When Ernie heard that, he snorted. “Nobody likes a person with a problem until that person has already solved the problem.”
It also occurred to me that the Club Council had had years to set up a mechanism to help employees with emergency medical expenses, but they never had. Better to make them come begging for it.
We went to the Enlisted Club that night for Happy Hour and paid thirty-five cents for a tax free beer and forty cents for a shot of bourbon to go with it.
The stripper had eyes like a cat.
“She was a real trouper,” Freddy said. “Appeared before the Club Council looking sharp, standing up straight, and didn’t bat an eye when they told her that she’d been suspended for thirty days.”
“How have the other Korean employees taken it?”
“The place has been like a morgue. They do their jobs all right, but they won’t look at me and they won’t say anything. The laughter’s gone around here.”
“It’ll come back.” Freddy looked skeptical, but I knew it would.
I’d learned that in East L.A.
At first the Korean National Police Liaison Officer tried to keep it from us but Yongsan Compound is like a small town in the huge metropolis of Seoul and word spreads quickly. Especially amongst the MP’s and the C.I.D.
Ernie didn’t chew any gum on the way out to Itaewon, and he drove carefully.
Neighbors clogged the narrow alleyway leading to Miss Lim’s hooch, but we pushed our way through them and flashed our I.D.’s to the uniformed Korean policeman at the gate. Captain Chong, commander of the Itaewon Police Box, was there. He didn’t say anything when we stepped to the front of the room.
The baby looked pretty much the way I’d seen her before. Thin. Still. But she wasn’t sweating any more. She lay on the vinyl floor as if she’d rolled away from her mother’s bosom. Miss Lim’s mouth was wide open and so were her eyes. They were white. Without pupils.
When I turned around, Captain Chong was standing right behind us.
“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” he said.
I looked at the aluminum tubing above the heater. There was a hole in it, as if someone had punctured the thin metal with a knife and twisted.
The photograph of the brown-haired major lay face up on the floor. Smiling at me.
As I scanned the rest of my mail, I absentmindedly opened the one letter my secretary had left sealed, thinking it might be personal. Absorbed as I was, I failed to notice the return address, so its message came as rather a shock:
The sun pouring through the Venetian blinds of my office seemed suddenly chilled. I had been standing while I opened the letter, but now I sat, swung the big leather chair around, and gazed out the window. So she had died — at last.
I was only a kid, no more than sixteen, when they let Old Man Winters out and, since I was the one responsible for his release, I went around that summer swaggering like a damn hero. It wasn’t until later that I came to think differently of myself. I haven’t been back to Wilton Falls in a good many years, and I wonder if they still tell their kids and their grandchildren about that summer. I wonder if they still tell it the wrong way, too — making Miriam Winters out to be some sort of witch. Well, they’re wrong. She wasn’t a witch. I talked to her enough later (
Swinging my chair back to the desk, I looked at the letter again. It was strange, but I was probably the only living person who had ever heard the full details of her side of the story. Certainly the newspapers had never given her her due. They were too busy making sensational copy out of the horror she had perpetrated — and it
