“The tower told me you wanted to talk to me,” he said.
Ernie and I flashed our identification. I asked if there was a more comfortable place to talk.
“No,” Boson said. “We talk here. What do you want?”
The chopper’s engine still buzzed. The crewman and the co-pilot hustled about on various errands, all the while listening to what we were saying. Boson, apparently, wanted it that way. We asked Boson where he had been last night, the night of the murder.
“In the O Club.” The Officers’ Club here on Camp Colbern. “For dinner, a couple of beers, and then to the BOQ for a good night’s rest.” The Bachelor Officer’s Quarters.
“You didn’t visit Miss O Sung-hee?” Ernie asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Boson shrugged. “I don’t run the ville when I have duty the next morning.”
“You were scheduled to fly?”
“Yes. To Taegu to pick up the Nineteenth Support Group commander. And then south from there.”
“When did you hear Miss O was dead?”
“Just before I left out this morning. Everyone was talking about it.”
“Did you realize you’d be questioned?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I knew her but a lot of other guys knew her too.”
“Like who?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know their names.”
We continued to question Warrant Officer Boson and he finally admitted that he’d spent more than just a few nights with Miss O Sung-hee and that he’d also escorted her and Miss Kang to the Namkang River the day the photograph Ernie showed him had been taken. They’d rented a boat and rowed to a resort island in the middle of the river and a few hours later returned to Paldang-ni where Boson spent the night with Miss O.
“In her hooch?” I asked.
Warily, Boson nodded.
“It’s tiny,” Ernie said. “So where did Miss Kang sleep?”
For the third time, Boson shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“But she lived there too, didn’t she?”
“Yes. But every time I stayed with Miss O, she’d disappear. I figured she bunked with the landlady who owns the hooch.”
“But you weren’t sure?”
“Why would I care?”
We asked if he knew Rothenberg. He didn’t.
“You didn’t know a lot of things,” Ernie said.
Boson bristled. “I’m here to fly helicopters. Not to write a history of business girls in the ville.”
“And not to murder anyone?”
Boson dropped his helmet and leapt for Ernie’s throat. I thrust my forearms forward, blocked him and managed to hold Boson back, although it was a struggle. The chopper crewman and the co-pilot ran over. I shoved Chief Warrant Officer Boson backward, they held him, and I dragged Ernie off of the helipad.
Night fell purple and gloomy over the village of Paldang-ni. But then a small miracle happened. Neon blinked to life: red, yellow, purple, and gold. Some of it pulsating, some of it rotating, all of it beckoning to any young GI with a few dollars in his pocket to enter the Jade Lady Nightclub or the Frozen Chosun Bar or the Full Moon Teahouse. Tailor shops and brassware emporiums and drug stores and sporting goods outlets lined the narrow lanes. Rock music pulsated out of beaded curtains. A late autumn Manchurian wind blew cold and moist through the alleyways but scantily clad Korean business girls stood in mini-skirts and hot pants and low-cut cotton blouses, their creamy bronze flesh pimpled like plucked geese.
The women cooed as we passed but Ernie and I ignored them and entered the first bar on the right: The Frozen Chosun. They served draft OB, Oriental Brewery beer, on tap. We jolted back a short mug and a shot of black market brandy, ignored the entreaties of the listless hostesses scattered around the dark enclosure, and continued on to the next dive. At each stop, I inquired about Miss O Sung-hee. Everyone knew her. They all knew that she’d been murdered brutally and they all assumed that the killer had been her jealous erstwhile boyfriend, an American GI by the name of Everett P. Rothenberg. But a few of the waitresses and bartenders and business girls I talked to speculated further. Miss O had Korean boyfriends-a few of them. Mostly men of power. Business owners in the bar district. But one of the men stood out. It was only after I’d laid out cash on an overpriced sweetheart drink that one under-weight bar hostess breathed his name. Shin, she said. Or that’s what everyone called him: Mr. Shin. He was a dresser and a player and had no visible means of support other than, she’d heard, playing a mean game of pool and beating up the occasional business girl that fell under his spell.
“A kampei,” I said to her. A gangster.
She shook her head vehemently. “No. Not that big. He small. How you say?” The overly made up young woman thought for a moment and then came up with the appropriate phrase. “He small potatoes.”
In addition to buying her a drink, I slipped her a thousand won note-about two bucks. The tattered bill disappeared into the frayed waistband of her skirt.
When Ernie and I entered the King’s Pavilion Pool Hall, all eyes gazed at us.
There was no way for two Miguks to enter the second-story establishment surreptitiously. It was a large open room filled with cigarette smoke and stuffed with green felt pool tables from one end to the other. Narrow-waisted Korean men held pool cues and leaned over tables and lounged against walls, all of them puffing away furiously on cheap Korean cigarettes and all of them glaring at us, eyes narrow, lips curled into snarls, hatred filling the air even more thickly than the cloud of pungent tobacco smoke. This pool hall wasn’t for GIs. It was for Koreans. The GIs had their bars, plenty of them, about two blocks away from here in the foreigner’s bar district. Nobody, even the man who collected money at the entranceway, wanted us here.
Ernie snarled back. “Screw you too,” he whispered.
“Steady,” I replied.
In Korean, I spoke to the bald-headed man collecting the fees. “Mr. Shin?” I asked. “Odiso?” Where is he?
The man looked blankly at me. Then he turned to the men in the pool hall. From somewhere toward the back, a radio hissed and a Korean female singer warbled a rueful note. I said it again, louder this time, “Mr. Shin.”
The snarls turned to grimaces of disdain. Korean cuss words floated our way. A few men laughed. More of them turned away from us, lifting their cues, returning their attention to eight balls and rebound angles and pockets. Nobody came forward. Nobody would tell us who Mr. Shin was or, more importantly, where to find him.
Ernie and I turned and walked back down the stairway. At the next pool hall, we repeated the same procedure. With the same result.
Later that night, we stood at the spot where Miss O had been murdered.
The site was located atop a hill overlooking both Paldang-ni and Camp Colbern. On the opposite side of the hill, to the north, moonlight shone down on the sinuous flow of the Namhan River. One or two boats drifted in the distance, fishermen on their way home to straw-thatched huts. On the peak of the hill stood a tile-roofed shrine with a stone foundation and an enormous brass bell hanging from sturdy rafters. No one was there now but I imagined that periodically Buddhist monks walked up the well-worn path to sound the ancient-looking bell.
“When did they find her?” Ernie asked.
I pulled out a penlight to read my tattered notebook.
“Zero five hundred this morning,” I said. “Just before dawn. Two Buddhist monks who came up here to say their morning prayers. She was laying right here.”
I pointed at the far edge of the stone foundation, nearest the river.
“Stabbed in the back once,” I continued. “And then four or five times in the chest. She bled to death.”
“And the murder weapon?”
“Never found. The KNPs assume it was a bayonet for two reasons, the size and depth of the entry wounds and the fact that Rothenberg, being a GI, would’ve had access to one.”