Admin Sergeant Riley’s thin lips crawled over the edge of the porcelain mug. He glugged down some of the milky coffee, set the mug down, and pulled the pencil out from behind his ear.
“You were right, George. The stats on stolen office equipment have risen sharply over the last three months.”
“Up ten percent,” I said. “Prior to that, they ran steady for years.”
Riley shook his head. “Not the smooth operations we’re used to either. Crude. Clumsy. Doors broken. Windows shattered.”
“The slicky boys are going downhill,” I said.
Riley nodded.
“Slicky boys” was a term that had come into use during the Korean War, more than twenty years before. The entire peninsula, from the Yalu River on the border with China to the tip of the peninsula at the Port of Pusan, had been completely ravaged. Hardly a factory or a business enterprise of any sort still stood. Crops had been allowed to rot in the fields after terror-stricken families fled to evade the destruction by the armies that stormed back and forth across the land. People were desperate. People were starving.
In the midst of this desolation were a few military enclaves, surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags. The only places that had food, that had clothing, that had shelter.
Some of the people would barter with the GI’s for the wealth they held. They’d trade anything, even their bodies, for something as insignificant as a bar of soap.
Others took more direct action. These were the slicky boys.
“Slick boys” is what the GI’s called them, but the Korean tongue is incapable of ending a syllable in a harsh consonant. They must add a vowel. So “slick” became “slicky.” And the GI’s picked it up. “Slicky boys” stuck.
And some of them really were boys.
Six, seven, eight years old. They could more easily slip through the barbed wire and hide on the compound for hours and bring out something precious to their waiting families. A handful of dried potatoes, a can of preserved beans.
It didn’t take long for their activities to become organized and their thievery to become bolder. The disappearance of supplies and equipment became a serious problem during the war, and the American generals made sure that precious warehouses were heavily guarded. Armed soldiers were given orders to shoot.
As the war dragged on, desperation kept the slicky boys at their work in the military compounds. And there were many compounds to choose from. By 1952, the United Nations had sent soldiers from sixteen different countries to help defend the Republic of Korea from the Communist aggressors.
In one incident, a slicky boy broke into a stronghold of the Turkish Army and was captured. The Turks tried the twelve-year-old on the spot and convicted him of thievery. After being tortured for a few hours, the boy was decapitated. The severed head was set atop a spike at the gate to the compound and allowed to rot until the unit moved back to the front.
Riley rattled the paperwork in his hand.
“This stealing just isn’t professional enough to be the work of the slicky boys,” he said. “It had to be an amateur.”
“Maybe Whitcomb?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
We thought about that for a moment; I voiced what we were both thinking.
“Even without Whitcomb butting in, how can thievery statistics stay so constant?”
“That’s a hell of a good question.”
Riley loved a puzzle. You could almost see him salivating. He picked up the heavy black receiver and started dialing.
I sat back, sipping on my black coffee. Relaxing. Letting him do the work for a while.
After talking to Whitcomb’s houseboy, Ernie and I had tracked down one of the guys on the “best buddies” list the Sergeant Major had provided us: Terrance Randall.
The picture Randall gave of Cecil Whitcomb wasn’t what we’d expected. Pictures of real people seldom are.
Whitcomb was born into a poor family on the south end of London. His father worked on the docks of the River Thames packing fish and had to make his daily appearance at the market well before dawn. Somewhere along the line, Whitcomb’s dad picked up two bad habits. The first was gambling, which didn’t do much to help the family finances. The second was rising a little early on a wintry morning to make a stop along the way at a likely-looking household and pick up a trinket or two to help pay for bad habit number one.
Whitcomb’s brothers, when they were old enough, picked up where Dad left off and made a full-time business of burglary. As the youngest of the three sons, Whitcomb had been initiated into the family trade but somehow managed to avoid the lengthy police records that his brothers acquired. As such, all the family’s hopes were pinned on him. When he was old enough, he enlisted in the Royal Fusiliers.
They all thought of him as the success story of the family and expected him to make a career of the army. Be somebody. Not just another fool in and out of prison.
But Whitcomb couldn’t resist the rich pickings on an American compound. There was so much equipment and so much of it just wasn’t well guarded. It wasn’t fair.
Randall didn’t know who Whitcomb sold to, but said he was smarter than most of the other blokes in the unit. Most just black-market with one of the women in the bars. The Korean business girls turn around and sell the PX goods to their mama-sans, and they turn around and sell the stuff to someone else. Everybody makes a profit. Whitcomb decided to go right to the source, keep all the profit for himself.
But he wouldn’t tell Randall who that source was. It was Whitcomb’s secret and Randall really didn’t want to become involved. A few bucks a month for selling booze and cigarettes was enough for him.
For the most part Whitcomb was a regular guy. He hung out with his buddies at the 8th Army Snack Bar on the nights when they sold draft beer, and at the 7 Club in Itaewon while their pay lasted.
Randall claimed Whitcomb bragged about the money he was making. How much he’d sent home and how much he would be able to save, for when he went back to civilian life. But he wasn’t planning on retiring from the army for twenty years. A very patient guy. And cautious.
I asked if there was anyone special in Whitcomb’s life or if Randall had ever heard of anyone named Miss Ku. The answer in both cases was negative.
He did give me two things I could hold on to. The first was that they never wore civilian clothes on any of their details, and they had never helped set up equipment at the British Embassy. That made a liar of Miss Ku.
Randall also told us that in the shower room he had once noticed welts on the back of Whitcomb’s thighs. When he asked about them, Whitcomb snapped at him and told him to mind his own business.
He couldn’t think of anyone who would want to kill Cecil Whitcomb. In every murder case I’ve worked, no one ever can. Somehow, people still end up dead.
Riley spoke in what seemed like code to some guy on the other end of the line: percentages, dates, figures. He jotted everything down as he spoke.
Ernie sat on the edge of the desk of the fine-looking Admin secretary, Miss Kim. They’d had a thing going, un-consummated, for months. In front of them were two cups of coffee and they took turns swirling sugar and cream through the satiny liquid. Ernie watched Miss Kim’s slender, red-tipped fingers gracefully rotate. If they were any hotter for one another they would’ve burst into flames.
“Sure,” Riley said. “Thanks, Fred. You got it.”
He hung up the phone.
“That was the Eighth Army Budget Office,” he said. “The guys who plan for casualty losses and theft losses, things like that. The losses that show up in every annual budget. Casualty’s hard to pin down. You never know when there’s going to be a fire or a flood on one of the outlying compounds, or when there will be accidents and supplies and equipment will be damaged beyond repair. That fluctuates every year. All these guys can do is plan for an average.
“Theft is a little different, though. For all the years Fred’s been here, about four, they’ve always written in a three-point-five-percent theft loss in the budgets. Why? Because that’s what they’ve been using as far back as he knows about. Almost to the Korean War. What does it actually run? You already know that. Right about four percent.”
“Every year?”
“Every goddamn year.”
“But that’s a lot of compounds. At least fifty, scattered all over Korea. And a lot of equipment and supplies that vary from year to year.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Riley said. “But somehow the theft losses run almost exactly four percent every year.”
“Any ideas why?”
Riley sipped on his coffee. “Sure.”
“Spell ‘em out.”
He watched Ernie and Miss Kim for a minute. They’d tossed aside their swizzle sticks and were now dipping their fingers into the coffee. That wasn’t so bad. It’s when they started to lick one another’s fingertips that it became sort of ridiculous.
Riley growled. “You two want to tongue each other to death, fine. But do it on your own time.”
Miss Kim turned as red as a silk banner on Chinese New Year’s. She reached into her in-basket, grabbed some paperwork, and started fumbling with her typewriter. Ernie sucked off the coffee that remained on his fingertips and stared at her. Smiling. A coyote admiring a chicken.
Riley looked back at me. “Spell ‘em out? Okay. Koreans are highly organized. They have been for four thousand years. Nothing they do is freelance. Goes against their nature. Whatever it is, it’s got to be done in a group. It might be slaughtering innocent villagers or planting roses for the spring but whatever it is, it’s okay as long as it’s approved by a group and done by a group.”
“So the thievery’s organized?”
“Beyond the shadow of a doubt.”
“Gangs.”
“I wouldn’t call them gangs, Sueno. More sophisticated than that.”
“But they must get into it every now and then. Like in East L.A. turf battles. The low-riders from one barrio going at it against the low-riders from another barrio.”
“No. Never.”
“No dead vatos? How do they pull that off?”
“Central authority.”
“For all of Eighth Army’s activities all over the country?”
“Right,” he said. “How else do you figure they keep the entire take down to four percent? Everything they steal is pre-approved by a central authority.”
I sat quietly, letting that sink in. “Why wouldn’t somebody realize this before? And do something about it?”
Riley shrugged. “All of us Americans are here on a one-year tour. A few more, if we extend. It takes a while to find out about this stuff. The Korean slicky boys don’t exactly advertise. And it would take a lot longer than a year to do anything about it. By that time, all you’re thinking about is going home. So far, nobody’s had the gumption to rock the boat. Not only could it be dangerous to your health but think about it for a minute, we budget for it. The U.S. Government has plenty of money to fight the Communist threat. The American taxpayer is an endless source of wealth. So what’s to worry?” He shrugged.
“And that’s why the slicky boys keep theft down to just above the budgeted amount?”
“Sure. Nobody notices. The honchos at the head shed don’t get upset. Everything’s going according to plan.”
He picked up his coffee mug and drained the last of the stagnant fluid. When he set it down he looked at me. “You’re slow, George. But not hopeless.”
Down the hallway, the First Sergeant barked into his phone. Just a matter of time until he started in on us, and I didn’t feel like answering any of his questions.
I thanked Riley and gave him a thumbs-up. When I policed up Ernie, I almost had to drag him away from Miss Kim. She pouted and didn’t look very happy about him leaving.
To find shelter from the cold we made our way over to the 8th Army Snack Bar. Inside the welcoming warmth of the huge Quonset hut, we filled two heavy-duty cups with steaming black coffee, paid for them, and took a seat at a small table looking out at the passing pedestrians.
I was exhausted. But the memory of Whitcomb’s blood-drained body was keeping me going. That, and the fear of what could happen if we didn’t come up with a culprit, and come up with one soon.
The coffee went down warm and harsh in my throat. I swallowed and set the mug down.
“Maybe we should interview the rest of those guys in the British Honor Guard like the First Sergeant said.”
“Hell with him,” Ernie said. “We start doing everything Top tells us to and he’ll lose respect for us.”
“But the Korean National Police want those reports too. And it takes time to translate them.”
“They already have the important ones.”
We had given a synopsis of what we had found, which wasn’t much, to Riley, who had sent it on to the KNP Liaison Officer.
A couple of Korean women, probably dependent wives, sat at a table near us. Both were attractive. One had long hair and eyes so wide she looked as if she’d paid for an operation to remove the fold of skin above her eyelid. It was supposed to make her look more American. Actually, it just made her look as if she’d taken a terminal hit of methamphetamine.
Ernie stirred his coffee, sipped on it, and gazed at them through the steam. As his glasses fogged up, both women giggled.
I thought of what we had so far. There seemed to be four possibilities.
Ernie listened and occasionally nodded as I ticked them off.
One was that Whitcomb had broken into 8th Army J-2 because he was after classified information. If that was the case, he could’ve been killed by almost anybody-either an agent from Communist North Korea or a counterintelligence agent from our side, or the Korean CIA, or by a middleman in a dispute over payment.
Spying was a growth industry in Korea.
Since the Korean War ended over twenty years ago, the country had been divided by a brutal gash across the center of the peninsula known as the DMZ-the Demilitarized Zone.
On one side sat the South Koreans, officially known as the Republic of Korea, and on the other sat the Communist North Koreans, officially designated as the People’s Republic of Korea. Both republics claimed title to the entire country.
The People’s Army of the Communist regime to the north was over 700,000 men strong, backed up with heavy armor and artillery provided by the Chinese and the Soviet Union.
Their largest artillery pieces were emplaced only thirty miles north of Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The North Korean guns were capable of firing shells into the city itself. North Korean aircraft could drop bombs on the downtown business district within two minutes of the first warning of their approach.
Meanwhile, the South Koreans hadn’t been sitting on their hands, waiting for the big bad North Koreans to come south and gobble them up. Their army was over 450,000 strong. Every able-bodied man was drafted into service at the age of twenty, and their soldiers were amongst the toughest and best trained in the world.
Between these two snarling dragons sat the 30,000 GI’s of the United States 2nd Infantry Division. They were the trip-wire. If the North Koreans ever invaded, their heavily armored legions would slaughter the outgunned and out-manned Americans of the 2nd Division. It was planned that way. Casualties would provide the U.S. President with the ideal pretext to fly in more troops to help defend South Korea from the Communist hordes.
When I’d first arrived in-country, a colonel delivered an orientation speech which summed up the situation we were facing. If war ever broke out again in Korea, he told us, United States soldiers would be involved in the most brutal conflict they’ve seen since the founding of our nation.
In a tribute to how things change, the poets of ancient China had once referred to Korea as the Land of the Morning Calm.
Did the Communist North Koreans send spies into South Korea? By the truckload. One commando raid had actually reached the grounds of the Presidential Mansion in Seoul.
The spies came in by land, across the DMZ through barbed wire and mine fields; by sea, along the rocky coastline of the Korean peninsula; or by air, with phony passports via Japan.
Still, Cecil Whitcomb being a spy for the Communist North Koreans didn’t seem likely. If he was really playing with fire and going after classified documents, why would he have stolen a typewriter and stashed it in his locker? Petty thievery wouldn’t pay much and would only bring unwanted heat. Meanwhile, the North Koreans would be paying him big bucks.
It didn’t make sense.
There had to be something else happening here.
The second possibility was that Miss Ku was exactly what she seemed to be. A woman in love who’d been wronged and decided to hire somebody to exact her revenge.
That made’ some sense when you considered the murder site. Whoever had taken out Whitcomb was a pro. The meeting spot was right in the heart of Seoul, a seemingly safe place for a rendezvous, and yet, because of the layout of the buildings, it was actually quite isolated from prying eyes. Someone had carefully selected it.
Also, Whitcomb had not been very effective in fighting back. He had been stabbed cleanly under the sternum and into the heart. A swift, deft move delivered by an expert.
And he had received many light cuts on the arm. Whoever had assaulted him had been so sure of their abilities that they’d toyed with him before killing him. That didn’t seem very professional, but I suppose some professionals enjoy their work.
Afterward, the money in his wallet had been removed, but that could’ve been done just to make it appear that the murder was a common robbery.
Option number two didn’t appeal to me much. Miss Ku had seemed like a determined young woman. If she wanted to take revenge on Whitcomb she would’ve done it herself. Korean women are bold. When they feel they’ve been wronged, they will attack a man in public, challenge him toe to toe, dare him to hit them, and physically fight if it comes to that. Of course, it’s a great loss of face for the man. And if he beats the hell out of her, he loses even more face. That’s how Miss Ku would’ve gone after Whitcomb.
Maybe.
The third possibility was that it was a random killing perpetrated by a thief who spotted a foreigner in downtown Seoul, attacked him, and stole his money.
Two things argued against that.
First, why would anybody have gone to the trouble of sending Miss Ku to hire us to entice Whitcomb to go to the Namdaemun area? Street thieves prowl likely areas looking for random victims. They don’t make elaborate plans to entice their victims to certain spots.
Second, if it were a common thief, the Korean National Police probably would’ve cracked the case already. And so far they had no more than we did. In a high profile case like this you can bet they’ve already rounded up the known muggers and questioned them thoroughly. The KNP interrogation methods are extremely effective. They don’t have to worry about civil liberties. As long as the guy lives through the interview, the KNP’s are safe from criticism.
It was the last possibility that seemed most likely to me.
When Whitcomb became a freelance thief on Yong-san Compound he’d elbowed into someone else’s territory. He didn’t know it, but it was a territory that had been extremely well-organized for decades.
Ernie nodded as I spoke.
“The slicky boys,” he said.
“Exactly.” I leaned forward. “Think about the bruises that Terrance Randall told us Whitcomb had on his legs.”
“They tried to discipline him?”
“Right. And when he kept it up, the slicky boys hired Miss Ku, used her to dupe you and me into giving Whitcomb that note, then killed him when he showed up in Namdaemun.”
Ernie sipped on his coffee, set it down. He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”
“Why?”
“Koreans wouldn’t rock the boat like that. They knew Whitcomb would only be here a few more months. They’d try to discipline him but if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t kill him. Bring too much heat.”
“Maybe his sloppy thievery would’ve brought even more heat. Ruined a sweet deal.”
Ernie thought about that. “Maybe.”
“And maybe they knew that by compromising us, by getting us to take money from Miss Ku, they’d effectively eliminate the Eighth Army CID from the investigation.”
“Because we’re the only two investigators who even have a prayer of solving a case off-compound?”
“Right.”
“And they wouldn’t be worried about the Korean police?”
“No.”
“‘Cause they got them in the bag?”
“Right again.”
Ernie thought about it. His brow crinkled.
“But that would mean that they would’ve had to know that the case would be assigned to us. That we were on call the night they killed Whitcomb.”
I stared at him.
“Jesus,” he said. “That means they must know damn near everything about us.”
I nodded. We both let it sink in. Finally, I spoke.
“And they expect us to roll over on this. To protect our own butts.”
“Shit.”
Ernie glanced at the two women at the next table. They’d been waiting for him to look over. When he did, they smiled and slowly sucked on ketchup-covered french fries. Ernie stared but he wasn’t seeing them.
“I’m not worried about protecting my own ass,” he said. “It’s hung out there often enough before.”
“Then we have to go through with it, Ernie,” I said. “We have to go after the slicky boys.”
“Nobody’s ever done it before.”
“We’ll be the first.”
A tremor went through Ernie’s body. His lips tightened. I knew he had made a decision. And once Ernie makes a decision he usually doesn’t back away from it, even when he gets hit over the head with a two-by-four.
“You’re damn right we’ll be the first,” he said.
We finished our coffee, stood up, and strode toward the door. The girls had finished their french fries and I almost wanted to go back and talk to them, but we didn’t have time.
We stepped out into the frigid winter air. I took a deep breath, trying to clear my mind of all the jumbled nonsense that had been tumbling through it before. For the first time since we started on this case I felt as if I knew what I was doing.
Whether or not what we were doing was a smart move was another matter entirely.
We’d be going after the slicky boys, the most highly organized criminal organization in the country, to prove that they murdered a British soldier.
Not exactly a routine case.