Nightmare Range

THE BLACK MARKET DETAIL

A full-length dress clung to the soft, round parts of her short body like cellophane on a peach.

“Looks like we’ve found our culprit,” Ernie said.

We’d been sitting in the parking lot of the Yongsan Commissary for about thirty minutes, sipping acidic coffee, watching the housewives parade in and out, trying to decide which one to pinch for black-market activities. None of them had been good-looking enough. Until now. She pushed her overflowing shopping cart toward the taxi stand and smiled at the bright spring day. A voluptuous Oriental doll come to life.

“Instant coffee, strawberry jam, a case of oranges, about twenty pounds of bananas. Is she black marketing or what?”

“Either that or she owns a pet gorilla.”

The bag boy helped load her booty into the trunk of the big PX taxi. The driver closed the door for her after she climbed in the back seat, ran around, and started the engine.

Ernie tossed his Styrofoam cup onto the pavement and choked the old motor pool Jeep to life. He slammed the gear shift into low, we jerked forward, and I barely managed to keep what was left of my coffee from splashing all over the front of my coat and tie.

Shadowing hardened criminals is never easy.

Ernie slid expertly through the busy afternoon Seoul traffic and stayed within a few yards of the cab. In Itaewon the cabby turned left, ran the big Ford up a steep hill through a walled residential area, and took a quick right. Ernie waited at the base of the hill until he was out of sight and then, the sturdy old engine whining all the way, charged up after him. At the corner he turned off the Jeep and wedged us up against a stone wall.

I got out and peered around the corner. The cab driver was helping her unload the groceries. I went back to the Jeep and waited.

Most Korean wives of GIs will finish their black market activities in the afternoon before their husbands get home from work. They don’t want to jeopardize his military career by getting caught selling a few jars of mayonnaise and maraschino cherries for twice what they paid for them in the commissary. Sometimes the husbands are a little squeamish about the whole thing, but most of them like the extra income just as much as their wives do. An extra four or five hundred dollars a month. Easy. And if they get serious, go for the big ticket items-TVs, microwaves, stereo equipment-they can make as much as fifty thousand dollars during a one-year tour.

Ernie and I usually get stuck with the black market detail. Our job is to bust housewives, embarrass their husbands, and cut back on the flow of duty-free goods from the US bases to the Korean economy.

So far we’d managed to keep the deluge down to about a couple million dollars a week. Exactly what it has always been.

The cab driver finished unloading the groceries, accepted his tip with both hands, bowed, and in a few seconds the walled street was empty and quiet.

Ernie and I walked by her front gate. Stopped. Listened. Nothing I could make out.

Down about fifteen yards on the other side of the road was a small neighborhood store, fronted by an ice cream freezer and a couple of rickety metal tables under an awning emblazoned with the Oriental Beer logo. We rummaged around, Ernie bought some gum, and the old woman smiled as she came up with two paper cups to go with the liter of beer we bought. We sat outside, under the awning, and waited.

Spring was becoming summer in Korea and the afternoon was clear and bright but not hot. It reminded me of the endless days of sunshine I’d survived in foster homes throughout East LA. The sun had been as glaring and unrelenting as the gaze of the adults I’d been forced to live with. I’d cursed my mother for dying and my father for disappearing into the bottomless pit south of the border.

It hadn’t all been grim. One of my foster parents, Mrs. Aaronson, made sure I brought my schoolbooks home and then took the time to correct my homework. She showed me that arithmetic and spelling and science are all puzzles. Games. The greatest games. And as I lost myself in these games for hours, I looked forward, for the first time in my life, to being praised by the teacher and respected by the other children for something besides my fists.

The first payoff was when I joined the army and my high test scores earned me a brief stint in the military police. Later, I found myself graduating from the Criminal Investigation School-and on my way to Korea.

Ernie and I had gravitated toward each other somehow. The two duds of the CID Detachment. The first sergeant kept us together mainly to keep an eye on us. We both had this bad habit of following an investigation even after the right slots had been filled in the provost marshal’s statistical charts. They wanted a body count of GIs caught selling coffee in the village-not a report on how it was a customs violation for a general’s wife to ship Korean antiques back to the States at government expense and then sell them at a three hundred percent profit.

There was no briefing chart for that.

By all rights Ernie should have been in Georgetown trying to pass the bar exam or working his way up through the ranks of young stockbrokers on Wall Street. His dad, a big honcho somewhere in the government, expected it of him. But for Ernie, Vietnam had interrupted everybody’s plans.

Most people would blame his choices on the pure China White he was able to buy there from snot-nosed boys through the wire. But I knew him better than that. It was the loathing of routine, of predictability, that had caused him to reject a life of seeking riches in the States and caused him to reenlist in the army. And besides, he’d put down the heroin now-you couldn’t buy it in Korea anyway-and replaced it with the duty-free, shipped-at-taxpayer-expense, happy-hour-priced booze that gushed from the army warehouses like crude from a grounded tanker.

A Korean man wearing sandals, a T-shirt, and loose-fitting gray work pants rode past us on a sturdy bicycle.

Ernie elbowed me. “Must be the pickup, pal.”

The produce displays kept the man from seeing us, and Ernie and I got up, taking our beer with us, and faded deeper into the darkness of the grocery store.

The man parked his bicycle in front of the doll’s front gate and rang the bell. In less than a minute the door opened and the man went through, carrying some flattened cardboard boxes and some string.

We sat back down and finished our beer. Ready for action.

A rag dealer pushing a wooden cart on oversized bicycle tires rolled past us. He clanged his big rusty metal shears and wailed something incomprehensible to his prospective customers. A woman down the street, across from the doll’s house, came out from behind her big metal gate and bartered with the rag dealer for a while, finally selling him a brown paper bag filled with flattened aluminum cans.

The Koreans have been recycling for centuries.

The rag dealer tried to interest her in some bits of clothing but she shook her head and demanded money instead. A few coins changed hands, the woman went back behind her protective walls, and the rag dealer clanged down the road, turned left, and was out of sight.

In the distance his clanging and wailing stopped for a while and I figured he must have found another customer.

The man on the bicycle reappeared carrying two large cardboard boxes wrapped in string. He struggled beneath their weight but managed to hoist them up onto the heavy-duty stand on the back of his bicycle. He secured the boxes with rope, hopped on the bike, and rode off. The gate behind him had long since been closed.

“Let’s go, pal.” Ernie and I trotted down the hill after him, and then jumped in our Jeep and followed at a safe distance as he crossed the Main Supply Route and went about a half mile farther into the heart of Itaewon.

A steep alley turned up a hill, and the man jumped off his bicycle and pushed it slowly up the incline. Ernie pulled over, and I got out of the Jeep. I followed the man to the top of the hill and down a couple of alleys, and watched as he parked in front of a small house surrounded by a decrepit wooden fence. He unloaded his boxes and entered. Then he took his bicycle in and closed the gate.

On the way back to the Jeep I stopped at a public phone and called the Korean National Police liaison officer.

By the time I returned to where Ernie was waiting, a small blue and white Korean police car was just pulling up. Two uniformed KNPs got out, and the four of us walked up into the catacombs of the Korean working class neighborhood.

They kicked the door in. In about ten seconds the man was face down on the floor of his home, his wrists handcuffed securely behind him. Some of the fruit was smashed and the US-made canned goods rolled slowly across the room. They took him to the Itaewon police station.

Ernie and I popped back to the doll’s house and knocked on the door. There was no answer. We waited for a while and then a GI sauntered toward us carrying a briefcase. He was tall and thin, with a pencil-line mustache and the strut of a Southern aristocrat.

The insignia on his neatly pressed khaki uniform identified him as Chief Warrant Officer Three Janson. Medical Corps.

“What do you want?”

I flashed my badge. “To question your wife concerning black market activities.”

“No way.”

Janson opened the door and told us to wait, but it didn’t take long because we barged in when we heard his scream.

The voluptuous Oriental doll lay dead on the floor, blood seeping from a hole in her side where her ribs should have been.

The big red brick building that was the headquarters of the CID detachment seemed to be waiting to swallow us as we approached.

The first sergeant wasn’t in his office, but down in the admin section barking into telephones and ripping off teletype reports.

“What the hell happened with you guys?” he said when he noticed us. “I send you on a simple black market detail, and you turn up with a corpse.”

Ernie sat down on the edge of Miss Kim’s desk and offered her a stick of gum. She smiled and accepted a piece with her long manicured fingernails.

“Bascom! Get down to my office! You too, Sueño!”

The ass chewing was royal. You would’ve thought we’d killed the girl ourselves, and in a way that’s sort of what he said. At least we’d been in the vicinity and had the opportunity-if not the motive. He told us that if she’d been raped we’d probably have been charged and locked up by now.

Shows you the high opinion our leadership has of us.

He’d given the case to Burrows and Slabem, affectionately known around the office as the Boot Hill Brothers, his favorite investigators when it came to burying inconvenient facts. When the dependent of a US serviceman gets murdered, all hell breaks loose up at the Eighth Army Headquarters. Colonel Stoneheart, our provost marshal, was briefing the commanding general right now. The first sergeant felt that only a trustworthy pair of sleuths like Burrows and Slabem could properly handle the case.

“You mean properly cover it up,” Ernie said.

The first sergeant freaked, chasing us out of his office and warning us to stay off the case unless Burrows and Slabem had some questions for us that weren’t covered in our initial report.

We wandered down the long hallway.

“What would we do without the first sergeant’s hoarse voice echoing down the halls?”

“I wouldn’t know how to act.”

Ernie winked at Miss Kim on the way out, and we jumped in his Jeep and went directly to the Itaewon police station.

Exactly what the first sergeant had told us not to do.

Burrows and Slabem were there. Burrows, tall and skinny with a pockmarked face; Slabem, short and round with a pimply face. The Korean police wouldn’t talk to them. Neither would we. They harrumphed and tried to look officious. Chins met necks. Except in Slabem’s case.

I greeted Captain Kim, commander of the Itaewon police station, and spoke to him in his own language.

“Were you told anything by the offender?”

“Yes. He told us everything.”

“How did you get his confession so quickly?”

Captain Kim slammed his fist into his cupped hand. “The lie detector.”

He ushered us back to the cells and the guy on the bicycle lay on a moist cement floor. I recognized him because of his clothes. His face was a puffed hive of purple welts.

Burrows and Slabem, the Boot Hill Brothers, glared at us as we walked out. Somehow I didn’t think they’d keep our little visit a secret from the first sergeant.

We talked to a lot of the folks in the neighborhood, covering much of the same ground the Korean police had already covered. The only thing unusual anyone had noticed was me and Ernie hanging around. The man on the bicycle had been conducting black market business with the GI wife in the neighborhood for many months, without incident as far as anyone knew.

The whole thing was a mystery to me. Why would a black marketeer kill one of his sources of income?

Ernie thought it might have been Janson. Husbands are always a first suspect in a murder case. But we checked the back of the building. The walls were ten feet high, sheer, with shards of glass embedded in cement on the top. When we had seen Janson, his uniform was still neat, with no more wear than one would expect from a hard day’s work at the office.

We couldn’t interrogate him. Burrows and Slabem would be handling that, on compound, in conjunction with the chaplain who was giving him counseling and trying to pull him through this crisis.

“Might as well forget it,” Ernie said. “If it wasn’t the black market guy, Burrows and Slabem might figure out who it was. And anyway the first sergeant said to stay off the case. We’re potential suspects. Nothing we can do about it.”

But we both knew what was at stake. The guys who played everything by the regulations considered us a couple of screw-offs anyway. And a young woman, a US army dependent, had been murdered while we were actually staking out her home. We both planned a long career in the army, preferably in the CID, and I wasn’t going to walk into one assignment after another with the stigma of an unsolved murder, one that happened right under my nose, hanging around my neck.

“We have to find out who killed her,” I said.

Ernie shrugged.

We went back to the compound and started making some phone calls. Calling in every favor we had out there. Tracking Janson.

Somehow all our investigations seem to lead us directly to the Itaewon nightclub district.

In this case we found out that Janson was the chief inspector for the Preventive Medicine division. They’re the guys who give the mess sergeants and the Officers’ club managers a hard time about the cleanliness of their kitchens, the temperatures of their food storage facilities, stuff like that.

Janson’s NCO-in-charge, the guy who actually ran the operation, was Sergeant First Class Billings. Billings was sort of a soft guy. I’d seen him before at the NCO Club. A little out of shape. Never with a woman. Suspect. And he always puffed on his scroags through a cigarette holder.

Word was that he was a real brown-noser. His boss, Chief Janson, or anybody else up the chain of command, could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. The privates who worked for him, though, could do nothing right, and he made their lives miserable. Much to the pleasure of Chief Janson, who felt that suffering subordinates meant a well-run ship.

Captain Bligh in khaki.

Sergeant Billings’s desire to please his superiors extended beyond the working day, and we had heard from one of his cronies that Billings and Chief Janson regularly ran the village of Itaewon together. The guy had heard Billings mention the Spider Lady Club, a little hole-in-the-wall amongst the bigger, gaudier nightclubs, as their favorite hangout.

Ernie and I had changed into our running-the-ville outfits: sneakers, blue jeans, and a nylon jacket with a golden dragon embroidered on the back. It was nighttime and we were in the Spider Lady Club, having a welcome cold one and checking out the exceptionally attractive ladies. The music was mellow. The place was lit by red lamps and the flickering blue light from a row of tropical aquariums.

“Janson has good taste,” Ernie said. “First his late wife and now this joint.”

“Living his life to the full.”

After about twenty minutes, Billings walked in, which didn’t surprise us much, but what did surprise us was the guy he had in tow. Chief Janson.

We were at a table in a dark corner; my back was to them, and Ernie adjusted his seat so his couldn’t be easily seen from where they sat at the bar.

“Looks like the chaplain’s counseling has done wonders for Janson,” Ernie said.

I heard their laughter as the excited barmaids brought them drinks without their having to order. Regulars. Through the smoke-covered mirror on the back wall I made out the smiling woman who leaned over to serve Janson. She was tall, thin, and elegant. Gorgeous, all in all. Black hair billowed around her pale, heart-shaped face. Her eyes slanted up, painted heavily with shadow.

The Spider Lady.

Ernie had checked with one of the girls earlier and gotten her story. She owned the joint, having apparently earned the initial capital outlay from working as a nurse. Some of the girls claimed it didn’t come so much from her salary but from making extracurricular arrangements with a few of the doctors. On a cash basis.

That would explain her infatuation with the white-coated types who worked in the Preventive Medicine division.

I wondered if she knew that Janson was actually a veterinarian-a horse doctor. But maybe it was just the rubber gloves that turned her on.

Could this be it? Could it be as simple as Janson’s wanting to break free from his present old lady to hook up with the Spider Lady? We waited until Janson walked into the latrine and Billings was deep in conversation with one of the Spider Lady’s girls, then we slipped out of the club.

We walked into the crisp night air of Itaewon, rejected two propositions, and sauntered down the hill toward our favorite beer hall.

“We have the motive,” Ernie said. “All we have to do now is find the opportunity.”

The big beer hall was on the outskirts of Itaewon. We drank draft beer, rubbed elbows with Korean working men, and bantered with the rotund Mongolian woman who slammed down frothing mugs in front of us.

All I could think about was the small Oriental doll and how she had looked with that bloody gash beneath her breast.

In the morning we slipped out of the office as early as we could, supposedly on our way to pump up Colonel Stone-heart’s black market arrest statistics but actually on our way to see Captain Kim and get the key to Janson’s house. It went smooth. Captain Kim liked the way we didn’t try to revamp four thousand years of Korean culture every time we ran into a procedure we didn’t approve of. He gave us the key.

The first sergeant would have had a fit if he’d known we were entering the restricted premises of a murder site. But we didn’t plan on telling him.

Janson had moved most of his stuff out and was staying in officers’ quarters on the base. White tape in the shape of a small woman surrounded a caked blot of blood. The Korean police usually use tape instead of chalk since it’s hard to make an outline of the victim with chalk on vinyl floors that are heated from below by hot-air ducts. The floor we walked on in our stocking feet was cold now.

We surveyed the apartment. It was a one-bedroom job with a small kitchen and a cement-floored bathroom. There was no beer in the refrigerator.

Metal clanged and I heard an old man wailing for his life.

The rag dealer.

We put our shoes back on and hurried out to stop the old man and ask if he’d seen anything unusual yesterday afternoon.

I greeted him in Korean, “Anyonghaseiyo.”

The old man halted his cart, smiled, and his leathery brown face folded into so many neat rows that I almost thought I heard it crinkle. He kept his mouth open and didn’t seem to know what to say. Talking to Americans wasn’t exactly an everyday occurrence for him. Folks in the UFO society probably have more conversations with aliens.

“Yesterday,” I said, “we were sitting in that store over there when you came by.”

The old man nodded. “Yes. I saw you.”

“You bought some aluminum cans from this woman in this house here.”

“Yes, yes. That’s right.”

“And then you went around the corner, down the hill.”

“Yes.”

“Did you notice anything unusual?”

“Unusual?”

“Yes. Did you see any American people in the neighborhood?”

“No. I saw no American people. The Korean police already asked me that. Look, I am an old man and I have to support myself and a sick wife. Do you want to buy something?”

“No. We don’t want to buy anything.”

We went back into the house and the old man trundled his cart down the road, clanging his metal shears and wailing his plaintive song.

We searched the grounds, passing through a narrow passageway that ran between the side of the apartment and the big sandstone brick wall that separated the building from the two-story house next door. Out back, a small cement-floored courtyard sat behind Janson’s apartment and the landlord’s apartment next door. It was enclosed by the big ten-foot masonry wall topped with the shards of glass.

The entire complex was on a corner, formed by the alley that ran up the steep hill we had originally come up in our Jeep and the street that ran in front of the little store from which we had conducted our surveillance.

The only way for someone to enter this house while we were watching from the store was over the back wall, which seemed unlikely since it faced other people’s residences, or over this ten-foot stone wall, which faced the public street. We had already checked the other side and it was sheer and very difficult to climb. But the inside of the wall was not as high since the level of the back courtyard was higher than the street by a few feet. It also provided a number of footholds, from a clinging vine and from some protruding rocks imbedded in the wall.

The wall had been designed to keep out intruders. But from inside it could be easily climbed.

So I climbed it. Ernie stayed on the ground, clicking his gum and telling me-sarcastically, I think-to be careful.

The tricky part about the climb was the handholds on the top of the wall, since you had to be careful to grab a spot between the randomly spaced shards of glass. If you were in a hurry you’d cut yourself for sure.

The jump down into the street would be rough also, although not impossible. About twelve or fourteen feet, depending on which part of the rapidly descending pavement you landed on. An airborne trooper, with a good hit and roll, would have no trouble with it.

As I gazed over the wall and out into the street, I noticed something fluttering in the gentle breeze. It was blue and stuck to the base of one of the shards of glass. Fiber. Wool maybe. A clump of it. I reached out and pulled the material off the jagged edge of the glass. It was soft and blue. Baby blue.

It didn’t look worn. It looked new, but it would impossible to tell much about it without a lab analysis and that would be difficult since I wasn’t officially on the case. And anyway the lab was in Tokyo. Before a packet could be sent there it had to be approved by the first sergeant.

So much for high technology. I fell back on my meager allotment of common sense.

It looked like threads from a woman’s sweater. Maybe a woman climbed this fence and got part of her clothing caught on these jagged shards of glass. It would be easy, of course, with a ladder, but the Korean police had already interviewed everyone in the neighborhood and no one had seen any workmen or anyone setting up any sort of apparatus.

I climbed down and showed the fiber to Ernie.

He thought for a while and then he said, “The problem is how did she get over the wall? It would have to be something that would give her a lift without causing any particular notice from the neighbors. Trashcans maybe?”

That was it. “Or a trash cart?”

Ernie and I ran outside and scoured the neighborhood until we found the old rag dealer.

“Yesterday, when you rounded the corner away from the store, you stopped calling and clanging your shears for a while. You had a customer.”

“Yes.”

“Who was it?”

“A beautiful young lady. Very tall. Very fancy.” The old man slashed his fingertips across his eyes and up. “She locked herself out of her house.”

“So she had to climb the wall?”

“Yes. I rolled my cart over and tilted it up. She climbed over easily.”

“And then what?”

“And then I went about my business.” The old man looked at the ground, shaking his head slightly. “But she was a very strange woman. Later, down at the bottom of the hill, I saw her again. She was all out of breath from her climb and she had torn her sweater.”

“Her sweater? What color was it?”

The old man reached under some stacks of cardboard. “Here. She sold it to me, cheap, because it had been torn. My wife repaired it, and it looks fine now. I should be able to sell it for a good price.”

The old man held it up to us, and I reached into my pocket for my small wad of Korean bills.

It was soft and fluffy and baby blue.

Since the Spider Lady was a Korean citizen and therefore not under our jurisdiction, we contacted Captain Kim and had him go along with us to make the pinch.

She was behind the bar of the Spider Lady Club, just getting ready for the evening’s business, laughing and joking with the other girls.

Ernie and I came in the door first, wearing our coats and ties, and when she saw Captain Kim behind us and the blue sweater in my hand, the exquisite lines of her face sagged and her narrow eyes focused on me, like arrows held taut in a bow. Blood drained from her skin, and she stood stock-still for a moment. Thinking.

Then she reached under the bar and pulled out a long glistening paring knife, and as her girlfriends chattered away she kept her eyes on me and pulled the point of the blade straight down the flesh of her forearm.

She kept pulling and ripping until finally the other girls realized what was going on and by the time we got to her, her arm was a shredded mess.

Her nurse training had come in handy because she knew that stitches weren’t likely to close arteries that had been cut lengthwise. We applied a tourniquet, but somehow she managed to let it loose while she was in the ambulance and, turning her back to the attendant, kept her secret long enough to do what she wanted to do: die.

Janson was put on the first flight out of the country by order of the commanding general, his personal effects packed and shipped to him later.

Billings spent a lot of time at the NCO Club, restricted to post. He spun romantic tales about his two friends and what he saw as their self-sacrificing love.

The girls at the Spider Lady Club told us the truth. About how proud the Spider Lady had been to be marrying a doctor.

Through it all, from bar to bar, all I could think about was the doll-like woman with the nice curves.

Whose smile had been filled with life.