Coincidence or not, Mark never knew, but less than two years after that letter General Tarbert Weir resigned from the United States Army and moved permanently to Springfield.
Running smoothly now on the hard pavement, Mark Weir crossed the east-west streets named for Presidents Adams, Jackson, and Van Buren, his thoughts as insistent and rhythmic as his stride.
In the post-’Nam years, some of young Weir’s angers were eroded by civilian life and simple reasoning. His father had not made policy, had not been a commander in Vietnam or had any part of it. When he applied for Police Academy and was accepted, he wanted his father to be proud of him. He had written him the news to the farm but that letter was never answered.
It was not the accusation of personal treason that had hurt his father so deeply, Mark Weir knew that. Angry words can be forgiven and forgotten. It was the mutilated picture he had enclosed with that final letter. He had literally tom his father out of his life.
It was a snapshot taken the last time they had been photographed together as a family, one mild winter day in Wiesbaden, right after Colonel Weir had come back from two weeks of maneuvers on the border between Czechoslovakia and West Germany. Grimes had snapped the picture of the trio, their eyes squinting against the winter sun, arms around each other. At the last moment his father had taken off his Army cap and put it on his son’s head. The cap slid over the boy’s fine, sandy hair, and all three of them had laughed into the camera.
His mother had died a month later of lobar pneumonia, complicated by an atypical lung collapse. They had gone for a long weekend together in the Bavarian Alps, but Grimes had shown up unexpectedly to take Mark back to the base on Sunday night. His father said he did not want Mark to miss school, so the boy had not been with his mother when she died.
After crossing Harrison, the lieutenant slowed to a walk and stopped in front of the Blackstone Hotel. In spite of the cold, he was sweating, his hair dark and damp at the temples.
He had torn that picture in two, so that his mother and the boy in the officer’s cap were on one side and Colonel Scotty Weir was separated from them completely. But there was still the outline of his father’s hand as it rested on young Mark’s shoulder.
Mark Weir had carefully picked at the shiny surface, lifting off the flakes of photograph that recorded that hand, and dropping them into the envelope.
Symbolically, and then in fact, he had tom his father out of his life. John Grimes sent an occasional brief note and always a handwritten message at Christmas, but Mark Weir had known for some time that his father did not know how to forgive him, and he had never quite forgiven himself.
But he hoped the general would at least care about the three dead soldiers.
Chapter Five
A black sedan traveling north on Michigan Boulevard made a sharp U-turn, sending up spurts of grimy water, then braked to a stop in front of the Blackstone Building. Lieutenant Weir got into the front passenger seat.
The sergeant at the wheel turned north on Dearborn and drove past the Dirksen Courthouse and then past the Picasso masterpiece, a flaring sculpture of curved iron arches and a facelike flange that reflected in a soft glow from the glass windows of the buildings around it.
“It’s all strange to my daddy,” Sergeant Gordon said, nodding at the giant artwork as the car angled past Civic Center Plaza. “He says it’s the spittin’ image of Picasso’s mother-in-law.”
Gordon was a plump man of about forty with fine, smooth skin, light brown, and the habit of laughing softly in varying pitches to emphasize what he was saying. His eyes were cool and watchful, but bright with a sense of amusement. Only the patchy gray of his sideburns, like clumps of steel wool, gave away his age.
“And my daddy hates all those fucking glass buildings in the Loop. He liked it when everything was brick or brownstone and the streetcar tracks went down the middle of the street,” DuBois Gordon continued with a burst of laughter. “It’s always the Outer Drive to him, none of that Lake Shore Drive shit. Marina Towers, Daley Center, he won’t have ’em. Thinks we went wrong when we took the Pullman sleepers off between here and St. Louis. My daddy still likes to tell kinfolk that Chicago is Indian talk for wild onion...” He glanced at the lieutenant.
“Okay, boss, so we’re working,” he said. “I didn’t get much from Mrs. Lewis. Nothing solid. She didn’t know her nephew well. Before the Army, she told me, he was always in some sort of trouble, but he never hurt anybody, had a good heart. She never had kids of her own.”
At the lieutenant’s instructions, Gordon drove across the river and continued north toward Bonnie Caidin’s apartment building.
“Here’s what I got hold of so far,” Weir told the sergeant. “It’s just a lot of hearsay, none of the usual sources saw anything, but a clerk at the Traveler’s Aid booth said a Hare Krishna disciple had stopped by to get some ointment for a split lip. The Krishna said he tried to intervene when a pair of military police were manhandling a soldier in an O’Hare parking lot. He said the MPs told him the man was drunk, and they were taking him in for his own good. They tossed the soldier and his gear into a closed jeep and took off.”
“Did you check with the military?”
“I got the airport to do that, without using my name. They say the regular army MPs reported no trouble at the airport, but the other MPs, the new special cadre that works out of the west armory, they could have been responsible for the action. They’re a fairly new and experimental unit, operating only in urban areas. They’ve been given liaison responsibility between men in uniform and ordinary citizens. If needed, they’ve got the right to act in civilian areas, like the airport. That cadre reports directly to a First Sergeant Karl Malleck, and that’s a call I’m trying to make up my mind about.”
“You saying that Lewis could be sleeping off a drunk in an Army brig right now?”
“Let’s say I hope he is,” the lieutenant said.
Sergeant Gordon pulled up and stopped in a parking place beyond the canopied entrance to Bonnie Caidin’s building.
“How long do we sit on it, lieutenant? Three soldiers murdered, one missing and suspicious... are you and me just keeping score?”
“The stats aren’t out of line.” The lieutenant looked at his watch; he still had a few minutes. “I’ve checked, Doobie. New York, Cleveland, Denver, San Diego — three unsolved dead males over a six-month period doesn’t make a blip on the homicide curve.”
“Dead soldier boys?”
“Not far from the national average either. Servicemen are usually young, have money to spend, like to drink, try drugs and raise hell, and they look for hookers in dangerous neighborhoods.”
“Mostly black soldier boys? All with fucked up service records, alcohol on duty, insubordination, shit like that?”
“What good is guessing? We can’t make a case on what we’ve got, period. It’s only a series of coincidences at this stage.”
“And we can’t lean on Malleck?”
“No. It would be out of line for Homicide to inquire about a soldier who isn’t even officially classified as missing. If Malleck is involved, or his special cadre are in on it, it would only tip them off that we’re on to a developing pattern.”
Sergeant Gordon smiled without humor, the early morning light shining on his high, flat cheekbones. “You’re gonna ask Miss Bonnie to check out the Malleck angle, is that right?”
“She can do it legitimately, as part of a feature,” the lieutenant said. “Bonnie met this soldier’s aunt last night in a perfectly routine fashion. A follow-up inquiry to Malleck’s people isn’t out of line.”
“But she’ll have to tell him the police heard about a drunk soldier being hauled from the airport by MPs, right?”