Nightmare Range

by Martin Limon

  “How’d you eliminate names after that?” Ernie asked.

  “I made phone calls to their husbands’ units. Found out what shifts they worked.”

  Ernie slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Of course. Everson used to visit her at night. So her husband had to work nights. Probably a swing shift.”

  “Probably. That left us with three names.”

  “So we go talk to them?”

  “No. I’ve narrowed the list down to one.”

  “One?”

  “If I’m right, and if this woman were somehow involved in Everson’s death, she would’ve had to be able to persuade a Korean man, this mysterious Mr. Kim, to take the risk of approaching Miss Tae and Choi Yong-kuang and paying them to commit murder.”

  “So she’d have to have a helluva a lot of influence over him.”

  “Right,” I answered. “A helluva lot.”

  Ernie glanced again at the three names. “Two of these women don’t work at all. What are they going to do? Offer their houseboys a pile of money to have somebody killed?”

  I nodded. “But the third …”

  Ernie whistled. “Big money,” he said.

  The third entry was Gladys Hackburn, the wife of Colonel Orin Hackburn. She had her own career, a good one. Her current position was contracting officer for the 8th Army Procurement and Facilities Office. She was a woman who made the final decision on the disbursement of millions of US taxpayer dollars to local construction contractors.

  She was a woman with power.

  Before we approached Gladys Hackburn, I made a few discreet inquiries at the 8th Army Procurement Office. The biggest contract currently under construction was a Top Secret Signal Intelligence Facility actually being built into the side of a mountain south of Seoul. The dollar figures involved were staggering, and the Korean contractor with the most at risk was a wealthy businessman named Roh Ji-yun. From his background security check folder, I pulled his black-and-white mug shot. That afternoon I made a phone call, and a few minutes later Ernie and I drove our Army jeep out to the same teahouse where we had met Miss Tae before. She was already waiting.

  When I pulled out the photo of Roh Ji-yun, her eyes popped wide.

  “That’s him,” she said. “Mr. Kim.”

  She was so impressed that Ernie almost convinced her to spend the rest of the afternoon with him at a nearby inn. I frustrated his plans.

  “We have work to do,” I told him.

  Ernie pouted.

  Miss Tae merely seemed amused.

  We found Roh Ji-yun at one of his construction sites. He wore expensive slacks, a silk tie, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. An orange hardhat balanced atop his big square head.

  When I told him what we suspected, his face turned crimson and spittle erupted from fleshy lips.

  The punch was a surprise. Most Koreans swear a lot when they’re angry, but usually they don’t hit.

  I managed to dodge the blow, and then three of his assistants were on him, holding him back. He continued to curse in Korean, Ernie hurling epithets in English. It was obvious to me that we weren’t going to coax much information out of him.

  But for now we had enough.

  At the 8th Army Procurement Office, Gladys Hackburn’s secretary kept us cooling our heels for almost twenty minutes. Finally we were allowed to enter the inner sanctum.

  She sat at a large teak desk, the flags of the United States and the Republic of Korea draped behind her. She wore a powder blue business suit, and her reddish hair was cut short and curled up in a wave that framed a youngish-looking oval face. When she stood to shake our hands, I could see that she maintained her figure at least as well as had the late Captain Richard Everson.

  She smiled brightly.

  An intelligent woman. A caring woman. A woman willing to help.

  “What brings the CID to the Army Procurement Office?” she asked.

  Instead of answering, I tossed the black-and-white glossy of Roh Ji-yun onto her desk. A puzzled frown crossed her face. She glanced down at the photo but leaned back slightly as if she were afraid to touch it.

  “You had him follow Captain Everson,” I said. “To set him up for murder.”

  She stood perfectly still for a moment. Ernie and I both held our breath, wondering if she’d break down or tear the photo up or start screaming at us and call the MPs to escort us out of her office.

  She did none of those things. Instead she sat down slowly and interlaced her well-manicured fingers atop the varnished surface of her desk as if composing herself to make a speech in front of the Parent-Teachers Association. She cleared her throat and then spoke.

  “I loathed him,” she said, “for what he did to me. The lies he told me. The promises he made about our future together.” She shook her head as if trying to rid herself of a bad dream. “But we had no future together. He was just using me.”

  “So things didn’t work out,” I said. “And the plan to pay someone to kill Everson slowly grew in your mind. But you weren’t sure if it would work. So you followed, to make sure the job was completed. And when you saw him lying there in that alley and you were all alone and the ice pick was lying beside him …”

  “Yes,” she said calmly, staring directly into my eyes. “I killed him. I picked up the ice pick, and I stabbed it into his heart. And what’s more,” she said, her face as smooth as polished stone, “I’d do it again.”

  It took a while for the paperwork to be completed at 8th Army, translated, and then formally transmitted to the Korean National Police. It took even longer for the KNPs to send their report to the judge in charge of the Everson case. So long, in fact, that they almost hanged Choi Yong-kung for the murder of Captain Richard Everson despite the fact that we had a confession from Ms. Gladys Hackburn.

  Finally, though, a few hours before the sentence was to be carried out, Choi was released from prison. His mother was there to greet him, of course, along with Miss Tae.

  When the sun went down, Ernie and I made our way to Itaewon. We were ensconced on our usual barstools in our usual club in the heart of the nightclub district. The band had just taken their break when Choi Yong-kuang’s mother tugged on my shirtsleeve.

  This time she didn’t pull me off the barstool, but I turned around anyway.

  Everyone watched. The bartenders, the waitresses, the business girls and even the GIs, because they were aware of the man who’d been spared from hanging this morning.

  Choi Yong-kuang’s mother didn’t speak. Head bowed, she held three sticks of burning incense in front of the billowing folds of her red silk Korean dress. She knelt to the floor, leaned forward, and lowered her head three times to the dirty tile.

  It was sort of embarrassing. Ernie tried to laugh it off. I kept a straight face. For decorum’s sake, mainly, but also so no one would notice the pressure building in my eyes.

  THE FILIAL WIFE

  Before dawn on the last day of her life, Mrs. Yi Won-suk rose from her sleeping mat beside her husband, washed her face, and slid back the oil-papered front door of her home. She stepped out into her plot of about one-half pyong in which she had been tending twelve rows of peichu, the thick-leafed cabbage that the people of Korea soak in brine and use as the prime ingredient in kimchee, their spicy national dish.

  After her husband rose and trudged off to his fields, Mrs. Yi’s daughter, Myong-son, wiped her sleepy four-year-old eyes and joined her mother in the field, making a pretense of holding a flickering candle so her mother could see more clearly as she slashed at the bases of the fat green cabbages.

  As dawn broke behind Palgong Mountain, Mrs. Yi continued to work, tossing the heavy heads of peichu into her wooden cart. After she’d plucked all the ripe leafy vegetables from the earth, she took Myong-song by the hand and together they washed and changed into freshly pressed skirts and woolen blouses and bright red head scarves.

  Myong-son climbed atop the pile of peichu, Mrs. Yi grabbed the handle of the cart, and together th
ey walked through the first glimmerings of golden sunrise in the Land of the Morning Calm, heading for the produce market in the city of Taegu.

  Today, mid-November by the Western calendar, marked the beginning of kimjang, that time of year when Korean housewives buy large piles of ripe peichu and prepare enough cabbage kimchee to last throughout the cold winter. Sales in Taegu were expected to be good. Mrs. Yi needed the money to supplement the earnings she and her husband made from the backbreaking work of tending their rented field of rice and soybean.

  As Mrs. Yi and Myong-song entered the outskirts of Taegu, three-wheeled trucks and early morning taxicabs swished by on the narrow strip of blacktop that was the main road leading into the city from the west. Straddling the entranceway to the Taegu Market stood a huge wooden arch with fancy lettering welcoming one and all. Mrs. Yi pushed her cart past enormous glass tanks full of wriggling mackerel, past rows of snorting pigs and honking geese, and piled rolls of wool and cotton and silk. The entire market area was laid out like a giant squid in the center of the city of Taegu, with overhanging balconies and eaves and lean-tos made of canvas and bamboo blocking out the sun. Mrs. Yi finally jostled her way through the crowd until she reached the produce area and the stall of the mother-in-law of her husband’s second cousin. The elderly woman smiled and greeted Mrs. Yi and hugged Myong-song and soon enough space was cleared on the raised plywood platform. Mrs. Yi piled her iridescent green cabbages alongside mounds of round pears and red persimmons and jumbled green beans and all the earthly bounty that the fertile southern valleys of Korea offer in such abundance.

  Myong-song played, the women chatted, Mrs. Yi sold most of her cabbage at a good price, and for the last day of her life they tell me she was happy.

  My partner, Ernie Bascom, held the photograph up toward fluorescent light. His lips were pursed and there was no apparent emotion on his face. Behind the round lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses, however, his green eyes glowed.

  “Nice chest on her,” Ernie said finally.

  Mrs. Yi Won-suk, like many petite Korean women, was about as flat-chested as it is possible to be. Still, she was beautiful. The photo was taken at a resort area. She stood by the shore of the Naktong River, vamping with some of her girlfriends on an outing just before she was married some five years ago. Her face was calm and unblemished, with full lips and a smoothly rounded nose and eyes that were bright and cheerful. Her legs were straight and the calves, revealed by a short skirt, were full and round.

  Ernie and I had been flown down to Taegu by chopper, mainly because the 8th Army provost marshal was worried that once the Korean newspapers got wind of what had happened to Mrs. Yi, the proverbial waste would be splattered all over the Korean tabloids.

  I took the photograph out of Ernie’s hand and slid it into the neat dossier that the Taegu detachment of the Korean National Police had prepared.

  Our host was Lieutenant Rhee Han-yong. He’d picked us up at the military helipad and transported us over here in a police van, sirens blaring, until we reached this red brick police headquarters building in the heart of downtown Taegu.

  Lieutenant Rhee pulled out a pack of cigarettes, Turtleboat brand, and offered one to me and then Ernie. We both declined. Lieutenant Rhee had the weathered face of a cop who’d spent many years standing on a round platform directing traffic. Now he directed a homicide squad. Smoke swirled past his flat nose, causing him to squint.

  “GI,” he told us. “Must be. Other foreigners live in Taegu we already check.”

  “They had alibis?” Ernie asked.

  “Yes. Alibi. Good alibi. Very good.”

  “What kind of alibis?” I asked.

  “Two Peace Corps workers. That day they take go mountain somewhere. Also five priests. How you say? Chondu-kyo.”

  “Catholic,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yes. Catholic. Everybody say they inside church that day.”

  Taegu is a city of about a hundred thousand people. It sits in the central valley of South Korea and is responsible for more than half the country’s output of exportable produce. Few foreigners live in Taegu because there are few business opportunities. The big industrialized capital of Seoul gobbles up most of those, along with the dynamic seaport of Pusan to the south.

  That meant that the main source of foreigners living in Taegu was the US Army compound, Camp Henry, headquarters for the 19th Support Group. I’d already checked before Ernie and I left Seoul. Camp Henry was home to about fifteen hundred GIs. A decent-sized pond for a criminal to swim in.

  Forensic science is not the most highly developed art in Korea. In fact, it has not developed very well here at all. Why? Because with the Park Chung-hee government firmly in power and the Cold War raging and President Nixon and now President Ford providing total backing to the Park regime, the Korean National Police enjoy the luxury of solving crimes with methods more traditional than forensic.

  A judiciously employed rubber hose is one example. A sucker punch to the stomach another. But in this case those crude techniques wouldn’t do much good.

  No suspect was in custody.

  Why were the KNPs so sure that the perpetrator had been a foreigner? Two pieces of evidence: the semen and the pubic hair. The semen showed a blood type of O positive, extremely rare amongst the ancient and largely homogenous tribe that occupies the Korean Peninsula. And the pubic hair was obviously Caucasian. Short, curly, light brown.

  Because of this evidence, the Korean National Police had requested our presence to help them find the GI who had raped and murdered Mrs. Yi Won-suk.

  When a married woman is violated and then strangled, right in front of her four-year-old daughter, it is bad enough. When that unspeakably hideous crime is perpetrated by a foreigner, it becomes intolerable. The KNPs would go to any lengths to nab the killer. But their long arm didn’t reach into the inviolable sanctuaries of US Army compounds.

  That’s where Ernie and I came in.

  “I need to see the site,” I told Lieutenant Rhee.

  “You no go check compound?”

  “We’ll check the compound and we’ll find the GI who did this. But first I see the site.”

  Ernie nodded his agreement.

  Lieutenant Rhee glanced back and forth between us, not liking the idea. Finally, he sighed and stubbed out his cigarette. As he stood to his full height, he straightened his wrinkled khaki uniform and said, “Kapshida.” Let’s go.

  Lieutenant Rhee, like most Korean cops, didn’t want the 8th Army CID interfering in his operation. What he wanted us to do was the same thing the powers that be here in Korea wanted US military police to do. Control GIs. Slap them down when they became unruly and particularly when their wild ways caused grief to Korean civilians.

  Not that the Korean government wanted us gone. Quite the contrary. Communists on the northern side of the Demilitarized Zone were massively equipped by the Soviet Bloc, fielding a standing army of over seven hundred thousand soldiers. South Korea’s army could hold the northern troops off for a while, but in a prolonged conflict, the naval and air support of the US would prove indispensable.

  The Koreans needed us here for their very survival.

  But sometimes those of us assigned to defend their country—especially young GIs far away from home and far away from everything that made them civilized—could prove to be a royal pain in the butt. Like when they became drunk and unruly and brawled with whomever happened to be in their way. Or when they drove their tanks and their armored vehicles too fast through sleepy, straw-thatched-hut villages. Or when they treated Korean women as if they were dolls to be toyed with and then discarded.

  We ducked through a rickety wooden gate and entered a small courtyard. Earthen jars, probably filled with winter kimchee, lined the wall to the right. On the left, chicken wire housed a skinny white rooster who was busy scratching the earth. Flagstone steps led to a raised wooden platform that served as the floor of the hooch. In front of the sliding door sat an old woman. The neighbor, Lieutenant
Rhee told me, and the first person to hear the four-year-old Myong-song when she burnt her hand and started wailing.

  I nodded to the old woman. With sad, wrinkled eyes, she nodded back.

  Next to her, leaning against a pedestal, was a large photograph of Yi Won-suk bordered in black. In front of the photo stood a short bronze incense holder.

  Cops at a murder site are not expected to participate in ritual behavior. I could tell by his body posture that Lieutenant Rhee wanted me to keep moving. But rules had been broken here. The KNPs had allowed this old woman to set up this shrine to the dead not more than a few feet from a police crime scene. The KNPs had let their own rules be broken not only out of respect for the dead but also because of the age of this mourner. Old grandpas with poor eyesight can totter across busy intersections in Seoul, against the red light, and cops with whistles will stop traffic and make sure that younger drivers swerve safely around the old man. To ticket a venerable elder for jaywalking would be considered the height of impropriety.

  And no one had the heart to shoo away this old woman.

  Ernie was already slipping off his loafers in front of the raised floor, but I didn’t join him. Instead, I approached the old woman, bowed, and spoke in Korean. “I’m very sorry for your trouble, Grandmother.”

  She cackled. Surprised to hear a foreigner speak the tongue of the gods.

  “No trouble for me,” she answered. “Trouble for the young Mrs. Yi. And more trouble for her husband. And for their child, Myong-song.”

  “Yes. For my country’s part in this, we are greatly ashamed.”

  “Good for you. But don’t waste your breath on a foolish old woman.”

  “Did you see the man who did this, Grandmother?”

  “No. I heard Mrs. Yi return from the market and push her cart through the gate, but after that nothing. Apparently Myong-song was asleep from the long ride home. All was quiet, so I went about my business until about an hour later. Then I heard Myong-song scream.”