“What’s to believe? You haven’t told us anything one way or the other.”
“I told them.” He pointed to the three khaki-clad Korean National Policemen standing outside the cement-walled interrogation room. Their arms were crossed, fists clenched, narrow eyes lit with malice. Rays from a single electric bulb illuminated the interrogation room, revealing cobwebs and dried rat feces in unswept corners.
“What’d you tell the KNPs?” I asked.
“I told them I couldn’t have killed Miss O.”
“Why not?”
Rothenberg, once again, allowed his head to hang loosely on his long neck. “Because I love her,” he said.
Ernie smirked. Virtually every young GI who arrives in Korea and finds his first yobo down in the ville falls in love. The US Army is so used to this phenomenon that they require eight months’ worth of paperwork for an American GI to marry a Korean woman. What with a twelve-month tour of duty, a GI has to fall in love early and hard to be allowed permission to marry. Why all the hassles? Simple. To protect innocent young American GIs from the sinister wiles of Asian dragon ladies. At least, that’s the official rationale. The real reason is flat-out racism.
“Where were you last night, Rothenberg?”
“You mean after curfew?”
“Yes. But let’s start from the beginning. What time did you leave work?”
I dragged another wooden stool from against the wall of the interrogation room and sat down opposite Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg. I pulled out my pocket notebook and my ballpoint pen and prepared to write. Rothenberg started talking.
Ernie leaned against the cement wall, arms crossed, and continued to smirk. The KNPs continued to glare. A spider found its web and slowly crawled toward a quivering moth.
Our first stop was the Full Moon Teahouse.
Miss O had worked here. And, according to Rothenberg, she was the toast of the town, the tallest, most shapely, and best looking business girl in the village of Paldang-ni. The front door was covered with a brightly painted façade; a replica of a gateway to an ancient imperial palace. The heavy wooden door was locked. Ernie and I strolled around back. Here the setting was more real. Piled cases of empty soju bottles, plastic-wrapped garbage rotting in rusty metal cans, a long-tailed rat scurrying down a vented drainage ditch.
The back door was open. Ernie and I walked in. The odor of ammonia and soapy water assaulted our nostrils. After a short hallway, light from a red bulb guided us into the main serving room. Wooden tables with straight-backed chairs covered most of the floor. Cushioned booths lined the walls and behind a serving counter a youngish-looking Korean woman sat beneath a green-shaded lamp, laboring over heavy accounting ledgers. When she saw us, she pulled off her horn-rimmed glasses and stared, mouth agape.
I flashed my ID. Ernie found a switch and overhead fluorescent bulbs buzzed to life. The woman stared at my Criminal Investigation badge and finally said, “Weikurei nonun?” No bow. No polite verb endings. Just asking me what I wanted. A Korean cop would’ve popped her in the jaw. Being a tolerant Westerner, I shrugged off the insult.
“What we’re doing here,” I said, “is we want to talk to Miss Kang Mi-ryul.”
She touched the tip of her forefinger to her nose. A hand gesture not used in the West. She was saying, that’s me. I started to explain why we were there but she’d already guessed. She said, “Miss O,” and pulled out a handkerchief. After a few tears, she calmed down and started to talk. In Korean. Telling me all about her glorious and gorgeous friend, the late O Sung-hee. About Miss O’s amorous conquests, about the job offers from other teahouse and bar owners in town, about the men-both Korean and American-who constantly pursued her.
Miss Kang closed the accounting books and after shrugging on a thick cotton coat, walked with us a few blocks through the village. It was almost noon now and a few chop houses were open. The aroma of fermented cabbage and garlic drifted through the air. Miss Kang led us to her hooch, the same hooch she and Miss O had shared. She allowed us to peruse Miss O’s meager personal effects. Cosmetics, hair products, a short row of dresses in a plastic armoire, tattered magazines with the faces of international film stars grinning out at us. Kang told us that Miss O’s hometown was Kwangju, far to the south, and she’d come north to escape the poverty and straight-laced traditionalism of the family she’d been born into. When I asked her who had killed Miss O, she blanched and pretended to faint. It was a pretty good act because she plopped loudly to the ground and a neighbor called the Korean National Police, a contingent of which had been following us anyway.
In less than a minute they arrived and glared at us as if Miss Kang’s passing out had been our fault. One of the younger cops stood a little too close to Ernie and Ernie shoved him. That caused a wrestling match and a lot of cursing until the senior KNP and I broke it up.
So much for good relationships between international law enforcement agencies.
As we left, Miss Kang was still crying and two of the KNPs, God bless them, were still following us.
Camp Colbern wasn’t much better.
Rothenberg worked in the 304th Signal Battalion Communications Center. Electronic messages came in over secure lines, then were printed, copied, and distributed to the appropriate bureaucratic cubby holes. Apparently, Camp Colbern had two functions. First, as a base camp for an army aviation unit, boasting a landing pad with a dozen helicopters and associated support personnel and second, as a relay station for the grid of US Army signal sites that runs up and down the spine of South Korea. When I asked the signal officers a few technical questions, they clammed up. I didn’t have a “need to know,” they told me.
“How do they know what we ‘need to know’?” Ernie asked me. “This is a criminal investigation. We don’t know what we need to know until after we already know it.”
I shrugged.
Private Rothenberg had been a steady and reliable worker, I was told. A good soldier. He had no close buddies because his off duty time was spent out in the village of Paldang-ni, apparently mooning over Miss O Sung-hee.
Ernie pulled a photograph from his pocket, one he’d palmed while we rummaged through O’s personal effects at Miss Kang’s hooch. It was of Miss O and Miss Kang standing arm in arm, smiling at the camera, in front of a boat rental quay on the bank of a river. The sign in Korean said Namhan-kang, the Namhan River, not far from here. Miss O was a knockout, with a big beautiful smile and even white teeth and a figure that would make any sailor-or any GI-jump ship. Miss Kang, by comparison, was a plain-looking slip of a girl. Shorter, thinner, less attractive. Her smile didn’t dazzle as Miss O’s did, Rather it looked unsure of itself, slightly afraid, wary of the world.
Atop her head, at a rakish angle, Miss O wore a black baseball cap. Using a magnifying glass, I examined the embroidery on the front. It was a unit designation: 545th Army Aviation Battalion, Company C. In smaller print on the side was a shorter row of letters. It took stronger light for me to make them out. Finally, I did: Boson. I handed the photograph back to Ernie.
Ernie took another long look at the gorgeous Miss O and then slipped the photo back into his pocket. Something told me he had no intention of letting it go.
The air traffic controllers at the Camp Colbern aviation tower told us that Chief Warrant Officer Mike Boson was due in at sixteen thirty-four thirty P.M. civilian time. Ernie and I were standing on the edge of the Camp Colbern helipad when the Huey UH-1N helicopter landed. As the blades gradually slowed their rotation, a crewman hopped out and then the engine whined and the blades slowed further and finally the co-pilot and then the pilot jumped out of the chopper. Chief Warrant Officer Mike Boson slipped off his helmet as he walked toward us and tucked it beneath his arm.