Mortal Allies

CHAPTER 10

The Evac Hospital was a sprawling, one-floored building that reeked of antiseptic and excessive cleanliness. I asked the receptionist where to find Captain Wilson Bridges and she spat out some quick-fire instructions that sounded like “Take six right turns, then three or four lefts, then two rights, then walk down a long hallway.” It was a small place, so I figured no problem, and set off. Twenty minutes later I found it.

Bridges’s office turned out to be a tiny hovel all the way at the back of the building, like maybe they were trying to hide him back there, out of sight of the observant public. I knocked on the door, it opened, and I immediately saw why.

Wilson Bridges was probably the sorriest excuse for an Army officer I ever saw. His white doctor’s coat was wrinkled, stained, and splotched with things I didn’t even want to imagine. His hair was way too long and wildly disarrayed, almost spiky. There were tiny hair sprouts on his face where his razor had missed, and the combat boots that protruded from the bottom of his medical robe were gray and cracked, so starved were they for polish.

Ever the optimist, however, I perceived these blemishes as fairly hopeful signs. A little-known rule of thumb about Army docs is to never, ever go near the ones with crew cuts, starched BDUs, mirrorlike shoes, and the upright bearing of a drill sergeant. Odds are they want to be Army officers more than they want to be doctors. It’s the guys who look like they just got yanked out of the dryer you want operating on you. Chances are, their passion is for medicine, not marching and saluting. On the other hand, that theory sometimes turns out to be horribly wrong. Sometimes the doctor looks like a careless, disgusting slob because he really is. He’s the guy who’ll end up tying your aorta to your kneecaps.

He stuck out his hand. “Wilson Bridges. MD extraordinaire.”

“I know,” I said. “We just spoke on the phone, remember?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, grinning. “Sorry. It’s just that you don’t look like a lawyer.”

“Really,” I asked. “And what do lawyers look like?”

“Smart.”

I could’ve retorted that he looked more like a field sanitation worker than a doctor, but why waste an insult?

“Listen, Doc, I hate to rush things, but I’m in a hurry. Where’s the corpse?”

He waved a hand for me to follow, then led me to the absolute rear of the hospital and down some stairs that went into the dimly lit basement.

“We’ve only got a tiny storage facility,” he explained. “And be sure you make your reservation well in advance, because there’s only four drawers. Ordinarily, as soon as they expire, we stick ’em on the next plane going stateside.”

“Why was Lee turned over to you?” I inquired.

“Damned if I know. I was told to pick him up and move him over here.”

“Were you involved in the autopsy?”

“Nope. It was an all-Korean production. And don’t draw the wrong impression from that. They’re no slouches, believe me. This kid was done by a guy named Kim Me Song.”

“He any good?”

“He’s the guy they send to all the international conferences to make sure everybody believes Korean medicine is the best in the world.”

I said, “Shit.”

He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Guess you’d expect them to use the best on this kid, what with him being the son of the big kahuna.”

“I guess,” I said. I said it in a dismayed way, too, because there was every chance Dr. Kim Me Song was going to end up on the witness stand, and it’s never good to hear the prosecution’s got the A-team on their side.

We took a left into a tiny room that was quite cold. A special air-conditioning unit was positioned in the corner, pumping out frigid air at full blast. Bridges buttoned up his spattered doc’s coat and walked straight to a wall with four aluminum drawers. He reached down to the bottom row and slid one open.

“Voila!” he announced as he unzipped the body bag and yanked it down all the way to Lee’s feet, like he was a magician on a stage.

I glowered at him, then bent over and looked closely at Lee No Tae. The body was completely naked, stiff and pale. Somebody had obviously gone to the trouble to rearrange Lee’s facial expression, because he looked content, even peaceful, which was a far cry from the description in Chief Bales’s statement. What I guessed was that the father had come to have a last look at his dead son, and the Korean doctors had done the best they could to make it seem like he’d passed through the doorway to eternity without any pain and misery.

He was a very good-looking kid, with a narrow face, a long, aristocratic nose, a high, intelligent-looking forehead, and a muscular, well-proportioned figure. He looked much like what I suspect his father looked like as a younger man.

Bridges joined me in my inspection. He stood just to my left and I saw his eyes roving down the length of the body. You could still see the bruises and abrasions.

I asked, “Did anybody here get a copy of the autopsy results?”

“Yeah, I think I got a copy… maybe a few days after I collected the body. I haven’t read it, though.”

He walked over to a desk in the corner, opened a drawer, and rummaged around until he yanked out a manila folder. He stood and read it, while I continued observing Lee’s body. I had no idea what I was looking for, in fact, had really only come over to get a firsthand look at the subject who’d caused me such immense misery. That really wasn’t fair, since I sure didn’t want to trade places with him, but it’s so much easier to heap blame on an inanimate object than somebody who can argue back.

I found myself fixated on Lee’s face. I have this theory that life gives most folks pretty much the face they deserve. We all start out as rotund little babies, with plump cheeks and tiny lips, a button for a nose, and lively, sparkling eyes. That cuddly cuteness wears off. By the time we’re grown, some folks have grumpy faces, some thoughtful, some resentful and selfish, and some have no distinguishing look at all, just a bland emptiness, which I guess says something in itself.

Lee’s face was nearly beatific. There was a clean, almost surreal wholesomeness, unblemished by sorrow, or anxiety, or greed, or any other petty emotional ailment. It was the face of someone who’d had a happy childhood, loving parents, no riveting insecurities or life-shattering failures. I found myself liking him. And it gave me an insight into his mother and his father, because nobody gets a face like that who wasn’t embalmed in love nearly from the moment of conception.

I also found myself not liking Thomas Whitehall very much, for murdering and despoiling this cold cadaver on the table. He’d stolen this boy’s life and robbed his parents of a cherished jewel.

“All done,” Bridges announced from the corner.

“Huh?” I asked, surprised that I’d lost track of everything around me. I’m not ordinarily the sentimental type, so this wasn’t good. If a brief look at Lee No Tae had that unsettling effect on me, just imagine how a court-martial board was going to feel after a voluble, able prosecutor spent a few hours leading them through Lee’s life, his promise, and the thoroughly putrid things done to him.

Bridges, holding up the folder, walked over. “It’s a really awful thing, isn’t it?”

“It really is,” I mumbled. It was a damned good thing he’d stopped with the bad jokes. If he’d tossed another one my way at that moment, I might’ve popped him in the nose.

“Not good,” he said, tapping the autopsy folder with a finger. “His blood-alcohol level was.051 at the time of death. He was legally sober. He’s got some fairly hard contusions and abrasions on his stomach, his shins, his feet tops, his hands, and his forearms. Look at his stomach particularly,” he said, pointing at each part of the anatomy.

I saw several large bruises and swellings on Lee’s stomach.

Bridges continued. “It took some very hard blows to cause those contusions to his midsection. Really just short of sledgehammers. The tissue damage is extreme and there are several shattered ribs. The cause of death was asphyxiation. The purple welt around his neck was made by a thin, flexible object, and the bruising striations, which you can’t see with the naked eye, indicate the object was roughly textured, like a cloth Army-issue belt. Judging by the contusions and broken blood vessels, it was pulled back with great force.”

“How about the sex stuff?” I asked.

“There was fairly serious enlargement of his anus. That’s highly unusual. We sometimes get cases here, men and women, who’ve engaged in anal sex and get something lodged inside. Typically, the muscle and tissue recover and return to normal size within ten minutes.”

“But his didn’t?”

“No. They measured it, and it was open nearly a full half-inch. There’s only one way that could happen. He had to be dead the last time he was penetrated. His blood flow had stopped and the muscles lost their ability to retract.”

We stared at each other a long moment, because this was a fairly disgusting topic, even for a doctor, much less a lawyer.

“You’d rule out any chance he was strangled while they were doing it? Like maybe one of those perverts who gets off being asphyxiated at the moment of climax?”

He stared again at the corpse. “First of all, the recipient in homosexual sex generally doesn’t climax. Second, even if Whitehall was penetrating him at the moment of death, the muscles would still have enough elasticity to retract. Unless that is, Whitehall remained inside for at least ten minutes after death. That’s possible, of course. And from a technical standpoint, that’s still necrophilia.”

“But you wouldn’t rule out that maybe they were playing around and doing that asphyxiation thing, and maybe got a little carried away?”

“I might, except for those bruises,” he said. “Those get in the way of that theory. He put up a fierce struggle.”

“I guess,” I morosely admitted. I’d ascertained that the autopsy results were apparently valid. They could be used to support every charge being leveled at Whitehall. I’d also ascertained that I didn’t like Thomas Whitehall very much.

In the process, I’d put myself in the worst mood I could remember.

I thanked Bridges for his help. I went to the hotel and headed straight to the bar. It was five o’clock and I felt I’d earned a good stiff drink. And who should I discover in there but Katherine herself, seated in a dark corner, wedged in behind the jukebox, which was belting out some melancholy song about where all the cowboys went.

I told the bartender to send over two glasses of scotch and then walked in her direction.

“You look like hell,” she said when she looked up and saw me.

She didn’t look so great herself, but a real gentleman would never, ever reciprocate and acknowledge that observation.

“That right, Moonbeam? Look who’s talking,” I spitefully said.

She hiked up her long skirt and used a foot to shove out a chair for me. I couldn’t help stealing a peek at that bare leg, since I couldn’t ever remember seeing her when she wasn’t wearing pants or a skirt that went all the way down to her ankles. For all I knew, she didn’t really have any legs, only two stout poles she hobbled around on.

But she did have legs, I quickly discovered. At least one leg, anyway. And it was the real good kind of leg, too; slender, and quite nicely sculpted. What a shame to waste that artillery on a gay woman, I thought.

“You drinking?” I asked.

“Only a beer for me,” she answered. “I can’t handle the hard stuff.”

“One beer,” I yelled across the room to the bartender, who was putting the finishing touches on my scotch. To Katherine I sourly remarked, “I guess they didn’t drink much in that commune you grew up in.”

She shot me this irritated look, because it was pretty damned transparent what I was thinking about her parents’ drug of choice.

“Have you ever been on a commune?” she asked.

“I saw some in Israel,” I admitted. “Not the flower-power kind.”

“You think the whole thing’s pretty asinine, don’t you?”

“Asinine… stupid – yeah, that sums it up.”

The bartender appeared with our glasses, and I called a truce long enough to take the first long sip from my scotch. It burned the whole way down my windpipe.

“What’s got a burr up your ass?” she asked, her eyes glued to my glass, which was now only half full.

“Try that you’re the one who dragged me into this, and I just came back from the morgue, where I spent twenty minutes with someone who looked like he used to be a real nice kid. Only he’s not breathing anymore. And our client seems to be the cause of it.”

“Did you review the autopsy results?”

“Yeah.”

She picked up her beer with both hands, took a long sip, then stared at me over the lip. “And what did you think?”

“What I think is our client’s going to end up strapped to a chair in a dark room in Leavenworth with a few thousand volts coursing through his limbs to teach him a lesson. He’ll deserve it, too.”

She put her elbow on the table and took a smaller, more ladylike sip from her beer. “Unless he was framed,” she finally said.

“Come on, Katherine, even you can’t really believe that crap.”

“Give me the benefit of the doubt for a moment,” she said. “You keep ordering me to listen, now give me a turn.”

“All right,” I said, with an expression designed specifically to let her know she was being humored. Nothing pissed off Katherine Carlson more than the suspicion somebody was humoring her.

She somehow ignored it. “Say, for the sake of argument, Thomas was so drunk he became virtually comatose. Say he was sound asleep when Lee was murdered, and the body was placed there to make it look like he did it.”

“Ah, come on,” I said.

“Suspend your disbelief for a moment.”

“Okay,” I said, “then you got two suspects. Moran or Jackson.”

“Which of the two would you home in on?”

“Moran. He’s big and he’s powerful. Lee No Tae wasn’t any weakling himself, and his body was covered with welts and scrapes and bruises. The doc told me the stomach bruises looked like they were done by a piledriver. Whole ribs were shattered. Whoever subdued him was probably pretty big, and damned strong.”

“Unless Lee was so drunk he couldn’t fend anyone off.”

“The problem with that,” I countered, “was that his blood-alcohol level was only.051. Maybe he was technically drunk at midnight, but by the time he was killed he’d sobered up enough to fend for himself.”

“Okay, good point,” she said. “And the autopsy showed no contusions on his head, like he’d been knocked out?”

“Nope. There were contusions all over his stomach, his arms, his hands, his shins, and his feet tops, but none on his head or face.”

“None anywhere on his face?” Katherine asked, sounding surprised, although I suspected this was a ruse, because she was too diligent not to have already reviewed the autopsy results.

“That’s right,” I admitted.

“Isn’t that odd?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Well, figure that he’s in a fight with his attacker. They’re struggling and Lee’s doing everything he can to get away. Why no blows to the face?”

She had a good point, but I had a better one. “Think about it, Katherine. If a guy was trying to rape him, he’d be coming at him from behind. That’s how the geometry works out between men.”

“Then how did his stomach and shins get bruised?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe the assault started from his front, then the attacker wrestled himself behind him. Remember, too, that somebody got a web belt around his neck, and the autopsy shows that the belt was being held from behind him.”

“Maybe,” she said, but without the slightest trace of conviction, mainly, I figured, because she was grasping at straws to build her frame defense and didn’t want to be particularly bothered by any distractions, like conflicting evidence, or good common sense.

I said, “Look, I know you don’t want to get into this again, but the more I learn about this case, the more dubious your frame defense looks.”

“Then you stay dubious,” she said. “Maybe it’ll do me some good to have an in-house skeptic.”

“Maybe. But you think about what you’ll do to our client if it turns out you’re wrong.”

“Speaking of which,” she said, taking a deep gulp from her beer, “are you up for visiting Thomas again?”

“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.