P Deutermann - Darkside

“One assumes boy-girl. I suppose in this modern age, it could have been boy-boy.”

They were interrupted by the doorbell. Ev left her in the kitchen to go get the pizza. When he came back, he found her looking at a collection of Markham family pictures on a shelf beneath the cookbooks. She was holding one picture in her hand, a group photo of Ev, Joanne, and Julie at about age thirteen, based on the awkward posture and the hint of the good looks to come. Ev, taller than both, was beaming with pride, his arm around both wife and daughter. Joanne was spectacular in this picture, a glowing brunette, wide-eyed, perfectly proportioned face, luxuriant figure, looking back at the camera with practiced ease, knowing that she was beautiful, and apparently comfortable with it. Liz put the picture back as he walked in, then cleared some mail off the counter to make room for the pizza.

“Arrgh,” she said when she saw the anchovies.

“I know,” he said, “But it’s half-and-half. I was going to abstain, but I happen to love the little stinkers.”

“Aptly put,” she said, wrinkling her nose. He laughed at her.

“I’m going to switch over to beer,” he said. “Your half okay?”

“It’s fine. I rarely eat pizza, so when I do, it’s always good. Although hell on the girlish figure.” He got out some plates and silverware, and she helped herself to a slice well away from the offending anchovies.

“Nothing wrong with the girlish figure from where I’m standing,” he said, cracking open a Coors.

“One of these days, I’m going to give up and just let myself…expand.”

Ev laughed as they moved back to the counter.

“Is there a chance Julie might know more about this Dell business than she’s telling either of us?” she asked.

Ev felt a protective impulse rise in his chest. Liz kept coming back to this. She saw his concern.

“You want to know why I keep asking,” she said. “I sense there’s something wrong over there in Bancroft Hall. This is the Naval Academy. Four thousand straight-arrow men and women, the best and the brightest, duty, honor, country, pick your slogan. And yet someone’s killed a plebe?”

He stared at her, then down at his pizza. He pushed it away and concentrated on his beer while trying to marshal his thoughts. “You think Julie’s lying to you?” he asked.

“Not exactly. I mean, I don’t think she had a hand in the boy’s death, of course. But I do think she’s not telling me everything. I’m just a civilian, you see. She’s one of…them.”

“Them. Right.” He nodded slowly, still not looking at her. He was aware of the lights reflecting in small dazzling patterns across the creek. The house was very still.

“I hired you to protect Julie,” he said slowly.

“That’s correct.” She seemed to be waiting for him to understand something important.

“But you can’t do that if she’s holding back on you, can you?”

“Bingo.”

“And you’d like me to do what, exactly?”

“I’d like you to reinforce the notion that if she does know something about this incident, she needs to tell me, and preferably before those G-persons do. Maybe point out that precisely because she’s not a civilian, the government’s investigators might not play nice.”

He steepled his hands in front of his face, then nodded again, making up his mind. He’d been on the verge of getting angry, but he then saw the logic in what she was saying. “You’ve got my attention, counselor,” he said. “I’ll try to think of something.”

“Liz,” she said. “So far, I can’t get either one of you to call me by my first name.”

He laughed. “Liz it is.”

They finished their pizza, and Ev made some coffee. They took it into the study.

She stirred her coffee for a moment. “Julie indicated that sometimes there’s a collective decision made that a plebe isn’t worth keeping. That he’s a ‘shitbird.’ What happens then?”

“Pretty much what she described. In my day, he’d become a target for the entire company’s upperclassmen. After a month or so of that, he’d crash and burn and then resign. Nowadays, though, my impression is that the system steps in. The company officers, the kid’s academic adviser, his squad leader, his mentoring youngsters, even his sponsor, maybe. That said, they do lose a couple hundred by attrition during plebe year.”

“I guess what I’m trying to understand is how much power do the upperclassmen have? Julie implied it was a lot. Even if the executive staff and the faculty get into it, can the upperclassmen run a guy out?”

Ev shrugged. “I’m twenty-eight years out-of-date. When I went through, the answer would have been yes. But he’d really have to be a shitbird. Someone who bilged his classmates, skirted the honor system, or was suspected of stealing-that kind of stuff. It wouldn’t happen just as a matter of unpopularity.”

“Sounds like extra work for the upperclassmen.”

“Actually, they’d set in motion the ultimate sanction: Get the guy’s own classmates to shun him. The upperclassmen can run a guy ragged, but if his classmates see that as unfair persecution, they’ll help him, carry him even. But if they dump him, he’s meat.”

“I’m wondering if that’s what happened to Dell. Julie called him ‘weak.’ Right from the first, during that plebe summer. She says he appeared to be struggling. If someone combined that opinion of him with an innuendo that he was also a homosexual, he could end up feeling really cornered.”

Ev nodded. “But that would imply suicide, not homicide.”

She shook her head. “I just don’t know. From an outsider’s perspective, all I see are lots of windows, but I can’t see anything inside. But the civilian system’s saying there might be a murderer in there.”

“I can’t see that,” Ev said, shaking his head. “When I was there, there were some plebes who got through plebe year who shouldn’t have. We all knew it. Guys with no moral fiber. Liars. Shirkers. Some ex-enlisted who knew how to get by. Guys who held the system in visible contempt. But we also knew that the system would eventually catch up with them: They’d cheat on an exam, or lie, or do something else that would get them sideways with the honor system. And that’s what happened.”

“You’re implying that most midshipmen believe in the ‘system,’ as you call it.”

“Basically, they do. We do. I think West Point says it better than we do: Duty, honor, country. Midshipmen are proud to be there. They want to serve their country. They hold the profession of arms to be an honorable endeavor. They’ll bitch and moan about the red-ass nature of daily life in Bancroft Hall, but down deep, they believe in it.”

“And yet we have a homicide investigation in progress. We think, anyway.”

He sipped his coffee and tried to think of a way to explain what it was like inside Bancroft Hall. The hivelike relationships among the upperclassmen, the plebes, the commissioned officers of the executive department, the companies themselves. A civilian just wasn’t going to understand all that. Liz was looking at her watch.

“Tomorrow’s a workday, unfortunately,” she said. “I’d better go.”

“Thanks for sharing that tape with me,” he said. “Or most of it, anyway.”

“She meant well, I think. I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.”

He saw her out, then went back into the kitchen to clean up. The evening had not gone the way he’d envisioned it. He paused over the trash can, his hands full of pizza wrapping. Liz suspected that Julie was holding something back. Surely his daughter understood the danger of that.

He dropped the stuff into the trash can and put the silverware and coffee mugs into the dishwasher. What he hadn’t said to Liz was that there was another explanation possible in the Dell matter: that this wasn’t a case of a consensus decision on the part of the upperclassmen to drive out an unworthy plebe, but perhaps the work of a single upperclassman, some secret bastard who’d managed to fool the system long enough to rise to firstie status. As much as he would defend the Naval Academy, the midshipmen, and their sense of pride in being part of that duty, honor, country ethic, he knew as well as anyone who had actually been inside that the kids were very different today from when he’d gone through. He’d met enough of Julie’s classmates to know that they had experienced more of life than he ever had at that stage. If an evil kid, evil in the Columbine sense, was smart enough to get through the academic program without having to lie, cheat, or steal, he could play havoc in the military school culture of Mother Bancroft. The system was, after all, based on trust and expectations, and Ev had encountered a couple of midshipmen in the past few years who occasionally dropped the mask of military subservience long enough to reveal quite another attitude. What had happened to Brian Dell might have been the work of one of those gifted, smiling psychopaths who live in plain sight and fool all the people all the time until they do something truly unspeakable.