Jade Lady Burning (6 page)

Her name, she told me, was Miss Lim and she claimed she owned one of those hostess bars in Honolulu that cater to Japanese tourists and mainlanders looking for something exotic. What it meant, probably, was that she was married to a Gl, worked in one of those bars, and made more in tips during one good weekend than he made for the entire month.

She told me about how she prepared the
puupuus,
the free snacks, for her customers every night. What she didn’t tell me about were the handjobs under the table. When I asked, she just laughed.

She’d been here in Seoul, staying with her mother, for a few days and had to leave Korea in another week or so. I figured she could afford a nice hotel room but she didn’t think much of the idea.

“You man,” she said.

Since I was paying for it, we went to a rundown
yoguan.

She didn’t want to wash me like the business girls do and she balked when I asked her for a particularly intimate sexual favor.

“It’s only our first date,” she said.

They go to hell fast when they go to the States.

At dawn, gray light filtered through the tattered cloth curtain covering the small window. Miss Lim lay next to me, naked. Thanks to Miss Lim I was not too hung over and I lay still in the bed, trying to put myself in Kimiko’s place and imagine where she might have gone.

Kimiko was old enough to have been born during the Japanese occupation of Korea. That’s probably why she used a Japanese woman’s name, Kimiko, as her working name. She had seen Korea transformed from an Oriental colony into a hideous battlefield for warring superpowers and now into what verged on a modern industrial state. During all that time she had remained firmly entrapped on the lowest rungs of society.

I couldn’t begin to imagine what must be going through her mind. We were too different. My guess was, though, that she understood me and others like me—completely.

4

W
hen the first sergeant heard about Johnny he tried to take over the operation.

Ernie said, “You don’t want to do it that way, Top. Let me and George go in quietly and find out what’s going on with this guy before you send in the cavalry and the sirens and every glory hound in Eighth Army.”

The first sergeant stood up from behind his desk and leaned forward.

“All right. But I want this guy Johnny, whoever he is, arrested before close of business today. And don’t screw it up. The CG is screaming for a suspect. He has to keep explaining to the Koreans why no GI has been arrested yet and they don’t really want to hear it.”

“International relations, eh?”

“Don’t get cute, Bascom. Just get us the suspect.”

The first sergeant sat down and started to take a sip out of his coffee mug but realized it was empty. He got up, walked over to the metal coffee urn on the counter, tilted it, and cursed. It was empty, too.

Ernie and I looked at our full, steaming cups nervously. The first sergeant turned and looked at them, too.

“
And
you were late again. Both of you.” He sat back down behind his desk. “And why didn’t you give me the lead on this guy Johnny last night? We could have had him behind bars by now. The provost marshal is at the command conference room, as we speak, giving his briefing on our lack of progress on the case and getting his ass chewed. Don’t you guys have any loyalty?”

“Loyalty?” Ernie said. He looked at me. “Sure, We got loyalty.”

I sipped on my coffee. “Loads,” I said.

The first sergeant glared at us. One of his management techniques. His day was going too smoothly, I decided.

“What if he didn’t do it?”

“What?” He looked startled.

“What if Johnny didn’t kill Miss Pak Ok-suk? I mean all we have established so far is that he knew her and spent some time with her. No particular reason to believe that he was the guy who offed her.”

“He’s the boyfriend, isn’t he?” the first sergeant said. “It’s always the boyfriend.”

“Maybe he can prove where he was the night of the murder,” Ernie said. “Maybe he didn’t have an overnight pass. Or maybe he was Staff Duty Driver that night.”

The first sergeant toyed with his coffee mug. He gazed at it sourly. “We’ll worry about that shit once we get him behind bars.”

Burrows and Slabem breezed into the office.

Ernie stood up. “We’ll take care of the arrest, Top. Don’t sweat it.”

“What arrest?” Burrows said.

I tapped him on the chest. “Cardiac arrest. The one Top would have if you two guys ever actually dug out some information on your own.”

“What information?” Slabem said.

When we got to the Admin Office we waved at Miss Kim and trotted down the steps to Ernie’s jeep.

If we hesitated about going to the motor pool, the first sergeant might change his mind and send Burrows and Slabem. Not that they’d do a better job, they’d just do a more reliable one. Since Eighth Army needed a suspect, they’d arrest a suspect, and not pay any attention to frivolous bothersome facts.

Ernie popped the clutch, the wheels caught on the ice, and we jerked forward.

“Looks like Mr. Johnny stepped into a world of shit,” he said.

“Either that or we have.”

The jeep slid swiftly along the tree-lined avenues of Eighth Army Headquarters. My skin tightened at the rush of frigid air.

21 T Car was one of those great GI acronyms that actually stood for the Twenty-first Transportation Company, alias the motor pool: the place that provided the jeeps and the sedans and the buses and all the other requisite wheeled vehicles in support of the activities of the Eighth United States Army Headquarters. The huge open parking area was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with trident-pronged barbed wire. At the entrance a green arch covered the guard shack, emblazoned with a martial welcome and the insignia of the U.S. Army Transportation Corps.

The Korean guards waved us through. They knew Ernie.

Most of the other CID agents had to use the handful of sedans provided for their use at the detachment. Usually it was a half day’s work trying to prioritize the various cases everyone was working on and playing politics to see who got which sedan. After ending up with the clunker most of the time, Ernie took matters into his own hands and romanced the dispatchers down at 21 T Car into assigning him a jeep that they had managed to slip off the ready-for-duty list.

Two quarts of liquor every payday kept the jeep reserved and all regular maintenance was thrown in. We had the added advantage of being a little harder to spot by the bad guys, who had the makes and models of the CID sedans memorized.

“Where to first?” I asked

“Chief Winkle.”

Ernie jerked the wheel to the left and pulled up to a big ramshackle one-story wooden building that was the dispatchers’ office. He parked, locked the chain, welded to his floorboard, to the steering wheel, and got out.

Inside the building, he waved at the Korean dispatchers, who flashed big block-toothed grins, and we walked down a long narrow hallway until we came to the last office with a small wooden sign over the door that said CHIEF, DISPATCH.

Chief Warrant Officer-3 Frank Winkle sat ramrod straight in neatly pressed fatigues behind his cluttered desk. Talking on the phone, he looked for all the world like a worried doctor taking a discouraging lab report. He peered up, calm but concerned, then smiled when he saw Ernie.

“Okay, you got it,” he said. “Minus three on the Jets.” He hung up the phone, beamed at us, and waved to the empty lounge chairs. “Sit down, gentlemen. Just having a conversation with the ambassador. What can I do for you today?”

“The ambassador? Ours?”

“The same.”

“He bets football?”

“Oh, no. He just likes to match wits with the odds makers. Merely a hobby of his.”

Chief Winkle ran what was, as far as I knew, the only bookmaking operation for American sports in the Republic of Korea. His busiest time of the year was the pro football season, but he also took bets on baseball, basketball, and boxing. He used the betting line that was published every Thursday in the
Pacific
Stars
&
Stripes.
His trusted customers were allowed to place bets over the phone and he’d collect when he saw them, usually at the Embassy Club or the United Nations Compound Club. If they won, he had a Korean soldier transport their winnings directly to them in a U.S. government vehicle. He was in the perfect spot for running his operation—the transportation hub of the post.

If Burrows and Slabem ever found out about it, they’d bust him for sure, but of course nobody bothered to tell them. My guess was that the first sergeant knew about Chief Winkle but either he placed bets with him or the provost marshal did—maybe both. After all, betting on pro football is the national pastime. Nothing to get upset about.

“What can I help you with, Ernie?”

“I’m looking for a young Gl who works here at 21 T Car named Johnny. I realize that doesn’t narrow it down much but the girls out in the ville say that his running partners are called Freddy and Sammy.”

“What’d this fellow do?”

“Possibly murder.”

“Not that little girl they found out in the ville?”

“The same.”

The chief sighed. So much corruption in the world. Why couldn’t everyone be satisfied with something nice and sedate, like wagering?

“I know Johnny,” he said. “I know Freddy and Sammy, too. They’re just young kids. Fun-loving, boisterous. Your typical GIs, full of life. I can’t believe that they’d do … that.”

I asked, “Were they involved in anything, Chief?”

Winkle narrowed his eyes. “Like what?”

“Like your operation, for instance.”

“No. Not at all. I doubt that they even know about it. I don’t think they were even black-marketing. Just your average kids. Goofing off, pretending they were working to stay out of trouble during the day and then running the ville every night, chasing the girls. That’s all they had on their minds. Business girls.”

“Where can we find them?” Ernie said.

“They work in the motor pool. Get assigned to different jobs. Hold on, I’ll check.” The chief lifted up his phone and dialed some numbers rapid fire. “Hello, Joe? Yeah. I need to know where that kid Johnny Watkins is working today. No, he doesn’t owe me any money but you do. Okay, okay, okay. Payday. That’ll be fine. Now look it up for me, will ya?” The chief drummed his fingers on the desk. Joe came back on the line. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Joe. See ya.”

Chief Winkle cradled the phone. “He’s working for data processing. Been there a couple of weeks.”

“Regular duty hours?”

“Yeah.”

We thanked him and left. The ringing of his phone followed us down the hallway.

Eighth Army’s data is processed in a green cinder-block building fit snugly into a long row of offices in the main headquarters complex of Yongsan Compound. From time to time on Sundays I had walked down the tree-lined lanes with a soft female hand in mine, when the only sound was the rustling of the leaves and the gurgling of the creek that ran through the heart of the compound. Today the data processing building was full of buzzing and beeping and the quick movements of overworked clerks.

“Can I help you?”

She was a buxom thing with flows of red hair piled atop her head and a tight green Army Class-B uniform showing off her figure. I could have flashed her my badge but it always seemed overly dramatic to me.

“We’d like to see the NCO in charge.”

“Sergeant Parsons?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s out right now.”

I looked at the freckles across the bridge of her nose and her nice smile and somehow managed to keep my wiseass remarks to myself. Ernie clicked his gum.

I said, “We’re looking for Specialist Watkins. I understand he’s been assigned as your driver for the last couple of weeks. We just want to talk to him.”

“Oh, Watkins. Yeah.” She looked down at a chart on the counter between us. “He’s out on a run. Probably won’t be back until about four or four thirty.”

Ernie rolled his eyes. The first sergeant would have a fit.

I looked back at the girl’s bosom and then at the chart.

“Where’d he go?”

“He has to stop at a bunch of small compounds—at the PX’s and snack bars, places like that—and pick up their Ration Control Data Entry cards.”

“Is this his schedule?”

“Yes.” She ran a carefully manicured finger down the list. “Right now he should be at ASCOM City. His next stop is Yongdungpo.”

“Do you have a sheet of paper so I can write down this schedule?”

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll make a copy for you.”

A minute later she was back and handed me the extra copy.

“Do you have any idea where this guy has lunch?”

She giggled. “Knowing Johnny, it’s probably out in the village.”

We thanked her and ambled out.

“Not bad for a white woman,” Ernie said.

He started the jeep, rolled through the main gate, and jumped into the Seoul traffic. About twenty minutes later we crossed the Third Han River Bridge, heading south, across murky waters churning with ice.

The 362nd U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery Compound fit perfectly into the little village of Heichang-up. There were shops and restaurants and open-air produce markets and then a few feet of red brick wall, a gate, a few more feet of red brick wall, and then more shops and stores.