The Devil in Gray (15 page)

“How is she?” Decker asked Eunice.

“She's fine. She didn't see anything, thank God, and she didn't realize that poor man was killed.”

“I came to apologize for involving her, and you too. Believe me, if I'd had any idea what was going to happen—”

“Well, fortunately no harm was done. But don't expect us to help you again. Sandra is far too precious to me.”

“There's no question of it,” Decker reassured her. “I've arranged to have your close protection reinstated. I just hope it won't be necessary for very much longer.”

“Do you think you're going to be able to catch this man?”

“I don't know. I hope so. This is the first time I've ever gone looking for somebody I couldn't see.”

“He does have a physical presence, though, doesn't he?”

“Oh, you bet. He threw Gerald Maitland out of the window, and I felt him myself when he pushed me over. And if he has physical presence, that means we can restrain him. Theoretically, anyhow.”

“It's a trick, isn't it? Like conjurors do.”

“Yes, I think it is. All we have to do now is find out what
kind
of a trick.”

Sandra called out from the kitchen and Eunice said, “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” and went to see what she wanted. Decker looked around the room, picking up a silver-framed photograph of Sandra when she was a baby, and another photograph of a brown-haired man with a rather baffled-looking George W. Bush–type squint. Sandra's father, maybe.

Seven or eight of Sandra's sketches and watercolors were arranged on either side of the fireplace. Decker found her work unexpectedly moving—every drawing done with such atmosphere, and such attention to detail—and what a sadness it was that she probably wouldn't live beyond her twenties. Her most striking picture was a fine colored crayon drawing of Main Street Station, with its Beaux Arts balconies, its orange roof tiles and its fairy-tale dormer windows.

Oddly, though, Sandra had drawn a heavily shaded cloud over its clock tower, more like a mass of writhing black serpents than a cloud.

“Interesting picture,” he remarked, as Eunice came back into the living room.

“Yes. For some reason she calls it the Fun House.”

“The Fun House, huh? What's that cloud hanging over it?”

“I'm not sure. I remember her drawing it and the weather was perfect.”

“Strange, isn't it? Very, very good. But definitely strange.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The next morning Decker drove the ninety miles southeastward to Fort Monroe, headquarters of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, where Major Drewry had served in the military history section. It was a sunny day, but a fine warm rain was falling, so that the Mercury's windshield glittered and its tires sizzled on the highway.

Fort Monroe was situated on a spit of land in Chesapeake Bay. When Decker opened his car window to show his badge to the sentry at the gate, he could smell the ocean, like freshly opened oysters.

“I have a twelve o'clock meeting with Captain Tony Morello. Want to tell me where I can find him?”

“That's Toni with an
i
, sir. She's over in archives, right across there.”

Decker parked his car in the visitors' space and walked across the parade ground. A squad of pink-faced cadets in full dress uniform were practicing formation marching, their shiny boots splashing in the puddles. Decker climbed the steps, pushed his way through the double swing doors and followed the signs that said
OFFICE OF THE COMMAND HISTORIAN
.

He found Captain Morello in the library, leaning over a desk with a computer in front of her. She was almost as tall as he was, with short black hair that was slashed straight back from her forehead. When she turned around, Decker saw that she was also strikingly attractive, in a 1960s Italian-actress way, with a heart-shaped face and vixenish eyes. Her immaculately pressed uniform only emphasized her very full breasts, and even in a midlength skirt her legs looked unnervingly long.

“Lieutenant Martin,” Decker said, showing his badge. “But, you know, don't let's stand on ceremony. All my friends call me Decker.”

“Captain Morello,” Toni Morello said, with a tight little smile. “All my friends call me sir.”

Decker looked around at the floor-to-ceiling shelving. Each shelf was filled with hundreds of gray-backed files, and each file was identified by a neat white label—
Armored Maneuvers in Italy, Spring 1945; Airborne Assault Forces in Cambodia, 1971; Logistical Operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1994
. The library was more than 150 feet long, with a yellow-tinted clerestory window to filter the sunlight.

“Hell of a library,” Decker remarked, although he was really thinking,
Hell of a librarian
.

“I won't keep you a moment, Lieutenant.” Toni Morello tapped out a few more lines on her computer and then switched it off. “I understand you wanted to talk to me about Major Drewry. We were all deeply distressed about that.”

“Well, yes. It was a pretty goddamned horrible way to go. I'm going to be talking to Mrs. Drewry again, but I don't want to upset her more than I have to and I was wondering if you could help me at all.”

“I'll do my best.”

“What I need to know is, were any of Major Drewry's ancestors connected with the army?”

“Oh
yes
. George was very proud of his family history. His great-great-grandfather fought with Robert E. Lee, and his grandfather was out in the Philippines with Teddy Roosevelt. He was always bitterly sorry that he never saw active service himself.”

“Would you have any information here about his great-great-grandfather?”

“Of course. George used our archives to research his family tree, and he managed to find a whole lot more original material besides. Diaries, letters, that kind of thing. I don't think he'd even gotten around to cataloguing everything. Do you want to take a look?”

Decker followed her along the lines of shelving. She had a fluid way of walking that reminded him of a wildlife documentary that he had been watching on television that morning, nyala gazelles loping across the African bush. They reached a section at the far end of the library marked
ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA
, 1861–1865, and Toni Morello took out a box file with a label that said
Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–May 7, 1864: Maj. Gen. Maitland's brigade
.

She carried the file over to a reading table and opened it. Inside it was packed with original letters, dispatches, maps, and photographs. “Here,” she said. “This is a picture of Major General Maitland's brigade at dawn on the morning of May sixth, just before they were sent up the Orange Plank Road to attack the advancing Federal army.”

The photograph was remarkably similar to the one that Decker had taken from 4140 Davis Street. About a dozen bearded men in slouch hats and képis, some of them in tunics and others in nothing more than dirty shirts and muddied pants. A typed caption underneath identified the third mounted officer on the left as Lieutenant Colonel Henry Drewry.

Toni Morello was about to tuck the photograph back in the file when Decker said, “Wait up a moment. Let me look at that again.”

He took off his glasses and studied the group as closely as he could. At the back of the group stood three men, well apart from the rest, and although they were deep in shadow, Decker could see that at least two of them were wearing greatcoats. All three of them had slouch hats, and their hats were all decorated with black ragged plumes.

“Have you ever heard of the Devil's Brigade?” he asked.

“I've heard it mentioned, of course. It was a myth, as far as I know. Propaganda, put out by the Federal generals to excuse themselves for being driven back by an army that had forty thousand fewer men than they did—not to mention being much more tired and hungry and very short on ammunition.”

“Do you have any records about it?”

“I don't know offhand, but I could check for you.”

Decker put his glasses back on. “I'd really appreciate it. Meanwhile—what time do you break for lunch?”

As he drove back toward Richmond with the steering wheel in one hand and a double cheeseburger in the other, his cell phone rang.

“Lieutenant? Hicks here. It looks like we've got ourselves another one.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

He turned into Sixth Street and was waved through the crowds of sightseers. The entire front window of Jimmy the Rib's Soul Food Restaurant had been smashed and the sidewalk was strewn with sun-glittering glass. Seven squad cars were parked higgledy-piggledy across the street with flashing lights, as well as an ambulance and two khaki station wagons from the coroner's department.

As he pushed his way past the crowd, Decker saw somebody he recognized—a lanky young man with a straight-nosed profile like a pharaoh from one of the pyramids. He wore a jazzy red and white shirt and huge hoop earrings and a sharks' tooth necklace, as well as a floppy red crochet beret that was decorated with feathers and antique keys and fishing flies.

“Hi, Jonah. What's happening?”

“Deck-ah! How should I know, man? I only just got here.”

“Junior Abraham's been wasted, that's what I hear.”

“Had it coming, man. Junior Abraham was a liar and a blowhard and if anybody needs financial reimbursement for the bullet they bought to give him a premature funeral, then all they have to do is pass the hat around and I'll be the first to contribute.”

“You have any idea who did it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Come on, Jonah, give me a clue. You know this termites' nest better than anybody.”

“Deck-ah, even if I knew something I wouldn't tell you.”

“What? This is African-American
omerta
, is it?”

“No, this is Jonah Jones thinking about his self-preservation. Whoever whacked a heavy-duty dude like Junior Abraham wouldn't have no compunction about swatting a mosquito like me. I'll tell you something, Deckah, even if I knew for sure who done this deed, which I don't, I wouldn't tell you who done it even if you rubbed my nuts with marrowbone and let two hungry Dobermans loose in the room.”

Decker rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers, as if he were thinking seriously. “You know something, Jonah?
There's
an idea.”

Decker crunched across the shattered glass into the restaurant, already crowded with scene-of-crime investigators and photographers and uniformed officers and bewildered looking witnesses. The interior was pungent with soul-food spices and fried chicken, and the walls were covered with sepia photographs of slave cabins and cotton fields and dozens of framed photographs of famous people of color, everybody from Maggie L. Walker, the first woman in America to found a bank, to Denzel Washington and Arthur Ashe Jr.

Cab and Hicks were talking to witnesses. Decker went to join them. Plastic grapevines hung down from the ceilings in such profusion that he had to push them away from his face. “Jesus,” he said, “it's a jungle in here.”

Cab said, “It sure is. Take a look at this.”

Decker followed him to a booth at the very back of the restaurant, partly enclosed by a carved mahogany screen. In the corner hung a slanty-eyed African voodoo mask with an electric lightbulb shining through its eyes. Underneath the mask sat a skinny man in a shiny black satin shirt and shiny black satin pants, and black alligator moccasins with no socks. Above the man's collar, all that remained was his lower jaw, like a dental cast. The rest of his head was sprayed up the wall in an ever-widening fan shape of dark red blood and pink glistening lumps. Even as Decker was examining him, one of the lumps started to creep its way surreptitiously down the wallpaper like a garden slug.

“Heck—he was
right
in the middle of eating,” Hicks said, in disgust. “If you look into his neck, you can still see chewed-up ham and potatoes. Didn't even have time to swallow them.”

“I'll take your word for it, sport,” Decker said. “What went down here, Cab? This doesn't look anything at all like the other two killings.”

“It doesn't but it does. The story is that Junior Abraham comes here for lunch every Monday regular at one o'clock. Always sits at the same table and always orders the same thing, ham hocks and mixed greens, with candied sweet potatoes. He's sitting in the first booth right here with his brother Treasure and two of his heavies. A guy in a waiter's apron comes out of the kitchen door carrying a tray with four bowls of fish chowder.”

Cab took out his handkerchief and slapped it open. “We got
nine
eyewitnesses, would you believe? They all say that the waiter guy goes up to the booth and throws the chowder into Junior's lap. Junior jumps up, hands clutching his crotch, natural reaction, and that's when the waiter guy pulls out a pump-action shotgun from under his apron and blows a respectable part of Junior's head off. There's another of Junior's heavies on the door but the waiter guy doesn't bother to exit via the door—he simply shoots out the window.”

“Anybody recognize this waiter guy?”

“Nobody
says
they do. What do you expect? They all want to keep their heads intact.”

“So it was a hit. What makes it anything like the other two killings?”

“The waiter guy was out
here
, right? In the restaurant. But—and this is the weird bit—he was never in the kitchen.”

Decker blinked. “What do you mean he was never in the kitchen?”

Hicks said, “All the eyewitnesses in the restaurant say that he came out of the kitchen door, but the cooks insist that he was never in there. He just, like,
appeared
.”

“Ah, come on. The cooks weren't concentrating, that's all. They were cooking, they were filling out orders, they were stacking plates. They weren't going to notice some guy in a waiter's apron.”