The plastic-coated menu bore the Indianhead 2nd Division patch on the front. The numbered list inside featured the usual adventurous fare one found in military dining facilities: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, sirloin steak, fried chicken, and a couple of exotic foreign dishes like onion rings and coleslaw.
The dining room was operating, the cocktail lounge was operating, but the main ballroom of the Gateway Club was still closed. Later this evening a rock band would start and the ballroom would be packed with young GIs-and the twenty to thirty business girls whom the club manager was authorized to escort on post. Right now, the big room was dark and empty except for one man sitting alone at a table on the far edge, hunched over a plate of food. I recognized him. Sergeant First Class Otis, who’d greeted us upon our arrival in 2nd Division and the NCO who’d been leading the physical training formation this morning, the formation that had been so anxious to express their feelings-in a knuckle sandwich kind of way-toward Ernie and me.
I told Ernie I’d be back, rose from my barstool, and sauntered toward Sergeant First Class Otis.
“I don’t want no trouble,” was the first thing he said to me when he looked up. He was eating fried chicken with rice and gravy. A glass of iced tea stood next to his plate.
“No trouble.” I pulled a chair out from the table and sat down across from him. “Thanks for saving our butts during the run this morning.”
He shook his head and shoveled a spoonful of rice into his mouth. “I ain’t your friend,” he said.
I let that sit for a while. Then I said, “So why’d you stop your MPs from beating the crap out of us?”
“Nothing to do with you,” he said. “When I’m in charge of a formation, it don’t turn into a mob.”
I appreciated that. Whatever those MPs did, right or wrong, would reflect on his ability to lead. His ability to control men in formation. NCOs, most of them, take their leadership role seriously. Obviously, Sergeant Otis did.
“Weatherwax had it coming,” I said. Ernie had punched him for following us through the ville.
Otis shrugged. “You say.”
A middle-aged Korean waitress approached and poured more iced tea into Otis’s glass from a plastic pitcher. He knew her, they seemed relaxed with one another, and Otis probably tipped well to convince her to serve him dinner some twenty yards from the boisterous young GIs in the well-lit dining room. I figured Otis was working the desk tonight. That’s why he was wearing a freshly pressed set of fatigues and why he was having chow at the Gateway Club, the eating establishment nearest to the Provost Marshal’s Office. The waitress gazed at me quizzically, feeling the tension between me and Otis. When she asked if I wanted anything I told her no. She left. I waited for her footsteps to fade.
“You know more than you’re telling me,” I said.
Otis didn’t even look up from his plate. “Of course I know more than I’m telling you. What the hell you think?”
“Why aren’t you telling me?”
“First, you didn’t ask. Second, you a rear echelon motherfucker just up here to make Division look bad.”
I paused again, letting the silence grow. It wasn’t silence exactly. We could still hear the rock music from the cocktail lounge and the clang and buzz of people talking and eating and laughing in the dining room. But for Camp Casey, a place where men and heavy equipment were always on the go, it came as close to silence as we were going to get.
“Druwood,” I said. “You know what they’re saying about him isn’t right.”
Otis picked up a drumstick and chomped into it, chewing resolutely.
“Private Druwood didn’t die out at the obstacle course,” I continued. “Crumbled cement was still lodged in his skull. I saw it. No way he could’ve jumped from that tower. No cement around there. Somebody dumped him at the obstacle course. Said he jumped from the tower. Said it was an accident.”
Otis stopped chewing.
“He was an MP,” I continued. “White. Young. Not black and old and wise like you. But he was your responsibility, Sergeant Otis. Your soldier. You were supposed to look out for him.”
Otis swallowed the last of the chicken, as if it were something dryer than sand. He stared at his plate, at the half-eaten remains of the bird and the gravy smeared through glutinous Korean rice. Slowly, he looked up at me.
“He wasn’t in my platoon.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
Otis stared so steadily that for a minute I thought he was going to come across the table at me. I wouldn’t use my pistol, I knew that, but I might pick up a chair to hold him off. Although I was taller, and probably heavier, he was a strong man, the thick muscles of his shoulders bulging through the material of his green fatigues. I held his gaze. If we had to fight, I’d fight.
Instead, his lips started to move.
“Bufford,” he said. It was almost a rasp, as if his vocal chords had suddenly been stricken by laryngitis.
“What?”
“Bufford,” he repeated. “Maybe he drove Druwood on compound, maybe he didn’t. But he was behind it. Arranged it so it would look like a training accident.”
“Druwood was killed off base?” I asked.
“Maybe not killed. Maybe he killed himself.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“No. But the excuse to bring him on base was that the Division suicide rate is too high. Had to make it look like an accident.”
“Bufford didn’t want Division to look bad.”
“Not him,” Otis said. “Somebody higher.”
“How high?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I listen,” he said. “And I think.”
“So they don’t confide in you?”
“I don’t know which ‘they’ you’re talking about but no, they don’t.”
“Where was Druwood killed?”
“You don’t know that he was killed.”
“Okay. Where was his body found?”
“In the ville, that’s what I heard. Where the black-market honchos operate. An off-limits area.”
“Which one?” In Seoul there are numerous areas designated as off-limits to United States Forces personnel. Sometimes they’re placed off-limits for health reasons because of poor sanitation or disease. Sometimes because there’d been altercations between GIs and the local populace and 8th Army didn’t want a repeat. I assumed the same was true in Tongduchon, that there were many off limits areas. I was wrong.
“There’s only one off limits area,” Sergeant Otis said. “The Turkey Farm.”
I’d heard of it. Almost as if it were a footnote in history. The Turkey Farm was an old brothel district that during and after the Korean War had been infamous. Infamous for the number of desperate business girls the area housed, for the amount of venereal disease that was spread, and for something neither the U.S. military nor the Korean government liked to talk about: child prostitution.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“There’s a map at the PMO. In the MP briefing room. Every nightclub and bar and chophouse is listed.”
“How do you know that it was Bufford who had Private Druwood’s body driven back on post?”
“I don’t. Not for sure. But he does everything else.”
“Everything else? Like what?”
A group of MPs stormed into the Gateway Club. A couple of them glanced our way.
“You ruined my dinner,” Otis told me. “It’s time for you to leave.”
I knew he meant it. Still, I had one more question for him. “Matthewson. Where is she?”
“Don’t know.”
“Why’d she leave?”
“You would too if you had to put up with the shit she put up with.”
“Like what?”
“What do you think?”
I waited, my arms crossed, knowing that he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with an 8th Army CID agent sitting across from him at his table. He sipped on his iced tea and then set the glass down, hard.