Mortal Allies sd-2

by Brian Haig

  A box was on the desk. It was taped and tagged, and had not been opened. It contained the personal possessions that had been returned, a fact I easily surmised since Minister Lee stared at it a long, difficult moment before he pointed his finger. “Please, you go through it.”

  I broke the seal and pried open the lid. Inside was some money, all in Korean currency, a wallet, and some keys. There was also a rosary, a silver cross on a chain, a stack of letters wrapped with a rubber band, and two Army medals.

  I flipped through the letters. They were written in Korean and all had the same sticklike symbols for a return address – from No’s parents, I guessed. I didn’t open the envelopes, just looked to see if there were any free papers stuck between them. I riffled through the wallet and found more cash. There were charge cards and photographs of Minister Lee and his wife and another of a strikingly beautiful girl. Camouflage, I figured, just like the picture cadet Whitehall kept on his desk.

  Minister Lee was watching me closely, and I could swear he was holding his breath. His wife’s eyes were on the empty bed. I could hear her sniffle occasionally.

  I stared intently at the key ring. There were six keys. Three looked like car keys. The others were made of brass and were about the same size and make as the key to Whitehall’s apartment I’d already collected from the Taejom apartment management company. I pivoted my torso to block their view while I reached a hand into my pocket and withdrew the key I had obtained. The bodyguard watched my every move like a hawk. The minister looked past my shoulder into space.

  I handed the packet of letters to the minister. “Could you please look through these? I assume they’re from you, but I can’t read Hangul. Are there any here from anybody else?”

  He took the letters and stripped off the rubber band. He began looking through to make sure all the return addresses were his own. While he did so, I turned my back and carefully lifted the key ring out of the box. I began pressing the real key against the three brass ones on the ring. The last one seemed a perfect match. I stared down at it. Every edge, every cut, every indentation was the same.

  I heard the minister say, “They are from my wife and me. Have you found anything else?”

  “Uh, no sir,” I said, dropping the keys and turning around to face him. “I don’t see any notes here. Nothing like the paper my client said might be present.”

  “This is everything we received,” he assured me, sounding half relieved, and half something else.

  “Well, I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  We stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, neither of us knowing what to say next. I had the feeling the minister wanted to talk to me, to say something. His eyes were fixed on his son’s desk. His arms hung loosely at his sides. His lips opened and closed a few times. Whatever he was struggling to get out was a gut-twister.

  “Is there something you want to speak to me about?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer for a long time. His mind was very far away. His expression suddenly changed.

  “I… uh, I… uh, do you believe Captain Whitehall is innocent?”

  A good defense attorney would instantly say, “Yes, of course my client’s innocent. This whole thing’s a rotten sham and he should be released right away.” Only I didn’t want to lie to this man and his wife. Misery has a way of stripping off all vestiges of power and conceit. He didn’t look like a mighty minister in my eyes; he was only one more sad man who’d suffered a bottomless loss. And besides, he’d demonstrated a streak of fairness I knew I wouldn’t have had the character to show.

  “Truthfully, I don’t know. He says he is innocent, but the evidence is not in his favor. As a member of his defense team, I owe him every benefit of the doubt. It’s my sworn obligation.”

  He accepted that with a polite nod that I took as a benediction of forgiveness for my role in this despicable affair. He grasped his wife’s hand and gently led her from their dead son’s room. The bodyguard let them pass, then stepped swiftly in front of the doorway. I avoided his eyes for nearly a minute, until he finally spun around and led me back to the front door. I let myself out and he coldly watched while I trooped down the street and climbed into my sedan.

  Whitehall had told the truth; No did have a copy of the key. Unfortunately, No still had that key when he died. Nobody had used it to gain entry to the apartment. No was murdered by someone who was inside that apartment when the front door was locked. Of course, there was still evidentiary relevance to the key – if we wanted to use it for that purpose – to persuade the board that No and Whitehall had been lovers.

  I can’t say I felt real good about that. Actually, that’s putting too fine an edge. I felt like an utter cad. I felt like the kind of rodent that eats human dung. I had gained entry to the Lees’ home on a contrived pretext so I could find proof their son was a homosexual. The minister struck me as a remarkably honorable man, and even a dimwit could see his wife’s heart ached horribly – and I now possessed the means to expose their son in the most shameful way to a nation that believes homosexuality is a huge depravity.

  The worst part was, it wouldn’t do a damn thing to get Whitehall off. No had still been murdered and sodomized. So Katherine and I could destroy the memory of Lee No Tae, and by extension the reputation of his family, and for what?

  As we drove through the streets, I couldn’t shake the feeling the minister wanted to tell me something important. I don’t think he really cared whether I considered Whitehall guilty or innocent. Maybe he saw me checking that key, figured out what I was up to, and was on the verge of telling me what a piece of nasty garbage I am. Only he ultimately decided not to waste his breath because it would only lower him to my plane.

  CHAPTER 20

  I knew we were back in Yongsan Garrison because every street corner held a grinning clergyman handing out literature to everybody who passed. The preachers’ brigade was all decked out in clerical garb, and in a few places gaggles of clean-cut soldiers and their wives were huddled around listening earnestly to whatever drivel the holy men were putting out. The American culture war had arrived full force in Korea.

  There was a long table in the middle of the lobby, and my new friend Preacher Prick stood sternly behind it, overseeing three other preachers who were seated like a royal triumvirate, with high stacks of holy literature piled around them. He gave me a mealy look and I shot him a surly salute.

  I went to my room and called Katherine in her office and asked her to meet me in the bar. She said she needed thirty minutes, so I decided to occupy myself watching CNN.

  Another of those odious talk shows was on. There were four obnoxious, noisy journalists crowded around a table, yelling and interrupting one another. The overheated topic du jour was Thomas Whitehall and the trial. We were six days out and the journalists were trying to predict who would win and what were the costs of victory for either side.

  A bald-headed, fat tout kept screaming that anything less than the death sentence would be a monstrous injustice. That was the word he kept using, “monstrous,” to re-cue the viewers to the revolting nature of the crime. Another guy, looking glamorous in a thousand dollar suit and horn-rimmed glasses, kept mumbling that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was bankrupt. The third guy was apparently the only one with a military background – having spent three or four years hiding out in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. He found five or six ways to say the military was a manly business and no place for queers and pansies. A woman with a horsey face, no makeup, and long, unkempt graying hair kept trying to say it didn’t matter whether Whitehall was guilty, that all gays shouldn’t be tarred with the same ugly brush, but she barely got a word in edgewise. The men shouted her down every time she parted her lips.

  I was instantly reminded of Imelda’s edict that homophobia was a guy thing. Maybe it was, I realized. You never hear women using epithets like “fags” or “fudge-packers” or “dykes.” Maybe this was another of those “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” things. />
  My idle thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a hard knock at the door. I was expecting Katherine, so I swung it open wide and Wham! a fist crashed into my nose. I saw blackness and felt an electric shock that went straight to my brain. I flew backward and landed on my ass. A body launched through the air and crashed down hard on top of me.

  I tried shoving and rolling away, but it was no use. Whoever was straddling and pummeling me had at least fifty pounds of advantage and complete surprise in his favor. I finally straightened my fingers and got a clean shot at his throat. He flipped backward and rolled off, writhing and gurgling.

  I wiped at the blood gushing from my nose down my lips and chin and sat up to look at my attacker. Son of a bitch! Colonel Mack Janson, General Spears’s legal adviser, was grasping his throat, eyes bulging, face crimson, struggling desperately to force air down his windpipe. The fight was out of him, so I got up and went into the bathroom. I grabbed a nice white face towel, soaked it in cold water, and held it against my nose. In an instant, the towel was no longer white.

  When I walked back out, Janson was on his knees, and while he wasn’t breathing real well, he was getting enough air that he wasn’t going to die.

  “You bastard,” he croaked. “I’ll fuck you for this.”

  I shook my head. “What are you, some kind of stupid recording? What the hell’s your problem?”

  “I don’t like you, Drummond.”

  “I know,” I said. “That why you hit me?”

  His speech was coming back now. “You had no business bothering the minister. You had no business going to his house.”

  He reached over to the minibar and pulled himself up to his feet. He was glaring at me with as much hatred as I’ve ever seen in a man’s eyes. “You’re a disgrace to the JAG Corps. And the Army. That poor man and his wife have been through enough. You should’ve left them alone.”

  “I did what I needed to do.”

  “And what was that, Drummond? Why were you nosing around the minister’s house?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I’m making it my business. I live here and it’s part of my job to help maintain this alliance.”

  “Too damn bad.”

  His glare got more choleric. “Do I need to remind you, Drummond, that I’m a colonel and you’re a major?”

  “Up yours,” I said. “You trashed your authority when you punched me.”

  “What were you doing?” he persisted. “Looking for evidence the kid was gay? Did you actually enter their home for such a disgraceful purpose?”

  “No, I went for a cup of tea.”

  “I’m warning you, Drummond, leave their son alone. Bad enough the poor kid got murdered… then the disgusting things they did to him afterward. Don’t you add to their pain.”

  “It’s none of your damned business,” I told him again.

  “No decent gentleman would even think of it.”

  “I’m not a gentleman, I’m a lawyer,” I replied. “Now get the hell out of my room. And if you ever try to hit me again, I’ll break both your legs.”

  Janson was much bigger than me, but he had a fairly big paunch, and what he didn’t know was that when I was back in the outfit I’d been fairly well trained to break bones. I could see he thought I was making an empty threat, and for a fraction of an instant, I think he considered hitting me again. I actually hoped he’d try. I wanted to kick his ass. On the other hand, maybe he was tougher than I gave him credit for, and it was me who was going to end up a bloody mess. Christ, that would’ve sucked.

  Anyway, he spun around and went out the door. Of course, he couldn’t resist announcing again, “I swear I’ll fuck you for this, Drummond. You’ll see.”

  I was starting to think there were only twenty words in the man’s vocabulary and “fuck” was half of them.

  I inspected myself in the mirror. The bleeding had stopped, but my nose was red and starting to swell up. I looked like a drunk on a binge. I changed into a fresh shirt and headed downstairs to the bar.

  Katherine was already seated at her same table beside the jukebox when I came in. That same song about where all the cowboys had gone was playing again. This couldn’t be coincidence – it had to be her who kept putting it on. Odd thing that – a lesbian obsessed with where all the cowboys went. Whatever happened to the Village People and Melissa Etheridge?

  She had a beer and it was half empty. She stared at my face as I sat down. “What happened to your nose?”

  “It was what we call a soldier’s fight.”

  “And what’s a soldier’s fight?”

  “One of those ones where there’s no rank, no rules, no apologies.”

  “Why are you men so childish?”

  So much for sympathy from my co-counsel.

  “Look, all I did was open the door to my room and boom! I got hit in the nose. Guess who the assailant was.”

  “Knowing your forte for making friends, I’m surprised there wasn’t a line at your door.”

  “It was Janson,” I said, for once ignoring her gibes. “He was pissed as hell.”

  “Over what?”

  “I went over to Minister Lee’s house.”

  “You what?”

  “Remember how Whitehall told Bales he had the only key to his apartment?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He lied. I went to see him yesterday. He told me he gave a key to Lee several months ago. I went looking for it.”

  She gave me a dubious look. “And the minister let you in?”

  “Yeah, actually. He’s quite a gentleman. Besides, I lied about what I was looking for.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “Among the sealed possessions the hospital returned.”

  She took a sip from her beer, then reached up and fingered my nose. It was a surprisingly intimate gesture. It hurt like hell, too.

  “It might be broken,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” I muttered in a callous, manly-like way. For that I got the aren’t-you-an-idiot eye-roll I richly deserved.

  She said, “We’ll have to get the key sequestered as evidence. It’ll help us prove Lee and Thomas had a relationship. It’s not definitive proof, but it’s a fairly inescapable conclusion, don’t you think?”

  “And what will it accomplish?” I asked, since that was exactly the question I was wrestling with.

  “It puts a crack in the prosecutor’s case. At the moment, the only crack we’ve got.”

  “At the price of humiliating the Lees and destroying a dead man’s reputation. What else do we accomplish? It won’t get Whitehall off.”

  “What about our client’s reputation? Look what’s happened to his good name.”

  “This is a little different, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “For Chrissakes, Katherine, at least our client’s alive.”

  “In a Korean prison cell where he’s been beaten, publicly humiliated, and nearly starved. He’s being accused of the most despicable crimes imaginable and he’s facing a death sentence. Don’t get your sympathies confused, Drummond.”

  I might ordinarily have continued arguing, except this wasn’t really a debate, because I’d known before I even uttered my first word exactly how she’d come down. It’s how I’d come down, too, but I guess it made me feel better to force her to be the one to make the hard, bitter decision. She was the lead counsel. I was selfishly exploiting that fact.

  She knew that, of course.

  I said, “At least they won’t be beating him anymore. With only six days till trial, they won’t want him parading in front of cameras with bruises all over his face.”

  “Some consolation,” she mumbled.

  “Speaking of which, with only six days left, what the hell are we going to say in court?” I asked, reaching across and taking a sip from her beer. Actually, it was a bit more than a sip. I drained the rest of the mug.

  She stared down at her empty stein. “I got a call from the
prosecutor just this morning.”

  “From Eddie Golden?”

  “He wants to meet this afternoon.”

  “He say what for?”

  “No. What do you think? Does he want a deal?”

  “If he’s a damn fool. He’s got the best murder one case I ever saw. Not to mention there’s enough ancillary charges, he’s guaranteed a win.”

  “Are wins important to him?”

  Wins were important to every attorney, but I knew what she meant.

  “Like you wouldn’t believe. Son of a bitch even sends a signed baseball bat to every attorney he beats.”

  “Sounds like a sweetheart.”

  “Put it this way. Imagine a young Robert Redford with a gift for bullshit you’d die for. He once had a court-martial board rise to their feet and applaud when he finished a summary.”

  “You’re just trying to frighten me,” Katherine said, with a properly skeptical look.

  “I saw it with my own eyes. I was the defense attorney. It was easily the crappiest day of my career.”

  “Wow.”

  “Katherine, Eddie’s tried maybe seven or eight murder cases. He doesn’t lose. He’s the current holder of the JAG Corps’s Hangman Award. Has been the past five years. I’m not trying to rattle your confidence, but the Army’s got the deck stacked pretty good. A killer prosecutor, a judge who hates defense lawyers, and a case so lopsided, we’re drowning under the weight of it.”

  I can’t ever remember seeing any hint of anxiety or self-doubt on Carlson’s face. But I thought I did this time. Just a flicker, but I was pretty sure it was there.

  I said, “Say Eddie does offer a deal? Would you take it?”

  She brought her hand up to her forehead and began kneading it, as though her head was about to explode into a thousand shards unless she held it together. I never thought I’d feel sympathy for Katherine Carlson, but I did.

  “Would you?” she asked, staring at me with doleful eyes.

  “Depends on the deal, I guess. Wouldn’t take much, though. Anything less than murder one or a sentence less than death, and I’d probably leap at it.”