Martin Limon - Jade Lady burning

Ernie leaned back in his big canvas-covered seat, his hands resting contentedly on the steering wheel.

“You think Johnny did it?”

“Hard to say. So far we don’t have much information. A girl killed. Brutally. Skewered and burned. Johnny knew her. Kimiko knew her. A whole bunch of other customers knew her. I don’t see any reason yet to pick this Spec-4 out of the crowd.”

“Other than he’s a GI and the Korean newspapers are assuming it’s a GI and the commanding general has to give them something.”

‘There’s that. But locking him up for a while won’t hurt him. And it’ll give us a chance to sort this shit out. If he did it, fine, we’ll burn his ass. If he didn’t, we’ll find out who did.”

“Better hope so. For his sake.”

Ernie spit his gum out the window, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. “One thing bothers me, though.”

“What’s that?”

‘The interrogations Captain Kim conducted. Nobody saw nothin’. Nobody heard nothing.”

‘That’s what I’d expect them to say.”

“But Captain Kim can be very persuasive. And he’s got enough power out in that village to twist the truth out of them. Yet he let them get away with claiming that nothing shit.” Ernie sat up and turned towards me. “You saw those hooches. They’re all jammed right against each other. And they’re not much more than plywood and plaster. If this guy hurt that girl that bad, and held her down and tied her up and then started a fire, somebody must have heard something! You know they did. They probably all know who the hell did it!”

‘They heard. For sure they heard something. But they didn’t necessarily see anything. People out there have a habit of not poking their noses outdoors at night.”

“Well, maybe they didn’t actually see the guy but they knew that something was going on. Hell, that’s why that landlady called the fire department so fast. She was wide awake. Listening to it all. And when she first smelled smoke, she called the fire department.”

I nodded slowly.

“But for some reason Captain Kim isn’t beating the truth out of them. He’s letting us work on the case in the blind, without any eyewitness accounts, pretending that he can’t get any information.” Ernie leaned closer and I could smell the spearmint and stale liquor on his breath. “He wants us to collar a GI on this end so he can clear the case. Even if the Gl is acquitted. By the time that happens, everyone will be convinced that he did it and just got off easy in the Korean court because he’s an American. It takes the pressure right off Captain Kim to find out who really did it.”

What Ernie said made a lot of sense. I couldn’t see any flaw in his logic, except one.

“Maybe we’re not giving Captain Kim enough credit. Maybe he is working on this case and maybe the next time we talk to him he’ll have come up with some leads.”

Ernie leaned back farther into his chair and crossed his arms. “Don’t count on it.”

“Why would Captain Kim not want to find the real guy?”

“Because it involves somebody high up. Somebody with power over him.”

“I don’t know, Ernie.”

Conspiracy theories make me nervous. My stomach churned for a while. Evil juices. I got out of the jeep and walked a few yards down the street to a shop with a big red sign over it that said yak-medicine. The middle-aged woman behind the counter blinked at me as I paid her for the Bacchus D, and when I got back inside the jeep I unscrewed the top and poured the entire contents of the little bottle down my throat in one greedy gurgle. It tasted like fruit juice-pears and pineapples-and did wonders for my stomach and my newly aroused headache.

I tossed the empty bottle in the backseat (Ernie’s boys at the motor pool would clean it out for him) and settled back in my seat to wait.

Twenty mi nutes later a hard-topped jeep pulled up to the front of the ADA compound. A sign in the window said, COURIER, DO NOT DELAY. The gate guard pulled back the chain across the gate and waved him through.

I got out of the jeep and walked over to the guard shack.

“Was that the guy who picks up the ration control stuff?”

The crewcut MP put down his comic book. “Yeah,” he said.

I motioned to Ernie and we got into position and waited some more. We didn’t wait long. When Johnny Watkins pulled up to the gate coming out, I stepped out of the guard shack and flashed my badge at him.

“Good morning, Johnny. I’m Investigator Sueсo. Just want to ask you a few questions about an acquaintance of yours out in the ville.”

“Who’s that?”

“Miss Pak Ok-suk.”

Johnny was a trim guy, blond, and he wore his fatigues loosely, like a pair of pajamas, unwashed and unstarched. He looked more like he should be on a surfboard at Doheny than driving a jeep for the Army in the Republic of Korea.

“Miss Pak? Sure. No sweat.”

He reached for his gearshift as if he were going to park the vehicle and then he let out the clutch, the engine squealed, and he leapt forward, just missing my foot.

Ernie was already making a U-turn as I ran towards the road. He slowed down to let me hop in, but not much.

Johnny got a good head start on us and we got trapped for a few seconds behind a three-wheeled truck overloaded with sacks of cement. Ernie jerked the wheel out into the oncoming traffic, stepped on it, and we barely nosed in front of the truck before a kimchi cab had a chance to plow into us, headfirst.

Johnny sped north towards the Han River and must have had the accelerator to the floorboard because his little buggy was moving. I thought I heard a Jan and Dean song in the background: “Dead Man’s Curve.”

Wasting ourselves in an auto accident wouldn’t be good, and losing Johnny and not making the arrest wouldn’t be good. What would be good would be for him to pull over and stop this foolishness, but that didn’t seem likely.

Ernie leaned forward, like a pointy-nosed demon, and let the little jeep do its thing. We were up to about sixty-five or seventy and I kept hearing little pings and coughs in the engine as if it were clearing its throat.

Up ahead at the river, the road took a sharp turn around a hill and I figured it for the curve that would get him. We heard honking but when we got around the curve ourselves the oncoming traffic was getting back into line and somehow Johnny had increased his lead. He sped past the entrance to the Third Han River Bridge and boogied on down the banks of the ancient River Han.

Ernie seemed to be getting angrier and taking more chances as Johnny increased his lead. He swerved in and out of traffic, his knuckles white on the wheel, and I saw his jaw moving and I wasn’t sure if that was his teeth I heard grinding or the gears of the engine.

We ran past the National Cemetery, green mounds rising gracefully up the side of a hill, and somehow I felt that it was appropriate for us to end here.

It was the water buffalo that finally got Johnny. It was on the road, towing an old wooden cart, an old farmer pulling it forward gently by the rope through the huge, snorting nostrils. The farmer’s wife and two children were in the cart, bundled up in quilts.

Johnny wasn’t expecting the traffic to slow that quickly. He slammed on his brakes and swerved to the left, but then had to jerk the wheel back to the right to avoid the man on the bicycle with pallets of eggs piled two feet above his head on the carrying rack behind him.

The eggs went down and Johnny lost control. He spun a couple of times and slid sideways into the water-filled ditch in front of a rice paddy.

Johnny wasn’t hurt too bad. Just bruised and shaken up. The guy on the bicycle had a broken leg-a compound fracture-and the biggest omelet I’d ever seen in my life. The water buffalo was okay.