25
Ernie and I pushed through a crowd of gawkers outside of the House of the Tiger Lady. We entered the cool confines of the main ballroom. A uniformed policeman escorted us down the hallway.
The huddled kisaeng, their faces naked and raw in the morning light, almost leapt back in fright when they saw Ernie.
Outside in the alley, Lieutenant Pak was hunched over in a conference with some older men. Our blue-clad escort went out, conferred with him, came back, and asked us politely to wait here in the hallway.
Ernie was nervous, chomping on about three wads of gum, glancing back and forth, fidgeting with the knot in his tie. I told him to wait, took a few steps toward the back alley, turned a corner, and saw the body slumped in a puddle of blood.
Miss Ku. Her eyes still open, mouth slack. Her neck twisted and her stomach gouged with something sharp and long. Blood had dried like a frozen waterfall of cinnabar slime.
She was in her nightclothes: Silk gown with only a bathrobe wrapped around her slender body to protect her from the cold. The job looked familiar. The same long, deft jab below the sternum, slicing into the heart. Probably while holding her from behind with a powerful arm crooked around her frail neck. Then letting her go. Letting her slump to the ground in death.
There were cuts on her arms. Whoever had killed her had toyed with her, as Whitcomb had been toyed with. If it was the same killer, it made sense.
What didn’t make sense were her fingers. The tips were raw and red. The nails had been ripped back one by one.
Another thing that didn’t make sense was that the body was too close to the back of the Tiger Lady’s kisaeng house. On the other side of the wall resided a couple of dozen women, and at least some of them must be light sleepers. Yet the killer had finished his bloody night’s work while disturbing no one.
There was blood on the cobbled road but not much. Not as much as we found beneath Cecil Whitcomb.
I turned, took a few deep breaths, and returned to Ernie.
Something pushed through the crowded hallway. People were jostled, slammed against walls. The Tiger Lady, gray-black hair splayed like the mane of a lion, eyes as intent as the eyes of a viper, plowing through the bending reeds, heading right for us.
Ernie straightened himself and stood away from the wall.
She screeched. “Shangnom-al” You bastard! And launched her crimson claws at his eyes.
Ernie twisted his head away just in time, but she sank her nails into his shoulder. He rotated his body and pushed her, slamming her into the wall. Like some enraged simian, she rebounded and renewed her attack.
Women screamed. Policemen cursed.
Ernie bounced back and grabbed her wrists as she came toward him again. Somehow he managed to retain his balance with her weight pushing against him.
I moved forward to help but three girls emerged from the crowd, swinging tiny fists, and simultaneously punched me in the stomach. I held my belly and looked at them.
“You stay back, Goddamn-uh!” one of them said.
Ernie and the Tiger Lady rocked back and forth like two bulls in a pen until finally the Tiger Lady collapsed and fell to her knees and covered her eyes with her withered palms. She started to cry.
“Nuga, nuga, nuga kurei?” Who, who, who would do this?
Two of the policemen pushed through the crowd of wailing kisaeng and helped the Tiger Lady to her feet. Another emerged from the hallway and called for Ernie and me to accompany him. The girls ignored us as we left, all their attention turned toward the moaning Tiger Lady.
When Ernie saw Miss Ku’s body I thought he was going to collapse. I grabbed him around the waist and helped him down the alley past it, out into the coldness of the morning air. Lieutenant Pak and the other policeman were waiting for us. Ernie pulled himself together although his face was as pale as I’d ever seen it.
Lieutenant Pak strode forward and poked his nose in Ernie’s face.
“You sleep with her,” he said, pointing at the corpse.
I stepped between them. “Wait a minute. He’s in no condition to answer questions. Not yet. He needs a chance to recover.”
There is no right to immediate counsel in Korea. You either answer the policeman’s questions or face the consequences-from a jail cell.
Ernie laid his hand on my shoulder. “That’s okay, George. I’ll talk to him. I need to.” He unwrapped another stick of gum, put it in his mouth, and turned slowly to Lieutenant Pak.
“Yeah. I spent the night with her. I came late. She wasn’t busy, we went to her room and talked.”
Lieutenant Pak tried to keep his face from moving but the eyes crinkled involuntarily around the edges. Korean men weren’t happy about Americans spending time with their women. But since fraternization was inevitable, they preferred that Gl’s stick to the business girls in Itaewon. The ones who’d teen designated for the job.
“In the morning she let me out the back door.” Ernie turned, pointing. “This door here. She was wearing the same clothes she has on now. The silk nightgown. The robe.”
“After you left, did she lock the door?”
“No. She wore slippers and she followed me out into the alleyway.” He pointed again, to a spot about ten yards in front of the back door. “When I reached the main road, down there, I turned one last time and waved. She waved back.”
“So she was standing there, away from the door, alone, when you left her?”
“Yes,” Emie answered: “And it was still dark.”
“We found sandals,” Lieutenant Pak said. “They must’ve fallen off her feet in a struggle, and the tops of her feet are scraped raw, as if she’d been dragged.”
Ernie shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that.”
Lieutenant Pak stared at him. Waiting to see if he’d fidget.
“Check her pockets,” Ernie said.
“Why?”
“You’ll find a stick of ginseng gum. I gave it to her just before I left. It probably has my fingerprints on it.”
Lieutenant Pak studied Ernie some more. Without looking over his shoulder he shouted an order to one of the uniformed policemen. The policeman answered, trotted off to the body, and after bending over it and checking, returned to Lieutenant Pak.
“Nei. Issoyo.” Yes. It’s there.
I spoke up. “He wouldn’t have left such clear evidence if he was planning on killing her.”
Ernie winced.
Lieutenant Pak half smiled. “I said nothing about killing.”
He hadn’t and suddenly I felt embarrassed. But it was what everyone was thinking.
“You know I didn’t kill her,” Ernie said.
Lieutenant Pak’s eyes probed Ernie’s face. “We’ll see.
He turned to me. “This woman who calls herself Miss Ku, she is same woman you saw at Kayagum Teahouse. The one who wanted you to black-market?”
I didn’t answer.
“And maybe she knew something that you didn’t want anyone else to know.”
A chill of fear went through me. Pak was close to finding out that we had been paid to deliver the note to Cecil Whitcomb, thereby demonstrating a motive for Ernie to murder Miss Ku. What with the way military justice works, just the suspicion was enough to get us both locked up. I had to give him something else to think about.
“Miss Ku was able to identify the American who followed us in the U.N. Club.”
Lieutenant Pak thought about that.
“So the American’s been following you,” he said. “And he killed Miss Ku.”
“Maybe.”
