“What do you want?”
I flashed my badge. “To question your wife concerning black market activities.”
“No way.”
Janson opened the door and told us to wait, but it didn’t take long because we barged in when we heard his scream.
The voluptuous Oriental doll lay dead on the floor, blood seeping from a hole in her side where her ribs should have been.
The big red brick building that was the headquarters of the CID detachment seemed to be waiting to swallow us as we approached.
The first sergeant wasn’t in his office, but down in the admin section barking into telephones and ripping off teletype reports.
“What the hell happened with you guys?” he said when he noticed us. “I send you on a simple black market detail, and you turn up with a corpse.”
Ernie sat down on the edge of Miss Kim’s desk and offered her a stick of gum. She smiled and accepted a piece with her long manicured fingernails.
“Bascom! Get down to my office! You too, Sueño!”
The ass chewing was royal. You would’ve thought we’d killed the girl ourselves, and in a way that’s sort of what he said. At least we’d been in the vicinity and had the opportunity-if not the motive. He told us that if she’d been raped we’d probably have been charged and locked up by now.
Shows you the high opinion our leadership has of us.
He’d given the case to Burrows and Slabem, affectionately known around the office as the Boot Hill Brothers, his favorite investigators when it came to burying inconvenient facts. When the dependent of a US serviceman gets murdered, all hell breaks loose up at the Eighth Army Headquarters. Colonel Stoneheart, our provost marshal, was briefing the commanding general right now. The first sergeant felt that only a trustworthy pair of sleuths like Burrows and Slabem could properly handle the case.
“You mean properly cover it up,” Ernie said.
The first sergeant freaked, chasing us out of his office and warning us to stay off the case unless Burrows and Slabem had some questions for us that weren’t covered in our initial report.
We wandered down the long hallway.
“What would we do without the first sergeant’s hoarse voice echoing down the halls?”
“I wouldn’t know how to act.”
Ernie winked at Miss Kim on the way out, and we jumped in his Jeep and went directly to the Itaewon police station.
Exactly what the first sergeant had told us not to do.
Burrows and Slabem were there. Burrows, tall and skinny with a pockmarked face; Slabem, short and round with a pimply face. The Korean police wouldn’t talk to them. Neither would we. They harrumphed and tried to look officious. Chins met necks. Except in Slabem’s case.
I greeted Captain Kim, commander of the Itaewon police station, and spoke to him in his own language.
“Were you told anything by the offender?”
“Yes. He told us everything.”
“How did you get his confession so quickly?”
Captain Kim slammed his fist into his cupped hand. “The lie detector.”
He ushered us back to the cells and the guy on the bicycle lay on a moist cement floor. I recognized him because of his clothes. His face was a puffed hive of purple welts.
Burrows and Slabem, the Boot Hill Brothers, glared at us as we walked out. Somehow I didn’t think they’d keep our little visit a secret from the first sergeant.
We talked to a lot of the folks in the neighborhood, covering much of the same ground the Korean police had already covered. The only thing unusual anyone had noticed was me and Ernie hanging around. The man on the bicycle had been conducting black market business with the GI wife in the neighborhood for many months, without incident as far as anyone knew.
The whole thing was a mystery to me. Why would a black marketeer kill one of his sources of income?
Ernie thought it might have been Janson. Husbands are always a first suspect in a murder case. But we checked the back of the building. The walls were ten feet high, sheer, with shards of glass embedded in cement on the top. When we had seen Janson, his uniform was still neat, with no more wear than one would expect from a hard day’s work at the office.
We couldn’t interrogate him. Burrows and Slabem would be handling that, on compound, in conjunction with the chaplain who was giving him counseling and trying to pull him through this crisis.
“Might as well forget it,” Ernie said. “If it wasn’t the black market guy, Burrows and Slabem might figure out who it was. And anyway the first sergeant said to stay off the case. We’re potential suspects. Nothing we can do about it.”
But we both knew what was at stake. The guys who played everything by the regulations considered us a couple of screw-offs anyway. And a young woman, a US army dependent, had been murdered while we were actually staking out her home. We both planned a long career in the army, preferably in the CID, and I wasn’t going to walk into one assignment after another with the stigma of an unsolved murder, one that happened right under my nose, hanging around my neck.
“We have to find out who killed her,” I said.
Ernie shrugged.
We went back to the compound and started making some phone calls. Calling in every favor we had out there. Tracking Janson.
Somehow all our investigations seem to lead us directly to the Itaewon nightclub district.
In this case we found out that Janson was the chief inspector for the Preventive Medicine division. They’re the guys who give the mess sergeants and the Officers’ club managers a hard time about the cleanliness of their kitchens, the temperatures of their food storage facilities, stuff like that.
Janson’s NCO-in-charge, the guy who actually ran the operation, was Sergeant First Class Billings. Billings was sort of a soft guy. I’d seen him before at the NCO Club. A little out of shape. Never with a woman. Suspect. And he always puffed on his scroags through a cigarette holder.
Word was that he was a real brown-noser. His boss, Chief Janson, or anybody else up the chain of command, could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. The privates who worked for him, though, could do nothing right, and he made their lives miserable. Much to the pleasure of Chief Janson, who felt that suffering subordinates meant a well-run ship.
Captain Bligh in khaki.
Sergeant Billings’s desire to please his superiors extended beyond the working day, and we had heard from one of his cronies that Billings and Chief Janson regularly ran the village of Itaewon together. The guy had heard Billings mention the Spider Lady Club, a little hole-in-the-wall amongst the bigger, gaudier nightclubs, as their favorite hangout.
Ernie and I had changed into our running-the-ville outfits: sneakers, blue jeans, and a nylon jacket with a golden dragon embroidered on the back. It was nighttime and we were in the Spider Lady Club, having a welcome cold one and checking out the exceptionally attractive ladies. The music was mellow. The place was lit by red lamps and the flickering blue light from a row of tropical aquariums.
“Janson has good taste,” Ernie said. “First his late wife and now this joint.”
“Living his life to the full.”
After about twenty minutes, Billings walked in, which didn’t surprise us much, but what did surprise us was the guy he had in tow. Chief Janson.
We were at a table in a dark corner; my back was to them, and Ernie adjusted his seat so his couldn’t be easily seen from where they sat at the bar.
“Looks like the chaplain’s counseling has done wonders for Janson,” Ernie said.
I heard their laughter as the excited barmaids brought them drinks without their having to order. Regulars. Through the smoke-covered mirror on the back wall I made out the smiling woman who leaned over to serve Janson. She was tall, thin, and elegant. Gorgeous, all in all. Black hair billowed around her pale, heart-shaped face. Her eyes slanted up, painted heavily with shadow.