I pulled out my CID badge, opened it, and lowered it until it was between her nose and the paperwork she was still reading. She snorted, twisted her face, but still didn’t look up at us. “You gonna have to wait,” she said.
Ernie’d had enough. He slammed his open palm down on her desk. “Hilliard!” he said. “Now!”
The young woman rose from her desk and started cursing. Ernie cursed back. While they shouted at one another, I walked back toward a room with a nameplate that said: Sergeant Firs t Class Quinton A. Hilliard, 8th Army EEO NCO-in-char ge.
PFC Wallings shouted at me. “Get your ass back here, damn you!”
I went through the door to Sergeant Hilliard’s office. He was on his feet-Afro a little too wide for his head, green fatigues neatly pressed, a belly just slightly protruding over his highly polished brass belt buckle.
“Why you messing with my secretary?” he shouted. He rushed past me out into the front room and pointed a finger at Ernie. “You keep your damn white-ass hands to yourself.”
Ernie hadn’t touched anyone, not yet, and he told Hilliard to get bent.
Hilliard stepped toward Ernie and I rushed forward and placed my body between them. PFC Wallings was still shouting and waggling her finger, her pretty face contorted in rage. Suddenly, from down the hallway, about a half-dozen more people joined us. One of them was a second lieutenant, a white female with short-cropped blonde hair, doing her best to be heard amidst the yelling, beseeching Sergeant Hilliard to calm down, asking PFC Wallings to take her seat behind her desk.
Ernie had vented as much as he wanted to and now he was grinning, arms crossed. I kept my face straight, standing protectively in front of Ernie, not because I was worried that either Wallings or Hilliard would hurt him but because I was worried that they might try and then Ernie would be in trouble for knocking them out.
The second lieutenant rushed back and forth between Wallings and Hilliard, pleading for calm. Hilliard never would’ve confronted Ernie like this out in the ville. Only here where he felt safe, with plenty of witnesses and plenty of co-workers to protect him, was he a tiger. PFC Wallings, however, was truly angry-and ready to fight. A real hellion, with pent-up anger, the cause of which I could only begin to imagine. The young lieutenant, whose name tag said Beresf ord, kept most of her attention on Wallings. Smart girl. Finally, Lieutenant Beresford convinced PFC Wallings to stop shouting and take her seat.
Whatever happened to giving orders? Second Lieutenant Beresford was acting more like a social worker than a commanding officer. A young female lieutenant, that’s why she’d been assigned to this office. EEO had no real power in 8th Army except the power to occasionally embarrass the command. No officer who was ambitious would accept an assignment to EEO. Beresford was either too naive to realize that or, more likely, she had no plans to make the military her career.
When things calmed down, Lieutenant Beresford turned to Ernie and me and asked to see our credentials. We flashed our CID badges.
“Is this an official visit?” she asked.
“That’s the only reason we’d be here,” Ernie replied.
Hilliard glowered at him.
I spit out what we were after, mentioning the King Club and Miss Kwon’s name.
“Yes,” Beresford said. “I remember that one. We have a copy of the complaint here, don’t we Sergeant Hilliard?”
“We gonna turn it over to them?”
“Why not?”
“Don’t they have to subpoena it or something?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary. They just want to look at it. Isn’t that so, Agent Sueno?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Hilliard crossed his arms. “Well, I don’t like it.”
Beresford looked dismayed and her face reddened. Her complexion was pocked from teenage acne and she wore thick-lensed glasses. She seemed like a nice woman; probably recently graduated from college, she was trying to do her best here although, with our long history of racial tension at 8th Army, I believed she was in over her head. Fights between black and white soldiers were common, hard feelings ubiquitous.
“Well, I ain’t giving them nothing,” Hilliard told Lieutenant Beresford, “If you want to turn one of our reports over to them, that’s your lookout. I’m leaving.” Hilliard grabbed his garrison cap and stormed toward the exit. “Hold my calls,” he told PFC Wallings on the way out. It didn’t make any sense but I suppose he thought it sounded good.
Ernie grinned again. “On his way over to the NCO Club for a shot and a beer.”
Lieutenant Beresford’s face turned even redder. Misconduct on duty reflected poorly on a soldier’s immediate supervisor. Or at least it should.
“What was the name again?” Beresford asked.
“Miss Kwon,” I replied. “At the King Club.”
PFC Wallings sat at the front desk, her back to us, fuming. Lieutenant Beresford didn’t ask her to retrieve the file. Instead, she walked over to a row of gray metal filing cabinets, rummaged through the green folders inside until she found what she was looking for. The complaint was a typed, onionskin sheet, three pages long. She disappeared down the hallway and two minutes later she returned with a photocopy.
“Here you are,” she said.
We thanked her. PFC Wallings was so angry that she rapped the heels of her combat boots rhythmically on the floor
Once we were outside the building, Ernie said, “Nuthouse.”
I didn’t argue.
In the Serious Incident Report concerning the Itaewon Massacre, Cort never revealed his thoughts on what might’ve happened to Moretti’s body. But despite being taken off the case, he continued to interview everyone he could locate with knowledge of the incident. Even the Buddhist nuns.
Once the Seven Dragons took over as the new landlords, the Buddhist nuns, and the orphans, were run out of Itaewon. Someone had written, in Korean, the name of the Buddhist order that the nuns belonged to. The same person also had written down the area of Kyongki Province where their nunnery was located. I could tell it was the same person because the note was still in the file and the handwriting matched perfectly. On a Sunday afternoon about a month after the Itaewon Massacre, Cort signed out a jeep from the 21 T Car motor pool, filled it with mogas and, using an army-issue map, drove out to a Buddhist temple known as the Temple of Constant Truth.
When the nuns greeted him, they were confused at first as to why a G.I. had driven all the way up to the slopes of Yongmun Mountain. Then, Cort showed them the black-and-white photograph he had retrieved from Moretti’s military personnel file. They understood immediately and soon Cort was sitting cross-legged on a warm floor drinking tea with a half-dozen, bald-headed female Buddhist nuns. He came to understand through sign language and some broken English that these nuns had been the cadre assigned to operate the Itaewon orphanage and take care of the children.
Cort asked them where the children were.
The nuns didn’t want to talk about it but some of them started crying and then apologized for their unseemly display of emotion. Cort assumed that because of lack of funds, the nuns had been forced to turn the kids over to one of the many international organizations which were actively saving children all over South Korea. Being a polite kind of guy, Cort didn’t press the issue. Instead, he sipped on his tea and waited for them to calm down.
Then Cort asked them about the night of the Itaewon Massacre.
6
We found Sergeant First Class Hilliard at the 8th Army NCO Club, sipping on a bourbon and Seven and dropping coins into a pinball machine. In the cocktail lounge, a Korean go-go girl danced on a well-lit stage to music blaring from a jukebox. G.I. s ate their lunch and drank beer, mostly ignoring her. As soon as Hilliard sensed our presence, he took his hands off the machine and turned slowly.