Die behind the wheel, p.19
Die Behind the Wheel, page 19
“Keep your hands off! It’s mine! You can’t have any!”
“We’ve got a picture of you at the wheel of your boyfriend’s Yugo,” said Howser. “How does that jibe with your sworn statement that he took the car out that night?”
“I want a lawyer,” said Paloma.
“They always ask for a lawyer about this time.”
She returned to chewing on her thumbnail. Howser moved in for the kill.
“You and Connie planned the whole thing after Quinn had his way with you then dumped you. You begged your boyfriend to forgive you. Said you’d never cheat on him again. He agreed, but only if you helped him erase his humiliation. Isn’t that right?”
“I want a lawyer,” she repeated.
“And you decided to stay here with him. Probably even to marry him. And the two of you cooked up this story to cover for each other. You would blame him, he would blame you. You knew his car would be clean. No proof. We’d never make the charges stick.”
“Okay. I want to make a deal,” said Paloma, changing course. “I’m not spending the rest of my life in jail for a clown like Connie.”
Howser nodded knowingly and produced a sheet of paper for her to sign. “I guess the weekend at the college didn’t turn out like you planned.”
“You still can’t prove I was anywhere near the scene,” said Connie. “I read the papers. There was no one in the street. No witnesses.”
“You’re right. At least partially,” said Ernie. “There was no one in the street. But I’ve got nine witnesses. Eyewitnesses, as a matter of fact. And their stories all match.”
“Nine witnesses? That’s impossible.”
Ernie rose from her chair and pulled a piece of paper from her back pocket. She placed it on the table before Connie and smoothed the folds and the wrinkles.
“I’m gonna need you to sign this confession,” she said. “The judge might go a little softer on you and your pretty girlfriend if you do. Go ahead. Read it. You’ll find it’s all true and in order. And I’ll lay odds Paloma’s already signed hers in the other room.”
“I’m not signing anything. I want to know who your non-existent witnesses are.”
“All right then. I’ll tell you. You were careless, friend. Stupid, really. That clown college of yours didn’t make you so smart after all. You’re going to be one of the most famous—infamous—undergrads Clown Science Polytechnic University ever produced. Even more famous than your mime professor, Harley Quinn. Lost your girl to a mime? That’s pathetic, even for a clown. But what I don’t understand is why you didn’t just club him to death with a juggling pin? Squirt him with poison from your lapel flower? Or sabotage his unicycle on the high wire? What the hell were you thinking taking nine classmates along with you to run him over? Did you really think they wouldn’t turn you in?”
As the realization dawned on him, Connie lost the power of speech. He was going to jail, and so was Paloma. He cursed himself silently for his oversight. He’d planned everything so carefully, only to make that one tiny mistake that nabbed him. Why had he chosen death by clown car?
He began to weep. Weber, having swallowed the last of his Slim Jim, set about licking the grease from the inside of the wrapper. Ernie patted the prisoner on the shoulder. At length, Connie composed himself and Ernie asked him one last question.
“I gotta know one thing,” she said. “How did you fit ten clowns into that little car? I just don’t get it. How the hell did you do that?”
Connie lifted his head and regarded the cop with more vitriol and hatred than she’d ever encountered in a criminal. He fairly spat his words at her.
“That is a trade secret.”
“You know, this case reminds me of an old song,” said Howser, raising a beer to his partner at McNally’s.
Ernie rolled her eyes. “Not more of your seventies crap. How many times do I have to tell you I hate that progressive rock you play.”
“No, no. Not my usual stuff. I was thinking of an opera I heard once. You know, the one about clowns.”
Back to TOC
SHOW BIZ KIDS
Brian Thornton
The orderly pulled back the sheet. I didn’t recognize the face beneath it.
“Either of you know him?” I said to the two guys flanking me.
Pritzkau, looking green, shook his head.
“Burbridge,” Moore, our corpsman, said. “He’s an Ops guy. ST, OS, something like that. One of the FNGs we picked up in Guam.”
I looked from the paperwork on my clipboard to the remains of Seaman Apprentice Tim Burbridge, laid out on the slab before us.
“He’s no ST,” Pritzkau, the sonar tech, said. “And if he were any kind of ops guy, I’d have seen him around CIC.”
Moore reached over and pulled the sheet all the way back. Burbridge was fair-haired and young—no more than twenty—shirtless and barefoot, a pair of flare-legged jeans the only thing on him other than the tag adorning his right big toe.
There were only two marks on the kid: a long red gash traveling the breadth of his forehead and a partially healed skull tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. I was willing to bet my crow and the stripes stacked below it that the tat had nothing to do with his death.
“What’s an FNG?” the orderly said.
“If you gotta ask what an FNG is,” Pritzkau said, “you’re an FNG.”
“I know that CIC means Combat Information Center,” the orderly said testily. “That ST is a sonar tech, that OS is short for Operations Specialist, and that although we asked for your Master-at-Arms, we got a Sonar Tech, a Hospital Corpsman, and a Quartermaster, which is some kind of navigator. Where’s your Master-at-Arms?”
“Ashore,” I said. “I’m the Master-at-Arms for today’s duty section, which is how it works on anything smaller than a carrier. And an FNG’s a Fuckin’ New Guy, Boot.” Sometimes with boots you gotta spell it out. “Who found him? And where?”
“Bunch of kids diving off the Shit River Bridge for coins found him.”
“That’s practically on the base. How did nobody else turn him up before them? They take his clothes?”
“I don’t know.”
“He have anything else on him other than his ID?”
“He won’t know that, either,” Moore said. Then to the orderly, “Where’s base police? NIS? SP’s?”
“Subic base police brought him in,” the orderly said.
“This isn’t what an accidental drowning looks like,” Moore said.
“You can say that again.” The orderly crossed his arms and looked triumphantly from me to Pritzkau, and back at me. “What drowning victim has his ID folded up and stuffed down his throat?”
“Think that gash on his noggin killed him?” Pritzkau called over his shoulder, loud enough to be heard over the Jeep’s engine as we bounced down the access road in the direction of Pier 6. He was the duty driver, and our ship, the USS Paul F. Foster, was moored there.
“There was no hemorrhaging in the whites of his eyes, and no water in his lungs,” Moore yelled from the passenger seat. “He didn’t choke on anything, and he didn’t drown. Someone smacked him upside the head with something heavy and then tossed him into the Shit. He was dead before he hit the drink.”
“And in the Shit River?” Pritzkau laughed. “Gimme a break.”
Everyone called this particular body of water the Shit River because of the smell. Even our U.S. Government-issued charts and pubs used that name for it. But the Shit wasn’t really a river. Size-wise, it barely qualified as a creek. It was only listed at all because it marked part of the border between the outer perimeter of the Subic NAVSTA and the Philippine territory of Olongapo City.
I had often wondered whether the sages at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration had designated it a river to avoid giving any wiseacre squid an open invitation to make “up shit creek” jokes.
I attributed it at least in part to Jimmy Carter being president. That shit never would have flown under Nixon, and Ford wasn’t around long enough to make an impact at government agencies like NOAA.
While musing on whether the Shit was actually a creek or a river, I had unconsciously pulled out the letter I’d been carrying around unopened in the left breast pocket of my dungaree shirt for the past two days. Now I sat staring at it, as if trying to determine its contents without indulging in the finality of unsealing it.
Moore’s voice brought me back. “Say again?”
“I asked what you think, QM2.” He used my rank rather than my name. Most of my shipmates did. I was the only second-class Quartermaster on the Foster.
I looked back down at the envelope I’d been turning over and over in my hands. “What’re you askin’ me for?”
“You’re the Master-at-Arms.”
“Duty section Master-at-Arms,” I corrected him. “Chief Day’s the cop. You’ll have to ask him.”
“We’d have to see him to ask him,” Pritzkau said.
“Oh, we’re gonna see him. If Moore’s right,” I repeated, “this might be an accidental death and it might not. Either way, that kid’s dead, and he’s one of ours. And that is gonna necessitate a fair amount of paper-pushing from our ship’s Master-at-Arms.”
“He’ll just make you do it.”
“He may try,” I said as I folded my letter. “But I only work for the chief on duty days. And Gorelick outranks him.”
Senior Chief Gorelick was the leading quartermaster, and my boss. In the Navy, quartermasters have nothing to do with the Supply department, a fact lost on my Army-veteran father when I first told him I’d joined up. Navy quartermasters are navigation experts.
Moreover, Senior Chief Gorelick and Chief Day hated each other. So I didn’t foresee my boss allowing Day to pass off the paperwork on a ship’s personnel death—accidental or otherwise—to me. And none of the other duty-section MAAs knew how to do it.
“If Burbridge is…uh…was Ops,” Pritzkau said, “why wouldn’t I see him in CIC, or at least around the berthing?”
“He was already mess-cranking,” Moore said. “Washing dishes for the officers up on the second deck, so it’s not like you’d ever even see him in CIC. They put him to work up there the day he stepped onboard in Guam.”
“Okay, but the berthing?”
“Your berthing’s full. They stuck him in Engineering’s berthing.”
“With the snipes?” Pritzkau was from Kentucky, and his accent really came out to play when he was either surprised or scandalized.
“With the snipes,” Moore repeated.
“Poor bastard,” Pritzkau said, as if Burbridge’s actual situation—being dead—was only marginally better than berthing with ship’s engineers.
“Was he hanging with snipes?” I asked, impressed by how switched-on Moore was with the goings-on onboard the Foster. It was a time-honored truism: people open up around their doctors. Our corpsmen were the closest thing to one.
Moore shrugged and fished a cigarette out of a pack of Old Golds. He offered the pack around. I waved him off. Pritzkau took one.
“A couple of ’em. You know how it is, QM2,” Moore said. “FNGs on a new duty station, maybe they get to know each other a bit waiting for their ship, hang together for a while—at least until they start to fit in within their division.”
I looked down at the still-unopened envelope in my hand. I refolded it and tucked it back in my shirt pocket. “Sounds like all roads lead to snipes berthing.”
“God help you,” Pritzkau said around the Old Gold dangling from the corner of his mouth.
Lieutenant J.J. Willis met me on the Foster’s quarterdeck just as we crossed the ship’s brow. He was the duty section’s command duty officer for that day, filling in for the captain and XO, who were both ashore. He looked tired. I knew the look. He was my division officer. I had seen that look a lot.
I quickly filled him in. He removed his ship’s ballcap and wiped his sweating face. “Why does shit like this have to happen to me?”
Yeah, that’s right, I thought. This sure is one big inconvenience for you.
“Guess God just hates you, sir. Is MAC Day back aboard, sir?” I knew the answer already. Still, it was important to fix in the CDO’s mind how my first move upon returning to the ship from ID’ing a dead kid was to respect the chain of command and seek to make contact with my superior. “If he is, then maybe we ought to get him up here. After all, he’s the expert.”
Willis made a face. “Chief Day is still ashore. I’ve left messages with his wife’s sister at the number he left as a contact point when he went on leave, but so far, no dice.”
“Captain and XO?”
“Still ashore, too. I’ve left messages for both of them at the BOQ.”
“Anyone check the White Castle yet?” This from the petty-officer of the watch, a loud-mouth boatswain’s mate named Davison.
It was common knowledge that when in the P.I., our captain was fond of frequenting a place in town called the White Castle Hotel. A couple of Australians ran it, and the captain knew one of them from ’Nam. There were standing orders from him that, unless the ship was sinking, we were not to disturb him while he was off-ship, regardless of port. Our captain was a work-hard/play-hard kinda guy.
And it was precisely that sort of thing that drove an indecisive twit like my boss nuts. Where our captain was a risk-taker by nature, having won both a silver star and the Navy Cross in Vietnam, our ship’s navigator was one of those guys comforted by the rules, considering them guidelines to live by.
Willis turned and stared at Davison. Davison clasped his hands behind his back and looked down at his boots.
I broke the tension by saying, “Mr. Willis, would you wake up the duty Ops department head and the duty Personnelman? I’m gonna need access to some of the kid’s files so I can get going on the paperwork.”
“I’ll pull his medical file,” Moore said.
“And I’m gonna need Pritzkau to help me inventory the contents of the decedent’s locker and rack, sir.”
I used the master key to open the lock situated just below the middle edge of the dead kid’s mattress. Then I reached over and snapped on the reading light over the head of his rack, right above his pillow.
Burbridge’s rack was made up neat: sheets clean, with crisp, hospital edges, standard-issue wool blanket folded into a square just like they drilled into us back in boot camp.
“Put out that light!” The voice came from somewhere off to my left.
I ignored it.
Pritzkau cleared his throat, leaned close, and murmured, “Do you really wanna roust this whole berthing?”
Snipes tended to be a notoriously unruly bunch when they were awake. A sonar tech—any non-snipe, for that matter—caught in their berthing after lights-out, making enough noise to wake up even a few of them, could expect to be on the receiving end of a pink belly at the very least.
“Kid’s dead, Pritz. Can’t be helped. This is ship’s business, and I’m the MAA, so it’s on me. Don’t worry,” I added as I got a grip on lip of the kid’s locker. “Your belly will depart this berthing as white as a full moon.”
He grinned in the half-light and leaned in to help me with the lid.
“Goddammit, I said to put out that light!”
“Pipe down!” another voice broke in. “Tryin’ a sleep, here!”
The lid came up with an audible creak. Before I could so much as flash my light into the locker, I found myself clamped hard on the shoulder and spun around.
“Just what in hell do you two assholes think you’re doing down here after lights-out?” Engineman Third Class Lynn Glenn snarled.
Like me, Glenn was a duty section Master-at-Arms. Lots of guys tried to get qualified to do it so as not have to stand a quarterdeck or engine-room watch. Most of them didn’t take the job very seriously. To them it was considered “cake duty.”
EN3 Glenn was one of those guys.
I shone the flashlight full in his face to back him off a bit. He was bare-chested, in just his skivvies.
He raised a hand to shield his eyes and swore loudly.
“Ship’s business, Glenn,” I said brightly. “You want me to turn on every light you have in the overhead, or are you gonna leave us to it and go back to your rack?”
“You don’t get that light outta my face,” he said, “I’m gonna shove it up your ass.” But there wasn’t much behind the words.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “If you’re not gonna turn back in, shipmate, then pitch in.” I slapped a new plastic bag full into his broad, hairy chest. “Help us bag up Burbridge’s belongings.”
“What did Burbridge do?” a third voice, this one coming from the next row over.
“How much trouble’s he in?” asked another.
“The worst,” Pritzkau said. “He’s dead.”
That brought a chorus of equal parts shock and disbelief, and the overhead lights went on.
Demands for explanation followed, echoing down the aisles in this berthing that served as home to fifty men. Pritzkau and I found ourselves in the middle of a knot of at least twenty of them. The others must have been out sampling the sins on offer in the fleshpots lining Magsaysay Drive.
“When was the last time any of you guys saw him?” I asked loudly.
“He and Rummage went out to the Pearl of the Quarter last night,” someone said.
“Nah, not the Pearl of the Quarter,” said another guy. “They closed that place down. New one. Forget the name….”
“Who’s Rummage?” I said.
A torrent of speculation poured forth from those gathered around Burbridge’s rack as to which of Magsaysay’s colorfully named brothels—cum-bars Burbridge might have intended to spend what turned out to be his final night on this earth.
“The Washington Zoo?”
“That’s not new.”
“Around The World?”
