by Linda Barnes
When? Vietnam. Vietnam. I’d been in grade school throughout most of the turmoil, shielded by spelling bees and Friday-night pizza parties. My mother had railed against the Imperialist War. My mother had railed against everything. This was another capitalist plot, another excuse to march, march, march. I’d probably tagged along, doggedly apolitical. I remembered snatches of songs, chants. “And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?” And for Lyndon Johnson: “Waist-deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on.” I marched. I sang. I got to spend time with my mother. A little time.
Joey Fresh was Joseph Frascatti’s street name. Joseph Frascatti, Sr. The only one I’d ever heard of. He’d been outmaneuvering organized-crime task forces since before I was born.
“Frank’s” papa.
What now?
I could fly to Washington, meet the elusive woman of Sam’s dreams. Run my fingers over the black granite memorial till they rested on the name of Joseph Frascatti, Jr.
I needed to talk to Sam. Sam, with a best friend in a rival Mafia camp. Had his father and brothers known about little Joey Fresh?
I blinked my eyes and yawned, forgot to signal a left turn. What I needed was sleep, a long dreamless solo interlude. A snack; I couldn’t remember dinner or lunch.
Roz was out, but she’d scrawled a note. It was highlighted with arrows and stars and hung on the fridge so I’d have no chance to miss it.
I read as I swallowed orange juice. “Went through the G and W files. Seem okay. Please remove the you-know-what.”
The you-know-what being the cash in the tumbling mats. I glanced at the clock. Sure, plenty of time to sew it into homemade pillows with a little fancy embroidery on top so no one would suspect. Maybe I could piece together a patchwork quilt while I was at it.
I found cold cuts, sniffed them suspiciously, wedged them between slices of Swiss cheese. No bread.
I thought I’d try the computer. If Roz hadn’t erased Sam’s files, they must work with my machinery.
The message light blipped steadily. I punched the button, scrabbled for note paper. I ought to do it the other way around.
“Hello,” said a woman’s voice, faintly familiar. “My name is Lauren Heffernan. I’m calling from the District of Columbia. Two oh two, five five five, oh three two three. Sam spoke to me from the hospital. I’ll be arriving on the morning shuttle as soon as I can find an available seat. I’ll take a cab to your house. If that’s a problem, please call.”
I was dialing 202 before she finished, my mind spinning with questions. Coming here? Early? When did the first Washington shuttle arrive? Probably around eight, in time for the government suits to put in a full day’s work.
Come on, Lauren. Answer your damn phone.
Five rings. Answering machine.
I hung up.
I slept badly. The alarm buzzed at 7:15. Up early, but I didn’t think I’d make volleyball practice.
THIRTY-SIX
By the time a cab disgorged a woman, at 9:31 A.M., I was wired. Three cups of coffee sloshed around the two blueberry muffins I’d downed for breakfast. I flung the door wide as Lauren Heffernan mounted the steps.
She’s stocky, I thought. She’s plain. With her feet on the same level as mine, she was easily eight inches shorter. She extended a determined hand, flashed a warm and knowing grin. Her blue eyes, clear as a child’s, were set in a nest of tiny wrinkles. Sam’s age. Older. Comfortably in her forties, with no pretense at anything younger.
Not the siren I’d visualized from her come-hither voice.
“Ms. Heffernan,” I said.
“Call me Lauren, okay? We got stuck in a holding pattern over Logan,” she said. “I thought we’d never land. Carlotta. Good to meet you.”
Please, I begged silently, don’t say you’ve heard so much about me.
“Coffee?” I asked.
“I’m already floating. Bathroom?”
“Through the kitchen. Let me take your coat.”
It was navy wool, serviceable, one button missing, neatly folded Kleenex in the pockets. She’d dumped her large handbag, more briefcase than purse, on a chair. If she’d taken it with her I’d have been curious. Since she left it in full view I was only mildly tempted to rifle it.
The toilet flushed. Water ran. She came back smiling.
“Have you talked to Sam?” she asked.
“They won’t put my calls through. He hasn’t called me.”
“He bribed somebody to get around hospital rules when he phoned me.”
Could have tried the same with me, I thought.
“He sounded exhausted, but he wanted me to arrange a few things that could only be done through Washington,” she said, as if she’d read my mind.
Have to work on the poker face. She was disarming, this woman. Through Washington, she’d said, not in Washington. Using Washington as a synonym for government.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She sucked in a breath. “Can we sit down?”
“No problem,” I said.
Just then Roz staggered down the steps, dressed in something gold and gaudy. Could have been a nightgown. God knows what time she got in last night. I hadn’t heard her yowling. Must have taken her mate elsewhere.
“Carlotta,” she said, acknowledging my presence. Her eye makeup was smearier than usual, her lips almost black.
“Roz, this is Lauren. Lauren, okay with you if we talk in the kitchen?”
She didn’t stare at Roz, which must have taken a major-league effort.
“If I can change my mind about the coffee,” she said cheerfully.
“Mind waiting for me there? I need to discuss something with my, uh, associate.”
I waited until Lauren was out of sight, lowered my voice.
“Okay,” I said to Roz. “I know you didn’t find anything on the diskettes, but that’s because you were looking for the wrong things.”
“You know the right ones?”
“I think so.”
She flexed her fingers like a pianist warming up for a Liszt concerto.
“First,” I said, “get me whatever you can on Lauren Heffernan. Eighty-one eighty-two Warren Street Northwest. Washington, D.C.”
She shot a glance toward the kitchen. “I see.”
“I doubt it. Let me have hard copy on Heffernan. Then bring up Sam’s G and W files and compare them with the bank statement in the top drawer of the desk.”
“You have Sam’s bank statement?”
“I lifted it from his place.”
“Tricky you.”
“Roz?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you up so early?”
“I got home about half an hour ago,” she said. “I haven’t been to sleep yet.”
When I entered the kitchen, Lauren seemed to be pacing the dimensions of the room. While she tucked herself into a cane-back chair and kicked off her low-heeled pumps, I put the kettle on to boil, and found two clean mugs in the drainer. I settled in across the wooden table and waited.
“Who am I?” Lauren Heffernan repeated. “That’s what you asked, isn’t it? You want to see my driver’s license?”
“Not particularly.”
“In this context, I’m Sam’s friend. We were together in Vietnam. I was in the army.”
There was an emphasis on “together.” They were “together” during the war. “Honey,” she’d called him. Maybe that was left over from the war as well.
“Joey too?” I asked.
She whistled a low note. “You know more than you’re supposed to know.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Like?”
“Start with how Joey died in Vietnam.”
She rested her elbows on the table and lowered her head into her hands. Her chestnut hair was cropped short; it showed streaks of gray. Her index fingers traced circles at her temples. She wore no jewelry, no rings.
Staring at the tabletop, she said, “Why he died makes a better sto
ry.”
“Why will do fine. By the way, is your name really Lauren Heffernan? The Veterans’ Administration have records on you?”
“Laura McCarthy,” she said, giving me the candid-blue-eye treatment. “Women change their names all the time. Lauren’s my given name, but it wasn’t popular then, so I used Laura. I’ve been married twice. Didn’t take either time.”
“Men don’t change their names that often.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Surprise me.”
“Coffee?” she asked.
“Almost ready.”
She stared at the kettle as if willing it to boil. It hissed like a steam engine.
Nothing to do but start talking. No distractions.
“Sam didn’t have to go to Vietnam,” she said. “Neither did Joey. They were volunteers near the end, when the draft was a true lottery. Didn’t wait for their numbers, just enlisted. They saw themselves as a team. That’s what I thought at first. I didn’t realize what was going on till later.”
“What do you mean, going on?”
A smile crinkled the fine lines around her eyes. “I’m not going to tell you Sam’s gay.”
“Well, that would have been a surprise,” I admitted.
“He and Joey were eighteen-year-olds having an adventure, escaping. That’s what they thought it was about. They didn’t fit in back home, didn’t want to become cogs in their fathers’ machines. That’s why they were such close allies, because they were both sons of big-time crooks. Neither one felt he’d ever be allowed to exist outside his father’s shadow.”
She said, “I’m Irish, but not from any fancy neighborhood. My town, they called them gangs, not Mafia or anything. Just gangs.”
“The boys saw the army as a way out,” I prompted.
“Water’s boiling,” she said with relief.
“Instant okay?”
“Milk and sugar.”
I fussed with mugs and silverware for two minutes. She didn’t start talking again until she’d tasted her drink, spooned in extra sugar.
She said, “I don’t know whose idea it was to die. To rig a death. I know they’d both talked about disappearing, going AWOL. Deserting would have been a way to thumb their noses at their families.”
“The Mob sees itself as patriotic,” I said.
“Invade Cuba for you any day,” she responded wryly. “I don’t think they had a plan for what happened. It worked out of … serendipity, out of where they found themselves, and the chaos that marked the end of the war, the Vietnamization of the war, the withdrawal, their assignments. My job. I was an army nurse. Mobile unit. In a war zone, but not a fighting job. Support for our men in uniform.”
“In a position to alter records?” I asked.
“Joey was a grunt. Sam had been temporarily assigned as company clerk. Typing skills. He wanted to get back to the front line, pound ground again, and he did before the end.”
“Unit?” I asked.
“One ninety-sixth Light Infantry. Provisionals. One of the last brigades to leave.”
I’d run that through my computerized lie detector. “Go on,” I said.
“Joey had troubles. And he got into more. Troubles at home, with his family.” Lauren rocked her chair so it rested on its two back legs. She drank coffee.
“Yeah?” I said. “So?”
“He got into drugs in Vietnam. I mean, we all did drugs, if you call marijuana ‘drugs.’ But Joey … When he wasn’t toking, he was snorting. I think he was shooting up too. Anyway—what with his family screaming that they were going to pull strings with their congressman and drag him back home, and him messed up on dope and owing money in the black market—at some point, Joey decided to die. For real. Maybe it seemed like the easiest way out. Sam and I, it got so we just wanted to save him if we could. I once promised Sam that if Joey was injured, I’d make sure the injury got bad enough to send him home. I was a nurse. I can’t imagine myself saying that today, but it was different then. Joey kept volunteering for more and more dangerous assignments. Volunteer Joe, G.I. Joe, the man who couldn’t get killed, was starting to self-destruct.
“Friends were scarce,” she said. “I don’t condone what we did, but friends were scarce.”
“What exactly did you do?” I’d drunk half my coffee without tasting it. I could feel caffeine thrumming through my bloodstream.
Lauren stirred her coffee, stared into its milky depths as if she were watching a blurred film of her past. “Joey crawled into camp one night, into my tent. Camouflage gear covered with blood and mud. Mud and blood. The hills were numbered then. No names. No Porkchop Hill. No Little Round Top. Just numbered hills a grunt was expected to give up his life for. And they knew by now that each hill was nothing more than a bargaining chip. Land that would be given back after they’d bled and died for it. The sky was so blue … every day there would be boys who’d never see the sky again, never see a white bird fly across a blue sky.…”
She shook her head and sighed, deliberately firmed her voice, went on. “Joey kept charging up the hills. Nothing could stop him. He was prime Section Eight material by then, absolutely psycho, but I couldn’t get anyone to agree. He was doing heroin, black market, you name it. When I saw him that night, that morning, I thought he was a ghost. He was clutching his dog tags, holding them so tight I had to pry them out of his hands. It was only then that I realized they weren’t his.”
“Whose were they?”
She looked up at me then, a clear-eyed, steady gaze. “I don’t believe—Sam doesn’t believe—that Joey killed him. The dead boy wasn’t popular, but he was just another ground pounder, not an officer, and fragging wasn’t common in units near our position. And there was enemy action that night, on point. Where Joey was, always near the front of the column, waiting to die. Instead another kid got blown apart. The dog tags landed at Joey’s feet. Like a gift, Joey said. Like a gift from Mary, Mother of God, he said. He had his own tags over his head and on the ground before he consciously thought about it, he said.”
The “Frank” I’d met was a good talker, too, I thought. I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to break her concentration. She stirred her cold coffee with a spoon and the sound blended with the clack of computer keys from the living room.
She sighed. “So my friend Joey Frascatti was killed in hostile action. KHA. And then Sam and I made arrangements for him, for our buddy Joey, who had a different name now—Floyd Markham, the name on the dog tags, the name of a boy from Traverse City who was beyond help. It was easier for ‘Floyd Markham’ to disappear. MIA.” She frowned. “We should have made him KHA, but that would have been trickier. We’d have needed a body. It would have been more merciful to the boy’s family though. MIA, all these years …”
“Hard,” I said.
“Sam and Joey bought and backdated a life insurance policy in the dead boy’s name. And that’s why Sam’s been spending so much time in Washington lately. We’ve been trying to track what’s left of the boy’s family, through unofficial channels, to make sure they absolutely know their boy is dead, to eliminate any hope or fear. Fear that he deserted, that he was somehow abandoned, that he was tortured or kept alive. You imagine things when you don’t know, when you never get to see a coffin and bury a body.”
“Joey didn’t keep the boy’s name?”
She replaced her coffee mug on the table. “Joey was never going to come back to the States. That was part of the plan, the deal. No USA. No Italy. No place where somebody might see him and say ‘Hey, that’s Joey Fresh’s kid.’ There was no harm in it. The other boy, Floyd Markham, was blown to blazes. The Frascattis got to hold their big funeral. The Markhams didn’t. Now that I’m older, I appreciate the ritual of committing a body to the earth. I was young. I never thought about it then. I don’t believe any of us ever thought about it.…”
“Why did Joey come back?”
Her voice sank to a whisper. “He got in touch with Sam via e-mail. From Australia, then New Zeala
nd. It was a shock. Sam and I had … woven a fantasy around Joey, the boy who got to start over again, the boy who’d promised to get clean and stay clean, if only we’d give him the chance. We’d all sworn secrecy; but more than that, we’d all sworn aid. If one of us was in need or in trouble, the others would try to help.”
She stopped talking, looked at me. I might have been wrong but I thought she was searching for my approval.
“Three Musketeers is just a candy bar to me,” I said. I kept thinking about Floyd Markham’s mom and dad, his sisters or brothers, waiting, waiting, waiting. Wearing those copper bracelets, keeping the flame alive.
Her eyes hardened. “Sam came to me when ‘Frank’ called from California, earlier this year.”
“And what did ‘Frank’ want?”
“To come home. He made it sound simple. Just to come home. He missed the people he used to hate. He’d never made a new life for himself, although he’d earned a fortune in the electronics industry. Sam and I had fixed it for him to die, and now he wanted us to fix it so he could come back from the dead.”
“Could you?”
“If he hadn’t been so pig-headed, possibly. But he wanted to come home as himself! As Joseph Frascatti, Jr. How could he? Joseph Frascatti, Jr., was dead. What could he say? He woke up in some field in Indochina twenty years later, no idea what happened?”
“You sound angry.”
“I am angry. Sam and I’d turned somersaults to give Joey what he wanted, a new chance. We’d envied him, especially Sam. Fighting the same battle over and over with his father, Sam could say ‘Well, Joey’s out there, free.’”
“Why did Joey come to Boston?”
“I don’t know. Sam and I were concentrating on learning as much as we could about the Markham family.”
“If they were all dead, Joey’s reappearance would be easier.”
“If they heard a peep about Joey’s ‘resurrection,’ we were fried. It would have been a case of ‘Who’s buried in Joey’s tomb?’ We’d written the family a letter, one of those ‘he-was-a-hero’ things, saying how Floyd had gone missing trying to prevent Frascatti’s death. We’d turned them both into heroes.”