She looked sad and changed the subject. “Walter, how in the world did you ever end up in law enforcement?”
“In the marines, during Vietnam.” I looked at her for a good while, taking in all the details. Her hair was down, and I noticed how thick and luxurious it was, held back from her face on one side by a single etched silver barrette that draped the reddish curtain behind one ear. It was like a box seat to a command performance. The earring that showed was a roweled spur studded with little turquoise and coral stones and dangling jingle bobs. She had great ears, even better than mine. Up close, I could see the wrinkles around her eyes, and it was nice. They softened the lupine slant, and the soft brown in her eyes looked inviting, like the mud on the banks of streams that beg you to take off your shoes and wade through them.
I squirmed a little and started in. “I graduated in ’66, lost my deferment and got drafted by the marines. I got the letter, and it scared the shit out of me. Hell, I didn’t even know the marines could draft you. I got through Paris Island, officer’s training, and because I was big got shuffled into the marine military police, which meant that I got to do exciting things like man checkpoints at traffic control areas, provide convoy security, investigate motor vehicle accidents, and patrol off-limit areas. And then there was the traditional task of maintaining good order and discipline within the battalion.” I turned to look at her, stiffening my back for effect.
“I guess you don’t forget that stuff.”
I laughed and looked over at the fire. “No, you don’t. Now, granted, I was just some dumb kid from Wyoming, but it was all pretty confusing.”
“The war?”
“The war, the military, a foreign country; hell, I was just getting used to California. So, I decided to devote myself to the police side of my job. It was the only part that seemed to make sense. It wasn’t easy, because the marine police were not a formalized occupational specialty. We were only cops on a rotational basis, operating under a skeleton force of navy officers. I was lucky, and after a while I gained some experience and credibility as an investigator.”
“How did you do that?”
“A couple of cases.”
“You don’t want to talk about it?”
I went back to looking at the fire. “They’re not good stories.”
“Good?”
“Happy.”
“Oh.” She shifted and warmed up both of our drinks with straight rum. “Do I seem like the kind of person who only wants to hear happy stories?”
“Maybe not, but I’m not sure I want to be the one to tell you the sad ones.” She held on to my glass and wouldn’t let me have it. I laughed. “All right, you’ve broken me.” I took a sip of the almost straight rum and thought back, remembering the heat. “In January of ’68, I was assigned as a liaison to the 379th Air Police Squadron, 379th Combat Support Group, NCOIC Air Police Investigations. A number of Corps personnel were shuttled in and out of Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base, and a lot of them were turning up self-medicated.”
“So the air force called in the marines?”
“Oh, no, not at all. They didn’t want me there, but the Marine Corps Provost Marshall’s office did. They saw it as a wonderful opportunity for me to get some on-the-job training from the investigative operations officer there who was career air force and who consequently hated my guts because I was a marine.”
“Nobody told him we were fighting the North Vietnamese?”
“Only as a secondary front.” I laughed a little at the absurdity of the situation long passed. “I was assigned to him, but I wasn’t particularly one of his. I broke up a lot of fights, patrolled a lot of outlying areas, like Laos and Cambodia…”
“You’re joking?”
“Yep, but I did get to meet Martha Raye.” This time she laughed, hard. “Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the air police I worked with were the best, but they were overworked, and sometimes it helps to have a new set of eyes come in from outside. The Vietnamese were selling it right on the base in exchange for black market items from the PX. There were an awful lot of Vietnamese military police involved as ring leaders. I tracked the problem back to air force personnel.”
“They must have really loved you for that.”
“Semper Fi.”
“What else? You said there were a couple of cases?”
“Yep, I did.” I took another hit from my drink and rested it on my knee; the plain rum with the sugar remnants and cinnamon sticks was surprisingly good. “There was this prostitute that was killed off base. We really didn’t have any jurisdiction, but I made a personal campaign out of it.”
She put her hand out and rested it along the back of the sofa near my shoulder. “How have you survived, doing this for so long? I mean, you still care.” Her eyes closed a little like they did. “Do most guys still care after thirty years in this line of work?”
I thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think they can afford it. Nobody makes an emotional bulletproof vest, so you just have to carry the shrapnel around with you.”
It took her a long time to respond. “You must be tough.”
I turned and looked at her. “No, I’m not. It’s one of my secret weapons.” She smiled. “There was this prostitute in the village up near Hotel California, this old French fort where they housed an RVAN company at the northernmost tip of Tan Son Nhut Air Base. It looked like something out of Beau Geste. It had twenty-foot walls that were three-feet thick, whitewashed concrete that formed a perfect rectangle. It had solid iron gates that shut the arched doorways into this huge courtyard with all these smaller cubicles. There was a small village out past the fence line, a civilian mortuary, and a cemetery with thousands of little white headstones…”
I thought back as I told the story, and it was amazing how all the details were still there, like some carefully packed footlocker that had withstood the consistent inspection of time. “Her name was Mai-Kim, and I met her over Tiger beers in the village at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge. They told us not to drink the water, so I didn’t… habitually.”
“Were you a customer?”
“No, they told us not to do that either, and I was a young marine and did what I was told.” She laughed some more. “She was cute, though. Had good teeth, a rarity in that place. She was tiny, and she loved to talk about America. She took a great deal of pride in the fact that she had lots of American friends.”
“As many as money could buy?”
“Yep, but she was better than that.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“No, I know that.” I rushed ahead, so she would know that no feelings were hurt. “They had an old upright piano in the bar, and I know I single-handedly overdosed all of Vietnam with Fats Waller and Pete Johnson.” I thought for a moment. “She would read Stars and Stripes at the bar between clients, and I would help her with the pronunciations and meanings of words she didn’t understand. After the drug thing, none of the air force guys would talk to me and neither would the Vietnamese police, so I talked to her.” I paused a moment, remembering. “She had a great voice, husky like yours. Like she had just gotten out of bed.” I nodded. “In retrospect, she probably had.” Another laugh.
“She died?”
“Yes. Badly.”
I looked back at the fire and listened to the dog breathe. “Her body was found in one of our abandoned forward bunkers. She’d been raped and strangled. I still remember the crime scene. The killer had pulled down a number of the sandbags to make a bed, and it all looked so normal, until you saw her eyes or the marks on her neck.” I started to take another sip of my rum but stopped a little ways away from my mouth to just smell it. “Nobody was talking, nobody. So there I was, at the last outpost of the last war, investigating a murder that nobody cared about.” I exhaled a short breath, laughing at myself. “It was my way of introducing a little order into the chaos.”
She waited a moment, but she had to ask, “Did you get him?”
The dog yawned loudly and rolled over on his back. I watched as his huge fan of a tail slowly dropped. “War stories; I’m even boring the dog to death.”
“Who did it?”
