The Line

by Martin Limon

  “The yes-men at the Judge Advocate General’s office,” Ernie said. “They’ve taken our case from us.”

  “They’ve elevated it,” Riley corrected. “The honchos will be handling it from now on.”

  “And making sure,” Ernie told him, “that nobody in the chain-of-command is embarrassed.”

  “Which is something you two guys don’t usually give a shit about.” Riley tossed a memo he was holding into his out-basket. Then he said, “And another benefit of the Judge Advocate General taking over the case is that the North Koreans are no longer being accused of murder.”

  “That’s why the alert was called off,” Ernie said. “They’re assuming, without having proved anything, that this guy Fusterman is guilty.”

  “Hey,” Riley said, shrugging his narrow shoulders. “Better for everybody.”

  “Except for Colonel Peele,” I said.

  Riley chuckled. “Yeah. He’s pissed to the max.”

  Ernie wanted to barge into Colonel Brace’s office and confront him about being pulled off the JSA case. I grabbed his elbow and pulled him into the hallway, out of earshot of Sergeant Riley. “If we confront the Provost Marshal now,” I said, “he’ll probably comply with Colonel Peele’s wishes and pull us off the case, officially, in writing. First, before they have a chance to do that, let’s look around on our own.”

  “Look around for what?”

  “To make sure these JAG officers accuse the right person.”

  “They don’t want it to be a North Korean,” Ernie said. “Less trouble if the killer is a GI. They can court-martial him, send him to Leavenworth, and close the book on the whole thing.”

  “Maybe the killer is a GI,” I said. “But we’ll be on their butts. Raise hell if something seems wrong.”

  “I don’t like it,” Ernie said.

  “Neither do I. But searching for a missing wife could take us anywhere—and give us time to do whatever we want.”

  “Yeah,” Ernie said, calming down, seeing the possibilities. “Anywhere.” He grabbed the chicken-scratch note back from me. “So what’s she look like, anyway?”

  Major Bob Cresthill wasn’t at the office of the 8th Army Corps of Engineers. A helpful secretary told us he was at a construction site near Soyang Lake.

  “Where the hell’s that?” Ernie asked.

  The secretary was a middle-aged American woman, almost certainly married to an officer or enlisted service member and working this job to supplement the family income. She walked us over to a map of South Korea that covered the entire wall. It was dotted with some red pins, a few green ones, and a lot of blue ones. “The red pins are sites where we’re actively building roads, bridges, dams, canals or other types of infrastructure. This one’s on the Soyang River.”

  The US government had contributed to the rebuilding of South Korean infrastructure since the end of the Korean War. Part of that was in order to facilitate military operations. Without good roads, bridges, and dams in place to prevent seasonal flooding, the Army would become bogged down, which would hurt us tactically since one of our biggest advantages over the Korean People’s Army was mobility. It was also thought that good infrastructure would bolster the South Korean economy, thereby strengthening the position of one of our most dedicated allies in the fight against international Communism. South Korea was so aligned with us, in fact, that they’d sent two infantry divisions to assist in the Vietnam War—a total of 50,000 soldiers in country at any time. And those soldiers saw plenty of combat and suffered mass casualties. This made US politicians happy, since Korean boys dying instead of American ones eased their paths to reelection.

  I studied the map. The construction site was on the western slopes of the Taebaek Mountains, northeast of Seoul by about forty miles.

  “Near Chuncheon?” I said.

  “Yes. There’s been periodic flooding in the Chuncheon area. The Soyang River dam project should help to alleviate that.”

  “And protect the tactical missiles we have at Camp Page.” An 8th Army antiaircraft artillery and helicopter base located near the city limits of Chuncheon.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” she said.

  “Does Major Cresthill drive back to Seoul at night?”

  “No. I don’t believe so. They have temporary quarters up at Camp Page, at least for the next few days.”

  “No wonder his wife left him,” Ernie said.

  The secretary flushed red, turned away, and looked back at us, angry now. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” she said curtly.

  “That should do it,” Ernie replied. He doffed an imaginary hat, and we walked out of the office and down the long corridor.

  The drive to Camp Page in Chuncheon took less than two hours. It was easy to find, with ample road signage guiding us. Once we arrived, our first objective was to locate the construction site along the Soyang River. On base, we drove to the 8th Army Engineers temporary office and asked for assistance. The NCO in charge was Sergeant First Class Bonneville, a big man with a bushy mustache. We explained that Major Cresthill had requested our assistance and we were there to talk to him.

  “I’m transporting noon chow right now. Lend a hand and I’ll give you a lift.”

  We did. He backed his three-quarter-ton truck to the loading dock behind the Camp Page Dining Facility. While Sergeant Bonneville signed a hand receipt for the storage and serving equipment, Ernie and I tossed a stainless steel urn of coffee and a pair of Mermite hot-food containers into the back of the vehicle. On strips of masking tape, one container was marked beef stew and the other rice.

  “Creative menu,” Ernie said.

  “Three Michelin stars,” I agreed.

  It was a rocky ride into the mountains, but after sliding around a few corners slick with mud, Sergeant Bonneville got us there in one piece. Apparently, the engineers were working on some sort of drainage channel to divert excess river water. Over the edge of a nearby cliff, the view of the valley stretched to the city of Chuncheon, which floated eerily in a distant mist.

  “If I didn’t know Chuncheon was full of bars and whorehouses,” Ernie said, “I’d almost say it looked enchanting.”

  Somebody had told Major Cresthill we were looking for him. He approached and shook our hands.

  “Sorry about the mud,” he said, pointing to the dried crust on his fingers. “Coffee?” he offered.

  “That’d be good.”

  In the mess tent, we poured lukewarm java into paper cups. Then Major Cresthill led us toward a larger engineering tent. He wore fatigues and a fur-lined cap with the earflaps tied above his head. The top of a set of thermal long johns peeked up beneath the collar of his army-issue fatigues. He dropped heavily into a canvas chair and we sat opposite him.

  “Thank you for responding so quickly,” he said.

  Normally, a missing person’s case—one involving the missing Korean wife of an enlisted man, for example—would be handled by the Military Police, not the Criminal Investigation Division. And the MPs did pretty much nothing more than file the report and order subordinate units to notify them if the missing person, or their corpse, turned up. I didn’t bother telling Major Cresthill that his status as a fellow field-grade officer had led Colonel Brace to prioritize his case. Officers liked to believe they weren’t receiving special treatment.

  Cresthill was average height—about five-foot-nine or –ten—but his face seemed small, as if he’d reached adolescence and his bone structure hadn’t changed since. He was probably best described as “cute,” with curly black hair falling over blue eyes. The kind of “cute” that might work well with women, but earned you less respect among military men. His eyes darted away as I analyzed him, as if sensing this disadvantage.

  “I won’t waste your time,” Cresthill said. “My wife and I have had our difficulties. Back in the States, she was always busy. Working full-ti
me. And her parents lived nearby, close enough that she could drive to see them on weekends.”

  “You’re command-sponsored,” Ernie said.

  Meaning the army had paid for him to bring his family to Korea. A prime benefit, with tens of thousands of enlisted men stationed near the DMZ on “unaccompanied tours,” meaning that not only had they not been allowed to bring their families, they couldn’t ship over a car or even a household pet.

  “Yes. We share a duplex on south post. Comfortable quarters, and my wife seemed happy with them at first. My daughter Jenny is attending Seoul American Elementary School.”

  “How old is Jenny?” I pulled out my notebook and started jotting down details.

  “Ten,” he replied. “She’s in the fifth grade.”

  “So what went wrong?” Ernie asked.

  “My wife couldn’t find work,” Cresthill said. “The Civilian Personnel Office said they had a few positions open, but they were all secretarial. Filing clerk, receptionist, things like that. Evelyn—my wife—didn’t want to accept the downgrade. Back in Texas, she was a frontline manager in marketing and sales. Making good money, used to being in charge. She didn’t want to take orders from some uneducated bozo or get pawed at by a lonely officer far from home.”

  Cresthill glanced toward the sound of workmen’s hammers on the cliff below.

  “A lot of women go into charity work,” I said, “with the Officers’ Wives Club.”

  “She hates the military social whirl, the one-upmanship. The way some of the wives wear their husband’s rank on their collars.”

  “Overall,” I said, “it sounds like she’s not too happy with the life of a military dependent.”

  “She’s not,” he said. “And she hates these field deployments.” He spread his fingers at the encampment around us. “Too much time apart.”

  This was a familiar tale of woe to me and Ernie. We both sat silent, waiting for him to go on.

  “She started going out. To the Officers Club. She’d get all dolled up and be there by happy hour. She would leave Jenny with one of the neighbors who had a daughter in the same class.” He gave me the name of the neighbor, which I wrote down. “Then the O’Club became too small for her. She started going out somewhere off base.”

  “Do you know where?”

  He shook his head. “No. All I know is that there was some Korean woman who used to go to the O’Club regularly. About Evelyn’s age, someone said. They’d sit together and chat and laugh and eventually go off somewhere together.”

  “In a PX taxi?” I asked. The ones that wait outside the front of the club.

  “I’m not sure,” he replied. “I guess so.” I made another note. “After Evelyn found her new friend, she stopped going to the O’Club altogether. She’d just leave home without a word.”

  “Do you think she was meeting this same woman?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  It figured that if an American woman decided to venture into the city nightlife of Seoul, which was vast and varied, she would need either a male escort or a female guide. She wouldn’t know where to go on her own, especially if she didn’t read or write or speak Korean. Ending up at the wrong joint could be dangerous. Mobsters frequented and sometimes owned the nightclubs, and they weren’t known for their chivalry.

  “This Korean woman who befriended Evelyn, do you know her name?”

  He shook his head again.

  “So who told you about her?”

  “Quincy.”

  “Who?”

  “Randy Quincy. Captain. He’s the CO of the Honor Guard and seems to spend about half his life over at the Officers Club. Somebody told me they’d seen him talking to my wife, so I confronted him.” I nodded and kept writing. Then I paused, which seemed to spur Major Cresthill on. “He’s a known womanizer. Hits on the nurses from the One-Two-One hard, I’m told.”

  The 121st Evacuation Hospital, located just a few hundred yards from the 8th Army Officers Club.

  “What’d he tell you?”

  “He claimed he’d never had anything to do with Evelyn. That he was just being polite, seeing a woman alone and all. Once she’d made friends with the Korean woman, he let her be.”

  “And then she disappeared?”

  “Yes. You saw the note.”

  I pulled it out of my right pocket. “It’s sort of incoherent.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Is she on prescription drugs?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But she could be?”

  “When I get home, I’ll search our medicine cabinet.”

  I didn’t tell him not to bother. If she was hooked on uppers or downers, she would’ve taken them with her. I made a note to check with the medicos over at the 121.

  “So when did she disappear?” Ernie asked.

  We pinned down the time. Major Cresthill had gone to work as normal three days ago, and when he’d come home that night, she was gone.

  “And this note was on the table?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s taking care of Jenny now?”

  “The same neighbor.”

  I made a note to talk to her. And to Jenny.

  “When are you leaving Camp Page?” I asked.

  “We wrap up this afternoon. After that, I’ll go pick up Jenny and head straight home.”

  He gave me his quarters address and phone number.

  “Anything you want to add?” Ernie said.

  Cresthill shook his head negatively.

  “Don’t give this a lot of thought,” I said. “Just say the first thing that comes to mind. If you were to go looking for Evelyn right now, where would you go?”

  “The BOQ of Captain Randy Quincy.”

  In military parlance, BOQ meant Bachelor Officer Quarters.

  “And if you found her there?” Ernie asked.

  “I’d murder the son of a bitch,” Cresthill said.

  We both leaned back, surprised. Ernie asked, “You’d murder Quincy?”

  Major Cresthill nodded, a grim expression on his face. Then he seemed to come to his senses, looked at the two of us and said, “Well, you asked me for the first thing that came to mind.”

  -7-

  When we walked through the door of the CID office, Riley said nothing and kept busy with his pile of paperwork. Miss Kim similarly ignored us, pecking industriously away at her hangul typewriter.

  Something was up. Ernie sensed it too. He sat down in front of Riley’s desk.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “What?” Riley looked up suddenly as if surprised to see us.

  “What happened when the JAG officers went north to question Fusterman at the JSA?”

  “Nothing.” His voice rose at the end.

  “Not nothing,” Ernie persisted. “Come on, you can tell me. I won’t slap the shit out of you. Probably not, anyway.”

  Riley shoved the stack of paperwork to his side, sighed, and looked at Ernie.

  “They arrested him.”

  “Fusterman?”

  “Yeah. They found his entrenching tool hidden behind his wall locker. It has stains on it that look like blood.”

  “But they can’t be sure.”

  “Which is why they packaged it up and are sending it off to Camp Zama for analysis.”

  “Did Fusterman sing?”

  “No. He denied everything. Even said it wasn’t his entrenching tool. The JAG officer read him his rights and a couple of MPs arrested him. They’ve already transported him to ASCOM.”

  ASCOM is the military acronym for the Army Support Command, a logistical base southwest of Seoul near the city of Bupyong. It was where 8th Army housed its stockade.

  “Do you have a copy of Fusterman’s statement?”

  “Not yet. JAG is working
on it, but according to them, he didn’t say much.”

  “Smart guy.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Has anybody notified the Noh family of the arrest?”

  Riley shrugged. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask the ROKs about that. They’re responsible for notification.”

  “What does the Provost Marshal think?” Ernie asked.

  Riley lowered his voice. “I think Colonel Brace is relieved.”

  “Because Noh wasn’t murdered by a North Korean?”

  “Yeah. And now the Eighth Army Chief of Staff has the MAC under control.”

  “Convenient,” Ernie said.

  “Yeah. Except Colonel Peele is still claiming the North Koreans did it. He wanted to keep the pressure on the NKs for negotiating purposes, and he blames you two for muddying the waters.”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” Ernie replied. “To stir shit up.”

  Riley pointedly grabbed his pen and returned to his paperwork. I said nothing. Ernie looked at me and raised an eyebrow, as if to ask, “What now?”

  I jerked my head to the southwest, toward ASCOM.

  Ernie nodded, and without further conversation, we got up and left. For once, Riley didn’t ask where we were going, probably because he didn’t want to know.

  As far as 8th Army was concerned, everything was going fine: a crisis had been defused, a bullet dodged. The only flies in the ointment were a recalcitrant Teddy Fusterman, who wouldn’t confess to the murder of Corporal Noh Jong-bei, and two notoriously uncooperative criminal investigators. Namely, me and Ernie Bascom. Plus a colonel at the Military Armistice Commission named Peele.

  A half-hour later, we walked toward a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with coiled razor wire. After checking our identification, an MP pulled back a gate and let us through. Across a narrow courtyard, a metal door led into a cement-block building, where we walked down a tiled hallway until we reached a room marked interrogation. Inside, there was a long table separated by dividers. We sat down.