Jade Lady burning

4

When 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 amp; 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 GI 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.

Air defense. A part of daily life in this country.

The village sat south of the Han River, about fifteen miles as the crow flies from Seoul. Perfect for shooting up those North Korean pilots who’d just dropped all their ordnance on a bombing run of the South Korean capital. The compound had sat there, quietly, since the end of the Korean War. They’d been on alert plenty of times but so far they hadn’t had to use their pop guns, except in training.

A Korean gate guard and an American MP checked everyone who went in or out of the one-lane main gate. Rather than go through the hassle, Ernie and I just parked across the street, got comfortable, and waited for Specialist-4 Johnny Watkins to show up.

Old women, resplendent in their chima-cbogori, their traditional full-length Korean dresses, peered at us curiously. The young people strode by all in a bustle, paying us no attention. One old woman became so intent on trying to figure us out that she stuck her face into the jeep. Not a lot to do in these little towns. Ernie offered her a stick of gum.

She looked confused, her face wrinkled a little more, and then she withdrew and paraded slowly away.

Ernie leaned back in his big canvas-covered seat, his hands resting contentedly on the steering wheel.

“You think Johnny did it?”

“Hard to say. So far we don’t have much information. A girl killed. Brutally. Skewered and burned. Johnny knew her. Kimiko knew her. A whole bunch of other customers knew her. I don’t see any reason yet to pick this Spec-4 out of the crowd.”

“Other than he’s a GI and the Korean newspapers are assuming it’s a GI and the commanding general has to give them something.”

‘There’s that. But locking him up for a while won’t hurt him. And it’ll give us a chance to sort this shit out. If he did it, fine, we’ll burn his ass. If he didn’t, we’ll find out who did.”

“Better hope so. For his sake.”

Ernie spit his gum out the window, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. “One thing bothers me, though.”

“What’s that?”

‘The interrogations Captain Kim conducted. Nobody saw nothin’. Nobody heard nothing.”

‘That’s what I’d expect them to say.”

“But Captain Kim can be very persuasive. And he’s got enough power out in that village to twist the truth out of them. Yet he let them get away with claiming that nothing shit.” Ernie sat up and turned towards me. “You saw those hooches. They’re all jammed right against each other. And they’re not much more than plywood and plaster. If this guy hurt that girl that bad, and held her down and tied her up and then started a fire, somebody must have heard something! You know they did. They probably all know who the hell did it!”

‘They heard. For sure they heard something. But they didn’t necessarily see anything. People out there have a habit of not poking their noses outdoors at night.”

“Well, maybe they didn’t actually see the guy but they knew that something was going on. Hell, that’s why that landlady called the fire department so fast. She was wide awake. Listening to it all. And when she first smelled smoke, she called the fire department.”

I nodded slowly.

“But for some reason Captain Kim isn’t beating the truth out of them. He’s letting us work on the case in the blind, without any eyewitness accounts, pretending that he can’t get any information.” Ernie leaned closer and I could smell the spearmint and stale liquor on his breath. “He wants us to collar a GI on this end so he can clear the case. Even if the Gl is acquitted. By the time that happens, everyone will be convinced that he did it and just got off easy in the Korean court because he’s an American. It takes the pressure right off Captain Kim to find out who really did it.”

What Ernie said made a lot of sense. I couldn’t see any flaw in his logic, except one.

“Maybe we’re not giving Captain Kim enough credit. Maybe he is working on this case and maybe the next time we talk to him he’ll have come up with some leads.”

Ernie leaned back farther into his chair and crossed his arms. “Don’t count on it.”

“Why would Captain Kim not want to find the real guy?”

“Because it involves somebody high up. Somebody with power over him.”

“I don’t know, Ernie.”

Conspiracy theories make me nervous. My stomach churned for a while. Evil juices. I got out of the jeep and walked a few yards down the street to a shop with a big red sign over it that said yak-medicine. The middle-aged woman behind the counter blinked at me as I paid her for the Bacchus D, and when I got back inside the jeep I unscrewed the top and poured the entire contents of the little bottle down my throat in one greedy gurgle. It tasted like fruit juice-pears and pineapples-and did wonders for my stomach and my newly aroused headache.

I tossed the empty bottle in the backseat (Ernie’s boys at the motor pool would clean it out for him) and settled back in my seat to wait.

Twenty mi nutes later a hard-topped jeep pulled up to the front of the ADA compound. A sign in the window said, COURIER, DO NOT DELAY. The gate guard pulled back the chain across the gate and waved him through.

I got out of the jeep and walked over to the guard shack.

“Was that the guy who picks up the ration control stuff?”

The crewcut MP put down his comic book. “Yeah,” he said.

I motioned to Ernie and we got into position and waited some more. We didn’t wait long. When Johnny Watkins pulled up to the gate coming out, I stepped out of the guard shack and flashed my badge at him.

“Good morning, Johnny. I’m Investigator Sueсo. Just want to ask you a few questions about an acquaintance of yours out in the ville.”

“Who’s that?”

“Miss Pak Ok-suk.”

Johnny was a trim guy, blond, and he wore his fatigues loosely, like a pair of pajamas, unwashed and unstarched. He looked more like he should be on a surfboard at Doheny than driving a jeep for the Army in the Republic of Korea.

“Miss Pak? Sure. No sweat.”

He reached for his gearshift as if he were going to park the vehicle and then he let out the clutch, the engine squealed, and he leapt forward, just missing my foot.

Ernie was already making a U-turn as I ran towards the road. He slowed down to let me hop in, but not much.

Johnny got a good head start on us and we got trapped for a few seconds behind a three-wheeled truck overloaded with sacks of cement. Ernie jerked the wheel out into the oncoming traffic, stepped on it, and we barely nosed in front of the truck before a kimchi cab had a chance to plow into us, headfirst.

Johnny sped north towards the Han River and must have had the accelerator to the floorboard because his little buggy was moving. I thought I heard a Jan and Dean song in the background: “Dead Man’s Curve.”

Wasting ourselves in an auto accident wouldn’t be good, and losing Johnny and not making the arrest wouldn’t be good. What would be good would be for him to pull over and stop this foolishness, but that didn’t seem likely.

Ernie leaned forward, like a pointy-nosed demon, and let the little jeep do its thing. We were up to about sixty-five or seventy and I kept hearing little pings and coughs in the engine as if it were clearing its throat.

Up ahead at the river, the road took a sharp turn around a hill and I figured it for the curve that would get him. We heard honking but when we got around the curve ourselves the oncoming traffic was getting back into line and somehow Johnny had increased his lead. He sped past the entrance to the Third Han River Bridge and boogied on down the banks of the ancient River Han.

Ernie seemed to be getting angrier and taking more chances as Johnny increased his lead. He swerved in and out of traffic, his knuckles white on the wheel, and I saw his jaw moving and I wasn’t sure if that was his teeth I heard grinding or the gears of the engine.

We ran past the National Cemetery, green mounds rising gracefully up the side of a hill, and somehow I felt that it was appropriate for us to end here.

It was the water buffalo that finally got Johnny. It was on the road, towing an old wooden cart, an old farmer pulling it forward gently by the rope through the huge, snorting nostrils. The farmer’s wife and two children were in the cart, bundled up in quilts.

Johnny wasn’t expecting the traffic to slow that quickly. He slammed on his brakes and swerved to the left, but then had to jerk the wheel back to the right to avoid the man on the bicycle with pallets of eggs piled two feet above his head on the carrying rack behind him.

The eggs went down and Johnny lost control. He spun a couple of times and slid sideways into the water-filled ditch in front of a rice paddy.

Johnny wasn’t hurt too bad. Just bruised and shaken up. The guy on the bicycle had a broken leg-a compound fracture-and the biggest omelet I’d ever seen in my life. The water buffalo was okay.

Johnny wouldn’t be seeing any paychecks for a while. He’d be liable for the claims against the government on the eggs and the leg and the jeep. But that was the least of his worries.

I set him up on the edge of the road. He looked dazed. I slapped him a couple of times. It felt good but I was on duty, so I stopped.

Johnny Watkins blinked and then stared at me with big blue eyes.

“Miss Pak?” he said.

“No. My name is George.”

“Miss Pak? Is she dead?”

“Under the circumstances, yes.”

Johnny stared straight ahead for a while, along the splotches of frozen ice covering the rice paddy.

“We were going to get married,” he said.

I squatted down next to him. ‘That’s nice.”

“We already had the paperwork in. It was supposed to come back any day.”

I was touched. So was Ernie. But he was busy tiptoeing through the shattered eggs and listening to the cursing of the man with the broken leg.