“So she’d have to have a helluva a lot of influence over him.”
“Right,” I answered. “A helluva lot.”
Ernie glanced again at the three names. “Two of these women don’t work at all. What are they going to do? Offer their houseboys a pile of money to have somebody killed?”
I nodded. “But the third …”
Ernie whistled. “Big money,” he said.
The third entry was Gladys Hackburn, the wife of Colonel Orin Hackburn. She had her own career, a good one. Her current position was contracting officer for the 8th Army Procurement and Facilities Office. She was a woman who made the final decision on the disbursement of millions of US taxpayer dollars to local construction contractors.
She was a woman with power.
Before we approached Gladys Hackburn, I made a few discreet inquiries at the 8th Army Procurement Office. The biggest contract currently under construction was a Top Secret Signal Intelligence Facility actually being built into the side of a mountain south of Seoul. The dollar figures involved were staggering, and the Korean contractor with the most at risk was a wealthy businessman named Roh Ji-yun. From his background security check folder, I pulled his black-and-white mug shot. That afternoon I made a phone call, and a few minutes later Ernie and I drove our Army jeep out to the same teahouse where we had met Miss Tae before. She was already waiting.
When I pulled out the photo of Roh Ji-yun, her eyes popped wide.
“That’s him,” she said. “Mr. Kim.”
She was so impressed that Ernie almost convinced her to spend the rest of the afternoon with him at a nearby inn. I frustrated his plans.
“We have work to do,” I told him.
Ernie pouted.
Miss Tae merely seemed amused.
We found Roh Ji-yun at one of his construction sites. He wore expensive slacks, a silk tie, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. An orange hardhat balanced atop his big square head.
When I told him what we suspected, his face turned crimson and spittle erupted from fleshy lips.
The punch was a surprise. Most Koreans swear a lot when they’re angry, but usually they don’t hit.
I managed to dodge the blow, and then three of his assistants were on him, holding him back. He continued to curse in Korean, Ernie hurling epithets in English. It was obvious to me that we weren’t going to coax much information out of him.
But for now we had enough.
At the 8th Army Procurement Office, Gladys Hackburn’s secretary kept us cooling our heels for almost twenty minutes. Finally we were allowed to enter the inner sanctum.
She sat at a large teak desk, the flags of the United States and the Republic of Korea draped behind her. She wore a powder blue business suit, and her reddish hair was cut short and curled up in a wave that framed a youngish-looking oval face. When she stood to shake our hands, I could see that she maintained her figure at least as well as had the late Captain Richard Everson.
She smiled brightly.
An intelligent woman. A caring woman. A woman willing to help.
“What brings the CID to the Army Procurement Office?” she asked.
Instead of answering, I tossed the black-and-white glossy of Roh Ji-yun onto her desk. A puzzled frown crossed her face. She glanced down at the photo but leaned back slightly as if she were afraid to touch it.
“You had him follow Captain Everson,” I said. “To set him up for murder.”
She stood perfectly still for a moment. Ernie and I both held our breath, wondering if she’d break down or tear the photo up or start screaming at us and call the MPs to escort us out of her office.
She did none of those things. Instead she sat down slowly and interlaced her well-manicured fingers atop the varnished surface of her desk as if composing herself to make a speech in front of the Parent-Teachers Association. She cleared her throat and then spoke.
“I loathed him,” she said, “for what he did to me. The lies he told me. The promises he made about our future together.” She shook her head as if trying to rid herself of a bad dream. “But we had no future together. He was just using me.”
“So things didn’t work out,” I said. “And the plan to pay someone to kill Everson slowly grew in your mind. But you weren’t sure if it would work. So you followed, to make sure the job was completed. And when you saw him lying there in that alley and you were all alone and the ice pick was lying beside him …”
“Yes,” she said calmly, staring directly into my eyes. “I killed him. I picked up the ice pick, and I stabbed it into his heart. And what’s more,” she said, her face as smooth as polished stone, “I’d do it again.”
It took a while for the paperwork to be completed at 8th Army, translated, and then formally transmitted to the Korean National Police. It took even longer for the KNPs to send their report to the judge in charge of the Everson case. So long, in fact, that they almost hanged Choi Yong-kung for the murder of Captain Richard Everson despite the fact that we had a confession from Ms. Gladys Hackburn.
Finally, though, a few hours before the sentence was to be carried out, Choi was released from prison. His mother was there to greet him, of course, along with Miss Tae.
When the sun went down, Ernie and I made our way to Itaewon. We were ensconced on our usual barstools in our usual club in the heart of the nightclub district. The band had just taken their break when Choi Yong-kuang’s mother tugged on my shirtsleeve.
This time she didn’t pull me off the barstool, but I turned around anyway.
Everyone watched. The bartenders, the waitresses, the business girls and even the GIs, because they were aware of the man who’d been spared from hanging this morning.
Choi Yong-kuang’s mother didn’t speak. Head bowed, she held three sticks of burning incense in front of the billowing folds of her red silk Korean dress. She knelt to the floor, leaned forward, and lowered her head three times to the dirty tile.
It was sort of embarrassing. Ernie tried to laugh it off. I kept a straight face. For decorum’s sake, mainly, but also so no one would notice the pressure building in my eyes.
THE FILIAL WIFE
Before dawn on the last day of her life, Mrs. Yi Won-suk rose from her sleeping mat beside her husband, washed her face, and slid back the oil-papered front door of her home. She stepped out into her plot of about one-half pyong in which she had been tending twelve rows of peichu, the thick-leafed cabbage that the people of Korea soak in brine and use as the prime ingredient in kimchee, their spicy national dish.
After her husband rose and trudged off to his fields, Mrs. Yi’s daughter, Myong-son, wiped her sleepy four-year-old eyes and joined her mother in the field, making a pretense of holding a flickering candle so her mother could see more clearly as she slashed at the bases of the fat green cabbages.
As dawn broke behind Palgong Mountain, Mrs. Yi continued to work, tossing the heavy heads of peichu into her wooden cart. After she’d plucked all the ripe leafy vegetables from the earth, she took Myong-song by the hand and together they washed and changed into freshly pressed skirts and woolen blouses and bright red head scarves.
Myong-son climbed atop the pile of peichu, Mrs. Yi grabbed the handle of the cart, and together they walked through the first glimmerings of golden sunrise in the Land of the Morning Calm, heading for the produce market in the city of Taegu.
Today, mid-November by the Western calendar, marked the beginning of kimjang, that time of year when Korean housewives buy large piles of ripe peichu and prepare enough cabbage kimchee to last throughout the cold winter. Sales in Taegu were expected to be good. Mrs. Yi needed the money to supplement the earnings she and her husband made from the backbreaking work of tending their rented field of rice and soybean.