The First Wave (13 page)
COLONEL WALTON’S OFFICE looked more like a whorehouse parlor than an army hospital administrator’s digs. Thick deep purple drapes hung over the windows, blocking out the sun and heat. Oriental rugs were spread over the floor, and a velvet couch sat next to the antique walnut table that served as his desk. A big, ornate telephone and a glass ashtray stood on either side; otherwise the table was bare. There was a matching table at the other end of the room with six chairs around it. Probably for poker games, although there was a map open on it now. It was a National Geographic map of the Mediterranean, dated 1935. Hardly a top-secret document. On the wall opposite the window, a bookshelf was half-filled with army manuals and a few scattered medical books.
I was seated in front of Walton’s desk, waiting for him to finish the delicate business of lighting a cigar. He clipped the end, fired up his Zippo, and pulled on the stogie until it glowed red like a taillight at a stop sign. He finally blew out a substantial puff of smoke and appeared to be satisfied. He looked at the cigar like it was the only thing in his world and smiled. He took his eyes off of it and laid them on me, and the smile faded to a frown. Next topic on the agenda.
“Well, Lieutenant Boyle? What have you found out so far?”
“If I were a gambling man, Colonel, I’d bet it was an inside job.”
He went back to puffing on his cigar, and gazed at me through a cloud of blue smoke.
“I am a gambling man, junior, but then you probably know that already.” He blew smoke in my direction and looked at the stogie again, rolling it between his thumb and thick fingers. The tobacco leaf crinkled faintly under the pressure.
“Yessir, I do. I know that officers under your command owe you money, and that makes me wonder what they’d do to pay you back.”
“Dunbar doesn’t have the balls to kill a soul. The rest of them don’t owe enough to worry about.”
“Colonel, doesn’t it bother you that gambling is against regulations? You’re the commanding officer—”
“Regulations, hell, sonny boy. This is a war, and we aren’t stateside, in case you haven’t noticed. I’ve got a major hospital to run here, as well as being responsible for half a dozen field hospitals just behind the front. This isn’t your spit and polish regular Army unit, it’s a medical unit, and I make sure it runs as smooth as a baby’s bottom. A little recreational game of chance now and then lets everyone blow off some steam. No one’s forced to play, and if the brass doesn’t like it they can get someone else to be CO. Send me back to England! Who the hell wants to be in North Africa anyway?”
I couldn’t find a lot to disagree about. I liked his attitude. Unfortunately, I had just a few hours to prod these folks with a stick and see who jumped the highest.
“How much money did Sergeant Casselli owe you?”
“Listen, Lieutenant Boyle, if you want to run some chicken shit investigation into card games at this hospital, you go right ahead, after you figure out who killed Casselli and stole my drugs. Otherwise, I’m liable to think you’re a lazy sonofabitch who couldn’t figure out how to pour piss out of boot if the directions were written on the heel. Now is there anything of substance you have for me?”
“Well, yes, there’s something I’ve been wondering about. How do medics in the field administer morphine? Do they have needles?”
“No, they have self-contained doses in sealed syrettes. That’s usually enough to take care of the pain until the soldier gets to an aid station.”
“So how do the doctors know how much a wounded GI has had already?”
Walton stopped puffing on his cigar for a second, and looked at me as if he were deciding whether to answer me or throw me out. I waited for him to ask me why I wanted to know all this, but instead his eyes narrowed and he gave me a little lecture.
“Medics are supposed to pin each used syrette to the wounded man’s collar so he won’t be accidentally overdosed at the aid station. Sometimes, in real cold weather, the effects of morphine may be delayed until the body warms up.When it’s a cold night, you can usually count on some nervous medic giving too many doses for the GI’s own good. Soon as we warm him up, we have double trouble, the wound and a morphine overdose.”
“So what do you do?”
“Give him a morphine antidote, nalorphine. It’s a new drug, and works pretty well, unless you wait too long to administer it. Then we treat the wound, and make sure the patient survives both problems.”
“Nalorphine, penicillin. Lots of new drugs around here.”
“War is the great accelerator of medical progress, Lieutenant Boyle. I sometimes wonder if after all the deaths in battle are added up, we save more lives in the long term with the medical advances we make.”
It wasn’t what I expected from Colonel Maxwell Walton. It sounded thoughtful, and he wasn’t yelling. I didn’t like his theory of medical progress, but maybe he was right. I didn’t care to do the accounting. I had all I needed. I got up, thanked him for his time, and turned to leave.
“Two C notes,” he said.
“What?”
“You asked what Casselli owed me. He’s dead, I’m out one good supply sergeant, and short two hundred bucks. Does that make me a murderer in your book?”
“Not much there in the motive department.”
The telephone on his desk rang.
“I agree. Now go find someone who’s got one.” He picked up the phone and barked his name into it.
I left, crossing Walton off my list of suspects for now. He hadn’t looked at all surprised to see me, which meant either he was a good actor or he wasn’t the one who’d called up a French hit man. He was right about motive, too. There was nothing in it for him, as far as I could see. He could be getting a cut of the take, but all this killing on his home turf seemed too messy. He wouldn’t want to draw so much attention to his own command. And how could he be connected to the French underworld in Algeria? Actually, that last question applied to everyone involved in this case. There had to have been some advance work done. I could see Villard and his pals setting up their own smuggling operation to take advantage of whichever way the war went. But how could anyone on the inside of the U.S. Army hook up with them so quickly? I gave up trying to figure that one out and went to look for Corporal Willoughby. Something told me he knew more than he let on about what went on around here.
I left the main building and started to cross the courtyard, heading toward the supply depot, when I caught sight of Willoughby. I started to yell to him, but caught myself. He was headed for a row of supply trucks parked on the side of the road that ran between the hospital and the depot. I could see a work crew loading the last two trucks with crates and cases of who knows what. Willoughby made for the first truck, swiveling his head around to be sure no one spotted him. He was paying attention to the work crew, not me, so I stayed behind him and watched as he climbed in. I trotted over to the side of the canvas-covered deuce and a half where could hear Willoughby clattering around inside. Maybe he was checking to be sure everything was tied down tight. Or maybe he was pilfering Chesterfields. I decided to wait a minute and let him get deep into whichever it was. Then I walked to the back of the truck and lifted the flap.
“I thought the point was to send that stuff to the front,” I said. Willoughby turned, one hand holding the top of a wooden carton, the other in the pocket of his fatigue pants. I was pretty sure he wasn’t making a personal donation. I hoisted myself up into the truck bed and made my way down a narrow aisle between stacks of cartons, all marked “U.S. Army Medical Supplies.”
“Graduated from Chesterfields, have we, Corporal?”
“It’s sergeant, now, sir,”Willoughby said, with a certain pride that didn’t really match the circumstances. “Colonel Walton decided I should have the same rank as Casselli.”
“You won’t for long,” I said as I grabbed his left arm and pulled his hand out of his pocket. A bunch of little cardboard containers, about as long as your finger, fell to the floor. One was still in his hand and I took it.
“Solution of Morphine, 1/2 Grain, Syrette. Warning: May Be Habit Forming,” I read. These were the morphine syrettes Walton mentioned.
“So, Willoughby, are you volunteering for duty as a front-line medic?”
“Sir, this isn’t what it looks like,” he said, with a wide-eyed nervousness as the thought of going to the front or to prison began to dawn on him. I didn’t know which would be worse and I could tell he didn’t want to find out.
“Did you not heed the warning, or is this a business deal?”
“I’m not a addict, if that’s what you mean,” he said, in a disgusted tone of voice, as he leaned down and picked up the syrette boxes on the floor. He put them back in the shipping carton, stacking them neatly, as if he could undo everything by putting them back.
“Addict or thief, it really doesn’t matter now, boy-o, your little racket is done for,” I intoned, going for the intimidating sound of a Boston cop making a collar. I wanted Willoughby to look at me and see his entire future in my hands. This might be just the link I needed. If Willoughby had a connection on the black market to dispose of this stuff, he might be able to tell me who else was involved and how the whole thing was set up. If it was for personal use, then tough luck for him. Morphine withdrawal in a cell wasn’t anything I wanted to see.
“I don’t have a racket, sir.”
“Roll up your sleeves and shut up.”
He did both and I checked his veins. No telltale tracks.
“Or a habit,” he said quietly.
“That’s too bad. They might have gone easy on you if you did. Diminished capacity, the lawyers call it.”
“Lieutenant, you gotta believe me, I’ve never done anything like this before. It was supposed to be a one-time thing, just to get a little extra cash!”
“Never? What about those packs of Chesterfields?”
“Aww, come on, sir, with all this stuff lying around, everyone takes something. Couple of cartons get dropped, break open, you know how it is.”
I did, but I wasn’t going to admit it. It was a tradition in my family among those of us who were cops, which included every male over twenty, that when we recovered stolen goods, there was a right to “spillage.” Just the thing Willoughby was talking about. If we caught a guy who boosted a truckload of booze, everyone would go home with a case. I figured that the owners owed us, since we recovered their stolen property.Who’s to say that the thieves hadn’t disposed of a percentage before we got to them? The crooks wouldn’t tell if they wanted to keep the bluecoats from pulling out their billy clubs. I gave up thinking about the good old days and zeroed in on Willoughby.
“You’re not playing in the minor leagues here,Willoughby. This is the big time, a felony, not to mention a goddamn low thing to do. Did you ever think about some GI out there, wounded and in pain, and a medic shows up fresh out of syrettes?”
“A felony?”
I could see Willoughby had more sense of self-preservation than feelings of guilt.
“Larceny with intent to sell, and probably some charges related to falsification of records, since I’m sure you signed out a certain amount of supplies to be delivered to the front. You waited until they were out of your jurisdiction and then lifted them, so if anyone discovered it at the other end, the finger would point at the driver or some other poor slob.”
“He told me to—” Willoughby caught himself, trapped between the desire to explain away his actions and the fear of implicating someone else.
“Who?”
“Why should I tell you anything? You’re going to turn me in, take my stripes, and have me court-martialed.”
“That all depends on what I saw in here. I’m pretty sure I saw you stealing morphine from the U.S. Army. But maybe you were checking the shipment and that carton fell and broke open?”
Willoughby thought for a minute, flogging his brain cells to come up with a course of action. I decided to hurry it along a bit.
“Just so you know, we’re talking about ten years at hard labor. Or not.” That was pretty easy math, even for him.
“Okay. I tell you who and we forget the whole thing?”
“If I believe you, and if it checks out.”
“You’re not going to tell him I squealed?”
“Ten years. Splitting rocks every day.”
“Okay, okay. I get it. It was Doctor Dunbar. He’s been after me ever since Joe got killed.He owes Colonel Walton and some other officers. He’s been on a big losing streak and he wanted to get even. He told me to take the syrettes after I logged them out of the supply depot. We were supposed to split the take.”
“Who is the buyer?”
“I don’t know. He said he’d find someone at the Kasbah in Algiers. Officers have been cleared to go into town when they’re off duty. I haven’t been anywhere since I got here.”
He sounded frantic. He knew everything depended on my believing him. Dunbar had managed to keep his hands clean. He could deny everything and Willoughby would be hung out to dry.Willoughby was sweating, little beads of moisture forming on his forehead and cascading over his face. It was hot in back of the truck, under the canvas, standing in the narrow passageway between stacked cartons of supplies. I decided to turn the heat up some more.
“When were you supposed to hand the stuff over to him?”
“Right now. He pulled two shifts in a row and he’s off duty for the rest of the day. He was going to head into Algiers and nose around the Kasbah. Let me give him some of these syrettes and then you’ll see it was his idea! He wouldn’t take them otherwise, would he?”
I had seen honor among thieves, so I knew it existed. But not today, not here, not with this guy. I told Willoughby to give Dunbar half a dozen syrettes and tell him he’d get a lot more tomorrow.Dunbar could take the six samples with him and find a buyer. I was betting that he already had the buyer and was working Willoughby, hooking him with the idea of a one-time heist with no intention of stopping at that. If I was right, I had the connection I needed. If not, then I had a couple of small-time punks.
It sounded like a plan. Just what I liked, a plan, a suspect, clues, the works. The only problem was that I wasn’t any closer to finding Diana. I had to be sure to get back here and meet Harding at four o’clock to get to the MTB base in time for my little jaunt. If this lead didn’t pan out by mid-afternoon, I’d leave Dunbar with his six syrettes and take off.Willoughby, I had other plans for.