Hell Bent (22 page)

Henry loved to ride in cars. His ears perked up and he cocked his head at me, and when I nodded, he trotted to the door, pressed his nose against the crack, and whined.

I pulled into the Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge parking lot a few minutes after eight. It was a low-slung, single-story building cut into some woods and surrounded by cracked asphalt where ten or twelve other vehicles were parked.

I opened my car windows an inch for Henry and told him I’d be gone no more than an hour, and his job was to guard the car, although if he wanted to take a nap, that would be all right, too.

Inside, the VFW hall was a big open pine-paneled room with a bar and some tables and chairs on the left and two pool tables on the right. A dozen or so men more or less evenly divided between bald and silver-haired sat at the tables with beer bottles and ashtrays in front of them looking at the giant flat-screen TV on the wall, where a young blond woman was interviewing a black football player who was about three times her size. Four younger-looking guys—twenties and thirties, I guessed—were playing pool.

The wall behind the bar was lined with framed photographs of various men in military uniforms shaking hands with other men. I recognized Robert Kennedy, Rick Pitino, Cardinal Cushing, Jungle Jim Loscutoff, Steve Grogan, Kevin White, Rico Petrocelli, Red Auerbach, Johnny Pesky.

Some of the men at the tables had turned to look at me. I read neither friendliness nor hostility on their faces. Just mild curiosity. I was a stranger in their private place.

“I’m looking for the Sarge,” I said to one of the bald guys.

“He expecting you?”

I nodded. “I was supposed to meet him here at eight.”

“He’s out back,” said the bald guy. “Should be out in a minute. You want a beer?”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

He got up, went behind the bar, and came back with a bottle of Budweiser. He put it on the table, wiped his hand on his shirt, and held it out to me. “I’m Tony.”

“Brady,” I said. “Brady Coyne.”

“So you a friend of the Sarge?”

“Not yet,” I said. “We just met on the phone.”

Tony sat at one of the empty tables and pushed out a chair with his foot. “Take a load off, Brady.”

I sat in the chair.

“Hey,” yelled Tony over his shoulder to the men at the pool table. “One of you guys give the Sarge a holler, willya? Tell him he got company.” He turned to me and jerked his thumb at the television.
“Monday Night Football.
I got fifty bucks on the Dolphins, giving three points. Vegas odds. Whaddaya think?”

I shook my head. “My opinion wouldn’t help you. I always lose when I bet on sports.”

“Me, I like the underdogs,” said Tony, “but them Dolphins—” He stopped and looked behind me. “Hey, Sarge.”

I turned.

The Sarge—Phil Trapelo, I assumed—had brush-cut steel-gray hair and bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows and liquid brown eyes. His face was dark and leathery, as if he’d spent all of his life outdoors.

“You’re Coyne?” His deep voice startled me. He was a small man, barely five-eight or -nine, and wiry like a jockey, but his voice came from a big bass drum.

I stood up and held out my hand. “Brady Coyne,” I said.

“Phil Trapelo.” He gripped my hand with a paw that was surprisingly big and strong. “I see you got yourself a beer.”

“Tony got it for me,” I said.

He nodded at Tony, then said, “Come on. We’ll talk in private.”

He turned and headed for the back of the room. I noticed that he favored his right leg with a slight limp. I followed him through a door into a living-room-sized area with fifteen or sixteen folding metal chairs arranged in a circle. More folded chairs leaned against the wall. There was a wooden table in one corner with an industrial-sized steel coffee urn and two stacks
of Styrofoam cups. The windows were covered with closed Venetian blinds.

Trapelo sat on one of the folding chairs. So did I.

“This is where we meet,” he said. “Tuesdays, seven thirty, right here.”

“Gus’s group?

He nodded. “My group.”

“You’re the leader?”

He shrugged. “I’m the one who got it organized, that’s all. It was around the time of Desert Storm. Lots of guys came home pretty messed up psychologically. Originally the group was for vets with PTSD. In my day, we called it shell shock. You don’t get professional help here. Nothing like that. No headshrinking. It’s just for anybody who needs support. Who doesn’t need support sometimes, right? Me, I don’t lead the discussions. No leaders. No connection to the VA or doctors or insurance. It’s not formal like that. Whoever has something going on, something they need to air out, they go ahead and talk, and everybody else chips in, and you find out you’re not alone, maybe get some advice. Mostly, it’s a bunch of guys—well, we sometimes have a woman or two, they’re always welcome—people who’ve been there. Mostly vets. But survivors, too. Husbands, wives, parents. And people like Gus Shaw, who’ve been there for other reasons. We share. Lean on each other. Make sure each other knows they’ve got a friend, somebody in their corner, someone they can trust, someone they can say anything to and know it ain’t leaving the room.”

“What about you?” I said.

“Me?” He ran the palm of his hand over his bristly gray hair. “I was in Vietnam. Two tours. Made tech sergeant.”

“That where you got this?” I patted my leg.

He slapped his knee. “Booby trap. Long time ago. Bum knee
is all. I was lucky. Physical wounds heal. I saw plenty over there. I still have bad dreams, night sweats. I came home with an addiction to amphetamines. Bastards gave ‘em to us like candy, keep you awake and alert for three or four days and nights in a row. Then you crash big-time. Took me a long time to get my shit together.” He smiled quickly. “It’s still not all that together. The group helps.”

“There must be a lot of heavy emotional stuff going on,” I said.

Trapelo nodded. “Oh, sure. Depression, paranoia, addiction, divorce. Plenty of anger. Suicide’s always an issue. Guys can’t hold jobs. Frustration with the VA, the army, politicians. Civilians in general. What we try to do is just encourage the guys to talk about it. Put it out there. Not keep it bottled up. Our rule is, nobody gets criticized, nobody gets put down. If you say it, it’s important.”

“When I mentioned Gus on the phone to you this afternoon,” I said, “you said that he betrayed you. What did you mean?”

“Look,” he said. “These guys, most of ‘em, they’re hanging on by their fingernails. How do you think it makes them feel when they hear Gus Shaw blew his brains out? These people need success stories, you understand?”

“Did it surprise you?”

“What? What Gus did?”

“That he would kill himself, yes.”

Trapelo looked past my shoulder for a minute. Then his dark eyes returned to mine. “In one way,” he said, “I’m never surprised. Gus Shaw wasn’t even a soldier. He wasn’t trained for what he saw, what he experienced over there. Poor bastard lost his hand. So he came home and his wife kicked him out of the
house. He couldn’t use a camera anymore.” He shook his head. “War is hell, Brady. It really is. And that one over there now is worse than most. No training in the world really prepares you for it. But still. I really thought Gus had a chance. He seemed to be doing better.”

“Did he talk about suicide?”

“Not specifically. Not that I remember.”

“But you thought he was suicidal?”

Trapelo shrugged. “Everybody’s suicidal in this room. Some of ‘em talk about it, some don’t.”

“Any chance that Gus didn’t do it?”

He frowned. “You mean, that somebody murdered him?”

I shrugged. “If he didn’t kill himself …”

“Who’d want to kill him?”

“That’s the question I hoped you might be able to answer for me.”

“If you’re thinking of guys in the group,” he said, “you’re way off base.”

“I would’ve thought that emotions would run pretty high sometimes.”

“Sure,” said Trapelo. “They do.”

“So you’ve got a bunch of unstable men,” I said, “ex-military, most of them, trained to violence, having arguments, holding grudges …”

“Whatever happens here,” he said, “stays here.”

“I keep hearing that,” I said. “Seems to me, that would be expecting a lot even from the most stable, well-adjusted people.”

Trapelo narrowed his eyes at me. “If you came here to accuse somebody of something, you better spit it out.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

“What’s to understand? Gus killed himself.”

I shrugged.

“What’d the police say?” he said.

“They called it a suicide,” I said.

Phil Trapelo shook his head. “You gotta face up to it. We all do, those of us who knew him. Gus Shaw was another casualty of that God damn war. He did what he did. I’m no shrink, but I know that denial doesn’t help. This is something our group has gotta deal with.”

“I was wondering if he mentioned an enemy, somebody he was having a problem with.”

“Everybody’s got enemies,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they get murdered.”

“But everybody who gets murdered has an enemy,” I said.

He smiled. “Sure. Good point. I was thinking about that after you called today. I don’t know. I mean, there was his wife. Gus thought she had a boyfriend. And there was something about some photographs that had him pretty agitated. But I don’t know about some enemy who’d kill him. Except himself.”

“What did Gus say about photographs?”

“Listen,” Trapelo said, “I told you that what happens in the group stays in the group.”

“Gus is dead. What harm can it do?”

“It’s a violation of our rules, that’s all.”

“I’m only interested in Gus Shaw,” I said.

He narrowed his eyes at me for a moment, then shrugged. “Gus didn’t say much anyway. Just he was pretty paranoid about some photographs he took over there.”

“Did he say what the photographs showed?”

“Not really. Look. Gus was pretty radically anti-war. Anti-government. Most of the guys are. They’ve all been fucked over
pretty bad. Gus never said what was in those photos, but it was pretty clear that he thought it was stuff the government and the military wouldn’t want the world to see.” Trapelo stopped and looked at me. “Wait a minute. You think those photos …?”

I shrugged. “What do you think?”

“Worth killing for?” he said. “That what you’re getting at?”

“If you can remember any names he might have mentioned or anything at all Gus might have said about his photographs …”

He frowned for a minute, then shook his head. “Sorry. If he said anything like that, I don’t remember it.”

“Phil,” I said, “did you know Gus outside the group at all?”

“Did we hang out, you mean?”

I nodded.

“No,” he said. “All I know about Gus was from our Tuesday nights here. I never met his family or went to his house or had dinner with him or watched TV with him or had beers with him. Nothing like that. I called his wife last week, just to offer my sympathies. That’s all.”

“So you wouldn’t say you were friends.”

He shrugged. “I guess not. I knew a helluva lot about him in one way. But in another way I guess you could say I didn’t know him at all.”

“What about the other people in your group?” I said.

“You mean was Gus friends with any of them?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Could be.”

“Maybe you saw Gus leaving with somebody, or talking with somebody after a meeting or something?”

“I don’t remember one way or the other.”

“There’s a meeting tomorrow night, right?”

“Right. It’s Tuesday.”

“Will you be talking about Gus?”

“If anybody wants to talk about him we will. We don’t have an agenda. We talk about what we feel like talking about.”

“I wonder,” I said, “if you’d mind telling them that I’d like to talk to anybody who knew Gus outside of the group. Tell them I’m just trying to help his family deal with what happened. Make sure they know that talking with a lawyer gives them absolute confidentiality, but at the same time, I only want them to tell me what they’re comfortable with.” I looked hard at Phil Trapelo. “Will you do that for me?”

He looked right back at me for a minute. Then he nodded. “I don’t see why not.”

I gave him all the business cards I had in my wallet. “Anybody who seems like they might be willing to talk to me, give him one of my cards, tell him to call me anytime.”

Trapelo squinted at the cards, then looked up at me. “These guys are pretty messed up, you know?”

I nodded.

“They might tell you things that aren’t true. That they imagined or remember backwards.”

“I understand that.”

He shrugged. “Well, it’s still a free country, thank God. I’ll mention it to them tomorrow. No promises that anybody’ll take you up on it.” He looked at the clock on the wall, then stood up. “I gotta get going.”

I followed him out to the big main room. It looked like more people had showed up while I was talking with Phil Trapelo. They had pulled their tables and chairs around so they could watch the football game on the big TV.

I shook hands with Trapelo and went out to my car. I let Henry out so he could sniff the bushes and mark his territory.

“Go ahead,” I told him. “Pee everywhere. In the long run,
it’s just urine, and pretty soon it’ll rain, and then nobody will know you’ve been here.”

Henry, unfazed by my bleak existentialism, continued to lift his leg on the shrubs.

A
lex was lying in her king-sized hotel bed with her head propped up on two pillows and the sheet pulled up—or down—to her waist. I was sitting on the edge of the bed putting on my pants.

“Sure you won’t stay?” she said.

“I can’t leave Henry alone for the night.”

“So you’ll never spend a night away from your house?”

“Not unless I bring Henry with me,” I said. “Or get a babysitter.”

“Is that a reason,” she said, “or an excuse?”

I found my socks, put them on.

“It feels like wham, bang, thank you ma’am,” said Alex softly. “Don’t slam the door behind you.”