Martin Limon: Slicky Boys

“Did you see a young woman in here tonight? A very attractive young woman. A university student?”

Lieutenant Pak looked at me. Ernie fidgeted. Suddenly, I realized that I’d made a mistake by bringing it up.

“College student?” The old woman shook her head. “No.”

“Maybe not a college student, but a young woman. Waiting for someone.”

She shook her head again. “There have been no young women here tonight.”

Right, I thought. There were probably three or four bar girls upstairs right now. With paying customers.

I asked a couple more questions but the old couple stuck to their story, which boiled down to they hadn’t seen anything and they hadn’t heard anything. With those big bolted doors it was possible. Maybe.

On our way down the steps, Lieutenant Pak walked next to me. Snow started to fall again, in moist clumps.

“Who is the young woman you asked about?”

I shrugged. “All soldiers-British, American, or Korean-always look for young women.”

“Yes. But you…” He stopped and searched for the word. “You expect something.”

“I expect GI’s to look for women,” I said. “That’s all.”

The blue-smocked technicians at the crime scene were wrapping up their work. The Korean police-and the U.S. Army overseas-don’t rely much on high-tech methods of crime detection. They rely on shoe leather. And on interrogation techniques, the most reliable of which is a fist to the gut.

I turned to Lieutenant Pak and waved my arm toward the jumbled buildings and shacks that ran up the hill away from the murder site.

“Will you let me know if you learn anything from your interviews in the neighborhood?”

“Yes.” He handed me his card. One side was printed in English, the other in Korean. It gave his phone number and his address at the Namdaemun Police Station. I didn’t have a card, but he knew where he could find me. “Will you be talking to his unit today?”

“First thing,” I said.

“And will you tell me what you find out?”

“Yes. I will.”

He nodded. Not quite a bow but good enough for cop to cop. I nodded back.

As Ernie and I stepped down the treacherous stairway, Lieutenant Pak stood at the top, hands thrust deeply into his overcoat, watching us.

So far, this case fell fully under Korean jurisdiction. But Lieutenant Pak knew he’d need my help to ferret out information on the military compounds. And I’d need his if the assailant turned out to be a Korean. So far, we were cooperating.

We’d see how long that lasted.

When we got back to the jeep, Ernie unlocked the chain around the steering wheel and started up the engine. “You almost stepped on your dick back there, pal,” he said.

“Yeah. You think he was suspicious?”

“Of course he was suspicious. He’s a cop, isn’t he?”

“But we’re the investigators assigned to this case for the U.S. side. He’s not going to think we had anything to do with it.”

“Not as long as you keep your trap shut.”

Ernie backed away from the wall, turned the jeep around, and swooshed through the growing blanket of snow. On the way back to the compound, slush and shattered ice ran after our spinning wheels. Frozen ghosts vanishing in the night.

I thought of Cecil Whitcomb and how pale and shriveled his body looked. Just yesterday I’d talked to him, gazed into his eyes, watched as he dispassionately read a note from a beautiful woman pleading for a rendezvous. And I thought of the two women who’d maneuvered us into this mess.

All the shit started with Eun-hi, the sexiest bar girl in Itaewon. For quite some time I’d wanted to get my hands on her flesh. Before it was for lust. Now I had a different motive.

Ernie and I were both grateful to the army.

It may sound strange when you consider that the last big case I solved got me sent to the DMZ for six months. Standard price for busting a general. But somehow the army always seems to know best. I learned a lot up there, found out what life is like in the hinterlands of Korea, and learned to accept my fate like a combat soldier, facing one day at a time, accepting the few comforts fortune might provide. And it gave me time to cool off.

After I’d done some investigative work for the 2nd Infantry Division Commander, the Department of the Army had questioned what a CID agent was doing in an artillery battery. When nobody could answer, I was transferred back to Seoul. Fortunately, the old 8th Army Commander had rotated back to the States so there was nobody left at the head shed with a hard-on for me. I was assigned back to the CID Detachment and after a couple of days it was as if I’d never left.

The army is always changing, which might have something to do with why it doesn’t change at all.

What was I grateful for? For having a real life, for having money coming in-not much, but enough-and for having a job to do. I was an investigator and I wore suits and did important work. A status I never thought I’d reach when I was a kid in East L.A.

My mother died when I was two years old, and my father had taken off for Mexico shortly thereafter. My cousins sometimes told me that he was dead, sometimes that he was alive. After a while I figured that they didn’t know whether he was dead or alive and their rumormongering was just another form of childish cruelty. A few years later, they stopped mentioning him-and I stopped caring.

I was brought up by the County of Los Angeles-in foster homes. It was a rough existence but I learned a lot about people, how to read them, how to hide when it was time to hide, and how to wait them out. The mothers were all right. It was the fathers you had to watch put for. Especially when they were drunk.

In the summers I was allowed to stay with my Tia Esmeralda, and she and her son, my cousin Flaco, taught me what it is to be Mexican. They taught me what it is to revere a family. What it is to cling to your honor no matter how painful a prospect that might be, even unto death.

What they didn’t say to me, what nobody said, was that my father hadn’t clung to his. He was a lost man. A man who hadn’t honored his family. I learned a GI phrase later that described it perfectly: lower than dog shit.

Ernie was from a whole different world: the suburbs of Detroit. And he was grateful to the army for another reason.

When Ernie had first landed in Southeast Asia he was an eighteen-year-old pup with wide eyes and a sex drive as big as the monsoon sky. He loved it all: the mad convoys of two-ton trucks swerving around children and sharpened spikes on Highway 1, the dugout bunkers wired with rock and roll and shuddering with the pounding of nightly rocket attacks, the taking of women in broad daylight in muddy rice fields, the dirty-faced kids selling moist clumps of hashish through barbed wire fences.

After a year it was over.

When he went back to the States the place seemed bizarre. Everyone worried about deodorant and cars and mortgage payments. They ignored the fundamental realities of life. Like slaughter. Ernie had to go back to Vietnam. Back to the real world. He did.

But by this time the skinny Vietnamese boys had run out of hashish. All they had for sale were dirty vials of white horse, pure heroin from the Burmese Triangle. The GI’s knew it was a weapon, unleashed on them by the North Vietnamese in their desperate attempt to turn the tide of battle. But they took it anyway.

By the end of his hitch in the army, Ernie was strung out.

Back on the streets as a civilian, he was just another junkie and he knew he wouldn’t last long. In a fit of sobriety, he popped into the army recruiter’s office. Two weeks later he was back in boots. Clean. Quieting the aching need in his gut by filling it with liquor. To the point of madness. A fully acceptable pastime, as far as the army was concerned. They even encouraged drunkenness. They considered it whole-some.