Brian Haig - Mortal Allies

Katherine said, “Captain Thomas Whitehall.”

She started to open her lips to say something else, and I raised my hand again.

“What?” she said, even more agitated.

“Hey, I apologize if I’m getting ahead of myself here. What’s he accused of?”

Katherine shook her head and looked around at the others in exasperation. “I’m sorry,” she explained, very nastily, “I know this case has been plastered for weeks on the front page of every newspaper in the U.S. and Korea, but Attila here doesn’t know how to read. Keith, would you quickly summarize the case for our token Army lawyer?”

Keith turned to me and smiled. “Three American soldiers, a first sergeant named Carl Moran, a private named Everett Jackson, and our client were all seen entering an apartment building in the Itaewon section of Seoul. This was around nine o’clock on the night of May 2. Three different witnesses observed them. There was a fourth party with them, a Korean soldier wearing an American Army uniform. His name was Lee No Tae. The witnesses also testified they heard sounds of a loud party that lasted past midnight.”

“The witnesses,” I asked, “they were all South Koreans?”

His smile broadened. “Oh, Sean, how wonderfully clever of you. Anyway, the four soldiers were all in Apartment 13C. It had a living room, a kitchen, three bedrooms, and was leased by Captain Whitehall. About five-thirty in the morning, First Sergeant Moran entered the bedroom where Captain Whitehall was sleeping and discovered him on a sleeping mat beside Lee No Tae. Lee had been strangled with a belt. An autopsy was done and revealed that his anus contained two different specimens of semen. One was traced to First Sergeant Moran, the other to Captain Whitehall. The autopsy also revealed that at least one case of anal penetration had been inflicted after the victim was dead. Since corpses can’t willingly consent, that leads to charges of murder, necrophilia, and rape.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And aside from the fact the victim was lying beside him, what evidence is there that Captain Whitehall did the crime?”

“Lee was strangled with an Army-issue belt that turned out to be Whitehall’s. Also First Sergeant Moran and Private Jackson are both turning evidence against Whitehall. Finally, one of the two semen specimens was traced to Whitehall, and he was the last known partner Lee slept with.”

“This is not good,” I said, which was so ridiculously obvious that everyone else chuckled.

“No, it’s worse than that,” Keith went on. “You know about Lee’s father?”

“The defense minister, right?”

“Also a living legend. He was a big war hero in one of the two army divisions the Koreans sent to Vietnam back in the sixties. When he returned home, he became disgusted with the military dictatorship here, resigned from the army, and became a democratic activist. He was imprisoned a number of times. He was beaten, tortured, and nearly executed, but he never broke. Every time he got out of prison, he went right back to the barricades. Once democracy finally came, he could’ve run for president and easily won. But he never did. He refused to take any rewards, until Kim Dae Jung, the current president, begged him to take the post of defense minister. The reason he begged him is because the Defense Ministry is so rife with corruption that the past three ministers have all ended up in prison. President Kim hoped that Minister Lee would lend his own good name to restore some public confidence in an institution known for being completely rotten.”

I said, “So that makes it bad from a public relations standpoint, but what does it have to do with this case?”

“Well, Lee No Tae was supposedly lured to the apartment without any foreknowledge that the three American soldiers were gay. Supposedly , Lee No Tae just thought he was being given the chance to party with some friendly Americans, one of whom was a high-ranking noncom, and another of whom was an officer. If you accept that, then he was raped twice, once by Moran and once by Whitehall.”

“So that gives the prosecution something to hang over Moran’s head? Is that your point?”

“Oh, Sean, you are clever. But there’s one other point: Nobody in the American Army wants to insult Minister Lee by impugning his son’s sexuality. Like adding insult to injury, if you get my meaning.”

“And what have Moran and Jackson said?”

“We reviewed the statements they gave CID. They say Lee was straight, that he was just there to party, a lot of booze was being imbibed, and things got a little carried away.”

“Anything else?” I asked, noting with some dubiousness how Katherine’s team all seemed to believe the murdered man, Private Lee, was gay, despite what the witnesses were saying.

Katherine said, “Moran refused to confess he had intercourse with Lee. For obvious reasons, of course. He said the last time he saw Lee was when Lee and Whitehall entered the bedroom together, sometime around one in the morning. He said he heard them arguing angrily in the bedroom, but couldn’t tell what the argument was about. Jackson says pretty much the same thing.”

Katherine then began pointing her tiny fingers and handing out assignments to her coterie of cronies, while I stewed and moped in my corner.

I’d never given much thought to the topic of homosexuality, I guess because I’d never had to. I know damn well which sex I want to go home with when the cocktail party’s over, and that’s that. And the thing with the Army is, if you’re gay, you can’t tell anybody, or act like it, so to the best of my knowledge I didn’t even have any gay friends or acquaintances.

But I’d spent my whole life listening to jokes about gays. Eventually that seeps in, so you get to think of gays, at least the male ones, as whimsical, capricious, odd little creatures. Not all of them, though, because there’s another type. There’s the Rock Hudson variety that can completely fool you. I mean, he and Doris Day did manage to pull off some pretty steamy scenes. To this day, all lurid disclosures aside, I still wonder about the Rock. Anyway, his kind of gay doesn’t bother anybody in the least, because after all, what you don’t know don’t hurt you.

I stared at the floor and wished I was anywhere but here. There’re some cases you don’t mind defending, some you’re uncomfortable defending, and some that make you want to leap off a cliff – the kind that make you ashamed to be a lawyer.

Murder, necrophilia, rape: Katherine must’ve plotted her sweet revenge against me for eight long years.

She finally finished passing out instructions, and it didn’t escape my notice that no chores fell my way. The other three went eagerly dashing out of the room. I sat perfectly still in my corner till they were gone. Katherine acted like she took no notice of my still sitting there, till I finally stood up and walked over. I got right in her face, which made it damned hard to pretend I was a piece of furniture.

She broke into an impish grin. “Isn’t this exciting?” she asked. In all seriousness, too.

“No, it’s not exciting. See, exciting is a vacation in Bermuda, living in a cottage only a ten-minute walk from Horseshoe Bay. Exciting is lying on a beach and having no cares in the world. Exciting is wondering which girl’s skimpy bikini top is gonna get washed off by the next big wave. Those were all things I was doing until thirty hours ago.”

“What would you call this, then?”

“May I be candid?”

“Within limits,” she carefully replied. Like I said earlier, the woman wasn’t dumb.

“Completely absurd. You’ve got a client who’s probably guilty as hell. You’ve got a political agenda that never was popular, and your client has probably set it back a few centuries. And you’ve got an axe to grind with me.”