"Why?"
"To find out how tall they are. "
"Can't do that for the driver Vassell and Coomer had on New Year's Day. Major Marshall. He was a visitor. His records won't be here. "
"He wasn't here the night Carbone died," I said. "So you can take him out, too. "
"Twenty-eight. "
"So go pull twenty-eight sets of records," I said.
She slid me a slip of white paper. I picked it up. It was the one I had written 973 on. Our original suspect pool.
"We're making progress," she said.
I nodded. She smiled and stood up. Walked out the door. I took her place behind the desk. The chair was warm from her body. I savored the feeling, until it went away. Then I picked up the phone. Asked my sergeant to get the post quartermaster on the line. It took her a few minutes to find him. I figured she had to drag him out of the mess hall. I figured I had just ruined his dinner too, as well as the pathologist's. But then, I hadn't eaten anything yet myself.
"Yes, sir?" the guy said. He sounded a little annoyed.
"I've got a question, Chief," I said. "Something only you will know. "
"Like what?"
"Average height and weight for a male U. S. Army soldier. "
The guy said nothing, but I felt his annoyance fade away. The Quartermaster Corps buys millions of uniforms a year, and twice as many boots, all on a budget, so you can bet it knows the tale of the tape to the nearest half-inch and the nearest half-ounce. It can't afford not to, literally. And it loves to show off its specialized knowledge.
"No problem," the guy said. "Male adult population aged twenty to fifty as a whole in America goes five-nine and a half, and one seventy-eight. We're overrepresented with Hispanics by comparison with the nation as a whole, which brings our median height down one whole inch to five-eight and a half. We train pretty hard, which brings our median weight up three pounds to one eighty-one, muscle being generally heavier than fat. "
"Those are this year's figures?"
"Last year's," he said. "This year is only a few days old. "
"What's the spread in height?"
"What are you looking for?"
"How many guys have we got six-three or better?"
"One in ten," he said. "In the army as a whole, maybe ninety thousand. Call it a Super Bowl crowd. On a post this size, maybe a hundred and twenty. Call it a half-empty airplane. "
"OK, Chief," I said. "Thanks. "
I hung up. One in ten. Summer was going to come back with twenty-eight medical charts. Nine out of ten of them were going to be for guys too small to worry about. So out of twenty-eight, if we were lucky, only two of them would need looking at. Three, if we were unlucky. Two or three, down from nine hundred seventy-three. Making progress. I looked at the clock. Eight-thirty. I smiled to myself. Shit happens, Willard, I thought.
Shit happened, for sure, but it happened to us, not Willard. Averages and medians played their little arithmetic tricks and Summer came back with twenty-eight charts and all twenty-eight of them were for short guys. Tallest among them was a marginal six-foot-one, and he was a reed-thin one hundred sixty pounds, and he was a padre.
Once when I was a kid we lived for a month in an off-post bungalow somewhere. It had no dining table. My mother called people and had one delivered. It came packed flat in a carton. I tried to help her put it together. All the parts were there. There was a laminated tabletop, and four chrome legs, and four big steel bolts. We laid them out on the floor in the dining nook. The top, four legs, four bolts. But there was no way to fit them together. No way at all. It was some kind of an inexplicable design. Nothing would join up. We knelt side by side and worked on it. We sat cross-legged on the floor, with the dust bunnies and the cockroaches. The smooth chrome was cold in my hands. The edges were rough, where the laminate was shaped on the corners. We couldn't put it together. Joe came in, and tried, and failed. My dad tried, and failed. We ate in the kitchen for a month. We were still trying to put that table together when we moved out. Now I felt like I was wrestling with it all over again. Nothing went together. Everything looked good at first, and then everything stalled and died.
"The crowbar didn't walk in by itself," Summer said. "One of those twenty-eight names brought it in. Obviously. It can't have gotten here any other way. "
I said nothing.
"Want dinner?" she said.
"I think better when I'm hungry," I said.
"We've run out of things to think about. "
I nodded. Gathered the twenty-eight medical charts together and piled them neatly. Put Summer's original list of thirty-three names on top. Thirty-three, minus Carbone, because he didn't bring the crowbar in himself and commit suicide with it. Minus the pathologist, because he wasn't a convincing suspect, and because he was short, and because his practice swings with the crowbar had been weak. Minus Vassell and Coomer and their driver, Marshall, because their alibis were too good. Vassell and Coomer had been stuffing their faces, and Marshall hadn't even come at all.
"Why wasn't Marshall here?" I said.
Summer nodded. "That's always bothered me. It's like Vassell and Coomer had something to hide from him. "
"All they did was eat dinner. "
"But Marshall must have been right there at Kramer's funeral with them. So they must have specifically told him not to drive them here. Like a positive order to get out of the car and stay home. "
I nodded. Pictured the long line of black government sedans at Arlington National Cemetery, under a leaden January sky. Pictured the ceremony, the folding of the flag, the salute from the riflemen. The shuffling procession back to the cars, bareheaded men with their chins ducked into their collars against the cold, maybe snow in the air. I pictured Marshall holding the Mercury's rear doors, for Vassell first, then for Coomer. He must have driven them back to the Pentagon lot and then gotten out and watched Coomer move up into the driver's seat.
"We should talk to him," I said. "Find out exactly what they told him. What kind of reason they gave him. It must have been a slightly awkward moment. A blue-eyed boy like that must have felt a little excluded. "
I picked up the phone and spoke to my sergeant. Asked her to get a number for Major Marshall. Told her he was a XII Corps staffer based at the Pentagon. She said she would get back to me. Summer and I sat quiet and waited. I gazed at the map on the wall. I figured we should take the pin out
of Columbia. It distorted the picture. Brubaker hadn't been killed there. He had been killed somewhere else. North, south, east, or west.
"Are you going to call Willard?" Summer asked me.
"Probably," I said. "Tomorrow, maybe. "
"Not before midnight?"
"I don't want to give him the satisfaction. "
"That's a risk. "
"I'm protected," I said.
"Might not last forever. "
"Doesn't matter. I'll have Delta Force coming after me soon. That'll make everything else seem kind of academic. "
"Call Willard tonight," she said. "That would be my advice. "
I looked at her.
"As a friend," she said. "AWOL is a big deal. No point making things worse. "
"OK," I said.
"Do it now," she said. "Why not?"
"OK," I said again. I reached out for the phone but before I could get my hand on it my sergeant put her head in the door. She told us Major Marshall was no longer based in the United States. His temporary detached duty had been prematurely terminated. He had been recalled to Germany. He had been flown out of Andrews Air Force Base late in the morning of the fifth of January.
"Whose orders?" I asked her.
"General Vassell's," she said.
"OK," I said.
She closed the door.
"The fifth of January," Summer said.
"The morning after Carbone and Brubaker died," I said.
"He knows something. "
"He wasn't even here. "
"Why else would they hide him away afterward?"
"It's a coincidence. "
"You don't like coincidences. "
I nodded.
"OK," I said. "Let's go to Germany. "