by Martin Limon
On the main road outside of Gate Five, Miss Kim climbed onto a packed Seoul metropolitan bus. After about a dozen other customers clambered aboard, Ernie pulled himself up the narrow steps and wedged his way into the teeming mass of humanity. The bus pulled off in a cloud of exhaust.
I met Captain Leah Prevault at Hanil-guan, a restaurant in downtown Seoul that specialized in noodles. It was a large place with two floors and probably more than sixty tables, vastly popular with young Koreans. What Leah and I liked about it was that it was miles from the compound and, other than us, we’d never seen any foreigners there.
“You’re getting better with chopsticks,” I told her. Only about half the noodles were sliding back into the broth. She dabbed her lips with a folded napkin.
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Only you.”
We’d been seeing each other since we’d first worked on a case together some six months ago. Captain Prevault was a psychiatrist, and I often picked her brain about the cases I dealt with.
“Major Schultz has everything going for him,” I told her. “A wife, a family back at Fort Hood, a solid military career. Even after losing that fifty bucks to that business girl, he should’ve kept his mouth shut. Instead, he makes it worse.”
She’d heard about the beating Miss Jo had received.
Leah Prevault picked up the flat metal spoon and ladled broth into her mouth.
“Male pride,” she said. “Can’t admit that he can’t get it up.” She grinned devilishly.
“You think that’s it?”
“Yup. And when he can’t get it up, he has to blame somebody. Unfortunately, it’s usually the woman.”
“You’ve seen cases like this before?”
She nodded her head. “Often.”
“You think his wife has heard about it?”
“No question. So has his boss, the J-2.”
The J-2 was the staff officer in charge of military intelligence, who reported directly to the Commanding Officer of the 8th United States Army. The “J” stood for joint command—of both the ROK and US—and the “2” was the standard designation for military intelligence operations.
“Has the J-2 relieved him of his regular duties?” I asked.
“That’s not what I hear at the O Club.” She was referring to the 8th Army Officers Club. “In fact the J-2 is backing him up, keeping him on some important investigation he was in the middle of.”
“About what?”
She shrugged. “I’m just a lowly MD. You’ll have to talk to the honchos about that.”
When we finished our dinner, I took her hand. “Thanks for coming out here with me.”
She stared straight into my eyes. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Leah Prevault wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, but she had brains and an outgoing personality that made most people relaxed enough to confess their innermost secrets to her. By Ernie’s standards she was plain: She wore no makeup, her long brown hair was usually knotted in the back of her head, and her horn-rimmed glasses often slipped halfway down her nose. But her full-lipped smile was generous, her complexion smooth, and I’d probably fallen for her the first time I met her.
“You like the brainy ones,” Ernie told me, without a tone of approval. “They just land you in trouble.”
“Trouble in what way?”
“They make you want to settle down.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Ernie looked at me like I was mad. “There’s a whole world of women out there.” He waved his arm. “How can you settle for just one?”
“How many do you need?” I asked.
“More than I’m getting,” he said.
Captain Prevault and I didn’t return to the compound that night. Fraternization between the ranks is a court-martial offense. We stayed at a Korean inn, away from the prying eyes of the 8th US Army.
Two days later, the word came down. Riley hoisted the phone to his ear, listened, and barked, “Roger that!” He slammed down the receiver. “You guys remember that Major Schultz?” he asked.
“What do you mean, ‘remember’?” I asked.
“He’s history.”
“What are you talking about, Riley?”
“That was the KNP Liaison. They found Schultz dead, at some dive out in Itaewon.” He jotted something on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “Captain Kim’s at the scene right now.”
I looked at the paper. The Dragon King Nightclub.
“Dead?” Ernie asked.
“Deader than a ping-pong ball in a minefield,” Riley replied. “Better get your asses in gear.”
We did. Ernie grabbed his coat and I grabbed mine. Within seconds, we were in his jeep and speeding out Gate 7, waving at the MPs, swerving toward Itaewon. Ernie honked his horn and zoomed past a three-wheeled truck loaded with a small mountain of garlic. He held his nose.
“I’ll never get used to this country,” he said.
“Oh, bull, you love every minute of it,” I told him. “I’ve seen you pop down three orders of roasted garlic in one sitting.”
“That’s after a bottle of soju.”
“You like the smell of garlic better after a bottle of soju?”
“I like anything better after a bottle of soju.”
-6-
Captain Kim, Commander of the Itaewon Police Station, stood waiting for us. He was a lugubrious-faced man with sagging jowls and eyes that sloped downward at the edges, as if weighed down by years of misery. He opened his palm and waved us through the door of the Dragon King Nightclub.
It was a small joint off the main drag of Itaewon, along the main supply route. One of the boutique barrooms that had sprung up not only to cater to GIs, but also to the growing class of young Koreans from wealthy families who could afford to spend ten or twenty thousand won per night—twenty to forty US dollars—on beer or liquor and an evening of cabareting. These youthful elites found it particularly exciting because these nightclubs were near the notorious red-light district of Itaewon, restricted to foreign guests only. Nothing is more titillating than that which is forbidden.
The place was modern compared to the old joints in the heart of Itaewon. The floor was tiled, the bar lit with a wedge of neon, and the stools made of stainless steel. We followed Captain Kim to the hallway in the back that led past the bathrooms and through a swinging door and into a neatly kept storage room. The back door was open. Sunlight filtered through a heavy overcast. We stepped into the alley.
“Here,” Captain Kim said, pointing, “next to those.”
Four wooden crates, all full of empty crystalline soju bottles, were piled on top of one another. But beyond that were more crates, some of them smashed, bottles shattered, and the strong rice liquor long since seeped into the ground. I knelt and watched the dim sunlight play off the jagged edges of the glass, stained with tiny spots of reddish-brown. The spray droplets grew larger as they consolidated into a pool of something sticky and black, looking as if they had been tossed from a large pan.
I stood slowly. “The technicians?” I asked.
“They come soon,” Captain Kim said. “Truck come.”
“And the body?”
“Already take to Seoul. They gonna check. Everything.”
He meant the morgue in downtown Seoul. Ernie and I had been there many times before.
“Why didn’t you wait for the Eighth Army Coroner?” Ernie asked.
“First, we don’t know he GI. No wallet, no nothing.”
“We’re right next to Itaewon,” Ernie replied. “You must’ve known he was a GI.”
“Maybe,” Captain Kim said, shrugging. “But honcho say take Seoul.”
“Which honcho?” I asked.
“You know.”
I stared at him. “No, I don’t know.”
&n
bsp; He shrugged, resigned to the fact that we’d find out soon enough. “Gil Kwon-up,” he said.
This was indeed a man we knew well. The brilliant chief homicide detective of the Korean National Police, whom American GIs called “Mr. Kill.”
“Why’s he interested in this?” Ernie asked.
Captain Kim shrugged again. “You ask him.”
“When we took the call, we were told that the victim was Major Schultz. If you had no wallet and weren’t even sure he was a GI, how’d you know his name?”
“Maybe they find wallet later. I don’t know. You ask chief inspector.”
The KNPs were just making excuses for having transported his body to the downtown morgue. Routinely, if the victim was an American, they were more than happy to turn it over to us; less trouble for them, less scrutiny from their superiors. In this case, there had to be a reason they’d wanted to examine the corpse on their own.
“How was he killed?” I asked.
“A lot of blood, you see. Body cut bad. Maybe twenty, thirty times.”
“What type of blade?”
“Maybe more than one type.”
“A knife?”
“You look at body. You see.”
“Did he fight?”
Captain Kim spread his arms and turned slightly. “Look.”
What surrounded us were neatly stacked wooden crates filled with glass bottles, beyond the stack that had been turned over and smashed. Not one of the others had been knocked over.
“Did somebody clean up?”
“No, still same.”
That meant that if a fight had taken place, it had been short and sweet, and Major Schultz had gone down quickly.
“What time was the body found?”
“This morning, old lady come. Her job, clean up.”
“She has a key?”
“Yes. Always come in back door. First she see body, then she see blood. She run away, go KNP station.”
“Did she see anybody else around here?”
“No, just body.”
“And last night, was there a fight?”
“Owner at station now. We go talk.”
We did. The owner claimed to know nothing about the big American who’d ended up dead behind the Dragon King Nightclub. As a matter of fact, no Americans at all had entered his club last night. Just before the midnight curfew, he had personally locked the place up tight and left through the back door. He hadn’t noticed anyone lurking in the alley at that time.
When we were through talking to him, I asked Captain Kim, “Has he already been interrogated by Gil Kwon-up?”
Captain Kim nodded. “Already.”
Ernie and I returned to the jeep. As we climbed in, Ernie started the engine and said, “Looks like we’re sucking hind tit.”
“Mr. Kill wants to get a handle on this crime,” I said. “An American officer stabbed to death on the edge of Itaewon. His bosses will want a report every five minutes.”
The Republic of Korea was receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military assistance from the United States government. There were more than 50,000 American military personnel stationed in country with the mission of helping to protect the ROK from another invasion by the Communist regime to the north. Incidents involving the murder of American soldiers generated bad publicity back in the States, put pressure on politicians, and directly threatened the flow of military and financial aid. The Korean government leaders refused to tolerate such a risk. As such, as soon as it was out that an American field grade officer had been murdered, they’d put their best man, Mr. Kill on it, and so far he’d taken full control of the case and full control of the evidence.
“Before we go to the morgue,” Ernie said, “maybe we should check on Miss Jo.”
“Maybe we should,” I said.
Ernie parked the jeep on the edge of the Itaewon Market and we hoofed it into the narrow pedestrian alleys. But the landlady told us that Miss Jo had already moved out. With her hospital bills, she hadn’t been able to make the rent.
“Where’s her stuff,” Ernie asked, “the bed and her clothes?”
I translated and the landlady led us to a wooden storeroom. She pulled a keychain out of the deep folds of her house dress and popped open the padlock. Inside, stacked upright were the bed, the now dismantled plastic wardrobe, and cardboard boxes full of clothes.
“Is she coming back for them?” I asked in Korean.
The landlady shrugged. “That’s what she said. If she doesn’t, I’ll sell everything.”
I asked the landlady for a forwarding address, but of course she didn’t have one. She did believe that Miss Jo would be staying nearby, here in Itaewon, so she could earn enough money to pay her back rent and reclaim her clothes.
“Clothes are very important to a young woman like her,” she said.
The City Morgue in downtown Seoul is a giant stone building one major street over from KNP headquarters. There was no place to park, so after I hopped out, Ernie cruised around the block. Wisps of cold rain splattered against my face as I made my way up the steps and through the big glass double doors. Inside, the clerk was less than helpful. Even my 8th Army CID badge didn’t impress her. She did, however, pick up the phone, press a button, and was soon chattering away with someone who I believed was at KNP headquarters. She hung up and said, “You wait.”
Ernie showed up.
“Where’d you park?”
“I paid a mama-san to move her cart.”
Pushcarts serving bean curd soup or roast corn-on-the-cob or pindaedok, mung bean pancakes, roam the crowded streets of Seoul, mainly at night but some to service the lunch crowd during the day. They guard their territory with their life, but room can be made for a jeep if the price is right.
I was about to question the clerk again when a man accompanied by a young woman wearing the neat blue uniform of the Korean National Police pushed through the front door. Chief Inspector Gil Kwon-up, aka Mr. Kill, with his female assistant, Officer Oh.
He was dapper as usual, with grey hair swept back from his forehead and a neatly pressed suit that, for all I knew, was imported straight from Europe. They walked briskly toward us, then swerved to the right. “Come,” he said.
We did. Officer Oh lagged behind, making sure we followed her boss. She looked crisp and efficient in her knee-length dark-blue skirt with a sky-blue blouse buttoned to the collar. A flat, upturned brim cap sat atop a cascade of curly black hair. When I caught her eye, I nodded to her and she nodded back, smiling politely. We’d worked with her and her boss before; sometimes cooperatively, sometimes not so much. The four of us trotted down two flights of broad cement steps. At the bottom, we entered a low-roofed hallway illuminated by yellowing fluorescents. The bulbs grew dimmer as we rounded a corner until we finally pushed through a pair of swinging doors and entered a refrigerated room bathed in reddish light. A technician with a white smock stood at attention.
Mr. Kill barked an order.
The tech retreated to an inner room and within seconds, he rolled out a long table and shoved it in front of us. Then he pushed over a lamp on wheels and switched it on. When the lumpy object in front of us was fully illuminated, Mr. Kill whipped off the sheet.
Major Frederick Manfield Schultz, lifeless eyes staring straight ahead, looking, now, a little worse for wear. His cheeks weren’t puffed out anymore; they were sunken, and they certainly weren’t red, but a sickly grey. A stench wafted off the corpse. I knew the body had been washed, but the odor of two hundred pounds of dead meat still reminds one of the undiscerning darkness that will one day embrace us all.
Mr. Kill pointed toward the wounds. “Two knives,” he said. “Maybe one a small axe?” He made a chopping motion.
“A hatchet,” I said.
“Yes. A hatchet.” He seemed satisfied with the word.
I studied the wounds. “Two different blades,” I said.
“Yes. Here are the measurements.”
Officer Oh handed me a sheet of paper written in both hangul and English. The measurements were in centimeters. I thanked her and pocketed it.
“What was the cause of death?” I asked.
Mr. Kill nodded toward the technician, stepped forward and, with Officer Oh’s assistance, rolled Major Frederick Manfield Schultz onto his side. As they did so, his right arm flopped forward lifelessly, as if waving for us to join him in the endless depths.
While Officer Oh held the corpse in place, the technician hurriedly repositioned the lamp, aiming it at the back of Major Schultz’s head.
“Christ,” Ernie said.
I let out a gasp too.
It was a neat chop, slicing the flesh and then the skull, like a tomahawk blow to a tree.
“Hatchet,” Mr. Kill said once again.
“Hatchet,” Officer Oh repeated.
Then he turned to us. “Tell me what you know,” he said.
The KNPs put out an all-points bulletin for Miss Jo Kyong-ja. After her recent trouble with Major Schultz, she was a prime suspect in this murder. It was physically unlikely that she could’ve pulled off the attack herself, unless she’d caught him completely unawares, but it was possible that she put somebody up to it. In fact, Mr. Kill thought it likely.