Mortal Allies (4 page)

I stared up at her a long moment. How could I not? I’m only five foot ten, and she’d moved up real close, like she wanted to accentuate her advantage.

I nearly screamed in fright, only I’m too tough for that.

“Who’re you?” she demanded in a gruff voice.

“Drummond, Sean, Major, one each. Reporting as ordered,” I said in my most wiseass tone. When I’m scared out my wits, I get like that — blustery to the point of being obnoxious.

She turned around and yelled, “Katherine, you expectin’ some runt in a uniform?”

“Does he look sort of Neanderthalish and ignorant?” a voice yelled back.

“Uh-huh,” she grunted.

“That’s just Drummond. Let him in.”

The amazon stepped aside and I warily circled past her. There were two other people in addition to Katherine and the amazon. One guy and one girl.

The guy was improbably handsome. He was a few years younger than me, blond with sea blue eyes, perfectly white teeth, a slender build, and facial features that presumptive writers might describe as sculpted. Maybe I was predisposed, but I had the impression of a guy who was naturally good-looking who went to some lengths to be even better-looking; an effort that makes many manly guys somewhat squeamish and mistrustful, if you know what I mean.

The other woman had short-cropped brunette hair that accentuated her delicate, almost tiny features. She was actually an inch or two shorter than Katherine, and was so slight of build that she was what my mother would call dainty. Like Katherine, she was dressed in a fancy silk pantsuit and would have been quite pretty if it weren’t for the gloomy frown on her face. I thought she seemed feminine in a kittenish way, but that got cleared up real quick when the amazon lumbered past me, jumped on the same bed, and threw an extraordinarily long arm around her neck. To say they were an unlikely-looking couple would be to put too fine an edge on it. They looked like a distorted version of a Disney tale — a teeny beauty and a gangly beast.

It’s important at this point to understand that I grew up on military bases and spent my entire professional life in the Army. You become accustomed to the military culture, which has a fairly masculine ambiance and a distinctly conservative bent. Anything that’s divergently different makes your hair stand up. And that’s what was happening at this instant. I literally reached up and patted down the top of my head, so it wasn’t too obvious.

“Hey, everybody,” I said, with this painfully awkward smile.

Katherine said, “Attila, you look like you’re about to faint. Excuse him, everybody. I warned you he’d be a big disappointment.”

“Heh-heh,” I laughed, just to show them I was a good sport.

Nobody else laughed, I noticed.

The amazon said, “I’m Alice. I like Allie, though.”

“Pleased to meet you, Allie,” I incoherently mumbled, since it wasn’t strictly correct. I wasn’t the least bit pleased to meet her.

“I’m Keith,” the guy said, bouncing off the bed with his left hand hanging from a very limp wrist. “Keith Merritt, if you want my full name.”

His handshake was so quick and light, you wondered if it actually happened.

The other woman stayed on the bed, frowned, and complained, “I’m Maria.”

“Hi,” I said, smiling. She didn’t smile back.

“Okay, everybody’s met,” Katherine said. “Get seated and let’s get started.”

I looked around for a moment and wondered where I should sit. Allie the amazon stayed on the bed right next to Maria the grump. Keith patted a spot on the mattress he was stretched out on.

I rolled my eyes and audibly groaned, then went over and sat on the floor in the corner, as far from everybody as I could belligerently get. The rest of them giggled, like my discomfort was just the funniest damn thing in the whole damn world.

Katherine studied us all in a businesslike way.

“We’ve got a court date,” she announced. “It’s set for two weeks from today. They’re bringing in a judge from Washington. Attila, have you ever heard of a Colonel Carruthers?”

“Barry Carruthers?” I asked, and she nodded. There’s actually a fairly small corps of military judges, and lawyers are inveterately gossipy, and if there’s one thing lawyers love to share, it’s stories about judges.

“I’ve heard of him,” I admitted. “I’ve never tried anything before him, but I know his rep.”

“And what’s his rep?” she asked.

“A prosecutor’s dream date. Loose on rules of evidence, murder on theatrics, and he’ll kill you if you deal with the press.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, apparently unimpressed.

She should’ve been impressed as all get out. Barry Carruthers loved to dance with defense attorneys, only it was a very ugly kind of dance, because he always took the lead, he stepped on your toes, and he whirled you around so hard that you fell on your ass a lot. Just hearing he was assigned to a case was enough to make some defense attorneys bawl like babies. The stories about him were legion. He’d once suspended a trial for two months because a defense lawyer raised an objection that so thoroughly aggravated him, he actually threw the attorney in the slammer. It did not escape my notice that the Army was bringing in the most notoriously antidefense judge on its rolls.

I raised my hand like a schoolchild. “Could I ask a question?”

“What?” Katherine barked.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to get too technical at this early stage, but who’s our client?”

The other four in the room all looked at one another like I’d just asked the stupidest question there ever was. I didn’t think it was stupid.

Katherine said, “Captain Thomas Whitehall.”

She started to open her lips to say something else, and I raised my hand again.

“What?” she said, even more agitated.

“Hey, I apologize if I’m getting ahead of myself here. What’s he accused of?”

Katherine shook her head and looked around at the others in exasperation. “I’m sorry,” she explained, very nastily, “I know this case has been plastered for weeks on the front page of every newspaper in the U.S. and Korea, but Attila here doesn’t know how to read. Keith, would you quickly summarize the case for our token Army lawyer?”

Keith turned to me and smiled. “Three American soldiers, a first sergeant named Carl Moran, a private named Everett Jackson, and our client were all seen entering an apartment building in the Itaewon section of Seoul. This was around nine o’clock on the night of May 2. Three different witnesses observed them. There was a fourth party with them, a Korean soldier wearing an American Army uniform. His name was Lee No Tae. The witnesses also testified they heard sounds of a loud party that lasted past midnight.”

“The witnesses,” I asked, “they were all South Koreans?”

His smile broadened. “Oh, Sean, how wonderfully clever of you. Anyway, the four soldiers were all in Apartment 13C. It had a living room, a kitchen, three bedrooms, and was leased by Captain Whitehall. About five-thirty in the morning, First Sergeant Moran entered the bedroom where Captain Whitehall was sleeping and discovered him on a sleeping mat beside Lee No Tae. Lee had been strangled with a belt. An autopsy was done and revealed that his anus contained two different specimens of semen. One was traced to First Sergeant Moran, the other to Captain Whitehall. The autopsy also revealed that at least one case of anal penetration had been inflicted after the victim was dead. Since corpses can’t willingly consent, that leads to charges of murder, necrophilia, and rape.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And aside from the fact the victim was lying beside him, what evidence is there that Captain Whitehall did the crime?”

“Lee was strangled with an Army-issue belt that turned out to be Whitehall’s. Also First Sergeant Moran and Private Jackson are both turning evidence against Whitehall. Finally, one of the two semen specimens was traced to Whitehall, and he was the last known partner Lee slept with.”

“This is not good,” I said, which was so ridiculously obvious that everyone else chuckled.

“No, it’s worse than that,” Keith went on. “You know about Lee’s father?”

“The defense minister, right?”

“Also a living legend. He was a big war hero in one of the two army divisions the Koreans sent to Vietnam back in the sixties. When he returned home, he became disgusted with the military dictatorship here, resigned from the army, and became a democratic activist. He was imprisoned a number of times. He was beaten, tortured, and nearly executed, but he never broke. Every time he got out of prison, he went right back to the barricades. Once democracy finally came, he could’ve run for president and easily won. But he never did. He refused to take any rewards, until Kim Dae Jung, the current president, begged him to take the post of defense minister. The reason he begged him is because the Defense Ministry is so rife with corruption that the past three ministers have all ended up in prison. President Kim hoped that Minister Lee would lend his own good name to restore some public confidence in an institution known for being completely rotten.”

I said, “So that makes it bad from a public relations standpoint, but what does it have to do with this case?”

“Well, Lee No Tae was
supposedly
lured to the apartment without any foreknowledge that the three American soldiers were gay.
Supposedly
, Lee No Tae just thought he was being given the chance to party with some friendly Americans, one of whom was a high-ranking noncom, and another of whom was an officer. If you accept that, then he was raped twice, once by Moran and once by Whitehall.”

“So that gives the prosecution something to hang over Moran’s head? Is that your point?”

“Oh, Sean, you
are
clever. But there’s one other point: Nobody in the American Army wants to insult Minister Lee by impugning his son’s sexuality. Like adding insult to injury, if you get my meaning.”

“And what have Moran and Jackson said?”

“We reviewed the statements they gave CID. They say Lee was straight, that he was just there to party, a lot of booze was being imbibed, and things got a little carried away.”

“Anything else?” I asked, noting with some dubiousness how Katherine’s team all seemed to believe the murdered man, Private Lee, was gay, despite what the witnesses were saying.

Katherine said, “Moran refused to confess he had intercourse with Lee. For obvious reasons, of course. He said the last time he saw Lee was when Lee and Whitehall entered the bedroom together, sometime around one in the morning. He said he heard them arguing angrily in the bedroom, but couldn’t tell what the argument was about. Jackson says pretty much the same thing.”

Katherine then began pointing her tiny fingers and handing out assignments to her coterie of cronies, while I stewed and moped in my corner.

I’d never given much thought to the topic of homosexuality, I guess because I’d never had to. I know damn well which sex I want to go home with when the cocktail party’s over, and that’s that. And the thing with the Army is, if you’re gay, you can’t tell anybody, or act like it, so to the best of my knowledge I didn’t even have any gay friends or acquaintances.

But I’d spent my whole life listening to jokes about gays. Eventually that seeps in, so you get to think of gays, at least the male ones, as whimsical, capricious, odd little creatures. Not all of them, though, because there’s another type. There’s the Rock Hudson variety that can completely fool you. I mean, he and Doris Day did manage to pull off some pretty steamy scenes. To this day, all lurid disclosures aside, I still wonder about the Rock. Anyway, his kind of gay doesn’t bother anybody in the least, because after all, what you don’t know don’t hurt you.

I stared at the floor and wished I was anywhere but here. There’re some cases you don’t mind defending, some you’re uncomfortable defending, and some that make you want to leap off a cliff — the kind that make you ashamed to be a lawyer.

Murder, necrophilia, rape: Katherine must’ve plotted her sweet revenge against me for eight long years.

She finally finished passing out instructions, and it didn’t escape my notice that no chores fell my way. The other three went eagerly dashing out of the room. I sat perfectly still in my corner till they were gone. Katherine acted like she took no notice of my still sitting there, till I finally stood up and walked over. I got right in her face, which made it damned hard to pretend I was a piece of furniture.

She broke into an impish grin. “Isn’t this exciting?” she asked. In all seriousness, too.

“No, it’s not exciting. See, exciting is a vacation in Bermuda, living in a cottage only a ten-minute walk from Horseshoe Bay. Exciting is lying on a beach and having no cares in the world. Exciting is wondering which girl’s skimpy bikini top is gonna get washed off by the next big wave. Those were all things I was doing until thirty hours ago.”

“What would you call this, then?”

“May I be candid?”

“Within limits,” she carefully replied. Like I said earlier, the woman wasn’t dumb.

“Completely absurd. You’ve got a client who’s probably guilty as hell. You’ve got a political agenda that never was popular, and your client has probably set it back a few centuries. And you’ve got an axe to grind with me.”

The grin left her face and she turned around and went over to sit in a chair by the window. It struck me she was buying time to think about how to address all that. Then she spun and looked out the window at all the twinkling lights off in the distance.

She lightly said, “You’ve got two out of three correct.”

“Which two? The guilty client? The political agenda? Or the axe to grind?”

She ignored my question. “Lighten up, Attila. When I got here ten days ago, they assigned a local as my co-counsel. I didn’t like him, so I fired him and asked for you.”

“What didn’t you like about him?”

“He was a homophobic bigot, for one thing, so my assistants didn’t trust him. He was dumb, for a second thing. Third, he was the kind of spit-shined, pants-pressed, salute-himself-in-the-mirror type your JAG Corps has in too great abundance. This is going to be a tough case. I can’t afford an unthinking automaton on my team.”

“Why me?” I asked. “To say it charitably, you and I never hit it off too good.”