Pale Horse Coming (40 page)

A
S
he said he would, Davis Trugood drove straight through the night and arrived the next day in Pascagoula. The old city lay balmy in the soft breezes off the bay, and Davis stopped just outside of town, rented a room in a tourist home, took a nice shower, put on a new suit of white linen, a fresh spruce white shirt and a nice yellow tie. Meanwhile, his driver buffed up his shoes to a fine shine.

At 3:00
P.M.
, they drove into Pascagoula, but he wasn’t looking for a place to have a church prefabricated under crash conditions, as he had told Earl. In fact, had Earl and Sam seen what happened next, it would have boggled their minds no end at all. For with no hesitation whatsoever, Mr. Trugood’s driver headed them downtown and swiftly found the town hall on Pascagoula Street, where a crowd had gathered and some sort of festivity was soon to commence. The driver guided the large black car to the curbside, where indeed a red carpet lay, its destination the stairway into that ancient, distinguished building.

Davis Trugood stepped out.

Flashbulbs popped.

Applause arose.

A tide of well-wishers engulfed the man, pumping his hand, welcoming him back, assuring him that everything was as he had planned.

There, standing proudly on the steps of the city hall, was the mayor, the assistant mayor, the chief of police, the president of the city council, three aldermen, two distinguished-looking gentlemen from the governor’s office in Jackson, ready to make excuses that the governor himself was not there to grace the proceedings with his presence.

Davis, accompanied by two smartly dressed police officers, was taken to the confab at the top of the stairs, where handshakes were exchanged all around.

Microphones were brought out, and quickly the mayor took over as master of ceremonies.

“May I say, Mr. Davis Trugood, we are so happy to see you back on this wonderful day, which promises so much for our fair city, for its out-of-work ship chandlers and carpenters, for the entire region of southeast Mississippi, for all our citizens, for our nation forever.”

More clapping and, smiling broadly, Davis Trugood acknowledged the applause.

“These have been hard times,” the mayor continued. “With the war over and the Navy shrinking, Pascagoula ain’t the shipbuilding town it once was, and so our proud city has done seen itself on the decline. We have lost population to our northern neighbors. Our most talented young people have gone off to seek a better life in the North…” and of course it went on in that vein for quite some time, as the mayor was not one to speak succinctly when he could speak at length.

A few other officials got their moment of glory, each to speak an equally fine piece complimenting each other, the great city of Pascagoula, the great state of Mississippi and the future.

Finally, the mayor nodded, and an open limousine pulled up. The mayor ushered Mr. Trugood into its backseat, and, escorted by police motorcyclists and several other official cars, the small parade negotiated the few blocks to the waterfront where, outside a large building, another crowd awaited.

The ceremony was repeated, though much attenuated this time through, and at last, Davis Trugood was allowed to speak.

“Mr. Mayor,” he said. “I am happy to be here on this historic day, and I am so happy to have a small part in revitalizing this beautiful old town. I should tell you how this came to pass. In the North, where I do my business, where certain things are taken for granted, where I have prospered, we count upon one thing: the immutability of earth. Earth there is solid. It is unmoving, unyielding and permanent. You may dig into it, build upon it, mold it, channel it, sculpt it, landscape it. But here, earth is shaky. It is soupy, tangential, marginal stuff, which may not be trusted. The history of your region is a tragedy of rivers taking their revenge. Well, sir, it occurred to me that I would take my revenge on the river. Yes, sir, I would find a way to defeat the river, at least in a small way, and seize from it its most disturbing violence, the violence it does to our dearly departed, those who gave so much to establish us here in what we call civilization.”

The applause was nice.

“And so I have researched and invested heavily in this new factory. I have hired over fifty of your best artisans and I have provided them with the best materials. From quality lumber to quality caulking to quality joinery, and at a surprisingly modest price, for I am a kind man and wish not to make a profit but to assuage the anguish of grieving. I will, from this base, ship throughout the riverine southland, reaching into swamp and forest and creek and quay, and in that way, I will reduce the ache of pain that a man feels when not only is his home or farm devastated by water but his progenitors are so destroyed. Therefore, I give you the Trugood Waterproofed Casket Company.”

The applause was slapped dryly against the gulf breeze and the smell of the river was everywhere.

“The new Trugood waterproof coffin is impervious to the ravages of the river. Your loved ones’ mortal remains will remain exactly as they were when they passed. Your rural poor will no longer have to consign the dead to the uncertainty of the water table, nor to store them aboveground in stone mausoleums that we understand to be baking ovens that do as much damage as the water, only faster.

“Therefore, today we begin to ship to the immediate region.” Of course, there was no need to point out that this commercial enterprise, well financed by Mr. Trugood, was hastened to accomplishment by numerous gifts, loans, presents, and promises he had given the good politicians of Pascagoula and surrounding counties.

“Today we ship to the Biloxi Bayou. We ship up the Pear River. We ship into Louisiana and into Alabama. We ship upriver even, so that our wares may even meet the benighted and isolated souls of counties such as George and Greene and even the farthest and most desolate, Thebes. Yes, friends, we consider this day the start of our revenge on the dark waters of Mississippi and all the grief and pain they have brought to our families.”

S
AM
had removed his family to St. Louis, where they lived with his wife’s mother, far from the retaliatory powers of the men of Thebes. He had become furtive, unsettled, paranoid. He knew he was on somebody’s kill list. He couldn’t even enjoy any time with the heroic Connie, whose finger had been stitched up and set (it was broken by the force of the descending striker), during which time she, of course, had made wisecracks and flirted with the young doctor. Sam had rented as cheaply and anonymously as possible a combination apartment-office in an undistinguished neighborhood of Little Rock, near the Air Force base, amid a sea of transients, where he could now but wait for Earl to strike in the dark of the moon and remove the threat against him and return his life to him.

So he returned to his quest, though the dark of the moon was but a few days off. He had determined to find out the secret of David Stone, M.D., and if, lacking gun skills, experience, and the type of mind to close with and shoot to death the men of Thebes, then he had decided that this last thing, small as it was, and perhaps as meaningless as it was, would be his last contribution.

If no doctor would help him, he would try lawyers. Reasoning that students at Harvard law and Harvard medical might share dormitory space, and having far more contacts in that world, he began to examine the Harvard law class of 1928, helped by the good auspices of a former governor of Arkansas, who was himself Harvard law of 1918. Thus he fought his telephone war, alone in his office in Little Rock, armed with numbers and charts of connections; in this way, he tracked men through corporate boards and municipal judicial systems, through great law firms, through directorships of huge organizations, and through the professorates of many great law schools.

It was among the last that he finally achieved just the faintest possibility of a breakthrough. He was talking to a Professor Reginald Duprey, of Madison, Wisconsin, and the University of Wisconsin Law School.

“Well, Mister—what was it?”

“Vincent. Samuel Vincent, sir.”

“Mr. Vincent, you know, I didn’t know anybody in the medical school except my poor brother.”

Sam knew that from his examinations of the Harvard medical graduates there was no Dr. Duprey carried in the graduating class of ’28, or ’29 or ’30 for that matter.

“I see,” he said noncommittally.

“Jerry was a little wild. He made some mistakes. He was smart, don’t get me wrong, but I think Dad pushed him into medicine, and he wasn’t suited for medicine.”

“Dad was a doctor?”

“Dad was a lawyer
and
a doctor. There are a few. We were to be one of each. I did what I was told, but Jerry finally blew out his third year. He was so close. But he got caught cheating on a test. It was a family scandal. Jerry’s in Texas now. He’s a high school biology teacher. I haven’t heard from him in years.”

“Do you have an address?”

“Yes.”

Sam took it, and eventually reached Jerry Duprey in New Braunfels, not that it did any good, for at first Jerry denied knowing anything about his brother, then he denied having been at Harvard or even having heard of Harvard, and finally he denied ever having heard of a Dr. David Stone. But Sam had been a prosecutor long enough to know the little gulp that announced the presence of a lie or two, when a tide of phlegm clogs the throat as the liar improvises awkwardly.

So he knew Jerry Duprey knew a thing or two. He drove a full day to New Braunfels, a leafy town south of Austin, and called upon Mr. Duprey at New Braunfels High School. There, it was clear, he was a beloved figure, not only a popular teacher but the basketball coach, the chess team sponsor, the faculty advisor to the weekly
New Braunfelian
and the college counselor.

Jerry made him wait, and when he finally admitted him to the little office, was quite nervous.

“Sir,” Sam explained, “I am not here to bring you any trouble. I am not here about any aspect of your past except that you might have a line on a man named David Stone. I don’t even care where or when you met him, and this is not a deposition. It has no legal meaning whatsoever. I’m just asking a favor.”

Duprey sat, caught in his own private agony. Finally he said, “I have built a good life down here. I am sorry for what happened and for my failures in the other life and for my father’s rage and my brother’s contempt. But I am proud of what I have done down here and the kids I have helped and I do not mean to lose that.”

“I absolutely represent no threat to you. I will take no notes. I will declare under oath that I have never met you. This is not in regard to a legal matter and no court case is in the offering, nor any testimony of any kind. Give me the benefit of your memories, and I will never see you again.”

“It was very long ago and I have forgotten much.”

“Yet you did, in fact, know him.”

“He was a friend. Briefly. I don’t know why. Insanely ambitious, very hard worker. Maybe he scented in me what he was, and that is a son bending under a mantle of family expectations. In my case, it broke me; in his, I suppose, it made him a saint.”

“He was a saint?”

“In that, unlike the others, he was not interested in money. He had a genuine interest in doing good. I think his rebellion against his father was different than mine. Mine was to destroy the life my father had planned for me, which not incidentally killed my father and estranged my brother. David’s was to be everything his father wasn’t; that is, not a society gynecologist, but a great researcher. Not a Jewish outsider trying to make it in the cosmopolitan town, and proud when he did, but someone known far and wide for his goodness. He was obsessed with ‘goodness,’ somehow.”

“He sounds dangerous.”

“See, that’s your cynicism. You’re a prosecutor; you think everyone is guilty of something, even if only in their minds. But I don’t think David was like that. He took great pleasure in his goodness, almost sensuous pleasure.”

“I see. Well, he lived a hero’s life, he died a hero’s death. But there are some things about him I thought maybe you’d have some insight into.”

“Insight? Boy, that’s a word you don’t hear much in New Braunfels. Sure, yeah, try me.”

“Ah, I visited his home and his widow. And found that he had secrets. Odd that he should have secrets, such a good man. Do you have a comment? I also found that the body reported to be his after his death in nineteen forty-five was not. It was some other man’s.”

The man’s stony face met Sam’s. In a time, he said, “You know, he was a good man. Why are you doing this?”

It was Sam’s first true inkling that he was onto something.

“It’s not about him. It’s about what happened to him in the war. I have to find out his involvement in something in the war that may have led to something going on now.”

“But you can’t tell me what?”

“I have confidences to keep, too.”

“Then you certainly understand that I must keep mine as well, if only out of respect to the dead.”

“Well then, what about the fact that his wife was infected with syphilis in the mid thirties, and could have no children. Now, again you’ll think it’s my cynicism, but suppose she got that disease from him in the first place, he knew it but could not face her knowing of a secret life. So he had her raped, so that the syphilis was thought to come from the rapists. Does that strike you as a possibility?”

“Good Lord, man, have you no decency?”

“His subsequent actions are consistent with incredible shame. He suffered what can only be termed a serious attack of nerves, maybe even a breakdown, immediately prior to what was called his death. But it gets stranger yet. There still seems to be, at some high level, some sort of government involvement in the program that he founded in Mississippi. And someone is extremely interested in keeping it secret. It’s a fine kettle of fish this saint has gotten himself into.”

Jerry Duprey just shook his head.

“And finally this. He published for years, very aggressively, very dynamically, very brilliantly, in a number of prestigious medical journals. Then, in 1936, nothing. That would have to be about the time his wife was raped and lost the capacity to have children. He ceased to exist. Yet he didn’t die until 1945. Or so it’s alleged. But whatever, he ceased publishing. Do you know why?”

“Well, you are a clever man, aren’t you, Mr. Vincent? You have uncovered a great deal. Is it that important? He meant well, he did well, he really did help the world. The sick, the poor, the victimized. He believed in them. Yes, I suppose he had some human appetites. Who doesn’t? Don’t you?”

Sam thought of the woman he loved more than his wife, with whom he would never sleep nor live, who would leave, eventually, and he would then wallow in his bitter destiny.

“Of course I do. But I’m not here to judge him. That’s for someone else. Not me. And one last thing. Can you think of anything that might connect him to the Plutonium Laboratory at Los Alamos, or some issue of nuclear medicine, and thence to a government installation in Maryland called Fort Dietrich? I know that seems—”

“You’ve been seeing too many movies.”

“I haven’t seen a movie since nineteen forty-six.”

“As for the other three questions, I happen to know the answer to all of them. It’s really the same answer. But I’m not going to give it to you. Because I don’t like your certitude. You are a man who has never made a mistake, and it annoys me, a man who’s made many mistakes.”

“Sir, take it from me, I have made some lulus.”

“Well, then, I will give you one clue, for your lulus. One clue alone. If you are as smart as you seem, you will have no trouble figuring it out and all your questions will be solved.”

“Fair enough.”

“Maybe when he finally decided where his career had to go, he could no longer publish under his own name. For certain reasons. So maybe he published under another name.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Sam, and thought immediately of that letter from Harold E. Perkins, about a bill of lading being cc-ed to another doctor in Thebes, Mississippi, years after the alleged death of David Stone whose name he could not remember but who he knew was not named Stone.

“I only know this because he was the one guy from Harvard who kept in touch with me and dropped me a card or two every year. He even offered to loan me some dough when I was kicked out. He
was
good, you know.”

“I believe that.”

“So he made a joke about what he was doing, and what it linked up to in his private personality that I knew about when I was close to him, and what he had to do to preserve the name of the ‘good doctor’ he had become.”

Sam’s eyes bored into him intently, the old prosecutor’s trick. It had no effect. Jerry Duprey told him because Jerry Duprey wanted to, and for no other reason.

“His middle name was Goodwin. Remember that, Mr. Vincent. His middle name was Goodwin.”