Mortal Allies

by Brian Haig

  He was a very good-looking kid, with a narrow face, a long, aristocratic nose, a high, intelligent-looking forehead, and a muscular, well-proportioned figure. He looked much like what I suspect his father looked like as a younger man.

  Bridges joined me in my inspection. He stood just to my left and I saw his eyes roving down the length of the body. You could still see the bruises and abrasions.

  I asked, “Did anybody here get a copy of the autopsy results?”

  “Yeah, I think I got a copy . . . maybe a few days after I collected the body. I haven’t read it, though.”

  He walked over to a desk in the corner, opened a drawer, and rummaged around until he yanked out a manila folder. He stood and read it, while I continued observing Lee’s body. I had no idea what I was looking for, in fact, had really only come over to get a firsthand look at the subject who’d caused me such immense misery. That really wasn’t fair, since I sure didn’t want to trade places with him, but it’s so much easier to heap blame on an inanimate object than somebody who can argue back.

  I found myself fixated on Lee’s face. I have this theory that life gives most folks pretty much the face they deserve. We all start out as rotund little babies, with plump cheeks and tiny lips, a button for a nose, and lively, sparkling eyes. That cuddly cuteness wears off. By the time we’re grown, some folks have grumpy faces, some thoughtful, some resentful and selfish, and some have no distinguishing look at all, just a bland emptiness, which I guess says something in itself.

  Lee’s face was nearly beatific. There was a clean, almost surreal wholesomeness, unblemished by sorrow, or anxiety, or greed, or any other petty emotional ailment. It was the face of someone who’d had a happy childhood, loving parents, no riveting insecurities or life-shattering failures. I found myself liking him. And it gave me an insight into his mother and his father, because nobody gets a face like that who wasn’t embalmed in love nearly from the moment of conception.

  I also found myself not liking Thomas Whitehall very much, for murdering and despoiling this cold cadaver on the table. He’d stolen this boy’s life and robbed his parents of a cherished jewel.

  “All done,” Bridges announced from the corner.

  “Huh?” I asked, surprised that I’d lost track of everything around me. I’m not ordinarily the sentimental type, so this wasn’t good. If a brief look at Lee No Tae had that unsettling effect on me, just imagine how a court-martial board was going to feel after a voluble, able prosecutor spent a few hours leading them through Lee’s life, his promise, and the thoroughly putrid things done to him.

  Bridges, holding up the folder, walked over. “It’s a really awful thing, isn’t it?”

  “It really is,” I mumbled. It was a damned good thing he’d stopped with the bad jokes. If he’d tossed another one my way at that moment, I might’ve popped him in the nose.

  “Not good,” he said, tapping the autopsy folder with a finger. “His blood-alcohol level was .051 at the time of death. He was legally sober. He’s got some fairly hard contusions and abrasions on his stomach, his shins, his feet tops, his hands, and his forearms. Look at his stomach particularly,” he said, pointing at each part of the anatomy.

  I saw several large bruises and swellings on Lee’s stomach.

  Bridges continued. “It took some very hard blows to cause those contusions to his midsection. Really just short of sledgehammers. The tissue damage is extreme and there are several shattered ribs. The cause of death was asphyxiation. The purple welt around his neck was made by a thin, flexible object, and the bruising striations, which you can’t see with the naked eye, indicate the object was roughly textured, like a cloth Army-issue belt. Judging by the contusions and broken blood vessels, it was pulled back with great force.”

  “How about the sex stuff?” I asked.

  “There was fairly serious enlargement of his anus. That’s highly unusual. We sometimes get cases here, men and women, who’ve engaged in anal sex and get something lodged inside. Typically, the muscle and tissue recover and return to normal size within ten minutes.”

  “But his didn’t?”

  “No. They measured it, and it was open nearly a full half-inch. There’s only one way that could happen. He had to be dead the last time he was penetrated. His blood flow had stopped and the muscles lost their ability to retract.”

  We stared at each other a long moment, because this was a fairly disgusting topic, even for a doctor, much less a lawyer.

  “You’d rule out any chance he was strangled while they were doing it? Like maybe one of those perverts who gets off being asphyxiated at the moment of climax?”

  He stared again at the corpse. “First of all, the recipient in homosexual sex generally doesn’t climax. Second, even if Whitehall was penetrating him at the moment of death, the muscles would still have enough elasticity to retract. Unless that is, Whitehall remained inside for at least ten minutes after death. That’s possible, of course. And from a technical standpoint, that’s still necrophilia.”

  “But you wouldn’t rule out that maybe they were playing around and doing that asphyxiation thing, and maybe got a little carried away?”

  “I might, except for those bruises,” he said. “Those get in the way of that theory. He put up a fierce struggle.”

  “I guess,” I morosely admitted. I’d ascertained that the autopsy results were apparently valid. They could be used to support every charge being leveled at Whitehall. I’d also ascertained that I didn’t like Thomas Whitehall very much.

  In the process, I’d put myself in the worst mood I could remember.

  I thanked Bridges for his help. I went to the hotel and headed straight to the bar. It was five o’clock and I felt I’d earned a good stiff drink. And who should I discover in there but Katherine herself, seated in a dark corner, wedged in behind the jukebox, which was belting out some melancholy song about where all the cowboys went.

  I told the bartender to send over two glasses of scotch and then walked in her direction.

  “You look like hell,” she said when she looked up and saw me.

  She didn’t look so great herself, but a real gentleman would never, ever reciprocate and acknowledge that observation.

  “That right, Moonbeam? Look who’s talking,” I spitefully said.

  She hiked up her long skirt and used a foot to shove out a chair for me. I couldn’t help stealing a peek at that bare leg, since I couldn’t ever remember seeing her when she wasn’t wearing pants or a skirt that went all the way down to her ankles. For all I knew, she didn’t really have any legs, only two stout poles she hobbled around on.

  But she did have legs, I quickly discovered. At least one leg, anyway. And it was the real good kind of leg, too; slender, and quite nicely sculpted. What a shame to waste that artillery on a gay woman, I thought.

  “You drinking?” I asked.

  “Only a beer for me,” she answered. “I can’t handle the hard stuff.”

  “One beer,” I yelled across the room to the bartender, who was putting the finishing touches on my scotch. To Katherine I sourly remarked, “I guess they didn’t drink much in that commune you grew up in.”

  She shot me this irritated look, because it was pretty damned transparent what I was thinking about her parents’ drug of choice.

  “Have you ever been on a commune?” she asked.

  “I saw some in Israel,” I admitted. “Not the flower-power kind.”

  “You think the whole thing’s pretty asinine, don’t you?”

  “Asinine . . . stupid — yeah, that sums it up.”

  The bartender appeared with our glasses, and I called a truce long enough to take the first long sip from my scotch. It burned the whole way down my windpipe.

  “What’s got a burr up your ass?” she asked, her eyes glued to my glass, which was now only half full.

  “Try that you’re the one who dragged me into this, and I just came back from the morgue, where I spent twenty minutes with someone who looked like he use
d to be a real nice kid. Only he’s not breathing anymore. And our client seems to be the cause of it.”

  “Did you review the autopsy results?”

  “Yeah.”

  She picked up her beer with both hands, took a long sip, then stared at me over the lip. “And what did you think?”

  “What I think is our client’s going to end up strapped to a chair in a dark room in Leavenworth with a few thousand volts coursing through his limbs to teach him a lesson. He’ll deserve it, too.”

  She put her elbow on the table and took a smaller, more ladylike sip from her beer. “Unless he was framed,” she finally said.

  “Come on, Katherine, even you can’t really believe that crap.”

  “Give me the benefit of the doubt for a moment,” she said. “You keep ordering me to listen, now give me a turn.”

  “All right,” I said, with an expression designed specifically to let her know she was being humored. Nothing pissed off Katherine Carlson more than the suspicion somebody was humoring her.

  She somehow ignored it. “Say, for the sake of argument, Thomas was so drunk he became virtually comatose. Say he was sound asleep when Lee was murdered, and the body was placed there to make it look like he did it.”

  “Ah, come on,” I said.

  “Suspend your disbelief for a moment.”

  “Okay,” I said, “then you got two suspects. Moran or Jackson.”

  “Which of the two would you home in on?”

  “Moran. He’s big and he’s powerful. Lee No Tae wasn’t any weakling himself, and his body was covered with welts and scrapes and bruises. The doc told me the stomach bruises looked like they were done by a piledriver. Whole ribs were shattered. Whoever subdued him was probably pretty big, and damned strong.”

  “Unless Lee was so drunk he couldn’t fend anyone off.”

  “The problem with that,” I countered, “was that his blood-alcohol level was only .051. Maybe he was technically drunk at midnight, but by the time he was killed he’d sobered up enough to fend for himself.”

  “Okay, good point,” she said. “And the autopsy showed no contusions on his head, like he’d been knocked out?”

  “Nope. There were contusions all over his stomach, his arms, his hands, his shins, and his feet tops, but none on his head or face.”

  “None anywhere on his face?” Katherine asked, sounding surprised, although I suspected this was a ruse, because she was too diligent not to have already reviewed the autopsy results.

  “That’s right,” I admitted.

  “Isn’t that odd?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “Well, figure that he’s in a fight with his attacker. They’re struggling and Lee’s doing everything he can to get away. Why no blows to the face?”

  She had a good point, but I had a better one. “Think about it, Katherine. If a guy was trying to rape him, he’d be coming at him from behind. That’s how the geometry works out between men.”

  “Then how did his stomach and shins get bruised?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe the assault started from his front, then the attacker wrestled himself behind him. Remember, too, that somebody got a web belt around his neck, and the autopsy shows that the belt was being held from behind him.”

  “Maybe,” she said, but without the slightest trace of conviction, mainly, I figured, because she was grasping at straws to build her frame defense and didn’t want to be particularly bothered by any distractions, like conflicting evidence, or good common sense.

  I said, “Look, I know you don’t want to get into this again, but the more I learn about this case, the more dubious your frame defense looks.”

  “Then you stay dubious,” she said. “Maybe it’ll do me some good to have an in-house skeptic.”

  “Maybe. But you think about what you’ll do to our client if it turns out you’re wrong.”

  “Speaking of which,” she said, taking a deep gulp from her beer, “are you up for visiting Thomas again?”

  “For what purpose?”

  “A health-and-welfare visit. He could probably use some cheer.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I muttered, “but if I had my druthers, I’d rather bean him with a baseball bat than cheer him up.”

  The car was out front and it took us about two hours and more wrong turns than I can remember before we found the prison again. All the signs were written in Korean, and Katherine kept berating me, like it was my fault this country was filled with folks who put those goofy sticklike symbols on their signs. Some women are that way.

  It was turning dark when we pulled into the courtyard. We left the driver with the car idling. It took a few more minutes to explain to a guard at a desk who didn’t speak any English why we were there. He kept looking at us like we were door-to-door salespeople, while I kept trying to use sign language to explain what we wanted. I was pointing at the white wall, and repeating “Whitehall,” over and over. I thought it was pretty clever, but Katherine kept glaring at me like I was a complete dolt. At least until the guard finally grinned and started shaking his head up and down, like an overeager puppy who finally got it.

  Then he left us there a few moments till he came back accompanied by the big goon with shoulders like an ox.

  “You wish to see Whitehall?” he asked, giving us that toothy grin.

  “Please,” I humbly said. “Only for a few minutes.”

  He crossed his thick arms across his huge chest. “You should’ve called ahead.”

  “So sorry about that,” I said. “We are relying on your overabundant generosity to allow us to see him.”

  He scowled at me a few seconds, like he thought I was pulling his leg, or maybe he didn’t like being called a generous person, but then he dropped his arms and indicated for us to follow him. We made the same trek. Again, it was so eerily quiet, I swear I heard a guy break wind up on the third floor.

  “What’s this, reading hour again?” I remarked.

  “No, this is prayer hour.”

  “How’s that one work?”

  “They pray to God for forgiveness.”

  “They’re all Christian?”

  “Not when they get here. But they all leave Christian.”

  We were at Whitehall’s cell by that time, and the big Korean was digging through his pockets for the key.

  “I am the only one with one of these,” he said, as he stuck it in and gave it a hard twist. “It is for Whitehall’s safety. There are many men here who would gladly kill him. Even guards.”

  I let that one pass as Katherine and I stuck our heads inside the cell. What I didn’t say was that I wouldn’t mind killing him myself.

  It took a moment to adjust our eyes. The dim light in the overhead cage barely emitted enough rays to make it to the floor.

  “Thomas?” Katherine said.

  There was a slight rustling in the corner of the tiny cell. “Katherine, is that you?”

  “Yes. How are you?”

  “I’ve been better,” he said. “Come in.”

  So we did. The room stank. Obviously Whitehall was using the little metal bowl for his toilet, and just as obviously the bowl wasn’t being emptied.

  “Excuse me,” Katherine said, talking to the big Korean, “why don’t you have someone collect his waste? For God’s sake, this is disgusting. He’ll catch some terrible disease.”

  “Not to worry,” the man assured her. “We collect the bowl every third day. He shouldn’t have eaten so much before he entered. Soon his body will be purged, and his new diet will correct the problem.”

  In other words, pretty soon Whitehall would be getting only small portions of rice and water, so he wouldn’t be producing much human waste. Very economical, these Korean prison officials.

  I said, “Could you relocate about fifty feet away? We have to discuss a few things with our client, and American law affords us the privilege of confidentiality.”

  “Certainly,” he said, smiling like it was a particularly stu
pid request.

  My eyes were now fully adjusted and I carefully examined our client. He was wearing Korean prison garb that consisted of some coarse gray cotton pajamas and a pair of cloth slippers. His lips and face seemed oddly misshapen, and either he had two pretty serious black eyes or he was turning into a raccoon.

  “Pretty rough?” I asked him.

  “Very rough,” he said.

  “Who did this to you?” Katherine demanded, sounding pissed to beat the band.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Whitehall said.

  “No, I won’t ignore this. I—”

  “I said, forget it!” Whitehall yelled, so insistently I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had reached out and punched her.

  “Damn it, Thomas, they can’t do this to you.”

  “Katherine, they can do much worse than this to me. Don’t make them angry.”

  Katherine said, “I’ll go see the minister of justice. If I have to, I’ll hold a press conference and tell the whole world what’s happening here.”

  Whitehall collapsed onto his sleeping mat. “What in the hell do you think caused this in the first place? They dragged me out of my cell in the middle of the night, took me to a room to watch you on CNN, then beat the crap out of me. No more damn favors, huh?”

  I could hear Katherine draw in a deep breath.

  Before she could say any more, I said, “Other than that, how’s things?”

  “Unbearable.”

  “Think you could stand this the rest of your life?”

  There was a moment of still silence. Then out of the shadows he said, “I’d kill myself.”

  It sounded fairly bizarre because he didn’t say it angrily, or forcefully, or even threateningly, like most folks would say it, either to garner some sympathy or to make you offer to do something. His tone was perfectly flat, absolutely unaffected, like it was just a fact.

  I said, “Captain Whitehall, the more I look into your case, the more likely it seems you’re facing just that. Your only chance is me and Katherine here. You’re going to have to tell us more.”

  A reflective look came to his face. The truth was, I’d been sadistically hoping a few days of Korean prison would make him sing like a castrated canary.