She’d been tortured before she was killed.
I stood up.
I was embarrassed, but relieved about one thing. There were no bullet holes in her body or anywhere in the apartment. This unfortunate young woman had been brutally murdered, but not with my gun.
Ernie and I spent the next couple of hours at the crime scene, and later that evening returned to the deserted CID detachment to catch up on our written reports. Ernie left after an hour. I’d told him I’d finish up. He had a date, I think, with Sergeant Whitworth, the medic at the 121, but he was being cagey and didn’t tell me for sure. About midnight, I returned to the barracks and collapsed exhausted into my bunk.
It was Chusok. The 8th United States Army Yongsan Compound was pretty much closed down. All the Korean employees at the snack bar had the day off, so the American manager was working the cash register, selling nothing but coffee and donuts and pre-made sandwiches wrapped in plastic. Ernie joined me there, bleary-eyed. He wolfed down a couple of egg and bacon sandwiches, cold, and we walked out the main gate of the compound, down the MSR three-quarters of a mile to the Hamilton Hotel.
Already Suk-ja was waiting for us in the coffee shop.
“They no come,” she said.
She, of course, had memorized the faces in the sketches of the smiling woman and her brother and had promised, as her contribution to the investigation, to spend as much time as she could in the Hamilton Hotel Coffee Shop, seeing if they showed up. Private Boltworks had said they loved this place, and I could see why. There were GIs here and foreign tourists, Korean business girls and bright-eyed college students, hanging out for the excitement of being near the notorious international red-light district of Itaewon.
Suk-ja was happy in her work, but I was worried as to what she was up to. Why had she left the Yellow House? Did she owe the mama-san money? Why had she decided to glom onto me? I was enjoying the attention, of that there was no doubt. If it hadn’t been for this murder investigation, I would’ve enjoyed Suk-ja’s company even more. But I wasn’t fool enough to believe that she didn’t want anything out of this. Yesterday morning, when I offered her money, she’d taken it, but with the proviso that it was merely reimbursement to cover expenses while she was on duty at the coffee shop. She wasn’t taking any money from me in return for sex. Soon, she told me, she would receive her first paycheck as a stripper, and it would be her turn to treat me.
I wasn’t holding my breath.
Suk-ja snuggled closer to me. Ernie sat across from us.
“Today,” she said, “you go with me, Geogi. My older brother, he live in Mia-dong. We start Chusok at noon time. He want me come. I tell him about you and he say he want you come too.”
I studied her face, wondering why in the hell she wanted me to meet her family. Ernie smirked at my discomfort.
“We’ll be working on the case,” I said.
“Doing what?” she asked. “We only know Miss Yun’s son sometime come here. If he no come, how you find? Anyway, KNPs look for him. They find.”
She was right. The KNPs would find him eventually. But how many people would be dead before they did? At least, in the most recent murder, he hadn’t used my piece. As relieved as I was about that, it still troubled me. Why hadn’t he used the automatic?
“Go!” Ernie told me. “You need a break. Go somewhere and clear your mind.”
Maybe he was right. Everything I’d seen and heard the last few days had jumbled into a knotted ball of grief. How to unravel it? How to stop the killing? No matter how hard I pressed, the answer was not forthcoming.
Suk-ja clutched my arm tightly.
“How about you?” I asked Ernie. “What do you plan to do?”
He shrugged. “Wendy has duty today. I’ll probably run the ville.”
“’Wendy?’”
Ever so slightly, Ernie’s pale cheeks colored. “Sergeant Whitworth. The WAC at the 121.”
“They don’t call them WACs anymore,” I told Ernie. The Women’s Auxiliary Corps had been disbanded a few years ago, and female soldiers were integrated into regular Army units.
“Whatever you call them,” Ernie said. “And anyway, I received a note from an old friend.”
He pulled a piece of lined notepaper out of his pocket. It was folded elaborately into the shape of a swan.
Suk-ja grabbed it and, without asking permission, unfolded it. Quickly, she read the note.
“Who’s this?” she said.
“An old girlfriend.”
Written in broken English, the note said that she missed him and she wanted to be with him, and she had no place to go on Chusok. She asked him to meet her at the Seven Dragon mokkolli house. It was signed Miss Na.
I knew the Seven Dragon mokkolli house. It was a little dive in a back alley. It served warm rice beer. The type of place cab drivers and fledgling Korean gangsters hung out.
Exactly the type of place Ernie loved.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“What are you, my mother?” Ernie sipped on his ginseng tea. “One of the Seven Club waitresses slipped the note in my pocket while we were in there drinking the other night. I met Miss Na when I first arrived in country. Sexy lady. I was with her for a while, but she went to the States on a yobo visa.”
Invited to immigrate to the United States for the purpose of matrimony.
“If she’s back in country, why didn’t she talk to you herself?”
“The waitress said she’d been in there three or four times looking for me, but we’ve been busy on this case. So she asked the waitress to hand me this note if she saw me.”
“Why Chusok?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Maybe she figured I’d have that day off.”
Suk-ja tugged on my arm. “We go to my brother’s house, okay Geogi?”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
Her face beamed with joy.
Burnt pine needles.
I had smelled them before and now I was smelling them again. Suk-ja and I had taken a cab to the northern district of Seoul known as Mia-dong. The cabby let us off on the main road, and we hiked through winding pathways up the side of a hill. I lugged a basket of Asian pears that Suk-ja made me buy, because it would be impolite to enter her brother’s house with “empty hands.”
It was a rickety hovel made of splintery wood, like all the others in the neighborhood. Her brother was a construction worker, she said, trying to become a carpenter, working secretly for a union that the government had declared illegal, like all the other unions in Korea. His wife was a stout woman with a ruddy smiling face, and they had three kids; one infant, two toddlers. When I shook hands with Suk-ja’s brother, his brown eyes were moist, earnest. This meeting meant a lot to him. And somehow, in that brief moment, I read the anguish he felt at not being able to properly take care of his younger sister. Of being poor and seeing her go with foreigners in order to survive.
Suk-ja and I slipped off our shoes and stepped up onto the raised wooden floor. The main room of the small home had been cleared of furniture, and against the far wall were two large photographs, lined in black, of a wrinkled-looking man and a plain-faced woman.
“My parents,” Suk-ja said. “They die long time ago.”
“What’s that smell?” I asked.
“Pine needles,” Suk-ja answered. “We roast them at Chusok time. Makes house smell good. How you say? Cozy.”
The brother lined up the children first. The infant in his small crib. The two toddlers knelt on the floor, bowing their heads three times to the photographs of their grandparents in front of them. Then it was our turn. Suk-ja moved the crib, and we four adults knelt. She motioned for me to watch her. She placed her slender hands-thumb and forefinger touching-flat on the floor in front of her. Her brother chanted something I couldn’t quite catch, and then they bowed, touching their foreheads to the floor. Quickly, I mimicked their movement. The brother chanted again and we bowed. In all, we repeated this three times.
Then Suk-ja’s brother brought in a rectangular table. I helped him unfold the legs, while his wife carried in the
