Nightmare Range (5 page)

Somehow all our investigations seem to lead us directly to the Itaewon nightclub district.

In this case we found out that Janson was the chief inspector for the Preventive Medicine division. They’re the guys who give the mess sergeants and the Officers’ club managers a hard time about the cleanliness of their kitchens, the temperatures of their food storage facilities, stuff like that.

Janson’s NCO-in-charge, the guy who actually ran the operation, was Sergeant First Class Billings. Billings was sort of a soft guy. I’d seen him before at the NCO Club. A little out of shape. Never with a woman. Suspect. And he always puffed on his scroags through a cigarette holder.

Word was that he was a real brown-noser. His boss, Chief Janson, or anybody else up the chain of command, could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. The privates who worked for him, though, could do nothing right, and he made their lives miserable. Much to the pleasure of Chief Janson, who felt that suffering subordinates meant a well-run ship.

Captain Bligh in khaki.

Sergeant Billings’s desire to please his superiors extended beyond the working day, and we had heard from one of his cronies that Billings and Chief Janson regularly ran the village of Itaewon together. The guy had heard Billings mention the Spider Lady Club, a little hole-in-the-wall amongst the bigger, gaudier nightclubs, as their favorite hangout.

Ernie and I had changed into our running-the-ville outfits: sneakers, blue jeans, and a nylon jacket with a golden dragon embroidered on the back. It was nighttime and we were in the Spider Lady Club, having a welcome cold one and checking out the exceptionally attractive ladies. The music was mellow. The place was lit by red lamps and the flickering blue light from a row of tropical aquariums.

“Janson has good taste,” Ernie said. “First his late wife and now this joint.”

“Living his life to the full.”

After about twenty minutes, Billings walked in, which didn’t surprise us much, but what did surprise us was the guy he had in tow. Chief Janson.

We were at a table in a dark corner; my back was to them, and Ernie adjusted his seat so his couldn’t be easily seen from where they sat at the bar.

“Looks like the chaplain’s counseling has done wonders for Janson,” Ernie said.

I heard their laughter as the excited barmaids brought them drinks without their having to order. Regulars. Through the smoke-covered mirror on the back wall I made out the smiling woman who leaned over to serve Janson. She was tall, thin, and elegant. Gorgeous, all in all. Black hair billowed around her pale, heart-shaped face. Her eyes slanted up, painted heavily with shadow.

The Spider Lady.

Ernie had checked with one of the girls earlier and gotten her story. She owned the joint, having apparently earned the initial capital outlay from working as a nurse. Some of the girls claimed it didn’t come so much from her salary but from making extracurricular arrangements with a few of the doctors. On a cash basis.

That would explain her infatuation with the white-coated types who worked in the Preventive Medicine division.

I wondered if she knew that Janson was actually a veterinarian—a horse doctor. But maybe it was just the rubber gloves that turned her on.

Could this be it? Could it be as simple as Janson’s wanting to break free from his present old lady to hook up with the Spider Lady? We waited until Janson walked into the latrine and Billings was deep in conversation with one of the Spider Lady’s girls, then we slipped out of the club.

We walked into the crisp night air of Itaewon, rejected two propositions, and sauntered down the hill toward our favorite beer hall.

“We have the motive,” Ernie said. “All we have to do now is find the opportunity.”

The big beer hall was on the outskirts of Itaewon. We drank draft beer, rubbed elbows with Korean working men, and bantered with the rotund Mongolian woman who slammed down frothing mugs in front of us.

All I could think about was the small Oriental doll and how she had looked with that bloody gash beneath her breast.

In the morning we slipped out of the office as early as we could, supposedly on our way to pump up Colonel Stone-heart’s black market arrest statistics but actually on our way to see Captain Kim and get the key to Janson’s house. It went smooth. Captain Kim liked the way we didn’t try to revamp four thousand years of Korean culture every time we ran into a procedure we didn’t approve of. He gave us the key.

The first sergeant would have had a fit if he’d known we were entering the restricted premises of a murder site. But we didn’t plan on telling him.

Janson had moved most of his stuff out and was staying in officers’ quarters on the base. White tape in the shape of a small woman surrounded a caked blot of blood. The Korean police usually use tape instead of chalk since it’s hard to make an outline of the victim with chalk on vinyl floors that are heated from below by hot-air ducts. The floor we walked on in our stocking feet was cold now.

We surveyed the apartment. It was a one-bedroom job with a small kitchen and a cement-floored bathroom. There was no beer in the refrigerator.

Metal clanged and I heard an old man wailing for his life.

The rag dealer.

We put our shoes back on and hurried out to stop the old man and ask if he’d seen anything unusual yesterday afternoon.

I greeted him in Korean, “
Anyonghaseiyo.
”

The old man halted his cart, smiled, and his leathery brown
face folded into so many neat rows that I almost thought I heard it crinkle. He kept his mouth open and didn’t seem to know what to say. Talking to Americans wasn’t exactly an everyday occurrence for him. Folks in the UFO society probably have more conversations with aliens.

“Yesterday,” I said, “we were sitting in that store over there when you came by.”

The old man nodded. “Yes. I saw you.”

“You bought some aluminum cans from this woman in this house here.”

“Yes, yes. That’s right.”

“And then you went around the corner, down the hill.”

“Yes.”

“Did you notice anything unusual?”

“Unusual?”

“Yes. Did you see any American people in the neighborhood?”

“No. I saw no American people. The Korean police already asked me that. Look, I am an old man and I have to support myself and a sick wife. Do you want to buy something?”

“No. We don’t want to buy anything.”

We went back into the house and the old man trundled his cart down the road, clanging his metal shears and wailing his plaintive song.

We searched the grounds, passing through a narrow passageway that ran between the side of the apartment and the big sandstone brick wall that separated the building from the two-story house next door. Out back, a small cement-floored courtyard sat behind Janson’s apartment and the landlord’s apartment next door. It was enclosed by the big ten-foot masonry wall topped with the shards of glass.

The entire complex was on a corner, formed by the alley that ran up the steep hill we had originally come up in our Jeep and the street that ran in front of the little store from which we had conducted our surveillance.

The only way for someone to enter this house while we
were watching from the store was over the back wall, which seemed unlikely since it faced other people’s residences, or over this ten-foot stone wall, which faced the public street. We had already checked the other side and it was sheer and very difficult to climb. But the inside of the wall was not as high since the level of the back courtyard was higher than the street by a few feet. It also provided a number of footholds, from a clinging vine and from some protruding rocks imbedded in the wall.

The wall had been designed to keep out intruders. But from inside it could be easily climbed.

So I climbed it. Ernie stayed on the ground, clicking his gum and telling me—sarcastically, I think—to be careful.

The tricky part about the climb was the handholds on the top of the wall, since you had to be careful to grab a spot between the randomly spaced shards of glass. If you were in a hurry you’d cut yourself for sure.

The jump down into the street would be rough also, although not impossible. About twelve or fourteen feet, depending on which part of the rapidly descending pavement you landed on. An airborne trooper, with a good hit and roll, would have no trouble with it.

As I gazed over the wall and out into the street, I noticed something fluttering in the gentle breeze. It was blue and stuck to the base of one of the shards of glass. Fiber. Wool maybe. A clump of it. I reached out and pulled the material off the jagged edge of the glass. It was soft and blue. Baby blue.

It didn’t look worn. It looked new, but it would impossible to tell much about it without a lab analysis and that would be difficult since I wasn’t officially on the case. And anyway the lab was in Tokyo. Before a packet could be sent there it had to be approved by the first sergeant.

So much for high technology. I fell back on my meager allotment of common sense.

It looked like threads from a woman’s sweater. Maybe a
woman climbed this fence and got part of her clothing caught on these jagged shards of glass. It would be easy, of course, with a ladder, but the Korean police had already interviewed everyone in the neighborhood and no one had seen any workmen or anyone setting up any sort of apparatus.

I climbed down and showed the fiber to Ernie.

He thought for a while and then he said, “The problem is how did she get over the wall? It would have to be something that would give her a lift without causing any particular notice from the neighbors. Trashcans maybe?”

That was it. “Or a trash cart?”

Ernie and I ran outside and scoured the neighborhood until we found the old rag dealer.

“Yesterday, when you rounded the corner away from the store, you stopped calling and clanging your shears for a while. You had a customer.”

“Yes.”

“Who was it?”

“A beautiful young lady. Very tall. Very fancy.” The old man slashed his fingertips across his eyes and up. “She locked herself out of her house.”

“So she had to climb the wall?”

“Yes. I rolled my cart over and tilted it up. She climbed over easily.”

“And then what?”

“And then I went about my business.” The old man looked at the ground, shaking his head slightly. “But she was a very strange woman. Later, down at the bottom of the hill, I saw her again. She was all out of breath from her climb and she had torn her sweater.”

“Her sweater? What color was it?”

The old man reached under some stacks of cardboard. “Here. She sold it to me, cheap, because it had been torn. My wife repaired it, and it looks fine now. I should be able to sell it for a good price.”

The old man held it up to us, and I reached into my pocket for my small wad of Korean bills.

It was soft and fluffy and baby blue.

Since the Spider Lady was a Korean citizen and therefore not under our jurisdiction, we contacted Captain Kim and had him go along with us to make the pinch.

She was behind the bar of the Spider Lady Club, just getting ready for the evening’s business, laughing and joking with the other girls.

Ernie and I came in the door first, wearing our coats and ties, and when she saw Captain Kim behind us and the blue sweater in my hand, the exquisite lines of her face sagged and her narrow eyes focused on me, like arrows held taut in a bow. Blood drained from her skin, and she stood stock-still for a moment. Thinking.

Then she reached under the bar and pulled out a long glistening paring knife, and as her girlfriends chattered away she kept her eyes on me and pulled the point of the blade straight down the flesh of her forearm.

She kept pulling and ripping until finally the other girls realized what was going on and by the time we got to her, her arm was a shredded mess.

Her nurse training had come in handy because she knew that stitches weren’t likely to close arteries that had been cut lengthwise. We applied a tourniquet, but somehow she managed to let it loose while she was in the ambulance and, turning her back to the attendant, kept her secret long enough to do what she wanted to do: die.

Janson was put on the first flight out of the country by order of the commanding general, his personal effects packed and shipped to him later.

Billings spent a lot of time at the NCO Club, restricted to
post. He spun romantic tales about his two friends and what he saw as their self-sacrificing love.

The girls at the Spider Lady Club told us the truth. About how proud the Spider Lady had been to be marrying a doctor.

Through it all, from bar to bar, all I could think about was the doll-like woman with the nice curves.

Whose smile had been filled with life.

“T
he last time the USS
Kitty Hawk
pulled into the Port of Pusan, the Shore Patrol had to break up a total of thirty-three barroom brawls in the Texas Street area. Routine. What we didn’t expect was the fourteen sailors who were assaulted and robbed in the street. Six of them had to be hospitalized.

“From eyewitness accounts, the local provost marshal’s office ascertained that the muggings appeared to have been perpetrated by Americans, probably the shipmates of the victims. However, no one was caught or charged with a crime.”

We were in the drafty headquarters building of the 8th Army’s Criminal Investigation Division in Seoul, two hundred miles up the Korean Peninsula from Pusan. When the first sergeant called me and Ernie into his office, we expected the usual tirade for not having made enough black market arrests. What we got was a new assignment. The first sergeant kept it simple.

“First, make sure you take the right flight out of Kimpo. Then, when you land in Pusan, infiltrate the waterfront area and find out who’s been pulling off these muggings.”

Ernie adjusted his glasses and tugged on his tie.

“Maybe the gang who did it has left the navy and gone on to better things.”

“Not hardly. The
Kitty Hawk
was here only six months ago.
The tour in the navy is four years, minimum. Not enough time to break up the old gang.”