Service Dress Blues by Michael Bowen Read Free Book Online Page A

when she was furious with him, thinking of him as almost superhuman. On that I-Day, though, he’d had a deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes and a nervous quiver in his limbs that left her shaken. He had stepped onto the Naval Academy grounds looking at eleven months of being a plebe—one of eleven-hundred-plus first-year midshipman whom three-thousand upper-classmen would treat as the lowest form of human life. Eleven months of screaming stripers, of rounding every indoor corner on a run, never sitting down outside, calisthenics at five A.M. , white-glove inspections, hazing, push-ups on any pretext or no pretext, dress parades, midnight watches, sleep deprivation, all on top of a grueling class schedule. And she remembered the gleam in his eye and the strut in his step in May of the following year, when he officially stopped being a plebe and became a Midshipman Third Class.
    She had a soft spot for plebes.
    She took considerably more time composing her email to Lieutenant Commander Francis X. Seton than she had on the missive to Robert Yi Li.
    ***
    â€œThe attempted murder rap is a trial lawyer’s dream,” Walt Kuchinski told Rep not quite three hours later as they were walking through the chilly evening to a parking ramp where the Germania Building reserved spaces for its tenants. “The cops caught Lena with the blood literally dripping from her hands. Well, not literally. But holding the murder weapon and standing over the body, which is close enough. And I think I might get her off. She could actually walk.”
    â€œBy pointing to an unknown intruder who didn’t take anything or leave any fingerprints?”
    â€œDon’t sound so skeptical. Lena tells me their driveway is lousy with partial bootmarks. Who knows whose they are or how long they’ve been there?”
    â€œIf Lena heard a sound in the club room while she was coming in the back door, though, the intruder would have had to go out a rear window into the back yard or side yard. Otherwise Lena would have run smack into him.”
    â€œOr smack into her. Let’s not eliminate half the human race from the universe of potential suspects. We’ll want as many as we can get to accompany us on our search for reasonable doubt.”
    â€œGood point.”
    â€œYou’re onto something, though. I’ll have to take a careful look around the property when I pop up to Loki for a little face-to-face with my client.”
    Kuchinski towered over Rep. Of course, he towered over most people who didn’t dribble for a living. He was also wider than Rep. Considerably. Once straw-colored, his thinning hair now tended toward off-white, and his face and belly showed evidence of thousands of six P.M. beer calls and scores of nights in bars celebrating verdicts, or commiserating about them, or telling stories about them. But after three decades-plus of trial work,
joie de guerre
still gleamed in his eye when he thought about facing a jury again.
    â€œFor what it’s worth, based on an hour or so with them,” Rep said, “Lena and Ole both have sharp tongues and hard-boiled attitudes, but I think they really do love each other. I don’t think it’s one of those things where they just stay together out of habit or inertia. I think they’ve really been in love for almost fifty years.”
    â€œDid you just say ‘them?’” Kuchinski asked, his voice rising in astonishment. “You mean Lena was with Ole when you talked to him?”
    â€œMost of the time, yeah.”
    â€œSo they didn’t tack a no-contact order onto Lena’s bail requirements?”
    â€œIf they did, someone apparently forgot to tell Lena.”
    â€œI’ve heard they run a pretty loose ship up there in Sylvanus County, but that doesn’t sound like any attempted murder charge I ever heard of,” Kuchinski said, pulling out his cell-phone and punching the speed-dial button that would get him to