J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“That’s not. . You’re not looking at the whole picture. Nesbitt drew first. He fired first. Whatever the rumors are on the Internet, those cops didn’t assassinate him.”

“Yeah,” he says, “and those guys tonight didn’t come after you. It was just a fender bender, right? Wrong place at the wrong time. You don’t get it. You still have blinders on. It’s time to wake up and see what’s happening in this country. If tonight didn’t do the trick, what’s it gonna take?”

It’s so late it’s early. Despite my warning that I might be out well past midnight, Charlotte will be worried about me. I should have called. If I do it now, though, I risk waking her up if she’s managed to get to sleep. Look at me, finding more excuses not to pick up the phone.

I rise to my feet, tucking the file under my arm.

“Lemme see that picture again,” he says.

I hand it over and he studies the faces like he’s committing them to memory.

“There’s one thing more I can tell you about this woman. Hilda, you called her? I liked her. She reminded me a lot of my own mom. Maybe she felt the same. After Mr. Nesbitt got shot, she did call me. Just checking to see if I was all right. This was after the others caught up to me and burgled my place. She gave me the address of somewhere I could hole up. A safe house, she said. But to be honest with you, I didn’t know if I could trust her. And I already had this scoped out.” He sweeps his hand through the air, indicating the garage.

“Do you remember where this safe house was?”

He goes to the table where his books are stacked and hands me The Foxhole Atheist . “You were flipping through it just a minute a go. It’ll be somewhere in the readings for April.”

I skim the section until I find a handwritten note on the entry for April 14, a page with the heading COMFORT IN LIES IS NO COMFORT AT ALL. Down the inside margin, scrawled in blue ink, is the address of a Midtown apartment tower.

I start to tear out the page.

“Don’t,” he says. “Just take it with you. I have another copy, and it’s such a good book. You should read it.”

I slip the book into my jacket pocket, then give the garage a final once-over. There’s nothing more I can do at the moment.

“Hey,” he says, “I’m still in this.” Issuing a challenge.

“Give me your number.” I program him into my phone, then outline the various numbers he can use to get in touch with me. Although I realize it will do no good, I warn him to keep his nose clean anyway. “Wait until I get back in touch, Jeff. Can you at least do that?”

He answers with a noncommittal shrug.

As I leave, the dead bolts start turning behind me.

Interlude: 1986

I ran into Magnum on base fairly regularly after our first conversation, but we always kept our distance. Sometimes I’d pretend like I didn’t see him. Other times he’d acknowledge me with a far-off nod. Though we never talked, over time we were coming to understand each other better. I was conscious of his presence even when he wasn’t there.

This was some kind of test, I decided. Magnum was keeping an eye on me to see what I was made of. After all, he had told me things he probably had no right to reveal. Had he divined something in me-some kind of trustworthiness or cunning-that suggested there was no danger in opening up?

“I’m a talent scout,” he’d said. And I was a willing recruit.

Whenever scuttlebutt on base touched on the doings of Magnum and his cabana boys, Sgt. Crewes reported everything in thrilling detail. He kept an ear to the ground, presumably on Shattuck’s orders, though he never said as much. According to the Spanish-speaking master sergeant, Magnum’s men were Uruguayans, or possibly Argentines. They were junior officers of similar rank to one another with the exception of César, who gave orders and never seemed to get his hands dirty. Unlike the others, César also had the run of the town. He’d been observed sampling the Leesville night life, such as it was, doling out hundred-dollar bills like he had an endless supply. The whole group had come direct from Ft. Benning, meaning they were School of the Americas alumni. Crewes had to explain to me what that meant.

Unfortunately the sergeant’s intel was low-grade product, spiked with implausible rumors.

“One of them’s missing,” he revealed one afternoon. “They’re keeping everything hushed up, but the word is, he took a nosedive out of a Huey.”

“One of the cabana boys? He fell out of a chopper?”

“More likely he was pushed,” the sergeant said, a gleam in his eye. “It’s all over base.”

By “all over base,” he meant the tight-knit circle of long-serving NCOs who were the only soldiers who mattered to Sgt. Crewes. I was incredulous.

“You’re saying one of them was thrown out of the copter-for what? To demonstrate how it’s done? Let me guess. Nobody actually saw this, but they heard it from someone who did. The Huey pilot will never turn up, and neither will the crew, but that doesn’t stop the word from getting around.”

“What’s your problem?”

I stiffened.

“Let me rephrase that,” he said. “What’s your problem, sir ?”

“My problem is, you’re supposed to be a sergeant, but you gossip like an old woman.”

The words were out before I could stop them. I paused and swallowed hard, bracing myself from the reaction.

Crewes cocked his head like a pointer catching the scent of the fox.

“Oh,” he said to the air over our heads. “I think I know what the problem is now. Somebody has a crush.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s all those secret meetings,” he said, still talking to the ceiling. “Only the major already laid down the law on that point.”

He knew.

Crewes looked me in the eye and grinned. “I’m just saying, you’d better watch yourself, Lieutenant. Things aren’t always what they seem. And neither are people.”

The next time I spotted Magnum on base, he was coming out of the PX. I made a beeline for him, still shaken by the sergeant’s warning. Our paths would have crossed in the parking lot, but at the final moment I veered away, spooked. A few steps behind Magnum came a warrant officer assigned to our company, one of our criminal investigators. He looked preoccupied and nondescript, the way you would if you were tailing somebody.

Maybe he had just been doing some shopping. But I doubted it. I bent down between two cars to tighten my bootlaces, letting both of them pass. Then I headed off in the opposite direction, sweat blooming on my brow.

That night, dressed in jeans and a pullover, I made a round of the Leesville clubs. Since I’d grown up in Houston, there wasn’t much Sleezville’s bars and nightclubs and strip joints could do to shock me. Besides, I was moderate in my vices and preferred to indulge them outside the public eye. In the hot, intermingling crowd, the thumping music, the alluring shadows, I became too self-conscious ever to lose myself. I was an observer, an all-seeing eye. Sometimes that was all the escape I needed.

I passed the night in a series of dank settings, matte-black walls and jury-rigged stage lights, local bands offering a semblance of live music, half the crowd probably underage. Although I recognized a few faces, I spoke to no one and no one spoke to me. I thought about the girl I’d met in Alexandria and taken to the movies. I thought about the girl in the blue gown at the ball in Austin, too, her strange and lofty world so different from mine. Mostly I thought about Magnum and the way he’d led me on and groomed me. And the fact that, whatever he was up to, it was enough to infuriate an officer like Shattuck.