“Shit, you saw one, you saw them all,” he muttered under his breath. “Just another dead Vietnamese,” he said as he approached the crime scene at the end of a dingy, garbage infested alley, in the heart of L.A.’s “Little Saigon.”
The call had come into his office a little after eight a.m. that morning. The caller hadn’t identified himself. He It just said in a low raspy voice, “You’ll find a dead Vietnamese at the end of Baker’s Alley. You’ll have a tough time distinguishing him from the other garbage in the alley, but if you don’t get there for an hour or so, you should be able to follow your nose to him.”
That’s all there was, no name to tag onto the mysterious caller. No chance to run a trace, because the mysterious caller had only been on the line less than thirty seconds. It was a man’s voice, even though he was obviously trying to disguise it . . . Jerry was sure of that. Not much to go on, but he’d grabbed his coffee and headed for the door, letting his supervisor, Captain Henry Davis, know he was going to Little Saigon to investigate another homicide.
“What’ve you got, Jerry?” Davis had yelled as Jerry ran past his office.
“Just got a tip that another Vietnamese has been killed in Little Saigon. I’m on my way to check it out. Care to come along?”
“No way, I’ve got too many reports to check out, but thanks for asking, Jerry.”
Jerry had known the captain wouldn’t want to come. The captain had been flying his desk for over five years, long enough to earn the Air Medal and a DFC, and was just six months and a wake-up call from a full retirement.
As Jerry approached the body, the same voice that told him he had seen all this before began to turn on like a leaky faucet. It was like a warning light on the dashboard of his car, only he didn’t need to add oil, and from the looks of the blood on the concrete, this stiff was long past needing a transfusion.
Another car pulled into the alley and disgorged a police photographer who went by the name of “Smiley.” He immediately set to work taking pictures of the crime scene. He took shots of the entrance to the alley, the garbage cans, and the body from every conceivable angle. The guy used more film on this one shoot than Life Magazine had used to photograph the fall of Saigon in ’75. “Any other shots you want me to take, Jerry?” he asked, as he reloaded his camera for the fourth time.
“Yeah, Smiley, come over here and let’s roll the body over for some shots of his other side.”
Smiley gently laid down his camera then took hold of both the victim’s feet and abruptly turned him over, as easily as if flipping a fried egg.
“Thanks, Smiley,” Jerry said, amazed by Smiley’s apparent strength.
“No problem, Jerry. Anything to help the macho homicide squad.” Smiley was talking to Jerry, but his eyes were looking elsewhere.
Jerry followed his gaze to the blood-encrusted head of the victim.
“Holy shit, his friggin ear’s gone,” Jerry said, with more than a little apprehension.
“No shit, Sherlock. Now move out of my way so I can shoot up the rest of this film,” said Smiley with his usual nonchalance.
Jerry moved back to let Smiley finish his work. The county coroner’s ambulance arrived and Jerry held them back until Smiley was done with his shoot. Jerry couldn’t get the stiff off his mind. That throat was slit, long and deep, and one of his ears was missing. Who the hell would take a guy’s ear for a souvenir? Jerry thought, as he continued to keep the coroner’s team from carting off the body. His internal alarm went off again, only this time, he flashed back to Nam. It was 1967 again and he was standing at a Vietnamese bar, having a brew.
Pleiku City was the provincial capital of a group of small farming communities in the central highlands of Vietnam. It was also the headquarters of Jerry’s “B” Team. The “A” Team had been invited in for a reception in honor of an ARVN Colonel by the name of Vinh Ho. ARVN was the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the supposed counterparts of Jerry and his comrades. The idea was that the Americans were supposed to advise and the Vietnamese were supposed to fight, but it never seemed to work out that way. It seemed that every time a firefight started, the ARVNs disappeared like Harry Houdini’s rabbit. When the smoke of battle cleared, the Americans would be licking their wounds and gathering up their dead, while the ARVNs were nowhere to be seen. Blaster used to joke, “That’s why those little fellers were issued tennis shoes, so they could run at the first sound of battle.” Blaster was insightful when it came to the ARVNs, as he was about most things.
The reception was mandatory, or no Americans would have been there. But since it was required, well, there was no sense not drinking ARVN booze and having a good time. The party was held at the Club Saigon, a small but elegant hole in the wall, with a nice bar, enough room for twelve SF Troopers, and a small contingent of Vietnamese that always made up the entourage of Vinh Ho. They partied hard, and long into the night. There was an endless supply of good booze, and Vietnamese party girls more than willing to get a leg over a hard GI. It was about two a.m. when Jerry heard the ruckus out behind the Club. Scuffling and shouts in both Vietnamese and English, then a loud report from what sounded to Jerry like a forty-five automatic.
Jerry quickly looked around the room. Almost everyone was shitfaced and hadn’t heard a thing. He took a mental inventory of the personnel in the room. Just as he had suspected, Gunner McConnell, the team’s light weapons specialist, wasn’t there, and he always carried his forty-five auto mag in a shoulder holster under his shirt. He slid out through a rear door and into the alley behind the club, holding to the shadows like a black spot on a dark wall.
A single light illuminated the alley’s recesses, not much, but enough so that Jerry could make out Gunner’s large bulk standing over a motionless body. “Gunner, is that you?”
“Sure is, Jerry, come over and look what I’ve got.”
“What the fuck have you done, Gunner?” Jerry shouted.
“Not much, just something I’ve been wanting to do for the last two years.”
Jerry inched closer. “What have you done, Gunner?”
“Just killed me one of those chickenshit ARVNs. Shot him, slit his throat, and sliced off a piece to remember him by.” He was standing in front of me with a shit-eating grin on his face, holding a bloody ear out in front of him.
“We’re in for it now, Gunner. It’s bad enough killing an ARVN, but shit, did you have to mutilate the body?”
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, Jerry. I thought about it every time these bastards cut and ran on us in the field. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it for a real long time. See, he’s a Buddhist.” Gunner reached down and jerked the dead ARVN’s head up by pulling on the chain that held his religious medallion. “Can’t go to Buddha heaven if he can’t hear the gongs.”
It occurred to Jerry at that moment to ask Gunner why he also didn’t cut off the ARVN’s nose, since burning incense was such a big part of their religion, and that way he couldn’t smell, either, but he thought better of it and kept his mouth shut, not wanting to give Gunner any more bright ideas. He looked down at the carnage in front of him. The dead ARVN appeared to be staring at him through his dead eyes. It was then that Jerry noticed the card lying on the ARVN’s chest . . . It was an ace of spades with a skull and crossbones emblazoned across its face. Gunner had put a “death card” on his victim.
“Brilliant, Gunner, fucking brilliant. Now what do we do?” Jerry said.
Gunner looked at Jerry with his big, all-absorbing, Irish eyes and just shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s a rhetorical question, Gunner; the answer is as obvious as the ears still left on your head. About a hundred fucking years in the Long Binh Jail, that’s what we do.”
“No way, Jerry. The way I figure it, we just stuff him into one of these trash cans and go back to the party. By the time they find this guy, we’ll be back at the ‘A’ Team and they’ll think Charley killed him for the few piasters he had in his pockets.”
“You me
an you stole his money too?”
“Yeah, part of my plan—fuckin’ brilliant, huh?”
They stuffed him into a fifty-five-gallon drum, covered him with trash and went back to the party, just the way Gunner planned it. And they never did hear anything from that ARVN colonel, and never spent a day in the LBJ.
Jerry pulled the sheet back and looked one more time. The right ear was gone, just like the other six victims before him. The M.O. was the same in each case. The victims had all been Vietnamese males, all had their throats slashed, and all had their right ears severed. Gunner. The name popped into Jerry’s brain like a red light going on at an intersection. They all looked just like the dead ARVN back in Pleiku; the one Jerry helped stuff into the fifty-five-gallon drum so many years ago. But Gunner had been dead for over twenty years—Jerry had brought the body into GRU himself.
Jerry wished he could put the fucking war behind him, but it kept filling his head at the most inconvenient times. No way could this series of killings be related, but try as he might, he just couldn’t shut up that inner voice. It just kept droning into his ears and wouldn’t let him solve this crime using the standard deductive techniques that he’d been taught since he’d been with the LAPD.
THREE
The noise in cop bars is generally deafening, but Jerry always did his best thinking at the 44 Magnum. The bar, located at 44 Magnum Street, was the favorite watering hole of many of his off-duty compadres, a place for them to drown out the memories of shitty days and endless nights. The bartender, a sleazy, foul-mouthed Spaniard by the name of Armando Perez, could always be counted on to supply Jerry with the latest rumors or act as his father confessor, whichever was appropriate at the time.
“Hey Jerry, I hear another VC was slashed in Baker’s Alley today?”
“Armando, where did you hear that?”
“A little fuckin’ bird told me, Jerry. You ready for another blast?”
“Yeah, and this time, make it a double.” Jerry had been hitting the scotch really heavily lately. He made a mental note to stop drinking as soon as he solved this case.
Armando leaned across the bar toward Jerry’s ear, causing Jerry to back away momentarily. “Shit, Jerry, I ain’t no faggot. I wasn’t trying to nibble on your ear, or nothin’.”
“I don’t believe you, Mondo. Now what’s the big secret you were trying to tell me?”
“See that guy at the end of the bar?”
“You mean the bearded guy that looks kind of down in the mouth and long in the tooth?”
“Yeah, that’s him. He’s the one that told me about the dead Vietnamese. He says he knows you; you and he used to be on the same team or something. No offense, Jerry, but you don’t look like any athlete to me.”
Jerry looked down into his half-empty glass, then casually stole a glance down to the end of the crowded bar. It had been so many years, and they all had changed so much. Could that really be one of his old teammates? The guy looked to be about six foot four and two hundred twenty-five pounds. He had hams for hands and gunboats for feet. As he leaned forward to take another swig of his drink, Jerry noticed his thick hair and beard, a beard now gone salt-and-pepper from age or circumstances. Circumstances, most likely, Jerry thought. His nose was large and Jerry could see the remnants of a long, jagged scar, running from his nose down his darkly tanned cheek.
The team . . . after all the nightmares, Jerry should have been able to place each of the team members as easily as he could identify the twelve apostles at the Last Supper. Actually, that would be just as tough for him, since he hadn’t been to church in over ten years. He leaned back and took a long swallow of his scotch, draining the glass and feeling the pleasing, burning sensation all the way down into the pit of his stomach.
It was 1967. They were all sitting outside the team house having a 3.2 brew when their commo man, William “Sweet Willy” Beal, came staggering out the door with his hands over his face and fell headfirst into the dirt. Sweet Willy was a big ol’ southern boy from Dothan, Alabama. He had been a star basketball player at Virginia Military Institute before he decided to enlist as a grunt in Uncle Sam’s finest. To hear Sweet Willy tell it, he had made the “All World” team as a forward in his junior year at VMI. He looked like he wished he had stayed on and graduated. At least then he would have been an officer with some status, instead of a buck sergeant always getting his dick dragged in the dirt.
Gunner McConnell was standing in the doorway of the team house, looking down in disgust at his fallen teammate, while he picked his front teeth with his Ka-Bar knife. “That ought to teach you to fuck with me, Sweet Willy. From now on, you’re going to be so ugly you wouldn’t be able to get a date with a Saigon whore.”
Willy looked up and for the first time, Jerry saw what Gunner was talking about. Gunner had slashed Willy across the nose and cheek with his knife, leaving a jagged red trail down the enlisted man’s previously unblemished face. “Why’d you go and do that, Gunner? I didn’t mean anything personal by what I said!”
“Nothing personal was taken. I just felt like carving me a piece of white meat for lunch today. Maybe the next time you start shooting your mouth off, you’ll look in the mirror, then think twice about what you’re going to say.”
Now Sweet Willy was no pussy, and it was unlike him to take any shit from anyone. And that was when Jerry saw his hand inching under his fatigue jacket for the Browning 9mm that everyone knew he kept in a shoulder holster. Jerry jumped between them and grabbed Willy’s hand before he could reach it. “I think we better get you into Pleiku, Willy, before you get any uglier.”
“Yeah, okay, Jerry. But you ain’t heard the last from me, Gunner.”
Over two decades later, Jerry walked over to the man at the end of the bar. “Willy, Willy Beal, is that you?”
“None other than, my man, and who might you be?”
“Don’t you recognize me, Willy? It’s Jerry Andrews, A-Detachment 255.”
“Yeah, Jerry. Boy, do you look different. I heard you were doing a tour with the LAPD, so I put out the word that I was looking for you.”
“That’s what I heard, Willy. How’ve you been doing?”
“Well, as you can see, probably not too good by your standards.”
Willy’s tattered, threadbare clothes and unshaven, sallow face said it all. How many times had Jerry seen Vietnam vets that looked like his old pal Willy? More times than he could count or would want to. They spent two, maybe three tours in the Nam and they came out different. They were no longer the clean-cut, good and moral kids that went over the pond hoping to rid the world of Communism and do it like their fathers had in World War II.
Their fathers had come home to brass bands and accolades from a grateful nation, a nation that applauded their efforts all the way from the towns and villages of Europe to the beaches and jungles of the South Pacific. They got a grand parade, but what did guys like Jerry and Willy get? They got a bunch of longhaired hippie freaks carrying anti-war, anti-American signs instead of M-16s, and burning flags instead of carrying them. They got called “baby-killer” and spit on for their efforts on what they had thought was the nation’s behalf. The worm had turned in their once-proud country in the short span of a few years.
Willy, and guys like him, came home damaged. They could not assimilate back into society. Some turned to drugs, others alcohol, but all felt a deep depression, resentment, and loss. Those with a different mindset could find jobs. “Fake it so you can make it” was their mantra, their battle cry! For others like Willy, their next tour, the one through life, would be a long series of endless nightmares, drug-and-alcohol-induced misery, and search for the meaning to it all. In the end, it was not so much where he was but what he had become, and that’s what drove his self-pity and loathing. His only peace would be found at the end of his earthly trail, where there would be no Purple Heart for the injury he had endured.
Jerry felt it was time to change the subject and find out why Willy was trying so hard to get h
old of him after all these years. “Why did you need to get hold of me, buddy boy?”
“You been reading the newspapers lately regarding the Little Saigon murders, Jerry?”
Choosing not to let on that he was the lead investigating officer, he just nodded noncommittally. “What about them, Willy? You haven’t looked me up to confess, have you?”
“You know better than that, Jerry. These murders are not my style. But we do know someone that used to operate like that. I mean, cutting off ears and the like.”
“Shit, Willy, have you lost it altogether? You’re not still pissed because Gunner scarred you that time? I delivered his remains to GRU after Charley kicked our asses all over our compound.” Jerry looked at Willy. Willy’s face was screwed into a tight ball as if he was thinking real hard, but Jerry was convinced he was two beers short of a six-pack.
“Mondo, get my friend another beer, and back it up with some of your finest bourbon,” Jerry said. Back at the team house, Willy had used to love “boiler-makers.” They were “a real man’s drink,” as he used to say.
“Thanks, Jerry. You know, it never crossed my mind that he died that day. I guess I really am losing it.”
“I’m sorry, Willy, I didn’t mean to insult you. Still pals?” Jerry offered his open hand in Willy’s direction and he took it, his face crinkling around his scarred cheek and his eyes in as much of a smile as he was capable of at that moment.
Willy was right, of course, in that Jerry had thought about Gunner not long ago while working the case, but Gunner was as cold as a quartered side of beef in a meat locker. Jerry pictured him in that bloody body bag. He saw the skull’s-head ring Gunner wore on his right hand. He saw Gunner’s dog tags protruding from what was left of his face. He had taken his body home to his parents and stood by them as his coffin was lowered into the ground. He had even thrown a handful of dirt on his old teammate, before saluting and wishing him bon voyage into the great unknown. And he had thought, just before he left the cemetery that day, When Gunner enters Hell, and I’m sure he will, the first thing that’s going to happen to him is they’re going to cut his ears off. Jerry had smiled to himself at the thought of him walking around with two holes in his head where his ears used to be.
Club Saigon Page 2