“You know my question?”
“Yes, and here’s my answer. Get that damned idea out of your head and keep it out. The Army doesn’t kill that way and you should damned well know it.”
“Buck,” Weir said, “I’m going to be in touch with you again before the day is out. I’ll call you back when I can. And in the meantime, I want you to do something for me. I’m going to give you a name, a soldier to check out. I want all the information you can give me. And do this on your own. Don’t go through Benton’s office on this one, got that?”
“You have my word, Scotty.”
“All right. The name to check out is Durham Lasari.”
“I’ve got that,” General Stigmuller said. “I’ll have a record on him, if there is one, when you get back to me. Anything else, Scotty? You name it...”
Put those four stars to use, lean on your connections... Those were almost the last words Mark had said to him.
“In a day or two, Buck, I’m going to ask you for something, something very important. You make up your own mind, but as far as I’m concerned, it will be a direct order.”
“I stand alerted, sir,” General Stigmuller said.
“And here’s a hunch, Buck, just a hunch. When you’re checking on Durham Lasari, see if you can find me a readout on George Jackson. Got that? George Jackson, no middle initial that I know of.”
Weir hung up the phone and poured himself a cup of tea, then looked down at the slip of paper still in his hand. Laura Devers... John Grimes... Superintendent Clarence McDade...
The general tore the paper into bits and threw the scraps into a wastebasket. Then he checked his watch and gave himself five minutes for the tea and rye toast.
He went into the lobby with his overnight bag, told the desk clerk he wouldn’t be staying for the night after all, and presented a credit card. As he went toward the revolving doors, Sergeant DuBois Gordon raised himself from a leather chair and fell into step beside him.
“I knew you didn’t plan to see the superintendent, general,” he said, “so I waited to say goodbye.”
General Weir gave his license number to the doorman who jogged around to the hotel parking lot. The two men stood in silence until the doorman brought the Mercedes up under the canopy. Sergeant Gordon swung the single piece of luggage into the back seat, then went around to the driver’s side and tapped on the window.
When Scotty Weir rolled it down, the police sergeant leaned his elbows on the door and said, “If there was anything I could do that would bring Mark back, like cutting off my right arm, I’d do it. But I don’t want you driving off thinking you’re alone in this, general. We’re going to find who did it.”
A car behind the Mercedes honked and Gordon said to the doorman, “Explain to that gentleman that this is police business.”
When he turned to the general again, his dark eyes were moist with tears. “I’m mad, too, general. Different things get different people mad. My grandfather was pretty senile when they brought him up from Alabama to live with us. He got my bed, I got a cot in the corner. I soon learned what got him mad. There was a song down South in the old days called ‘What Makes a Nigger Prowl,’ a real catchy thing about watermelons and breaking into chicken coops. Little white kids got to sing it at school, sometimes they’d just shout the words at my granddaddy when he was walking down the road. That’s what got him mad. That’s what he’d rant and curse about at night when I was trying to sleep.
“Well, Doobie Gordon’s got something different on his mind. I’ve been black all my life, general. I don’t need ethnotherapy. I know who I am, what I see and what I hear. And that voice on Mark’s squad car tape last night, that wasn’t Martin Luther King — that was a honkie setting Mark up. And that’s what gets me mad, some bastard pretending to be kin to Mrs. Lewis, trying to dump the killing on my people. But I’m not helpless like my granddaddy. I don’t have to take it. I got a badge that says I can fight back. So you’re not alone in this, general, remember that.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Tarbert Weir talked over the items on the list with John Grimes and decided to take care of the first one himself. It was ten minutes to ten in the evening, nearly closing time, when he dialed Log Cabin Liquors, the store that catered to this stretch of privileged countryside, and gave an order for a case of J and B Scotch, four bottles of Bombay Gin, some mixers and half a dozen liters of Martells cognac.
When the owner said the order would be out first thing in the morning, Weir protested; it was imperative that the order be delivered that night. After a pause the man said he would make the delivery in person as soon as he locked up for the night, and then added, “Mr. Weir, sir, you have our condolences, my wife and I, our whole staff, sir.”
The general sat in the study, lights off, until he heard a knock on the back door and a murmur of voices. He listened as the delivery truck left the graveled drive and Grimes’ footsteps sounded on the stairs. Then Weir went up to his own quarters.
There was a pale moon that laid squares of silver light on the carpet and gave the room an ethereal look. The general lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, forcing his body into repose long before he could silence the rush of his thoughts and the words he had spoken to Grimes earlier. “... I have no choice but to go on and do what I know how to do best. Not the thing I’m proud of, but the thing I do.”
The next morning Weir jogged longer than usual, the dogs at his heels, then spent the morning in his study checking the contents of his wallet, bringing his pocket phone directory up-to-date, looking over his travel kit and studying the weather charts in the Springfield Journal-Register.
His call to Henrotin Hospital brought the kind of answer he expected. Miss Caidin’s condition was guarded but she had had a moderately restful night. It would be some days before the fracture and swelling in her jaw would allow her to speak. Yes, the nurse would definitely tell her that Tarbert Weir had called.
The phone rang every five minutes or so. Grimes took the calls on the kitchen extension and Weir could hear the tone of his voice but not the words, a low, respectful murmur, courteous but brief.
When Laura Devers called, Weir agreed to speak to her and knew from the broken, throaty quality of her voice that she’d been crying. Mrs. Devers and Mark Weir had never met but she and the general shared an easy intimacy that put Mark well within her sphere of caring. Weir told her that he was all right and, yes, there was something she could do for him. General Weir told her of his plans, at least as much as he wanted her to know.
Around noon the young assistant pastor from St. Durban’s came to call and the general talked with him in the study. Weir was not a Catholic and did not know Father Keene, so he was mildly surprised when the young curate accepted a glass of Jerez sherry and then, in a rush of information, began to tell the older man about himself, his life back in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, and his concerns and misgivings about having accepted an assignment to an American pastorate.
He could not have been much older than Mark, the general thought, but slim and tentative, the morning sunlight haloing his red hair and highlighting the balding spots on his receding hairline.
American customs were not quite within his grasp, he told Weir, but in Ireland, in the case of a death such as his son’s, the neighbors, all of them, would rally round... When he asked General Weir’s permission to dedicate his early Mass tomorrow for the peace and salvation of Mark’s soul, Weir said yes, and when the young priest left, he told Grimes that he would see and talk to no one else for the rest of the day, unless General Stigmuller or DuBois Gordon called.