Nightmare Range (47 page)

Ernie and I were dispatched from 8th Army Headquarters as soon as we received word about a stabbing near Camp Colbern, a communications compound located in the countryside some eighteen miles east of the teeming metropolis of Seoul.

Paldang-ni was the name of the village. It clings to the side of the gently-sloping foothills of the Kumdang Mountains just below the brick and barbed wire enclosure that surrounds Camp Colbern. The roads were narrow and farmers pushed wooden carts piled high with winter turnips and old women in short blouses and long skirts balanced huge bundles of laundry atop their heads. Ernie drove slowly through the busy lanes, avoiding splashing mud on the industrious pedestrians. Not because Ernie Bascom was a polite kind of guy but because he wasn’t quite sure where, in this convoluted maze of alleys, we would find the road that led to the Paldang Station of the Korean National Police.

Above a whitewashed building, the flag of
Daehan Minguk
, the Republic of Korea, fluttered in the cold morning breeze. The yin and the yang symbols clung to one another, red and blue teardrops embracing on a field of pure white. Ernie parked the jeep out front and together we strode into the station. Five minutes later we were interrogating a prisoner: a thin and very nervous young man by the name of Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg.

“They were sisters,” Private Rothenberg told us.

“Who?” Ernie asked.

“Miss O. And the woman she shared a hooch with, Miss Kang.”

“Sisters?”

“Yeah.”

Ernie crossed his arms and stared skeptically at Rothenberg. Rothenberg, for his part, allowed long forearms to hang listlessly over bony legs. The three-legged stool he sat upon was too low for him and his spine curved forward and his head bobbed. He looked like a man who’d abandoned any hope of receiving a fair shake.

“Didn’t it ever trouble you,” Ernie asked, “that the two women had different last names?”

Rothenberg shrugged bony shoulders. “I figured they had different fathers or something.”

I asked the main question. “Why’d you kill her, Rothenberg?”

He tilted his head toward me and his moist blue eyes became larger and rounder. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“What’s to believe? You haven’t told us anything one way or the other.”

“I told
them
.” He pointed to the three khaki-clad Korean National Policemen standing outside the cement-walled interrogation room. Their arms were crossed, fists clenched, narrow eyes lit with malice. Rays from a single electric bulb illuminated the interrogation room, revealing cobwebs and dried rat feces in unswept corners.

“What’d you tell the KNPs?” I asked.

“I told them I couldn’t have killed Miss O.”

“Why not?”

Rothenberg, once again, allowed his head to hang loosely on his long neck. “Because I love her,” he said.

Ernie smirked. Virtually every young GI who arrives in Korea and finds his first
yobo
down in the ville falls in love. The US Army is so used to this phenomenon that they require eight months’ worth of paperwork for an American GI to marry a Korean woman. What with a twelve-month tour of duty, a GI has to fall in love early and hard to be allowed permission to marry. Why all the hassles? Simple. To protect innocent young American GIs from the sinister wiles of Asian dragon ladies. At least, that’s the official rationale. The real reason is flat-out racism.

“Where were you last night, Rothenberg?”

“You mean after curfew?”

“Yes. But let’s start from the beginning. What time did you leave work?”

I dragged another wooden stool from against the wall of the interrogation room and sat down opposite Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg. I pulled out my pocket notebook and my ballpoint pen and prepared to write. Rothenberg started talking.

Ernie leaned against the cement wall, arms crossed, and continued to smirk. The KNPs continued to glare. A spider found its web and slowly crawled toward a quivering moth.

Our first stop was the Full Moon Teahouse.

Miss O had worked here. And, according to Rothenberg, she was the toast of the town, the tallest, most shapely, and best looking business girl in the village of Paldang-ni. The front door was covered with a brightly painted façade; a replica of a gateway to an ancient imperial palace. The heavy wooden door was locked. Ernie and I strolled around back. Here the setting was more real. Piled cases of empty
soju
bottles, plastic-wrapped garbage rotting
in rusty metal cans, a long-tailed rat scurrying down a vented drainage ditch.

The back door was open. Ernie and I walked in. The odor of ammonia and soapy water assaulted our nostrils. After a short hallway, light from a red bulb guided us into the main serving room. Wooden tables with straight-backed chairs covered most of the floor. Cushioned booths lined the walls and behind a serving counter a youngish-looking Korean woman sat beneath a green-shaded lamp, laboring over heavy accounting ledgers. When she saw us, she pulled off her horn-rimmed glasses and stared, mouth agape.

I flashed my ID. Ernie found a switch and overhead fluorescent bulbs buzzed to life. The woman stared at my Criminal Investigation badge and finally said, “
Weikurei nonun
?” No bow. No polite verb endings. Just asking me what I wanted. A Korean cop would’ve popped her in the jaw. Being a tolerant Westerner, I shrugged off the insult.

“What we’re doing here,” I said, “is we want to talk to Miss Kang Mi-ryul.”

She touched the tip of her forefinger to her nose. A hand gesture not used in the West. She was saying, that’s me. I started to explain why we were there but she’d already guessed. She said, “Miss O,” and pulled out a handkerchief. After a few tears, she calmed down and started to talk. In Korean. Telling me all about her glorious and gorgeous friend, the late O Sung-hee. About Miss O’s amorous conquests, about the job offers from other teahouse and bar owners in town, about the men—both Korean and American—who constantly pursued her.

Miss Kang closed the accounting books and after shrugging on a thick cotton coat, walked with us a few blocks through the village. It was almost noon now and a few chop houses were open. The aroma of fermented cabbage and garlic drifted through the air. Miss Kang led us to her hooch, the same hooch she and Miss O had shared. She allowed us to peruse Miss O’s meager personal effects. Cosmetics, hair products, a short row of
dresses in a plastic armoire, tattered magazines with the faces of international film stars grinning out at us. Kang told us that Miss O’s hometown was Kwangju, far to the south, and she’d come north to escape the poverty and straight-laced traditionalism of the family she’d been born into. When I asked her who had killed Miss O, she blanched and pretended to faint. It was a pretty good act because she plopped loudly to the ground and a neighbor called the Korean National Police, a contingent of which had been following us anyway.

In less than a minute they arrived and glared at us as if Miss Kang’s passing out had been our fault. One of the younger cops stood a little too close to Ernie and Ernie shoved him. That caused a wrestling match and a lot of cursing until the senior KNP and I broke it up.

So much for good relationships between international law enforcement agencies.

As we left, Miss Kang was still crying and two of the KNPs, God bless them, were still following us.

Camp Colbern wasn’t much better.

Rothenberg worked in the 304th Signal Battalion Communications Center. Electronic messages came in over secure lines, then were printed, copied, and distributed to the appropriate bureaucratic cubby holes. Apparently, Camp Colbern had two functions. First, as a base camp for an army aviation unit, boasting a landing pad with a dozen helicopters and associated support personnel and second, as a relay station for the grid of US Army signal sites that runs up and down the spine of South Korea. When I asked the signal officers a few technical questions, they clammed up. I didn’t have a “need to know,” they told me.

“How do they know what we ‘need to know’?” Ernie asked me. “This is a criminal investigation. We don’t know what we need to know until after we already know it.”

I shrugged.

Private Rothenberg had been a steady and reliable worker, I
was told. A good soldier. He had no close buddies because his off duty time was spent out in the village of Paldang-ni, apparently mooning over Miss O Sung-hee.

Ernie pulled a photograph from his pocket, one he’d palmed while we rummaged through O’s personal effects at Miss Kang’s hooch. It was of Miss O and Miss Kang standing arm in arm, smiling at the camera, in front of a boat rental quay on the bank of a river. The sign in Korean said Namhan-kang, the Namhan River, not far from here. Miss O was a knockout, with a big beautiful smile and even white teeth and a figure that would make any sailor—or any GI—jump ship. Miss Kang, by comparison, was a plain-looking slip of a girl. Shorter, thinner, less attractive. Her smile didn’t dazzle as Miss O’s did, Rather it looked unsure of itself, slightly afraid, wary of the world.

Atop her head, at a rakish angle, Miss O wore a black baseball cap. Using a magnifying glass, I examined the embroidery on the front. It was a unit designation: 545th Army Aviation Battalion, Company C. In smaller print on the side was a shorter row of letters. It took stronger light for me to make them out. Finally, I did: Boson. I handed the photograph back to Ernie.

Ernie took another long look at the gorgeous Miss O and then slipped the photo back into his pocket. Something told me he had no intention of letting it go.

The air traffic controllers at the Camp Colbern aviation tower told us that Chief Warrant Officer Mike Boson was due in at sixteen thirty—four thirty
P.M
. civilian time. Ernie and I were standing on the edge of the Camp Colbern helipad when the Huey UH-1N helicopter landed. As the blades gradually slowed their rotation, a crewman hopped out and then the engine whined and the blades slowed further and finally the co-pilot and then the pilot jumped out of the chopper. Chief Warrant Officer Mike Boson slipped off his helmet as he walked toward us and tucked it beneath his arm.

“The tower told me you wanted to talk to me,” he said.

Ernie and I flashed our identification. I asked if there was a more comfortable place to talk.

“No,” Boson said. “We talk here. What do you want?”

The chopper’s engine still buzzed. The crewman and the co-pilot hustled about on various errands, all the while listening to what we were saying. Boson, apparently, wanted it that way. We asked Boson where he had been last night, the night of the murder.

“In the O Club.” The Officers’ Club here on Camp Colbern. “For dinner, a couple of beers, and then to the BOQ for a good night’s rest.” The Bachelor Officer’s Quarters.

“You didn’t visit Miss O Sung-hee?” Ernie asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Boson shrugged. “I don’t run the ville when I have duty the next morning.”

“You were scheduled to fly?”

“Yes. To Taegu to pick up the Nineteenth Support Group commander. And then south from there.”

“When did you hear Miss O was dead?”

“Just before I left out this morning. Everyone was talking about it.”

“Did you realize you’d be questioned?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I knew her but a lot of other guys knew her too.”

“Like who?”

He shrugged again. “I don’t know their names.”

We continued to question Warrant Officer Boson and he finally admitted that he’d spent more than just a few nights with Miss O Sung-hee and that he’d also escorted her and Miss Kang to the Namkang River the day the photograph Ernie showed him had been taken. They’d rented a boat and rowed to a resort island in the middle of the river and a few hours later returned to Paldang-ni where Boson spent the night with Miss O.

“In her hooch?” I asked.

Warily, Boson nodded.

“It’s tiny,” Ernie said. “So where did Miss Kang sleep?”

For the third time, Boson shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“But she lived there too, didn’t she?”

“Yes. But every time I stayed with Miss O, she’d disappear. I figured she bunked with the landlady who owns the hooch.”

“But you weren’t sure?”

“Why would I care?”

We asked if he knew Rothenberg. He didn’t.

“You didn’t know a lot of things,” Ernie said.

Boson bristled. “I’m here to fly helicopters. Not to write a history of business girls in the ville.”

“And not to murder anyone?”

Boson dropped his helmet and leapt for Ernie’s throat. I thrust my forearms forward, blocked him and managed to hold Boson back, although it was a struggle. The chopper crewman and the co-pilot ran over. I shoved Chief Warrant Officer Boson backward, they held him, and I dragged Ernie off of the helipad.

Night fell purple and gloomy over the village of Paldang-ni. But then a small miracle happened. Neon blinked to life: red, yellow, purple, and gold. Some of it pulsating, some of it rotating, all of it beckoning to any young GI with a few dollars in his pocket to enter the Jade Lady Nightclub or the Frozen Chosun Bar or the Full Moon Teahouse. Tailor shops and brassware emporiums and drug stores and sporting goods outlets lined the narrow lanes. Rock music pulsated out of beaded curtains. A late autumn Manchurian wind blew cold and moist through the alleyways but scantily clad Korean business girls stood in mini-skirts and hot pants and low-cut cotton blouses, their creamy bronze flesh pimpled like plucked geese.

The women cooed as we passed but Ernie and I ignored them and entered the first bar on the right: The Frozen Chosun. They served draft OB, Oriental Brewery beer, on tap. We jolted
back a short mug and a shot of black market brandy, ignored the entreaties of the listless hostesses scattered around the dark enclosure, and continued on to the next dive. At each stop, I inquired about Miss O Sung-hee. Everyone knew her. They all knew that she’d been murdered brutally and they all assumed that the killer had been her jealous erstwhile boyfriend, an American GI by the name of Everett P. Rothenberg. But a few of the waitresses and bartenders and business girls I talked to speculated further. Miss O had Korean boyfriends—a few of them. Mostly men of power. Business owners in the bar district. But one of the men stood out. It was only after I’d laid out cash on an overpriced sweetheart drink that one under-weight bar hostess breathed his name. Shin, she said. Or that’s what everyone called him: Mr. Shin. He was a dresser and a player and had no visible means of support other than, she’d heard, playing a mean game of pool and beating up the occasional business girl that fell under his spell.