by Martin Limon
“We did have a breakin,” he told us. “About a week ago.”
“Eight days ago,” I said. “To be exact.”
Burlingame checked his calendar. “Right.”
Ernie and I sat in his office, Ernie fidgeting as usual. Cramped spaces and symbols of authority always made Ernie uncomfortable.
“The MP report said you lost one typewriter and two small jars of freeze-dried coffee.”
“That’s right. I’d bought them at the PX the day before.”
“Who locks up at night?”
“I do. I always do.”
The padlock on the office door was pretty flimsy. Not much trouble for someone with the proper tools to pop it open. Other than scratches, the lock hadn’t even been damaged, according to the MP report.
“This isn’t a secure building, then?”
“Not the whole building. Just the basement.”
“What do you keep down there?”
The captain lifted one eyebrow higher than the other and gave me a wry smile. “Do you have a need-to-know?”
“In this case, yes.”
“Classified documents. We’re an intelligence operation.”
“No guards?”
“We have guards at the gates. And guards who make sweeps through the buildings at intervals during the night. That’s it.”
“Then the downstairs area must be pretty secure.”
“It is. Like a vault.”
“Besides you, who has a key to the office?”
“Nobody. Except the supply officer.”
“Do you ever loan your key to anyone?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Maybe that nice-looking Korean secretary likes to come in late and get some work done.”
Burlingame scowled. “What is it you’re implying? Miss Ahn is honest. Been with us a long time.”
“I’m not implying anything. Just asking questions.”
He sipped on his coffee again.
Actually I was trying to rattle his cage, provoke him into saying something unguarded. He’d seemed nervous since we’d walked in. A normal enough reaction to CID agents. But Burlingame was an intelligence officer. An educated man. He should’ve realized that he had nothing to worry about.
“Before the breakin, or after it, what did you notice that was unusual?”
“Nothing. Everything pretty much routine. Except our typewriter was gone and I had to hustle a replacement. And we had to buy coffee from the snack bar because my ration for the month had been used up,”
“Do you always use your entire ration?”
“Hell, no. Are you accusing me of black-marketing?” I didn’t answer. His face flushed red. “I don’t like your attitude very much.”
Ernie rose from his chair. “A man is dead, Captain. Somebody didn’t like his attitude very much either.”
Ernie stepped over to the hot water pot, grabbed the half-empty jar of freeze-dried coffee, and unscrewed the lid. He licked his finger, dipped it in, and tasted the chunky grounds. Moving his mouth, he savored them for a moment.
“He’s clean,” Ernie said.
Captain Burlihgame’s jaw fell open. “Now you’re accusing me of using illegal drugs?”
Ernie shrugged. “If the shoe fits, wear it.”
The captain rose to his feet and pointed his forefinger at Ernie.
“You’ll take that back. Right now, Mister. You have no reason to be casting aspersions on a superior officer.”
“I’ll cast any goddamn thing I want.”
The interview was over.
I stood up, grabbed Ernie by the elbow, and yanked him toward the door. He shrugged off my grip and walked out on his own. As we left, Captain Burlingame followed us into the hallway. He stood watching us, hands on his hips.
I pulled Ernie outside into the cold air.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“The guy pissed me off. More concerned about whether or not we were accusing him of anything than if we find the guy who sliced up Whitcomb.”
We walked rapidly through the redbrick buildings of the 8th Army complex. The snow had let up, for the moment anyway. Naked elms swayed in the breeze like arthritic claws, scratching at the cold sky.
“Give him a break, Ernie,” I said. “Most people get nervous when CID agents ask them questions. They start worrying about their own positions. About how they’re going to look.”
“Yeah? Well, hell with them.. I’m tired of that piddly shit.”
When Ernie kicked in the door at Suk-ja’s hooch I’d figured he was just having fun. Now I realized that this case was already getting to him. He was pissed that our stupidity in delivering a note and not asking enough questions had somehow contributed to the death of Cecil Whitcomb.
So was I.
We had a list of names. Cecil’s buddies. I wanted to find out about the real life of Lance Corporal Cecil Whitcomb.
But there was somebody I needed to talk to first. The man who knew more about Gl’s than they sometimes knew about themselves.
The houseboy.
We slipped in a side door of the Honor Guard barracks and walked down the long hallway. Each room housed eight to fourteen soldiers, broken down by squads. The building was quiet now in the midafternoon. Most of the houseboys were finishing up the last of their laundry, and the soldiers were out in the motor pool or on the parade field. Maintenance and training, the story of a dogface’s life.
We slipped into Whitcomb’s room and waited. A few minutes later a thin Korean man in baggy fatigue pants and a loose T-shirt shuffled down the hallway, his rubber sandals slapping the cement floor. When he entered the room and saw us, his tired eyes widened slightly. Other than that, his square, craggy face showed no hint of surprise.
“Mr. Yim?”
He nodded. I had gotten the name from the Sergeant Major. I showed him my identification.
“I am Agent Sueno and this is my partner, Agent Bascom. We’re here to ask you a few questions about Cecil Whitcomb.”
He nodded again, dropped the bundle of underwear he was carrying on one of the neatly made bunks, and sat on a footlocker facing us.
“How long have you worked for him?”
“Since he got here. Three months ago.”
His English was well pronounced. Hardly an accent. I knew he’d never gone to high school-probably not even middle school-or he wouldn’t be working here. He’d picked it up from the GI’s over the years. Intelligence radiated from his calm face. When I first arrived in Korea, I wondered why men such as this would settle for low positions. I learned later that after the Korean War, having work of any kind was a great accomplishment. Even cleaning up after rowdy young foreigners. At that time, the rowdy young foreigners were the only people with money.
“Tell me about Whitcomb,” I said.
Mr. Yim raised and lowered his thin shoulders. “He is a GI. Like all the rest.”
“But he’s British. Not American.”
“Same same.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“Sometimes he go Itaewon. With friends. Maybe he catch girl. I don’t know.”
“No VD?”
“No.”
So Whitcomb never caught the clap. Otherwise Mr. Yim would’ve seen evidence of the drip-clotted green pus-in his shorts.
“Did he sleep here every night?”
“Yes. Every night.”
His dark brow crinkled.
“What is it?” I asked.
“He sleep here every night but sometime he come late.”
“Was he in bed when you arrived to work?”
“Not always.”
“What time do you report in?”
“Five o’clock.”
The curfew runs from midnight until four A.M., and the MP’s routinely open the compound gates for Korean workers at five o’clock in the morning. Houseboys have to report in early so they can shine the boots and shoes of their GI charges before reveille.
“W
here did he go late at night? Out to Itaewon?”
“No.”
That surprised me.
“How do you know?”
“Because of clothes. When I come in he not in bunk. Bunk no messed up. He down in shower, washey washey. On his bunk is clothes.”
“What kind of clothes?”
“Strange clothes.”
“Can you show me?”
Mr. Yim got up and walked to Whitcomb’s footlocker. He opened it and rummaged through the rolled underwear and socks and towels. He pulled out three items: a pair of dark dungarees, a black pullover turtleneck sweater, and soft-soled, navy blue shoes made of an elastic-type canvas material.
Ernie looked at me. We’d gone through everything while the Sergeant Major was here, but these items of clothing hadn’t meant anything to us at the time. Now, when they were displayed together like this, they seemed a little more ominous.
“Maybe he made his own bunk,” I said. “And wore these clothes out to Itaewon.”
“No.” Mr. Yim said it firmly. “He no make own bunk. And he no sleep. He taaksan tired.”
Very tired.
“How often did this happen?”
“Two, maybe three times each month.”
“Near payday?”
He shook his head. “Anytime.”
Mr. Yim seemed lucid, calm, smart, sober. An excellent witness, except that I knew from experience that houseboys were so low on the social scale that nobody took their testimony seriously.
But I did. So did Ernie.
“What else can you tell us about Whitcomb?”
“No more. He potong GI.”
A regular soldier.
“Who killed him?”
Mr. Yim’s eyes widened. “Maybe gangster.”
“Gangsters?”
He nodded. “In Namdaemun many gangster.”
“Do you know any?”
He shook his head vehemently.
We talked for a while longer but Mr. Yim didn’t have much more to offer. His life was an endless chain of shining shoes, washing laundry, ironing fatigues, and putting up with GI bullshit. Cecil Whitcomb had been just one more link in those loops of iron that weighed heavily on his soul.
On the way out, Ernie offered him a stick of gum but Mr. Yim refused. Instead, he went back to sorting the folded underwear and placing each item in the proper footlocker.
8
Admin Sergeant Riley’s thin lips crawled over the edge of the porcelain mug. He glugged down some of the milky coffee, set the mug down, and pulled the pencil out from behind his ear.
“You were right, George. The stats on stolen office equipment have risen sharply over the last three months.”
“Up ten percent,” I said. “Prior to that, they ran steady for years.”
Riley shook his head. “Not the smooth operations we’re used to either. Crude. Clumsy. Doors broken. Windows shattered.”
“The slicky boys are going downhill,” I said.
Riley nodded.
“Slicky boys” was a term that had come into use during the Korean War, more than twenty years before. The entire peninsula, from the Yalu River on the border with China to the tip of the peninsula at the Port of Pusan, had been completely ravaged. Hardly a factory or a business enterprise of any sort still stood. Crops had been allowed to rot in the fields after terror-stricken families fled to evade the destruction by the armies that stormed back and forth across the land. People were desperate. People were starving.
In the midst of this desolation were a few military enclaves, surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags. The only places that had food, that had clothing, that had shelter.
Some of the people would barter with the GI’s for the wealth they held. They’d trade anything, even their bodies, for something as insignificant as a bar of soap.
Others took more direct action. These were the slicky boys.
“Slick boys” is what the GI’s called them, but the Korean tongue is incapable of ending a syllable in a harsh consonant. They must add a vowel. So “slick” became “slicky.” And the GI’s picked it up. “Slicky boys” stuck.
And some of them really were boys.
Six, seven, eight years old. They could more easily slip through the barbed wire and hide on the compound for hours and bring out something precious to their waiting families. A handful of dried potatoes, a can of preserved beans.
It didn’t take long for their activities to become organized and their thievery to become bolder. The disappearance of supplies and equipment became a serious problem during the war, and the American generals made sure that precious warehouses were heavily guarded. Armed soldiers were given orders to shoot.
As the war dragged on, desperation kept the slicky boys at their work in the military compounds. And there were many compounds to choose from. By 1952, the United Nations had sent soldiers from sixteen different countries to help defend the Republic of Korea from the Communist aggressors.
In one incident, a slicky boy broke into a stronghold of the Turkish Army and was captured. The Turks tried the twelve-year-old on the spot and convicted him of thievery. After being tortured for a few hours, the boy was decapitated. The severed head was set atop a spike at the gate to the compound and allowed to rot until the unit moved back to the front.
Riley rattled the paperwork in his hand.
“This stealing just isn’t professional enough to be the work of the slicky boys,” he said. “It had to be an amateur.”
“Maybe Whitcomb?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
We thought about that for a moment; I voiced what we were both thinking.
“Even without Whitcomb butting in, how can thievery statistics stay so constant?”
“That’s a hell of a good question.”
Riley loved a puzzle. You could almost see him salivating. He picked up the heavy black receiver and started dialing.
I sat back, sipping on my black coffee. Relaxing. Letting him do the work for a while.
After talking to Whitcomb’s houseboy, Ernie and I had tracked down one of the guys on the “best buddies” list the Sergeant Major had provided us: Terrance Randall.
The picture Randall gave of Cecil Whitcomb wasn’t what we’d expected. Pictures of real people seldom are.
Whitcomb was born into a poor family on the south end of London. His father worked on the docks of the River Thames packing fish and had to make his daily appearance at the market well before dawn. Somewhere along the line, Whitcomb’s dad picked up two bad habits. The first was gambling, which didn’t do much to help the family finances. The second was rising a little early on a wintry morning to make a stop along the way at a likely-looking household and pick up a trinket or two to help pay for bad habit number one.
Whitcomb’s brothers, when they were old enough, picked up where Dad left off and made a full-time business of burglary. As the youngest of the three sons, Whitcomb had been initiated into the family trade but somehow managed to avoid the lengthy police records that his brothers acquired. As such, all the family’s hopes were pinned on him. When he was old enough, he enlisted in the Royal Fusiliers.
They all thought of him as the success story of the family and expected him to make a career of the army. Be somebody. Not just another fool in and out of prison.
But Whitcomb couldn’t resist the rich pickings on an American compound. There was so much equipment and so much of it just wasn’t well guarded. It wasn’t fair.
Randall didn’t know who Whitcomb sold to, but said he was smarter than most of the other blokes in the unit. Most just black-market with one of the women in the bars. The Korean business girls turn around and sell the PX goods to their mama-sans, and they turn around and sell the stuff to someone else. Everybody makes a profit. Whitcomb decided to go right to the source, keep all the profit for himself.
But he wouldn’t tell Randall who that source was. It was Whitcomb’s secret and Randall really didn’t want to become involved. A few bucks a mo
nth for selling booze and cigarettes was enough for him.
For the most part Whitcomb was a regular guy. He hung out with his buddies at the 8th Army Snack Bar on the nights when they sold draft beer, and at the 7 Club in Itaewon while their pay lasted.
Randall claimed Whitcomb bragged about the money he was making. How much he’d sent home and how much he would be able to save, for when he went back to civilian life. But he wasn’t planning on retiring from the army for twenty years. A very patient guy. And cautious.
I asked if there was anyone special in Whitcomb’s life or if Randall had ever heard of anyone named Miss Ku. The answer in both cases was negative.
He did give me two things I could hold on to. The first was that they never wore civilian clothes on any of their details, and they had never helped set up equipment at the British Embassy. That made a liar of Miss Ku.
Randall also told us that in the shower room he had once noticed welts on the back of Whitcomb’s thighs. When he asked about them, Whitcomb snapped at him and told him to mind his own business.
He couldn’t think of anyone who would want to kill Cecil Whitcomb. In every murder case I’ve worked, no one ever can. Somehow, people still end up dead.
Riley spoke in what seemed like code to some guy on the other end of the line: percentages, dates, figures. He jotted everything down as he spoke.
Ernie sat on the edge of the desk of the fine-looking Admin secretary, Miss Kim. They’d had a thing going, un-consummated, for months. In front of them were two cups of coffee and they took turns swirling sugar and cream through the satiny liquid. Ernie watched Miss Kim’s slender, red-tipped fingers gracefully rotate. If they were any hotter for one another they would’ve burst into flames.
“Sure,” Riley said. “Thanks, Fred. You got it.”
He hung up the phone.
“That was the Eighth Army Budget Office,” he said. “The guys who plan for casualty losses and theft losses, things like that. The losses that show up in every annual budget. Casualty’s hard to pin down. You never know when there’s going to be a fire or a flood on one of the outlying compounds, or when there will be accidents and supplies and equipment will be damaged beyond repair. That fluctuates every year. All these guys can do is plan for an average.
“Theft is a little different, though. For all the years Fred’s been here, about four, they’ve always written in a three-point-five-percent theft loss in the budgets. Why? Because that’s what they’ve been using as far back as he knows about. Almost to the Korean War. What does it actually run? You already know that. Right about four percent.”