Mortal Allies (22 page)

It’s what writers term an appalling irony. I call it frustrating as hell.

But the most surprising thing I’d learned was that Whitehall was actually a pretty good guy. Actually, unless Ernie Walters was a complete fool, Whitehall was a great guy. And if Gilderstone was right, then Whitehall should be showing terrific emotional effects from the murder. I’d seen no signs of that.

Too bad I’d also learned my client was a boxer with concrete fists driven by powerful pistons, and with a psychic trigger that could drive him over the edge. He had the kind of power to shatter jaws and noses — certainly enough to cause the hideous bruising I’d seen on Lee’s body.

T
he sign over the door read HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, YONGSAN GARRISON. There was nothing distinctive about the building. It was just a musty old red-brick barracks built by the Japanese back when the Korean peninsula was a colony they’d collected from the Russo-Japanese War.

The Japanese had not been generous or merciful rulers. In fact, they’d been boneheadedly cruel, plundering Korea’s resources and treating its people like slave laborers. They had even drafted a few thousand young Korean girls and shipped them off to troop brothels all over Asia, where they forced them to perform as sex slaves for the emperor’s warriors. As insults to other cultures go, that’s pretty vile. The Koreans remembered it, too. Vividly, in fact.

I walked through the entrance and asked the first soldier I saw to direct me to the first sergeant’s office. He gave this quick, fleeting look of disbelief and then pointed me to the third door down on the left, where a big green sign that read FIRST SERGEANT stuck out into the hallway.

And you wonder why enlisted troops think officers are such dopes.

When I entered the office, I found myself standing directly in front of a dark-haired specialist four. She was seated behind a gray metal desk and talking on the phone, shamelessly flirting with somebody on the other end. She got my attention right away. She was a bit too fleshy and her features were too big for her to be considered real attractive, but she’d make heads swivel; no doubt about that. One look and you got this instant vision of bedsheets and heavy breathing.

The Army’s got fairly stiff rules against female soldiers making themselves too alluring and seductive. This woman didn’t just violate them, she knocked them miles out of the ballpark with her puffed-up bouffant hairdo, a pair of big, flashy gold hoops that hung from her earlobes, and enough blush, lipstick, and rouge to paint the Berlin Wall. She was ferociously chewing what seemed to be a gigantic wad of gum.

“Hey, wait a moment,” she mumbled, putting a hand over the mouthpiece, then skillfully using her tongue to wedge the gum to the side of her mouth.

I gave her a nice, warm, cheery smile. “I’d like to speak with your first sergeant, please.”

She didn’t reply. Or she
did
reply. Her shoulders arched back a bit, a gesture I recognized right away as a womanly attempt to get me to notice her uptoppers a bit better. They were big uptoppers, too; so big she really didn’t need to waste any energy to draw attention to them. Even through her baggy battle dress, I could see that right nicely.

Having gotten my attention, she smiled a bit more encouragingly. “And could I know the nature of your business, Major?”

“I’m the attorney for Captain Whitehall.”

“Captain Whitehall?”

“Yeah, Whitehall,” I said, looking around like maybe I’d wandered into the wrong unit. “Isn’t he the guy who used to command this company?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, hanging up the phone without saying good-bye and then standing up. “Well, I’m sorry. The first sergeant’s not in.”

“Uh, okay. Thanks,” I told her, getting ready to depart.

Then I changed my mind.

“Wait a moment, Specialist, uh . . .” To check her nametag, I had no choice but to gaze once again at that huge chest of hers, an act she made all too easy by very generously pushing it even closer to my face.

“Uh, Specialist Fiori,” I finished.

She seemed to like that a lot. Her gum slipped back into the chewing position and her jaw started chomping again. She coyly asked, “There something I can do for you?”

“Well, maybe. Did you know Captain Whitehall?”

“Yes sir.”

“Did you know him well?”

“I’d guess so. I was
his
clerk before . . . you know, everything happened.”

“So, you what? You worked directly for him?”

She nodded and chewed her gum even more vigorously.

“How long?”

“Seven months. I sat right in his outer office. I was, uh, his girl Thursday. That’s what he always called me.”

“Thursday?” I said, scratching my head. “You mean Friday?”

“Uh, yeah. Whatever,” she replied with a ditzy look.

Very foolishly, I said, “See, it’s from this novel called
Robinson Crusoe
. Maybe you read that when you were young?”

“Nah,” she said, chewing even harder. “Reading wasn’t never my thing.”

No, it probably wasn’t.

I leaned up against her desk and got comfortable. So she leaned up against her desk and got even more comfortable — a little too much so, maybe. She ended up about six inches from me.

I said, “Did you like him?”

Her eyes started searching my face, like maybe she was wondering how to answer that. If she was looking for a clue, I didn’t give her any.

She sucked on her tongue a moment, then said, “Okay, yeah, I liked him. A lot.”

“Why’d you like him?”

“He was just a swell guy. Everybody liked him. At least, everybody respected him.”

Amazing, I thought — almost word for word how Ernie Walters had phrased it.

“Okay,” I said, “could you tell me why everybody liked, or at least respected him?”

“He was a good officer. Y’know, you work in a headquarters company like this, you see scads of officers. I mean, there’s probably two hundred on our roll. No offense or nothin’, but most of them are either jerks or wimps.”

“That bad, huh? And I always thought officers were the crème de la crème.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the pick of the litter,” I said, and she still looked perplexed. “The best of the crop,” I tried again, and her befuddled look only deepened.

Not only did she not read much, but her knowledge of French, hogs, and farming was sorely lacking.

“Yeah, whatever,” she finally mumbled, like, Why was I torturing her with these complex issues? “Anyway, Captain Whitehall was different. He was real smart, y’know.”

I couldn’t escape the thought that this woman considered anybody who could tie their own shoes stratospherically intelligent.

Then after a thoughtful pause, she said, “And fair. He was always real fair.”

“Now, you’re sure you’re not just saying that because you were his clerk?”

“No way. You wanta know the truth? Word’s been put out
not
to say anything nice about the captain.”

I pulled back and gave her a shocked look. “Really? No kidding? Who’d put out something like that?”

“Well, y’know, nobody ever announced it or anything. I mean, there’s nothing official. It’s what I hear, though. Y’know?”

Yes, I knew.

The Army, like most big organizations, has two channels of communications, and this clearly wasn’t one of those instances where the first sergeant could simply draw all the troops into a formation and scream, “The first one of you jerk-offs who mutters a single nice thing about Whitehall will be cleaning the shitters for the rest of your Army career!” A more subtle method was used. They simply whispered the same message into the right sergeant’s ear, and in seconds flat it was the talk of the latrine.

Anyway, I said, “But you thought he was a pretty good commander?”

“Hey, it isn’t just me saying so,” she insisted, pointing toward a tall trophy rack in the corner.

I looked over and there were some very old, badly corroded antiques neatly positioned on the two top shelves, and six gleaming, brand-spanking-new trophies near the bottom.

In peacetime, you can’t win any battles — there aren’t any — so the Army channels all that dormant martial energy into having units compete against one another for various distinctions. The competitions get pretty fierce and bloodthirsty, since they’re the only way the overambitious can outshine their peers and get noticed doing it.

I was staring at six months’ worth of trophies declaring Headquarters Company, Yongsan Garrison, to be the top unit in all of Korea.

Thomas Whitehall, it appeared, was a singularly energetic and competent officer. Of course, he’d
told
me he was the first time I’d met him. But you learn to discount that kind of stuff, because if there’s one thing most officers get pretty good at, it’s spit-shining their own asses.

I turned back to Specialist Fiori, who, while I wasn’t looking, had somehow gotten herself fully up on top of her desk and into this strangely contorted position where her hips were twisted sideways, and her shoulders were slung back, and her breasts bulged tightly against her battle dress. If she were wearing a bikini, it would’ve been a glorious sight. Even in camouflage battle dress it had its righteous qualities.

And that’s when I realized what a sly dog Tommy Whitehall really was. No wonder he’d planted her in his outer office. If she wasn’t a full-blown nymphomaniac, she sure pulled off a lavish impersonation. That slick devil. She was the replacement for that girl’s picture he’d kept on his desk back at West Point; his latest piece of camouflage.

I smiled at Specialist Fiori and thanked her for her honesty. She sucked in her lower lip, fluttered her eyelashes, and swiveled her shoulders in this sideways, provocative, swaying motion that made her uptoppers undulate like a couple of humongous sand dunes in a windstorm. She’d seen a few too many Marilyn Monroe movies, if you ask me.

“So, you’re a lawyer?” she asked, licking her lips.

“Yep, that’s right.”

“Does that mean you get paid more than other officers?”

“Nope,” I told her, making my way steadily toward the door. She only had time to give me one more sizzling glance before I made it to the safety of the hallway.

I rushed straight back to the hotel to see if there were any messages. But the moment I walked into the lobby, I ran smack into the middle of a large gaggle of men. They were mostly in line, getting checked in. There were probably fifty in all; some wore black-and-white collars and some didn’t. By their noisy chatter, they sounded like a convention of southern rednecks. How very curious, I said to myself.

I artfully worked my way to the end of the line and stood behind a fleshy older gent, tall and rotund, who had nothing but some frizzy fuzz left on his big head. He looked like a big walking peach, nudging his bags forward with the tip of his foot as he inched up in line.

I bumped up against him and he spun around.

I winced and said, “Uh, gee, sorry. I hope that didn’t hurt.”

“Not at all, son,” he responded in a syrupy, deep southern drawl that made it sound like “not’all, sun.”

I grinned. “Well, welcome to Korea. This your first time here?”

“Actually, nope. I was here in ’52, as a private, during the war.”

“Place has sure changed, hasn’t it?” I asked.

This was always a surefire opener to use with old Korean War vets. The last time they laid eyes on Korea it was nothing but shell-pocked farming fields that reeked literally of shit, and countless tiny, drab villages composed of thatched huts, and miserable, squalling people who couldn’t rub two nickels together. Now it was cluttered with skyscrapers and shiny new cars and, believe me, more than a few billionaires.

“The Lord surely has wrought a miracle,” he pronounced.

“Indeed he has. Is this some kind of returning vets’ group?” I asked, nodding with my chin.

“Nope. We’re all preachers and deacons.”

“Aha!” I said to Preacher Peach. “I suppose, then, that you’re all here for some religious convention?”

“Not actually, no. We’re here ’bout this Whitehall thing. Y’know, that murderin’ ho-mo-sex-u-al,” Preacher Peach intoned, painfully stretching out every single vowel, like it was just so damned hard to force that particular noun through his lips.

“Uh-huh. I guess that makes sense.”

“We’ve been invited by the Army,” he said, obviously immensely proud of that.

“The Army? No kidding? What? They asked you to come over?”

“They sure did. See, we were in Washington, for the big march. You see that on TV over here?” he asked in such a tone that it sounded like, Hey, did you see me land on the moon?

“Uh, yeah, I did. Very impressive,” I assured him.

“Yep. Well, we’re the fellas who put all that together. Anyway, a group of us was asked to stop over at that Pentagon, and the Chief of the Staff of the Army, he asked us hisself if we wanted to come over. Even loaned us a plane. A real nice fella, you ask me.”

“Well, ain’t that really something,” I remarked, slyly slipping into my own version of a bacon-and-grits brogue. “Mind if I ask, what’s the Army expecting y’all to do over here?”

“Ah, well, there weren’t no conditions nor nothin’. We’re just here to represent the views of all good Christian ’Mericans,” he said. “We’re here to show the cross.”

“You got any plans for how to show the cross?” I asked as offhandedly as I could manage, under the circumstances.

“You’ll be seein’ us around.” He smiled and beamed, nudging his bag up another yard or so. Then he looked at the lawyer insignia on my collar, and his eyes moved down to my boots and back up again.

“Say, you’re a lawyer, ain’t you?”

“Yep,” I admitted. “Worst thing in the Army to be. Dregs of the profession of arms.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, like from his experience that surely was true. “So, you got any opinion how this Whitehall devil’s gonna fare in court?”

“Sure do,” I announced.

“And what’s that?” he asked. Immediately seven or eight more of his preacherly brethren turned around to hear what I might say.

This was what you might call a golden moment. I mean, no way it was going to be a good thing having a bunch of fired-up, overzealous preachers demonizing our client. The environment was already poisonous enough. Besides which, the only leverage we had over the Korean government was its fear that American public opinion might be on our side. We didn’t want anybody creating the impression that fear was unfounded.