Guilt

'Mark Dooher was selling marijuana?'

Brown laughed. 'Marijuana? Look at me, you think I'm strung out on marijuana? You think thirty years down the line, my brain's fried on some doob?' He shook his head, amazed at Thieu's world view. 'We're talking shit here, china white, skag.' Thieu digested this. 'Horse, man. Heroin.'

'You're saying Mark Dooher sold you heroin?'

A continual nod. 'That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Not just me. The whole platoon. Got his own stash free and sold to his guys. Did us a favor, lowest price in Nam.'

Thieu sat back, rocked by this information.

But Brown was going on unbidden. 'And you know, if you look at it the way it really was, Dooher's the one who let it all happen. It was his job to keep us straight. Instead, he kept us wired.'

Thieu leaned forward. 'Let what happen?'

Brown wasn't good with direct questions. They seemed to spook him. He leaned back, found himself out of the umbrella's shadow, his face in the sun, and that moved him forward again. 'You don't know about this, why did you want to see me?'

'I wanted to see if the guys in your platoon – Dooher specifically -smuggled out their weapons. If you knew if Dooher had.'

'Why?'

Though it had nothing to do with Sheila Dooher, which was his case, Thieu ran with what he had. 'We think Dooher used a bayonet to kill somebody, that's why.'

Brown's face cracked – a broken smile. Thieu had just verified something for him. 'Yeah,' he said.

'Yeah what?'

'That's how he did Nguyen, too.'

Thieu was learning about the art of interrogation with this man. Don't ask directly. Just keep him talking. 'Nguyen?'

'His source – Andre Nguyen. Had a little shop just outside Saigon, pretended to sell groceries.' Thieu must have looked confused. Brown put his beer mug down, brought his face in close, eye to eye. 'Come on, man! The guy he killed.'

The story came out. There had been no ambush with a platoon of stoned soldiers. Nguyen had sold Dooher a load of bad heroin, or maybe it was extra-good heroin. In any event, Dooher sold it to his troops and it overdosed all but two of them.

'And this never got reported?'

Again, an expression that told Thieu that his world and Brown's operated on different planes. 'Dooher covered it. He wasn't part of it. We – me and Lindley – we weren't part of it. We all alibied each other. We were out on patrol, the guys left back at camp had this bad load of shit, and it killed them.'

'And the authorities believed you?'

Brown nodded. 'Enough, but that wasn't really the end of it.' A slug of beer. 'Problem is, Dooher knows it's his fault. And we know it's his fault. So now he like wants to be friends, afterwards. Make sure Lindley and me, we got no hard feelings.'

'How'd he try to be your friend?'

'You know, pulled us – me and Lindley – some cherry R and R in Hawaii. He had a knack of getting what he wanted. He thought he'd show us a good time, make up for the other, some bullshit like that. Lindley wouldn't do it.'

'Why not?' It was a direct question and Brown hesitated again, but Thieu couldn't stop himself. 'Chas, why didn't Lindley want to go out with Dooher?'

'He thought he was going to kill us.'

'Why?'

'Why? 'Cause we knew he'd fucked up, that's why. We could ruin him if we told. We were the only witnesses left and we were pretty bitter.'

'At Dooher?'

Brown shrugged. 'At the whole thing, man. You get tight over there with your guys. You're like twenty years old and then, wham, they're all dead but you. It makes you bitter.'

Thieu believed it. 'But you went out with Dooher? In Hawaii?'

Chas nodded. 'I just didn't see it. He wasn't going to kill nobody. Lindley was just paranoid. I thought.'

'Now you don't think he was?'

'Well, he didn't try to kill me. There's the proof of that.'

The eyes seemed to go empty again, but Thieu saw something in them that Chas Brown was trying to keep hidden. Chas grabbed for the crutch of his beer glass, but Thieu surprised himself, reaching out, grabbing his wrist, stopping him.

'What?' he asked.

'I always thought, later, that if Lindley had come along, he might have. Killed us both, I mean. When I showed up at his hotel alone, it was like he freaked out, goes all quiet on me, like, "What the fuck? I ask my guys out for a good time, on me, and they stand me up. What kind of bullshit is that?'"

'So what did happen? That night?'

'Nothing. We got drunk. Well, tell the truth, first time in my life, somebody got drunker than me. I was, I guess, still a little scared what he might do.' Brown's ravaged face creased into a little-boy smile. 'I poured out a lot of good rum that night. Still breaks my heart to think about it.'

'I bet it does.' Thieu found the thread again. 'And so, after that, you became friends?'

'Not hardly.'

'Why not?'

'Cause he was an officer.' This time he got the beer to his mouth. 'No, not that. I thought he was pathetic, I guess. That's why.'

'Pathetic?'

A nod. 'You ever have somebody push on you too hard they want to be friends so bad?'

'And Dooher wanted to be your friend?'

It was all coming back now, and Brown's head swung from side to side. 'No, no, no. He wanted to be forgiven, that's all he wanted. I mean as long as we were alive, and he wasn't going to kill us, then he wanted us to understand how bad he felt, how he had proved it, how he'd made fucking amends.'

'How did he do that?'

'Shit, I shouldn't be telling you this. You're a cop.'

'I am a cop. So what?'

Thieu's hand was still locked around his wrist, and suddenly Brown became aware of it; he moved it, raised the beer to his mouth. Drained it. Took a deep breath. 'So he killed Nguyen, the guy who sold us the shag. Went to his store and gutted him with his bayonet, wiped the fucking blade clean on his pajamas. Told me all about it, man to man, how he'd taken this great risk and all to get the guy who'd been responsible for everybody's o.d. So I'd forgive him, see what a hero he was. Can you believe that?'

'My Lord.' Glitsky, sitting on the table in one of the interrogation rooms on the 4th floor, the door closed behind him, flicked off the tape recorder.

'That's what I thought,' Thieu said, 'except I didn't use exactly those words.'

'He wiped his bayonet on the guy's pajamas!'

'That was my favorite part, too. Do you think this is enough to play for Drysdale?'

'I think we're getting there. You know, you came barging in with this, you didn't hear the other news.'

'What's that?'

'We got the blood lab report in today. You know what EDTA is?' Glitsky consulted his notes.

'Sure. Ethylene Diamine Tetra-Acetic Acid.' Glitsky's mouth hung open. 'My sister's a nurse,' Thieu explained. 'I used to test her on stuff. But what about it, the EDTA?'

Glitsky was still shaking his head. 'You think – well, most people think -when you give blood, they take it out, put it in a vial, spin it down or whatever, do their tests, right?'

'Right.'

'Right. But often they need to add an anti-coagulant to the blood to keep it from clotting, and that, my son, is EDTA. Actually, that's not precisely right. They don't add it to the blood. It comes in the vials. They've got purple stoppers on the top.'

'So?'

'So the blood all over Sheila Dooher's bed, supposedly left there by the perp when he was cut in the struggle, was loaded with EDTA.'

'Which means?'

'Which means that Dooher got his hands on some blood – maybe at his doctor's, maybe the same place he got the surgical glove, I don't know. He thought he'd leave a bunch on the bed, send our slow-witted selves off in search of a man with A-positive blood, which couldn't be him. But, sadly for him, the vial he picked up wasn't pure.'