Jade Lady Burning (13 page)

She got hooked up with Johnny and they put in their marriage paperwork. Kimiko told her not to trust that. The whole process took six months or more and usually, after talking to his immediate supervisor, his commanding officer, the chaplain, the legal officer, and the personnel officer, and after whatever new hurdle the Army bureaucracy had cooked up, the young GI would change his mind.

Kimiko knew. She’d had marriage paperwork put in on her a half dozen times and it had never gone through. She told Miss Pak not to fall for it, but the girl had stuck with Johnny and this is how it turned out.

I asked her if she had seen Miss Pak on the night she died. She said she had. Briefly. She tried to talk her into going to one of the big hotels and finding a couple of rich tourists. Miss Pak refused. The last Kimiko had seen of her was when she left Miss Pak on the front steps of the Lucky Seven Club. She had no idea where she’d gone after that, back into the club, or elsewhere.

I was about halfway done with my BLT, and I was already finished with my cold glass of milk so I got another one. Ernie pushed his empty plate away, sipped on his coffee, and read the
Stars & Stripes.

I wondered how much justice we’d done that girl. So far, we didn’t have much more than when we started. We knew that she’d been murdered, but exactly how, we still weren’t sure. The Korean medical examiner’s report had been vague. Asphyxiation. That could have been from strangling or from the smoke of the fire. And if it was from the fire she must have been knocked out or drugged or something. No one was too interested now that a GI was in custody. My guess was that the family had fallen under the wing of a lawyer who specialized in claims against the U.S. government.

No one had any particular interest in proving that Spec-4 John Watkins hadn’t been the one to commit the murder. Certainly not the family. They didn’t want to blow a bundle. And not the Korean National Police, who were glad that, once the GI suspect was turned over to them, they’d get the press off their backs. Even Eighth Army was ambivalent about the whole thing. With Spec-4 Watkins as the sacrificial lamb, their public-relations problem was solved and they could go back to business as usual.

Of course, maybe Johnny Watkins did kill her. I couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t, but it didn’t seem to fit. He just wasn’t mean enough. But who knows? I’m wrong about people more often than I’m right.

Then there was Kimiko. No one in Itaewon had known Miss Pak Ok-suk better than Kimiko. Not even Johnny. But why would she want to kill that young girl? Was she stepping on territory Kimiko considered to be her own? Or maybe it was jealousy engendered by years of bitterness and ridicule in the oldest and toughest of professions.

And why had those guys come looking for Kimiko? They had been after her for something. Only what? Kimiko didn’t appear to have any money at all. Or had she been squirreling away a little bit at a time over the years, with a big stash somewhere? Or maybe they were looking for something else.

Kimiko hadn’t seemed too concerned about the whole thing. She’d relaxed right away, as soon as they left, and she didn’t seem worried that they might come back.

The Korean National Police? They hadn’t gone at this case aggressively. Like Milt Gorman said, they must be protecting someone, or something.

Those two guys we’d seen this morning—were they members of the local syndicate? Sent by Mr. Kwok? If so, why? If Mr. Kwok wanted to kill one of the girls in Itaewon, he could do it a lot more efficiently than Miss Pak’s assailant had. Why would he want to ice some bar girl anyway? Even if Miss Pak was a little money machine, getting married and backing out of the business was routine in Itaewon. Hundreds of girls married GIs every year. No sweat, there were plenty of replacements.

I looked down at my plate and realized I had finished my BLT. I hadn’t tasted it. Not that there was much taste to an Army snackbar sandwich.

I felt a chill. Or maybe it was just that I knew we had to go into the office and face the first sergeant.

“Where the
hell
have you two guys been?”

Ernie cracked his gum. “Doing what you told us to do, Top. Trying to get a line on who murdered Pak Ok-suk.”

“More evidence on Watkins?”

“We’re not so sure he did it.”

“Then who did?”

“We don’t know that either.”

“You got any evidence?”

“Nothing new.”

He looked at us long and hard. “Dicking off again, eh?” Neither of us moved. “Let the Watkins case be,” he said. “The Korean courts will take it from here.”

Ernie clicked his gum again, wandered over to the big coffee urn, and started fiddling with the cups and the spoons and the non-dairy creamer.

“There’s no reason in the world,” I said, “to think that Johnny Watkins murdered that girl.”

“Other than that he was going to marry her,” the first sergeant snarled, “and she was messing around with other guys.”

“I’m talking about physical evidence. Sure, maybe he had a motive. But we got no direct evidence putting him near the scene of the crime.”

“But we got no evidence putting him anywhere else, either. A strong motive and the lack of an alibi is enough for the Koreans.”

“Because the newspapers and the locals want blood?” I said.

“Yeah. But I wouldn’t worry about him too much. The judges are fair. They won’t give him too much time if they can’t pin it on him. And they’ll probably let him ease on out of jail quietly, after about eighteen months, and deport him back to the States.”

“And kick him out of the Army.”

“A general discharge. No sweat.” The first sergeant shrugged.

“And if all this happened to you and you were innocent?”

“I wouldn’t let it happen to me,” he said, softly.

The first sergeant leaned across his desk and picked up a manila folder. He probably wouldn’t; he was a very cautious guy. But you never know.

I rubbed my eyes. “And what about the real killer? What happens to him?”

“If it isn’t Watkins, the Korean police will find the real killer.”

Ernie snorted. Some of his swirling brown coffee splashed onto the counter and the dingy brown carpet below. The first sergeant waited while Ernie sopped it up with a brown paper towel, then started again.

“Besides, I need you two for yet another load of shit that’s come up at the Korean Procurement Agency.”

We waited.

“There’s a guy named Lindbaugh—Fred Lindbaugh. According to Tom Kurtz, our snitch over there, he’s been approving a lot of the changes in contracts. We want you to follow him, find out a little more about his personal life. He’s single. Other than that, we don’t know much about him.”

“I thought Burrows and Slabem were going to handle this KPA thing.”

“They are. The paperwork part. But their faces have been seen in the main office. Lindbaugh knows them.”

“Does he run the ville?”

“Probably. He’s single.”

“Which is why you want us to follow him?”

“Yeah. The experts.”

“What are we looking for?”

“A flamboyant lifestyle. He’s only a GS-7. We want to find out if he lives above his means.”

“GS-7. Single. That’s a lot of loot for Korea.”

“Yeah. And we understand he’s very popular with the ladies.”

“He doesn’t have to be on the take to be spending pretty free.”

“Just watch him. Burrows and Slabem will be checking out his bank account.” The first sergeant gave us a long once-over. “You two look sort of haggard. Take the rest of the day off. Lindbaugh gets off at five. Be there.”

On the way out, we turned into the Admin Office. Miss Kim had on a bright green dress that clung to her figure and when she smiled my nerve endings flared like flower buds triggered by the sun. Ernie offered her his customary stick of gum, she took it, unwrapped it, and they fell into their customary monosyllabic conversation punctuated by grunts and giggles.

Riley was out. I sat down behind his desk and pouted. Over Miss Kim and over the Watkins case—I wasn’t happy about being taken off it. On the other hand, I really didn’t know what else to do. The only lead I had was Kimiko and she wasn’t the type to spill much of anything. If this guy Lindbaugh was a ville rat, though, we could still keep an eye on her. And also I had my free time. Top couldn’t say anything about that.

I wondered why I gave a damn about the fate of Johnny Watkins and, to be honest, I probably didn’t. Top was right. He would be okay. A little jail time—max. Unless they actually proved that he did it. It wasn’t him that I was worried about. It was the late Miss Pak Ok-suk. She would never be okay. Maybe she wasn’t a saint but she wasn’t the worst person in the world either. She didn’t deserve to be murdered that way and none of us who were still living deserved to have her killer walking around free.

Back in the barracks I took out a pencil and paper and wrote down as much as I could remember of what the Korean thug had said to us that morning.

The first part was clear.
E yoja dala kamyon
meant “if you follow this woman.” The second part was a little more difficult.
Jamji chaluhkeita.
This meant he was going to cut something. Something of mine. Something called a
jamji.

I got out my little plastic-bound Korean-English dictionary and thumbed through it, humming to myself. Happy to have something academic to do for a change. My humming stopped when I found the definition.

Jamji
was the diminutive reference to the male member: the penis of an infant.

The offices of the Korean Procurement Agency were in a small compound off by itself, away from the main Eighth Army Headquarters complex, near Samgakji. The buildings were the familiar two-story red-brick jobs built by the Japanese Imperial Army during the occupation prior to World War II.

The parking lot was small and almost full. A lot of the American civilians who worked here had cars. The Koreans, without exception, took the bus. We were sitting in Ernie’s little jeep, wedged between a beat-up old Chevy Impala and a quarter-ton delivery truck.

“We should be off by now,” Ernie said, getting ready to run the ville. “Not waiting around for some overpaid civilian asshole.”

Ernie, when he wasn’t raving, was usually a pretty calm person. One of the calmest people I’ve ever met in my life. Almost comatose. But don’t mess with his Happy Hour.

People started to pour out of the offices, as if a whistle had gone off. Then we heard the distant bugle call and the blast of a howitzer on the main post. The flag-lowering ceremony was under way. Nobody stopped for it here. The Korean men in suits and ties and the women in smart office outfits shrugged on their overcoats on the steps, wrapped mufflers around their necks, and headed purposefully towards the bus stop just beyond the gate, manned by two Korean security guards.

A roly-poly rascal bounded down the stairs. Tom Kurtz trotted to keep up with him, almost tugging on his sleeve, and finally got him stopped in the parking lot, chatting quickly. The fat guy looked around, trying to make a getaway, totally uninterested. Kurtz had promised to show us Lindbaugh by glomming on to him at the end of the workday. The fat guy was our boy.

Finally Kurtz smiled a goodbye and let Lindbaugh go. With a sigh of relief, the fat man waddled towards a green Army sedan on the other side of the parking lot.

Lindbaugh was average height, maybe five nine or so, but he must have weighed about two hundred pounds, most of it lard. His hair was straight and black and parted, so it had a habit of sliding down across his forehead into his eyes. He kept brushing at it with his pudgy fingers. He wore a three-piece suit and the vest was stretched so far beyond its limits that it rode up a couple of inches above the overloaded belt, exposing white shirt.

He bundled into the sedan, fired it up, and pushed his way through the crowd of Korean co-workers. Ernie started up the jeep, rolled slowly forward and, after watching the thick calves of a pair of nice-looking female office workers, he popped us into the Seoul rush-hour traffic.

Lindbaugh seemed to be in a big hurry so he fit right in, because everybody was. Kimchi cabs swerved in and out of one another’s way, straining for that extra few inches of advantage over their competitors. Lindbaugh swerved, accelerated, slammed on the brakes, and seemed to be cursing a lot. Ernie sat back in his canvas seat, hands lightly touching the steering wheel. Relaxed. And he had no trouble keeping us an almost constant fifteen or twenty yards behind the erratic Lindbaugh.

Lindbaugh turned right at Huam-dong, ran up the long straightaway between Camp Coiner and the ROK Marine Corps Headquarters, and was waved through by the gate guards at the back entrance to Yongsan Compound. We followed him in and past the barracks and the gym and the main PX and the big Army Communications Center, back out through Gate 5, across the MSR, back to the sedate environs of Yongsan South Post. He turned left in front of the Officers’ Club, raced past it, turned right down a tree-lined avenue, and stopped in front of one of the small houses that served as BOQs—Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. That’s what the civilian workers get: their own private rooms, a communal living room, kitchen, and latrine with an old
mama-san
who did the laundry and the cleaning. Pretty convenient lifestyle really and, other than the monthly tips for the cleaning woman and the aged houseboy, free. All part of their pay and benefits.

Ernie rolled on past. Lindbaugh was struggling to get his chubby body out of his car, not paying any attention to us whatsoever. Ernie cruised around the block, came back, and parked under a tree where we had a clear view of the sedan and the front of Lindbaugh’s BOQ.

We could have busted him for unauthorized use of a government vehicle. The sedan was for use during the day, for official business, not for running back and forth from your hooch. Lindbaugh seemed pretty brazen about its use, not caring how many of his co-workers saw him using it to get home at the end of the workday. Small wonder Kurtz had fingered him.

Ernie drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “We could be here all night.”

“No way, pal. If he doesn’t go out in an hour or two, we’ll just figure he’s going to stay in for the night.”