and found a toothbrush and a razor and travel-sized tubes of
toothpaste and shaving soap. Nothing else. No medications. No
heart prescription. No pack of condoms.
I checked the closet. There was a Class A uniform in there,
neatly squared away on three separate hangers, with the pants
folded on the bar of the first and the coat next to it on the
second and the shirt on a third. The tie was still inside the shirt
collar. Centred above the hangers on the shelf was a field grade
officer’s service cap. Gold braid all over it. On one side of the
cap was a folded white undershirt and on the other side was a
pair of folded white boxers.
There were two shoes side by side on the closet floor next to
a faded green canvas suit carrier which was propped neatly
against the back wall. The shoes were gleaming black and had
socks rolled tight inside them. The suit carrier was a privately
purchased item and had battered leather reinforcements at the
stress points. It wasn’t very full.
‘You’d get the results,’ I said. ‘Our pathologist would give you
a copy of the report with nothing added and nothing deleted.
You see anything you’re not happy about, we could put the ball
right back in your court, no questions asked.’
Stockton said nothing, but I wasn’t feeling any hostility
coming off him. Some town cops are OK. A big base like Bird
puts a lot of ripples into the surrounding civilian world. Therefore
MPs spend a lot of time with their civilian counterparts,
and sometimes it’s a pain in the ass, and sometimes it isn’t. I
had a feeling Stockton wasn’t going to be a huge problem. He
was relaxed. Bottom line, he seemed a little lazy to me, and lazy
people are always happy to pass their burdens on to someone
else.
‘How much?’ I said.
‘How much what?’
‘How much would a whore cost here?’
‘Twenty bucks would do it,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing very
exotic available in this neck of the woods.’
‘And the room?’
20
‘Fifteen, probably.’
I rolled the corpse back onto its front. Wasn’t easy. It
weighed two hundred pounds, at least.
‘What do you think?’ I asked.
‘About what?’
‘About Walter Reed doing the autopsy.’
There was silence for a moment. Stockton looked at the wall.
‘That might be acceptable,’ he said.
There was a knock at the open door. One of the cops from
the cars.
‘Medical examiner just called in,’ he said. ‘He can’t get here
for another two hours at least. It’s New Year’s Eve.’
I smiled. Acceptable was about to change to highly desirable. Two hours from now Stockton would need to be somewhere
else. A whole bunch of parties would be breaking up and the
roads would be mayhem. Two hours from now he would be
begging me to haul the old guy away. I said nothing and the cop
went back to wait in his car and Stockton moved all the way
into the room and stood facing the draped window with his
back to the corpse. I took the hanger with the uniform coat on it
and lifted it out of the closet and hung it on the bathroom door
frame where the hallway light fell on it.
Looking at a Class A coat is like reading a book or sitting
next to a guy in a bar and hearing his whole life story. This one
was the right size for the body on the bed and it had Kramer on
the name plate, which matched the dog tags. It had a Purple
Heart ribbon with two bronze oak leaf clusters to denote a
second and third award of the medal, which matched the scars.
It had two silver stars on the epaulettes, which confirmed he
was a major general. The branch insignia on the lapels denoted
Armor and the shoulder patch was from XII Corps. Apart
from that there were a bunch of unit awards and a whole salad
bowl of medal ribbons dating way back through Vietnam and
Korea, some of which he had probably earned the hard way,
and some of which he probably hadn’t. Some of them were