“Yeah. Maybe.” Ernie slammed through the big double doors of the red brick CID building. “At least it’ll give us a chance to run the ville in ASCOM City.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”
We flashed our identification to the desk sergeant at the ASCOM MP station.
“Lieutenant Crane has been waiting for you,” he said. “Straight down the hallway. Third room on the left.”
Lieutenant Crane was a gangly man in his early twenties with fatigue pants covering the length of his stilt-like legs. When we walked in, he looked up from a scattering of paperwork and ran a hand through his hair.
“I don’t know why they sent you down here. The KNPs are still looking for the girl, but other than that it’s nothing more than a carbon monoxide poisoning.”
Erne let me do the talking. He usually did when we talked to officers.
“Let’s go see the hooch anyway, Lieutenant. You never know.”
His face went through suspicious contortions, but then he came to the conclusion that since we were from 8th Army headquarters, and since we were on an official investigation, it would be best to cooperate. In our business those thought processes are familiar.
He strapped on his.45, perched his shiny MP helmet liner atop his head, and ambled out into the hallway. As we went through a doorway, the top of his narrow shoulders hunched forward and stayed that way. “I’ll be in the ville,” he told the desk sergeant, “on the VonEric case. Send a patrol for me if you need me.”
The desk sergeant nodded.
At the gate, armed MPs carded Ernie and me but just saluted the lieutenant and let him by.
The ville started right across the street: Lee’s Tailor Shop, the Brass Emporium, Chosun Souvenirs. Farther down the road came a few nightclubs: the Hideaway, the Lotus Blossom, the UN Club. And then the alleys. Narrow. Mud-filled. More nightclubs, more neon, and more rock and roll blared out of darkened doorways. Little eateries were interspersed throughout the maze, advertising fried chicken and yakimandu, fried dumplings. Old women carried bundles of laundry atop their heads. Young girls scurried back and forth from bathhouses, flat sandals slapping against the balls of their feet.
Ernie took a deep breath.
“Nice place they got here,” he said.
We wound down another couple of alleys, Lieutenant Crane leading, until he turned down an opening that was nothing more than a gap between cement block walls. As we passed through, I turned slightly sideways to keep the arms of my leather coat from getting scuffed. A quick jog to the left and then he pounded on a high wooden gate.
“Ajjima,” Crane said. “Honbyong!”
I was impressed. He announced himself in a polite way as being a representative of the military police. And his pronunciation was good.
An old woman opened the gate and let us in.
The hooch was typical. A small dirt-floored courtyard surrounded by a tile-roofed building divided into four or five rooms. Without bothering to speak to the woman, Lieutenant Crane stepped up on the wooden porch in front of the nearest hooch and slid back the wood frame door.
“It was here,” he said. “We found Specialist VonEric dead about zero seven hundred this morning. This old lady called the Korean National Police, and they relayed the message to us.”
I talked to the old woman. She was surprised at first that I spoke Korean, but she went on to explain that she had heard nothing with the possible exception of the front gate slamming some time before dawn. Of course she might’ve been dreaming it, she said. I liked the old woman. She had a fat oval face that broke into concentric circles when she smiled, which she often did. The smile disappeared when I asked her about the body.
It was late, the sun was already up, and she knew the GI who was staying in the first hooch should have been on his way to work, but she had heard no noise. She called to the woman who lived there-her name was Yu Kyong-hui-and when there was no answer, she rapped on the rice-papered door and slid it open.
She couldn’t smell the carbon monoxide, of course, because it’s an odorless gas, but she saw the gray pallor on the GI’s face and smelled the evidence of the loosening of his bowels. She opened all the windows and called the police, but it was too late.
Ernie wandered around the courtyard, restless. A few young Korean women were playing flower cards in their room and had slid back the door when we came in. Ernie winked at them. They giggled.
The old woman said she recognized the GI. He had lived with Miss Yu in the past but hadn’t been around for over a month. Who had Miss Yu been seeing during that time? No one. She kept talking about an old boyfriend who would be coming back to Korea. The old woman didn’t know who he was. She had never seen him, that had all happened before Miss Yu ever moved here. The old woman also had no idea where Miss Yu had gone, and there had been no indication that she was planning to leave but, yes, most of her clothing had been taken with her. It didn’t look like she was planning on coming back. She’d left a deposit on the room, the old woman said, but it didn’t cover the back rent she owed.
Ernie and I slipped off our shoes before we stepped into the hooch. A large western-style bed filled most of the space. There was a beat-up old hi-fi set, a few scattered jars of makeup, some loose scraps of clothing, and a jumble of naked coat hangers in the small plastic wardrobe.
“The KNPs have already searched the room,” Lieutenant Crane said. “They’re very thorough.”
“I know that,” I said.
Just for drill I lifted the mattress, and Ernie poked around behind the wardrobe.
After a little searching Ernie said, “This must have been where the gas came out.”
There was a crack in the cement floor. Most Korean homes are heated by charcoal gas that is pushed through ducts beneath the floor. When the floor is covered with vinyl and a soft mat is laid down, it makes a comfortable place to sleep during the cold Korean winters.
Ernie lifted his fingers. They were dusted with powdered cement from the edges of the crack. “The hole opens directly into the gas duct,” he said.
We stood up and straightened our clothes. On the way out I noticed something white and pointed peeking out of a crack in the wallpaper. It was flat against the wall, and I had a little trouble prying my fingernail under it to pull it out.
It was a wallet-sized photograph of a GI. His smiling face beamed out at the world over his neatly pressed dress green uniform. Blue infantry piping draped his arm.
The morgue was in the basement of a thick-walled cement building that was so heavily fortified it must have been an ammunition storage building at one time. I shivered when the white-smocked attendant slid the body out of the refrigerated cabinet.
“The remains of Specialist Four Rodney VonEric,” Crane said. “Former stalwart employee of the ASCOM Repo Depot.”
I compared the pasty gray face of the corpse to the bright suntanned face in the photograph. Not even close.
Lieutenant Crane decided he had pretty well wrapped up the case for us, so he left us and went back to his office. A small army compound is always nervous when somebody from 8th Army comes poking around, but Crane figured that the case was so clearly an accident he’d be able to tell the ASCOM provost marshal that there was nothing to worry about from us.
Probably he was right.
After he left, we wandered around the compound. Neatly clipped patches of lawn had been bleached yellow by the cold breath of autumn. A few crinkled leaves hadn’t given up for some reason and clung stupidly to skeleton branches.
‘Should we catch the last bus to Seoul?” Ernie asked.
“I keep wondering why that girl disappeared.”
“The KNPs will find her. That’s not for us.”
“Yeah.”
We wandered past the façade of the post theater. A fantasy was playing, with the half-naked daughter of some movie star in the lead. Nothing I wanted to see.