J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

And the stupidity of the fall still gets to me. A man urges me to be careful, and because he’s younger than me and I’m feeling conscious of my age, to defy his expectations I take a leap that ends up confirming both his assumption and my worst fear.

Given time, a man can adapt to just about any pain. I can live with this if I have to. That’s what I tell myself. I can live with it until the day that I can’t.

After I’m dressed, I head downstairs again. Part of me wants to call Wilcox back and get him to watch the video with me. Either he will tell me I’m crazy or he’ll see what I see. If it’s the latter, I reckon he will feel duty-bound to take a second look at the case. I’ll warn him about giving out Tom Englewood’s number, too. That’s a good way to get people killed.

Not that I want to put ideas in Wilcox’s head.

Seeing him again stirred up some feelings. Maybe I’m yearning for the old days when we were still partners and the world seemed so uncomplicated.

The old days.

That was a phrase Jeff used last night. He had insisted that Nesbitt and I were acquainted, that we knew each other from “the old days,” whatever that means. Once the thought lodges in my head, I can’t get it out.

The only photos I remember seeing of Nesbitt were in the newspaper just after the shooting. They didn’t ring a bell at the time, but I wasn’t expecting them to. It’s always possible we knew each other by sight or that-considering his penchant for cloak-and-dagger-I knew him by a different name.

Back to the computer, back to the interminable search results. I click around until only images are displayed, then only the ones with decent resolution. There seem to have been two pictures of Andrew Nesbitt circulating at the time of his death. The more common one depicts a jowly, balding man of sixty with capped teeth and crow’s-feet. His button-down collar bulges at the sides, framing the knot of a regimental tie. I stare at the picture, but there’s nothing familiar.

In the second image, which appears only on a few sites and seems to have been produced in an effort to verify his intelligence claims, a younger Nesbitt stands in a receiving line, shaking hands with the first President Bush, former Director of Central Intelligence. The photo appears to date during Bush’s reelection campaign, so there’s no direct tie to the CIA. His face is leaner and more handsome, his hair thick and jet-black. He sports a full Tom Selleck mustache.

It’s the mustache that does it.

Old days is right.

The summer of 1986, to be exact. I was just twenty-four years old, younger than Jeff is now. A first lieutenant assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division at Ft. Polk, living off base in nearby Leesville, Louisiana. We all knew we had to assist him with whatever he requested, but none of us knew his real name. One of the sergeants, taking into consideration the facial hair, dubbed him Magnum.

I knew Nesbitt after all. And what I remember, I do not like.

Interlude: 1986

The housing block where the cabana boys were quartered wasn’t difficult to locate, not once I started looking. The trick was making do without the help of Sgt. Crewes or anyone likely to report back to him. The man had ears all over the base. I spent a few hours each night camped out in my car, keeping an eye on the block with a starlight scope, all without the sergeant’s knowing. My first surveillance.

I never saw Magnum there, but I spotted a couple of guys I took to be handlers. They escorted the group when it left the building, functioning more like tour guides than guards. Occasionally they went out on errands, returning with groceries or beer or, on one occasion, a van-load of women in high heels and skimpy dresses. Through the scope I couldn’t make out any features-either of the men or the prostitutes they’d procured. That night in particular I left with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Good-time girls on base?” Crewes said in mock horror. “Something’s gotta be done. Next thing you know, there’ll be dancing.”

“I’m just asking.”

I’d brought up the subject without explaining my interest, saying I’d heard from some of the investigators that it was getting to be a problem.

“You never struck me as the puritanical type, sir.”

“Last time I checked, it was illegal.”

“So it is,” he said thoughtfully. “So it is.”

A day later I was standing at attention in front of Maj. Shattuck’s desk, with the major looking right through me. He didn’t need to say a word, but he did anyway.

“March, I thought we’d gone over this. I told you to steer clear of the man. I told you to have nothing to do with him, that he was dangerous. Do you know something I don’t?”

“No, sir-”

“Because you must think you do, otherwise why go against me on this? I was looking out for you, son, and you’re throwing it in my face.”

“No, sir !”

“What other explanation is there?”

A long silence.

“Explanation, sir? For what, sir?”

Shattuck gave me a withering look of disgust. He opened a file folder lying on the desk before him, wrote a note inside, then slid it away. “From now on, Lieutenant March, you will follow my instructions. You will not have any contact with that man. You will not go anywhere near the housing where his people are quartered. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You must have a pretty high opinion of your abilities,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

I did, but I kept my mouth shut. I wanted to ask who’d informed him, though I knew the answer had to be Sgt. Crewes. Subtle as I’d attempted to be, I’d given the game away with my questions. I also wanted to know what harm it did to keep an eye on things. Something was going on under our noses that the major didn’t like any more than I did. In fact, while my feelings had been conflicted, he knew that Magnum meant trouble from the start. So why warn me off like this?

“You have nothing to say?” Shattuck asked.

“No, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

I was tempted to drive by the housing block that night, not to stop but to roll by casually and give the place a glance. But I thought of all the other cars parked on the street and remembered the warrant officer who’d been trailing Magnum from the PX. There was no point in bringing aggravation down on my head.

I managed to clock César a couple of times on base, though. Whenever I did, tagging along to see where he was heading. In the mornings I jogged through the picnic tables in search of random encounters, but the cabana boys had moved their party elsewhere.

The one time I spotted Magnum, it was at a bookstore off base. He was browsing through the high-tone foreign policy journals shelved by the newspapers, the ones nobody ever bought, so I ducked into the history section to avoid being spotted. It didn’t work. When I looked up from a volume on warfare in the classical world, Magnum was staring at me from across the store. He winked, then disappeared out the door.

I dropped the picnic detour from my morning path, returning to my old route. On the sidewalk at a quarter past seven, I jogged past a couple of parked cars in front of an officers’ housing unit, swinging wide to avoid a woman who was slipping an overnight bag into an open hatchback. A few steps later I stopped and turned. She shut the hatch before noticing my presence. Her hand went unconsciously to the stud in her nose.

“Excuse me,” I said. “You remember me, don’t you?”

“Of course,” she said, smiling, though I could tell she didn’t. “Good to see you.”

I shook my head. “I’m not a customer, ma’am. We ran into each other about a week ago. You were bolting out of a car, and there I was.”