gasped and squeezed Paul’s arm. “Look! There’s that green Taurus again. I swear he’s been following me.”

  Paul glanced into the rearview mirror. “Where?”

  I swiveled in my seat, but the Taurus had vanished. All I could see was a lineup of taxis at the Kiss-and-Ride and two Metro buses, spewing exhaust.

  Paul rolled down his window, stuck out his arm for the ticket. “Do you know how many Ford Tauruses are being driven in the U.S. right now?”

  I shook my head.


  “I don’t know, either,” he chuckled as he steered the Volvo up the ramp that led to the second parking level, “but at the end of 2002, Ford celebrated the production of the five millionth Taurus.”

  “You’re making that up just to make me feel better.”

  “No, I looked it up.” He pulled into a parking space, hauled up on the emergency brake, and turned sideways in his seat to face me. He tapped my nose with the tip of his finger. “I’m not the only Googler around the house, you know, sweetheart.”

  As Paul turned off the ignition and released his seat belt, I studied his profile, strong, solid, familiar. I knew he was trying to be reassuring, but if so, the move had backfired. Why had Paul taken the trouble to look up information about Tauruses? I wondered. Had he been seeing phantom Tauri, too?

  Inside the station, Paul handed me a five dollar bill. We stood side by side at adjoining ticket machines, waiting while the machines inhaled our money, judged it acceptable, and spit out our fare cards. Neither of us said anything as we joined the line of people climbing the escalator to the platform—D.C. subway riders wouldn’t be caught dead simply standing to the right on the moving stairs—and scooted into seats on the train just as the doors were closing. Although I was sure they’d find it fascinating, I had no intention of sharing my run-in with the law with the other passengers, so Paul and I sat side by side, forearms mashed together, saying little, exchanging sections of the Baltimore Sun to pass the journey.

  When the doors opened at L’Enfant Plaza, we hustled to the upper level, where we switched to the Yellow Line train that would head south through the city, briefly rise into the daylight as it crossed the Potomac, then dive back into the tunnel that would take us to the Pentagon.

  “Have you ever been to the Pentagon before?” I asked Paul, breaking the silence as our train rolled into the underground Pentagon station.

  “Never,” he replied as the doors slid open and we stepped onto the platform. “After all these years, you’d think I’d have made it over here, but no. I’m looking forward to it.”

  On our way up the escalator, Paul explained that Captain Jack Turley served as the military assistant to one of several Under Secretaries of Defense whose offices were on the third floor of the labyrinthine building, in a VIP corridor only a few doors down from Donald Rumsfeld.

  “But what does he do?” I asked as the escalator spit us out near the Pentagon bus stop.

  “You’ll have to ask Jack,” Paul said, “but I imagine that he does whatever the Secretary asks him to.” He looped his arm through mine and led me around to the main entrance, where a line had formed in front of a kiosk. Security personnel sat at tables under an awning, inspecting handbags and briefcases. I was about to hand over my bag when somebody came pounding up behind us. “Sorry I’m late. Couldn’t find a cab.”

  It was my lawyer, Murray Simon.

  I hauled out my permagrin and arranged it across my face. “Murray, what a surprise.” Then I aimed a scowl at my husband.

  “Sorry, Hannah,” Murray panted as he unbuttoned his overcoat. “I can tell from your expression how happy you are to see me, but Paul thought it was important for me to be here. You’re in trouble, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “How could I forget when you’re always popping up to remind me, Murray.”

  “Hannah!” Paul hissed. “Murray’s here to help. There’s no need to be surly.”

  “Maybe if you told me he was coming,” I hissed back, “I’d have been prepared.” As a child, I’d never liked surprises. As an adult, I still don’t.

  After Security cleared my handbag and Murray’s computer case, Paul used his cell phone to call Jack, who arranged to meet us in the lobby on the other side of the Pentagon’s enormous stainless steel doors.

  It was late February, so I’d expected service dress blues, but Jack was wearing khakis, the Navy’s year-round working uniform. Ribbons marched in orderly rows across his heart: a Defense Meritorious Service Medal, a Meritorious Service Medal with one gold star, which meant he’d won it twice, and a green and white Navy Commendation Medal with two gold stars. There were others, too, like the blue ribbon with two thin green stripes that told me Jack was an expert shot with a pistol, but I didn’t know what the others were, except one: the red, white, green, and black bar that meant he’d helped to liberate Kuwait. An impressive rack. Jack had certainly paid his dues.

  Paul reached his former student in two strides, hand extended. “Jack! Good to see you, man!”

  “Good to see you, too, sir.” Jack pumped Paul’s arm, then turned to me. “We met once, Mrs. Ives, at a tailgater one Homecoming game, ten, maybe fifteen years back. You probably don’t remember.”

  “Surprisingly, I do,” I said, squeezing his hand. “It’s hard to forget that red hair.”

  “Or the freckles.” He blushed, the tips of his ears turning pink. “Mother always swore I’d outgrow them.” He leaned forward. “She lied,” he whispered.

  “And this is my attorney, Murray Simon,” I said, sweet as molasses.

  Jack beamed. “Pleased to meet you, sir. I followed the Ted Barber case in the Post. Brilliant work, sir, simply brilliant.”

  Ted Barber was a northern Virginia real-estate developer accused of murdering his wife, Melanie. Using Luminol, investigators had uncovered evidence of foul play in the stable of their Middleburg farm, but Melanie’s body had never been found. Murray’d gotten Barber off scot free. Keep your mouth shut, Hannah, and keep smiling, and maybe he’ll do the same for you.

  Jack escorted us to Security and waited while a uniformed civilian peered at our drivers’ licenses and asked us our business. When we successfully passed that hurdle, we were directed to X-marks-the-spot, where we were photographed and issued yellow plastic ID badges. I was impressed; the whole process took no more than thirty seconds. Good thing, too, as I’d been holding my breath, worried sick that my record in JABS would start alarms whoop-whoop-whooping, and that any second brusque, burly guards would materialize to haul my ass out of there. But either the Pentagon didn’t share data with JABS or the data hadn’t caught up with them yet, because the security guard simply smiled, handed me my photo ID badge and said, “Have a nice day, ma’am.”

  “Thanks so much for taking time to see us, Jack,” I said as I clipped the badge onto the lapel of my jacket.

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  Jack led us quickly through a maze of velvet ropes that in happier times had been used to control the tourists who flocked to the Pentagon like visitors to Disney World. There were plenty of military personnel and men in suits hanging around that morning, but I hadn’t noticed anybody in sweats with cameras slung around their necks. Maybe February was a slow month. Either that or tour buses were taking those visitors to other Washington landmarks where security, especially for foreign visitors, was not nearly so tight.

  As we followed Jack past the visitors’ center and the nearly deserted gift shop toward the escalators, I was thinking about 9/11, feeling slightly queasy and desperately sad that just a short walk from where we were standing, terrorists had flown an airplane into the building and 184 people had died.

  And then I saw it, completely covering the wall to my right, stretching so high that I had to throw my head back to see the top: a spectacular 9/11 quilt. From across the lobby it had looked like the American flag, but when we got closer, I could see that the flag was composed of thousands of four-by-four-inch squares, one for each individual who had perished in the nearly simultaneous terrorist attacks on New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., that terrifying September day. Men and women, young and old, their faces smiled out at us. Christine Hanson of Groton, Massachusetts, who would never see her third birthday. Robert Grant Norton of Lubec, Maine, eighty-five, the oldest victim. White, black, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim, Jew—a cross section of America, land of the free, where their promising lives had been snuffed out in an instant. And for what? It broke my heart.

  “Amazing, isn’t it? Three
thousand thirty-one squares altogether,” Jack commented as he directed us to the turnstiles and showed us how to scan the bar codes printed on our badges. “The quilt was put together by quilters from more than forty states, honchoed by the Memorial Quilts group out in California. They toured it for a while, but I think it’s home for good now.” He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back on his heels. “Frankly, I hope it stays forever. Not that anyone working here needs any reminding.”

  As we rode the escalator to the next level, I glanced up. A military guard dressed in camouflage gear stood on the landing, cradling a machine gun. In the corridor behind him was a shopping mall; I watched Pentagon workers scurrying from a dry cleaner to a card store, from a chocolate shop to one of several fast food stalls. “Expecting trouble at Burger King?” I asked with an uneasy eye on the cop in cammies with the gun.

  “Regrettable, but necessary, I’m afraid. This is the main entrance,” Jack explained. “If someone should barge in and jump the turnstiles …” His voice trailed off.

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence; I could see clearly what would happen. From his vantage point on the landing, that single guard controlled the entire lobby. Anyone attempting to charge up the escalator would be shot, easy as plugging a rat in a drainpipe.

  “There’s a river entrance, too.” Jack waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the Potomac River just to the north. “But it’s for the bigwigs.”

  Walking briskly, Jack led us up a gradual rampway into the Pentagon proper, past a more luxurious food court—KFC, Manchu Wok, Pizza Hut, Subway—with a common seating area furnished, to my surprise, with wooden tables and chairs and upholstered furniture that wouldn’t look out of place in my own dining room.

  Just past the ATM and the Navy Federal Credit Union, Jack paused before a glass case that housed a wooden model of the Pentagon. “You probably remember the structure of the building from the newspaper accounts of the crash,” he said, “but this scale model shows it graphically. There are five levels to the complex.” He tapped the glass with his finger, pointing out each feature of the building as he explained it to us. “Five levels, five sides and five rings. The A-ring is the inside ring, as you can see. The E-ring is the most desirable because it has windows that look out rather than looking in at other windows.”