We questioned them in separate rooms and it took only a few minutes for Frankton to confess. It was all his tall, good-looking buddy’s idea, he said.
“Dartworth knew what time they’d be picking up the payroll, how much it would be, even the name of the sergeant who would accompany the payroll officer.”
“How’d he know all this?” Ernie asked.
Frankton shrugged. “A friend told him.”
“A friend?”
“For the last couple of months my good buddy Dartworth has been popping an officer and a lady.”
We waited. I almost whispered the question. “Lieutenant Burcshoff?”
Frankton nodded. “That’s right. Lieutenant Burcshoff.”
While we searched their rooms, I explained to Ernie what had made me decide to look for a driver who might’ve had some chance of meeting Lieutenant Burcshoff prior to the robbery.
The first thing that seemed screwy was her stopping for a couple of GIs in civvies who stood on the curb and waved her down. Sharing rides is common in 8th Army but not when you have ten thousand dollars in military payroll in the back seat.
And the fact that she’d been vague in her description of the two thieves although she was a top graduate of her reserve officer class. Sergeant Holtbaker, who’d been bopped over the head, had noticed more detail than she had.
Also, when Ernie and I picked her up in Kimpo, she couldn’t believe that the thieves had stolen her treasured family heirloom, the pearl-handled.45.
What had she expected from a couple of payroll hijackers? Normally they’ll take anything of value. Her shock didn’t make sense unless she knew more about these two particular thieves than she was willing to tell us.
And outside 8th Army Finance this morning, when Ernie told her that the arrest of the culprits was imminent, she seemed sad. Not elated.
In Dartworth’s locker we found eight thousand dollars’ worth of the old blue Military Payment Certificates.
An MP patrol arrived. They handcuffed Dartworth and Frankton and took them to the MP station to be booked.
It was then that something dawned on me.
“We’ve got trouble, Ernie.”
“What trouble? We wrapped up the case.”
“Not completely. What about her pearl-handled pistol?”
“You worry too much, George. Those two jerks probably sold it on the black market.”
“Not a gun they didn’t.”
Korea has total gun control. Only the military and the police are allowed to possess firearms. Because of the threat of North Korean Communist spies, trafficking in guns has only one penalty: death. And it is enforced. Absolutely. Even the people who run the black market wouldn’t be foolish enough to buy firearms.
Ernie nodded, seeing my point. “So what did Dartworth do with it?”
“Only one place that makes any sense.”
“What’s that?”
“He gave it back to Lieutenant Burcshoff.”
“Good. She owns it. So what’s the problem?”
“She’s the problem.”
I made a call to the Aviation Detachment headquarters and spoke to the commanding officer.
“Lieutenant Burcshoff? No. We’ve been looking for her, too. She disappeared about an hour ago. Not like her. Not like her at all.”
I slammed down the phone. Ernie and I ran to the jeep.
We found her in the Women Officers’ Quarters. Sitting in the recreation room, television off, small refrigerator humming in the corner. She seemed calm. Wearing cutoff blue jeans and a loose sweatshirt with the name of her alma mater blazoned across the front. She looked exactly like a hardworking young woman relaxing on her day off except for one thing. She pointed the barrel of her pearl-handled.45 right between my eyes.
Ernie lifted his hands slowly out to his sides. “It won’t do any good, Lieutenant Burcshoff. Just tell the truth, and it will all be over soon. Maybe you were in on it with them, maybe you weren’t.”
She barked at him. “I wasn’t in on it with them. It was the sonofabitch Dartworth.” Her eyes started to glisten with tears. “I know it was wrong, an officer fraternizing with an enlisted man. But I met him while he was driving us to the Officers’ club. He seemed so cheerful. So full of life.”
With the back of her hand she wiped away the tears, still keeping the pistol trained on us.
“So it wasn’t your fault,” Ernie said. “You didn’t know that Dartworth and his buddy were going to hit Sergeant Holtbaker over the head. You didn’t know they were going to steal the payroll. All you did was stop when he waved you down.”
She shook her head. “I did more than that.”
Ernie and I waited. The silence grew long. Finally her eyes blazed with fury. “I didn’t shoot the sonofabitch!”
Ernie and I flinched. I started to edge my way along the wall. If she had to swivel to take aim, she might not be able to plug both of us.
As quickly as it had come, the fury subsided. “It’s a matter of honor,” she said. “The money in that satchel was the hard-earned pay of soldiers in the Aviation Detachment. Soldiers under my command. Not receiving it when they were supposed to receive it caused a lot of hardship. Rents they couldn’t pay, groceries they couldn’t buy, money they couldn’t send home to their families.”
And booze they couldn’t buy down in the red light district, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.
She gazed at us, eyes wide, as if wondering if we’d understand. “It was my duty as an officer, as one sworn to obey the orders of those appointed above me, to protect that payroll. With my life, if need be. I should’ve pulled out this pistol and aimed it at Dartworth’s blond head and blown his damn brains out!”
Ernie held out his hand, expecting the gun to go off. It didn’t. She paid no attention to our discomfort but seemed wrapped in a world of her own misery. Ernie took a step to his left.
“Instead, what did I do?” she asked. “I took the soft way out. I thought of my own feelings, of my own failure to live as an officer first and as a woman second. I didn’t live up to my responsibilities.”
“Hey,” Ernie said. “You liked the guy. Of course you didn’t want to kill him. You’re only human.”
Coming from Ernie, the biggest woman-chasing, booze-guzzling ville rat in 8th Army, I almost laughed out loud at the remark. Lieutenant Burcshoff shook her head vehemently.
“My dad told me becoming an officer would be tough. My grandfather told me it would be tough. They told me if I couldn’t handle the job, if my personal life was more important to me than doing my duty, then I should never put on the uniform of an officer of the United States Army.”
Most of the officers I knew only talked a good game. The truth was that they always put their careers and their personal goals above their duty to God and country. I was about to tell Lieutenant Burcshoff this when a red light flashed outside the window. Ernie glanced over. “The commanding general,” he said.
A line of staff cars led by an MP jeep pulled up in front of the Women Officers’ Quarters. A blue flag spangled with four stars fluttered in front of the longest sedan. Someone at the MP station must’ve notified the CG, General Skulgrin, that we were on our way to arrest one of his officers.
When Lieutenant Burcshoff glanced outside, Ernie stole another step toward the humming refrigerator. “The CG is here for you,” I told her. “Because he respects you and doesn’t want anything to happen to you.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “It’s just more MPs come to arrest me.”
The commanding general of 8th Army, tall and lean and craggy-faced, climbed out of the back seat of his sedan. “I’m not lying,” I said. “He’s come to help you.”
“It’s too late, she said. “I’ve humiliated my family. I’ve dishonored the officer corps.”
With his back against the refrigerator Ernie could reach one of the plateglass windows. He rapped his fingers lightly and caught the attention of one of the MPs outside. As he turned and looked, Ernie flipped him the bird.