Mortal Allies (23 page)

I put on my most lawyerly expression and recklessly announced, “I think he’s gonna get off.”

His chin flew back and his big beefy jowls shivered like poked Jell-O. “Get off? Now, how could that boy get off? He was sleeping right next to the corpse. His own belt was wrapped around that child’s neck. And his devil’s fluids were inside.”

His explosion was so loud that nearly twenty of the preachers and deacons began gathering in a knot around us, collectively eavesdropping on every word. There were more than a few apprehensive faces. The last thing they wanted was to publicly vilify a man who might subsequently be found innocent. How could they ever return home and look their flocks in the eye?

“Look, there aren’t many lawyers over here, and y’all know how us lawyers love to talk, right? Rumors fly around pretty thick.”

“That right?” another preacher stepped forward to ask. This one was a few years younger than Preacher Peach, and leaner, and weathered in that tough, parched, dried-out way some southerners get. He had hard eyes, too. What my mother used to call brimstone eyes. He would be Preacher Prick, I decided.

I said, “Well, I hear things.”

Preacher Prick’s neck shot forward an inch or two. “So what you hearin’, son?”

“That maybe the police didn’t do such a thorough job. They might’ve jumped to conclusions a bit, if you get my meaning.”

“Nope,” he said. “Don’t get your meaning at all.”

“Well, I’m only going on rumors now, but the word is the Korean police rushed into that apartment and messed up the scene of the crime something terrible. Contaminated the evidence, shoved around the witnesses. Also, given who died and all — if you’ll excuse my language — they were getting their nuts squeezed something awful to name a suspect. Any suspect, even if meant cramming a square peg into a round hole.”

The lids on Preacher Prick’s tight eyes screwed down even tighter, until all there was were two thin black slits, and the part of his face beneath his nose started moving around, like he was chewing something hard with his lips.

“Don’t say?” he asked, craning his neck forward dubiously.

“Just what I hear,” I replied, glancing at my watch, as though I suddenly remembered I had some drastically important appointment.

He drew his shoulders together a bit, and in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, said, “Son, ’fore we all dedicated ourselves to this lofty task, we got briefed by some two-star general back in the Pentagon. He went over every last detail about this case. Accordin’ to him, now, that Whitehall boy’s guilty as hell. He says he ain’t got a rat’s chance of gettin’ off. Them’s his words.”

I suddenly tasted a rush of bile slithering up my throat. I swallowed it, though, and struggled to appear normal.

“Ah, well,” I said, “and would you happen to remember that general’s name? I mean, even generals sometimes get these things wrong. And he’d be back in Washington, wouldn’t he? And we’re out here, on the forward frontier of justice, aren’t we? Besides, he ain’t a lawyer, is he? So what’s he know?”

“I can’t recall the man’s name,” Preacher Prick frankly admitted, scratching his head a bit. Then he quickly said, “I mean, there was a whole room full of generals when he was talking. He was a lawyer, though, just like you. ’Ceptin’, he’s like the head lawyer, so I expect he knows what he’s talkin’ about.”

The smile disappeared from my face. Then, since I’d already made a horse’s ass of myself, I glanced down at my watch again and said, “Holy cow, look at the time! I gotta get going.”

Preacher Peach smiled benignly, while Preacher Prick stared at my nametag like it was a name he meant to remember, and maybe even check up on.

I rushed straight to the elevator and up to my room. I was so furious, I could barely see straight. I lifted up the phone and gave the operator the number in Washington. A few seconds passed before Clapper’s administrative assistant, a captain with the silly name of William Jones, answered.

Trying to contain my rage, I choked out, “Drummond here. Let me talk to the general. Put the bastard on right now!”

Somehow or another, Captain Jones detected I was miffed.

“Major Drummond,” he said, in the calmest, most reasonable voice imaginable, “perhaps I should offer you some advice. You really might want to cool down, and call back later.”

To which I replied, “Jones, put me through right away or I swear I’m gonna climb on the next flight out of here and come kill you.”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” he answered, quite wisely deciding that his definition of duty did not require him to get trapped in the middle of whatever was happening here.

A moment later, Clapper, all warm and bubbly, said, “Hello, Sean. What can I do for you?”

“What can you do for me?” I screamed. “Jesus Christ! I just ran into a lynching party made up of cornpone preachers. They claimed the Chief of Staff of the Army invited them over here.”

“Now, settle down, Sean. It’s not like you make it sound.”

“No?” I replied. “Okay, listen closely to this, because I mean it exactly like it sounds. I am formally advising you that I’m considering filing an immediate motion to have this case dismissed. You’d better have a damned good excuse for this.”

He didn’t skip a beat. “The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs thought it might be a good idea if the Army tried to reach out to the southern religious community. While our position with regard to Whitehall is completely neutral, we can’t afford to antagonize the religious right.”

“You’re shittin’ me!”

“Did you know some forty percent of Army recruits come from the South? That’s almost half the Army’s enlisted strength. Hell, forty-five percent of the officer corps are southerners. I’m from Tennessee myself. And we nearly all fit into one profile. We’re nearly all dyed-in-the-wool, corn-fed, red-white-and-blue Baptists and Methodists. Do you have any idea what’ll happen to our recruiting statistics if these preachers take to the lecterns and start speaking out against military service? They very easily could, too. They’ll get up and start talking against the immoral and godless policy of gays serving in the ranks, and before you know it, you’ll swear service in the Army is the same thing as leasing a condo in Sodom and Gomorrah. You know us southern boys, Sean. When our mamas and our preachers talk, we sit up and listen. Christ, there won’t be any Army left to join. Believe me, they’ve got us by the short hairs.”

“How about you briefing them on the particulars of this case? Is that true?”

“It was perfectly aboveboard. They insisted on being briefed before they all climbed on an airplane to spend the next two weeks away from their churches. All I did was assure them the trial would go off as scheduled. I hardly told them anything.”

“Is that right?”

“I simply went over a few things they could as easily have read in the newspapers. I disclosed nothing confidential. I said nothing that isn’t public knowledge.”

“Gee, General, now I’m thoroughly baffled. See, those preachers swore you said Whitehall’s guilty as hell, that he hasn’t got a rat’s chance of getting off. Your words exactly, according to them.”

Now here’s where you have to understand that there’s this list of cosmically dumb things you can do in the Army, and right near the top is catching a two-star general in a full-blown, bald-faced lie. You can
suspect
a general is lying, you can even
know
a general is lying, but to actually
acknowledge
that fact, to his face, falls under the heading of more than stupid: It’s like putting a gun to your own head.

Then again, there are exceptions to every rule — like when you can file a motion to get this case dismissed, and get the general a front-cover picture on
TIME
magazine that will ruin his career, his life, and his reputation. In instances like that you can say you balled his wife last night and odds are all he’ll do is grin and ask how it was.

And Clapper was no dummy. He knew that, too.

Sounding very legalistic, he said, “As I recall, I was answering a question, off the record. And to the best of my recollection, I caveated that response by clarifying this was only a personal reflection, not my professional opinion.”

When you hear those golden words, “as I recall,” and “to the best of my recollection,” and all the rest of that specious gobbledygook, especially from the lips of a trained lawyer, you know you’ve got a guilty scoundrel by the balls.

I said, “Know what really pisses me off about this?”

“No, Sean, what really pisses you off?” Clapper asked, struggling to sound affable.

“I know the guy probably did it, but I still can’t stomach it being done this way. He deserves every chance of squirming out of it everybody else gets.”

“And he’ll get that, Sean. He’ll have a fair trial in front of an impartial board. You can voir dire anybody off that board you don’t like.”

I hung up on him. I was suddenly sick of listening to him. He and the rest of the Army were stacking the deck against Whitehall, who might even deserve it, only it was wrong, and unethical. I was tired of hearing soldiers tell me they’d been told not to say anything nice about Whitehall; and the State Department trying to trade him like a piece of rotten meat; and learning the Army had handpicked its most viciously successful prosecutor and a military judge who thought he worked for the prosecuting attorney. And now I was tired of preachers telling me the Army had actually flown them over here to publicly pillory my client.

What really fried me was that comment from Katherine about how I had no idea how my side played, and I’d stubbornly insisted she was wrong. Well, she wasn’t wrong. That, I really hated. That, I hated more than anything.

As it was, I now faced one of those head-splitting moral dilemmas Professor Maladroit used to pontificate about. Based on what Preacher Peach and Preacher Prick had told me downstairs, I probably had a shot at getting this case thrown out. I could file a motion and ask the judge to hold an inquest to determine what the chief of the JAG Corps really told those preachers. Then, poof! Thomas Whitehall might walk out a free man.

Not an innocent man — a free man.

The South Koreans would of course go so insanely crazy with rage they’d probably throw every last American trooper off the peninsula.

The Army would reassign me to be chief counsel on some Aleutian island nobody had ever heard of — and leave me there till the next ice age.

My client, who was possibly a murdering, raping necrophiliac, would adore me.

Katherine would send me Christmas cards the rest of my life.

I’d hate myself forever.

These were all the points I listed in my head as I tried to reason through this. Although I shouldn’t have been the least bit ambivalent, because, technically, there was no debate. It was open and shut. I was supposed to immediately inform my co-counsels and my client of everything I’d just discovered. That was the right and proper thing to do. That was the legally ethical thing to do. It even happened to be the expedient thing to do.

Of course, I wasn’t about to do any such thing.

Some lawyers believe in winning any way they can. It isn’t about guilt or innocence — it’s about winning no matter what it takes. I don’t happen to be one of them.

Clapper had foolishly created an
impression
of command influence in this case that would be impossible for any military judge to ignore. But were Clapper’s remarks to some bunch of preachers really prejudicial to Whitehall’s fate?

Of course not. On the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt to let Clapper sweat. It might even be helpful.

I
went to the hair parlor to see Katherine. Bedlam reigned: Phones were ringing, the clerks were jumping around taking messages, referring calls, scribbling and passing notes. The amazon and the grump were hunched over the fax machine frenziedly shoving papers through the slot and looking like a pair of hens with their tails on fire.

I ignored them and even Imelda, who glowered at me as I walked by. I guess she was pissed that I’d cold-shouldered her these past few days. Hey, what the hell? She’d betrayed me, right? She’d chosen her lot. Didn’t she know they were all gay?

Anyway, I went straight into Katherine’s office. She was on the phone; she shot me a distracted look and kept right on talking. I planted myself in the chair in front of her desk. I wasn’t going anywhere.

Finally she hung up. “Well?”

“I’ve got some very bad news.”

“This isn’t about the religious delegation, is it?” She waved a dismissive hand through the air.

“You mean you already know about them?” I asked, surprised.

“Drummond, I knew about them five days ago. I knew about them before they even walked into the Pentagon to get briefed.”

I got instantly suspicious. “Bullshit. How?”

“OGMM. They keep me informed of things I need to know.”

“Is that so?”

She leaned back in her chair and ran a hand through that long, luxurious hair of hers, as she apparently weighed whether or not I was worthy to be entrusted with this knowledge.

“This stays between us, right?”

This was Katherine Carlson. Before I agreed to anything so open-ended, I said, “It doesn’t involve breaking any laws, does it?”

“Come on, Drummond. If I was breaking laws, think I’d admit it? To you, of all people?”

She had a good point. I simply shrugged.

She leaned toward me. “Do you have any idea what OGMM does? How it works? What it is?”

I didn’t, actually, though I wasn’t going to admit that. Not to Miss Always Number One in the Class, anyway. “Of course I know,” I said with a facial expression and arm gesture intended to imply supreme confidence. “It’s one of those nonprofits that gets oodles of money from guilty-feeling rich liberals and gays, right?”

“Partly right. From a funding angle, anyway. But OGMM’s unique from other gay rights groups. It was formed by gay service-members themselves. It was set up as a secret organization — secret in existence and secret in membership. Put simply, its purpose is to protect gays who want to serve their country without having their rights violated.”