by Martin Limon
Kang shrugged, thinking it over. His black market and illicit currency exchange operation depended on the cooperation of the Korean National Police. He probably paid them a stipend each month to look the other way. But if a lot of grief rolled downhill from the 8th Army commander and the chief of police of the Yongsan precinct, the local KNPs would be embarrassed. And when corrupt cops get embarrassed, they also get angry. And they take it out on the crook who embarrassed them.
All these thoughts played themselves out on the features of Kang’s shifty face. Finally, muscles stopped twitching. He’d made his decision.
“Maybe you no believe,” Kang told us. “The guy with the six hundred, he not soul brother.”
“Who was he?”
“Everybody surprise. Tall white dude walk in Black Widow Club, ask for me, want to do business. Later I check. He do business with a lot of black market mama-san. Change MPC in Itaewon.”
“So you weren’t his only stop?”
Kang shook his head.
It figured. With ten thousand dollars to exchange for Korean currency, the thief would have to use more than one fence. Later, he could take the won to a Korean bank and use them to buy international money orders in US dollars. Mail them home. Stuff them in a bank account somewhere.
“What was this dude’s name?” Ernie asked.
“I don’t know. Tall. White hair. That’s all I know.”
“You must know something more about him.” Kang didn’t answer. “Think hard, Kang, or your next interrogation will be conducted by the KNPs.”
Ernie smiled. Civil liberties were about the last thing the local Korean cops were worried about.
Kang took his time lighting another cigarette. “He have black stuff on his fingers,” he said. “Like maybe he work on car. Later I see him with other GIs.”
“You know these GIs?”
Kang nodded.
“And they’re all in the same unit?”
Kang nodded again.
“Which is?”
“Twenty-one T Car.”
The 21st Transportation Company (Car). The main motor pool for 8th Army headquarters.
When Captain Turntwist, the commander of 21 T Car, saw two CID agents stride into his office, his narrow forehead crinkled like an accordion.
“What have they done this time?” he asked.
The troops of the motor pool weren’t known for being sedate during their off-duty hours. They ran a neck-and-neck contest with the 8th Army Honor Guard for the number of times one of their members appeared on the MP blotter report.
I ignored his question. “I’d like to see a roster of duty assignments for your drivers.”
Ernie pulled out another stick of gum and looked at me curiously. He had expected us to look through the personnel folders, searching the official photographs for two GIs who matched the descriptions give by Sergeant Holtbaker and Lieutenant Burcshoff. I had another idea.
Without argument, Captain Turntwist instructed his company clerk to provide me with the information. After ten minutes I came up with a list of names. I showed them to the captain. “Is one of these men tall, blond, and thin?” I asked.
Turntwist took the list out of my hands and studied it. “Yeah. Three of them,” he said.
“Does one of those three have a best buddy who is average height with brown hair?
He stabbed his finger at a name. “Dartworth, Private First Class.”
I found his name on the assignment list. “He’s been driving a sedan for the Protocol Office.”
“Right,” Captain Turntwist said. “Shuttling officers to and from Eighth Army social functions.”
“You need a personable guy for that.”
“That’s why we selected him.”
“And his buddy’s name?”
“Frankton.”
“Where are they now?”
“The entire unit’s in the auditorium. Mandatory winter driving class.”
“We need to talk to both of them.”
Captain Turntwist told the clerk to pull them out of training. While we waited, Ernie and I walked out onto the big cement entranceway.
“What made you look at their assignments?” Ernie asked.
“Something about this case has been bugging me. A few things.”
“But Protocol,” Ernie said. “Why would a couple of payroll thieves have anything to do with the Eighth Army Protocol Office?”
We heard the heavy tromp of combat boots down the hallway. “No time now,” I said.
Dartworth was indeed tall and blond, and good looking enough to have a shot at doing Hollywood hair oil commercials. His short buddy, on the other hand, would’ve looked more at home modeling leopard skins. The tight muscles of Frankton’s wide shoulders were knotted, as were his fists.
I decided to start with the formalities.
I pulled a copy of the Uniform Code of Military Justice from a bookshelf behind the clerk’s desk and handed it to the commander of the 21st Transportation Company (Car). “Captain Turntwist,” I said. “Would you do me a favor and read these two gentlemen their rights?”
We questioned them in separate rooms and it took only a few minutes for Frankton to confess. It was all his tall, good-looking buddy’s idea, he said.
“Dartworth knew what time they’d be picking up the payroll, how much it would be, even the name of the sergeant who would accompany the payroll officer.”
“How’d he know all this?” Ernie asked.
Frankton shrugged. “A friend told him.”
“A friend?”
“For the last couple of months my good buddy Dartworth has been popping an officer and a lady.”
We waited. I almost whispered the question. “Lieutenant Burcshoff?”
Frankton nodded. “That’s right. Lieutenant Burcshoff.”
While we searched their rooms, I explained to Ernie what had made me decide to look for a driver who might’ve had some chance of meeting Lieutenant Burcshoff prior to the robbery.
The first thing that seemed screwy was her stopping for a couple of GIs in civvies who stood on the curb and waved her down. Sharing rides is common in 8th Army but not when you have ten thousand dollars in military payroll in the back seat.
And the fact that she’d been vague in her description of the two thieves although she was a top graduate of her reserve officer class. Sergeant Holtbaker, who’d been bopped over the head, had noticed more detail than she had.
Also, when Ernie and I picked her up in Kimpo, she couldn’t believe that the thieves had stolen her treasured family heirloom, the pearl-handled .45.
What had she expected from a couple of payroll hijackers? Normally they’ll take anything of value. Her shock didn’t make sense unless she knew more about these two particular thieves than she was willing to tell us.
And outside 8th Army Finance this morning, when Ernie told her that the arrest of the culprits was imminent, she seemed sad. Not elated.
In Dartworth’s locker we found eight thousand dollars’ worth of the old blue Military Payment Certificates.
An MP patrol arrived. They handcuffed Dartworth and Frankton and took them to the MP station to be booked.
It was then that something dawned on me.
“We’ve got trouble, Ernie.”
“What trouble? We wrapped up the case.”
“Not completely. What about her pearl-handled pistol?”
“You worry too much, George. Those two jerks probably sold it on the black market.”
“Not a gun they didn’t.”
Korea has total gun control. Only the military and the police are allowed to possess firearms. Because of the threat of North Korean Communist spies, trafficking in guns has only one penalty: death. And it is enforced. Absolutely. Even the people who run the black market wouldn’t be foolish enough to buy firearms.
Ernie nodded, seeing my point. “So what did Dartworth do with it?”
“Only one place that makes any sense.”
“What
’s that?”
“He gave it back to Lieutenant Burcshoff.”
“Good. She owns it. So what’s the problem?”
“She’s the problem.”
I made a call to the Aviation Detachment headquarters and spoke to the commanding officer.
“Lieutenant Burcshoff? No. We’ve been looking for her, too. She disappeared about an hour ago. Not like her. Not like her at all.”
I slammed down the phone. Ernie and I ran to the jeep.
We found her in the Women Officers’ Quarters. Sitting in the recreation room, television off, small refrigerator humming in the corner. She seemed calm. Wearing cutoff blue jeans and a loose sweatshirt with the name of her alma mater blazoned across the front. She looked exactly like a hardworking young woman relaxing on her day off except for one thing. She pointed the barrel of her pearl-handled .45 right between my eyes.
Ernie lifted his hands slowly out to his sides. “It won’t do any good, Lieutenant Burcshoff. Just tell the truth, and it will all be over soon. Maybe you were in on it with them, maybe you weren’t.”
She barked at him. “I wasn’t in on it with them. It was the sonofabitch Dartworth.” Her eyes started to glisten with tears. “I know it was wrong, an officer fraternizing with an enlisted man. But I met him while he was driving us to the Officers’ club. He seemed so cheerful. So full of life.”
With the back of her hand she wiped away the tears, still keeping the pistol trained on us.
“So it wasn’t your fault,” Ernie said. “You didn’t know that Dartworth and his buddy were going to hit Sergeant Holtbaker over the head. You didn’t know they were going to steal the payroll. All you did was stop when he waved you down.”
She shook her head. “I did more than that.”
Ernie and I waited. The silence grew long. Finally her eyes blazed with fury. “I didn’t shoot the sonofabitch!”
Ernie and I flinched. I started to edge my way along the wall. If she had to swivel to take aim, she might not be able to plug both of us.
As quickly as it had come, the fury subsided. “It’s a matter of honor,” she said. “The money in that satchel was the hard-earned pay of soldiers in the Aviation Detachment. Soldiers under my command. Not receiving it when they were supposed to receive it caused a lot of hardship. Rents they couldn’t pay, groceries they couldn’t buy, money they couldn’t send home to their families.”
And booze they couldn’t buy down in the red light district, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.
She gazed at us, eyes wide, as if wondering if we’d understand. “It was my duty as an officer, as one sworn to obey the orders of those appointed above me, to protect that payroll. With my life, if need be. I should’ve pulled out this pistol and aimed it at Dartworth’s blond head and blown his damn brains out!”
Ernie held out his hand, expecting the gun to go off. It didn’t. She paid no attention to our discomfort but seemed wrapped in a world of her own misery. Ernie took a step to his left.
“Instead, what did I do?” she asked. “I took the soft way out. I thought of my own feelings, of my own failure to live as an officer first and as a woman second. I didn’t live up to my responsibilities.”
“Hey,” Ernie said. “You liked the guy. Of course you didn’t want to kill him. You’re only human.”
Coming from Ernie, the biggest woman-chasing, booze-guzzling ville rat in 8th Army, I almost laughed out loud at the remark. Lieutenant Burcshoff shook her head vehemently.
“My dad told me becoming an officer would be tough. My grandfather told me it would be tough. They told me if I couldn’t handle the job, if my personal life was more important to me than doing my duty, then I should never put on the uniform of an officer of the United States Army.”
Most of the officers I knew only talked a good game. The truth was that they always put their careers and their personal goals above their duty to God and country. I was about to tell Lieutenant Burcshoff this when a red light flashed outside the window. Ernie glanced over. “The commanding general,” he said.
A line of staff cars led by an MP jeep pulled up in front of the Women Officers’ Quarters. A blue flag spangled with four stars fluttered in front of the longest sedan. Someone at the MP station must’ve notified the CG, General Skulgrin, that we were on our way to arrest one of his officers.
When Lieutenant Burcshoff glanced outside, Ernie stole another step toward the humming refrigerator. “The CG is here for you,” I told her. “Because he respects you and doesn’t want anything to happen to you.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “It’s just more MPs come to arrest me.”
The commanding general of 8th Army, tall and lean and craggy-faced, climbed out of the back seat of his sedan. “I’m not lying,” I said. “He’s come to help you.”
“It’s too late, she said. “I’ve humiliated my family. I’ve dishonored the officer corps.”
With his back against the refrigerator Ernie could reach one of the plateglass windows. He rapped his fingers lightly and caught the attention of one of the MPs outside. As he turned and looked, Ernie flipped him the bird.
The MPs face crinkled in rage. “Screw you too, Bascom,” he shouted.
That was enough for Lieutenant Burcshoff to swivel her head and the barrel of the pistol along with it. I took two running steps and leapt across the couch. Ernie charged at the same time.
Lieutenant Burcshoff, with the reflexes of a tennis pro, backed off at the last moment. Ernie and I crashed into one another. Still, I was able to fling out my right hand and grab hold of one of her wrists. With all my strength I wrenched her arm toward the ground. She screamed, jerked her arm away, and twisted the barrel of the .45 toward her mouth.
Ernie kicked and flailed beneath me. A shot rang out. The smell of gunpowder exploded up my nostrils.
Heavy boots pounded down the hallway, and a herd of elephants crashed through the door.
I kept grabbing and turning and twisting, hoping to keep her from firing again. Finally a pair of knees ground into my back. MPs knelt above me and handcuffed my hands. In the confusion no one knew who was friend or foe. They sat me up against a bookcase.
They dragged Ernie, kicking and screaming, behind the safety of the couch.
General Skulgrin, the 8th Army commander, marched into the room. He knelt next to Lieutenant Burcshoff, one khaki-covered knee sopping up a puddle of blood. He turned his head and bellowed an order. “Get an ambulance! Now!”
Ernie was till wrestling with the MP he’d given the finger to. I heard knuckles crack on bone, and then reinforcement held Ernie to the ground until he finally stopped struggling.
General Skulgrin stuck gnarled fingers into the base of Burcshoff’s neck, feeling for a pulse. There wasn’t much left of the top of her skull. Finally he spoke to the MP officer hovering nearby. “Cancel the ambulance. She’s dead.”
He started to reach for the pearl-handled .45. A voice erupted in the room. To my surprise I realized it was mine.
“Don’t touch it! That pistol belongs to her! Not to her father. Not to her grandfather. Not to anyone else. It belongs to her!”
All eyes in the room stared at me, figuring I’d gone mad.
THE MYSTERIOUS MR. KIM
The old woman tugged so fiercely on my shirtsleeve that I almost toppled off of my barstool.
“You save my son!” she screamed.
Ernie set down his frothing brown bottle of Oriental Beer, swiveled, and grabbed the elderly woman by the worn cotton of her loose Korean tunic. I regained my balance and grappled with her for a moment, and soon Ernie and I wedged her between us, me waving my open palm in front of her nose and telling her, “Choyong hei.” Calm down.
Ernie and I were off duty, bar hopping through the red light district of Itaewon and, as we were wont to do, hoisting a few wets. About the last thing we expected was to be assaulted, for no apparent reason, by a hysterical old woman.
The out-of-tune rock band twanged their last note
and then stopped playing, their mouths open, gawking at us. The GI customers also stared, as did the “business girls,” their nightly work interrupted in mid-hustle.
The old woman stopped screeching long enough for Ernie and me to walk her over to a corner table. I sat down next to her, patting the back of her bony hand.
She had to be in at least her early sixties. Most of her teeth were missing. The strong brown eyes in the center of her face were enveloped by the burn wrinkles of someone who had spent the better part of her life toiling in muddy rice fields. When it seemed that she wouldn’t start grabbing on me again, Ernie returned to the bar and brought over our drinks.
Now that she had our attention, she spoke in rapid Korean. Breathlessly, so fast that I had trouble following and asked her to repeat herself more than once. Finally, I managed to absorb the outlines of her story.
Her son had been arrested, tried, and convicted of that most horrible of crimes: murder.
The case wasn’t exactly unknown to us. In fact, it was the biggest flap to hit 8th Army in years.
A US Army doctor, Captain Richard Everson, had been stabbed to death in one of the narrow back alleys behind the flashing neon of Itaewon. An ice pick was found at the scene, and smeared blood confirmed it as the murder weapon. The apparent motive? Robbery. Captain Everson’s wristwatch, fraternity ring, and wallet were all missing.
Since the crime occurred outside of a military reservation, jurisdiction for the case fell squarely on the capable shoulders of the Korean National Police. With the international spotlight on them, the KNPs wasted no time. All known thugs in the Itaewon area were rounded up, and soon—after interrogations involving rubber hoses—a suspect was identified. Choi Yong-kuang was his name, the son of the woman sitting in front of us. He had accomplices. Three other young men who were members of his gang, according to the KNPs, but all three of the men had testified that it was Choi Yong-kuang who had actually done the stabbing of Captain Richard Everson.
Why had they killed Everson when they’d already had him outnumbered and disabled? Sheer meanness, according to Choi’s former comrades. Choi Yong-kuang had just wanted to watch an American die.