She lay on the tiled floor, in the kitchen of an opulent Western-style apartment in a modern building in Hannam-dong. It was a ritzy neighborhood on the side of Namsan Mountain, overlooking the squalor of Itaewon. From the open door of the balcony, a panoramic view of the main drag of the nightclub district spread before us. In the dusk, I could make out the unlit neon signs above the 007 Club and the King Club and the Grand Old Opry Club. Jumbled brick and wood and cement buildings stretched downhill toward the banks of the River Han.
“How’d he get in?” I said.
“Delivery,” Captain Kim pointed toward the kitchen area, “of the songpyun. In old days everyone make at home, to honor ancestors. Now people buy from store.”
On Chusok, the steamed songpyun dumplings were offered before shrines to a family’s ancestors. Kim pointed to the sliding glass door that led onto the balcony. Ernie and I examined it.
“The lock was broken outwards,” Ernie said. “As if it had been shoved from inside.”
We peered over the edge of the concrete rail. Vines wound through a wooden trellis, many branches broken and hanging. Then we stepped back inside and turned our attention to the corpse.
She’d been a beautiful round-faced Korean woman, maybe in her late teens or early twenties. She’d been killed so young. And I knew her. At first I couldn’t place her, but when Captain Kim said the name Haggler Lee, I suddenly remembered who she was. His serving girl. Usually, she worked at the warehouse, serving Haggler Lee and his guests coffee or tea. I remembered the American-made instant coffee I had been so graciously offered there a few nights ago. This penthouse, according to Captain Kim, belonged to Haggler Lee. The serving girl had been left here to keep an eye on things while he spent the last day or two holed up in his warehouse.
We heard voices at the open door of the apartment, and Captain Kim and Ernie and I walked into the living room. It was modern, probably designed by some avant-garde interior decorator, so modern that there was no place to sit down. A group of Korean cops entered with a man held between them: Haggler Lee.
His face was wrinkled with worry.
“I didn’t think he would do this,” Lee said.
“Who?” I asked.
“The son of Miss Yun. He killed Jo Kyong-ah. Now he wants to kill me too. Why? Because I black market for his mother.”
“Did you cheat his mother?” I asked.
“Never!” Lee shrugged off the cops surrounding him.
“I’m a business man. I no cheat nobody.”
His usually precise English grammar was deteriorating rapidly.
“She borrow money from me. I give. Then she come back, again and again. Always promise that some GI boyfriend was going to buy something out of PX for her and she would pay me back. She had GI boyfriend all right, plenty, but they never buy her nothing out of PX. She never pay me back.”
“So you stopped loaning her money?”
“Of course,” Lee said.
“Then why,” I asked, pointing toward the kitchen, “would the son of Miss Yun murder your housemaid?”
Lee stared at a trickle of blood that had overflowed the tile and was now soaking into his wall-to-wall carpet.
“He couldn’t reach me,” Haggler Lee said. “I was at my warehouse, with my guards. So he come here.”
Suddenly, Haggler Lee grabbed his face and fell to his knees. Then he was sobbing like a little boy.
Captain Kim’s usually impassive face twisted in disgust, as if he’d like nothing better than to put his boot up Haggler Lee’s rear. But he resisted the urge. Instead, Captain Kim turned his back on Haggler Lee and barked an order to his officers. Unceremoniously, they dragged Haggler Lee out of his apartment.
I stepped back into the kitchen and studied the moonfaced young woman who lay on the blood-smeared floor. The fat dumplings between her lips looked obscene. The gash in her neck even more so. Beneath her silk sleeve I spotted something, and I knelt down and pulled the sleeve up above her elbow. Cigarette burns. New. She’d been tortured before she was killed.
I stood up.
I was embarrassed, but relieved about one thing. There were no bullet holes in her body or anywhere in the apartment. This unfortunate young woman had been brutally murdered, but not with my gun.
Ernie and I spent the next couple of hours at the crime scene, and later that evening returned to the deserted CID detachment to catch up on our written reports. Ernie left after an hour. I’d told him I’d finish up. He had a date, I think, with Sergeant Whitworth, the medic at the 121, but he was being cagey and didn’t tell me for sure. About midnight, I returned to the barracks and collapsed exhausted into my bunk.
It was Chusok. The 8th United States Army Yongsan Compound was pretty much closed down. All the Korean employees at the snack bar had the day off, so the American manager was working the cash register, selling nothing but coffee and donuts and pre-made sandwiches wrapped in plastic. Ernie joined me there, bleary-eyed. He wolfed down a couple of egg and bacon sandwiches, cold, and we walked out the main gate of the compound, down the MSR three-quarters of a mile to the Hamilton Hotel.
Already Suk-ja was waiting for us in the coffee shop.
“They no come,” she said.
She, of course, had memorized the faces in the sketches of the smiling woman and her brother and had promised, as her contribution to the investigation, to spend as much time as she could in the Hamilton Hotel Coffee Shop, seeing if they showed up. Private Boltworks had said they loved this place, and I could see why. There were GIs here and foreign tourists, Korean business girls and bright-eyed college students, hanging out for the excitement of being near the notorious international red-light district of Itaewon.
Suk-ja was happy in her work, but I was worried as to what she was up to. Why had she left the Yellow House? Did she owe the mama-san money? Why had she decided to glom onto me? I was enjoying the attention, of that there was no doubt. If it hadn’t been for this murder investigation, I would’ve enjoyed Suk-ja’s company even more. But I wasn’t fool enough to believe that she didn’t want anything out of this. Yesterday morning, when I offered her money, she’d taken it, but with the proviso that it was merely reimbursement to cover expenses while she was on duty at the coffee shop. She wasn’t taking any money from me in return for sex. Soon, she told me, she would receive her first paycheck as a stripper, and it would be her turn to treat me.
I wasn’t holding my breath.
Suk-ja snuggled closer to me. Ernie sat across from us.
“Today,” she said, “you go with me, Geogi. My older brother, he live in Mia-dong. We start Chusok at noon time. He want me come. I tell him about you and he say he want you come too.”
I studied her face, wondering why in the hell she wanted me to meet her family. Ernie smirked at my discomfort.
“We’ll be working on the case,” I said.
“Doing what?” she asked. “We only know Miss Yun’s son sometime come here. If he no come, how you find? Anyway, KNPs look for him. They find.”
She was right. The KNPs would find him eventually. But how many people would be dead before they did? At least, in the most recent murder, he hadn’t used my piece. As relieved as I was about that, it still troubled me. Why hadn’t he used the automatic?
“Go!” Ernie told me. “You need a break. Go somewhere and clear your mind.”
Maybe he was right. Everything I’d seen and heard the last few days had jumbled into a knotted ball of grief. How to unravel it? How to stop the killing? No matter how hard I pressed, the answer was not forthcoming.
Suk-ja clutched my arm tightly.
“How about you?” I asked Ernie. “What do you plan to do?”
He shrugged. “Wendy has duty today. I’ll probably run the ville.”
“’Wendy?’”
Ever so slightly, Ernie’s pale cheeks colored. “Sergeant Whitworth. The WAC at the 121.”