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The Nine-Tailed Fox

Page 7

by Martin Limon


  “A place for lifers,” Ernie said.

  Grayson nodded, stubbing his cigarette out in a tin ashtray. “That’s right,” he said, “a place for lifers like me. And the girls here don’t try to hustle me, mainly because they know they couldn’t even if they tried. Like I say, I’ve seen it all. Stuttgart, Saigon, Bangkok, you name it, I’ve been there. If I decide to spend time with one of the girls, I give her money. Treat her fair. But I never let any of them hustle me.”

  “And this woman was hustling Werkowski?”

  He nodded. “No doubt in my military mind.”

  “Did you talk to him about it?” I asked.

  He shook his head wearily. “You can’t tell nothing to a young troop like that, especially once he’s developed a hard-on.”

  “So you just came in every night and observed.”

  Grayson shrugged. “I didn’t figure she would do him any harm. She’d get a little money, which I figured she needed to survive, and he’d get in a little trouble just before he went home. That’s the name of the game. Hustle or be hustled. I figured Werkowski would learn—what do they call it these days?—a valuable life lesson. We used to call them hard knocks.”

  I asked him to describe the woman.

  He did, in detail. The description almost exactly matched the one Auntie Suh had given us earlier. But Grayson was able to recall more specifics. She was at least ten years older than Werkowski, maybe fifteen, but she had a pretty, heart-shaped face.

  I raised my eyebrow at Ernie. Looked like his theory about Shirkey murdering some random older woman was a miss. This woman was a concrete link between the disappearances of Specialist Shirkey in Pusan and Sergeant Werkowski in Uijongbu.

  “Her most distinctive feature,” Grayson continued, “was her nose. Very pointed. Almost tilted up at the end.”

  “That’s unusual. Do you think she might not be Korean?” I asked.

  “It’s possible.”

  “Did she look like she’d had work done?”

  “Surgery? How the hell would I know?”

  Although Grayson hadn’t eavesdropped on the couple, he was sure she spoke English. And, just once, she’d worn something other than her austere black skirt and vest. The last night he’d seen her, she’d been wearing a patterned blue silk dress.

  “That’s how I knew she was making her move,” Grayson told us. “Her tits were hanging out.”

  “And Werkowski was looking?”

  “You better believe he was.”

  “Did you see them leave?”

  “Nah. By then it was late, and I’d already had a few double bourbons.”

  “Where do you figure they went?” Ernie asked.

  “There’s only one yoguan in this village,” he told us. “If they didn’t go there, they have to have taken a cab to downtown Uijongbu.”

  “And after that night,” I said, “you never saw Werkowski again?”

  “No. It wasn’t until a couple days later that I heard he’d gone AWOL.”

  “What’d you think when you found out?”

  “I figured he’d taken off with her. I didn’t blame him; she wasn’t bad-looking. But I also figured he’d be back with his tail between his legs as soon as his money ran out.”

  “He left after end-of-month payday?”

  “Yeah. That’s why nobody was surprised after the third or fourth day. But after a week, the rumor started swirling.”

  “What rumor?”

  “That the old broad might have been what the Korean girls call a gummy whore.”

  “A what?” This was a new one on me. And to Ernie, too.

  Grayson waved his cigarette. “No, that’s not right. Let me ask Kimmi.” He waved the barmaid over. “What do they call that, Kimmi? A gummy whore or something like that?”

  She frowned, looking slightly offended.

  “You know,” he said, waving his cigarette again. “A woman who used to be a fox.”

  “Gumiho,” she said.

  “See?” Grayson said. “I was right. A gummy whore.”

  Kimmi rolled her eyes and returned to the bar.

  Wood creaked beneath our feet as we ascended the three-story building, the tallest in the vicinity of Camp Kyle. The black hangul lettering on the wooden sign outside read mobom yoguan, or Exemplary Inn. Beneath that, in neatly stenciled English lettering, it said best hotel. Commercial establishments in Korea often had Korean and English signs with slightly or even completely different meanings. Sometimes through simple mistranslation, but usually because what was said in English wasn’t as important to the proprietor as the fact that English had been employed to lend a cosmopolitan air to the enterprise.

  On the top floor, we turned right and stood before a short check-in counter.

  The manager had heard us climbing the steps and emerged from the small sliding door that led to her living quarters. I showed her my badge. She crossed her arms and reluctantly provided her ID information, then answered our questions carefully. I described the woman that Master Sergeant Grayson called a “gummy whore,” as well as Werkowski.

  No, the manager hadn’t seen a couple who matched that description. Most of the business girls who checked in here were regulars, and at least as young as the American GIs, usually younger. I explained that if she didn’t level with me, I’d ask the KNPs to pay the inn a visit, but she held to her story. No couple like the one I’d described had come in. No woman of any age in an austere black vest and skirt, nor one in a low-cut blue silk dress.

  “Miniskirt,” she told us. “All miniskirt.”

  “And black boots?” Ernie asked, smiling.

  “Yes,” she replied, looking at him oddly.

  I elbowed him to shut up.

  I asked if there was anywhere nearby they might’ve stayed, but she said hers was the only yoguan between here and downtown Uijongbu.

  We were about to leave when she said, “Two weeks ago?”

  “Yes.” She had a small standing calendar on the counter, and I pointed at the date of Werkowski’s disappearance.

  “About that time,” she told me in English, “man come. Big man. Not tall, but strong,” she said, holding her arms out to the side. “He driver.”

  Interesting. We listened patiently.

  “No place to park in this area.” She had a short driveway in front of the yoguan, and when the man had asked to use it to park his vehicle, she’d charged him a thousand won. About two bucks.

  “He pay,” she told me, sounding surprised.

  “What’d he do then?”

  “He wait.”

  “Inside the vehicle?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long was he there?”

  She told us that she’d heard him start the engine and drive away about an hour before curfew. About the same time Grayson claimed that Werkowski and the gumiho had left the Kimchi Club.

  “Did the driver have any passengers?”

  “I no see.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  She shuddered and hugged herself, rubbing her upper arms. “Mean. He look mean. Face twisted and burned. He look like a man we used to see in Korea a long time ago. When I was a little girl.” Then she said the word in Korean. I didn’t understand it, and asked her to explain. She tried, something about fire and heat, but it still made no sense to me.

  I pulled out my notebook, handed her my pen, and asked her to write the word in hangul.

  She did. Daejang jang-i. I had no idea what it meant.

  According to her, his vehicle was your typical dark, box-shaped domestic sedan, likely a Hyundai. The type that traveled in swarms all over Korea. She didn’t remember anything distinctive about it, and hadn’t bothered to write down the license plate number. Still, this was the first real lead we had. If this driver did work for our alleged kidnapper, that w
ould explain how she managed to pop up all over Korea. The gumiho had wheels.

  We thanked the proprietor and left. On the drive back to Seoul, Ernie and I discussed our theory.

  “She’s a pickup artist,” he said. “Seduces young GIs and whisks them away in her Hyundai sedan, chauffeured by some guy with a mangled face.”

  “Why GIs?”

  “Like everyone says, she’s a respectable woman. If she gets it on with a foreigner, there’s less of a chance anyone in her circle will hear about it.”

  “Wouldn’t she be worried about the clap?” I asked. The incidence of venereal disease is much higher amongst American GIs than it is in Korea’s general population.

  “So she takes precautions,” Ernie said. “Or maybe she gets off on the danger. You know, forbidden fruit and all that.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That jibes with what we know—or think we do—except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The GIs never come back. And one of them is dead. Skewered through the heart.”

  “Yeah,” Ernie replied. “I’m working on that.”

  We’d already passed through the high-rise area of downtown Seoul, and now the huge entrance to Namsan Tunnel Number Three loomed in front of us. Ernie zoomed straight into the darkness. About twenty yards in, he honked his horn.

  “What’d you do that for?”

  “Just to wake people up.”

  It worked. About a half dozen kimchi cabs had started honking, too.

  I studied Ernie. “You’re happy,” I said.

  His grin broadened. “What’s not to be happy about?”

  Then I got it. “You have a date,” I told him. When he didn’t deny it, I continued. “With Captain Retzleff.”

  His expression didn’t falter, but he said, “Hey, you shouldn’t spread rumors like that.”

  I crossed my arms. “You’re going to get your low-ranking butt in a serious ringer.”

  “Isn’t that where it usually is?”

  I wondered how they’d even managed to set up a rendezvous, but I knew with Ernie it was sometimes as simple as a woman handing him a slip of paper.

  When we emerged from the still-reverberating tunnel, I studied the accompanying traffic. Other than the taxicabs, privately owned Hyundai sedans were possibly the most common on the road. Most had tinted windows, and a few even had short white curtains to provide privacy in the back seat. Almost all were chauffeur-driven. Under the Park Chung-hee regime, the tax on privately owned vehicles was so prohibitively high—fifty percent or more of the price of the car—that most people couldn’t afford to buy one. But if you were rich enough to afford that, then hiring a chauffeur was de rigueur. A full-time driver’s annual salary was less than half what the car cost, and the Korean elite had to keep up appearances, for which a chauffeur was required.

  So this respectable woman in the back seat of her chauffeured Hyundai sedan would attract little, if any, law enforcement notice. She would be virtually invisible as she traveled the country at will. But a GI in her car? That would attract a lot of attention. In fact, it would almost certainly be reported up the line. And if they’d traveled far, they could easily run into one of the random ROK Army roadblocks set up at all hours. If the ROK Army caught her with an American GI, she would be pulled over and questioned.

  How would she have handled that?

  Ernie dropped me off at the barracks, and instead of asking him more questions, I waggled my finger at him.

  “Who are you to talk?” he said, laughing as he took off with a screech of his tires.

  I walked inside the plain stucco walls of the foyer past the CQ desk and stopped at the beer machine. I inserted the requisite thirty-five cents, and out popped a cold can of Falstaff. Like magic. The snack machine was depleted, except for one wrinkled bag of cheese-flavored crackers. Thus fortified, I repaired to my room. Alone in the dark, I thought of Leah Prevault. Apparently, the honchos at the 121st Evac Hospital had gotten wind of the fact that she and I had been seeing each other. They’d said nothing—no formal reprimand was forthcoming—but when her two-year tour was up, her request for extension was denied. Leah Prevault had been quietly shipped off to Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu. “Budget cuts,” they’d told her, but she didn’t believe a word of it.

  “They’re trying to keep us apart,” she’d told me.

  “It won’t work,” I’d replied.

  It had been almost three months now since I’d escorted her to Osan Air Force Base and watched her board a C-130 to Hawaii. Now I wished I’d given her a gift of some sort. Maybe a ring.

  -7-

  When we arrived at the CID office the next morning, Riley sat silently at his desk, his face buried in paperwork. Miss Kim stared resolutely at her keyboard, typing rhythmically like someone who’d been hypnotized. They were both intently ignoring the screams emerging from the Provost Marshal’s office.

  Apparently, from twenty yards down the hall, Colonel Brace somehow sensed our arrival. “Bascom! Sueño! Get in here!”

  We got in there.

  “Why are you wearing those?” he asked.

  He glared at the jackets and ties we were required to wear as 8th Army CID agents.

  “Eighth Army supplement to Department of the Army regulation one ninety-five dash one point three thirty-seven, sir!” Ernie explained, doing his best to sound like a military automaton while he was at it.

  “Get changed,” the Provost Marshal said, ignoring Ernie’s attempt at satire. “Into fatigues. You have a work detail to take care of.”

  The woman standing beside his desk, who’d done most of the hollering, crossed her arms and let out a satisfied humph.

  “Work detail?” I asked, thinking of the missing persons investigation.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Get that refrigerator out of the evidence room and transport it back to where you found it.”

  “Take it back?” Ernie asked.

  Colonel Brace looked up at him. “Do I have to tell you twice?”

  In the Army, arguing with a colonel is never a wise idea for an enlisted man. But Ernie wasn’t your average enlisted man. He didn’t give a Flying Funghini.

  “What was the big fuss about it being against regulation?” Ernie asked. “About the Women’s Power Coalition not being authorized to possess duty-free PX goods?”

  “We have an LOA,” the woman said. A Letter of Authorization.

  I looked at her for the first time. She was about five foot four, with dirty blonde hair cut in a bob at just about shoulder length. She wore a purple dress beneath her long beige coat.

  “I signed it myself,” she said, “while Mrs. Frankenton was in Tokyo, and I was the Acting President of the OWC.” The Officers’ Wives Club.

  Ernie and I both turned to Colonel Brace, awaiting an explanation. He didn’t have to give us one, of course. We enlisted men were just supposed to follow orders. On the other hand, we were currently handling the biggest missing persons case to hit US Forces Korea in months, possibly years, which had apparently just turned into a murder investigation, and he was sending us to shuttle a refrigerator back and forth. He cleared his throat and spoke.

  “When Mrs. Frankenton returned from Tokyo,” Colonel Brace told us, “she rescinded all LOAs issued by Mrs. Allsworthy here. She said that the Acting President didn’t have the authority to sign them.”

  When a field grade officer or higher signs an LOA, that transcends ration control regulations. Theoretically, it’s for things like a unit party, when more than the allowed two-cases-per-purchase amount of beer or soda is needed. Or on big-ticket items when, for example, a unit takes donations and purchases a water heater or stove for a local orphanage. Sometimes LOAs are abused, but there’s a thorough record kept of them in the 8th Army Ration Control Office. Since we often worked black market cases, Ernie and I had seen more than a
few LOAs, but I’d never heard of one being rescinded.

  “Mrs. Frankenton,” I asked, “the Chief of Staff’s wife?”

  Colonel Brace nodded.

  Now I knew how she’d managed to rescind the LOA. In the Army, the wives of high-ranking officers have almost as much power as their husbands. Sometimes more.

  I turned to the lady in the beige coat. “You must be Katie.”

  “Are you the one who refused to talk to me on the phone?”

  I nodded.

  “That was a damned rude thing to do,” she said.

  Her cheeks were red. She was in her early thirties, which would likely make her husband a mid-ranking officer. A major, maybe, or a lieutenant colonel. Like most officers’ wives, it was clear she considered the enlisted men who worked for her husband to be her employees, too.

  “We were only doing our job,” Ernie said.

  She glared at him.

  “Who is that woman?” I asked. “The tall one who runs things out there?”

  “Ok-ja,” she said.

  “That’s her whole name?” I asked. “Just Ok-ja?”

  “Wang Ok-ja,” she told me.

  There are many homophones in Korean, but wang is most often translated as king. And that was certainly befitting for the regal Wang Ok-ja.

  “Why?”

  I rubbed my cheek. “Just curious.”

  “She threw a rock,” Ernie added, “that shattered our windshield.”

  “Good for her,” she said.

  “What’s your business out there, ma’am?” Ernie asked.

 

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