Mortal Allies (12 page)

“We have the right to see our client,” Katherine insisted in her most frigidly commanding tone. The cop grinned and stared down at her. For all we knew, he didn’t speak a word of English.

“Please,” I very humbly lied, “we are only trying to ensure our client is given adequate treatment. We have an appointment to report back to Minister of Justice Chun. Would you please be so kind as to allow us to proceed?”

“No problem,” he finally replied, in almost perfect, oddly colloquial English. Then he gave us a big, frosty smile. “You can visit his cell. But you may not speak with him. Not today. In Korean prisons we believe the first day is crucial. The prisoner must learn to respect our rules. He must learn his place in our order. Whitehall will not be damaged as long as he obeys our rules.”

Odd that he chose the word “damaged,” as though he was referring to a piece of property rather than a human being.

Katherine had a horrified look, but frankly, even American prisons play by the same rule. Not as aggressively, perhaps, but it’s the same principle. Make the right first impression and things go smoother for everybody.

The officer led us inside. We walked down some long, well-lit hallways and through several sets of steel doors, until we found ourselves inside a large chamber with three floors of cells. Unlike American prisons, which are rambunctious and kinetically noisy, this chamber was profoundly silent. I thought at first it must’ve been empty, but as we proceeded, almost every cell contained a prisoner. They were all sitting upright on the floors, legs tightly crossed, like they were propped up at attention. Not a one of them was so much as breathing heavily.

“This is reading time,” our muscle-bound companion informed us.

“I don’t see anyone with a book,” I casually mentioned.

That brought a wolfish smile. “The book is inside their heads. We call it the Book of Regrets. They must spend three hours every morning contemplating their debt to society.”

He stopped and dug a key out of his pocket. Opening a cell door, he ushered us through the entry.

The cell was maybe four by seven feet. It looked like a tall coffin. There was a thin sleeping mat on the floor, and a small metal bowl for the toilet. There were no windows, only a dim light inside a cage on the ceiling. The cell was cold. It smelled — of human waste, of vomit, of despair.

Katherine looked around and shuddered.

“Don’t worry,” the officer assured us, beaming even more broadly. “I am personally responsible for Captain Whitehall. I will take excellent care of him.”

You can imagine how reassuring that was to hear.

F
our boxes were in my room when I got back. I called room service and told them to send up a fresh pot of coffee every hour, on the hour. Then I dug in.

It went down like this.

At five o’clock in the morning on May 3, First Sergeant Carl Moran called the desk sergeant at the Yongsan Military Garrison MP station and reported there was a dead body located in Apartment 13C, Building 1345, Namnoi Street, Itaewon. Then he abruptly hung up.

Ten or fifteen minutes of confusion erupted. The apartment building was on Korean territory, not American military property. The MP station shift officer was new to Korea and uncertain of the proper protocols. He finally reached the colonel in charge of the MP brigade and asked for guidance. The colonel ordered him to call Police Captain Nah Jung Bae, the commander of the Itaewon station, to notify him of the report and request a joint investigating team.

Itaewon is a fairly famous place. It is located right outside the back gate of the Yongsan Garrison, and one thing it’s famous for is its thousands of tiny, cramped, goods-laden shops that cater to foreign shoppers. This is where tourists and soldiers go when they want a leather jacket, or a pair of Nikes, or a knockoff polo shirt. What it’s also famous for is a red-light district that also caters to foreign shoppers, only this is where foreigners go to pick up nasty cases of syphilis and gonorrhea. Because alcohol, whores, and soldiers are a notoriously flammable combination, the Itaewon Police Station and the MP brigade do lots of business together.

The shift commander did what his colonel ordered. He called the Korean police chief and then dispatched two military police officers to the apartment building. By the time the MPs got there, some twenty South Korean policemen, headed by a detective, were already on the scene.

Sergeant Wilson Blackstone was the ranking member of the MP team. He immediately got antsy and therefore radioed back to his shift commander and requested to be reinforced by somebody from the Criminal Investigation Division, or CID.

Sergeant Blackstone’s written statement pointedly failed to explain what bothered him at the crime scene, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to make a few logical deductions. American police methods are the most advanced in the world. Fingerprint and fiber analysis, which have been used extensively by American police departments for over half a century, are only now working their way into the police arsenals of developing nations. More elaborate wizardry, such as chromosomal tracing or more sophisticated pathological techniques, is still vastly beyond the grasp of all but a handful of very wealthy, scientifically advanced nations.

When these tools aren’t available to your police departments, you don’t train your flatshoes to treat a crime scene like a hospital operating room, the way American cops get taught. What I guessed Sergeant Blackstone might’ve observed was twenty gloveless, low-tech cops scurrying around the apartment, disturbing crucial evidence, touching things they shouldn’t have been touching, dropping their own hairs all over the place, and just generally contaminating the crime scene with all kinds of impurities. It was only a guess. However, it would be extremely helpful to our case if I was right.

It took thirty minutes for the MP station to roust a CID investigator from his bunk, for him to get dressed and drive to the apartment building.

His name was Chief Warrant Officer Michael Bales, and the instant he arrived he became the lead American investigator. I read his statement with great care. It was well written, highly descriptive, and very concise — all signs he was likely to be a highly observant, fairly bright flatshoe.

When Bales arrived, he observed Sergeant Blackstone in a heated argument with Chief Inspector Choi, the lead Korean investigator. Blackstone wanted the Korean inspector to make his folks back off. Choi wanted Blackstone to shut up. Choi was insisting this was his country, and his murder case, and a Korean victim, and he didn’t like being told how to do things on his own turf.

We defense attorneys love this kind of thing. It’s often said that more cases have been blown on cop territorial disputes, and the confusion that results, than on proof of innocence. I marked this as yet another possible vulnerability in the prosecutor’s case.

Bales then approached Choi. Bales wrote that they knew each other and had a strong rapport. I guessed Bales sweet-talked him for a while, because things suddenly turned warm and friendly.

Choi led Bales to a bedroom where three American servicemen with nervous countenances were leaned up against a wall. Two Korean policemen stood guard to prevent them from confiding and building common alibis.

Choi then took Bales to another small bedroom where a naked body lay on a sleeping mat. The body rested on its back. There was a long purple welt around the neck, a sign that powerful force had been applied. The tongue protruded from the mouth, and the eyes bulged outward. The skin pallor was gray, an indication that a great deal of blood had already drained out of the head, presumably because someone had removed the tourniquet that caused the strangulation. Bruises and bloody abrasions covered the victim’s arms, shins, and stomach. Bales hazarded the logical guess that the victim had put up a fierce struggle.

Choi informed Bales that when he and his investigators got there, the corpse was lying on its side. Something had been wrapped around the victim’s neck, but one of the three Americans had removed it before the Korean police arrived at the scene. The victim’s uniform was lying in a pile on the floor. Choi said the nametag on the uniform identified the victim as Lee No Tae. Choi said he had already called in that name to the Itaewon station for further identification.

A few minutes later came a call on the radio, and they all learned that Lee No Tae was the son of the minister of defense. That had a gut-tightening effect on the South Korean police officers, who until that point, according to both Blackstone and Bales, had been almost lackadaisical and haphazard in their activities. Murders were common enough in Itaewon, and South Korean police officers, like cops everywhere, adopt a kind of jaundiced, unhurried, seen-it-all approach, if for no other reason than to impress upon their peers that they’re emotionally callused.

The calluses suddenly disappeared. They all looked like their asses were on fire. Three more South Korean detectives appeared within minutes, then the station commander, then the chief of police, then the mayor of Seoul himself. Bales described it as a long procession of busybody officials with worried expressions, all shouting out instructions and trying to appear more important and commanding than the last.

Crime scene photos were shot, evidence was bagged and tagged, the corpse was rushed off to a Korean hospital, and an immediate autopsy was requested.

The three Americans weren’t interrogated until two hours after the first police officer arrived on the scene. They were first transported to the Itaewon Police Station, where they were booked, then to the American MP station at Yongsan Garrison. Bales handled the interrogation. Inspector Choi sat beside him and acted as the liaison.

Very interesting. There were some strong possibilities here — at least if you went with the strategy I’d advocated, of knocking holes in the prosecutor’s case. Assuming, of course, that Whitehall didn’t hang himself in his interrogations.

I was opening the folder that contained Whitehall’s initial statement when the phone rang. It was Carlson. She coldly ordered me to get my butt up to the office. I told her I was busy. She said she didn’t care if I was busy. I told her I was doing something vitally important. She said what she wanted to talk about was much more important. She hung up.

I just love it when somebody hasn’t got a clue what you’re doing, yet still insists that what they’re doing is more important. Maybe I was tying a tourniquet around a severed artery in my leg. I obviously wasn’t, but how in the hell did she know that?

Anyway, like a good soldier, I locked my room and headed up to the hair parlor with the HOMOS sign over the door. As before, I looked around and checked carefully to make sure nobody was watching.

Imelda was again ensconced on one of the big rotating chairs in the middle of the floor. A stack of legal documents rested on her stomach. Her nose was tucked inside a thick folder. I heard her snort with disapproval at something as I walked by.

I entered Carlson’s office, where Keith, Allie, and Maria were seated and listening to their boss jabbering to somebody on the phone.

“Uh-huh,” she was saying. “Good. The sooner the better.”

She listened for a moment, then said, “CNN today, then NBC and ABC in the morning. That’s the best order. CNN always presents flat news without editorial twist. Give ABC and NBC enough time and they’ll make it look like a minidrama.”

I listened as she continued coordinating details. I developed this real queasy feeling.

Finally Carlson finished. She triumphantly hung up the phone and then shared quick, satisfied nods with the other three.

“What’s going on here?” I asked.

Before she could answer, the door swung open and in came a big, dykish-looking woman wearing way too much makeup, and hauling a microrecorder from a strap on her shoulder. She hugged Katherine, then they kissed. Uh-huh, I got that. Then a man with a big camera slung on his shoulder barged his way into the overcrowded office.

“Where do you want to do it?” the woman asked.

“Outside,” Carlson answered, standing up.

“What is this?” I stupidly asked. I mean, it was damned obvious what it was. A catastrophically bad idea was what it was.

The other three happily followed the camera crew out the door while I threw my arm across the sill and blocked Carlson. I gave her a hard look. “I don’t like being ignored. I’m going to ask one more time. What the hell is this?”

“Isn’t it obvious? We’ve got a one-minute spot on CNN.”

“Don’t.”

“It’s already scheduled.”

“Don’t,” I pleaded. “It’s a really bad idea.”

“Nonsense,” she said with an apathetic shrug. “It’s perfectly harmless. All they want is a quick puff piece on the defense team. Follow me. You’ll see.”

Some inner sense told me I shouldn’t. But to my everlasting regret, I ignored it. I put my arm down and she squeezed past me. I shuffled a few steps behind her. She preceded me out the front entrance and then mysteriously paused till I was walking beside her. To my immense surprise, she put her tiny right hand on the crook of my elbow, started waving her left hand in the air, and began flapping her jaw.

I didn’t pay any attention to what she was saying, though. I was too busy gawking at the cameraman, who had his lens pointed at the two of us. I felt like a spastic deer staring at the headlights of the thirty-wheeled semi roaring down on him. About five awkward seconds passed before I swiftly disengaged my arm and spun on her.

“What the hell—” I blurted.

“Major Drummond,” the CNN reporter asked, jamming her microphone in my face. “Is it true your client was beaten by the South Korean police?”

I gave Carlson a blistering stare, and she tilted her head in a challenging cant.

I looked at the reporter, my face clouded with anger, my jaws tightly clenched. “No comment,” I growled.

She paused, apparently confused, then asked, “Is that all you have to say?”

“No damned comment to that, either,” I roared, this time saying it with enough emphasis in all the right places that she had to get the message.