The Whisperers (30 page)

‘His father didn’t mention that he was receiving counseling.’

‘That’s because he wasn’t. We talked for a time after Kramer’s funeral, and met subsequently once, but there was no formal therapy. Actually, I’d have said that Damien appeared very well adjusted, apart from some insomnia.’

‘Did you prescribe drugs for any of those men?’

‘It’s part of my job, when necessary. I’m not a fan of heavily medicating troubled individuals. It just helps to mask the pain, without dealing with the underlying problem.’

‘But you did prescribe drugs.’

‘Trazodone.’

‘For Damien Patchett?’

‘No, just for Kramer and Harlan. I advised Damien to consult his own physician, if he was having trouble sleeping.’

‘But that wasn’t the limit of his problems.’

‘Apparently not. It may be that Kramer’s death was the catalyst for the emergence of Damien’s own difficulties. To be honest, I was surprised when Damien took his life. But I approached a number of Kramer’s former comrades at the funeral, Damien included, and offered to help facilitate counseling services for them, if they chose to avail themselves of them.’

‘With you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because it would have helped with your research.’

For the first time, she got angry. ‘No, because it would have helped
them
. This isn’t merely some academic exercise, Mr. Parker. It’s about saving lives.’

‘It doesn’t seem to be working out so well for the Stryker C,’ I said. I was goading her, and I didn’t know why. I suspected that it was resentment at myself for opening up to her that I was now trying to throw back. Whatever the reason, I needed to stop. She precipitated it by standing, indicating that our time together was over. I stood and thanked her for her input, then turned to leave.

‘Oh, one last thing,’ I said, as she began to open folders on her desk and return to her work.

‘Yes,’ she said. She didn’t look up.

‘You attended Damien Patchett’s funeral?’

‘Yes. Well, I went to the church. I would have gone to the cemetery too, but I didn’t.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘It was communicated to me that I wouldn’t be welcome.’

‘By whom?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘Joel Tobias?’

Her hand froze for an instant, and then continued turning a page.

‘Good-bye, Mr. Parker,’ she said. ‘If you’ll take some professional advice, you still have a lot of issues to work out. I’d speak to someone about them, if I were you. Someone other than myself,’ she added.

‘Does that mean you don’t want me to be part of your research?’

Now she looked up. ‘I think I’ve learned enough about you,’ she said. ‘Please close the door on your way out.’

22

B
obby Jandreau still lived in Bangor, a little over an hour north of Augusta, in a house at the top of Palm Street, off Stillwater Avenue. Once again, Angel and Louis stayed with me all the way there, but we reached Jandreau’s place without incident. It didn’t look like much from the outside: single-story, paintwork that flaked like bad skin, a lawn that was trying its best to pretend that it wouldn’t soon be overrun by weeds. The best that could be said about the exterior was that it didn’t raise any expectations that the interior of the house couldn’t live up to. Jandreau answered the door in his wheelchair. He was dressed in gray sweat pants pinned at the thighs and a matching t-shirt, both of which were stained. He was building up a gut that the shirt didn’t even attempt to conceal. His hair was shaved close to his skull, but he was growing a rough beard. The house smelled stale: in the kitchen behind him, I could see dishes piled up in the sink, and pizza boxes lying on the floor by the trash can.

‘Help you?’ he said.

I showed him my ID. He took it from me and held it on his lap, staring at it the way someone might examine the photograph of a missing child that had been presented to him by the cops, as though by gazing at it for long enough he might remember where he’d seen the kid. When he had finished examining it, he returned it to me and let his hands fall between his thighs, where they worried at each other like small animals fighting.

‘Did she send you?’

‘Did who send me?’

‘Mel.’

‘No.’ I wanted to ask him why she might have wanted to send a private detective to his home, because she’d given no indication of that level of trouble when we talked, but it wasn’t the time for that, not yet. Instead, I said: ‘I was hoping to talk to you about your army service.’

I waited for him to ask me why, but he didn’t. He just wheeled his chair backward and invited me inside. There was a wariness to him, a consciousness, perhaps, of his own vulnerability and the fact that, until he died, he would always be destined to look up at others. His upper arms were still strong and muscular, and when we went into the living room I saw a rack of dumbbells over by the window. He saw where I was looking, and said, ‘Just because my legs don’t work no more doesn’t mean I have to give up on the rest of me.’ There was no belligerence or defensiveness to his words. It was simply a statement of fact.

‘The arms are easy. The rest—’ He patted his belly. ‘—Is harder.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

‘You want a soda? I don’t have anything stronger. I’ve decided that it’s not good for me to have certain temptations around.’

‘I’m fine. You mind if I sit down?’

He pointed at a chair. I saw that my first impressions about the interior had been wrong, or at least unfair. This room was clean, if a little dusty. There were books – mainly science fiction, but history books too, most of them relating to Vietnam and World War II, from what I could see, but also some books on Sumerian and Babylonian mythology – and today’s newspapers, the
Bangor Daily News
and the
Boston Globe
. But there was a mark on the carpet where something had splattered recently and had been imperfectly cleaned up, and another on the wall and floor between the living room and the kitchen. I got the sense that Jandreau was trying his best to keep things together, but there was only so much that a man in a wheelchair could do about a stain on the carpet, not unless he was going to tip himself out of his chair to deal with it.

Jandreau was watching me carefully, gauging my reactions to his living space.

‘My mom comes around a couple of times a week to help me with the stuff I can’t do for myself. She’d be around here every day if I let her, but she fusses. You know how they can be.’

I nodded.

‘What happened to Mel?’

‘You know her?’

I didn’t want to tell him that I’d spoken with her until I was ready. ‘I read the interview with you in the newspaper last year. I saw her picture.’

‘She went away.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘Because I was an asshole. Because she couldn’t deal with this.’ He patted his legs, then reconsidered: ‘No: because
I
couldn’t deal with this.’

‘Why would she hire a detective?’

‘What?’

‘You asked if Mel had sent me. I’m just wondering why you might have thought that.’

‘We had an argument before she left, a disagreement about money, about ownership of some stuff. I figured maybe she’d hired you to take it further.’

Mel had mentioned some of this in our conversation. The house was in both their names, but she hadn’t made any effort yet to seek legal advice about her position. The break-up was still new, and she hoped that they might yet be reconciled. Still, something in Jandreau’s tone gave the lie to what he just said, as though he had greater concerns than domestic issues.

‘And you trusted me when I told you that she hadn’t sent me?’

‘Yeah, I guess. You don’t seem like the kind of man who’d try to beat up on a cripple. And if you were, well—’

His right hand moved very fast. The gun was a Beretta, hidden in a makeshift holster attached to the underside of the chair. He held it upright for a couple of seconds, the muzzle pointing to the ceiling, before he restored it to its hiding place.

‘Are you worried about something?’ I asked, even if it seemed like a redundant question to ask a man with a gun in his hand.

‘I’m worried about lots of stuff: falling over while using the john, how I’m going to manage when winter comes around. You name it, I’ve got a worry for it. But I don’t like the idea of someone finding me an easy mark. That, at least, I can do something about. Now, Mr. Parker, how about you tell me why you’re interested in me.’

‘Not you,’ I said. ‘Joel Tobias.’

‘Suppose I told you that I don’t know any Joel Tobias.’

‘Then I’d have to assume that you were lying, since you served together in Iraq, and he was your sergeant in Stryker C. You were both at the funeral of Damien Patchett, and later you got into a fight with Tobias in Sully’s. So you still want to tell me that you don’t know any Joel Tobias?’

Jandreau looked away. I could see him sizing up his options, debating whether to talk to me or simply send me on my way. I could almost feel the suppressed anger rolling off him, waves of it breaking on me, on the furniture, on the stained walls, the spume of it splashing back on his own maimed body. Anger, grief, loss. His fingers created intricate patterns from themselves, interweaving and then coming apart, forming constructions that only he could understand.

‘So I know Joel Tobias,’ he said at last. ‘But we’re not close. Never were.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Joel’s old man was a soldier, so Joel had it in his blood. He liked the discipline, liked being the alpha dog. The army was just an extension of his nature.’

‘And you?’

He squinted at me. ‘How old are you?’

‘Forties.’

‘They ever try to recruit you?’

‘No more than they tried to recruit anyone else. They came to my high school, but I didn’t bite. But it wasn’t the same then. We weren’t at war.’

‘Yeah, well we are now, and I bit. They promised me cash, money for college. Promised me the sun, the moon, and the stars.’ He smiled sadly. ‘The sun part was true. Saw a lot of that. Sun, and dust. I’ve started working for Veterans for Peace now. I’m a counter-recruiter.’

I didn’t know what that was, so I asked him.

‘Army recruiters are trained only to answer the right question,’ he said. ‘You don’t ask the right question, then you don’t get the right answer. And if you’re a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kid with poor prospects, faced with a guy in uniform who’s so slick you could skate on him, then you’re going to believe what you’re told, and you’re not going to examine the small print. We point out the small print.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as that your college fees aren’t guaranteed, that the army owes you nothing, that less than ten percent of recruits get the full amount of bonuses or fees that they were promised. Look, don’t get me wrong here: it’s honorable to serve your country, and a lot of these kids wouldn’t have any kind of career at all if it wasn’t for the army. I was one of them. My family was poor, and I’m still poor, but I’m proud that I served. I’d have preferred not to end up in a wheelchair, but I knew the risks. I just think the recruiters should be more upfront with the kids about what they’re getting themselves into. It’s the draft in all but name: you target the poor, the ones who got no job, no prospects, the ones who don’t know any better. You think Rumsfeld didn’t know that when he inserted a recruiter provision into the No Child Left Behind Act? You think he made it compulsory for public schools to provide the military with all of their student details because it would help the kids read better? There are quotas to be filled. You gotta plug the gaps in the ranks somehow.’

‘But if the recruiters were completely honest, then who’d join up?’

‘Shit, I’d
still
have signed on the dotted line. I’d have done anything to get away from my family, and this place. All that was here for me was a minimum wage job and beers after work on Friday. And Mel.’ That gave him pause. ‘I guess I still got the minimum wage job: four hundred dollars a month, but at least they threw in health care, and I saw most of my bonus.’ He grimaced. ‘Lot of contradictions, huh?’

‘Was that why you fought with Joel Tobias, because of your work with Veterans for Peace?’

Jandreau looked away. ‘No, it wasn’t. He tried to buy me a beer to quiet me down, but I didn’t want to drink on his dime.’

‘Again: why?’

But Jandreau skirted the question. As he himself had said, he was a man of contradictions. He wanted to talk, but only about what interested him. He appeared polite, but there was ferocity beneath the veneer. I knew now what Ronald Straydeer meant when he said that Jandreau was a man who looked like he was on the way down. If he didn’t use that gun on someone else, there was a chance that he might use it on himself, just like his buddies.

‘What’s your interest in Joel Tobias anyway?’ he asked.

‘I was hired to find out why Damien Patchett killed himself. I heard about the altercation at the funeral. I wanted to know if there was any connection.’

‘Between a bar fight and a suicide? You’re full of shit.’

‘That, or a really bad detective.’

There was a pause and then, for the first time, Jandreau laughed.

‘At least you’re honest.’ The laughter ceased, and the smile that followed was sad. ‘Damien shouldn’t have killed himself. I don’t mean that in a religious way, or a moral way, or because it was a waste of a life. I mean that he wasn’t the kind. He left his grief in Iraq, or most of it. He wasn’t traumatized, or suffering.’

‘I spoke to a shrink in Togus who said the same thing.’

‘Yeah? Who was that?’

‘Carrie Saunders.’

‘Saunders? Give me a break. She’s got more questions than Alex Trebek, but none of the answers.’

‘You’ve met her?’

‘She interviewed me as part of her study. Didn’t impress me at all. As for Damien, I served with him. I loved him. He was a good kid. I always thought of him like that, as a kid. He was intelligent, but he had no smarts. I tried to look out for him, but he ended up taking care of me in the end. Saved my life.’ His fist tightened on the arm of his chair. ‘Fuckin’ Joel Tobias,’ he whispered, and it sounded like a shout.