Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Okay, you run that trap, and I’ll get on the horn to Bupers and see what we come up with regarding officers going astray in beautiful downtown Filthadelphia.

  Santini said we could have a desk and a phone.”

  that afternoon, ensconced in a temporarily empty cubicle of the NIS office, Dan consulted Santini’s DOD phone book and called the Navy’s Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington. He reached the main operator

  and asked for the shop that handled long-term unauthorized absentees and deserters. A Master Chief Gonzalez answered the phone.

  “Master Chief, this is Commander Dan Collins calling.

  I’m assigned to OP-Six-fourteen over in Opnav and I’m on TAD doing a JAGMAN investigation up here in the Philly shipyard. I’ve got a question for you.”

  “Shoot, Commander.”

  “Right. I want to know if you have any record of a lieutenant junior grade going UA up here in the yards anytime in the past two, three years.”

  “You gotta be shitting me, Commander.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s sorta broad—”

  ” ‘Sorta broad’?” said the master chief. “Do you know how many officers and enlisted we have in the Navy today? Like right now?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nor do we.”

  “Say what?”

  “You heard me, Commander. We couldn’t begin to tell you. And that’s because of a thing we call the “float”: transients, the sick, UA and deserters, and prisoners.

  We can tell you what the average float is on any given day—say, roughly speaking, around two thousand personnel, give or take a couple hundred.

  But that’s as close as we can get. And you wanta find one guy?”

  Dan changed the phone from his right ear to his left.

  “Not exactly, master chief. We’ve found the guy. We’re trying to find out who he is—or was. See, he’s dead.

  And it looks like a homicide.”

  “Whoa. Hang on a minute while I get a pen. Okay, where’d you say you worked, Commander?”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s complicated,” Dan said, noting that Santini appeared to be eavesdropping from his office on the other side of the room. Grace was at another empty desk, on the phone with NIS in Washington. “But NIS is in it, too. I’m actually calling from the NIS office in Philly.”

  “How’s about I call you back, Commander.”

  “Yeah, sure, Master Chief. You want the number?”

  “I’ll get it. I’ll be right back to you.”

  Dan hung up and waited. The master chief was no dummy—anybody could call into Bupers and ask a question. He went to get a cup of coffee, and he heard the phone ring in the secretary’s cubicle.

  “Yeah,” she said through a wad of chewing gum.

  “He’s here.”

  Dan picked the phone back up. “Master Chief.”

  “Right. Okay, Commander. Just playing safe, you know. These days—”

  “Right, Master Chief. So the guy I’m trying to ID is a lieutenant junior grade. And he’s black. And that’s all I got until we get the results of an autopsy.”

  “In the Philly shityard, hunh? Okay, lemme hit the cornpopewter and see who we got on the run in Philly.

  I’ve got your number.”

  “Thanks, Master Chief.”

  Dan hung up at the same time Grace did.

  “Any luck in D. C.?” he asked.

  “Not yet. I’ve asked the question, but now I’m in the queue for an answer. Nobody works in real time in NIS.”

  “Man, ain’t that the truth,” volunteered Santini, now standing in his office doorway. “I’m surprised they gave you the time of day.”

  “I knew whom to call,” smiled Grace.

  “Wish I knew who the hell to call. I’ve got RFIs been down there for six weeks, some of them.”

  “RFI?” asked Dan.

  “Requests for information. Like I said, NIS is not a real-time data bank. It’s not like the FBI’s NCIC. Those guys can come back in fifteen minutes for an office request, and within two for a cop calling from his car.

  That’s an amazing system.”

  “Can’t NIS just copy it? Or join it?”

  Grace rubbed her thumb and forefinger together.

  “Money. Opnav submits our budget, and Opnav does not love us just now.”

  Dan sat back in his chair and nodded, then sat back up.

  “Oh shit!” he exclaimed.

  “What?”

  “Where’s that ambulance? You suppose they’ve left the shipyard yet?”

  Santini looked at his watch. “Nah. I just got back myself.

  They’re probably still strapping the body in on the pier. Why?”

  Dan called out to the secretary. “Miss.? Can you get the base cops’ dispatcher on the horn? I want to know if they’re still down on the pier. And if they are, I need them to do something.”

  Grace cocked her head to one side and looked at him. “Are you going to cut the rest of us in here?”

  Dan put up his hand. The secretary had patched back the police dispatcher, who had one of the cop cars down at the battleship pier on the radio.

  “Yeah, look, this is Commander Collins. I was down there earlier, with the NIS guys, looking at that body in the ship. Has the ambulance left yet?”

  The dispatcher gave him a wait, then replied that the body was wrapped for transport and the guys were closing up the meat wagon. Santini was staring hard at him, obviously wondering what new interference the amateur was going to cause.

  “Okay,” Dan said. “Ask one of the ambulance attendants to open the bag and look at something for me.”

  The dispatcher consulted with the car on the scene and then came back.

  “The NIS guy on the pier says those guys can’t open the bag once it’s sealed. Chain of evidence.”

  “All right. Hang on. Mr. Santini, I need you to tell your guy on the pier that it’s okay to open the bag. I want them to look at something.”

  “Well, Commander, we did a prelim search of that body, best we could in that steam drum and everything, and there was no—”

  “Yeah, sure. But the dead guy’s in uniform. Navy working uniform. If he was ship’s company, his name should be stenciled on the shirt collar and the waistband of his trousers—for the ship’s laundry.”

  Santini’s face began to turn red. “Shit. Gimme that goddamn phone,” he said. Grace Snow busied herself with her notebook, taking care not to look at anyone in particular.

  Five minutes later, they had it. According to his shirt collar, the dead officer was It. (jg) W. Hardin, and the insignia on his left collar indicated he was Supply Corps, USN. Dan called back to Bupers and talked to the master chief. The Bupers computer was down at the moment, but with the name and designator, the master chief promised a quick confirmation. Dan hung up.

  “Okay,” he announced. “Assuming this guy didn’t borrow someone’s uniform, now we have a name.

  Bupers will be back with a ship or station once their computer is back up. Mr. Santini, you sure your local files won’t have anything on this guy?”

  “With a name, yeah, we can maybe get a hit in the archives. Look, Commander, about the ID—”

  Dan waved him off. “Forget it, Mr. Santini. I should have thought of it when I saw that the body was in a uniform. That’s not something a civilian does, stencil his clothes.”

  “Yeah, well, okay, then. I was just, uh, kinda we— concerned that we’d get a ration of shit from headquarters for not making the ID right away.” He looked pointedly over at Grace Snow.

  Dan nodded his head. “So in other words,” he said, “I put in my report that an identification was made from the dead man’s uniform, full stop.

  Not how and by whom. Or when.”

  Santini pursed his lips and nodded slowly. Two other NIS men in the office were listening while pretending to work.

  “Yeah,” Santini said. “Something like that. It would be appreciated.”

  “You go
t it. Now, assuming we get the command’s name, we’ll get closer to a date of the incident. We all agree, I think, that it’s been awhile.

  And the forensic lab downtown will give us cause of death. After that—”

  “After that, we’ll probably not know very much,” said Grace, leaning forward in her chair. “I mean motive or any other explanation for what happened to him.”

  “Don’t be thinking we’ll see the autopsy results in just a day or so—the city morgue is a busy place,” said Santini.

  Dan closed his notebook. “Even so, I think we’ll have to wait for that autopsy before doing much more here —unless we can talk to some people in his previous command. But that’s going to be tough—ships, assuming he was in a ship, have a turnover rate of nearly fifty percent a year.

  If it’s been awhile, we’re not likely to find many people who knew this guy or what he might have been mixed up in that got him killed. And the ship could be anywhere in the world. Motive will be real tough.”

  “Hey, Commander,” Santini interjected, “this is South Philly you’re talkin’ about here; there’s a gazil lion things can get you whacked down here.”

  “Yeah, but in a shipyard?”

  “Two gazillion,” offered one of the other detectives.

  “We don’t know this happened in the shipyard,” said Grace. “He could have been simply stashed in the shipyard.”

  Dan shook his head. “You’re right. What we know is that we don’t know anything.”

  Santini laughed. “Now you’re starting to think like a cop,” he said.

  “We know that officer is dead and that someone probably killed him and put him in that boiler,” Grace said. The laughter stopped.

  santini had booked them two rooms at the Naval Station Philadelphia Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, which was a run-down three-story World War II tempo building adjacent to the officers’ club. The BOQ had been refurbished several times since its construction in 1942, but nothing could disguise its age and general decrepitude.

  The building was heated sporadically by clanking steam radiators, and the aging, lead-based paint was peeling in the hallways. The third floor was blocked off, its rooms having been deemed too far gone to be worth refurbishment. The rooms themselves were devoid of any decoration, with mottled ceramic washbasins sticking out of the wall, and a commode and shower crammed into what had once been a closet. Individual air conditioners in each room blocked most of the sunlight, and the industrial grime on the windows blocked the rest.

  Dan had apologized to Grace when he realized where they would be staying. But the alternatives were few: Either stay in the BOQ, on the base, where they could walk to the NIS office, or stay in an uptown hotel and face Philadelphia’s exciting metropolitan commute across South Philly twice a day. Grace had taken it in good stride.

  “I’ve always wanted to see how the brass lived,” she remarked with a perfectly straight face.

  They agreed to meet at the officers’ club at 6:30 p.m. for a drink, and then they would figure out what to do about dinner. They would have to leave the base, as the O-club’s dining room was open only at lunchtime.

  Dan was waiting for her in the side entrance to the club when she came out of the BOQ. He observed again that she would have been smashing if she would lighten up a little. But once again, she was wearing a severely cut, wholly unrevealing midcalf-length suit. She had her purse slung over her shoulder, and a light raincoat over one arm. He thought that the total effect—serious, businesslike expression, minimal makeup, painfully practical hairdo, plain shoes, and her alert, almost defensive posture—made her look just exactly like what she was: a cop. He wondered if she carried a gun in that purse.

  Dan was dressed in gray slacks, a blue blazer, a plain tie and white shirt, and highly polished loafers. He carried a London Fog raincoat over one arm; it was April, but not yet warm in Philadelphia, and the sunset had promised wet weather before morning. They went into the gloomy bar of the O-club and took a table in the corner. The bar was almost empty, with only two crusty looking warrant officers nursing beers and watching the evening news on the television. Grace ordered a white wine, Dan a gin and tonic. He noticed that she grimaced when she saw what the bartender was pouring for wine.

  “This isn’t exactly a high-rent, front-line operation here,” he said.

  “This so-called officers’ club wouldn’t survive one week without the civilian shipyard clientele at lunch. This whole shipyard is one big armpit.”

  “You said that the Navy keeps trying to close it.”

  “Right. Trying is the operative word. The Pennsylvania congressional delegation must have some severely compromising photographs of some very senior Navy people, because the yard keeps going, year after year, no matter how lousy their work is.”

  “That’s unbelievable.” She tasted her wine and then looked at it. “This is unbelievable.”

  He laughed. “Don Carlo’s finest, no doubt. Aged in the tank car at least one day. Part of the problem is the locale—this is South Philly, as Santini, he of the Irish heritage, said this afternoon. I was on a ship here once for six months; the yard is reportedly a major source of revenue for various racketeers, big and small. The rumor is that they do some big-league industrial-materials theft, contract fraud, union scams, phantom hours, world-class featherbedding, drugs. You name it, there’s a local running it here.”

  She studied the darkened barroom, with its cheesy fake paneling, cheap brass light fixtures, the ancient, grainy television, and the threadbare, stained carpet, as if looking at something genuinely interesting. He thought he saw her wrinkle her nose in a little sniff.

  “Could this killing,” she asked finally, “could it have been mob-related—something to do with an officer, maybe a naive young officer, who stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong?”

  Dan had to think about that one. “Maybe, but that’s kind of remote. You mean, like exposing the scams? I don’t think so. A lieutenant junior grade just doesn’t draw enough water to worry a shop group superintendent or a union boss. They might have his tires slashed in the junior officers’ parking lot, but kill him? No, I

  don’t think so. There were easier, more effective ways to screw a junior officer up—lose his job orders, lose the materials for the jobs in his work center, vandalize his stateroom in the ship, that kind of stuff.”

  She nodded, sipped her wine, and then put the glass down firmly. She shivered. “That battleship, that was a spooky place. And that body—mummified. I felt like I was in the depths of an ancient tomb, with all that steel and that flattened brown—”

  “Yeah. I guess, being from NIS, a battleship would make you feel uncomfortable.”

  She flared. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  He smiled. “Hey. I didn’t mean to pull your chain. I just meant that the last time the NIS got into a battleship investigation, it turned into one of the biggest goat f—the biggest Chinese fire drills the Navy’s seen for a few decades.”

  She studied the tabletop. “Well, I suppose you’re talking about the Iowa thing; that was before my time.

  But from what I’ve heard, most of the old hands in NIS thought their theory was at least feasible. The problem was that some of the fieldwork, the interrogations, choice of witnesses, was pretty shoddy.”

  “Plus, they couldn’t prove it.”

  “No. But I think the NIS has been made something of a whipping boy. Like in the Tailhook investigation: The main reason the Defense Department inspector general got into it was because they suspected there was a lot of command influence being exercised by Opnav.”

  “Maybe like this little deal,” Dan said softly.

  “Yes. You’ve been in the fleet—is NIS useful?”

  “They came when I called, and I always thought they did a good job with our shipboard problems,” Dan said.

  “But this is Washington we’re dealing with. Once an incident or an issue breaks in Washington, everyone gets lots of management help f
rom their superiors. Like in the Iowa thing.”

  “I’ve read some of the Iowa investigation materials— that was apparently a very loose ship, even if I say so.”

  Dan shook his head. “From what I’ve heard, she didn’t start out that way when they first brought her back in commission. But I have to admit that I haven’t read the actual investigation, although Captain Sum merfield—he’s my boss in Opnav; you met him at the meeting—recommended that I read it. He said it would explain why Opnav is gunning for the NIS.”

  “And is Opnav gunning for the NIS?”

  “Beats me. Sometimes when things get nasty, organizations that report to Opnav get sacrificed on the altar of public relations. That’s what the Tailhook affair looked like, down at the snuffy level. The admirals walked; the junior officers got nailed. But hell, I just work here.

  There. But you have to admit, the fact that I’m working this incident instead of the NIS system would indicate that somebody is gunning for the NIS, don’t you think?”

  She stared at her wine for a moment, her head down.

  He noticed for the first time that she had luxuriant almost blue-black hair, not brunette as he had first thought, and wide, squared-off shoulders. He wondered if she worked out. A swimmer perhaps. But then another voice: why do you care?

  “I’m kind of in the same boat as you are,” she said, looking up. “I said after our first meeting that I have several years of field-investigation experience. That’s true, but not in criminal investigations. Remember I told you I worked for SEC? I did all my investigating for SEC in Manhattan—securities fraud, mostly.”

  He was surprised. Securities fraud? What the hell was she doing here?

  Reading his question, she continued.

  “As I told you in the car coming up, I took a political appointment at the Justice Department in the last administration, toward the end, as it turned out. When all the hicks and tics showed up, I ended up in NIS as a civil servant in the Criminal Investigations Policy directorate.

  I guess I’m one of those political appointees they describe as burrowing in. But it was supposed to be investigative work, and it was criminal stuff, a change from strictly white-collar crime.”

  “And this was in Investigations Policy?”