Jungle Rules Read online

  “Rich is not all it’s cracked up to be,” Carter said, walking back to his bunk and sitting on it, resting his chin on his hands, and staring at the floor.

  “See?” O’Connor said to Kirkwood. “Can I pick ’em or can I pick ’em?”

  “Carter, you are filthy fucking rich, aren’t you,” Kirkwood said.

  “Yes,” Carter mumbled. “I hate it, too.”

  “My wife is well-to-do,” Kirkwood then admitted as he shoved his empty suitcase under the end of his bunk, hiding it behind his footlocker. “She has her emotional problems with the money and all, sounds a lot like you, too, when she bemoans the problems of having loads of cash, but given the choice of having wealth or living out of a soup can, she will choose to suffer in the lap of luxury every time.”

  “I intend to do good,” Carter said. “I refuse to be another rich, Boston elitist tossing crumbs to the poor from my Bentley on my regular weekend sojourns to Martha’s Vineyard.”

  “You drive a Bentley?” O’Connor said, kicking his suitcase under his rack. “I would have taken you for a Rolls-Royce purist.”

  “Very funny,” Carter said, still brooding with his face in his hands.

  “Hey, pal,” O’Connor said, “don’t take it so hard. Hell, you can give me a couple of your millions, and then you won’t be so rich. How’s that?”

  “Fuck off. You wouldn’t take it if I did give it to you,” Carter said.

  “Good judge of character,” Kirkwood said, leaning against his wall locker, “but I know this Irishman a lot better than that. I think that if you put a million bucks under Terry O’Connor’s nose, he would grovel for it like a hungry dog.”

  “Fuck-an-a, Jack,” O’Connor laughed, wadding his empty seabag and stuffing it in his footlocker. “Like I said, nothing wrong with money. It greases the axle for the proverbial wheel of life to keep right on spinning round and round. I’m a lawyer, for crying out loud. A law whore. Pay me a fee and I am all yours, baby.”

  “They don’t put guys like that on the defense team,” Carter said. “You’re a weenie just like the rest of us, trying to exact a little humanity and justice out of this fucked-up system. Now tell me the truth.”

  “I guess you saw the Nathan’s Hotdogs sign stenciled on my shorts,” O’Connor said and laughed, letting go of his footlocker’s lid, allowing it to bang shut. “Yeah, I really do give a shit what happens to these poor bastards. I also get good and pissed off seeing them railroaded by the likes of Dicky Fucking Doo and his Fabulous Don’ts.”

  “Dicky Doo is nothing,” Carter said. “You have not yet met the consummate evil, Captain Charles E. Heyster.”

  “As in shyster?” Kirkwood chimed with a laugh.

  “Heyster the shyster,” Carter said. “That’s good but not original, yet quite apropos. You’re not the first to call him that, nor will you be the last.”

  “So he is the shining star in Dicky Doo’s galaxy?” O’Connor said, pulling off his sweat-stained shirt.

  “He is Dicky Doo’s galaxy,” Carter said with a sigh, still sitting on his bunk resting his chin on the heels of his hands and his elbows propped on his bony knees. “His foremost champion for injustice. This morning in court, Charlie the shyster handed me my head yet again. This time he not only humiliated me, but my client, too, and he pissed squarely in the face of justice, railroading a completely innocent man, simply from the way he looks and a dirty little name that people called him behind his back. How can a human being be so cruel as to knowingly send an innocent man to prison?”

  “They do it every day,” Kirkwood said, noticing O’Connor stripping down to his T-shirt and boxer shorts, and following suit.

  “I know,” Carter said, and began choking on his words, his emotions now starting to overwhelm him. “I am such a failure at stopping it, too. That’s what I was praying about.”

  Jon Kirkwood could say nothing, seeing the stick figure of a man shuddering as grief from his loss took full charge and sent tears coursing from his pink-rimmed blue eyes.

  “Suck it up, pal,” O’Connor then muttered, tossing his dirty socks in his laundry bag and dropping it on the floor by the foot of his rack.

  “Yeah, right, suck it up,” Carter said, sobbing and wiping his wet face on his khaki shirt’s shoulder and upper sleeve. “I keep sucking it up, and Charlie Heyster keeps cheating and winning.”

  “What the hell did he do?” O’Connor said.

  “Subliminal influence and mind games for the jury,” Carter said, pulling out a yellow stained handkerchief and blowing his nose. “He cheats, and the judges let him get away with it. I object, and even when the judge sustains it, the jury is still influenced by the sideshow. He gets what he wants.”

  “You’re driving me crazy with your rhetoric,” O’Connor said, lying on his bunk and propping himself on his elbows. “Start at the point where you are in court, and give us a clue of what went on.”

  “Sorry,” Carter said, dabbing his eyes. “We began at nine o’clock this morning. My client, Lance Corporal Raymond Zelinski, rather former lance corporal, now private, was railroaded on false charges of possession of narcotics with intent to distribute, and the whole raft of typical misconduct charges they tie to such a case. None of it true.”

  “Kingfish, all my clients is innocent, don’t you know,” O’Connor said, rolling his eyes and grinning at Kirkwood, who lay on the neighboring bunk. “That’s why we’uns gots jobs as defense counsels.”

  “Calhoun the lawyer from Amos ’n’ Andy,” Kirkwood laughed, turning on his side and looking at O’Connor. “I loved that old show. That and The Honeymooners.”

  “It’s not funny, gentlemen,” Carter said with a frown at the racial bend of O’Connor’s wisecrack. “You’ll have your turns in the tub with Heyster, and then you won’t be so jovial about it.”

  “Oh, now wait a minute there, Sapphire,” O’Connor said, his eyes still open wide as he shifted his smile to Carter.

  “You want to hear this or not?” Carter fumed, now towering over O’Connor, whose bunk sat directly across the center aisle from Carter’s.

  “Shoot, Luke,” O’Connor said, lying back. “I’m all ears.”

  “We’re a little punchy after flying twenty-three hours straight from California to Okinawa, then no sleep, and catching the predawn flight from Kadina to Da Nang,” Kirkwood said, relaxed on his bed, propped on his elbows.

  “I did the same thing,” Carter said, now taking off his uniform shirt, revealing his dingy T-shirt with yellow sweat rings staining the garment’s armpits. “I know how you feel. Wednesday departure from Norton Air Force Base, landing in Okinawa, and then Friday morning the predawn freedom bird to Da Nang.”

  “It will rot out your brain,” O’Connor said.

  “At any rate,” Carter continued, pulling off his shoes and sitting on his bed, “Raymond Zelinski is not your poster-type Marine. Like yours truly, when God passed out good looks, we were someplace else.”

  “I can count at least a dozen not so pretty Marines I saw just getting off the plane and checking in today,” O’Connor said. “Take that guy at supply who issued us our helmets, flak jackets, and other duce gear, or even the guy at the armory that gave us our .45s. Somebody should have spanked their mamas! I doubt looks had really that much influence on the jury. They see ugly daily.”

  “Au contraire,” Carter said. “There is ugly, which I agree is quite common. Then there is repulsive. Lance Corporal Zelinski stands about five feet, ten inches tall and weighs all of 135 pounds at best. He has very dark eyes that are quite large and bug out. His brows are black as coal. His skin is a translucent pasty gray, and the tissue surrounding his eyes looks fragile and bruised, but it’s not. That’s just the color. Gray circles around very large brown eyes overhung with thick, black brows.”

  “Sounds beautiful so far,” O’Connor said and mimicked gagging, putting his finger down his throat. “He might look more natural with a hooded black cape and a scythe. Now that I think about it
, I’ll bet that was his sister I took on a blind date once, just after I enrolled at Columbia. The dark circles and thick eyebrows bring back those old freshman nightmares. She originally came from Hell’s Kitchen. I think she kills ducks for a living nowadays, out on Long Island.”

  “Very possibly his sister,” Carter said, offering a cheesy grin. “Zelinski happens to come from Hell’s Kitchen in New York.”

  “No shit?” O’Connor said, dropping his head back and letting out a laugh, and then looking back at Carter. “Doesn’t sound very Irish, though.”

  “No, I think Raymond is Polish,” Carter said, still showing his yellow teeth. “He has a very strong New York brogue, though, a voice that sounds like Muggs McGinnis from the Bowery Boys.”

  “Oh, good, I like that,” O’Connor said, propping himself back on his elbows. “Them and The Three Stooges were my favorites.”

  “That was The East Side Kids, though,” Kirkwood said, looking at Carter and then at O’Connor. “Leo Gorcey played Muggs in The East Side Kids movies. In The Bowery Boys he portrayed Terrence Aloysius ‘Slip’ Mahoney. Huntz Hall had the roll of Horace Debussy Jones, better known as ‘Sach.’ They’re some of my favorites, too, but for that era of comedies, I always liked Abbott and Costello best.”

  “What about The Dead End Kids?” O’Connor asked, looking at Kirkwood. “Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall played in those too, right?”

  “Yeah,” Kirkwood said, “The Dead End Kids were the first movies with Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey, in the late 1930s, then came The East Side Kids in the early 40s, and then The Bowery Boys later in the 40s and through most of the 50s. Same bunch, just different names. Gorcey’s father, Bernard, played Louie Dumbroski, the old man with Louie’s Sweet Shop, and Leo’s younger brother, David Gorcey, played Chuck.”

  “Carter, the man is a walking encyclopedia,” O’Connor said, pointing his thumb at Kirkwood. “Hell of a library between his ears. He can tell you anything about anything, and right down to the gnat’s ass, too.”

  “At any rate, gentlemen,” Carter interjected, standing up from his bunk and starting to pace, as though he now addressed a jury, “getting back to the subject: Zelinski, with his voice like Leo Gorcey, not only has these horrid eyes, but his hair is jet-black, well oiled, and combed straight back from his high-pitched forehead, like Dracula. The poor boy has thick blue lips and a nose that is at least four inches from its tip to his face. Beneath that prominent schnozzola, hugging his top lip and in the center making right-angle turns upward to each nostril, almost like it was drawn on with an eyebrow pencil, he has this sharply edged snit of a mustache, also very black and vividly contrasting his pale skin. If that’s not pathetic enough, his shoulders slope forward from a pronounced stooped back, slumping so badly that he looks like he’s slouching even when he stands straight. Just having him seated at the defense table was bad enough. He would have been a disaster on the witness stand. He looked and sounded like some two-bit hood from a B-class gangster movie.”

  “Sounds more like that character Gomez, from The Addams Family cartoons, you know the one that Charles Addams draws in The New Yorker magazine. Not so much like the Gomez Addams that John Astin plays on the television series, but the cartoon guy,” O’Connor said, leaning on his side and training his eyes at Kirkwood on the bunk next to him.

  “That or Peter Lorre, you know from the 1942 movie Casablanca, with Claude Rains, Ingrid Bergman, and Humphrey Bogart,” Kirkwood said, looking back at O’Connor.

  “Yeah, Rick’s Café Américain, the usual suspects, and play it again, Sam,” O’Connor said, focused on his pal and completely ignoring Carter, who now stopped pacing and stood with his arms folded, glaring impatiently at the two fellow captains.

  “But Peter Lorre didn’t have a mustache,” O’Connor continued, not giving Carter a glance. “He had the creepy eyes, but clean above the lip. Granted that Lorre would have made a better-looking Gomez, though, than John Astin. You know, more like the Addams cartoon guy, but he’s not the comedian that Astin is, so I guess it’s a wash. John Astin’s eyes and smile, though, as Gomez, kill me. The way Astin went after Carolyn Jones all the time, you know, Morticia Addams, kissing her up the arm, that’s classic stuff.”

  “Well, think of a skinny Peter Lorre, quite a bit taller, with a very narrow Gomez Addams mustache and slicked-back, ink-black hair, and you have Raymond Zelinski,” Carter said, once again steering the attention of his two colleagues back to the discussion of his case.

  “Little Richard has a mustache like that!” Kirkwood said, smiling at O’Connor and then at Carter. “Just hit me. You sure this character isn’t a little light in the loafers?”

  “No. ‘This character,’ as you call him,” Carter said, now getting frustrated with the trivial interruptions, “got railroaded today, purely on those odd looks.”

  “How so?” O’Connor said, returning his focus to Carter. “I know that prejudice played a part, but come on. Even the most bonehead Marine grunts would need more than looks to convict.”

  “Oh, there was quite a bit more, thanks to Heyster,” Carter said, again pacing as he spoke. “If I wasn’t up against a wall with Zelinski’s looks and demeanor, leave it to Charlie the shyster to put the whipped cream and cherry on top.”

  “This has got to be good, the way you’ve bled me on this,” O’Connor said, lying back on his bunk.

  “Well, Zelinski has his odd looks, and as such has absolutely no friends,” Carter said, now stopped between O’Connor’s and Kirkwood’s racks, his hands resting on his hips. “I can sympathize with him, because I have endured similar prejudices. At any rate, Zelinski is walking guard duty at Da Nang Air Base, and the corporal of the guard checks his post, gives him a shot of coffee from his thermos, and shoots the breeze with Zelinski while he drinks it. Just before he leaves he asks Raymond if he smoked pot. Zelinski tells him that he has never tried it, so the corporal offers him a single marijuana cigarette. Wanting to be cooperative, cool, and one of the guys, the dumb lance corporal accepts the joint.”

  “Guilty as charged,” Kirkwood said, looking up at Carter. “Possession, whether you like it or not.”

  “Not so fast,” Carter said. “The corporal of the guard had no more than driven from the scene, and Zelinski still had the joint in his hand when the military police swooped down on him from nowhere with three jeeps, and Zelinski’s gunny in tow.”

  “I smell a rat,” O’Connor said, sitting up. “Zelinski’s gunny does not like our boy Raymond, does he.”

  “Precisely,” Carter said. “When they took Zelinski in custody, and the military police wanted to check out his story with the corporal of the guard, the gunny intervened. Clearly protecting the corporal. If you ask me, that gunny sent the joint out with the corporal of the guard, just to burn Zelinski. That’s entrapment.”

  “So you have the word of the lance corporal against the word of the corporal, and the gunny vouches for the corporal,” Kirkwood said.

  “Correct,” Carter said, again pacing the aisle at the foot of the two captains’ racks. “The corporal and the gunny both lied on the stand, denying knowing anything about planting the joint on Zelinski. Also, like a bolt from the blue, the prosecution brought in the testimony of three other Marines from Zelinski’s squadron who were caught and arrested that same night smoking marijuana behind a hangar. Our only saving grace was the fact that all that the military police confiscated from Zelinski was the single joint of marijuana, and nothing else. Not even a book of matches or a cigarette lighter with which to light the joint, since Zelinski doesn’t even smoke.”

  “Well, that should have thrown some doubt the jury’s way,” O’Connor said, putting his feet on the floor, now sitting on the side of his bed. “The kid’s got a roll of dope, but no way to light it.”

  “Oh, but Charlie the shyster neutralized any reasonable doubt we had managed to put forth with his so-called character witness, Private First Class John White,” Carter said, pacing the floor faster. “He was n
ot charged, nor was he ever listed as a material witness.”

  “Since when does the prosecution bring in character witnesses?” Kirkwood said, falling back on his bunk.

  “He had totally nothing to do with the case!” Carter exclaimed, waving his arms, punctuating his words with their frantic movement. “Yet the judge allowed him to testify. This is what killed us.

  “I had pretty much discredited the gunny and the corporal of the guard, and tied them together in their conspiracy. The military police who arrested my client testified as to the contents of Zelinski’s pockets, and the lack of any kind of lighter or matches. Plus the three other culprits they arrested smoking dope in the hangar were nowhere near Zelinski at any time that evening.

  “Then the judge called the next witness. The doors in the back of the courtroom swing open and in walks the largest, blackest Marine I have ever seen: Private First Class John White.”

  “Oh, shit,” O’Connor said, falling back on his bunk, laughing. “Big, very black, and the name White. Oh, that is good. Sleazy but good.”

  “Charlie Heyster had this Marine state his name not once but twice for the jury,” Carter said, waving his arms faster. “And in all, three times!”

  “You objected?” Kirkwood said, leaning on his elbows.

  “Of course I did, right after the second time Heyster had him say his name, but the judge let it slide,” Carter said, again pacing hard. “I tried to approach the bench, but the judge stopped me in my tracks before I could even take two steps toward him, and told us to move on. I think that the judge just didn’t want me near his face.”

  “I wonder why,” O’Connor said, and then flashed a quick, eyebrows-raised grin at Kirkwood. “So what did Private White have to offer in the way of evidence?”

  “Nothing of relevance,” Carter said, stopping again between the two racks. “However, his nonevidence nailed the coffin lid shut on Lance Corporal Zelinski.