The Nine-Tailed Fox

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The Nine-Tailed Fox Page 4

by Martin Limon


  We studied the area as best we could in the dim light. Neither of us had thought to bring our flashlights. There was clear evidence of tire tracks, but that could’ve been from someone using the space to turn around. I pulled myself up the side of the bin until I hooked my nose over the edge. Ernie grabbed the soles of my feet and pushed me up farther. I teetered forward, almost falling in, but managed to maintain my balance. The bin was empty, only a few stray newspapers and broken bottles.

  I lowered myself back down and dusted off my shirt. “Nothing. They must’ve made a trash pickup recently.”

  We checked around and behind the bin. No bodies or shoes or belt buckles. No indication that a human being had ever been dumped here.

  “So maybe they kept walking?” Ernie said.

  “Maybe.”

  We looked down the road. There didn’t appear to be another cross street for a half mile.

  “Maybe she lives down there somewhere,” Ernie said.

  “Maybe. But we don’t know shit.”

  Ernie didn’t argue with that. Double-timing it, we trotted back past the Number One Inn, turned onto the main drag, and headed toward the front gate of Hialeah Compound. One by one, the neon signs of the bar district clicked off. Ten yards in front of the gate, a gaggle of GIs stood around, smoking and mumbling to one another. When we approached, I heard one of them say, “Are those the guys?”

  Another said yes, and a brick whistled out of the night.

  -4-

  We dodged the brick, but the next thing we knew, the small mob was moving toward us. Angry, drunk faces stepped into the glare of the streetlamp. One of the GIs pointed his forefinger at us. I remembered him—the shift leader from the Hialeah Compound Cold Storage Facility.

  “You’re not gonna start making us look bad,” he said. “It’s a lie. Shirkey didn’t beat up that business girl from the Sea Dragon Nightclub.”

  “She was just trying to get SOFA money,” another GI said.

  Ernie knew what to do with a hostile group: head straight into it, which he did. He stepped right at the first guy speaking and shouted, “Nobody gives a shit about whether he beat up some business girl!” When he was close enough, he shoved the guy in the chest with both hands.

  The GI reeled backward.

  “Out of my way!” Ernie shouted, starting to bull his way through the crowd. I followed, ready to fight if I had to, but hoping we could make it to the pedestrian entrance before these guys regrouped. No such luck. Some guy in the crowd grabbed Ernie by the neck, and then they were wrestling. I leapt forward and popped the attacker upside his head. Soon everybody was shouting and jostling and trying to throw punches in close quarters. I shoved forward, keeping my head down, as did Ernie.

  We were making headway when a whistle shrilled at the pedestrian entrance. A door burst open, and a squad of helmeted MPs brandishing nightsticks charged out. Swinging wildly, they broke up the mob. Ernie and I backed away, too, since the MPs clearly didn’t care who they hit.

  I pulled out my badge and held it up as I stepped into the light. Ernie did the same, and one of the MPs stopped swinging and waved us toward the compound. We flashed our badges at any of the helmeted MPs that glanced our way, like priests with a crucifix at a gathering of vampires. Finally, we reached the open door and stepped inside.

  Lieutenant Messler stood there, hands on hips, his head looking small in his giant visored helmet.

  “Do these Hialeah boys always play so rough?” Ernie asked, wiping sweat from his eyes.

  “Only when Criminal Investigation stops by for a visit.”

  “Thanks for saving us,” I said.

  “It wasn’t you,” he replied. “It’s midnight. Every GI out there is committing a curfew violation.”

  “So if this had happened earlier,” I said, “you would’ve just let them beat the hell out of us?”

  He shrugged. “You have a hundred percent medical.”

  We stepped past him and collapsed in the waiting room.

  We could’ve gone over to the Hialeah Compound Billeting Office to see if they had a room. If they did, we’d have to sign for linen and blankets, and in the morning we’d have to turn them back in and wait for the NCO in charge to inventory not only the linen, but also the quarters to make sure we hadn’t damaged any of the cheap furniture. That seemed like too much of a hassle, so instead, we rolled up our jackets like pillows and made ourselves as comfortable as possible on the hard wooden office benches.

  In the middle of the night, I got up to use the latrine, but when I returned to my bench and tried to sleep again, I couldn’t. All I could think about was the woman in old-fashioned clothing with frills, the young GI who’d pushed her around, and the long, narrow roadway that led away from the Number One Inn. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that someone else—someone with transportation—must’ve been involved. But why? Who would want to kidnap an American GI? It wasn’t like we were worth anything.

  The next morning at six a.m., Ernie and I were up, faces scrubbed, standing tall at the Hialeah Compound helipad. The chopper still sat there, one of its blades tilted toward the ground and secured by a metal hook. The crew chief and the two pilots, wearing their flight uniforms and carrying their helmets crooked under their arms, strode across the grassy field.

  The crew chief gazed at us, amused. “Up all night?” he asked.

  “You could say that,” Ernie replied.

  “Okay, I will.” The crew chief slid the side door of the helicopter open and motioned with his right arm. “Hop aboard.”

  We did. Gratefully.

  In a few minutes, the engine was revved up, and we lifted off the ground. The flight was uneventful, with very little turbulence. For once, Korea was living up to its ancient name of Chosun, the Land of the Morning Calm.

  When we landed in Seoul, a female officer stood on the tarmac. She wore a loose-fitting fatigue uniform and held onto her cap with one hand as the wind from the chopper blades swept her backward. Ernie and I hopped off and, still crouching, ran forward until we realized she was Captain Retzleff, Assistant to the Chief of Staff.

  “Your presence is requested,” she said.

  Which is the military’s ironic way of saying your presence is required and you’d better get your butt in gear. Normally Ernie would’ve mouthed off, but apparently there was something about Captain Retzleff that threw him off his regular game. He looked her up and down—boldly, as if formulating some sort of plan. She avoided his gaze, ignoring him, but as we walked toward her green army staff car, she glanced back at Ernie, who was now nonchalantly unwrapping another stick of ginseng gum.

  Not again, I thought. Ernie Bascom complicating an investigation with a romance. This time with a military officer, and therefore strictly prohibited by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

  We climbed into the car, Captain Retzleff behind the wheel, me in the passenger seat and Ernie in the back. I asked, “Where are we going?”

  Captain Retzleff adjusted her rearview mirror, stared into it just a little too long, and then said, “To see a body.”

  “A dead one?” I asked.

  “So they tell me.”

  A half hour later, our sedan was being waved through the front gate of a small military compound. A ROK marine with an M16 rifle stood beneath an archway plastered in Korean lettering.

  “What’s it say?” Captain Retzleff asked.

  “Coastal Defense Unit Number 1082,” I told her.

  The Korean military had so many small bases—Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force—scattered throughout the peninsula that most of them didn’t have names like the US military installations did, just numbers.

  We passed a short row of camouflage-painted Quonset huts before another marine waved us to a halt. Captain Retzleff parked the car. As we climbed out, a dapper lieutenant approached us, saluted Cap
tain Retzleff, and introduced himself in broken English as Lieutenant Chon. We followed him along a dirt trail past sandbagged gun emplacements until a string of small islands emerged from the morning mist.

  The Korean War had never officially ended. Only an armistice had been signed, not a peace treaty. The South Koreans never knew when or where the Communist North Korean government might attempt an invasion again. For the last twenty years, they’d been watching, waiting.

  We’d almost reached the end of the promontory when Lieutenant Chon stopped and motioned toward the water below. He passed Captain Retzleff his heavy-duty flashlight, which she then handed to me as if it were radioactive. Ernie and I studied the area and stepped carefully down the rocky slope. Seawater sloshed through looped concertina wire.

  “There,” Ernie said, pointing.

  Something dark, tangled in seaweed.

  I stepped into the shallow water and played the flashlight’s beam across it. Open-mouthed, a face gaped toward the sky. Beneath it, a fatigue uniform, faded and tattered but still recognizable. Now we were close enough to wince at the odor.

  “How long’s he been here?” Ernie asked.

  “We need to get the body out in order to tell,” I said.

  We did our best to part the concertina wire in order to wade forward, but the coiled metal warped and twisted as we attempted to make headway. On the path above, Lieutenant Chon barked an order, and two marines with plier-like cutters rapidly descended the incline and began expertly snipping and pulling back on the webbed barricade. Soon, I was able to wade in almost up to my hips. I grabbed the corpse beneath its arms. To my relief, the body held together as I pulled it away from the clinging barbs. The two marines closed in and used their cutters to release the torso, then the legs. Shivering, I dragged the body toward the shore, and Ernie helped me hoist it onto the pebble-strewn beach.

  Their job complete, the two marines retreated.

  As I caught my breath, I handed the flashlight to Ernie. He played it slowly along the body, reaching out as he did so to pull seaweed away from the face and limbs.

  “Buck sergeant insignia,” Ernie said. He spoke in short bursts, trying not to breathe. Now that the body had been exposed to air, its stench was becoming powerful. Ernie leaned forward and shined the light on an embroidered name tag. “Werkowski.”

  “The guy from Camp Kyle,” I said.

  “Yeah. The first one who disappeared.”

  “How in the hell did he end up here?”

  Ernie ignored my question and continued to study the body. “Everything seems intact. No boots or socks, but they might’ve fallen off in the water. Both legs and arms okay.” He turned one of the hands palm-up. “Defensive wounds.”

  “From what?”

  “Not gunshots, that’s for sure. Some kind of blade. A sharp one. Penetrated right past the bone and came out the other side.”

  He then zeroed in on the center of Werkowski’s chest. There was a large tear in the thick material.

  “Entrance wound looks deep,” Ernie said.

  “The same knife?”

  “Probably.” We didn’t have a ruler, but Ernie gingerly unbuttoned the shirt and used his thumb to estimate the length of the wound. “About an inch and a half.”

  “How wide?”

  “Narrow. Pretty thin blade. Definitely not a butcher knife.” He leaned forward. “Hard to tell out here, but it doesn’t even seem as wide as a bayonet.”

  Ernie leaned back, turned his head away for a moment, then slowly exhaled and inhaled. Facing the body again, he said, “Help me turn him over.”

  The 8th US Army didn’t have a forensics team. In the minds of the honchos, that was an undue expense. They didn’t believe there was enough crime in their ranks to justify hiring technicians, setting up a lab, and providing transportation, plus everything else that would be required. The nearest forensics lab was at Camp Zama in Japan, and the Army thought that shipping samples, photographs, and other evidence there was good enough.

  Ernie and I knew from hard experience that the techs in Japan didn’t place 8th Army requests on high priority; results could easily take two weeks, sometimes a month. So we often examined evidence on our own, though technically, we weren’t supposed to. The 8th Army coroner was designated as the person to gather evidence and ship it to Camp Zama.

  But if we abided by every military regulation, we’d never get anything done. Ernie and I followed the ones we agreed with and ignored the rest.

  I stepped closer and knelt, and on the count of three, Ernie and I rolled the remains of Sergeant Werkowski over onto his belly. He landed with a moist thump.

  Behind us, a vehicle rolled up and turned off its engine. There was a loud commotion with yelling in both English and Korean. Finally, footsteps approached.

  “The coroner’s here,” Captain Retzleff called from the pathway above.

  In a few seconds, they would take possession of the body. Ernie shined the flashlight on the back of Werkowski’s skull. “Look at this.” In the center, hair had been pulled off and the skin rubbed raw, forming an egg-shaped oval. “Like somebody took a Brillo pad to his head.”

  “Or rubbed it against blacktop.” I involuntarily recalled some particularly cruel incidents from my third-grade year in the LA City School District.

  Ernie played the light a foot below Werkowski’s shoulder blades toward the wound we’d both noticed when we first turned him over. “Exit wound. Too close to the wound on the front to be separate.”

  “A little higher,” I said.

  Ernie measured it with his thumb. “Not as long. Only about an inch. But the width is the same.”

  “The blade was long,” I said, “and curved upward.”

  Ernie stood up. Boots clattered against pebbles, and rocks rolled downhill.

  “Stand away from that body!” somebody shouted.

  “Says who?” challenged Ernie.

  “Says the Eighth Army Coroner’s Office.”

  We pushed past the three officious-looking medics and trudged uphill until we reached Captain Retzleff. Ernie tossed the flashlight to Lieutenant Chon.

  The coroner, a snide civilian named Wasson, hurried past us and halted when he saw the slippery rocks. “Bring him up here,” he commanded his subordinates, waving a pudgy hand.

  When we stepped away, Captain Retzleff lowered her voice and asked, “Who is it?”

  “One of our boys,” Ernie replied.

  “Which one?”

  “Werkowski. The one from Camp Kyle.”

  She stared downhill, stricken. “General Frankenton will be furious.”

  “Not as furious as me,” Ernie replied.

  “You’re wet,” she said.

  “Thanks for noticing.”

  She almost reached out to him, but then thought better of it and held her hand poised in midair. Ernie grinned and patted her on the back. We walked over to the sedan.

  On the drive to Seoul, Retzleff was silent. I wasn’t sure if she was in shock after seeing Werkowski pulled from the frigid Yellow Sea, concerned about the impact of this murder on her military career, or just thinking about Ernie.

  Maybe all of the above.

  When Retzleff dropped us at the 105th Aviation Unit, we retrieved Ernie’s jeep and drove straight to the barracks. After showering, shaving, and changing into the coat and tie required of all 8th Army CID agents, we returned to the CID Admin Office.

  “Where in the hell you been?” Staff Sergeant Riley growled.

  Ernie didn’t bother to answer, instead marching straight toward the still-perking coffee urn in the back. I plopped down into a straight-backed chair upholstered in government gray.

  “Where’s your report?” Riley asked.

  “Take it easy,” I told him. “I’ll type it up after I get a cup of java.”

  “No ti
me,” Riley replied. “You should’ve done it last night. The Provost Marshal has a job for you this morning.”

  “We’re already on a job,” I told him. “Assigned to us by the Eighth Army Chief of Staff, in case you forgot.”

  “Don’t be a name-dropper, Sueño. The Provost Marshal is still your immediate supervisor.”

  I rolled my eyes. That was the Army for you. Always pulling you in two different directions, then blaming you if you complained about it. “What?”

  “What do you mean, what?”

  “What the hell does Brace want us to do?”

  “That’s Colonel Brace to you.”

  Ernie approached with two cups of coffee. He handed me one, and I sipped it gratefully.

  “Where’s mine?” Riley asked.

  “Up your tight little rectum. Ain’t you checked on it lately? Everybody else has.”

  Miss Kim, the statuesque admin assistant, stopped typing. She grabbed a tissue from the box on her desk, stood up, and glided out the door and down the hallway in her high heels.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Riley said. “Upset Miss Kim again.” He made a big show of checking his watch. “How long did it take you? Not even ten minutes.”

  On the edge of Riley’s desk, Ernie found the day’s issue of the Pacific Stars & Stripes and thumbed through it until he spotted the sports page.

  Ernie and Miss Kim had once been a couple. Anyone on the outside looking in might’ve thought that they’d been developing a serious relationship. But those closest to Ernie Bascom knew better. I wasn’t happy about him two-timing her, but I didn’t believe it was my place to interfere. It took a while for Miss Kim to find out about his assignations, but her response was immediate. She dropped him like a bad habit. Even when we’d pulled her out of a serious jam recently—one could say we saved her life—she made a point of thanking me but ignoring him.

  Whenever I talked to Ernie about Miss Kim, he shrugged. “Stuff happens.”

  I’d never known anyone who cared less about the opinions of others. Ernie claimed it hit him during his second tour in Vietnam. “I thought I was dead,” he’d told me. “A load of high-explosive ammo in my truck, the VC closing in. Instead of praying to God to save me, I promised that if I survived, I’d never deny myself anything again. I’d do what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it, and I wouldn’t give a damn what anyone else thought.”

 

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