The Door to Bitterness

by Martin Limon

  Ernie felt the same as I did. He shook his head sadly.

  “Whoever this guy is,” Ernie said, “he’s a bad boy. A very bad boy.”

  Captain Noh described how the body had been found.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to the center of the room. “Face down. Arms out.” He raised his arms over his head as if preparing to take a leap off a high dive. “He shoot in back of head. But before he do, he try to strangle her. Here.” He pointed toward the back of his neck, and then thrust his hands in front of him, leaning down, as if applying pressure toward the floor.

  “He strangled her from the back?” Ernie asked.

  “Yes. Rape her from back too. Push down very hard. Front of her neck touch floor, head, how you say, back.”

  He mimicked the motion again, twisting the top of his head back toward his shoulder blades.

  “Her head was tilted back,” Ernie said, “because he was pushing her neck down onto the floor.”

  “Yes,” Captain Noh said.

  In front of where the body had lain was a small foot-high table with folding legs. The type Koreans use for everything from eating dinner to putting on makeup. Set like sentries across the table were three jewelry boxes. One large—the one in the center—and two smaller, on either flank. It was some sort of display.

  While the brown-haired GI had clenched her neck, the woman had been forced to her knees in front of this small table with the neat display of jewelry boxes. Then he had shoved her face down on the floor and had tried to strangle her from behind. It hadn’t worked. Apparently, she was a determined woman. She’d struggled. And when he hadn’t been able to kill her by strangulation, he’d pulled out the .45 and shot her in the back of the head. Her heart hadn’t stopped right away. That’s why all the blood.

  But why try to strangle her from the back? From the front of the neck, a strong man can place his thumbs right over the windpipe and with enough force cut off all air, stifle sound from the vocal chords, and even in some cases snap the neck bone itself. This would be much more difficult to do from the back.

  And why set up this little table with this jewelry-case display? It was almost as if it were some sort of shrine. But a shrine to what?

  Another anomaly occurred to me.

  “Where did he leave my weapons card?” I asked.

  Captain Noh shook his head and held up one finger, to let me know that he’d answer in a minute.

  We all backed out of the room, took off our gloves and our masks, and returned to the front room. I veered off toward the kitchen. It was a rectangular room, not much bigger than a large pantry in an American household, the cement floor lowered two feet below the wooden foundation of the rest of the house. On a low cement bench sat three propane burners. Atop one was a flat, round skillet. The fire below had been turned off and the knob dusted with fingerprint powder.

  Captain Noh stood behind me. “He start fire,” he said.

  There was a box of stick matches next to the burners.

  “Why?” Ernie asked.

  Captain Noh turned to look at him. The three of us were jammed into the narrow kitchen doorway.

  “He want cook something.”

  “What?”

  Captain Noh pointed. I stepped down into the kitchen, sliding my toes into a pair of plastic sandals. In the round skillet was spread a single layer of charred black things that looked like needles. Using my thumb and forefinger, I picked up a few. They crumbled to dust in my hand.

  Captain Noh said something in Korean. “Solip.” I didn’t understand the word at first, but then I figured it out. Pine needles. Roasted at a low temperature. That explained the burnt odor.

  “Why?” I asked Captain Noh.

  He shrugged. “Maybe because of smell.” Then he turned quickly and walked away.

  Ernie glanced at me and raised an eyebrow.

  I felt the same way. Captain Noh wasn’t telling us something. Why would he be so sensitive about burnt pine nee-

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  dles? I almost ran after him to question him further but stopped myself. No sense pressing. When Koreans decide to keep a secret from a foreigner, no power on earth can pry it out of them. Best to wait, figure it out for yourself. Usually, in due time, I can.

  Out in the courtyard, Captain Noh and his cohorts waited for us in front of the byonso. It was in its own separate little cement-block building up against the northern wall. When Captain Noh opened the wooden door, the smell of ammonia jabbed into our nostrils like a sharpened fingernail.

  “There,” he said.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Right there. Inside.” He pointed down.

  I stepped into the outhouse and gazed into the rectangular hole in the cement floor. Down into filth and blackness. Most Korean homes don’t have commodes. They just come out here and squat and do their business. If you’re a man urinating, you aim carefully.

  “My weapons card?” I asked. “You found it here?”

  “Yes,” Captain Noh said, his face unreadable. “First he do something. Then he drop card on top of it.”

  Ernie crossed his arms, trying not to laugh.

  “Thorough search,” Ernie told Captain Noh.

  Captain Noh nodded, taking Ernie’s comment as a compliment. He turned and returned to his colleagues waiting in the courtyard.

  I grimaced at Ernie.

  “Apparently,” Ernie said, grinning broadly now, “the brown-haired GI holds you in high esteem.”

  “Can it, Ernie.”

  Then, with Captain Noh and his two assistants, Ernie and I left the home of the woman known as Jo Kyong-ah. “Miss” Jo Kyong-ah.

  Now deceased.

  We spent the rest of the evening canvassing the bars and brothels of Songtan-up. The MPs were happy because they were able to loiter in the brightly lit alleys amidst blaring rock music and play grab ass with the Korean business girls. Ernie and I, however, were becoming less happy the more we learned.

  By the time our little convoy left Songtan, we were downright morose.

  The MPs drove us all the way back to Seoul. We stopped at various military checkpoints along the way because it was after the midnight curfew. We showed the stern-faced ROK soldiers our emergency dispatch and, holding their rifles at port arms, they waved us on. We approached the southern outskirts of Seoul, the Han River quiet and calm. Through glimmering moonlight, we crossed Chamsu Bridge, and the MPs drove us onto 8th Army’s Yongsan Compound and dropped us off in front of our barracks. I thanked them for the lift and told them we would no longer need their services. There was some grumbling about that; every GI likes easy duty. The sergeant in charge took it well, however, and sped off, leading his little convoy back to their home in the cave at Tango, 8th Army Headquarters (Rear).

  * * *

  The next morning, Ernie and I were showered, shaved, changed into clean clothes, and back on the job at 8th Army CID headquarters. But there was a new attitude toward us now. Cool. Distant. Agents walked down the hallway, not looking at us, pretending we weren’t there.

  I knew, of course, why.

  First, I’d committed the sin of losing my weapon and my badge. Something most cops swore would never happen to them unless they were dead. Second, Ernie and I together had committed the much worse sin of going “over the heads” of our immediate supervisors. Of course we hadn’t intended to. The decision to lay the blessing of the 8th Army Commander on us had come, not from us, but from General Armbrewster, the 8th Army Commander himself. Still, in the army, it doesn’t matter if you’re not responsible for a bureaucratic breach. The sin has been committed. No amount of rational explanation can wash away the stain.

  As always happens in military units, the attitude of the bosses flows downhill to the peons. Although they wouldn’t state it directly, the orders from the Provost Marshal and the CID Detachment First Sergeant were clear. Sueño and Bascom are to be shunned. Anyone who associates with them will be guilty of disloyalty.

  Even Staff Sergeant Riley,
the Admin NCO of the CID Detachment, acted as if we were strangers. Ernie put up with this new attitude for about twenty seconds.

  “You’re the biggest drunk in Eighth Army,” he told Riley, “and suddenly you’re too good for us?”

  Riley’s skinny face looked shocked. “The biggest drunk?”

  “What? Did I stutter?” Ernie asked. “If you hadn’t started with lining up those shots along the bar at the NCO Club, none of this shit would’ve happened.”

  That was the night a group of us had gotten drunk, stumbled out to Itaewon, and I’d ended up losing my weapon and my badge.

  “So it’s my fault now?”

  “It’s always been your fault.”

  I interrupted.

  “Let’s get down to business, Riley. Show me the lists.”

  Sullenly, Sergeant Riley slid a stack of paperwork across his desk.

  Ernie shot Riley a sour look and then turned and stalked across the room to the other side of the office. He sat down in front of the desk of Miss Kim, the attractive young Admin Office secretary. She ignored him, continuing to hammer away at the hangul lettering on her manual typewriter. Not that she didn’t like Ernie. She liked him a lot. In fact, for the last few weeks they’d been dating regularly. But Miss Kim also had the Korean respect for harmony in the family—and in the work place—that’s hammered into them from birth. She certainly didn’t want to step into the middle of any dispute between Americans.

  I plopped down on a vinyl-cushioned chair and started going through the lists.

  At first I couldn’t focus. I was still thinking about last night, the crime scene at the home of Jo Kyong-ah, and the gossip I’d heard about her from the bar girls and GIs who hang out in the back alleys of Songtan.

  Miss Jo Kyong-ah was retired, people said. She’d been a big-time black-market mama-san in Seoul, in Itaewon to be exact, before something caused her to pack it all in and move down south to Songtan. Now, with a packet full of ill-gotten money, she’d bought a nice home and set herself up as a respectable citizen. Still, old habits run deep, and she’d continued to dabble in the black market, concentrating on high-value items, like the television sets and stereo equipment we’d seen in her storeroom. And her clientele, one of the owners of a local bar told me, were rich Koreans who could afford to buy the high-priced items. Her suppliers were field-grade Air Force officers who could write themselves up Letters of Authorization to weasel their way around the strict 8th Army Ration Control regulations.

  Why had everyone been so forthright with their information? Jealousy. Jo Kyong-ah was seen as a wealthy intruder who’d taken business away from the more longtime residents of Songtan. Still, she’d lived a quiet life, and no one could imagine a competitor going so far as to kill her.

  As Ernie and I made our rounds, we flashed the sketches of the dark-haired shooter, the Caucasian thief, and the half-American smiling woman.

  Nobody recognized any of them.

  It seemed strange to me. Whoever had murdered Jo Kyong-ah—and I had no reason to think it hadn’t been the brown-haired casino thief—had picked their target well. She was a wealthy woman. No telling how much cash and jewelry the killer might’ve gotten away with. But if the brown-haired man planned to pick out a wealthy target, he would’ve either had to have lived here—and known who had money— or he would’ve had to come to Songtan and gather information. Either way, someone would’ve noticed him.

  Captain Noh and his legion of Korean National Policemen were having no better luck than we were. Instead of interviewing business girls and GIs, they worked the Korean side of the fence. Talking to citizens who lived nearby, who worked in the open-air Songtan Market. Even, he told me, wealthy local residents who were suspected of having bought black-market goods from Jo Kyong-ah. All dead ends.

  Somehow, the brown-haired GI had slipped into Songtan unnoticed, gone directly to his intended target, beat her, raped her, robbed her, and murdered her. All without being noticed by anyone.

  I put Songtan out of my mind and studied the lists Sergeant Riley provided.

  AWOL GIs. Absent without leave. That was the first list and, I figured, the most likely to produce results. I decided to save that for last, and set it on the bottom of my pile of perforated onion-skin computer sheets.

  Riley also ran a check at 8th Army Data Processing to see if anything had been purchased with my Ration Control Plate. I was worried that whoever had stolen my wallet would use my military identification card and my RCP to go on compound and buy duty-free goods out of the Commissary and PX. So far, nothing. But the computer punch cards were only collected once a week, so something might turn up on the next list.

  I set that one aside and quickly studied the list of GIs on mid-tour leave back to the States and in-country leave here in Korea. Both lists were massive. What with over 50,000 GIs in country, five to ten percent were on leave at any given time. Neither list would be useful. They were both too long. I set them aside.

  Finally, I was back to the list of AWOL GIs. There must’ve been close to five hundred names on it. Each entry showed the name of the GI, his rank, his unit, the date of unauthorized departure, and—in most cases—the date of return. American GIs in Korea don’t usually stay AWOL long. Where were they going to go? The country only has one international airport: Kimpo, near Seoul. And the Korean authorities are always on alert and allow no one to enter or leave the country without being thoroughly checked. To leave Korea, an AWOL American GI would need a passport and a forged visa. Very few GIs have passports and even fewer of them are creative enough to forge the other documents. And what with the terrorism threat from Communist North Korea, there was no black market in forged passports and visas. The Korean National Police would never allow it. They come down hard on anyone who tries, and the jail sentences are unbelievably harsh. Like heroin smuggling and arms trafficking, passport forgery is a criminal enterprise that just doesn’t exist in Korea.

  So when their money runs out, most AWOL GIs return to their units.

  A few stay out longer. Usually, they are well connected with the Korean underworld and manage to make a living buying from the PX and selling on the black market. There is a small trafficking operation for forged military ID cards and phony 8th Army Ration Control Plates. The KNPs don’t crack down as harshly on these operations since everyone makes money and it’s seen as being relatively harmless. Certainly no threat to national security.

  It was those GIs I concentrated on. The ones who’d been away from their units for at least a week. After about a half hour of work, I’d jotted down a list in my notebook of two dozen names. Then I made a list of GIs who’d left more recently and hadn’t yet returned. This provided another fourteen names. Now my list was manageable.

  Then I started studying the units.

  I was looking for the Field Artillery.

  Why? Because of what Mi-ja had told me. She was the business girl who’d spent part of the night with the Caucasian GI at House Number 17 at the Yellow House in Inchon. I’d questioned her for almost an hour, trying to coax her into describing everything about him that she could remember.

  She’d been nervous, still traumatized by being burned repeatedly with the tip of a lit cigarette. The fingers of her hand quivered as she talked. She pointed to various places on her body as she described the Caucasian GI who’d tortured her.

  No, there were no red marks or calloused skin on his shoulders. That eliminated an infantry grunt, who had to hump a forty-pound rucksack on a twenty-mile road march. Yes, his hands were rough and bruised, so he worked physically, maybe lifting things. She hadn’t noticed the soles of his feet, but she had noticed that he turned the radio up too loud—tuning in to AFKN, the Armed Forces Korea Network, to listen to the news broadcasts in English. She stuck two fingers in her ears, to indicate how loud the radio had been. His hands and face were tan, much darker than his arms or chest or the rest of his body. That indicated that he worked outdoors, but wore clothing—probably a long-sleeved milita
ry fatigue uniform—while doing it.

  Putting everything together spelled Field Artillery. He wasn’t an infantryman; his hands were rough, and, most importantly, his hearing was shot. Standing next to the big guns, hearing the booms every day, being too lazy or insufficiently self-disciplined to keep his earplugs in at all times. All these things indicated that he was a gun bunny.

  Still, all these things might be coincidence. He could be a supply clerk or a truck driver, or a concussed and deafened infantryman, for all I knew. But I had to narrow down the list somehow.

  If we didn’t catch him quickly, he and his brown-haired buddy might strike again.

  To clear my mind, I stood up and walked over to the silver coffee urn, and pulled myself a mug of java. While I sipped on the hot brew, Ernie and Miss Kim made eyes at one another. She managed to keep typing as she did so, but at a slower rate.

  What did she see in him? She was a good woman from a good family. A family that probably had high hopes of marrying her off to some well-educated young Korean man. A man who would treat her in the Confucian tradition as a respected wife and, eventually, a respected mother. What did she see in some wild GI who chased everything in skirts?

  Excitement, I suppose. One thing about Ernie Bascom is that he was never boring. Ernie was a connoisseur of the insane. He loved people who didn’t give a flying fart about what others thought, who were full of rage or passion or madness. They entertained him. And as soon as they stopped frothing at the mouth, he’d poke them—either verbally or physically—curious to see how they’d react. Like a demented kid torturing a beetle.

  But Miss Kim couldn’t get enough of Ernie Bascom. They’d already gone out together about a half-dozen times that I knew of. And maybe more, because when we weren’t working Ernie had a way of disappearing and showing up the next day with a satisfied grin on his face. I tried not to give him the satisfaction of asking what he’d been up to. At least not too often. But occasionally my curiosity got the best of me. He told me once that he’d spent the night with Miss Kim, and then went on to describe her long-legged, statuesque body. Before he delved into too much detail, I changed the subject. Torment, I don’t need.