Nightmare Range (37 page)

Their reason for showing so little curiosity was simple. In the army, the less you know the safer your career prospects.

Ernie and I performed our routine black market detail duties that day, but when I found a spare moment, I made a few phone calls. What I was trying to determine was the identity of Captain Richard Everson’s best friend. I found him: Bob Quincy, an engineering officer who had shared quarters with the late Captain Everson on 8th Army’s South Post.

Early that evening Ernie and I paid Quincy a visit.

He was a portly man with a round face and round spectacles and a pugnacious air. He stared straight up at Ernie’s pointed nose.

“You had to have some idea of what his social life was like,” Ernie said.

“I don’t believe in speaking ill of the dead.”

“ ‘Speaking ill?’ What the hell are you talking about, Quincy?”

Quincy turned away and stalked down the long hallway of the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters toward the dayroom. We followed. A green felt pool table and a TV sat unused. The room was empty. He plopped down heavily in a padded chair.

“I thought it was all over,” Quincy said. “I thought no one would come around asking me questions.”

I grabbed a three-legged stool and sat opposite Quincy. “A man’s life depends on your truthfulness, Captain Quincy. Anything you say will be held in a file classified Secret.”

He nodded, sighed, and let out a long burst of air. “Dick Everson jogged,” he told me. “He was in good shape, and that’s part of the reason he was popular with the ladies.”

“What’s the other reason?”

“He’s a pediatrician. You know how women love pediatricians.”

I didn’t but I let him talk.

“So he gave a few speeches at the Officers’ Wives Club. You know, on the welfare of children in the Command, on what the OWC could do to help, things like that.”

Ernie pulled out a stick of ginseng gum and unwrapped it. “So Everson hooked up with a couple of the wives,” he said.

Quincy swiveled his round head and frowned at Ernie. “Only one wife.” We waited, the silence growing longer, hoping he’d tell us who. Finally he answered the unspoken question. “I don’t know who she was. Dick Everson was a gentleman. He’d never talk. But every night when he put on his jogging suit and went out for a run, it always lasted a lot longer than it should have. At least an hour. More often two. And he came back smiling.”

“How can you be sure he was meeting this woman?” I asked.

“He told me. I could tell something was up. I didn’t pry, but he told me that she lived with her husband in quarters on post and he reassured me that this woman had no children.”

“That was important to him?” Ernie asked.

“Very,” Quincy replied. “He would have no part in traumatizing kids.”

“Decent of him,” Ernie said.

“But he didn’t give you her name?” I asked.

“No. Like I said, Dick Everson was a gentleman.”

“Boffing a fellow officer’s wife,” Ernie said. “Is that in the manual?”

Quincy’s face flared red. “He broke up with her,” he said. “She didn’t want to, but he knew it had to be done.”

“When?” I asked.

“Two months ago. Maybe three.”

After that, Ernie shot some pool. I asked a few more questions, but they didn’t go anywhere. When I finished with Quincy, we left.

Nothing else in Captain Richard Everson’s military life seemed in any way unusual. Ernie and I weren’t exactly sure where to take this unofficial investigation. At least we weren’t sure until that night in Itaewon when we ran into Choi Yong-kung’s mother again. She had been waiting for us on the road that leads from 8th Army headquarters to the nightclub district.

She grabbed my sleeve, pleading with me. Telling us she had someone she wanted us to talk to.

Miss Tae, the former waitress at the Silver Dragon Club, did indeed have long, straight, beautiful legs. She showed them off by keeping them crossed under her short skirt at the table in a Korean teahouse where we met.

After having escorted us to the teahouse, Yong-kuang’s mother made a discreet departure.

“When I left Everson,” Miss Tae said in Korean, “the ice pick was still on the ground, the GI doctor was alive, and Choi Yong-kuang had run away too.”

“Why don’t you tell this to the Korean police?”

“They would beat me. Make me tell them what they want to hear. So they don’t lose face and have to admit that they were wrong.”

I wasn’t so sure if that was true. Not for Lieutenant Pak Un-pyong, anyway, the chief investigator in the this case. But it was probably true for the institution he represented.

“So who killed Everson?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Then who does?”

Ernie couldn’t take his eyes off Miss Tae’s legs. I concentrated on her face. Too heavily made up for my taste, but I could still
admire the darkly lidded narrow eyes and the gentle curve of the smooth white flesh beneath her high cheekbones.

She sipped on a porcelain cup of green tea, set it down, and then spoke. “To find out the truth, there is a man you must talk to. He paid us to murder Captain Everson.”

I almost choked on my tea. When I recovered, I translated for Ernie.

“Paid you?” he asked.

She turned to him, speaking in English now. “Yes. But we no do. We no can do.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Someone paid you and Choi Yong-kuang to kill Everson, but you couldn’t go through with it?”

She nodded. “After we left, someone else kill Everson.”

“Maybe this man who paid you,” I said.

She nodded again.

“What is his name?”

“He called himself Mr. Kim.”

I groaned inwardly. The most common name in Korea. More common than Smith or Jones in the United States. Miss Tae continued.

“Mr. Kim come in Silver Dragon Club. Quietly. Wearing hat and sunglasses. He watch me with Everson. When Everson leave, he talk to me. Find out I have boyfriend who is
kampei
.” Gangster. She was talking about Choi. “Later he meet us both and offer us money to murder Everson.”

“Did he say why?”

“No. He never say. But one thing …” Miss Tae ran her long fingers along the edge of her teacup. “He strange.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Kim. I don’t think he hate Everson. I don’t think he even know Everson.”

“Someone else wanted Everson killed?”

“I think so.”

“But you don’t know who,” I said.

Miss Tae shook her head. I kept asking questions but was
unable to pull any further information from her. When his turn came, Ernie asked her questions having nothing to do with the Everson case. Before we left, Ernie had convinced her to go out with him. The date was set for next week, Tuesday. In her new job, in a nightclub downtown, Miss Tae wasn’t off until then.

Ernie was willing to wait. “You think she’s lying?” he asked.

We were walking down the brightly lit main drag of Itaewon.

“Probably,” I answered. “This mysterious Mr. Kim is a convenient scapegoat. But if she’s telling any part of the truth, it could mean that someone else actually did murder Captain Everson.”

“Like who?”

I had an idea. But I didn’t want to say anything yet. Not without proof.

The next morning I was on the phone again, identifying myself as a CID agent and asking questions. After about a dozen calls and a trip to the 8th Army housing office, I had the information I needed.

We sat at a table wedged against a side wall of the big Quonset hut that serves as the 8th Army snack bar. I sipped coffee. Ernie glanced at my notes. “Thorough,” he said.

“Thanks.”

What I had done was obtain a list from the Housing Officer of all the accompanied quarters on South Post along with the names of family members, and therefore I had a list of all the wives who lived on South Post. Almost two hundred names. First I crossed off all those who had children. The remaining list was about three dozen strong. I crossed off the enlisted families, and then I was down to twenty-six names.

“How’d you eliminate names after that?” Ernie asked.

“I made phone calls to their husbands’ units. Found out what shifts they worked.”

Ernie slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Of course. Everson used to visit her at night. So her husband had to work nights. Probably a swing shift.”

“Probably. That left us with three names.”

“So we go talk to them?”

“No. I’ve narrowed the list down to one.”

“One?”

“If I’m right, and if this woman were somehow involved in Everson’s death, she would’ve had to be able to persuade a Korean man, this mysterious Mr. Kim, to take the risk of approaching Miss Tae and Choi Yong-kuang and paying them to commit murder.”

“So she’d have to have a helluva a lot of influence over him.”

“Right,” I answered. “A helluva lot.”

Ernie glanced again at the three names. “Two of these women don’t work at all. What are they going to do? Offer their houseboys a pile of money to have somebody killed?”

I nodded. “But the third …”

Ernie whistled. “Big money,” he said.

The third entry was Gladys Hackburn, the wife of Colonel Orin Hackburn. She had her own career, a good one. Her current position was contracting officer for the 8th Army Procurement and Facilities Office. She was a woman who made the final decision on the disbursement of millions of US taxpayer dollars to local construction contractors.

She was a woman with power.

Before we approached Gladys Hackburn, I made a few discreet inquiries at the 8th Army Procurement Office. The biggest contract currently under construction was a Top Secret Signal Intelligence Facility actually being built into the side of a mountain south of Seoul. The dollar figures involved were staggering, and the Korean contractor with the most at risk was a wealthy businessman named Roh Ji-yun. From his background security check folder, I pulled his black-and-white mug shot. That afternoon I made a phone call, and a few minutes later Ernie and I drove our Army jeep out to the same teahouse where we had met Miss Tae before. She was already waiting.

When I pulled out the photo of Roh Ji-yun, her eyes popped wide.

“That’s him,” she said. “Mr. Kim.”

She was so impressed that Ernie almost convinced her to spend the rest of the afternoon with him at a nearby inn. I frustrated his plans.

“We have work to do,” I told him.

Ernie pouted.

Miss Tae merely seemed amused.

We found Roh Ji-yun at one of his construction sites. He wore expensive slacks, a silk tie, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. An orange hardhat balanced atop his big square head.

When I told him what we suspected, his face turned crimson and spittle erupted from fleshy lips.

The punch was a surprise. Most Koreans swear a lot when they’re angry, but usually they don’t hit.

I managed to dodge the blow, and then three of his assistants were on him, holding him back. He continued to curse in Korean, Ernie hurling epithets in English. It was obvious to me that we weren’t going to coax much information out of him.

But for now we had enough.

At the 8th Army Procurement Office, Gladys Hackburn’s secretary kept us cooling our heels for almost twenty minutes. Finally we were allowed to enter the inner sanctum.

She sat at a large teak desk, the flags of the United States and the Republic of Korea draped behind her. She wore a powder blue business suit, and her reddish hair was cut short and curled up in a wave that framed a youngish-looking oval face. When she stood to shake our hands, I could see that she maintained her figure at least as well as had the late Captain Richard Everson.

She smiled brightly.

An intelligent woman. A caring woman. A woman willing to help.

“What brings the CID to the Army Procurement Office?” she asked.

Instead of answering, I tossed the black-and-white glossy of
Roh Ji-yun onto her desk. A puzzled frown crossed her face. She glanced down at the photo but leaned back slightly as if she were afraid to touch it.

“You had him follow Captain Everson,” I said. “To set him up for murder.”

She stood perfectly still for a moment. Ernie and I both held our breath, wondering if she’d break down or tear the photo up or start screaming at us and call the MPs to escort us out of her office.

She did none of those things. Instead she sat down slowly and interlaced her well-manicured fingers atop the varnished surface of her desk as if composing herself to make a speech in front of the Parent-Teachers Association. She cleared her throat and then spoke.

“I loathed him,” she said, “for what he did to me. The lies he told me. The promises he made about our future together.” She shook her head as if trying to rid herself of a bad dream. “But we had no future together. He was just using me.”

“So things didn’t work out,” I said. “And the plan to pay someone to kill Everson slowly grew in your mind. But you weren’t sure if it would work. So you followed, to make sure the job was completed. And when you saw him lying there in that alley and you were all alone and the ice pick was lying beside him …”

“Yes,” she said calmly, staring directly into my eyes. “I killed him. I picked up the ice pick, and I stabbed it into his heart. And what’s more,” she said, her face as smooth as polished stone, “I’d do it again.”

It took a while for the paperwork to be completed at 8th Army, translated, and then formally transmitted to the Korean National Police. It took even longer for the KNPs to send their report to the judge in charge of the Everson case. So long, in fact, that they almost hanged Choi Yong-kung for the murder of Captain Richard Everson despite the fact that we had a confession from Ms. Gladys Hackburn.

Finally, though, a few hours before the sentence was to be
carried out, Choi was released from prison. His mother was there to greet him, of course, along with Miss Tae.

When the sun went down, Ernie and I made our way to Itaewon. We were ensconced on our usual barstools in our usual club in the heart of the nightclub district. The band had just taken their break when Choi Yong-kuang’s mother tugged on my shirtsleeve.

This time she didn’t pull me off the barstool, but I turned around anyway.