Had she entered the hotel? I asked.
No. She took off on foot, heading north.
Then I asked another question, still in Korean. What currency had she used to pay him? That was another odd thing, the driver replied. Although she was an American, she had insisted on paying her fare in Japanese yen. In fact, he told me that he was holding the thousand yen note in his hand right now and he wasn’t even sure how much it was worth. Another thing was odd. There was a brown smudge on the edge of the bill and it looked, almost, like dried blood.
Paco was still comatose. When I asked the nurse in the intensive care unit how he was doing, she stared at me with sad eyes and shook her head.
“You don’t think he’ll pull through?” I asked.
“He might,” she replied. She gazed in his direction. “Yes, probably. But he will never be the man he once was.”
Ernie patted me on the shoulder.
On our way out, the phone rang behind the emergency room counter. A medic picked it up and then called us over. “You guys Sweeno and Bascom?”
“That’s us,” Ernie replied.
“Somebody wants to talk to you.”
I took the call. It was Riley. He started talking without preamble.
“Do either of you guys know somebody named Mel Gardi?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Mel Gardi,” he repeated.
My eyes widened. “You mean ‘Maldeigari.’”
“Whatever.”
“That’s Horsehead,” I said. “What about him?”
“You better get your butts out to Itaewon.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“I ain’t repeating this shit,” Riley said.
I pulled out my notebook and jotted down directions: a block and a half up the hill from the Dingy Dingy Pool Hall.
“This is in Itaewon?” I asked.
“That’s what they tell me. Not far from the Hamilton Hotel.”
The front entrance to the Hamilton Hotel was the only authorized PX taxi stand in Itaewon.
“What about Horsehead?” I asked again. “Did something happen to him?”
“Go look!” Riley shouted and hung up.
“What is it?” Ernie asked.
I told him.
We ran outside of the 121 Evac, jumped in his jeep, and laid rubber halfway out the gate.
12
Horsehead had fought back.
The rope around his wrists was frayed and bit sharply into the flesh of his forearm. He’d tried to rip himself free. Instead, he’d managed only to tear great gaps in his skin. Blood had flowed down his wrist and his hands and onto the small of his back where his wrists were tied. He’d kicked against the wall of the little hooch, too, despite the fact that his ankles-like his wrists-were bound together with rope that had been laced in intricate knots.
And he’d been gagged. With a wool scarf and cotton stuffed into his mouth.
Like Moretti.
Maybe the similarities were coincidental. Maybe the Seven Dragons had nothing to do with this crime. Maybe. I knelt next to Horsehead’s body. The single bare bulb overhead had been switched on but I needed more illumination. I used my army-issue flashlight.
Last night, Horsehead had been spotted at the White Crane Hotel, policing up Jessica Tidwell. Then he had ended up here, in this dark and crowded neighborhood of Itaewon, in this tiny hooch rented by the hour, face down in his own vomit, his hands and feet bound, his body stabbed so many times that he looked like pulverized goose liver.
And where was Jessica Tidwell?
The old woman who owned the hooch was in tears. A gaggle of KNPs surrounded her, shooting questions at her. Her wrinkled face was smeared with moisture, and she kept repeating over and over again. “Na moolah. Chinja moolah.” I don’t know. I really don’t know.
What the old woman didn’t know was who the people were who’d brought in Horsehead.
“He was drunk,” she’d told us through sobs. “Two men were carrying him. They said they wanted a room so he could sleep it off. They paid me in advance and carried him to the room and laid him down and left him there. They said some women would be along to check on him and make him comfortable and I should let them in and they’d take care of him.”
She hadn’t recognized the men, had never seen them before. But they were Korean men, well into middle age, and they wore workingmen’s clothes as if they’d just come from some sort of job in a warehouse or a factory. And the women had shuffled in immediately after the men left. The landlady hadn’t paid much attention because by then she was watching Chonwon Diary, a popular prime-time soap opera. Her favorite show, she added. But there were three women and each wore some sort of jacket or shawl with a hood; she hadn’t seen their faces.
“Did they carry weapons?” one of the cops asked.
She didn’t know. She hadn’t looked. If they did they weren’t carrying them in their hands where she could see.
“Was there much noise?”
Not much. Some moaning. But she’d had drunks sleep it off in the rooms she rented before and they were never quiet, so she hadn’t paid attention. Except for the pounding on the wall. For a second there, she thought the drunken man was going to kick the house down but the women managed to get him under control.
“When did the women leave?”
She wasn’t sure. After her program was over she realized that all was quiet down the hall. But she hadn’t gone to look. It was late so she locked the outer gate and went to sleep. She believed the women had already left because she didn’t hear any footsteps pounding down the hallway during the night and no one had called for her to unlock the front gate.
“When did you discover the body?”
In the morning, while she was scrubbing the central hallway with a moist rag. The sun had been up for over an hour and she hadn’t heard any sound coming from the room. All her other guests-mostly business girls and American G.I. s-were up before dawn and had already left. When she reached the door to Horsehead’s room, she paused for a moment, listening. When she heard nothing, she knocked on the latticework door and called out. No answer. Finally, she peeked in.
Then the old woman sobbed again.
“Terrible,” she said, covering her eyes.
She ran next door to a neighbor who had a telephone and they’d called the police.
The KNPs notified 8th Army and now here we were. Ernie and I looked down on the remains of a man who, only hours before, had been wealthy and confident, abrasive and full of life. He liked to fight. I suppose, somewhere deep in Horsehead’s fevered mind, fighting had made him feel alive.
He’d lived. That was for sure. A full life. Maybe not a good life but an active life and now he was nothing more than chopped meat.
Ernie glanced at me, shook his head. I suppose we were both thinking the same thing. Who were the men who’d brought him here? And even more importantly, who were the women? Who could systematically chop a living, breathing human being to death? There must’ve been a hundred entry wounds in Horsehead’s body. Even without measuring them I could see that they were from different sized cutting implements. Three sizes, I thought. Probably knives. And that matched what the landlady had told us. Three women.
Had they been hired by a rival gang? Or had they been sent by one of the other Seven Dragons? Or were they just women who harbored a grudge against Horsehead? And who were their two male helpers? None of it made sense. People who murder don’t operate in groups. Not unless they’re professionals and they’re hired and well paid. But if they were professionals, why hadn’t they tried to hide their crime? Why hadn’t they hidden the corpse?
The coroner’s van from downtown Seoul pulled up and after a few more minutes of collecting evidence, the paramedics were allowed to hoist up the body and cart it away. The KNPs didn’t want us there anymore. It was their case. Ernie and I staggered away from the crime scene and then found ourselves wandering aimlessly through a maze of alleys.
The sky was as gray as my mood. It was still only fifteen hundred hours but I wanted a drink more than I’d wanted one in a long time. The nightclubs along the main drag of Itaewon were shuttered. All the neon was switched off and the signs looked sad and dusty in the dull afternoon light.