James Benn: A Mortal Terror

The last person to see him alive, other than his killer, was Lieutenant Kenneth Dare, the chaplain attached to Landry’s battalion. I wondered if it had been a social call or if something more serious was bothering Landry.

The photographs showed the ten of hearts clearly. In the closeup, it was easy to see the card was brand new, clean and crisp. It must have come out of a new deck and gone straight into Landry’s pocket. Maybe the ten of hearts was his good-luck charm, who knew?

The report on Captain Max Galante was more detailed, not surprisingly. Even before the MPs got the playing-card connection, this murder had been a priority. Captain Galante was a medical doctor assigned to the Fifth Army headquarters staff at Caserta. He got noticed, if not for his rank, for his proximity to the high and mighty. General Mark Clark, commander of Fifth Army, and his boss, British General Harold Alexander, of Fifteenth Army Group, both called Caserta Palace home, along with a passel of rear-area brass.

The MP’s report included the duty roster from the 32nd Station Hospital, where Galante worked. He’d gone off duty at 1800 hours, and planned to meet two other doctors for dinner two hours later, at eight o’clock civilian time. The other doctors rented an apartment in town and paid their rent in rations, which their landlady cooked for them. Galante never showed.

The hospital and the apartment were on the south side of the palace. A hand-drawn map was paper-clipped to two photographs; the first showed the hospital and the tree-lined boulevard with the palace at the end. The second photo, according to the map, was taken from the opposite side of the palace. Gardens and walkways sloped gently downward, over a mile of it all, leading to the end where the statues of Actaeon and Diana stood against the backdrop of a waterfall. That gave me the basic layout, but no answers about why Galante ended up at the far end of the gardens.

I went through the photographs again studying the position of the body. While it appeared that Landry had been left where he fell, Galante’s body looked like it had been laid out, tucked alongside the rocks that bordered the pond fed by the waterfall. Had he even been killed there? From what I could tell from the photos, there were no scuff marks in the grass, no telltale gouges of earth where a heel dug in during a struggle. But I had no way of knowing for sure; whoever took the shots hadn’t bothered to show the surrounding area, away from the body and the pond. Within the pond were the two sculptures, one of Diana and her maidens, all aflutter at Actaeon seeing her naked, and opposite was poor Actaeon with the head of a stag, being killed by his own hounds. Death and beauty sharing the same tranquil spot. Was Galante killed by one of his own? Had this spot been chosen for some reason other than its seclusion?

The jack of hearts stuck out of Galante’s pocket, just as the ten was positioned in Landry’s. Side-by-side shots of the two cards, front and back, showed that they were from the same pack-or at least the same kind of pack-and apparently unused. Probably no fingerprints. Maybe Galante and Landry had been in a card game together and kept souvenirs. Maybe they’d won big, and a killer, or killers, had decided to grab their cash.

All I knew for sure was that I had two stiffs waiting for me at Caserta, not to mention all the self-important brass throwing their weight around, demanding protection. The two cards were a flimsy connection, and the different ways the bodies had been left to be found didn’t seem like the work of the same killer. I gave up thinking about it, and wished I had a drink.

The plane lurched as we hit some turbulence, and the file containing the photographs fell to the deck. A close-up of Galante’s head and neck sailed farthest, ending up on the congressman’s toes.

“What the hell is this?”

“A guy who didn’t share his booze,” I said, grabbing it from him before the reporters got too interested. The aircraft shifted sideways in heavy winds as the pilot descended.

“It’s all gone,” he said, slurring it into one barely understandable word. The newspapermen moved away from him as he swayed in his seat, his face gone pale. I grabbed the files and moved as far away as I could just as the bomber hit another pocket of turbulence and the congressman vomited his share of the bottle into a bucket.

A few hours ago, I’d been looking forward to a day with Diana, strolling down a peaceful country road, and hoping for at least one more night together. Now, here I was, the stink of bile and whiskey in the air, hoping this crate would land in one piece so I could search for a card-carrying killer. The air had grown colder, and I shivered as one of the reporters made his way over to me, balancing on the narrow gangplank.

“Phil Einsmann,” he said as he sat. “International News Service.”

“Lieutenant Billy Boyle.” We shook hands. “You’re not going to be sick, are you, Phil?”

“No worries. I’ve flown worse than this. Combat mission over Germany a few months back, and I wish I’d had a bottle for that one.”

“I didn’t know correspondents went on bombing raids,” I said.

“They don’t, anymore. A few months ago, the Eighth Air Force decided to train a handful of reporters and send them on a few missions, to get the story out for the folks back home. We’ve been in ground combat, so they figured why not? Be good press for the flyboys. So they train about a dozen of us. How to adjust to high altitudes, parachuting, even weapons.”

“You actually volunteered?” I asked, thinking that air travel was bad enough without flak and tracer rounds shredding the aircraft.

“Yeah, crazy, huh? Some joker starting calling us the Writing 69th, and it stuck. They chose a few of us for the first mission. Me, Walter Cronkite from United Press, this kid Andy Rooney from Stars and Stripes, Bob Post from the New York Times.”

“I think I remember hearing about Post,” I said.

“Yeah,” Einsmann said. “The one thing they didn’t think through was the bad press if one of us got it. Post was killed over Germany. His B-17 blew up midair. Our first mission was our last. I’ll tell you, if Bob hadn’t been killed, I don’t know if I could’ve gone back up there. I’ve never been so scared.”

“Get a good story?”

“Best thing I ever wrote. Making it back in one piece focuses the mind wonderfully.”

“You and your pal headed to Naples?”

“I’m going back, believe or not. I was supposed to go to London. I left last night, and when I got to Gibraltar there was a cable from the home office. Return to Naples. Caserta, actually. I was billeted near Fifth Army headquarters. Something must be brewing.”

“News to me,” I said, and we both laughed at the unintended joke.

“Does that photograph have anything to do with why you’re headed to Naples, Lieutenant Boyle?”

“Call me Billy, everyone does. And I’m going to Caserta, too. Maybe I can give you a lift. You and your pal.”

“He’s the competition, Reuters, and he’s on his own. You’re pretty good at not answering a question.”

“Used to be a cop, so it’s second nature to ignore reporters.”

“Hmm. An ex-cop, first lieutenant, traveling way above his pay grade, with pictures of what looks like a strangled officer. You know they bumped a colonel to make room for the congressman?”

“How come they didn’t throw you off instead?”

“Billy, I’ve found that the promise of a mention in a news story works wonders with all sorts of people.”

“Including the noncom in charge of the flight manifest,” I guessed.

“Sergeant Randolph Campbell, of Casper, Wyoming, soon to be mentioned in a little piece about Americans stationed at Gibraltar.”