Ed McBain - Fiddlers

‘Yummy, I love pancakes. But that’s the Fourth, isn’t it? Sunday?’

‘Yes,’ he said, suddenly thinking he was making a wrong move here. ‘Yes, it is. Will that be a problem?’

‘No, no. In fact, we could hang out together all day, and then go see the fireworks at night.’

‘That’s just what I thought. We’d make it real casual, you know. Blue jeans. Like that.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Patricia said. ‘Just a nice, easy, relaxed Sunday.’

‘And fireworks later,’ Ollie reminded her.

‘Lo-fat pancakes, though, right?’

‘Right, lo-fat.’

‘Terrific. Good idea, Oil. What time did you have in mind?’

‘Eleven o’clock all right?’

‘Perfect. I’ll see you then.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good, Patricia. Casual, right? Blue jeans.’

‘Blue jeans, got it. See you then.’

‘See you, Patricia,’ he said, and hung up.

His heart was pounding.

He felt as if he’d just planned a candy store holdup.

* * * *

On and on the veterans’ stories went…

‘… this wasn’t my squad, it was another squad in D Company. You know how this works? Or do you? There’s your company, has two to four platoons in it, and then there’s your platoon, has two to four squads. There are only nine, ten soldiers in a squad, you get it? This kid who shot the woman uas in another squad…’

‘… we flushed out seven bunkers and two tunnels in the area just to the rear of us. Captured twelve 81-millimeter rounds and 11,200 small-arms rounds, more than a ton of rice, and a Russian-made radio…”

‘… an encircling maneuver, like in a vilsweep, we done them all the time. Attack at first light, catch Charlie by surprise. But they knew we were coming, they’d lined the trail with rifles and machine guns, and we walked right into it …”

‘… Sobolov took a mortar explosion should’ve killed him. Instead, it only blinded him.

* * * *

It wasn’t until that Monday afternoon, at a little past five o’clock, that Meyer and Carella located the lieutenant who’d been in command of the almost two hundred men in D Company during the Ala Moana offensive in December of 1966, almost thirty-nine years ago. His name was Danny Freund. Now sixty-one, with graying hair and a noticeable limp…

‘My war souvenir,’ he told them.

… he was enjoying a day away from his law office, supervising his two grandchildren in the park. On nearby swings, the kids reached for the sky while Freund recalled a time he’d much rather have forgotten.

‘I don’t know what you’ve learned about Sobolov,’ he said, ‘but there aren’t many of us lamenting his murder, I can tell you that. He was your stereotypical top sergeant, believe me. A complete son of a bitch.’

‘Some of the men in your company mentioned an incident with a Vietnamese woman,’ Meyer said. ‘What was that all about?’

‘It was all about a court martial that never happened. Max brought this kid up on…”

‘What kid?’

‘Twenty-year-old kid in his squad. Blew a Vietnamese woman away. Sobolov brought charges on an Article 32. That’s the equivalent of a civilian grand jury. Convened to determine if a crime was committed and if it’s reasonable to assume the person charged committed the crime. The kid claimed he’d been ordered to shoot the woman. Claimed Sobolov had ordered him to do it. The judges refused to take the matter to the next step. Instead, they

‘The next step?’

‘They refused to recommend a court martial.’

‘So they ruled in favor of the kid, right?’ Carella said.

‘Well, that depends on how you look at it, I guess. Conviction in a court martial would have meant a punitive discharge. Either a DD or a BCD. Instead, the judges ruled…”

He saw the puzzled looks on their faces.

‘Dishonorable Discharge,’ he explained. ‘Bad Conduct Discharge. Either one would have meant a serious loss of benefits. Instead, the kid got what’s called an OTH - an Other Than Honorable discharge. The OTH entailed a loss of benefits, too. Most significantly the GI Bill -which would have paid for his college education.’

Freund shook his head, cast an eye on his soaring grandchildren, yelled, ‘Boys! Time to go!’ and rose from the bench. ‘Sobolov got off scot-free,’ he said. ‘Well, maybe not. He came out of the war blind. But if, in fact, he gave the order that took that young woman’s life, he deserved whatever he got. Even before Ala Moana, he was smoking pot day and night. Couldn’t function without his daily toke. A bully, a prick, and a hophead, that’s what Sergeant Max Sobolov was. When that mortar shell took his eyes, everyone in the platoon cheered. We’d have cheered louder if it had killed him.’

This soldier he brought up on charges,’ Meyer said. ‘Could you remember his name?’

‘Charlie Something. Like the enemy.’

‘Charlie what?’

‘Let me think a minute,’ Freund said, and started walking toward the swings, the detectives beside him. Oh, sure,’ he said, ‘it was…”

* * * *

Jennifer Purcell lived in a low-rise apartment building in what used to be an Italian neighborhood in Riverhead. Now largely Puerto Rican, the area was enjoying a sort of vogue among younger people because of its proximity to the city proper: Forbes Avenue was a scant twenty minutes by subway to the heart of downtown Isola.

At five thirty that Monday, Jennifer admitted Hawes to her apartment and immediately apologized for its messy appearance. ‘I work the day shift on Mondays,’ she said, ‘we get a big lunch crowd. I haven’t had a chance to tidy up yet.’ She further explained that she was a waitress at a restaurant called Paulie’s downtown, and apologized again for not being able to talk to him this morning, but she was truly on her way out when he called.

She was, as Hawes had surmised from her telephone voice, a woman in her late twenties. Wearing jeans and a cotton sweater, her brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, no makeup, not even lipstick. Plain. A trifle overweight. They sat at her kitchen table, drinking coffee.

‘Do you think you’ll find who killed her?’ she asked.

‘We’re working on it,’ Hawes said.

‘The newspapers are saying it was a serial killer. That she was just another random victim.’

‘Well, the newspapers,’ he said.

‘I’ve been following the case. Not because she’s my grandmother. In fact, I never met the woman. She just up and left, you know. Never even tried to contact her own children again. That’s odd, don’t you think? A woman leaving her own children that way? Ten and eight years old? Never trying to reach them again? Talk to them even? I think that’s very odd. My father despised her.’

‘Was he the oldest? Or the youngest?’

‘The oldest. He was ten when she left.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘No, he died of cancer twelve years ago, when he was forty-eight. That’s very young. It runs in the family, you know. My grandfather died of cancer, too. Luke. He was much older, though, this was only seven years ago. He was seventy-six years old. I blame it all on her.’

‘On…

‘My grandmother. Helen. Leaving them the way she did. Cancer is directly traceable to stress, you know. My grandfather was a young man when she left the family, thirty-three, that’s very young. The boys were only ten and eight. He raised them alone, a single father, never remarried. The boys were very close when they were young… well, you can imagine, no mother. Then… well… my father died so young, you know. I didn’t see much of my uncle after that. He just sort of… drifted away.’

‘Is your mother still alive?’

‘Oh yes. Remarried, in fact. Living in Florida. A Jewish man.’ She hesitated a moment, looked down at her hands folded in her lap now. ‘There’s not much of a family anymore, I suppose. I’m an only child, you know. The last time I saw my uncle was when he came to my grandfather’s funeral seven years ago. He seemed so… I don’t know… distant. He never married, bought himself a little house out on Sands Spit. He was working in a shoe store then, selling shoes. He was always a salesman, ever since he got out of the Army. He was in Vietnam, you know. He used to sell records after the war. In a music store, you know. He used to bring me records all the time. I liked him a lot. I think she did everyone great harm back then. I don’t think any of them ever recovered from it. Well, cancer killed two of them. That’s stress, you know. Cancer. Helen Reilly. I didn’t even know her name until I read about her murder in the paper. I mean, I didn’t know this was my own grandmother until I read she was the former Helen Purcell. Then it clicked. And… I have to tell you… I was glad. I was glad someone killed her.’