Richard Greener: The Lacey confession

Like most men his age, Walter had been at least twenty pounds heavier than he wanted for far longer than he cared to admit. In his first year of exclusive leisure and new eating tastes he shed them all, all twenty and then some. And he didn’t stop there. He was an inch or so under six feet, and by this time in his life, sensed he’d shrunk perhaps a half-inch or more. Racing headlong to sixty, he wanted to be fit again. He was scared it might be his last chance. He started his new diet the morning his scale read 215 pounds. “Holy shit!” he thought. “Old, fat and shrinking.” He never regretted the panic he felt that morning. He kept going when he hit 195 pounds and didn’t even try to level off until he reached 180. Finally, deep into middle age, he weighed only five pounds more than he did when he left the Army in 1977. With that he was satisfied.

He still wore his hair long in the back. It had thinned on top, but not remarkably. It had, however, grayed considerably in the last two or three years. Still, some people continued to mistake Walter Sherman for a man younger than he was. His pale blue eyes and rugged, tan, leathery face highlighted the effects of a long stay in the Caribbean. Sure, fewer women found him attractive than had been his experience ten or twenty years ago, but he still got a look now and then. It never bothered him that the women doing the looking were getting older too. One thing he certainly didn’t grow tired of was the sight of his recently reacquired flat stomach staring back at him in the mirror. He wore the same kind of clothes since he came to St. John-loose-fitting jeans, a bit baggier as the years went by, and an oversized, pastel-colored T-shirt with no pocket. He was always clean-shaven and although some mistook his casual approach toward dress for messiness, they could not have been further from the truth. A man completely comfortable in his own skin, Walter Sherman carried nothing with him. No wallet. No personal ID of any kind. No money. No habitual paraphernalia, cigarette lighters and the like-he neither smoked nor chewed gum. The key to his car was all he had on him, in his right back pocket with nothing attached. He didn’t like shorts-he thought they looked silly on him-and was never seen in them. His only shoes seemed to be the old-fashioned, low-cut, white tennis sneakers. Unless he left the island, Walter never wore socks.

His cholesterol was too high. His doctor prescribed drugs to lower it. He took a little blood pressure medication too and his prostate wasn’t the smoothly operating piece of machinery it used to be.

“I’m not as old as you are-yet,” he told Ike one day. “But, I’m getting there. I piss in Morse code.” The two of them had a great laugh at that while Billy was left slightly bewildered.

Retirement? Sure, why not. The time had come for Walter to call it quits. He didn’t need the money. He’d done well for many years and did one unique, unforgettable job-his last one-that set him up for life. When a man named Leonard Martin began his crusade, his relentless campaign seeking justice for his family, all of whom had died from eating ground beef tainted with E. coli bacteria, they turned to Walter Sherman to find him. In the beginning, Walter didn’t know-not about Leonard. He knew what he was searching for, but not who. Nor was he aware of the righteousness of Leonard Martin’s crusade. How could he have known these things? He had been deceived. The clients he worked for were, in fact, the ones responsible for Leonard Martin’s tragedy. They let it happen. They knew better. The corporate hotshots. The gang of criminals on Wall Street-the very ones who hired Walter. Millions of pounds of poisoned ground beef. They let it leave the packing plant. They let it go to store shelves. They let people-Leonard Martin’s family among them-eat it. Thousands sickened. Hundreds died. They did nothing to stop it. Too much was riding on the outcome. Billions actually. They chose the risk to people over the risk to money. In the end they miscalculated. And Leonard Martin extracted a heavy price. One by one he hunted them down. One by one he killed them. Those still alive at the time hoped Walter could find Leonard before Leonard found them.

Walter found Isobel Gitlin first. An obit writer for The New York Times, she was the first to understand, to see beyond the fog and mystery. Leonard Martin was the one. For a while, Walter was her sole supporter. Together, Walter and Isobel searched for him. They searched for Leonard Martin, who was the Cowboy. And Isobel. It was still painful for Walter to even think about her. In the end, she betrayed him. She hurt him. He opened his heart to her and with callous indifference she thrust a dagger in it.

Now, when Conchita Crystal smiled at him and touched his wrist, he was only months shy of being fifty-nine years old. For one magical moment she made him feel half his age. Ike saw it plain as day.

Finding people was a young man’s game. For Walter it began when he was only nineteen. Because it seemed like a good idea at the time, Walter Sherman made the horrendous mistake of joining the Army on his eighteenth birthday. His birthday present was a quick trip to the killing fields of Southeast Asia. In no time at all he went from “Good Morning America” to “Good Morning Vietnam!” He survived. Many didn’t. It wasn’t just the bleeding, the dying, even the killing. It was drugs, disconnect from sanity, loss of a moral center. Saigon, and the tall grass, did many strange things to twenty-year-old American boys. But Walter made it. A year later he saved Freddy Russo’s life.

Walter found him after Russo went AWOL and was gone for a week. As surely as if he had carried the man’s broken body to safety in a jungle firefight, he’d saved Russo’s life. In Saigon-a world gone quite mad-if a man was AWOL more than a week, when they found him, they often shot him as a deserter. These executions were distinctly unofficial. It was easier that way. The worst of it was some of the MPs seemed to get off on it. Those who died in this fashion were always marked down as KIA-it was easier that way too-and there were many more of them than anyone back home ever knew. But Walter was there. He knew. He saw it. And that’s why he went after and found Russo, who turned out to be an ungrateful little prick.

After that episode, nineteen-year-old Sgt. Walter Sherman from Rhinebeck, New York, found himself transferred, attached to Headquarters Company. There, he did nothing else but look for people. He looked for Americans, Vietnamese, anyone at all, anyone he was told to find. Sometimes he knew why. Other times he didn’t. When he went after the pilot, and was gone three weeks, lost in the jungle-when the short odds said he’d never be seen again-and finally, when he emerged from Hell with enough of the pilot’s body to satisfy his commanders, Walter’s legend grew. By then he had already acquired his nickname, The Locator.

In between finding people for the Colonel, he was left alone. He had nobody to report to. He simply awaited the next call. Most of the time he didn’t even wear a uniform. He rented a small apartment, had a full-time cleaning lady who doubled as a cook, plus a valet of sorts, a teenage boy with a missing arm, ready and eager to do any errand Walter asked. Saigon was like a supermarket, isles jammed, stuffed, overstocked with women and drugs. Bob Dylan and James Brown serenaded the shoppers, with special guests the Rolling Stones and Bob Marley. The uniquely American cry of “Rock ’n’ roll!” was more than an often-heard command. It was the sound of invasion, the march music of occupation.

Walter wasn’t into drugs. Sure, he puffed the magic dragon-who didn’t?-but no cocaine, no heroin. Women on the other hand, were… everywhere, abundant, available, always there. Love you long time was damn near the Vietnamese national motto. Walter was as much a boy in a candy store as anyone. When his tour was over, he signed up for another. Nobody ever did a study of it, but many in the military believed that Southeast Asian sex was the leading motivator behind reenlistment. Another tour of Saigon’s bars and brothels or back to Applebee’s in Akron or Kansas City? Not much of a choice for some.