Southeastern New Mexico, this part of it anyway, was not what I had expected. I was beginning my trip to Roswell with a detour, heading up Highway 70 in yet another rental Ford (a green one), but cutting over at Alamogordo, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes out of El Paso, to take Highway 82 with a village called Cloudcroft as my destination. I was in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains, and on the winding eighteen-mile drive, past roadside produce stands peddling apples and cider, I climbed five thousand ear-popping feet, scenic overlooks frequently presenting themselves, views of sprawling desert dotted with sagebrush, yucca and cacti from a forest thick with pine, blue spruce and aspen; it was like seeing Mexico from Canada. From certain overlooks, the glittering white sands that gave White Sands its name were in amazing evidence, as if snow had fallen in the desert.
The more typical drive to Alamogordo-at one point crossing through a plateau-bounded basin-had been hot and dry, my cotton knit yellow-and-brown T-shirt and brown tropical worsted slacks sticking to me like flypaper (the T-shirt a Navajo pattern purchased at Sears in Chicago, to help me fit in out here in the wide open spaces). The brim of my straw fedora was snugged down, but the sun hadn’t bothered me-I wasn’t even wearing the sunglasses I’d brought along, enjoying the endless skies, which were a clear, rich, unthreatening blue, the occasional clouds looking unreal, like an artist’s bold brush-strokes. The lack of glare, however, didn’t keep that dry heat from turning the Ford into an oven, even with the windows down.
Now, up in these mountains, I found myself rolling the windows up; it was getting chilly, the shadows of evening creeping in like friendly marauders. I had to slip my tan notch-lapel sportjacket on when I pulled over by the road to watch the setting sun paint the desert more colors than an Indian blanket-a gaudy one, at that.
It had taken Drew Pearson almost a month to decide to send me to Roswell looking for flying saucers. I’d been back in Chicago, running the A-1, with both Washington and Outer Space filed under Bullshit in the back of my mind. My agency was doing fine; after a postwar lull, divorces were on the upswing again and personnel investigation was holding steady, while our retail credit work for suburban financial institutions remained the backbone of the business.
“I figured when I didn’t hear from you,” I told Pearson, “you were taking a pass on the little-green-men mission.”
“I received a document relating to that matter.”
“Could you be a little more vague, Drew? I almost understood you.”
“I can’t be specific on the telephone, you know that!”
“I thought you were calling from a pay phone.”
Which was Pearson’s usual habit.
“I am. But I suspect every pay phone in Washington is tapped.”
“Say, I understand there’s a nice room open next to Forrestal in Bethesda, if you want that paranoia of yours looked at.”
“I’m fortunate you don’t charge per witticism, Nathan.”
“What you pay is already pretty funny. So what got you off the dime?”
“… I’ve received a document that appears to be a briefing to the President on the formation of that … magic group.”
“You mean, Majestic Twelve.”
“… Yes. Nathan, please … a little discretion.”
“See, Drew, once you mention receiving a briefing document for the President, this whole discretion thing kinda goes out the window.”
Pearson sighed, but when he continued, he dropped the coyness if not his imperious manner: “I have all twelve names, now, and they’re all credible-people like Admiral Hillenkoetter and General Twining, commanding general at Wright Field.”
Hillenkoetter was head of the CIA, and Wright Field was significant because that was where Marcel had said the wreckage of the saucer had been taken.
“If this is a hoax,” Pearson said, “we have a very knowledgeable practical joker at work.”
“So you want me to investigate Major Marcel’s story,” I said.
“Yes. In particular, I’d like you to talk to the witnesses who claim they saw the crashed craft and the bodies of the crew.”
“Isn’t that the part of the country where they smoke locoweed?”
“Well, there’s smoke, all right, Nathan, but not necessarily from locoweed. And where there’s smoke, there’s-”
“Mirrors…. What’s the latest word on Forrestal?”
“Making good progress, they say.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed.”
Defensiveness edged his tone. “I don’t wish the man any ill, personally. Just politically.”
“Then why don’t you let up on him?”
“What I write and say isn’t having any effect on Jim Forrestal’s state of mind. My sources inside Bethesda tell me he isn’t allowed to read newspapers or listen to the radio and all communication from the outside is strictly controlled. He may be insane, but I’m confident the nation is strong enough, stable enough, to hear the truth, to have the answers.”
Pearson had been asking the questions in his column and on the air: Why had Forrestal’s malady not been detected or acted upon sooner? Who in our government was responsible for concealing this danger to our national security? And to what extent was Forrestal’s medical treatment being compromised by public relations considerations?
Now dry sarcasm colored his voice. “Do you know where your former client’s room is?”
“No.”
“The sixteenth floor of the Bethesda tower. Doesn’t that sound like just the ideal place to keep a potential suicide?”
“More like the ideal place to help keep him away from the press,” I admitted.
“Or maybe they’re isolating him for yet another reason.”
“What would that be?”
“Who knows what drugs they’re pumping into him, or what sort of mind-control magic they’re up to? That hospital is a hotbed of CIA shenanigans, you know.”
“Bethesda.”
“Yes. And if my sources are to be believed, the CIA-Forrestal’s own ‘baby,’ which is a nice irony-is doing research with drugs, electric shock, hypnosis…. Nathan, I just want you to understand-I’m not the villain here.”
“Neither is Forrestal.”
An operator’s voice came in to let Pearson know that he needed to feed in some more coins to keep this conversation going.
After the music of the dropping coins had ceased, Pearson said acidly, “You’re already costing me money. Will you go to Roswell and do this job?”
“Sure, but I want a five-hundred-dollar retainer, in advance, nonrefundable.”
“What if you only work three days?”
“It’s a minimum fee, Drew. I never chase flying saucers for under five cees.”
“… All right. I’m going to send you a list of names that Marcel has given me, with some rudimentary background information. It’ll come Special Delivery, with your retainer check, and your plane tickets. Can you go out there next week?”
I could, and I did. Of course that miserly son of a bitch sent me the cheapest way he could: on a charter flight of retired schoolteachers going to Carlsbad Caverns. At El Paso, the charter group boarded a bus and I rented the Ford. It was a wonder Pearson didn’t expect me to tag along with the teachers and then hitchhike to my first stop.
Sleepy little mountain-nestled Cloudcroft (pop. 265) had the near ghost-town look of off-season, its downtown storefronts no different than in an Illinois or Iowa hamlet; but from a perch overlooking this slumbering resort community loomed a wide-awake ghost of another sort.
The hotel known as the Lodge seemed to have been transported from another time-say, Queen Victoria’s-and another place-the Swiss Alps, maybe. The grand old railway inn was an architectural aberration, a rambling three-story gingerbread chalet-wooden, not adobe, painted gray, trimmed burgundy, with gabled windows, glassed-in verandas and a central copper lookout tower. The shape of the structure was distinct against the New Mexico sky, which at night was a deeper blue but no less clear, with stars like tiny glittering jewels set here and there in its smooth surface, purely for decorative effect, the full moon casting a ghostly ivory luster upon the mansionlike building, whose windows burned with amber light.
Lugging my Gladstone bag, I moved through the covered entryway, pushing open double doors decorated with stained-glass windows, and entered into a two-story lobby that was at once cavernous and cozy, its dark woodwork highly polished, its hardwood floor worn, plants and flowers everywhere, from potted to freshly cut, a world of elegant antiques and hand-beveled glass and sepia lighting; it was as if I had walked into a daguerreotype.
“We have your reservation, sir,” the assistant manager said numbly, at the check-in counter. He was a guy in his late twenties with short-cropped prematurely gray hair and a scar over his left eye; he was pleasant enough but had an all-too-familiar look, the postwar equivalent of what we used to call the thousand-yard stare.
“Which theater?” I asked.
“Huh?” He flashed a nervous smile. “Pacific.”
“Me too. I helped remodel Guadalcanal.”
“At least you had some ground under you-I was on a carrier.”
“Listen, Mac, you got any suites available?”
“Just one; we’re underbooked, and even off-season, the suites get snapped up.”
“But you do have one?”
“Yes,” he said, but shook his head, no. “The Governor’s Suite. It’s pretty expensive-it’s where Pancho Villa, Judy Garland, Conrad Hilton and Clark Gable’ve stayed.”
“Together?”
That made him chuckle; he looked like he hadn’t chuckled in a while.
Pushing my hat back, I scratched my head. “I have to do some interviews and I’d rather not do them in a public place, like your bar or restaurant-”
“It’s fifty a night.”
“Christ, I just want a room, not stock in the joint. Never mind-my cheapskate boss would stick me with the bill. I’ll muddle through with my five-dollar room …”
“… It’s just the one night?”
“Yeah.”
“Take the bastard,” he said. He had a tiny smile as he handed me the key. “You gonna eat first?”
“Think so.”
“Leave your bag. I’ll get it to your room.”
“Thanks, Mac.”
“A warning, though …”
“Yeah?”
“The Governor’s Suite is Rebecca’s favorite room.”
“Who’s Rebecca?”
He raised the shrapnel-scarred eyebrow. “Our resident ghost. She was a chambermaid, murdered by her jealous lover here, back in the thirties.”
“No kidding. Was she … is she … good-looking?”
“They say she’s a gorgeous redhead.”
“What the hell-I always wanted to lay a ghost.”
I tipped my hat to him and headed over to where leather armchairs were grouped about a large carved-wood-and-stone fireplace; New Mexico or not, it was chilly enough for a fire, flames lazily licking logs. Only two of the comfy chairs were taken, by a couple I’d spotted when I came in. The glow of the fire lent the pair a golden patina that made them seem a part of that old photo I’d walked into.
They were seated next to each other, but not saying anything much, watching the fire like a disaffected married couple watching television. These were obviously my interviewees: they fit the descriptions Pearson had provided, although the woman’s didn’t do her justice, as she’d been pronounced merely beautiful.
In her late twenties, a petite, painfully pretty thing, sitting with her hands in her lap atop a small black patent-leather purse, Air Force nurse Maria Selff looked a little like Dorothy Lamour only better, and instead of a sarong she was wrapped up in a simple but shape-hugging short-sleeve powder-blue frock with Spanish-style white embroidery on the bodice. Her heart-shaped face was blessed with large, luminous, long-lashed dark blue eyes, a strong yet feminine nose, and full, cherrylipsticked lips, stark against her milky white complexion, starkly lovely next to the lustrous black hair of her shoulder-brushing pageboy.
This is what the boys overseas had been fighting for, what pilots had painted on the nose of their planes, what dogfaces had pinned up in their barracks and foxholes, what Varga and Petty had imagined and God had finally accomplished. And yet her manner was shy, even demure.
Her male companion was out of his league, but then most men would have been, even those that weren’t-as Glenn Dennis was-a mortician. Smelling of Old Spice, which was better than formaldehyde, Dennis was of medium height, slender, twenty-five maybe, with short brown hair, heavy streaks of eyebrow lending the only distinguishing feature to a pleasant, oval face; he struck me as rather mild and unassuming, a rather typical small-town merchant, even if he was dealing in death. He was duded up in a Western shirt, tan with brown trim and cuffs, with a bolo tie and crisply pressed stockman’s slacks-trying to be worthy of her, the poor sap.
“Mr. Dennis?” I asked.
He looked up sharply, stood, nodding, extending his hand. “Yes, sir. You must be Mr. Heller.”
“I must be,” I said, shaking the hand, and motioning for him to sit back down. “Miss Selff? Nathan Heller.”
“Oh my,” she said, looking up at me like a frightened child, covering her mouth with a hand. She began to tremble, and averted her eyes from mine.
Usually I have to work at it awhile, before getting a reaction like that out of a woman.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Is something wrong? Did I-”
She was shaking her head, still turning away from me, holding up a hand, calling a momentary halt. “No, no … you didn’t do anything … I’m the one who’s sorry …”
Goddamn, she was crying! Fumbling with her purse, finding a hanky, she dabbed at her eyes, sniffled, and regained her composure.
“You … you just reminded me of someone, that’s all,” she said. “It’s a rather startling resemblance, and I’m afraid it just … threw me a little.” She smiled, embarrassed. “Please sit down, Mr. Heller.”
I nodded to her as I took the chair beside Dennis. She got her compact out of her purse, checked her makeup-it was fine-then returned it to her purse and her purse to her lap and her folded hands to their patent-leather altar.
I appreciate your cooperation, Miss Selff … Mr. Dennis,” I said. “I know this was a difficult decision …”
“I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she said. Her voice was a fluid alto, still quivering slightly from the odd emotional outburst. “I’m putting all of us in harm’s way, here.”
“Now, Maria,” Dennis said, his voice higher-pitched than hers and as flat as hers was musical, “that’s nonsense. It’s been almost two years since the trouble.”
“We were followed,” she said gravely, her distressed gaze starting on him, landing on me-and holding.
“Were you?” I asked him.
Dennis shook his head, no, insistently. “Highway was darn near empty. One farmer in a beat-up old pickup went roarin’ around us, like to have his fenders fall off. That wasn’t any government man.”
“They have devious ways,” she said.
Her melodrama was at once silly and disturbing.
“I’d like to interview you, individually,” I said. “But first, let’s get to know each other a little. Why don’t we have dinner? I’ll admit to being starved; I haven’t eaten since Chicago.”
“I could eat,” Dennis admitted.
She shrugged. “Fine.”
Just off the lobby, the dining room was called Rebecca’s (after the gorgeous ghost, whose image in stained glass adorned several windows) and we had the place pretty much to ourselves. Despite the Victorian trappings, the menu included plenty of traditional New Mexican dishes, and I tried the green chile stew-which made first my mouth, and then my eyes, water-while Dennis had spareribs with chauquehue (cornmeal and red chile) and Miss Selff a small bowl of soup, Anasazi bean with lamb, which smelled so good I had the waitress bring me a cup.
I used small talk to get information out of them and, I hoped, put them at ease. Dennis, it seemed, was not a full-fledged mortician at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell, but an assistant, serving a sort of internship.
“I graduated in ’46, from the San Francisco Mortuary College,” he added cheerfully, cutting meat off a bone. He said it as if he were looking forward to the class reunion.
Miss Selff had been a nurse since 1945, only it wasn’t “Miss.”
“Actually,” she said, “it’s Mrs. Selff. My husband was a pilot, Army Air Force.”
I drank some ice water; those green chiles were getting to me. “What does he do now, Mrs. Selff?”
“His B-17 went down over Dresden.”
“I’m sorry.” That was a tough break: only a handful of planes were shot down in the devastating raid on the so-called Florence of Germany. “Do you have any children, Mrs. Selff?”
“No. We didn’t have much time together-just one leave.”
She looked like she might start crying again, so I dropped the subject.
The mortician, however, picked it up. “After the tragedy, Maria decided to dedicate herself to her husband’s memory, and stay in the service.” He beamed at her. “I really admire her for that.”
This, understandably, seemed to embarrass her.
She pushed her barely touched bowl of soup away and leaned forward, the big blue eyes wide enough to dive into. “Is it possible, Mr. Heller, that we could talk more privately than this?”
“I’ve arranged a suite for that very purpose, Mrs. Selff. But I would like to interview you separately.”
Dennis frowned. “Why? Our stories kinda dovetail, you know.”
“That’s the problem.” I sipped my ice water. “I really need to hear your stories independently. It’s not good investigatory technique to allow interview subjects to interact…. The result can be a collaboration that doesn’t truly represent what either party saw.”
“I’d really like to get away from this public area,” she said, scooting her chair away, wadding her napkin and tossing it on the table, with an air of finality. “I don’t want to be seen.”
I got the room key out of my pocket. “Why don’t you go ahead to the suite, and wait there? I can interview Glenn downstairs, in the bar.”
She worked up a tiny smile, but on those luscious lips it was monumental; I wasn’t quite in love with her yet-at this point I’d only steal for her: we were hours away from murder. “Could you walk me to the suite, Mr. Heller? I’d feel more at ease.”
“Certainly.”
The mortician started to rise, but the Selff woman gave me a quick, narrow-eyed glance that sent a message: she wanted to speak to me, alone.
“Glenn,” I said, with a familiarity generally reserved for close friends, “why don’t you settle up the bill for me-just charge it to my room, Suite 101. Then go on down to the bar and find us a nice private booth.”
“Sure,” he said, but he obviously sensed something. “See you in a little bit, Maria.”
She smiled and nodded to him, rather stiffly.
Then she and I were on our way to the suite, moving together down a wide empty hallway. We’d walked silently for maybe a minute when Maria planted her tiny black-pump-shod feet on the carpet and swiveled toward me, clasping her hands tight before her like she was trying to keep a lightning bug from escaping. Her voice trembled as she said, “I need your help.”
“Name it.”
Her eyes tensed. “Glenn … he’s a problem.”
“How so?”
She sighed and her bosom strained at the embroidered bodice and, as I tried not to pass out, she looked away from me and began walking again, slower; I tagged along.
“We were dating,” she said, “back in ’47, at the time of … you know, at the time of all this … strangeness. We’d just gone together a few weeks, a month at most, and then when the strangeness began, I … I told Glenn it was better we didn’t see each other.”
“And not just because of the ‘strangeness,’ I take it.”
She nodded, smirking with chagrin. “I’m afraid I used that as an excuse to break it off with Glenn. He was moving way too fast … I’d only just started dating again … after Steve died, for the longest time, I …”
“I understand.”
“Anyway, now, almost two years later, against my better judgment, I agree to talk about what happened, and suddenly it’s thrown Glenn and me back together-I allowed him to drive me down here.”
“I see. And he’s trying to rekindle a spark you never felt.”
She stopped again, looking up at me with an expression that was not without compassion. “Yes. Glenn’s a nice man, but he thinks ‘no’ is a three-letter word.”
“Nice men usually spell better than that.”
The expression darkened, she shook her head and began walking again, more quickly now. “I don’t want to ride home with him tonight. I don’t trust him.”
“Hey, you wouldn’t catch me dead, riding with a mortician.”
That made her smile, just a little; she started walking again. Did I mention she smelled of Evening in Paris perfume, ever so delicately?
She was saying, “I’m enough of a nervous wreck without having to worry about those clammy mortician hands of his…. Would you drive me back to Roswell?”
“Tonight?”
“No, tomorrow morning…. I’ll get a room or something.”
Normally a letch like me would take this as an opening; but something wasn’t right about it, and I said so. “I thought you didn’t want to be seen with me. That was the whole point of meeting away from town-”
“I left my car in a parking lot at Bottomless Lake, southeast of Roswell. That’s where Glenn picked me up. You can drop me there. No one will see.”
“You should have just come separately …”
Abruptly she stopped, and clutched my arm: a tiny hand with surprising power. “I needed to talk to him about what happened; I needed to try and make him understand how dangerous this is. I need to do that with you, too, Mr. Heller.”
Then she let go of my arm and began to walk again, slowly, saying nothing.
Soon we were at the door to Suite 101. I asked, “Do you want me to tell Glenn you’re not going back with him?”
She beamed at me and it was like watching one of those speeded-up movies where they show flowers blooming. “Will you handle it, Mr. Heller? I’d be very grateful.”
That voice … she talked like Dinah Shore sang….
“Sure,” I said. “Which is a four-letter word, by the way … but don’t worry about it.”
That got another little smile out of her, and she handed me my key, and I unlocked the door for her, and she slipped into the suite, the first pretty girl who ever figured my hotel room was a safe haven from wolves.
In the basement of the hotel was the Western-themed Red Dog Saloon, with timbered fake-adobe walls, an intricately carved mahogany bar and wanted posters of Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Black Jack Ketchum. A bartender in a red vest and a barmaid in a dancehall dress were entertaining a handful of couples sipping beers or cocktails at tables and booths. This seemed to be-in the off-season, anyway-a place for couples, not necessarily married ones, to get quietly away.
Glenn sat in a back booth, sipping a glass of beer. I slid in across from him.
“She’s a little high-strung,” I said, arching an eyebrow.
“No kiddin’! She was weird all the way down here. You know, we used to go out, a little, you know-date? Hell, I know that’s over but I don’t see any reason we shouldn’t be civil to each other.”
“She wasn’t civil?”
“More like sullen. She’s really got herself worked up over this.” He sighed. “Not that I blame her. If she saw what she says she saw, it’d give anybody a permanent case of the willies.”
“Glenn-is it all right, me using your first name?”
“Sure. You go by Nathan or Nate?”
“Make it Nate. Glenn, you don’t share Mrs. Selff’s fears about reprisals?”
The heavy eyebrows lifted. “Well, hell, Nate, maybe she’s right-there were all kinds of threats and even some strongarm tactics …”
“By the military?”
“So they say, and I witnessed a little of it, myself. Anyway, there was enough of that nonsense that I can see Maria bein’ spooked. But that was almost two years ago, and-speaking for myself-there’s been nothin’ since.”
I got out my spiral notepad. “Why don’t you tell me your story, Glenn? Do you mind if I take notes?”
He didn’t mind. Back in ’47, on the afternoon of Saturday, July 5, Dennis had been “minding the store” at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell. Ballard’s, “the biggest firm of undertakers in town,” had a contract with the RAAF (Roswell Army Air Field) for both embalming and ambulance service.
So it was no surprise to Dennis, receiving a call from the RAAF’s mortuary affairs officer.
“This fella,” Dennis said, cradling his beer in both hands, “Captain somebody, don’t remember his name, he was more an administrator than a technical specialist, and didn’t know the ins and outs of handling corpses.”
The officer had asked Dennis if Ballard’s had any small caskets available, child- or youth-size, and if those caskets could be “hermetically sealed.” The assistant mortician had said there wasn’t much call for the latter, but as to the former, the funeral home had one kid casket in stock, and could call the warehouse in Amarillo and have more in by the next morning.
Dennis had asked, “Has there been some kind of crash, or accident, Captain?”
The Ballard Funeral Home had handled as many as twenty bodies at a time, from crashes out at the base, and had invested in building a special chamber next to the embalming room specifically for such emergencies.
But the captain had said, “No, no … we’re, uh, having a meeting and discussing provisions for, uh … future eventualities…. We’ll let you know when and if we need a coffin.”
“Well,” Dennis said, “if you need a bunch of little coffins quick, I gotta get the call in to Amarillo before three, and that’s just a couple hours from now.”
“At present I’m only gathering information,” the mortuary officer said, thanked the mortician and hung up. Dennis shrugged off the peculiar call and was in the driveway, washing one of the hearses, when the phone rang again. Running in to answer it, Dennis found the mortuary officer on the other end of the line.
“Glenn,” the captain asked, “how do you handle bodies that have been exposed out in the desert sun?”
“For how long?”
“Four or five days. What happens to tissue when it’s laid out in the sun like that?”
“Are you just gathering information, I mean is this a hypothetical situation, or do you need to know specifically how Ballard’s goes about it, what chemicals we use and suchlike?”
“It’s a hypothetical, but we want to know Ballard’s procedure. For example, what chemicals does your embalming fluid consist of? And what would you do if you didn’t want to change any of the chemical contents of the corpse? You know-not destroy any blood, destroy anything that might be of interest, down the road. Also, could holes in a body be sealed over, holes made by predators, I mean? What’s the best way to physically collect remains in such a condition?”
“That’s a whole lot of hypothetical, Captain….”
“Well, let’s start with the steps you could take not to change the chemical contents of the corpse.”
“Well, we usually use a strong solution of formaldehyde in water, and that’s damn sure gonna change the composition of the body. Of course, if a body’s been sunnin’ out on the prairie in July for four or five days, it’s already gone through some changes, lemme tell you, gonna be in real sorry shape. In a case like you’re describing, I’d recommend packing the body in dry ice and freezing it, for storage or transport or whatever…. Look, Captain, I can come right out there and help-”
“No! No thank you, Glenn. This is strictly for future reference.”
And the mortuary officer had hung up.
“Of course I knew right away,” Dennis told me, smiling as he sipped his beer, “that something big had happened, some VIP got killed or some such, and they weren’t ready to release it. But I might have forgot all about it, if an airman hadn’t got in a fender-bender that same afternoon.”
In routine Ballard’s business, Dennis had transported an airman who’d broken his nose in a minor traffic accident out to the base hospital. At about five p.m., Dennis-who was well known around the base, and had rather free access because of the funeral home’s contract with the RAAF-pulled around back to escort the injured airman in the emergency entrance.
But the ramp was blocked by three field ambulances, so the mortician parked alongside and walked the patient up and in, on the way noticing that standing near the rear doors of each of the boxy vehicles was an armed MP. The back doors of one vehicle stood open and Dennis glimpsed a pile of wreckage-thin, silver-metallic material, with a bluish cast.
“One piece was formed like the bottom of a canoe,” he told me, “and was maybe three feet long, with writing on it, about four inches high.”
“What kind of writing?” I asked him. By now I had my own beer to sip.
“Not English. It reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphics.”
“You ever talk to Major Marcel about what you saw?”
“No. Anyway, I just glanced in and kept goin’-I had this patient to deliver, and I took him to Receiving and did the paperwork. There was a lot of activity in that emergency room, I’ll tell ya, a real hubbub, not just doctors either, I knew all of them-big birds I never saw before.”
He meant high-ranking Army Air Force officers.
“Anyway, I wandered down toward the lounge, to get a Coke, kinda hopin’ I would run into Maria. We were dating then, you know.”
“Nobody stopped you?”
“Anybody who knew me would’ve made the natural assumption I’d been called out there. This one MP, who I didn’t know, stopped me in the hall and I told him the mortuary officer called me, which was true, and he let me pass. I went on to the lounge, and got my Coke and kinda stood where I could see what was goin’ on, out in the hall … and that’s when I spotted Maria, comin’ out of an examining room, holding a cloth over her mouth.”
The mortician had also caught a glimpse of two doctors, also covering their lower faces with towels standing by a couple of gurneys, but not of who was on those gurneys.
Nurse Selff had been shocked to see him.
“How did you get in here, Glenn?” she’d asked him, lowering the cloth, looking “woozy” to him.
“I just walked in,” the mortician had shrugged.
“Well, my God, you’ve got to leave! You could get shot!”
“Don’t be silly …”
“Listen to me-get out of here as fast you can.”
Then she’d slipped into another room, just as a captain was coming out; Dennis didn’t know this captain, who was in his mid-forties and prematurely gray.
“Who the hell are you?” the captain had demanded. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m from the funeral home,” Dennis said. “I run the ambulance service-just delivered a guy at the emergency room, and now I’m havin’ a Coke. Hey, I can see you had an air crash, I saw some of the debris-can I help?”
The captain had glared at Dennis and pointed to the floor. “You just stay right where you are.”
“Sure.”
The next thing Dennis knew, two MPs were grabbing onto his arms and were in the process of hauling him bodily out of there, when another voice called, “We’re not through with that S.O.B.! Bring him back here-now!”
And the young mortician had been dragged back to a second captain, “a redhead with the meanest-looking eyes I ever saw,” who said, “You didn’t see a thing, understand? There was no crash here. You go into town, shooting off your big mouth about what you saw, or that there was any kind of crash, and your ass is gonna be in a major fucking sling. Do I make myself clear?”
“I’m a civilian, mister,” Dennis said. “Where do you get off, talkin’ to me like that? You can’t do a damn thing to me!”
The redheaded captain gave the mortician an “awful” smile, and said, “Don’t kid yourself, kid. Somebody’ll be picking your bones out of the sand.”
“Go to hell!”
The captain nodded to the MPs. “Get his scrawny ass outa here.”
Then the MPs had dragged Dennis out to his ambulance and followed him all the way back to the funeral home, in Roswell.
“About two or three hours later, at home, I got a phone call, just a voice … I think it was that redheaded bastard … sayin’ if I opened my mouth, I’d get thrown so far back in the jug they’d have to shoot pinto beans in my mouth with a pea shooter to feed me. It was a stupid threat and I just laughed at it, and hung up on him; but a couple days later, my pop heard from the sheriff-Sheriff Wilcox-that I was in some kind of hot water out at the base. The sheriff told my father to tell me to keep my mouth shut about what I saw out there.”
“Why would Sheriff Wilcox be the one to convey that message?”
“Maybe because he and my pop were old pals. The sheriff said military personnel came around asking about me and my whole family, including my brother, who’s an Army fighter pilot. The implication was, my whole goddamn family was in trouble ’cause of me.”
“Anything come of it?”
“No. I heard about people getting threatened, and even hauled out to the base and questioned; but me? Nothing. I’d have probably forgot about it-except for being called an S.O.B., which I don’t think anybody much likes-if Maria hadn’t told me what she told me, the next morning.”
“Did she call you, or did you call her?”
“She called me. She said, ‘We need to talk.’ Urgent, upset. We decided on the officers’ club, and we met out there around eleven Sunday morning, had the place pretty near to ourselves. She was crying, very distraught. She looked … different, like if you said ‘boo,’ she’d go into shock. I asked what had happened out at that base last night, and she said she’d seen something no one else on this earth ever had.”
“Tell me what she said she saw.”
And he did. I would be hearing this firsthand, from her lips; but it might be helpful to compare the story she had told Dennis to the one she would tell me. Too many inconsistencies could indicate she was “remembering” a delusion, possibly unconsciously enlarging and enhancing it; no inconsistencies at all could mean her story had been learned by rote, government misinformation being fed, first to the mortician and then to me, a cover-up of some other incident and/or an effort to discredit Drew Pearson by planting a false, ridiculous story.
So I took it all down in my spiral notebook, and Dennis concluded with, “You think she really saw that, Nate? Or is she insane?”
“What do you think, Glenn?”
His frown drew the two thick dark streaks of eyebrow into one. “It was real weird out at that base hospital, that night; something big happened that afternoon, no question about it. And Maria saw something strange, no question about that, either. You know, bodies that been exposed to the elements for days on end, to predators and everything else out in the desert, they could look pretty darn weird.”
“Yeah,” I said, putting my pen down, “but could they grow suction cups on their fingertips?”