Nightmare Range (19 page)

Nothing, he replied, other than that one incident. It had been a quiet night. I thanked him and returned to the jeep.

“What’d they have?” Ernie asked.

“GIs ripping off a cab driver.”

Ernie grunted. “So what else is new?”

“Apparently they were local GIs,” I said. “They had the driver let them off in the middle of the Sonyu-ri strip and then they ran into the alleyways, disappearing before the driver could catch them.”

“They knew their way around.”

“Right. The driver was from Seoul,” I said. “Picked them up in Itaewon.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re our boys,” Ernie said.

“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t. All three of them were Caucasian. At least the driver thought they were.” Sometimes Koreans aren’t so sure about race. For many of them there are only two races. You’re either Korean or you’re not.

“Descriptions?” Ernie asked.

“Big. Wearing blue jeans and sneakers and nylon jackets. They smoked a lot and were very noisy.”

“That narrows it down.”

“Right.”

Ernie shoved the jeep in gear and we pulled away from the police station and started rolling through the main drag of Sonyu-ri. At the Kit Kat Club Ernie downshifted, gunned the engine, and honked his horn. The front door was open. Through a beaded curtain, three pairs of manicured hands waved gaily, brightly colored bracelets dangling from slender wrists.

Ernie grinned and waved back. “My fan club,” he said.

And then we were on the Main Supply Route, heading south toward Seoul. I shivered and wrapped my arms tighter across my heart, sheltering myself as best I could from the cold wind of the Western Corridor.

When we returned to the 8th Army CID office, Miss Kim looked up from her typewriter and smiled. Staff Sergeant Riley was just finishing up a phone call.

“All right,” he said. “Got it.” He slammed down the receiver and looked up at us. “You’re here,” he said. “Officers’ Wives’ Club. Disturbance. The Provost Marshal wants you two over there immediately, if not sooner.”

“A disturbance at the OWC?” Ernie said.

“That’s right.”

“What happened? Somebody stole the knitting fund?”

“I don’t know what the hell happened,” Riley growled. “Other than that the MP patrol says there’s an ambulance sitting outside and Mrs. Wrypointe is hysterical. Now get the hell over there.”

Ernie set his empty coffee cup on the edge of Riley’s desk and we ran outside toward the jeep.

MP Sergeant Unsworth stood next to his MP jeep in front of the big green Quonset hut set aside for the Officers’ Wives’ Club. A green army ambulance was parked behind him. Both Ernie and I have worked with Unsworth before. He’s a grown man and a responsible adult and a hell of a good Military Policeman, so seeing tears welling up in his eyes was downright terrifying. Ernie and I strode up to him.

“What the hell happened?” Ernie asked.

Unsworth jammed his thumb over his should. “Mrs. Wrypointe. I just can’t talk to her.”

His hand was shaking.

“Why?” Ernie asked. “She hurt?”

“No,” he answered. “I mean, yes. She says she is.” The tears were already running down his face. “She threatened me,” he said. “With what?” I asked.

“Demotion.” Then his eyes widened and he stared at us as if begging. “I can’t take the cut in pay. My wife and my kids back in the States are barely getting by as it is.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about demotion,”
I said, not sure if I believed it. We realized we weren’t going to gather much more information here so we left him and ran to the open door. Above the entranceway an engraved wooden sign was bolted:
EIGHTH UNITED STATES ARMY OFFICERS
’
WIVES
’
CLUB, YONGSAN BRANCH
.

Ernie and I entered.

Mrs. Wrypointe sat on a metal chair, covering her eyes with her left hand, the right being held by another American woman, who was comforting her. A half-dozen women swiveled to stare at Ernie and me as we entered. I pulled out my CID badge.

“Agent Sueño,” I said, “and Agent Bascom.”

They all started talking at once. Out of the hubbub the name that kept getting repeated was “Burkewalder.”

The convoy left the compound about twenty-two hundred hours that evening, or 10
P.M
. civilian time. Colonel Brace, the 8th Army Provost Marshal, was at the lead, riding in his green army sedan with his Korean civilian driver. Two jeeps full of MPs came next, followed by me and Ernie. We emerged from Namsan Tunnel and gazed down at the bright lights of downtown Seoul. Colonel Brace’s driver took the familiar turnoff toward Myong-dong.

“So she popped her a good one,” Ernie said.

“So they claim,” I replied. “Mei-lan Burkewalder interrupts the meeting of the OWC and reads off Mrs. Wrypointe for being behind the crackdown on black marketing and now her husband’s been notified and he’s in the middle of combat operations as part of the remaining US military advisory group in South Vietnam.”

“So Mrs. Wrypointe calls her a black marketing whore and Mei-lan karate chops her in the nose.”

“What Mrs. Wrypointe called her is in dispute,” I said, “but everybody agrees about the punch. Not a karate chop, a straight right. Knocked off Mrs. Wrypointe’s glasses and bloodied her nose.”

“So now we’re going to bust Tiger Kang for black marketing.”

“Mrs. Wrypointe insisted.”

What worried me were the people riding up front in Colonel Brace’s sedan. Lieutenant Pong, the Korean National Police Liaison Officer to 8th Army, I could understand. He was a law-enforcement professional and his presence was required to coordinate the arrests of any Korean civilians. The other person was along for the ride strictly because of who she was married to and because of her proven ability to intimidate: Mrs. Millicent Wrypointe.

“Colonel Brace might as well turn over the authority of his office to the OWC,” Ernie said.

“Might as well,” I agreed.

Colonel Brace’s driver took a wrong turn and Ernie and I waited at the intersection for them to figure it out. Ten minutes later they were back, the two jeeps full of MPs trailing behind, and they pulled up next to us. Colonel Brace rolled down his window.

“Where is this damn place?” he shouted.

“Follow us,” Ernie said and without further discussion we took off. Once again, we parked at the foot of the hill leading up to Tiger Kang’s. It took some time for the MPs and Colonel Brace’s driver to find safe places to park. When the entire party was assembled, Ernie said, “We have to approach on foot.”

Colonel Brace, wearing a starched set of fatigues, nodded. “So they won’t have time to destroy the contraband.”

Mrs. Wrypointe wore pressed slacks and sneakers and a warm pullover sweater. Her nose was bandaged with white gauze. “Come on then,” she said. “The more time we give all these Koreans to gawk at us, the more time they have to warn this Tiger Kang.”

Apparently, she thought all Koreans worked together.

With Ernie at the lead, we trudged up the hill. As we passed each streetlamp, I fell back further and further. Something told me not to get too involved in this; it wasn’t going to turn out
right, and if things went wrong, Mrs. Wrypointe would love nothing more than to blame me and Ernie.

But Ernie couldn’t resist the excitement. I believe he’d fallen in love with Tiger Kang’s
kisaeng
house, and maybe with Tiger Kang herself. And he certainly had a crush on Mei-lan Burkewalder. The hand-carved front door was lit by a floodlight and Ernie pressed the buzzer and in seconds the door popped open. Reflexively, two beautiful young women in tradition
chima-chogori
Korean gowns held their hands clasped in front of them and bowed so deeply they exposed the jade pins knotting their ebony hair. Ernie bowed back but as he did so Lieutenant Pong pushed past the women, followed immediately by Colonel Brace and Mrs. Wrypointe. The MPs milled around outside, thumbs hooked over their web belts. I told two of them to watch out back and two more to wait here at the front entrance. The other four followed me into Tiger Kang’s.

Ernie was already upstairs. That’s where the parties were going on, the noise and the laughter, and that’s where Lieutenant Pong, Colonel Brace and Mrs. Wrypointe headed first. When I reached the top of the stairs, I saw a startled group of Korean businessmen, seated next to beautiful young Korean hostesses inside one of the raised-floor party rooms, faces flushed by imported scotch. Lieutenant Pong looked inside, then proceeded down the row. All the rooms were empty until he reached the party room at the end of the hall. Lieutenant Pong slid open the oiled-paper door and stood there as if he’d been turned to stone. Colonel Brace and then Mrs. Wrypointe were following on his heels so closely that they practically bumped into him.

Ernie studied the expressions on their faces and then turned and grinned at me.

Mrs. Wrypointe screamed.

“What the hell did they expect to find?” Ernie asked. We were back in his jeep, winding our way through the brightly lit district
of Myong-dong. “Eighth Army honchos out for a night on the town, where the hell else are they going to go? Tiger Kang’s.”

“She didn’t expect to find her husband,” I said, “with his tongue down the throat of Mei-lan Burkewalder.”

“Mei-lan probably made sure that he picked her for the evening.”

“Out of revenge?”

“What else?”

“Maybe they’d been an item for a while,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she wasn’t worried about us busting her for black market.”

“Maybe.” Ernie zipped up onto the expressway and half a mile later we entered Namsan tunnel. “Anyway, they got their black market arrest. And a historic moment it was. Tiger Kang arrested and taken down to the local KNP station.”

“They’ll treat her like a queen.”

“You can count on that.”

When we emerged from the tunnel, Ernie turned left on the MSR. After zigging and zagging through a quarter mile of heavy traffic, he turned down a dark lane and parked the jeep in one of the back alleys of Itaewon. We should’ve gone back to the MP station to file our report but somehow I needed to cleanse myself of 8th Army for a while. What better place than Itaewon, the greatest red-light district in Northeast Asia?

We found two empty barstools at the Lucky Seven Club. Sunny still hadn’t returned to work. We asked about her and the barmaid said she was improving. She didn’t sound too convincing. We ordered two cold OBs and two shots of black market bourbon. Within seconds we’d jolted them down and ordered two more.

“What the hell happened to you?” Riley growled.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You look like dog shit.”

It was zero eight hundred. At some point last night I’d staggered back to the compound, made it up the hill to the barracks
and collapsed in my bunk. The houseboy, Mr. Yim, shook me awake in time for me to shower and shave before dragging myself to the CID office, but I’d made it. I touched my face. “I look all right.”

“Except for your eyeballs spurting blood.”

“They’re not bleeding.”

“No. They just look that way.”

I made my way to the counter and poured myself a cup of coffee.

“Where’s your partner in crime?”

“I don’t know.”

“You better find out.”

“Why?”

He tossed a pink phone message on the front of his desk. “This came in for you last night, to the MP desk officer.”

After sipping my coffee, I staggered back to his desk, grabbed the message and sat down heavily in a gray Army-issue vinyl chair. I stared at the message but couldn’t focus.

“Some guy named Singletery,” Riley said. “The desk sergeant said the connection was bad but Singletery seems to think that you need to get up there real quick. He has a lead for you.”

I studied the note. It was garbled, written in pencil in a childish script. I willed the pounding in my head to subside and tried to concentrate. It was a long message, filling up the entire pink square, finally trailing off at the end, but I got the gist of it. I set the note down on Riley’s desk

“He’s in danger,” I said.

“Who?”

“Singletery.”

For once, Riley didn’t make a smart remark. “Where’s Ernie?” he asked.

“Not in the barracks.”

“Out in the ville?”

I nodded.

“I’ll call the MP duty patrol to take you out there.”

I nodded again.