The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  I grabbed the portable tape recorder, the cassette that had the man talking about eight hundred dead sailors and the one that was marked .30 B M 1919A4, my toilet kit and gun cases and went back to the motel.

  What Allison had in mind was more than holding her. That was after I got even with her for hanging up on me by calling her Cuddles. Once. She in turn immediately got back by giving me an open-handed slap along the side of the head that left my ear ringing. We have a stormy relationship. But we also know how to put that all behind us.

  There were times I felt about Allison the way I have felt about no woman since the agonies of first love as a teenage know-nothing. What I felt for her was more than reasonable or safe, and I knew if I ever tried to articulate any of that to her, it might fatally damage whatever it was between us. It certainly was more than a relationship, in the normal sense of the word. A relationship was something I could have on a part-time basis with a smoky number like Jo Sommers. Being with Allison was more like Holy Communion. I was afraid to talk about it and scared to death of losing it. I often wondered if Allison ever felt the same way.

  It was something I never could ask her, but later on that night, while I was snuffling in her ear and she was toying with the hair on my chest, I offered an oblique approximation of what I felt for her.

  “About a million years ago, you told me that someday you’d like to make yourself a boy child that exhibited some of the same traits that you, at the time, ascribed to me. Remember?”

  “The First Night,” she intoned. “I remember.”

  “Still feel that way?”

  She rolled onto her stomach, rested her chin on her hands and stared me straight in the eye. “Yup. Someday.”

  “I know it seems like we’ve just been through all this, but I’m going to ask again. Would you ever someday consider getting legally hitched to a guy like me and then set about making yourself that male child, or female child, or whatever? I’m not fussy.”

  “I would seriously consider doing that only when a fellow like you found himself another line of work.”

  “Oh. That again.”

  “Yes. That again.”

  “Well, what if the fellow like me felt he was doing the sort of thing he was meant to be doing, according to some small voice at the very bottom of his existence. Supposing he wouldn’t feel right about going into another line of work? What then? Give up on making the boy child?”

  “Nope,” she said, cocking one elbow to prop up her chin with one hand while her other went exploring. “Seems to me I’d have one of two choices, pardner.”

  “Such as?”

  “I could either find another fellow like you…”

  “Or?”

  The fingers of her free hand were walking up my leg. “Or I could just go ahead and make me the boy child without bothering to get legally hitched. That way I’d have the boy child and not have to worry all the time about whatever might happen to Papa.”

  “You really would do that?”

  Her fingers quit walking. “Who says I already haven’t?”

  The next morning, while Allison was in the shower, I replayed the tape about the sailors that I’d listened to the night before. It still didn’t trigger any bright ideas. Then I played the other tape, the one with the code that rang faint bells in my memory. And partway through that, the bells clanged.

  The patient had been the young marine Billy Carpenter had told me about. He’d been part of the machine-gun squad that was overrun at a river crossing. The man speaking on the tape was the one who’d burrowed beneath the bodies of dead marines around him. The enemy camped around him for the rest of that night, and the next day they’d carried off their own dead. That night, the man on the tape had been able to slip away, back to American lines. But he had spent something like eighteen hours burrowed beneath the dead bodies of his buddies. It was a nightmare he had to carry for the rest of his life. Not even the Silver Star, which he told Sommers he’d received for that action, could still the memories.

  It wasn’t a pleasant tale, but by the time I’d heard most of it, I realized what the tape code was: .30 B M 1919A4. It meant .30-caliber Browning Model 1919A4 machine gun. It would have been the model number of the machine gun he would have been manning when his post was overrun. What I remembered was an obscure bit of knowledge I’d picked up as an aviation ordnanceman in the navy. Most light machine guns used by American troops in World War II and Korea were just modifications of the weapon that John Moses Browning first designed in 1901. Just after World War I, in 1919, the final modifications were made, creating the weapon used in the nation’s next two major conflicts, the .30-caliber Browning Models 1919A4 and A6. And that made me think of something else. Among the models on the fireplace mantel in the Sommers den was one of a water-cooled machine gun with its muzzle pointed groundward. It could have been the doctor’s memento of the patient whose story I’d just heard. And the other cassette codes could be similar, identifying a piece of ordnance that was a part of the patient’s past. There had to be somebody who could tell me what CA 35 meant.

  I dialed the Wakefield number. While I was waiting for somebody to answer, Allison came out of the bathroom in her undies. She looked a lot sexier in underwear than Jo Sommers had, but there was no way I could tell her that. She winked at me and went to stand in front of a full-length mirror on the wall and run a brush through her hair.

  Mrs. Wakefield answered. I identified myself and asked to speak to her husband. When he came on the line I addressed him as general and told him about the man wearing the cammies who had lobbed a grenade into the Sommers patio the night before. It startled him enough so he told me to call him Gus and asked what he could do for me.

  “I think I’m getting close to whatever’s behind all this,” I told him. “But I need some information. To do with navy things, in World War Two. I’d like to talk to one of your opposite numbers, a navy man, from back in those days. Preferably somebody who doesn’t live around here.”

  “Why not somebody living around here?”

  “Because here, I figure, is where the killer lives. And I don’t want him to learn how close I am.”

  He told me to wait a minute. While I waited, I watched Allison step into a pair of blue jeans and a red turtleneck top. She fussed with her hair some more, then went to the small refrigerator beneath the TV set and poured a couple of glasses of orange juice. Another trait we had in common was that neither one of us ate much of a breakfast, despite what the nutritionists say. You can’t let experts run your whole life for you.

  “I have the name of a man who should be able to help you,” Gus Wakefield said. “If he can’t answer your questions, he’ll be able to give you the name of somebody who can.”

  I thanked him and took down the name. It was an Admiral Smith Hollowell, who lived in a suburb of San Diego. I phoned and got the admiral on the line, used Gus Wakefield’s name as an introduction, told him about the killings going on hereabouts and the Haywood Sommers tapes.

  “What do you need to know?” he barked. He had a high, yappy voice and sounded as if he were late for an appointment.

  “I think one of the tapes is a key to all this,” I told him. “The patient is talking about something that occurred late in the war. Something like eight hundred sailors dying. It involved a ship identified as CA thirty-five.”

  “The Indy,” snapped Hollowell.

  “Sir?”

  “The cruiser Indianapolis. Took two torpedoes, after delivering components of the Hiroshima bomb to Tinian Island. But it wasn’t the torpedoes that killed all those bluejackets. It was command failure. Most of those men went mad and drowned. They drifted four days without anybody realizing the ship was missing. Men wearing braid should have been hung for that. And I don’t mean the captain of the Indianapolis, either. McVay was his name. He committed suicide several years after, you know.”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “CA was heavy cruiser designation. The Indy was CA thirty-five.
You apparently weren’t a navy man.”

  “I was air navy, sir.”

  “Ah. That explains it. Anything else you need to know?”

  “Do you recall if any ships picked up an SOS from the Indy, after she was torpedoed?”

  “Nobody ever admitted it. But from what Indy survivors reported later, they got a message out. And I can’t believe every ship and shore station was ignoring guard channels at the time.”

  “What sort of stir would it cause, this many years after, if it were revealed somebody had heard the Indy signal for help but ignored it?”

  Hollowell made something like a dog’s growl. “He would be loathed by every man who ever put to sea. Even somebody from air navy should be able to figure that out.”

  Allison was watching as I hung up the phone. “You learned something big,” she told me.

  “I learned a part of it,” I told her.

  “What now?”

  “I’m going to go find a library and read about World War Two. What are you going to do?”

  “Go paint a picture. Have fun.”

  SIXTEEN

  The library in Monterey was on Pacific Street. It had scaffolding along one outer wall. It looked as if workmen were getting ready to build an addition onto it.

  The periodical literature guide told me an article about the sinking of the Indianapolis had appeared in the August 27, 1945, issue of Time magazine. It listed another article that was published in December 1945, about an inquiry into the sinking.

  The twinkly-eyed lady at the information desk told me the library had copies of Time magazine on microfilm going back to 1923 and pointed me toward the viewing machine. Five minutes later I was reading about the sinking of the Indianapolis. It was a grim account. Hundreds of men had perished as they drifted in the Philippine Sea, hallucinating, dying of shark attack. After that long in the water, life vests became waterlogged, and men had slipped beneath the surface as they scanned the skies and horizon for the help that didn’t come until too late, for too many.

  The December article quoted testimony by the ship’s captain, Charles Butler McVay III. He said he’d been asleep in his sea cabin near the bridge when the torpedoes struck at 12:05 a.m., July 30, 1945. He’d run to the bridge, ordered the navigator to send out a distress call with the ship’s position, “then ran back to his cabin for his clothes.” The article went on to say the loss of the Indianapolis produced the heaviest casualty list of any U.S. ship since the battle-ship Arizona was blown apart and sunk at Pearl Harbor.

  I wondered why I hadn’t remembered something that catastrophic. I’d just been a kid at the time. Maybe the timing had something to do with it. Nuclear weaponry and war’s end could shove an item like that right off the front page, and the navy probably hadn’t wanted to clang any gongs when it made the announcement of the loss of the Indianapolis and a total of 880 crew members.

  I thanked the library people for their help and went back across the street to the public parking lot where I’d left my car. It was a nice morning. Sunny and warm. September’s a good month in this part of the world. I stood soaking it all in for a minute before getting back in the car.

  It seemed to me I had a couple of ways to go about things just then. One would be to take apart the Sommers home until I found the doctor’s code list, so I could link a name with the CA 35 tape, or else I could go find young Alex Kilduff and wring his neck until he told me what I wanted to know. I figured it would save time going after Alex.

  I drove west, along Lighthouse, then turned onto a street that ran down the long sloping hill not far from Cannery Row. I found the little place Jo had described. It was tucked into a far back corner of a lot with a rickety fence around it. You had to look closely to realize there was a dwelling back there. It was a good spot for a man who enjoyed privacy.

  I walked on back and rapped at the front door, then stood to one side so I couldn’t be seen through the window in the door. None of that got me anywhere. Nobody answered the door, and I didn’t hear any movement from inside. I walked around the side of the structure, ducking low when I came to a window.

  I looked through the window in the back door. I saw only one thing that looked out of place. A light over the kitchen sink was on. I walked back around to the front and looked through another window. It was a little hard to be sure in the daylight, but a lamp in the front room looked as if it were burning as well. At least I didn’t see anything that looked like a body.

  I walked all around the place again, looking into windows and listening to sirens in the distance. I had never taken a course in locksmithing, so whenever I wanted to get into a place where somebody wasn’t holding open the door for me, it was breaking and entering. Things didn’t seem to warrant that yet in this instance. Alex was due to show up at the Duck’s Quack before long. I’d wait and make a scene there.

  I drove back up to Lighthouse and turned east toward the freeway that would carry me over the hill to Carmel, but a block up from Lighthouse I saw cars and wagons blocking the street with their dome lights flashing. I was trying to get to the bottom of something involving two recent murders, a lot of extortion and nearly nine hundred dead sailors from more than three decades earlier. When you’re at the edge of that much death, you don’t just drive on by and ignore police cars and ambulances clogging a street with emergency lights flashing. I turned and drove up toward the lights. There was a knot of people standing around in a small municipal park. Somebody was pointing at something at the base of a flagpole. I got out of the car and walked across the street.

  Sometimes in a situation like that I cheat a little bit. I carry a plastic enclosed card with a photograph that identifies me as a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle. Media people would have a fit if they knew I was pulling a stunt like that, but the Chronicle probably wouldn’t much care. I used to be a reporter there, and I still fed them some information from time to time. The bogus card just helped smooth things along with out of town cops. I showed the ID to one of the uniformed officers and asked what was going on.

  “Don’t know, just got here myself. Speak to the lieutenant in the hat.”

  He pointed out a short man with no discernible chin who was wearing one of the silver-gray 25th Anniversary Jazz Festival golf caps, like the one Billy Carpenter had been wearing over the weekend. I waited until he’d finished a conversation with a couple of other men. There was what looked like a spattering of dried blood on the pavement at the base of the flagpole, but no body.

  The lieutenant turned to me. I showed him the ID and told him I was down there working on a story about the population boom thereabouts and how the old-timers were pulling out their hair over it. Told him I’d seen the flashing lights and decided to stop and see what was going on.

  “We’re not all that sure yet ourselves what we have,” he told me, raising his eyes. “We’re just about to get him down. But what it looks like is that somebody shot that gentleman through the head, then looped the flag halyard around his neck and hoisted him up the pole.”

  That’s when I looked up and saw Alex. There was a black hole in the side of his temple and his hands were tied behind his back. A dark scarf had been tied around his eyes, but I could tell it was Alex. Evidently the cops didn’t know him, but they would soon enough if his body had identification on it.

  “Hands tied, and blindfolded?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said the lieutenant, “almost as if somebody was trying to make a statement. Traitor, comes to mind.”

  I asked a couple of more questions, making notes in a pad, then told him that either I or a local stringer for the paper would be checking back with him later in the day. Then I got out of there and drove back to the home of the late Alex Kilduff. I parked a block away and hoofed it down the street. This time it didn’t have to be breaking and entering, even. A bedroom window at the rear of the house was unlocked. I slid up the sash and boosted myself over the sill.

  I went through the place quickly, looking for a desk or som
e other place where a man would do his paperwork. I figured I would have between ten minutes to a half hour before the police arrived, if they found ID on the body. There wasn’t all that much to go through. The bedroom was small and cramped, just room for a double bed, a low cedar chest of drawers and a closet bulging with clothes. If the bedroom was small, the kitchen was an afterthought. It had a refrigerator, a two-burner stove and open shelves that were for the most part bare. The front room took up the rest of the place. There were some books in a bookcase, a portable color television set, one easy chair and a low stand beside it with a telephone atop it. Under the stand was a shoebox where he kept his bills, a legal-sized yellow tablet and an old beer mug stuffed with pencils and ballpoint pens. I sifted through material in the shoebox, but it was mostly bills and circulars. No personal letters, no copies of Dr. Haywood Sommers’s audio cassette code.

  There was a small writing desk with a floor lamp beside it in a front corner, but the desk held no secrets I was after. The lamp was the one I’d seen through a front window, and I’d been right, it was turned on. It was beginning to look as if somebody had come for young Alex in the night. Or used some ruse to get him out to where somebody was waiting for him.

  I crossed to the bookcase. There were some school textbooks in it—American history, theory of economics, a small-business guide and a bunch of paperback science-fiction novels and general fiction. A section of the paperbacks stuck out a little further than the others. I used my handkerchief to pull them out further and found a hardcover book slipped in behind them. I took it out and looked at it and felt myself easing in a little closer to the core of things. It was a volume recently published by Stein and Day, written by a man named Raymond B. Lech. The title was All the Drowned Sailors. It was the story of the sinking of the Indianapolis.

  I backhanded the paperback books into place, but I didn’t worry about any fingerprints I might be leaving on the book about the Indy. I figured to take it back through the bedroom window with me on my way out. The book would mean more to me than it would to the police. Whenever I got to the bottom of things, I’d let Jo Sommers’s lawyer sort it out with the law. I riffled the pages of the book and a photograph fell out of it. It showed a navy enlisted man in working clothes, chambray shirt and dungarees. He was a good-looking young man with a strong resemblance to Alex Kilduff, like an older brother, or his father, maybe. He was seated, half-turned toward the camera and flashing a big grin. From the haircut he wore high on his scalp, it looked as if he’d be Alex’s father. And the equipment he was half-turned away from was a ship’s radio console. He was what Nikki Scarborough had scribbled shortly before she died. He was a radioman.