Ginger was a genius. She remembered everything, including her customers’ favorite musicians. No memory loss there.
She took off her rubber gloves, wiped some sweat from her brow, and fussed with her hair for a while. When Ernie and the Nurse became engaged in conversation, she leaned towards me.
“Why you no come, Georgie? Miss Lim she been looking for you.”
“I thought she was mad, about the last time she saw me with Kimiko.”
Ginger shook her head. “Yeah. She was mad. But I told her you CID. Sometimes you have to hang around with people you don’t really like. To get information. She thought about it. She calmed down. She’s okay now. Pretty soon she go back to the States. You be nice to her, okay, Georgie? Don’t make Ginger lose face.”
She sliced her chubby hand across her round face.
“Okay, Ginger. Don’t worry. You call her now. Tell her I’m sorry.”
Ginger’s face brightened and she trundled off to the phone. When she came back, she was smiling.
“Did you get that information you were going to get for me, Ginger?”
“What’s that?”
“About the girl who used to be Kimiko’s friend. Before Pak Oksuk.”
“Oh yeah, I got.” Ginger crossed her arms on the bar and leaned close. “She was young girl. Pretty too, like Miss Pak. Kimiko take her, introduce many men, make a lot of money. One day this girl gone. Nobody know why. Some people say she went back to country. Back to her family.”
“What was her name?”
“Li Jin-ai.”
I made a motion with my hand as if I were scribbling. Ginger brought me a pad and pencil. I wrote the name in English and then in Korean, but I misspelled the Korean so Ginger wrote it for me correctly.
“Did she have any friends here in Itaewon? Other than Kimiko?”
“I don’t know. Not many, I think. She wasn’t here long.”
“How long?”
“Maybe three or four months.”
“Which club did she hang out at?”
‘The Double Oh Seven Club.”
Another boy came in and Ginger got busy shouting orders to him about more cleaning. She kept a very clean club. No stale booze smell, just the lingering fragrance of ammonia. I liked jaded old places better. Where the liquor and the sweat and the burnt tobacco has seeped into the pores of the leather and the wood and the cement.
The wheels in Ernie’s mind were churning, I could see, as he leaned in at the bar rail.
“Aw,” he said, “we might as well face it. When you figure all we got to do and then add the time to do it, we sure as shit aren’t going to get much time down in the ville. All this because some broad got herself killed,” Ernie said.
“Remember, the mortician’s report said Miss Pak had been sexually abused just prior to her death,” I said, trying to interest him.
Ernie lowered his beer and looked at me in open-mouthed incredulity. “Sexually abused? Every girl in this country has been sexually abused.” Ernie turned and stared intently at the vacant wall. “A crusade,” he said, and let out a dramatic sigh. ‘There goes our time in the village.”
“Not necessarily. I might be able to wrap this thing up quick.” I gave Ernie my best sly smile but it never has seemed to work very well. “I got an idea.”
“You’re full of them.” But he couldn’t resist. “What is it?”
I took a quick drink of my OB. “We could solve this case.”
Ernie’s head swiveled. “You must have been mainlining rice wine again.”
“No,” I said. “I’m serious. I mean, we’re investigators, aren’t we? We’re highly trained dicks for the greatest investigatory agency in the world, aren’t we? The Criminal Investigation Division of the United States Army. That’s the C-I-fucking-D! I mean, after all, we could just solve the son of a bitch!”
Ernie clutched the edge of the bar and took a deep breath.
“Shit, pal. I never thought of that,” he said sarcastically.
“Yeah, we could just do it.”
“Fuck.” Ernie scowled. He checked his watch. “Mount up.”
The first sergeant was busy, getting briefing charts ready, while Riley stoked piles of paperwork into the big bureaucratic furnace that was the Eighth United States Army. They were too busy to mess with us. I pulled Ernie away from Miss Kim to review again the list I had made of the chaplain’s marriage packets signed out to the Eighth Army staff during the last few months. Each entry had the name of the service member, the prospective spouse, and the initials of the staff member who had taken a packet.
“Who do you know up at the headshed?”
“Strange.”
“What?”
“Strange-he works right there in the distribution center, in charge of the paper shuffle and the classified documents. You remember him. Receding hairline, dark glasses, cigarette holder.”
‘The guy who hangs out on the MSR trying to pick up little girls?”
‘That’s him, Strange.”
I shook my head. A pervert in charge of top-secret documents. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
We slid out of the office and wound through the old brick buildings of Eighth Army Headquarters, past brown squares of frozen lawn and short rows of naked trees. Just inside the back door of one of the Eighth Army Headquarters buildings was a snack stand with stale cellophane-wrapped doughnuts and a steaming urn of coffee clouding the windows. We turned right down the hallway and passed the sentries at the broad entranceway, one British and one Korean. Both were in their dress uniforms and armed with. 45s-members of the United Nations Command Honor Guard.
Halfway down the corridor we stopped at a wood-paneled room with large metal-barred windows. An empty cigarette holder peeped through the rods.
“Had any strange lately?”
Ernie pinched the cigarette holder and pulled it slightly forward. The pursed lips behind it seemed to be cemented in place.
“No strange, Harvey. No strange. What we came for is to get some information from you. On the QT.”
I slapped the list, palm down, on the narrow counter.
Strange glanced down at it but his lips were still cemented to his cigarette holder. Ernie noticed and let him go. Strange stood up slowly, slightly offended but unruffled. He glanced down at the piece of paper and then a bony claw flashed out and snatched it, wadding it quickly into his left pants pocket. He said nothing but turned away from the window. Then we saw a door open on the paneled wall along the hallway and the cigarette holder and then Strange peeped out. He looked both ways down the long plush carpet. The hallway was deserted. He crooked a finger and we followed him about five yards behind. He kept looking back over his shoulder, snapping his head back and forth.
His shoulders were narrow and his hips were just slightly wider than his waist. He was flabby. Unused. Like sliced suet sweating in the sun.
When he reached the men’s room he pulled the door open slightly and stepped through sideways until he disappeared. If I had blinked, I would have missed it.
“Why are we going in here?”
Ernie shrugged. “He feels most at home near a sewer.”
Strange waved us over to the sink in front of the last stall. His clawlike hands held the rumpled list and his cigarette holder traveled back and forth along his thin lips as he studied it.
“List of names,” he said. “GIs. And Korean women. But what’s all this shit?”
He pointed at the row of letters written next to the names.
“Initials,” I said. “Of the people who signed out marriage packets from the Eighth Army chaplains office. Do you recognize any of them?”
Someone walked into the latrine. An officer, in a dress green uniform.
