Martin Limon - Ping-Pong Heart

“About what?”

She shrugged. “I’m just a lowly MD. You’ll have to talk to the honchos about that.”

When we finished our dinner, I took her hand. “Thanks for coming out here with me.”

She stared straight into my eyes. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

Leah Prevault wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, but she had brains and an outgoing personality that made most people relaxed enough to confess their innermost secrets to her. By Ernie’s standards she was plain: She wore no makeup, her long brown hair was usually knotted in the back of her head, and her horn-rimmed glasses often slipped halfway down her nose. But her full-lipped smile was generous, her complexion smooth, and I’d probably fallen for her the first time I met her.

“You like the brainy ones,” Ernie told me, without a tone of approval. “They just land you in trouble.”

“Trouble in what way?”

“They make you want to settle down.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

Ernie looked at me like I was mad. “There’s a whole world of women out there.” He waved his arm. “How can you settle for just one?”

“How many do you need?” I asked.

“More than I’m getting,” he said.

Captain Prevault and I didn’t return to the compound that night. Fraternization between the ranks is a court-martial offense. We stayed at a Korean inn, away from the prying eyes of the 8th US Army.

Two days later, the word came down. Riley hoisted the phone to his ear, listened, and barked, “Roger that!” He slammed down the receiver. “You guys remember that Major Schultz?” he asked.

“What do you mean, ‘remember’?” I asked.

“He’s history.”

“What are you talking about, Riley?”

“That was the KNP Liaison. They found Schultz dead, at some dive out in Itaewon.” He jotted something on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “Captain Kim’s at the scene right now.”

I looked at the paper. The Dragon King Nightclub.

“Dead?” Ernie asked.

“Deader than a ping-pong ball in a minefield,” Riley replied. “Better get your asses in gear.”

We did. Ernie grabbed his coat and I grabbed mine. Within seconds, we were in his jeep and speeding out Gate 7, waving at the MPs, swerving toward Itaewon. Ernie honked his horn and zoomed past a three-wheeled truck loaded with a small mountain of garlic. He held his nose.

“I’ll never get used to this country,” he said.

“Oh, bull, you love every minute of it,” I told him. “I’ve seen you pop down three orders of roasted garlic in one sitting.”

“That’s after a bottle of soju.”

“You like the smell of garlic better after a bottle of soju?”

“I like anything better after a bottle of soju.”

Captain Kim, Commander of the Itaewon Police Station, stood waiting for us. He was a lugubrious-faced man with sagging jowls and eyes that sloped downward at the edges, as if weighed down by years of misery. He opened his palm and waved us through the door of the Dragon King Nightclub.

It was a small joint off the main drag of Itaewon, along the main supply route. One of the boutique barrooms that had sprung up not only to cater to GIs, but also to the growing class of young Koreans from wealthy families who could afford to spend ten or twenty thousand won per night-twenty to forty US dollars-on beer or liquor and an evening of cabareting. These youthful elites found it particularly exciting because these nightclubs were near the notorious red-light district of Itaewon, restricted to foreign guests only. Nothing is more titillating than that which is forbidden.

The place was modern compared to the old joints in the heart of Itaewon. The floor was tiled, the bar lit with a wedge of neon, and the stools made of stainless steel. We followed Captain Kim to the hallway in the back that led past the bathrooms and through a swinging door and into a neatly kept storage room. The back door was open. Sunlight filtered through a heavy overcast. We stepped into the alley.

“Here,” Captain Kim said, pointing, “next to those.”

Four wooden crates, all full of empty crystalline soju bottles, were piled on top of one another. But beyond that were more crates, some of them smashed, bottles shattered, and the strong rice liquor long since seeped into the ground. I knelt and watched the dim sunlight play off the jagged edges of the glass, stained with tiny spots of reddish-brown. The spray droplets grew larger as they consolidated into a pool of something sticky and black, looking as if they had been tossed from a large pan.

I stood slowly. “The technicians?” I asked.

“They come soon,” Captain Kim said. “Truck come.”

“And the body?”

“Already take to Seoul. They gonna check. Everything.”

He meant the morgue in downtown Seoul. Ernie and I had been there many times before.

“Why didn’t you wait for the Eighth Army Coroner?” Ernie asked.

“First, we don’t know he GI. No wallet, no nothing.”

“We’re right next to Itaewon,” Ernie replied. “You must’ve known he was a GI.”

“Maybe,” Captain Kim said, shrugging. “But honcho say take Seoul.”

“Which honcho?” I asked.

“You know.”

I stared at him. “No, I don’t know.”

He shrugged, resigned to the fact that we’d find out soon enough. “Gil Kwon-up,” he said.

This was indeed a man we knew well. The brilliant chief homicide detective of the Korean National Police, whom American GIs called “Mr. Kill.”

“Why’s he interested in this?” Ernie asked.

Captain Kim shrugged again. “You ask him.”

“When we took the call, we were told that the victim was Major Schultz. If you had no wallet and weren’t even sure he was a GI, how’d you know his name?”

“Maybe they find wallet later. I don’t know. You ask chief inspector.”

The KNPs were just making excuses for having transported his body to the downtown morgue. Routinely, if the victim was an American, they were more than happy to turn it over to us; less trouble for them, less scrutiny from their superiors. In this case, there had to be a reason they’d wanted to examine the corpse on their own.

“How was he killed?” I asked.

“A lot of blood, you see. Body cut bad. Maybe twenty, thirty times.”

“What type of blade?”

“Maybe more than one type.”

“A knife?”

“You look at body. You see.”

“Did he fight?”

Captain Kim spread his arms and turned slightly. “Look.”

What surrounded us were neatly stacked wooden crates filled with glass bottles, beyond the stack that had been turned over and smashed. Not one of the others had been knocked over.

“Did somebody clean up?”

“No, still same.”

That meant that if a fight had taken place, it had been short and sweet, and Major Schultz had gone down quickly.

“What time was the body found?”

“This morning, old lady come. Her job, clean up.”

“She has a key?”

“Yes. Always come in back door. First she see body, then she see blood. She run away, go KNP station.”

“Did she see anybody else around here?”

“No, just body.”

“And last night, was there a fight?”

“Owner at station now. We go talk.”

We did. The owner claimed to know nothing about the big American who’d ended up dead behind the Dragon King Nightclub. As a matter of fact, no Americans at all had entered his club last night. Just before the midnight curfew, he had personally locked the place up tight and left through the back door. He hadn’t noticed anyone lurking in the alley at that time.

When we were through talking to him, I asked Captain Kim, “Has he already been interrogated by Gil Kwon-up?”