Mr. Kill Read Online Free PDF Page B

them.
    “Where’s Ernie?” he asked.
    “Last night,” I replied, “he worked late on a case.”
    “What case?”
    “The case you said the Provost Marshal was so hot on. Theft from the Country Western All Stars.”
    Riley squinted suspiciously. “Ernie has a lead?”
    I ignored him and continued to shuffle through the paperwork.
    Staff Sergeant Riley is a paper-pusher. Nothing more. Still, he likes to pretend that he’s giving orders when he’s only relaying them, and he pokes his nose into every case that interests him, which is most of them. Ernie and I tolerate him because he has extensive contacts throughout the 8th Army headquarters complex and he often saves us a lot of legwork.
    Yesterday, before we’d left the office, I’d asked Riley to contact the American military units that are located near the route of the Blue Train. Specifically, Camp Ames in Taejon, Camps Henry and Walker in Taegu, and Hialeah Compound in Pusan. What I wanted was a list of who was on temporary duty to Seoul, who was on emergency leave, who was absent without leave, and who was on regular in-country leave. Once I had that, maybe I could start to narrow down the identity of the mystery man who’d hopped off the Blue Train in Anyang.
    “You’re not looking too well,” Riley told me.
    “I’m not feeling too well either.”
    “What in the hell did you two guys do last night?”
    While I continued to peruse the list of names, I told him. As I spoke, Miss Kim stopped her typing.
    The five women of the Country Western All Star Review were Marnie, Kristie, Prudence, Shelly, and the bass player, whose name I couldn’t recall at the time. During the breaks in the show, Ernie had shown them his Criminal Investigation badge and his .45, and for some reason they took a liking to him. Maybe it wasn’t so much his personality as the fact that they felt adrift in a sea of G.I.s who were fawning all over them and an ocean of Koreans they couldn’t understand. Ernie listened to their problems. There were many, the pilfering of a microphone and a cowboy boot and an electric guitar being the least of them.
    They complained about the food they had to eat in the hotel. They’d asked the waiter for something lighter than the greasy American breakfast that was served, and what they received instead was roast mackerel, white rice, and a bowl of clam bouillon.
    “For breakfast ,” Marnie said, crinkling her nose. Marnie Orville was the voluptuous one. The one who sang most of the numbers, the one who owned the equipment, and the one who had arranged the USO tour.
    The other girls chimed in, complaining about the food and how they couldn’t eat the kimchee; although they realized it was made of fresh vegetables and it was good for you, but they couldn’t tolerate the garlic smell on their breath.
    “The boys in the front row,” Marnie said, “would have to move back twenty feet.”
    I doubted that a hand grenade would’ve made the boys in the front row move back twenty feet, but Ernie let her talk. She was lonely, as were all the girls. It might seem strange, considering the rabid attention they were getting from stagestruck G.I.s, but once their show was over and they’d been driven back to their hotel, there was nothing for them to do but sleep and get up and then get ready for another show.
    It was a half hour before midnight by the time we reached the Grand Hotel in Uijongbu. We could’ve made it back to Seoul before curfew, barely, but the Grand Hotel had a nightclub in the basement and the girls of the Country Western All Star Review couldn’t wait to see what a Korean nightclub looked like. Ernie’d been there before, and he led us down carpeted steps. The joint was plush, with an orchestra of middle-aged men, a lead singer in a white dinner jacket, and three or four beautiful Korean women belting out old favorites for the mostly older crowd that sat at round tables covered in white linen.
    Ernie talked our way past having to pay