Martin Limon - Jade Lady burning

Ginger had jumped into an intimate conversation with a woman down the bar. She was elegantly dressed, tall, with a big shining rock on her finger. Ernie pointed his nose at a few of the girls on the dance floor and finally one of them walked over to him and stood leaning against his bar stool, his legs spread-eagled around her.

Ginger brought me another beer and leaned over to talk in my ear so I could hear her above the dulcet sounds of ‘The Orange Blossom Special.”

‘This is from her. She wants to talk to you.”

I glanced down the bar for a second. The woman was older than I usually liked, closing in on thirty. Her eyes were cast demurely down.

“No sweat,” Ginger said. “She’s my friend, here from the States. On vacation.”

I walked down the bar and she smiled when I took the seat next to her. Ernie got lost and, by the time the band was ready to start another break, so did we, scooting out the front without even saying goodbye to Ginger.

Her name, she told me, was Miss Lim and she claimed she owned one of those hostess bars in Honolulu that cater to Japanese tourists and mainlanders looking for something exotic. What it meant, probably, was that she was married to a GI, worked in one of those bars, and made more in tips during one good weekend than he made for the entire month.

She told me about how she prepared the puupuus, the free snacks, for her customers every night. What she didn’t tell me about were the handjobs under the table. When I asked, she just laughed.

She’d been here in Seoul, staying with her mother, for a few days and had to leave Korea in another week or so. I figured she could afford a nice hotel room but she didn’t think much of the idea.

“You man,” she said.

Since I was paying for it, we went to a rundown yoguan.

She didn’t want to wash me like the business girls do and she balked when I asked her for a particularly intimate sexual favor.

“It’s only our first date,” she said.

They go to hell fast when they go to the States.

At dawn, gray light filtered through the tattered cloth curtain covering the small window. Miss Lim lay next to me, naked. Thanks to Miss Lim I was not too hung over and I lay still in the bed, trying to put myself in Kimiko’s place and imagine where she might have gone.

Kimiko was old enough to have been born during the Japanese occupation of Korea. That’s probably why she used a Japanese woman’s name, Kimiko, as her working name. She had seen Korea transformed from an Oriental colony into a hideous battlefield for warring superpowers and now into what verged on a modern industrial state. During all that time she had remained firmly entrapped on the lowest rungs of society.

I couldn’t begin to imagine what must be going through her mind. We were too different. My guess was, though, that she understood me and others like me-completely.

When the first sergeant heard about Johnny he tried to take over the operation.

Ernie said, “You don’t want to do it that way, Top. Let me and George go in quietly and find out what’s going on with this guy before you send in the cavalry and the sirens and every glory hound in Eighth Army.”

The first sergeant stood up from behind his desk and leaned forward.

“All right. But I want this guy Johnny, whoever he is, arrested before close of business today. And don’t screw it up. The CG is screaming for a suspect. He has to keep explaining to the Koreans why no GI has been arrested yet and they don’t really want to hear it.”

“International relations, eh?”

“Don’t get cute, Bascom. Just get us the suspect.”

The first sergeant sat down and started to take a sip out of his coffee mug but realized it was empty. He got up, walked over to the metal coffee urn on the counter, tilted it, and cursed. It was empty, too.

Ernie and I looked at our full, steaming cups nervously. The first sergeant turned and looked at them, too.

“And you were late again. Both of you.” He sat back down behind his desk. “And why didn’t you give me the lead on this guy Johnny last night? We could have had him behind bars by now. The provost marshal is at the command conference room, as we speak, giving his briefing on our lack of progress on the case and getting his ass chewed. Don’t you guys have any loyalty?”

“Loyalty?” Ernie said. He looked at me. “Sure, We got loyalty.”

I sipped on my coffee. “Loads,” I said.

The first sergeant glared at us. One of his management techniques. His day was going too smoothly, I decided.

“What if he didn’t do it?”

“What?” He looked startled.

“What if Johnny didn’t kill Miss Pak Ok-suk? I mean all we have established so far is that he knew her and spent some time with her. No particular reason to believe that he was the guy who offed her.”

“He’s the boyfriend, isn’t he?” the first sergeant said. “It’s always the boyfriend.”

“Maybe he can prove where he was the night of the murder,” Ernie said. “Maybe he didn’t have an overnight pass. Or maybe he was Staff Duty Driver that night.”

The first sergeant toyed with his coffee mug. He gazed at it sourly. “We’ll worry about that shit once we get him behind bars.”

Burrows and Slabem breezed into the office.

Ernie stood up. ‘We’ll take care of the arrest, Top. Don’t sweat it.”

“What arrest?” Burrows said.

I tapped him on the chest. “Cardiac arrest. The one Top would have if you two guys ever actually dug out some information on your own.”

“What information?” Slabem said.

When we got to the Admin Office we waved at Miss Kim and trotted down the steps to Ernie’s jeep.

If we hesitated about going to the motor pool, the first sergeant might change his mind and send Burrows and Slabem. Not that they’d do a better job, they’d just do a more reliable one. Since Eighth Army needed a suspect, they’d arrest a suspect, and not pay any attention to frivolous bothersome facts.

Ernie popped the clutch, the wheels caught on the ice, and we jerked forward.

“Looks like Mr. Johnny stepped into a world of shit,” he said.

“Either that or we have.”

The jeep slid swiftly along the tree-lined avenues of Eighth Army Headquarters. My skin tightened at the rush of frigid air.

21 T Car was one of those great GI acronyms that actually stood for the Twenty-first Transportation Company, alias the motor pool: the place that provided the jeeps and the sedans and the buses and all the other requisite wheeled vehicles in support of the activities of the Eighth United States Army Headquarters. The huge open parking area was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with trident-pronged barbed wire. At the entrance a green arch covered the guard shack, emblazoned with a martial welcome and the insignia of the U.S. Army Transportation Corps.

The Korean guards waved us through. They knew Ernie.

Most of the other CID agents had to use the handful of sedans provided for their use at the detachment. Usually it was a half day’s work trying to prioritize the various cases everyone was working on and playing politics to see who got which sedan. After ending up with the clunker most of the time, Ernie took matters into his own hands and romanced the dispatchers down at 21 T Car into assigning him a jeep that they had managed to slip off the ready-for-duty list.

Two quarts of liquor every payday kept the jeep reserved and all regular maintenance was thrown in. We had the added advantage of being a little harder to spot by the bad guys, who had the makes and models of the CID sedans memorized.

“Where to first?” I asked

“Chief Winkle.”

Ernie jerked the wheel to the left and pulled up to a big ramshackle one-story wooden building that was the dispatchers’ office. He parked, locked the chain, welded to his floorboard, to the steering wheel, and got out.