Mortal Allies (17 page)

“For what purpose?”

“A health-and-welfare visit. He could probably use some cheer.”

“I’ll go with you,” I muttered, “but if I had my druthers, I’d rather bean him with a baseball bat than cheer him up.”

The car was out front and it took us about two hours and more wrong turns than I can remember before we found the prison again. All the signs were written in Korean, and Katherine kept berating me, like it was my fault this country was filled with folks who put those goofy sticklike symbols on their signs. Some women are that way.

It was turning dark when we pulled into the courtyard. We left the driver with the car idling. It took a few more minutes to explain to a guard at a desk who didn’t speak any English why we were there. He kept looking at us like we were door-to-door salespeople, while I kept trying to use sign language to explain what we wanted. I was pointing at the white wall, and repeating “Whitehall,” over and over. I thought it was pretty clever, but Katherine kept glaring at me like I was a complete dolt. At least until the guard finally grinned and started shaking his head up and down, like an overeager puppy who finally got it.

Then he left us there a few moments till he came back accompanied by the big goon with shoulders like an ox.

“You wish to see Whitehall?” he asked, giving us that toothy grin.

“Please,” I humbly said. “Only for a few minutes.”

He crossed his thick arms across his huge chest. “You should’ve called ahead.”

“So sorry about that,” I said. “We are relying on your overabundant generosity to allow us to see him.”

He scowled at me a few seconds, like he thought I was pulling his leg, or maybe he didn’t like being called a generous person, but then he dropped his arms and indicated for us to follow him. We made the same trek. Again, it was so eerily quiet, I swear I heard a guy break wind up on the third floor.

“What’s this, reading hour again?” I remarked.

“No, this is prayer hour.”

“How’s that one work?”

“They pray to God for forgiveness.”

“They’re all Christian?”

“Not when they get here. But they all leave Christian.”

We were at Whitehall’s cell by that time, and the big Korean was digging through his pockets for the key.

“I am the only one with one of these,” he said, as he stuck it in and gave it a hard twist. “It is for Whitehall’s safety. There are many men here who would gladly kill him. Even guards.”

I let that one pass as Katherine and I stuck our heads inside the cell. What I didn’t say was that I wouldn’t mind killing him myself.

It took a moment to adjust our eyes. The dim light in the overhead cage barely emitted enough rays to make it to the floor.

“Thomas?” Katherine said.

There was a slight rustling in the corner of the tiny cell. “Katherine, is that you?”

“Yes. How are you?”

“I’ve been better,” he said. “Come in.”

So we did. The room stank. Obviously Whitehall was using the little metal bowl for his toilet, and just as obviously the bowl wasn’t being emptied.

“Excuse me,” Katherine said, talking to the big Korean, “why don’t you have someone collect his waste? For God’s sake, this is disgusting. He’ll catch some terrible disease.”

“Not to worry,” the man assured her. “We collect the bowl every third day. He shouldn’t have eaten so much before he entered. Soon his body will be purged, and his new diet will correct the problem.”

In other words, pretty soon Whitehall would be getting only small portions of rice and water, so he wouldn’t be producing much human waste. Very economical, these Korean prison officials.

I said, “Could you relocate about fifty feet away? We have to discuss a few things with our client, and American law affords us the privilege of confidentiality.”

“Certainly,” he said, smiling like it was a particularly stupid request.

My eyes were now fully adjusted and I carefully examined our client. He was wearing Korean prison garb that consisted of some coarse gray cotton pajamas and a pair of cloth slippers. His lips and face seemed oddly misshapen, and either he had two pretty serious black eyes or he was turning into a raccoon.

“Pretty rough?” I asked him.

“Very rough,” he said.

“Who did this to you?” Katherine demanded, sounding pissed to beat the band.

“Don’t worry about it,” Whitehall said.

“No, I won’t ignore this. I—”

“I said, forget it!” Whitehall yelled, so insistently I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had reached out and punched her.

“Damn it, Thomas, they can’t do this to you.”

“Katherine, they can do much worse than this to me. Don’t make them angry.”

Katherine said, “I’ll go see the minister of justice. If I have to, I’ll hold a press conference and tell the whole world what’s happening here.”

Whitehall collapsed onto his sleeping mat. “What in the hell do you think caused this in the first place? They dragged me out of my cell in the middle of the night, took me to a room to watch you on CNN, then beat the crap out of me. No more damn favors, huh?”

I could hear Katherine draw in a deep breath.

Before she could say any more, I said, “Other than that, how’s things?”

“Unbearable.”

“Think you could stand this the rest of your life?”

There was a moment of still silence. Then out of the shadows he said, “I’d kill myself.”

It sounded fairly bizarre because he didn’t say it angrily, or forcefully, or even threateningly, like most folks would say it, either to garner some sympathy or to make you offer to do something. His tone was perfectly flat, absolutely unaffected, like it was just a fact.

I said, “Captain Whitehall, the more I look into your case, the more likely it seems you’re facing just that. Your only chance is me and Katherine here. You’re going to have to tell us more.”

A reflective look came to his face. The truth was, I’d been sadistically hoping a few days of Korean prison would make him sing like a castrated canary.

“All right,” he finally said, “I’ll answer two more questions. So pick wisely.”

“Tell me about Lee No Tae,” I said.

I heard him release a heavy sigh, and he didn’t say anything for a long moment. That moment stretched on so long, I worried that I’d picked something so vexing or embarrassing that he was going to go back on his word.

He finally said, “I’m sure this will sound sick to you, but we were in love. It started about five months ago. His sergeant sent him into finance to collect some forms and I was there checking on something, and we took one look at each other, and both of us just knew.”

“Five months?” I said.

“That’s right. That’s why I got the apartment off base. It was our . . . well, I’m sure you get the picture. I could see him, spend time with him, be alone in our private space.”

“You . . . uh, you what? You
dated
him for five months?”

“Regularly.”

“Then . . . what about witnesses? There must’ve been witnesses?”

“No, no witnesses. At least, none I know of. When you’re a gay in the Army, Major, you’re extraordinarily careful about these things. You get very expert at sneaking around in the dark. And if you’re a Korean, it’s even worse.”

“Why?”

“Why what? Why do we sneak around?”

“No. I think I got that part. Why are Korean homosexuals so paranoid?”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t know. Educate me.”

“Because in Korea, homosexuals are lower than any other life form. Many Asians are viciously prejudiced. They’re all very big on their racial bloodlines, and they despise anybody who makes that blood seem in any way tainted or perverted. Korean homosexuals are nonpeople, pariahs, beneath contempt. They don’t even peek out of the closet. That’s the world No lived in. He was scared to death about being discovered. Even more scared than me.”

“But everybody, the Koreans, the American Army, even Moran and Jackson, they’re all saying he was straight. How do you account for that?”

“Moran and Jackson know better. The rest of them probably believe he was. He was very persuasive. He even went so far as to date women, just to elude suspicion. They liked him, too. He was beautiful, you know. When he’d walk into a room, they’d all start eyeing him, as though he were a stud bull.”

“Did his parents know?”

“Absolutely not. That’s the single thing that scared No the most. He adored his parents. He knew it would kill them. I sometimes had this fantasy that he’d move back to the States with me, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He would never do anything to shame or disappoint his parents.”

This sounded like some weird twist on Romeo and Juliet, the old doomed love story, only in this case I somehow didn’t feel any surge of sympathy for the afflicted lover.

“Okay,” I said, moving along. “Your apartment was locked. There were no signs of a break-in, so if you didn’t kill Lee, that leaves only Moran and Jackson. If you had to pick one of them, which would it be?”

He mulled that over for a moment. For a frame defense to succeed, we had to have a scapegoat we could pin this on. We didn’t necessarily have to prove Moran or Jackson did it, but we had to create enough doubt in the minds of the court-martial board that they weren’t sure who did do it. In other words, there had to be a reasonable doubt that Whitehall was the guy.

What he finally said was, “Neither of them would’ve done it.”

“That’s not what I asked. Give us something to go on. Which one of the two?”

“Look, Major, maybe I’m terribly naive, I just don’t believe either of them could’ve done it.”

“Damn it, Whitehall, grow up. They’re both saying you did it.”

He snapped right back. “That’s not what they’re saying. I’ve read their testimonies. They’re saying they thought they heard a loud argument. They’re saying that No was in my room, with me. They’re saying I removed the belt from No’s neck. Except for the argument, that’s all true.”

I couldn’t argue with him on that point, since I hadn’t yet read the statements they’d made to Bales on the second go-around.

“Did Moran rape him?” I asked.

“You’ve gone beyond your allotted questions.”

“Who cares? Just answer the question.”

“No. You do some more research and come back to me again.”

I wanted to thrash him. The guy was living on rice and water, had twice been beaten, and was facing either a death sentence or life in a Korean prison — which he’d already said was tantamount to a death sentence. Despite all that, he was still playing ring around the rosy. The guy either had sawdust between his ears, or he had a death wish.

Maybe that was it, I suddenly realized. Maybe the damned fool wanted to become a martyr to the gay movement, a suffering Lothario who’d sacrificed himself for the cause. But that would only succeed if he was innocent. Which he wasn’t.

I glanced over at Katherine and she just shrugged her shoulders, like, What can you do?

“Look, Whitehall,” I said, “I have to be honest here. You’re starting to piss me off. We’ve got eleven more days to prepare your defense, so you better stop playing games.”

“I’m not playing games, Major. I’ve got my reasons.”

He was hunched over in a stubborn posture and it was pretty damned obvious I wasn’t going to get him to relent. I felt my temper rising. One of his co-counsels was in a hospital room on the edge of death, while the rest of us were working feverishly to defend him. The hell he wasn’t playing games.

I gritted my teeth and asked, “Could you at least tell me what the hell you’d like us to plead? Guilty or innocent?”

“Innocent, of course.”

“Innocent of what? Of homosexual acts? Of consorting with enlisted troops? Of rape? Of murder? Of necrophilia?”

“You tell me, Major. Isn’t that your job? You do your research, then come back and advise me.”

I couldn’t believe this. The guy was acting impudent. I glared at him through the darkness. He stared right back, unruffled. As for Katherine, the only sound I could hear coming from her was slow, shallow, tightly controlled breathing.

Why in the hell wasn’t she as mad as I was? Why wasn’t she jumping up and down and screaming at this jerk? She was the lead counsel, the anointed one sent over to save this guy. She should’ve been the one coaxing and boxing her client into opening up. She should’ve been livid with rage because he was being stupid and making it impossible for us to adequately defend him.

She wasn’t, though. She was as calm as ice.

I
had to wait until eleven o’clock that night to call the chief of the JAG Corps. He wasn’t in, but I got his deputy, a brigadier general named Courtland, which is another fabulous name for a lawyer, if you ask me. I’d worked with Courtland a few times over the years. We didn’t know each other well, but we were on first-name terms. Which, in the Army, meant he called me Sean, and I called him General.

I said, “Good morning, General. I hope it’s a nice day back there.”

“It’s hot and steamy back here. I’ve got a meeting in five minutes. What do you need, Sean?”

“I was wondering if you could tell me who’s been assigned as the prosecutor for the Whitehall case?”

“Uh, yeah sure. Eddie Golden. You know him?”

It was a perfectly duplicitous query because everybody in the JAG Corps knows Eddie Golden. Or at least they know of him.

The Navy and Marine Corps aviation wings have this nifty title they bestow on their most hot-shit fighter pilot, the Top Gun, which everybody in the world now knows about because of the corny movie of the same name. Although the Army JAG Corps doesn’t fly lethal arabesques like fighter pilots, we do have our own silly little version of this badge of honor, and it is known as the Hangman. It goes to the prosecuting attorney who’s put away the most bad guys. For the past six years, Eddie’s been the undisputed Hangman.

Eddie and I had faced off against each other twice in court, and obviously, since Eddie was still the reigning Hangman, I hadn’t made a dent in his record. To my credit, nobody held it against me — except my clients, of course — because both were fairly hopeless cases. But having seen Eddie in action at first hand, I was awed.