was framed by the very witnesses who are testifying against him.
I reached into the box again and pulled out a slip of paper. This was a photocopy of a transferal document for Lee No Tae’s corpse from the Itaewon Hospital to the Eighteenth Military Evacuation Hospital in Yongsan Garrison. I checked the name of the American officer who signed the receipt. I called the Evacuation Hospital.
“Captain Wilson Bridges please,” I said to the cheery receptionist who answered.
“Just a moment, please.”
An even cheerier voice finally said, “Doc Bridges here.”
“Captain Bridges, this is Major Sean Drummond. I’m on the defense team for Captain Whitehall.”
“What can I do for you?”
“You still got Lee No Tae’s corpse in your facility?”
“We do indeed,” he happily replied. “On ice in the basement.”
“Would it be convenient for me to come over and view the corpse? Like right away?”
“For me, sure. I guess he won’t have any problem with it, either.”
He chuckled; I didn’t. As morgue humor goes, that was one of the oldest and rottenest jokes there is.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. And could you please ask your experts on autopsies to be on hand?”
“You just did.”
“You a pathologist?” I asked hopefully.
“A surgeon, actually. But we’re only a small evac outfit, so everybody’s got to carry a few extra loads.”
“You must’ve done well in pathology at med school?”
“Nah. Nearly flunked it, but I never had a corpse complain.”
That was the second badly overused morgue joke in only seconds. Originality did not seem to be the man’s strong suit.
CHAPTER 10
The Evac Hospital was a sprawling, one-floored building that reeked of antiseptic and excessive cleanliness. I asked the receptionist where to find Captain Wilson Bridges and she spat out some quick-fire instructions that sounded like “Take six right turns, then three or four lefts, then two rights, then walk down a long hallway.” It was a small place, so I figured no problem, and set off. Twenty minutes later I found it.
Bridges’s office turned out to be a tiny hovel all the way at the back of the building, like maybe they were trying to hide him back there, out of sight of the observant public. I knocked on the door, it opened, and I immediately saw why.
Wilson Bridges was probably the sorriest excuse for an Army officer I ever saw. His white doctor’s coat was wrinkled, stained, and splotched with things I didn’t even want to imagine. His hair was way too long and wildly disarrayed, almost spiky. There were tiny hair sprouts on his face where his razor had missed, and the combat boots that protruded from the bottom of his medical robe were gray and cracked, so starved were they for polish.
Ever the optimist, however, I perceived these blemishes as fairly hopeful signs. A little-known rule of thumb about Army docs is to never, ever go near the ones with crew cuts, starched BDUs, mirrorlike shoes, and the upright bearing of a drill sergeant. Odds are they want to be Army officers more than they want to be doctors. It’s the guys who look like they just got yanked out of the dryer you want operating on you. Chances are, their passion is for medicine, not marching and saluting. On the other hand, that theory sometimes turns out to be horribly wrong. Sometimes the doctor looks like a careless, disgusting slob because he really is. He’s the guy who’ll end up tying your aorta to your kneecaps.
He stuck out his hand. “Wilson Bridges. MD extraordinaire.”
“I know,” I said. “We just spoke on the phone, remember?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, grinning. “Sorry. It’s just that you don’t look like a lawyer.”
“Really,” I asked. “And what do lawyers look like?”
“Smart.”
I could’ve retorted that he looked more like a field sanitation worker than a doctor, but why waste an insult?
“Listen, Doc, I hate to rush things, but I’m in a hurry. Where’s the corpse?”
He waved a hand for me to follow, then led me to the absolute rear of the hospital and down some stairs that went into the dimly lit basement.
“We’ve only got a tiny storage facility,” he explained. “And be sure you make your reservation well in advance, because there’s only four drawers. Ordinarily, as soon as they expire, we stick ’em on the next plane going stateside.”
“Why was Lee turned over to you?” I inquired.
“Damned if I know. I was told to pick him up and move him over here.”
“Were you involved in the autopsy?”
“Nope. It was an all-Korean production. And don’t draw the wrong impression from that. They’re no slouches, believe me. This kid was done by a guy named Kim Me Song.”
“He any good?”
“He’s the guy they send to all the international conferences to make sure everybody believes Korean medicine is the best in the world.”
I said, “Shit.”
He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Guess you’d expect them to use the best on this kid, what with him being the son of the big kahuna.”
“I guess,” I said. I said it in a dismayed way, too, because there was every chance Dr. Kim Me Song was going to end up on the witness stand, and it’s never good to hear the prosecution’s got the A-team on their side.
We took a left into a tiny room that was quite cold. A special air-conditioning unit was positioned in the corner, pumping out frigid air at full blast. Bridges buttoned up his spattered doc’s coat and walked straight to a wall with four aluminum drawers. He reached down to the bottom row and slid one open.
“Voila!” he announced as he unzipped the body bag and yanked it down all the way to Lee’s feet, like he was a magician on a stage.
I glowered at him, then bent over and looked closely at Lee No Tae. The body was completely naked, stiff and pale. Somebody had obviously gone to the trouble to rearrange Lee’s facial expression, because he looked content, even peaceful, which was a far cry from the description in Chief Bales’s statement. What I guessed was that the father had come to have a last look at his dead son, and the Korean doctors had done the best they could to make it seem like he’d passed through the doorway to eternity without any pain and misery.
He was a very good-looking kid, with a narrow face, a long, aristocratic nose, a high, intelligent-looking forehead, and a muscular, well-proportioned figure. He looked much like what I suspect his father looked like as a younger man.
Bridges joined me in my inspection. He stood just to my left and I saw his eyes roving down the length of the body. You could still see the bruises and abrasions.
I asked, “Did anybody here get a copy of the autopsy results?”
“Yeah, I think I got a copy… maybe a few days after I collected the body. I haven’t read it, though.”
He walked over to a desk in the corner, opened a drawer, and rummaged around until he yanked out a manila folder. He stood and read it, while I continued observing Lee’s body. I had no idea what I was looking for, in fact, had really only come over to get a firsthand look at the subject who’d caused me such immense misery. That really wasn’t fair, since I sure didn’t want to trade places with him, but it’s so much easier to heap blame on an inanimate object than somebody who can argue back.
I found myself fixated on Lee’s face. I have this theory that life gives most folks pretty much the face they deserve. We all start out as rotund little babies, with plump cheeks and tiny lips, a button for a nose, and lively, sparkling eyes. That cuddly cuteness wears off. By the time we’re grown, some folks have grumpy faces, some thoughtful, some resentful and selfish, and some have no distinguishing look at all, just a bland emptiness, which I guess says something in itself.
