“Jeeze, Hannah, that’ll take forever. Do you have any proof that she was fiddling around with the contracts she was supposed to be working on?”
“Not really. Just speculation.”
“If you ask me-which you didn’t, but I’ll tell you anyway-it’s a big waste of time.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, thinking so many contracts, so many databases, so little time. “But you know what, Emma, at least I’m doing something!”
“I should have figured you wouldn’t sit still and wait around for other people to do the legwork.”
While Emma was talking, I moused over to Start and shut the computer down. “I did find out something interesting yesterday,” I told her as the blue screen on the monitor turned to black.
“What was that?”
I swiveled my desk chair around, wondering whether I should tell Emma or not, but figured that it couldn’t be a sin to out a dead person. “Lieutenant Goodall was gay.”
Emma smiled. “I know.”
“You know?”
“Uh-huh. She came out to me maybe the second or third time I went to see her for help about the harassment.”
I felt like I’d gone out for popcorn and missed part of the movie. “Emma! What harassment? You didn’t tell me you were being harassed.”
Emma lobbed her empty soda can into the trash can. “Some firstie in Sixteenth Company. I think. Can’t be one hundred percent sure. Anyway, this guy, he kept asking me out and I kept turning him down. I guess he couldn’t figure out why I kept rejecting such a burning, burning hunk of love as him, so he started a rumor that I was a lesbian.”
“That’s despicable.”
Emma puffed air out through her lips. “If not dating is proof positive of homosexuality, then fifty percent of the brigade must be gay.”
“So, what did this guy do?”
“I’d get hate mails from anonymous Yahoo and Hotmail accounts. And I’d come back from PT to find notes on my bed, like go home dyke. D-I-K-E. Jackass couldn’t even spell.”
“Did Lieutenant Goodall put you in contact with anybody who could help?”
“Oh, sure. She got me with an outfit called the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.”
I nodded, thinking five points for Jennifer for hooking Emma up with Chris Donovan, one of the few people in all this mess who I felt I could trust.
“And?” I prodded.
“One of their counselors explained that harassment of gays is not allowed and that the Pentagon even put out regs about it. Problem is, nobody in the Navy’s ever heard of the regs, at least not so far as I can discover, so nobody knows what to do. And there sure as hell hasn’t been any training.”
“It seems to me that harassment of any kind shouldn’t be tolerated, it doesn’t matter what that harassment is about.”
“Well, right.”
“Can’t you complain about the harassment without admitting anything about your sexual preference?”
“Well, sure, but who’s gonna believe that?” She scrunched farther down into the doughnut-shaped cushion. “‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’” she singsonged. “That’s what they’ll think.”
I wanted to reassure the young woman, but I knew, too well, that what she was saying was true. People in the military were notoriously hard to turn. See an opening, they’d drive a wedge into it, and keep pounding and pounding and pounding until you broke, or simply gave up and went away. I’d seen it too many times before.
Then Emma surprised me again. “Lieutenant Goodall wanted me to be some sort of test case about the whole harassment issue, but I didn’t want to rock the boat any more than it’d already been rocked. I told her to forget it.”
Emma drew her legs up, wrapped her arms around them and rested her chin on her knees. “So, I decided to create a diversion. That’s where Kevin came in.” She looked up at me and beamed. “You know what he did?”
I shook my head.
“He cornered the firstie in the basement of Bancroft and beat the shit out of him. Told him to leave his girlfriend alone or else he’d cut off his balls and… well, never mind. It was pretty graphic.”
Normally I don’t condone resorting to violence to solve problems, but the way things were going for me lately, violence was looking like an attractive alternative. “Good for Kevin,” I said with some conviction.
“Now Kevin is stuck with taking me to the Ring Dance.” She smiled. “But I told him I’d step aside if the right girl came along. That goes for me, too, of course.”
I laughed, then helped Emma load her laundry into the washing machine. Shortly afterward, I sent her back to Bancroft Hall with a Ziploc bag full of cookies.
After she left, I began to wonder. Had the seed Chris Donovan planted in Jennifer’s mind taken root, grown and blossomed? If Jennifer Goodall had been on a mission, looking for cases to test the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, perhaps another one of her clients hadn’t been so sanguine about it.
In his landmark study, Alfred Kinsey claimed that homosexuals make up ten percent of the population. The Academy has four thousand students. If we believe Alfred Kinsey-and who am I to argue with an expert?-the list of suspects in Jennifer Goodall’s murder had just grown by another four hundred. Pretty soon we’d need Alumni Hall to hold them all.
CHAPTER 22
I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect Paul and our daughter, Emily, are in cahoots. How else-other than the most unlikely of coincidences-to explain her phone call on Monday evening.
Plans for the spa were proceeding apace, Emily said. Dante and Phyllis Strother, the woman who was his major investor, were meeting on Wednesday, along with an architect and a platoon of lawyers. They had found a piece of property. Would I care to come see it?
“I’m supposed to be laying low,” I reminded my daughter.
“I can really use your help, Mom. I feel like shit in the morning.”
“Pregnancy can do that to you,” I offered helpfully.
Emily groaned.
It would have been nice to see my grandchildren, of course, but I didn’t feel like driving for hours and hours to Virginia just to pat Chloe and Jake on the head, turn right around and come back.
That wasn’t going to be a problem, Emily said, because Phyllis was footing the bill. Food, hotel rooms. There’d be a separate room for Grandma, too.
It was tempting, but I was already in enough trouble with the law. “Emily, I’d love to, but I’m out on bail. I’m not supposed to leave the state.”
“Oh pooh, Mother. They’ll never know.”
“Oh, yes they will,” I said, and told her about my Sunday adventure, caught red-handed by the FBI, hot-footing around northern Virginia.
Emily listened, oh-ing and ah-ing and laughing at all the right places. Then the little scamp played her trump card. “Well, you’re not off the hook yet, ha-ha-ha, because the property we’re looking at is in Maryland, so you just can’t say no. Pleeeeeeease?”
I’d heard that tone of voice before. When Emily just wanted to go to a rave. When she only needed $150 for a ski trip. When all her friends were spending the weekend in Ocean City and I was the meanest mommy in the world.
And then I did what mommies down through the centuries have done. I weakened. “Tell me about it.”
Emily knew she had me. “Oh, thank you!” she gushed. “It’s in a development called Charlesmeade, down in Indian Head, Maryland. The realtor says it was built as a country club for one of those golf course housing developments. The developer built the club first, to attract buyers for his homes, I suppose. But then his company went belly up.”