She’d been there before, and recently, to the murder site of her husband.
Sergeant Dubrovnik, an experienced MP and a man on the run for his life, had either shot himself in the ribs with his own.45 or he’d allowed someone he trusted to stand very close to him. Who else but a woman? And a woman he knew well?
And the job she’d received on compound. Sure, the union would work very hard to make sure that, as a widow of one of their deceased members, she found employment, but starting as a billing clerk? That was a relatively high paying job that required extensive experience. The union gets people jobs but usually the job is at the lowest entry level and the person who lands it is happy to get it. The work is steady, the benefits better than most jobs in Korea, and advancement will depend on how hard they work.
The Widow Lee had started near the top. Somebody, probably a man, had cleared the way for her.
And now me. I was next on her list. She’d learned from her husband’s mistakes; Sergeant Dubrovnik, an MP, was no longer in the picture. A CID agent was her next step up.
And now I held the duplicated bills of lading in my hand. The proof I needed. Ernie was waiting in a nearby teahouse, the jeep outside.
But could I do it?
Her eyes widened when I told her.
“A drive? Why should we go for a drive?”
“Because I say so.” I ripped her coat off the peg in the wall and tossed it to her. “Kapshida,” I said. Let’s go.
She refused so I slapped her once-something I never do to a woman. But she was no longer a woman to me. She was a criminal.
At the police station in Inchon, Captain Rhee studied the bills of lading and listened patiently to my explanation. She wanted me to go into the scam with her. She had taken her husband’s job and now I would take Sergeant Dubrovnik’s place. And working in the CID headquarters, I’d be in even a better position to cover things up. Captain Rhee nodded, understanding what I said.
He held the Widow Lee overnight for questioning.
In a way I was proud of her. Captain Rhee told me later that she denied everything.
The Korean National Police re-covered the ground they’d covered before but this time they were asking different questions. Between the home of Lee Ok-pyong and the park overlooking the Yellow Sea, they canvassed local residents who’d been out on the night he was murdered. Previously, no one had seen two men walking together, one of them a Korean, the other an American. This time the police asked them if they’d seen a Korean man walking with a woman. A few of them had. One of them, a sweet potato vendor, even mentioned that she’d seen the couple, deep in conversation, pass the statue of General MacArthur and disappear into the brush. Later, the woman had come out alone, stood by the sea for a moment and had then thrown something over the cliff. A stick maybe. Maybe a mongdungi, a heavy club that women in Korea use to beat dirt out of wet clothing. Then the woman had hurried out of the park.
In Songtan-up, bar girls and local shop owners remembered a robust American GI walking arm in arm with a beautiful Korean woman. Both of them were strangers in these parts. They’d entered a narrow back alley and one of the bar girls assumed it was for a late night tryst. After only a minutes or two, the woman had left alone, in a hurry, and the bar girl assumed that she’d changed her mind about her affection for the big GI.
Had the bar girl heard a gunshot? No. The rock music blaring from the outside speakers that lined the narrow lane was much too loud.
Captain Rhee personally interviewed the local union leader. As an experienced cop, he knew enough to be circumspect in his questioning and didn’t press the union overly hard. There was too much power involved. Too much chance for the union and therefore all Korean employees to lose face. And, after all, how could you prove such an allegation? That a union leader had allowed a beautiful young widow to influence him and land her a better-than-average job? The union leader, however, was smart enough not to stonewall the Korean National Police completely. He confirmed to Captain Rhee that what he suspected, that the Widow Lee had received extraordinary assistance, was within the realm of possibility.
“You knew it was coming, didn’t you?” Ernie asked me.
Once again we were sitting in the 8th Army snack bar on the morning after the Widow Lee was convicted of the murder of her husband and Sergeant Dubrovnik.
“I guess I knew. Somewhere. But I didn’t want to know.”
“I don’t blame you.” Ernie nibbled on his bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. “She was a good looking woman.”
I sighed.
“Unlucky in love,” Ernie said.
“You got that right.”
“You could’ve gone along with the plan,” Ernie told me. “Made some money for yourself. And you’d still have her.”
I set my coffee down and looked into his green eyes. “I never thought of that.”
“Sure you didn’t,” he said.
THE OPPOSITE OF O
“Never the twain shall meet,” a wise man once said.
He was referring to the Occident and the Orient but as a criminal investigator for the 8th United States Army in Seoul, Republic of Korea, I can assure you that the two worlds often meet. And in the case of Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg and Miss O Sung-hee, the two worlds collided at the intersection of warm flesh and the cold, sharpened tip of an Army-issue bayonet.
Ernie and I were dispatched from 8th Army Headquarters as soon as we received word about a stabbing near Camp Colbern, a communications compound located in the countryside some eighteen miles east of the teeming metropolis of Seoul.
Paldang-ni was the name of the village. It clings to the side of the gently-sloping foothills of the Kumdang Mountains just below the brick and barbed wire enclosure that surrounds Camp Colbern. The roads were narrow and farmers pushed wooden carts piled high with winter turnips and old women in short blouses and long skirts balanced huge bundles of laundry atop their heads. Ernie drove slowly through the busy lanes, avoiding splashing mud on the industrious pedestrians. Not because Ernie Bascom was a polite kind of guy but because he wasn’t quite sure where, in this convoluted maze of alleys, we would find the road that led to the Paldang Station of the Korean National Police.
Above a whitewashed building, the flag of Daehan Minguk, the Republic of Korea, fluttered in the cold morning breeze. The yin and the yang symbols clung to one another, red and blue teardrops embracing on a field of pure white. Ernie parked the jeep out front and together we strode into the station. Five minutes later we were interrogating a prisoner: a thin and very nervous young man by the name of Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg.
“They were sisters,” Private Rothenberg told us.
“Who?” Ernie asked.
“Miss O. And the woman she shared a hooch with, Miss Kang.”
“Sisters?”
“Yeah.”
Ernie crossed his arms and stared skeptically at Rothenberg. Rothenberg, for his part, allowed long forearms to hang listlessly over bony legs. The three-legged stool he sat upon was too low for him and his spine curved forward and his head bobbed. He looked like a man who’d abandoned any hope of receiving a fair shake.
“Didn’t it ever trouble you,” Ernie asked, “that the two women had different last names?”
Rothenberg shrugged bony shoulders. “I figured they had different fathers or something.”
I asked the main question. “Why’d you kill her, Rothenberg?”
He tilted his head toward me and his moist blue eyes became larger and rounder. “You don’t believe me, do you?”