The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (60 page)

“Christ, Pops, how the hell do I know?” Bowden took a few steps and clicked the portable radio into silence. “Hey, it’s Saturday morning. You guys get a few hours off to polish your gear and get your letters written. What’s this?”

He picked up the playing cards and the cash that was laid out on a foot locker between two cots. “You guys know there’s no gambling allowed in the barracks. And it’s payday. How do you have any mazuma left to play for? Now I have to confiscate this evidence.” He stuffed the cards in one pocket and the money in another. “I don’t know, I don’t know, how are we ever going to make soldiers out of you sad sacks?”

Nick Train had shoved his feet into his boots and tucked his fatigue jacket into his trousers. “Coughlin really wants to see me, Bowden?”

“No, I’m just trying to ruin your Saturday. Of course he wants to see you.”

“No idea why?”

“Nope.”

Train smoothed out the blankets on his bunk, took his Garrand rifle down from the rack near the barracks door and headed out into the wintry Georgia air. For a December morning the day wasn’t too cold, certainly no colder than Train was used to in Brooklyn. The sky was clear and sparkling and the sun was a brilliant disk. There were a few patches of snow still on the ground. The last snowfall had been three days ago. Train held his rifle at port arms and quick-timed across the company area toward the office.

The building behind him was new construction, whitewashed wooden walls under a green tar-paper roof. It would probably be hot as blazes in the summer but he wouldn’t know that. It was definitely freezing cold in the winter.

First Sergeant Dillard was working at his desk in the company office. He looked up when Train arrived, then back at his paperwork. He didn’t say anything, didn’t indicate why Train had been summoned.

Train stood at attention facing the First Sergeant’s desk.

After a while, Dillard looked up again and grunted. “Go back to the door and knock the snow off your boots. What kind of pigsty do you think this is?”

Train complied. Then he returned to stand in front of Dillard, his Garrand at his side, butt on the linoleum floor beside his polished boot.

“Captain Coughlin wants to see you, Train.”

“Corporal Bowden told me. What’s it’s about, Sarge?”

“Sergeant.”

“Sorry. Sergeant.”

“I don’t know.” First Sergeant Martin Dillard shook his head. “I don’t know, but it’s something big. He’s got Lieutenant McWilliams in there with him. And I heard some walloping a while ago.” He shook his head again. “Just go knock on the door, Train, and maybe say a prayer while you’re at it.”

Lieutenant Phillips McWilliams opened the door to the captain’s office when Train knocked. McWilliams was gussied up in officer’s dark greens, the silver bars shining on his shoulder straps like miniature neon bulbs, the US insignia and crossed rifles of the infantry on his lapels polished to a sheen. He even affected the Sam Browne belt that every other officer Train knew had abandoned.

Train almost expected him to be wearing a parade ground saber with his uniform, but he wasn’t. Instead, there was a holster hooked to his uniform belt, the regulation holster issued to officers along with their .45 caliber Colt automatics.

The lieutenant jerked his head toward Captain Samuel Coughlin’s desk.

Train crossed the room, halted, thumped his rifle butt on the floor and executed a sharp rifle salute, the way he’d been taught a few weeks ago.

Captain Coughlin bounced his forefinger off his right eyebrow, then folded his hands in front of him on his desk. Even in December he sat in his shirtsleeves, his uniform jacket with the railroad tracks on the shoulders on a nearby hanger. Train had never been in the captain’s office before. He kept his posture but even so he was able to see the pictures on the freshly whitewashed wall behind the captain. There was a standard shot of President Roosevelt, one of old General Pershing and one of General Marshall, and a blow-up that must have been made in France during the First War. It showed a very young Samuel Coughlin standing rigidly while an officer who had to be Douglas MacArthur himself pinned a medal on his khaki tunic.

There was a fire axe on Captain Coughlin’s desk. Behind him, Train saw another doorway. The door-frame and the door had been damaged, Train guessed, by the fire-axe.

“They call you Pops, don’t they?” Captain Coughlin asked.

Train said, “Yes, sir.”

“Why is that?”

“They’re mostly kids, sir. All of them, in fact. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old. I guess Hirsch is a little older, maybe twenty. They think I’m an old man.”

“How old are you, Train?”

“I’m twenty-four, sir.”

“Used to be a police officer, did you?”

Captain Coughlin knew damned well that Train used to be a police officer. He knew how old he was, knew everything else that was in Train’s 201 file, the personnel folder that every man Jack in the Army had. Still, he answered.

“Yes, sir.”

“Twenty-four.” The Captain smiled sadly. “Twenty-four and they call you Pops. Well, I guess we did the same thing in ’18.” The Captain’s face was leathery and etched with lines, his hair graying at the temples.

Captain Coughlin jerked his thumb in the direction of the damaged doorway. “Do you know what’s in there, Train?”

“No, sir.”

“It’s the company safe room. We keep classified information locked up in there. What passes for classified information in this kindergarten. We also put the payroll in there the night before payday.”

Captain Coughlin pushed himself back from his desk and stood up. He moved toward the damaged doorway. “Take a look, soldier. Go ahead in there.”

It was only a few steps. Once inside the safe room Train stopped. The safe door hung open. Train couldn’t tell what if anything was inside. A coffee mug stood on top of the safe. Corporal Miller, the company pay clerk, sat beside it in a battered wicker chair. His arms hung over the arms of the chair, almost but not quite dragging on the linoleum. His head was canted to one side. His hair was matted with blood. He wasn’t moving, and Train had seen enough bodies in the line of duty as a cop to know that he was dead.

Even so, he flashed an inquiry to the Captain, got a suggestion of a nod in return, then felt the side of Miller’s neck, searching for a pulse. There was no pulse. The body was cold. There were no windows in the room. Most of the light came from a shaded fixture hanging by a long cord from the ceiling, casting macabre shadows on Miller’s face. A little more light filtered through the open doorway from the Captain’s office.

Train turned around. Captain Coughlin was standing with his fists balled and balanced on his hips. “Poor fellow,” Coughlin murmured. “He was one of our good boys, you know. Religious as all get-out. Chapel every Sunday. Rosary in his pocket, Missal in his foot-locker. Poor bastard.”

Coughlin didn’t use strong language very often.

Lieutenant McWilliams stood in the doorway, looking like a photographer’s model.

Turning back to Corporal Miller, Train observed that Miller, too, had been issued a forty-five. The holster hung from Miller’s belt, the butt of the automatic visible from where Train stood.

“I should probably call the Provost Marshal right now,” Captain Coughlin announced. “It’s his business eventually, in any case. But they’re looking to put me out to pasture. I shouldn’t tell you this, Train, I wouldn’t tell it to any of the kids in this outfit, but I’m going to rely on your maturity. If I turn up with a dead payroll clerk and an empty safe, they’ll decide I can’t cut it any more and I’m out of here on a pension. Not for me, Sunny Jim! Not with a big war going on.”

He walked around the safe and the wicker chair with its motionless occupant. “No, sir, not for Samuel Coughlin, USA. If we can solve this thing and present a solution to the Provost Marshal instead of a mystery, I just might get out of this kindergarten and got a chance to do some fighting before I’m through.”

“I don’t know if that’s wise, Captain.”

Lieutenant McWilliams had a cultured voice. He was the opposite of the Captain.

Train knew-everybody in the unit knew – that Coughlin was a mustang. He’d been an enlisted man in the first World War, earned a commission and spent the Roaring Twenties and the Depression years soldiering at backwoods Army posts. Now he was overage in grade and hanging on by his fingernails.

But McWilliams was the scion of a high society family. Barracks rumors claimed that his mother had wanted him to live out her own thwarted ambitions, to become a great and famous botanist. Either that, or enter the priesthood. Or both, like old Gregor Mendel. Instead, Old Man McWilliams was delighted when Junior opted for the United States Military Academy. All it took was a couple of phone calls and a generous campaign contribution to a United States Senator, and young McWilliams was in. And he’d done his daddy proud. Cadet Captain, top 10 percent in his class, starting quarterback on the Army football team until a knee injury sidelined him for his senior season. And that might have been a blessing in disguise. The team had played badly and wound up the season losing the Army-Navy game for the third year in a row. At least Phillips McWilliams wouldn’t be tarred with that loss. And the 1942 football season hadn’t been much better, ending with another loss to Navy, a disgraceful fourteen – nothing shellacking.

But now Phillips McWilliams was a First Lieutenant in the United States Army, executive officer of a training company at the Infantry School with a glittering future before him and only a careworn middle-aged Captain to climb over – at least for the moment. As an officer his duties weren’t too rigorous. Train knew that. The ordinary GIs knew more about the lives of officers than the other way around. The people on the bottom always knew more about the people on top. That was one of life’s constants. The trainees knew that Lieutenant McWilliams drove a shiny new Packard convertible, one of the last to roll off the line before the factory switched to war production, and he used it to cruise down broad Lumpkin Boulevard to Columbus or across the Chattahoochie River into Phenix City, Alabama, for a night of drinking and gambling and whoring pretty much whenever he felt like it.

McWilliams’s Packard was just one car that all the trainees recognized. All the officers and NCOs in the permanent party had cars: Captain Coughlin’s gray Plymouth, Sergeant Dillard’s battered Ford station wagon, Corporal Miller’s little green Nash. They all bore Fort Benning tags, blue for the officers, red for the NCOs, all carefully logged in or out every time they passed through the post gatehouse.

Captain Coughlin was talking again. Train snapped back to the moment. To the – he grinned inwardly-crime scene. “The First Sergeant called me this morning,” he said. “Told me that he couldn’t get a rise out of Miller. Corporal had spent the night in the safe room, same as every month the night before payday.”

The Captain paused. The room was silent. A platoon of officer candidates passed by outside. Train could hear their boots crashing on the frozen Georgia soil, hear them singing the unofficial Fort Benning Infantry School song.

They were past the company office now, their voices growing fainter. But Train knew the song, as well.

“Safe room door is secured with a hasp and padlock inside and out,” Captain Coughlin resumed. “Not exactly Fort Knox, is it, but it’s the best Uncle gives us to work with. Miller locked his side, I personally locked the outside. Sergeant Dillard, Lieutenant McWilliams and I all have keys to the outside lock, but that wouldn’t get us in if Miller didn’t open his. You see?”

Train grunted, then remembered himself and replied, “Yes, sir.”

“That’s why we had to use the fire-axe.” Lieutenant McWilliams sounded as if he disapproved of the whole proceeding.

Train knew the type. It was all beneath him. All beneath Mister Phillips Anderson McWilliams of the Newport and Palm Beach McWilliamses.

Captain Coughlin grasped Train’s bicep. The touch came as a shock. Officers didn’t touch enlisted men. They might become contaminated. Coughlin’s grasp was remarkably powerful. His fingertips dug into Train’s arm.

“What are you doing in this outfit anyway, Train?” He released Train’s arm, stood eye-to-eye with him. Train was taller by four inches easily but he felt no advantage in facing this older man. “Why are you here? Why didn’t you apply for a commission? You ought to be in CID.”

“Criminal Investigation Division? Me, Captain?”

“I said that, didn’t I?”

“Yes, sir. I – I just have to get through Basic first, don’t I?”