packages of warm chestnuts to overly made-up cocktail waitresses. She wasn’t in Terre Haute anymore. But she must’ve seen humanity too. People who were fundamentally the same as her. That’s why she’d become friends-or at least we thought she’d become friends-with the stripper, Kim Yong-ai. That’s why, together, they’d disappeared.
But had she become friends with anyone else?
That’s when it hit me. Brandy. The bartender in the Black Cat Club. Of course. There must be more she knew, more facts that we could pull out of that sharp brain beneath that bouffant Afro hairdo.
I told Ernie. He liked it. Any nightclub in a storm. Besides we had an entire evening to kill until the midnight to four a.m. curfew, which was when I wanted to try something else I’d been planning.
Had I proposed the plan to Ernie yet? No need. It was crazy and bold and reckless, and that’s why I had no doubt he’d love it.
Brandy wasn’t in. We checked with the old mama-san behind the bar and she said Brandy wasn’t feeling well. I asked for her address but the woman claimed she didn’t know it. How then, did she know that Brandy was sick? A boy arrived with a note, she claimed. I pressed but the old woman wasn’t budging. Can’t say that I blamed her. In a joint like the Black Cat Club a woman’s privacy is important. A drunken GI would be likely to barge in on her at any hour of the night or day if they gave out her address to anyone who asked.
I considered flashing my badge and threatening the old woman with calling in the Korean National Police if she didn’t cooperate. But that wouldn’t ingratiate me to Brandy and it was her goodwill and cooperation that I needed. Besides, a few of the soul brothers were beginning to mumble amongst themselves, upset that a couple of “T-shirts” were monopolizing the women at the bar.
Ernie grinned at them and flashed the thumbs-up sign. He could either defuse a situation with his charm or punch somebody and end up causing a riot, depending upon his mood. Rather than wait for that decision, I thanked the old woman and asked her to please tell Brandy that we’d been in.
She agreed and Ernie and I strolled out of the Black Cat Club.
Outside, I told Ernie what I wanted to do tonight. Ernie not only agreed but he laughed and rubbed his hands in glee. We decided to bypass the neon lights of TDC and return to Camp Casey. There were three reasons. One, we wanted to have some Miguk chow: meat and potatoes. Two, we needed to stay relatively sober. And three, we wanted to change out of these suits and ties and into clothing more appropriate for the task I had in mind.
Ernie kept running ideas and scenarios by me, thrilled to have something to do other than just walk around interviewing people. His enjoyment was further enhanced by the fact that what we planned to do tonight after the midnight curfew was, and still is, completely illegal.
On Camp Casey, we stopped at the Gateway Club, less than a hundred yards in from the main gate, eighty yards past the Provost Marshal’s Office and the twenty-foot-tall statue of the MP. The Gateway was theoretically an all-ranks club but mostly young enlisted men used it. The officers had restaurant/bar establishments of their own, as did the Senior NCOs. Ernie and I sat at the bar, sipping on beers, studying the Gateway Club menu in the dim glow of an overhead blue light. Behind us, a Korean go-go girl gyrated wildly on a raised stage. GIs cheered. Rock music blared from a jukebox. Both Ernie and I felt completely at home.
The plastic-coated menu bore the Indianhead 2nd Division patch on the front. The numbered list inside featured the usual adventurous fare one found in military dining facilities: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, sirloin steak, fried chicken, and a couple of exotic foreign dishes like onion rings and coleslaw.
The dining room was operating, the cocktail lounge was operating, but the main ballroom of the Gateway Club was still closed. Later this evening a rock band would start and the ballroom would be packed with young GIs- and the twenty to thirty business girls whom the club manager was authorized to escort on post. Right now, the big room was dark and empty except for one man sitting alone at a table on the far edge, hunched over a plate of food. I recognized him. Sergeant First Class Otis, who’d greeted us upon our arrival in 2nd Division and the NCO who’d been leading the physical training formation this morning, the formation that had been so anxious to express their feelings-in a knuckle sandwich kind of way-toward Ernie and me.
I told Ernie I’d be back, rose from my barstool, and sauntered toward Sergeant First Class Otis.
“I don’t want no trouble,” was the first thing he said to me when he looked up. He was eating fried chicken with rice and gravy. A glass of iced tea stood next to his plate.
“No trouble.” I pulled a chair out from the table and sat down across from him. “Thanks for saving our butts during the run this morning.”
He shook his head and shoveled a spoonful of rice into his mouth. “I ain’t your friend,” he said.
I let that sit for a while. Then I said, “So why’d you stop your MPs from beating the crap out of us?”
“Nothing to do with you,” he said. “When I’m in charge of a formation, it don’t turn into a mob.”
I appreciated that. Whatever those MPs did, right or wrong, would reflect on his ability to lead. His ability to control men in formation. NCOs, most of them, take their leadership role seriously. Obviously, Sergeant Otis did.
“Weatherwax had it coming,” I said. Ernie had punched him for following us through the ville.
Otis shrugged. “You say.”
A middle-aged Korean waitress approached and poured more iced tea into Otis’s glass from a plastic pitcher. He knew her, they seemed relaxed with one another, and Otis probably tipped well to convince her to serve him dinner some twenty yards from the boisterous young GIs in the well-lit dining room. I figured Otis was working the desk tonight. That’s why he was wearing a freshly pressed set of fatigues and why he was having chow at the Gateway Club, the eating establishment nearest to the Provost Marshal’s Office. The waitress gazed at me quizzically, feeling the tension between me and Otis. When she asked if I wanted anything I told her no. She left. I waited for her footsteps to fade.
“You know more than you’re telling me,” I said.
Otis didn’t even look up from his plate. “Of course I know more than I’m telling you. What the hell you think?”
“Why aren’t you telling me?”
“First, you didn’t ask. Second, you a rear echelon motherfucker just up here to make Division look bad.”
I paused again, letting the silence grow. It wasn’t silence exactly. We could still hear the rock music from the cocktail lounge and the clang and buzz of people talking and eating and laughing in the dining room. But for Camp Casey, a place where men and heavy equipment were always on the go, it came as close to silence as we were going to get.
“Druwood,” I said. “You know what they’re saying about him isn’t right.”
Otis picked up a drumstick and chomped into it, chewing resolutely.
“Private Druwood didn’t die out at the obstacle course,” I continued. “Crumbled cement was still lodged in his skull. I saw it. No way he could’ve jumped from that tower. No cement around there. Somebody dumped him at the obstacle course. Said he jumped from the tower. Said it was an accident.”
Otis stopped chewing.
“He was an MP,” I continued. “White. Young. Not black and old and wise like you. But he was your responsibility, Sergeant Otis. Your soldier. You were supposed to look out for him.”
Otis swallowed the last of the chicken, as if it were something dryer than sand. He stared at his plate, at the half-eaten remains of the bird and the gravy smeared through glutinous Korean rice. Slowly, he looked up at me.
“He wasn’t in my platoon.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
Otis stared so steadily that for a minute I thought he was going to come across the table at me. I wouldn’t use my pistol, I knew that, but I might pick up a chair to hold him off. Although I was taller, and probably heavier, he was a strong man, the thick muscles of his shoulders bulging through the material of his green fatigues. I held his gaze. If we had to fight, I’d fight.
Instead, his lips started to move.
“Bufford,” he said. It was almost a rasp, as if his vocal chords had suddenly been stricken by laryngitis.
“What?”
“Bufford,” he repeated. “Maybe he drove Druwood on compound, maybe he didn’t. But he was behind it. Arranged it so it would look like a training accident.”
“Druwood was killed off base?” I asked.
