The NCO in charge of the Data Processing Unit was a nervous type with thick glasses and a habit of biting on his lower lip and brushing back his brown-and-gray mustache.
“This’ll be hard,” he said. “Four numbers. All bogus. And they could’ve been used anywhere in country.”
“Start your search in Seoul first,” I said, “and spread out from there.”
“Not normal procedure,” he insisted. “And we have other batches to run. I’m already working everybody overtime.”
“I’ll call the Provost Marshal, if you want, and have him call your boss.”
“No.” He waggled his nervous fingers. “That won’t be necessary. Three murders, you say? Yes. That’ll get priority.”
“We thought so, too.”
He scurried off toward the clattering machines busily processing punch data cards. Ernie and I walked back into the waiting room and poured ourselves overly cooked coffee into white foam cups.
As we waited, I watched the stream of young GI’s, all with sheaves of paperwork in their hands, parading in to get a new ration control plate issued or an old one renewed. The time and money and effort the 8th Army put into ensuring that nobody sold a jar of instant coffee down in the village was enormous. Still, millions of dollars of black market goods found their way onto the Korean markets. The whole reason behind the system-supposedly-was to protect fledgling Korean companies from the unfair competition of duty-free goods from the U.S. Army compounds. The only problem was that there weren’t any Korean companies that grew bananas or bottled maraschino cherries or distilled Scotch whiskey, as far as I knew. So the demand was tremendous. And although the honchos of 8th Army went at their task with all the vigor of Hercules cleaning out his stables, they weren’t able to do much more than cause a ripple in the flow of contraband.
I think, if the truth were known, they were more concerned with making sure a bunch of foreigners didn’t get their grubby hands on the products that, by divine right, belonged to Americans. Brainwashed by Madison Avenue, the army hoards consumables like gold.
A courier came in carrying three oblong boxloads of data punch cards, stacked one atop another. He hoisted them onto the counter. Another bored clerk signed a receipt for them, then lifted them onto a long table with other stacks of boxed cards. I stood and wandered over to the end of the counter.
Each box was marked in black grease pencil: Wonju, Osan, Pyongtaek, Waegwan, Taegu, Pusan. The cities near all the major U.S. bases. Every few minutes, from the other end of the table, a listless clerk picked up a box and fed the cards into one of the whirring machines.
I sat back down and waited.
“This coffee’s for shit,” Ernie said.
“They use it on the printers when they run out of ink.”
“I believe it.”
He shuffled through a news magazine looking for pictures of naked women but didn’t find any.
“Don’t they have a National Geographic around here?” he said.
I helped him look. No dice.
It took about a half hour but finally the harried sergeant came back out, holding a sheet of paper with the four numbers Herbalist So had given us on it.
“Checked everywhere,” he said. “No luck. None of these numbers turned up. Not even in the history files. Which doesn’t surprise me because all of them are of a sequence that we haven’t even issued yet.”
“Then they made a good guess when they chose those numbers.”
“All four?” He frowned. “More likely they knew something.”
“How could anyone determine what number sequences you use?”
“Beats me. It’s strictly classified.” He handed the paper back to me. “Sorry we couldn’t help.”
I pointed to the boxes on the table behind the counter. “What about those?”
“Those? Cards from PX’s and commissaries around the country. They’re just in.”
“How about running them for us? Checking for these numbers?”
“But they just came in.”
“It’s a bother, that’s for sure. But, you know, murder and all that…”
He sighed, looking extremely tired and harassed. “Okay. But it’ll take a while.”
“We’ll wait.”
He went back into the noisy bowels of the data processing unit and I sat back down next to Ernie.
“Dick,” Ernie said.
It was almost midafternoon by the time the sergeant reemerged, and both Ernie and I were grumpy because with all the activity today we hadn’t been able to squeeze in lunch. The sergeant handed me a three-page computer printout. Rows of numbers were printed on it. The numbers were so light, I had to squint to read them.
“Don’t you guys ever change your ribbon?”
“Every week.”
“What’s all this supposed to mean?”
“Your number.”
“Where?”
“One of them anyway.” He pointed an ink-smudged finger at the second page. “Card was used once in the PX on Hialeah Compound. And again, less than an hour later, at the commissary on the same base.”
“How long ago?”
“This morning.”
“Where’s Hialeah Compound?”
“Pusan.”
“How’d these cards arrive here so fast?”
“Flown up by helicopter.”
“They bring them in every day?”
“Every day. Unless the weather grounds the aircraft.”
So Shipton had murdered the Nurse and then hopped on a train or a bus and headed down to Pusan, the southernmost city on the Korean Peninsula, a trip of about five hours. He’d appeared bright and early this morning at the PX and commissary, making purchases, knowing that we wouldn’t be looking for him that far away.
I grabbed the printout. “Can I keep this?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks for your help, Sarge.”
Before he could say anything, Ernie and I were out the door, running for the jeep.
It was finally time to level with the First Sergeant. Not about everything, but about most things.
Before I had given him the whole story he raised his hand and said, “Hold it.”
He checked on his intercom, received clearance, and the three of us marched down the slickly waxed hallway to the Provost Marshal’s office. The receptionist eyed us suspiciously but the Provost Marshal, Colonel Stoneheart, was waiting for us and waved us on into his office. We took seats in comfortable leather chairs. The flags of the United States, the United Nations, and the Republic of Korea stood behind his desk.
The Provost Marshal relit his pipe.
“Okay,” the First Sergeant said. “Go ahead.”
I cleared my throat, hoping I’d be able to play this right. Ernie was tense; I needed to make sure they didn’t ask him any questions. With two of us answering, they could trip us up.
“Cecil Whitcomb was a thief. You saw that, sir, in our preliminary reports. We have reason to believe that whoever killed Whitcomb down in Namdaemun knew him, or at least had seen him before.”
“What reason?”
“We’re not sure yet. We just don’t think it was random.”
Ernie shuffled in his chair. I continued.
“We got a lead that a woman in Mukyo-dong, a kisaeng-”
“A what?”
“A kisaeng, sir. A professional entertainer. Like a geisha girl.”
“Oh.” The Provost Marshal fiddled with his pipe. “And where in the hell is Mukyo-dong?”
“Downtown Seoul.”
