by Brian Haig
In a matter of only a few hours we now had a motive, and we had the makings of a very good circumstantial case. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish when you know who the killer is and only have to fill in the blanks from there. Especially on an Army base.
What we didn’t have was tangible proof. And what I didn’t have was more time to build a better case.
We could prove Berkowitz was here trying to break a story on white supremacists. We could prove, with the outfit’s wiretaps, that Williams was associated with a backwoods band of bigots. We could prove Berkowitz made contact with Williams. We could prove Williams had the right shoe size to fit a mold from the murder scene. All this was great. Arithmetically speaking.
What we couldn’t prove was that Williams murdered him. No small inconvenience that last point.
It was nearly noon. I turned to Martie. “I need you to provide me a wire, and I need you to call your judge and get me permission to tape a conversation with Williams. You’ve got proximate cause.”
He called the judge and it took about ten minutes before the judge wrote out an order.
The note I had earlier sent to Williams asked him to meet me at 1230 hours at my office. I’d also told Imelda to make sure everyone was gone and that the building was empty.
I figured it wouldn’t hurt anything to directly confront Sergeant Major Williams. It wasn’t like he could escape. Tuzla Air Base was heavily guarded and, even if Williams could get out into the surrounding countryside, he wasn’t going to get far without a passport. It wasn’t like he could blend into the population. He didn’t even speak Serbo-Croatian.
I asked Wolky to position a few of his best ass-kicking MPs in the nearby vicinity, without their identifying brassards, just in case our man got violent. Williams was about six foot three, and weighed about 230. I’m about five foot ten and weigh only 170. I was always pretty good with my fists, but the laws of physics are what they are.
I then returned to my office to meet the man I was sure murdered Jeremy Berkowitz. Imelda had done her job, and the building was empty. She’d also brewed me a fresh pot of coffee. I love that woman. I got a cup and went into my office.
Sergeant Major Williams swaggered in two minutes late. I went out to meet him, offered him some coffee, he nodded, and I went over and poured him a cup. I owed him a cup anyway, so now we were even. Well, not exactly even, since there was the matter of nearly two dozen excessive ass-kickings I still owed him. He followed me back into the office and sat in a chair across from my desk.
“So what you doin’?” he asked, grinning. He had a cocky manner anyway, but in my case, since he’d once spent two weeks pounding me like Silly Putty, he felt a bit superior.
I said, “I’m leaving tomorrow. My investigation’s complete so I gave the rest of my staff the day off, and I’m left with a little time to kill. Us being old comrades and all, I just thought you and I should get together.”
He looked at me curiously and took a sip of coffee.
I took a sip, too, then said, “Ever get to thinking about the outfit days?”
“Sure do. Great fucking days. We did some wild-assed stuff.”
“Sure did, didn’t we? If it wasn’t for getting accepted to law school, I’d probably still… well…” I let that thought taper off. “So, why exactly did you leave?”
“Ah, y’know, you get burned out. Can’t live on a high wire like that forever.”
I said, “That’s funny. I heard different. I heard you got in some kinda trouble back there.”
He became noticeably tighter. “Yeah? Where’d you hear that?”
“Here and there. Something about you working with a bunch of bigots down in North Carolina.”
I had his undivided attention. He was staring at me hard and trying to figure out what was going down here. “You must be listenin’ to the wrong people,” he said. “Ain’t no such thing happened.”
I said, “Did you know the outfit tapped all of our phones? Probably not. Hell, I didn’t know it myself till a few days ago.”
He leaned back in his chair and drew in a heavy breath. “That legal?” he inquired.
Give the man credit; his mind was racing quickly. He was trying to get a little free legal advice. He wanted to know how the wiretaps would stand up in court if he ever got apprehended for Berkowitz’s murder.
“I’d guess the outfit has some kinda court order that allows it,” I answered. “Kinda like the CIA is allowed to impose lie detector tests on its employees. Unique privileges for unique organizations.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, that was a long time ago.”
“Yep, it was,” I agreed. “And you probably stopped whatever you were doing when you left.”
“I probably did,” he said.
I took another sip from my coffee, and he took another sip from his coffee. He knew now this was no friendly, idle chat.
“Hey,” I said, “ever meet that reporter who got murdered? What’s his name? Berkowitz, right? Jeremy Berkowitz.”
His eyes were now very narrow and guarded. “Nope, can’t say I ever did.”
“That’s odd. I met with him the day he got killed. In the morning. He told me he was gonna see you around lunchtime,” I lied.
“No shit?” he said.
“That’s what he said.”
“Well, he never told me, ’cause I never heard of him till he was dead.”
“Well, that’s the other thing. There’s this sergeant who works for the information officer. Guy named Jarvis. I talked to him just this morning. Real pleasant guy. He says he helped line up a meeting between you two.”
“He must be lying,” Williams growled.
“Actually, he’s got an official log to prove it. Seems every time a reporter asks him to contact a member of the command, he’s required to log it.”
“That right?” he said a little too nonchalantly. He was working hard at repressing his hotheaded nature.
“Yep, that’s right. Oh, and another thing.”
“What’s that?”
I said, “You know, CID stops by here now and again to compare notes. Till now, everybody’s been convinced the killing was somehow connected to my investigation. Hell, CID still thinks that. Anyhow, they lifted the footprints of the asshole who killed Berkowitz. He wore running shoes so he could sneak up behind him. You know, we’re talking about a real gutless pussy. Never gave Berkowitz a fair chance. Same kind of low-life scum who’d burn a church.”
He shrugged, but I knew what he was thinking and feeling. He was once my torturer. Anyone who has ever been tortured for an extended period will tell you that it becomes a strangely intimate experience. You get closer than lovers. The interrogator is trying to measure your physical and mental breaking points, while you’re desperately trying to climb inside his head and figure out how to get him to stop hurting you. It’s very visceral. You study his every gesture, a shift in his muscles, a change of tone in his voice, a look in his eyes, anything to prepare yourself for the next blow. You learn how to please him, and in my case, how to infuriate him. In an obscene kind of way, I guessed I knew Sergeant Major Luther Williams better than any man I’d ever met.
I added, “Killer used a garrote, too. Back in the outfit, we always figured that was a real sicko’s weapon. You know, like something maybe an angry fag might use. Or maybe one of them sexual deviants. I mean, what kind of guy you figure would kill a man that way?”
“I never thought about it,” he said. His knuckles were very white.
“Another thing. From the footprints, turned out the murderer was some big, goofy bastard with splayed feet.”
“That right?” he asked.
“Size thirteen, double E. You’ve got big, wide feet. I didn’t mention it to CID yet, but I remember staring at ’em all the time while you were beating the crap out of me. What size you figure you wear?”
“I never went near that latrine,” he said.
I said, “Hey, you know, after you left Bragg that
rash of child molesting that had been happening in the housing area stopped altogether. All those little boys were safe to go to the bus stop without their parents again.”
He was now glaring at me with a very nasty scowl. Like a lot of big men, he did not like being taunted or mocked. One thing I’d learned about him in the hard sell was that he’d get real touchy when it came to sexual perversions. He’d be slapping me around, and I tried calling him all kinds of names. Wasn’t long before I learned that faggot or baby screwer, or variants thereof, really hit his funny bone. Like they say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. I’d always figured there must be some kind of ugly sexual pathology locked up inside that big skull of his that he either didn’t want to admit or sure as hell didn’t like to be reminded of. Lots of perverts are like that. Not real comfortable with their own nasty habits.
He said in this very menacing tone, “Listen, motherfucker, I don’t have to sit here and listen to yer shit.”
I stared at him hard. “Yeah you do. See, this ain’t the outfit’s screening. Now I’m a major and you’re a noncommissioned officer, and I’m ordering you to stay right where you are. Besides, you leave here and I’ll walk right over to CID and tell ’em what I suspect about you.”
A murderous look crept into his eyes.
“Anyway,” I continued, “only damned reason I haven’t mentioned anything yet to CID was because I wanted to be sure. But I got to thinking about your feet, and what Sergeant Jarvis told me, and why you were thrown out of the outfit, and the cowardly way Berkowitz was killed, and what a sick, yellow asshole I knew you were, and it all kinda makes sense.”
I knew the signs. Because he always wore a mask when he was kicking the crap out of me back at Bragg, I got to know his eyes real well. Right at that moment, they were scrunched with a calculating shrewdness, because he now knew I was the only man on this base who could put all that together. And golly gee… well, here we were, all alone in my office building. Just the two of us, just like old times. Only there was no hidden camera up in the corner making films that Colonel Tingle would review later that night. All there was was a tiny microphone under my shirt; of course, he didn’t know about that.
“Know what else, Williams?” I chuckled. “I think you probably screwed Berkowitz before you killed him.”
He leaped out of his chair and came across the desk, until his face was inches from mine. “I didn’t fuck that fat Jewboy,” he said.
“If you never met him, how’d you know he was fat?” I said.
I saw the punch, but I couldn’t dodge it. Williams hadn’t lost his touch, either. I went flying backward, right over my chair, and ended up sprawled on the floor, seeing stars, and hearing this loud ringing sound in my ears.
He shoved the desk aside and came after me. He lifted me right off the ground by my collar. I’d forgotten how incredibly strong he was when he got mad. I felt like a little Raggedy Ann doll. He threw me across the room, and I bounced off a wall. These weren’t the padded, cushiony walls he and I had practiced with before. These were the real thing, with hard, unyielding surfaces. It hurt a lot more. Then he ran over and jerked me up by the hair and started punching my head back and forth while I screamed, “You screwed him, you pervert! You sick bastard.”
He was now completely out of control, on a rampage like he had been so many years before. He pulled my face right up to his and hissed, “I didn’t screw him! I used that garrote so I didn’t have to touch the filthy Jewboy.”
He threw me across the room and sent me crashing into another wall. I felt something snap, maybe a rib, maybe an arm bone. Everything hurt.
He moved across the room for me. “You fucked up, Drummond. We’re all alone here. I’m gonna kill you, and I’m gonna make it hurt.”
He made only one mistake. His feet were spread apart when he bent over to jerk me up again. Maybe he was too enraged to watch his technique. Or maybe something deep inside his memory cells programmed him to remember me as a helpless, defenseless hostage. I aimed for his testicles. I felt the wonderfully satisfying sensation of my left heel burying itself in his groin. The thing with a testicular kick is that it does not immediately disable the opponent. A shin kick, a punch in the solar plexus, or a tap on the Adam’s apple, all cause an instantaneously overpowering response. It takes a second or two for testicular pain to wind its way up to the brain. Maybe that’s because women are right, and there’s another, tiny brain in the nearby vicinity that has to process all signals from that organ first.
Worked out fine for me, though. He had me hoisted back up to his eye level when his higher brain finally got the message that his left testicle was ruptured and his right one was severely concussed. His eyes got real round, and his hands suddenly got real slack and let go of my neck.
He doubled over, completely incapacitated by the pain. I knew the MPs had to be hearing the sounds of our fight, because of my wire, and must even now be running to save me. They should be there any second.
Ordinarily, I am not one to kick a man when he’s down. However, I made an exception. I was enraged, for one thing, and bent on revenge for another. My left knee came straight up and ended up in Williams’s face. Crunch, I heard his nose break, and his head came snapping back up. My right hand flew into his solar plexus. That blow doubled him back over again. Then my right knee came up, and there was another snap, only this time it was Williams’s jaw, or maybe a few teeth.
The door suddenly flew open, and I stepped back. Three real big MPs came diving through the air and jumped on Williams, who was reeling around in a slow, painful dance, but they sent him flying through the air, where he struck my desk and split open the back of his head. Kind of like adding insult to injury. It didn’t kill him, but head wounds always cause a fair amount of blood.
That’s about the point where I stopped paying attention. Suddenly there was this sharp pang in my left rib cage, and my face felt like it was on fire. Blood was running down my forehead and out of my nose and mouth. When you’re twenty-two, you can take a beating like the one he just inflicted on me and end up feeling no worse than you would if you’d just been hit by a speeding car. When you’re thirty-nine, you feel like a steam-roller just mashed you into the road. I slumped down on the floor and lapsed into a remarkably deep trench of self-pity.
Martie and Wolky walked in while the MPs were slapping metal cuffs on Sergeant Major Williams. They looked around my office and saw a fair amount of blood dripping down the walls where Williams had used me like a basketball, and puddling on the floor, where Williams and I had both given liberally of our precious liquids. They both were smiling, though.
The confession I’d extracted from Williams might or might not be admissible as evidence. I am an officer of the court, and I hadn’t read him his rights. A real slick defense attorney might be able to construct a plausible argument that I’d illegally entrapped Williams. If it were me, that’s how I’d handle the defense. Williams, however, had assaulted me with the stated intent of murdering me. That much was admissible. I’m a commissioned officer and the Uniform Code of Military Justice takes a dim view of enlisted men trying to murder officers. It also lists another twenty or so different offenses that could be thrown at him, from assault to a few odd zingers like disrespect by apportment, which translates literally as me, a senior officer, saying he had looked at me in a way I didn’t like very much. There really is such an offense. No kidding.
Plus, now that Williams had been apprehended, there was time to search for more evidence to support the charge of murdering Jeremy Berkowitz. Not to mention the flurry of charges related to the church burnings. As it was, the additional charges I’d just earned for Williams offered any able prosecutor a lot of material to trade for a full confession.
That’s why Wolky and Martie were smiling. I got my fanny whupped pretty good to break their case. All they’d had to do was sit back in the building across the street, sipping their coffee and listening to the sounds of me crashing into walls.
; Chapter 27
The doctor spent two hours inspecting and repairing the carnage Williams had administered to my body. There were two fractured ribs, not one. And I now sported eighteen stitches, about evenly divided between three different gashes. Williams was being treated in the next room, and the doc jovially told me they had to use a sewing machine on him. I guess he was trying to cheer me up. You know, like one of those “you should see the other guy” things. I didn’t need to be perked up, though. My mood actually was fairly frisky.
While the doctor taped and sewed and X-rayed to his heart’s content, I spent the entire time thinking about how I was going to handle Tretorne, Murphy, and Clapper. These guys were what my grandfather would call Slippery Dicks. Nothing to do with Richard Nixon, I don’t think, because my father and my grandfather both thought Nixon was the second coming. I guessed a Slippery Dick was something like a Pudley, only slimier.
Anyway, I couldn’t afford to underestimate them again. They weren’t as dangerous as I had thought, since they hadn’t murdered Berkowitz. But framing and blackmail and obstructing justice weren’t likely to get them on anybody’s list for sainthood, either. Also, Tretorne had warned me I wasn’t going to get a second chance. He didn’t strike me as the type who wasted idle threats.
The first thing I did when the doc released me was make a call back to that little base in Arlington, Virginia. I talked to that special judge they had there. I explained everything we had on Williams and told him we needed a team dispatched to collect our prisoner. He said they’d have someone here within ten hours. They had this real nifty jet that had been seized by the DEA from a Florida drug lord and subsequently got turned over to the Department of Defense. Then, through a little sleight of hand, the jet disappeared off the inventory and ended up belonging to my secret justice unit.
Then I made sure Williams was locked away in his own cell. He had to walk on crutches because his testicles had swollen up nearly as large as billiard balls. He actually looked pretty funny, with his legs splayed apart, trying to walk without his big thighs rubbing against his groin. One thing was for damn sure. He wasn’t going to run away.