Quickly I jotted down the information and folded the top corner of the ledger page. I continued to work, but after two hours, and going back in the records another year, I found no similar entry.
I walked back into the front office. Still no Sergeant Whitworth. And no Ernie. I poured myself some coffee and waited. When they finally returned, Whitworth’s immaculately white uniform was askew, her cheeks flushed red. Ernie grinned at me.
“Find anything?” he asked.
Whitworth scurried behind her desk and sat, immediately picking up the phone and making what must’ve been an extremely urgent phone call. While she chatted, I filled Ernie in.
“What the hell does the red asterisk mean?” he said.
I nodded toward Whitworth. When she’d finished her phone call, I asked her.
“Tuberculosis,” she answered.
I sat quietly while she explained that when a prostitute was known to have an active case of tuberculosis, and Fairbanks found out about it, he routinely notified the Korean health authorities. Then a pickup was arranged.
“What do you mean ‘a pickup?’”
“Four or five Korean health officials meet us here at the 121, and we convoy out to Itaewon, usually with the infected GI. He shows us where the woman lives, or at least where he had contact with her, and we take it from there. Usually, we find her, and the Koreans take her into custody.”
“So,” I said, “if a streetwalker with tuberculosis was picked up in Itaewon, Fairbanks would’ve been there to see her arrest. To see her being taken away.”
“Oh, yeah. He had some stories. People crying, children screaming. You know, the whole works.”
“By the way,” I asked, “do you miss him?”
Her nose wrinkled. “Honestly,” she said, “he was sort of a jerk.”
Ernie and me and Suk-ja sat at a low-backed booth in the first-floor coffee shop of the Hamilton Hotel in the heart of Itaewon. Ernie sipped ginseng tea. Suk-ja and I drank coffee. She ladled plenty of sugar and cream into hers. Mine was black. She grimaced every time I took a sip.
“Nomu jjia,” she said. Too sour.
I explained to them what I thought, so far, about the case.
“First, Boltworks, the smiling woman, and her brother are running around Itaewon bopping drunken GIs on the head and taking their money.” I sipped on my coffee, picturing the three of them in action. Then I set the coffee cup down. “But this can’t last long, because Captain Kim and his men have dealt with crooks like that countless times, and I think the smiling woman was smart enough to realize they had to try something new. So they decide to go for a big score. A casino. But how? How do you gain entry and the confidence of a casino manager-get close enough to the cashier cage so you can force your way to the money?”
“That’s where you came in,” Ernie said.
“Right. They drug me, bop me over the head in an alley, and take my identification, badge, and sidearm.”
Suk-ja looked as if the thought of me being hurt was causing her pain.
“So they rob The Olympos Hotel and Casino in Inchon,” I said. “But while the robbery is going down, the owner makes a break for the fire escape. Without thinking, Kong, the brother, pops off a round. A young female blackjack dealer steps in the way and takes a bullet that should’ve landed in the casino owner’s back.”
“Okay,” Ernie said. “I buy that. But why do you say ‘without thinking?’ This son of a bitch, Kong, is a cold-blooded killer.”
“All right. Scratch the ‘without thinking’ part. But as far as we know, at that moment he had never killed anyone before.”
“So he’s in deep kimchee,” Ernie said. “He takes the money and he and his sister run and hide.”
“Right. But how long is that going to last? The KNPs are all over the case. And when Han Ok-hi dies, he knows they’ll never stop coming after him. Maybe they don’t have any leads, maybe they won’t be able to track him down, because he left very little evidence at the crime scene.”
“Other than a bullet from your gun.”
“Yeah. Other than a round from my gun. But he knows that once he and his sister start spending the money, they’ll be caught.”
“Marked bills?”
“No. Not marked, but people remember half-Miguks, especially when they spend money and have no visible means. Eventually, they’d come to the attention of the Korean police.”
“He should’ve thought about that before.”
“And he knew Bolt would be caught. A GI on the run in the Korea-how long is that going to last?”
“Not long,” Ernie said.
“Since they stiffed him of the money, they knew Bolt would spill his guts.”
“They were right about that,” Ernie said. “So why didn’t he kill Bolt when he had the chance?”
“Maybe he was planning to. Maybe that’s what the rendezvous in Seoul was all about, or maybe he planned to slip back into Inchon and murder Bolt at Yellow House Number 17.”
“But we screwed it up by chasing Bolt away.”
“Exactly.”
Suk-ja stopped sipping coffee. Her smooth brow wrinkled in concentration as she stretched her knowledge of English in an attempt to follow our conversation.
“What about woman?” she said.
“The smiling woman?” I replied. “What about her?”
“She no have plan? She no say nothing?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Maybe she smarter than man.”
“How do you mean?”
“Maybe her brother fight you, fight Korean police.
When you catch him, she run away. Take all money, go.”
“Maybe,” I said.
But I didn’t think so. The smiling woman had grown up with her brother under conditions that most of us couldn’t begin to imagine. That would’ve made their bond impossible to break. But she had been fooling around with Bolt when her brother wasn’t watching. What was that all about? And then I remembered her face. The eternal smile, the eternal willingness to please. Maybe she hadn’t made a decision to fool around with Bolt, maybe he had simply made a demand.
“Sueno,” Ernie said. “You still with us?”
I nodded and sipped on coffee. “Yeah.”
I continued to explain that once the woman and her brother knew they were so hot they were bound to be caught, they had decided that-before being caught-they would take revenge on the people who had wronged their mother.
“Everybody murdered so far-at least after Han Ok-hi’s death-has been somebody who was an important player in Itaewon during the years their mother operated there as a prostitute. Jo Kyong-ah was the biggest black-market mama-san in Itaewon until she retired less than a year ago. Spec Five Fairbanks was the VD tracker for the 8th Army. He wielded the power of life and death over some of these poor hookers. If he turned them in to the Korean health authorities, they couldn’t work any longer.”
Ernie sipped his tea. Suk-ja stirred her coffee.
“Makes sense,” Ernie said. “But the big question is, who’s next?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But Haggler Lee seems awfully nervous.”
“Maybe for good reason. Maybe he hasn’t told us everything.”
“Maybe. You finished with your tea yet?”
“Almost. Why?”
“Let’s go check out a few bokdok-bangs.” Real estate offices. “See if we can scare up somebody who remembers Miss Yun and her two kids. They lived here in Itaewon for years.”
“Probably hopping from hooch to hooch,” Ernie said.
“That’s a needle in the haystack, Sueno.”
“We’ve got to try something.”
“Good. You do that. Me, I’m taking the jeep in for maintenance.”
“You can do that anytime.”
“What else do you want me to do? Stand around while you speak Korean to a bunch of realtors? Xin loy. You do what you got to do, I’ll do what I got to do.”
Suk-ja stared into her coffee, embarrassed by the disagreement.
Ernie was burning out on this case, that much was clear. We’d made progress. Plenty of it. We knew who had perpetrated the murders, and we even had a pretty good theory as to why. The problem was that we didn’t know where the woman or her brother were hiding and, even more importantly, we had no idea who in the hell they might choose as their next victim. The thought that they’d stop killing now, when they’d gone this far, seemed unlikely. Ernie was frustrated, so was I, and going back to talk to realtors sounded too much like starting from scratch. He couldn’t deal with it. I was having trouble myself, but I was determined to drive on. If he didn’t want to help, that was his problem.