“You need rest too,” I told Doc Yong.
She nodded her head slowly. “And the clinic-”
“The clinic can wait,” I said.
I pulled her to her feet, guided her out to the jeep, and Ernie and I drove her home.
It was the first time I’d seen where she lived. It was a small room, she told us, on the third floor of a rundown apartment building, shoved into a crowded slot in a tightly packed neighborhood known as Oksu-dong. She left me at the first floor and, although I offered to help her to her door, she shook her head negatively and trudged alone up the squeaking wooden stairs.
When I poked my head through the hole in the brick wall of the basement of the Grand Ole Opry Club, I normally would’ve been embarrassed about screaming except that all the MPs-and Ernie too-were as scared shitless as I was. Especially when they took their turns peering inside. Even Lieutenant Pong, who normally had a ferocious expression on his face, appeared a little green around the gills.
We had to pull the body out from behind the wall because it was no longer a skeleton. It was a big, fleshy corpse, full of blood and mucous and other bodily fluids, and it was wrapped in a flowery pink dress and its dyed black hair was damp and strung around its ears and neck like snakes uncoiling from the skull of Medusa.
Once we dragged her through the hole and plopped her on the floor and searched back inside the opening, we discovered that the bones of Mori Di, every last one, were now gone. Along with the tattered uniform and the combat boots and the rusty old pair of handcuffs and the cotton swabs and the woolen gag. Mori Di had once again been spirited away-to points unknown, by person or persons unknown. And in his place had been left the rotund, no longer breathing body of Two Bellies.
Her mouth was open in horror. Her throat cut. Blood covered everything.
One of the MPs vomited. Then the rest of us did. Olive ran for a mop. Lieutenant Pong disappeared into the back alley.
Martin Limon
G.I. Bones
8
T he Korean National Police insisted on taking over the investigation into the death of Two Bellies. We tried to retain jurisdiction but they wouldn’t hear of it. She was a Korean citizen, murdered on Korean soil and, at this point, there was no reason to believe that an American had been involved. That is until they interrogated the night bartender, and the other employees who’d been working the late shift at the Grand Ole Opry.
Lieutenant Pong was assigned to the case, personally, which surprised everybody because his job at 8th Army as the ROK-U.S. liaison officer centered around the political and diplomatic rather than the investigative. But once he sank his teeth into police work he was thorough. Maybe that was because he wanted to prove that he was a real cop and not just a paper pusher. He even interviewed Kimchee Kitty, the beautiful female lead singer of the Kimchee Kowboys and I was flattered that she’d noticed me-but not Ernie-entering and leaving the club. I was further flattered that she watched me proceed to the back hallway that led to the latrines and she noticed that even after her third number, I had not emerged. During the second set of the evening, while she was backstage, she peered through the curtains to watch the crowd and saw me emerge from the latrine area and leave the club. My winter jacket was still wrapped around me, she told Lieutenant Pong, and my short hair was moist and in disarray, as if I’d been working. And there appeared to be smudges on my knees and the sides of my blue jeans from dirt or dust of some sort.
Had I known Kimchee Kitty was watching me that closely, I would’ve asked her for a date a long time ago.
Ernie, for his part, was slightly offended that she hadn’t noticed him. But the bartender had and so had a couple of the other employees. And at least one of them, the bartender, had noticed that during the entire time we’d been in the Grand Ole Opry Club, we hadn’t bought a drink.
Unusual for us.
The evidence recovery team working in the basement discovered some threads that appeared to come from American-made blue jeans. They also searched the crypt where Two Bellies’s body had been found and discovered that the dirt below had been thoroughly sifted. They found no combat boots, no dog tags, no bones, no tattered remnants of a twenty-year-old U.S. Army uniform. In short, they found nothing that would indicate the presence of Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti’s remains. They did find Two Bellies. And they found that her throat had been slashed with a very sharp knife; so sharp that she probably didn’t have time to whistle, much less scream, before her windpipe was severed. And Lieutenant Pong also discovered that we’d been seen around Itaewon with Two Bellies a couple of nights before her death, having her show us the sights.
The result of this evidence was that, instead of recovering the twenty-year-old remains of Tech Sergeant Flo Moretti, Ernie and I were taken into custody by the Korean National Police. All this happened quickly. Before the midnight curfew, Ernie and I were downtown, under harsh lights, being sweated.
The interrogation wasn’t as bad as I feared. No bamboo shoots up the fingernails or acetylene torches singeing my private parts. Maybe the KNPs were saving all that for later. Mainly, the interrogation consisted of Lieutenant Pong trying to trick me into admitting that I’d somehow sneaked Two Bellies into the basement of the Grand Ole Opry and, while down there, I’d slit her throat.
“If I did that,” I asked him, “why would I request a search warrant to go back to the scene of the crime?”
He had no answer for that. Despite his scowl, he didn’t believe for a minute that Ernie or I had murdered Two Bellies. This was all a sham. He knew it, I knew it, but of course he’d never admit it. The point was to cast suspicion on Ernie and me and then, if the real killer of Two Bellies turned out to be someone important, Ernie and I could be charged in order to protect the powerful.
I was in a dangerous position and I knew it. Some sort of chess game was being played behind the scenes and Ernie and I had been turned into pawns. What had triggered the start of the game? Our inquiries into the death of Mori Di. Who was behind these machinations? Probably the Seven Dragons but could someone else be involved? And what were the stakes? Old grudges? Or something more?
Ernie and I had probably been watched all along. Maybe from when we first talked to Two Bellies. Maybe earlier. Whoever had taken Two Bellies down there and slit her throat was demonstrating to us how much power they had. Enough power to make anything, no matter how improbable, happen. And there was nothing that Ernie or I could do about it.
Lieutenant Pong kept hammering away at the time I’d spent with Two Bellies. Trying to build a timeline to be able to show that if nothing else I’d had the opportunity to murder her if I’d wanted to. I answered his questions honestly, knowing that Ernie would too. Being near somebody, talking to them, is not a crime. I knew that even though Lieutenant Pong might be able to establish the means and opportunity for murder, he’d never be able to establish a motive. Neither Ernie nor I had any reason to kill Two Bellies. In fact, I pitied the old gal, lying there in that brick-lined pit. Whoever had done that to her had dispatched her without remorse. A blade sliced expertly through her throat-a lot of blood, a little twitching-and fini. No more Two Bellies.
Lieutenant Pong was intelligent enough to know that Ernie and I had no possible reason to murder Two Bellies but, apparently, his bosses wanted him to build as much of a case against us as he could.
And build a case he would.