Chapter 8
THE BODY
DESPITE THE GROWING shadows and deepening orange
light cast from the setting sun, marking the end to another
blistering day, sweltering heat still boiled off the pavement and
concrete sidewalks that ran next to the wide river that slashes
through the heart of Da Nang, forcing three Marines strolling
there, stifling in the humidity, to look for shade and cold beer.
The short cyclo-taxi ride they had taken from outside the air base
gates had left sweat dripping from their faces. At the first sight
of pleasurable refuge, the trio of fun-seeking lads ducked inside
an open-fronted bar that blared from cathedral-sized loudspeakers
Tommy James singing, “My Baby Does the Hanky-Panky.” Deep inside
the saloon’s dark and smoky cavern, the evening’s feature
entertainment sported a lineup of mostly naked dancing girls
go-going on a red-lit stage.
Perching their butts on three open bar stools and
drying out under the cool breezes stirred by a quartet of ceiling
fans spinning above their heads, the Leatherneck trio ordered a
round of 33s from a well filled with water, chipped ice, and
submerged brown bottles with the infamous Vietnamese beer’s red and
yellow paper labels soaking off their sides. Two swigs of the
dirty-sock-tasting brew and the boys had their heads turning like
swivels as their eyes searched the joint for what quality snatch
might troll there.
“Buy me drink, GI?” came the familiar mating call
from one hungry old shark that swam by them, smelling the fresh
blood and hoping for a bite.
“Take a hike, mama-san,” the first Marine
growled, a corporal who wore sunglasses and a dark mustache above
his lip. He had gotten a good look at the hooker when the outside
sunlight had caught her hard face that sprouted makeup-filled deep
lines around her eyes and mouth. She wore a bad-fitting wig, phony
lashes, and dark red lipstick.
“She’d make a freight train take a dirt road,” the
second Marine scowled as she passed the trio.
“What you name, GI?” came a soft voice from the
other side of the third Marine, a blond-haired lad with a baby face
and swimmer’s build tied to a six-foot tall, 180-pound frame.
“Mike,” the young man said, and smiled at the
pretty face that had asked him. “What’s yours?”
“Wild Thing,” the girl said, shaking her long,
black hair over her front, bending forward so it touched the floor,
and then in a furious cloud tossing it back again, behind her
shoulders. “My friend, they call me Wild Thing ’cause I so
wild.”
“Wild Thing!” the American with the dark glasses
and mustache then bellowed, and clapped his hands as he began to
sing the 1966 rock and roll hit. The second Marine clapped his
hands, too, and rumbled out the bass side of the song, mimicking
the hard-edged guitar riff between lyric phrases.
“You make my heart sing!” the first man wailed as
his partner kept pace with the bottom side of the music. “You make
everything groovy. Wild Thing.”
The girl snapped her fingers to their impromptu
song and began dancing and gyrating, tossing her hair to the rhythm
as she moved.
“Wild Thing! I think I love you! But I want to know
for sure,” the blond Marine then howled, joining the little barroom
choir. “Come on and hold me tight. I love you.”
In a moment, seeing the action, the bartender
slipped the original recording by the Troggs on the turntable, and
then let the full rock and roll blast of “Wild Thing” jam the club.
With the booming bass and amplified stereophonic sound shaking the
walls and floor, the girl stepped away from the bar and let go with
her show.
While she moved, and mesmerized the trio of Marines
with her storm of tossed black hair, two of her friends, wearing
g-strings and nothing else, dashed from the stage and joined her.
The girls flung their waist-length manes fore and aft, and shook
their bodies to the hard rock beat, capturing the full attention of
the three young Americans.
When the song finally ended, the hookers then moved
close to set their barbs in the three GIs while music of The Lovin’
Spoonful seguéd into the sound system, “What a day for a daydream,
what a day for a daydreamin’ boy. And I’m lost in a daydream;
dreamin’ ‘bout my bundle of joy.”
“You buy me drink?” the girl then asked the blond
Marine as the pair of nearly naked dancers hustled glasses of
watered-down fake champagne from his two friends.
Seeing the stemware sliding down the bar, the young
blond fellow shrugged his shoulders and said, “Okay, why
not?”
“Come, we go sit over there,” the young hooker
said, pointing to a shadowy table that sat well outside the light
that streamed in from the saloon’s open front. She took the young
man by the hand and discreetly led him from the bar and away from
the close attention of his two friends, who now busily ran their
hands over the bare skin of the dancers, trying to fast-talk the
youthful but experienced bordello veterans.
Seating the young American at the dark table with
his back turned to his friends, the young hooker wearing the high,
tight, black miniskirt, her nickname, Wild Thing, written in silver
sequins on the sleeveless blue knit top that covered her perky,
braless, hard-nipple breasts, pulled her chair by his and angled it
facing toward him.
“Hey, boy, you like make boom-boom? Me show you
plenty good time. All night fuckie-suckie, twenty-dollar,” she then
blurted to the Marine lance corporal whose look reminded the girl
of her former boss, Brian Pitts, especially from behind.
Hunched in a dark corner booth in the bar that
opened onto the street that ran along the Han River, in the heart
of Da Nang, near the American consulate and the press center, Huong
Van Nguyen, his youngest brother, Bao, and James Mau Mau Harris sat
quietly and watched their one-night-stand employee work her craft
on the unsuspecting young Leatherneck. They had targeted the blond
lad the moment they had spotted the trio of GIs as they strolled on
the boulevard. With Wild Thing in tow, Harris, Huong, and Bao had
followed the three Marines inside the bar.
They could not believe their luck when they first
saw the lad. They had hoped at best to find a medium-built American
who had a body that when disfigured enough could pass for the
Snowman. Such a close match, however, seemed too good to be true.
No matter what, they could not afford to let this fellow who could
pass for Brian Pitts’s brother slip away.
Although Pitts had personally broken in the whore
he nicknamed Wild Thing two years ago at his ranch, when her uncle
sold the teenage waif to him for a hundred dollars cash American,
she fell under the employ of Benny Lam as of a day and a half ago,
when the Snowman’s empire fell. That night, rather than trying to
fly on her own wings, the Snowman’s lead whore, Madam Nanna, had
gone straight to Lam and pledged him her and the girls’
allegiances. She had wisely calculated that the maneuver would
avoid his deadly wrath against her independent competition, or a
worse yet fate, her and the girls working for the fat, heavily
perfumed, and often sexually cruel Major Toan.
Thus, this afternoon, when Huong found Wild Thing
lurking on the street, he had to bribe Benny Lam’s watchdog two
hundred dollars to let her go with them, and then had to pay the
whore fifty more for the one evening’s work.
Now seventeen years old, Wild Thing still kept a
childish, innocent look about her that attracted men who liked sex
with prepubescent girls. When Brian Pitts first saw her, just shy
of her fifteenth birthday, he considered the child well worth the
five Andrew Jackson bills he paid her uncle when he brought her to
Dogpatch. Homesick at first, she quickly forgot about life on the
farm after enjoying the luxury that her new profession rewarded
her. Nanna had seen great potential in the pretty girl with the
raven hair that hung a full twelve inches past her waist when
unfurled. For nearly any skirt-sniffing GI or horn dog American
contractor, she proved impossible to resist.
“So what’s your real name?” the Marine asked the
girl as she slid her hand across his lap. “I know your mama didn’t
name you Wild Thing.”
“That my working-girl name, Wild Thing,” the
childlike whore said, and then lied, “my real name Song, like water
that flow from mountain.”
“Song. That’s a real pretty name,” the American
said, feeling himself grow hard at the touch of her hand massaging
his groin. “Wild Thing. That’s not a good name for a pretty girl
like you. But Song, I like that a lot. Anyway, your mama know
you’re working in a dive like this?”
“My mama know, she no care. My daddy, he dead. VC
kill him when I maybe ten year old. American GI kill VC, so I like
see American GI. You be my boyfriend, maybe you take me Stateside?”
she said, unbuttoning his pants with quick, nimble fingers and
sliding her hand inside.
“Oh, wait!” the young Marine said, rocking back in
his chair. “You can’t do that in here!”
“They no care,” the girl said, urging him to slide
the chair close to her again. Then she slipped her hand back inside
his fly. “Nobody see. No sweat, GI. I make you feel too
good.”
As she began to massage him, she put her left leg
across his lap and slipped out his stiff penis so that it rubbed
against the hot, bare flesh along the inside of her thigh. Then she
took his hand and put it where his fingers rested across the heart
of her silk panties, pulled tight into the slit of her hairless
mound, soaked wet. As he touched her there, the girl gasped and
shuddered.
“You make me oh, so horny, baby,” she moaned in his
ear, pulling herself tight to him, pressing her small, firm breasts
against his bare arm. “Me get beaucoup hot for you. Come. Go my
room. Stay all night. Twenty-dollar. Five dollar go one hour. We
fuck all way you like. Okay?”
Just as the hooker felt the young Marine nearly
succumb to an orgasm, she quickly took her hand from his groin,
slid it under his T-shirt, and began massaging his stomach.
“What you say you name? Mike?” she whispered.
“Yeah, Mike Scott,” he panted, and took a hard pull
on the bottle of beer he had setting on the table. Then he glanced
at the bar to make sure that his two buddies from the air wing
still sat there, looking out for him. Both of them had six months
in country, while he had just checked in a few days ago, and today
enjoyed his first excursion off the base.
Taking a pledge not to abandon him for any reason,
they had taken the cyclo-taxi to the wide boulevard that ran along
the river because this part of town had a low-risk reputation. The
new guy felt safe here. Many Americans on the streets. Never any
trouble. And the hookers all clean. Nothing worse than a rare case
of plain old clap.
Barracks tales of the black syphilis, an incurable,
deadly strain of venereal disease, had made all three of them
fearful. The saltiest of the trio, the man with dark glasses and
mustache, who had the most time on the shitter in Vietnam,
reassured his two cohorts, though, that black syph did not occur
among the girls who worked the boulevard along the Han River.
“The government has these whores checked,” he told
the other two while the cyclo driver peddled. Now, while he and his
one bud kept busy with the two nearly naked dancers at the bar, the
blond Marine drifted toward oblivion with the baby-faced whore,
relaxing his caution while her seasoned, professional seduction
took hold of his mind.
“You so good-looking man,” she breathed, putting
the tip of her tongue inside his ear. Then she felt a slight ooze
of seminal fluid bead onto her hand from his penis, and with the
tip of her index digit she smeared it around the head. Then she
took that finger and put it on her tongue.
“Mmmmm, you taste so good,” she sighed. “I want
taste more.”
Suddenly she ducked her head under the table and
took him into her mouth. Then she quickly rose up again, and kissed
him, darting her tongue between his lips.
“We go now,” she breathed and then swirled the tip
of her tongue in his ear.
For twenty-one-year-old Mike Scott from Orchard
Park, New York, a village just south of Buffalo, this girl named
Song who hustled on the streets of Da Nang and stripped in the bars
as Wild Thing burst open a whole new vista of life for him that he
had never before encountered. His first afternoon off the air base,
and he was suddenly in love.
“Where you live?” the blond Marine asked, kissing
the girl, his breath racing and his face feeling on fire.
“Down hall next door,” Wild Thing lied, standing up
and taking the young man by the arm. “I show you. I live just
here.”
“I need to tell my buddies,” Mike Scott said,
looking at the two of them still busy at the bar with the naked
girls now perched on their knees.
“You stay all night?” the girl said, hoping for the
twenty-dollar commission that he would pay up front.
“Naw, we got to get back pretty soon,” the lad
said, looking at his watch.
With her clinging to his arm, he walked to the
dark-haired Marine wearing the sunglasses and mustache and pointed
to his watch.
“I’ll be back here in thirty minutes, tops,” he
said.
The salty leader grinned at the blond and said, “No
sweat, GI. You go boom-boom. No more Da Nang cherry boy. We’ll be
right here, unless we go fuck these two hogs first.”
“I’m not leaving anyplace without you guys,” the
blond Marine said, and then looked at Wild Thing wrapped on his
arm.
Seeing doubt start to show on his face, the hooker
then pressed her groin against his leg and pulled his arm
hard.
“We go do short time,” Wild Thing said, and then
pointed to the two girls, “they no let your friends leave without
you. I promise. You be okay. Come, we go my room now.”
“Don’t sweat about it, Mike,” the dark-haired
Marine said, reassuring his newbee pal. “We won’t leave here
without you, man. I promise.”
James Harris sat, sipping his beer, watching the
show, and shook his head at the trio of fools. Huong and Bao
slipped away from the table and walked to the back of the saloon,
past the red-lit stage and the bar’s one, stinking restroom used by
both sexes, and pushed through a doorway that led them into a dark
hall that emptied into another passage along which half a dozen
single-room apartment doors opened.
Still wearing his uniform and sergeant chevrons,
Mau Mau Harris ambled to the front of the bar and elbowed his way
to the counter next to the Marine with the dark glasses and
mustache.
“You guys with the wing?” Harris asked the
man.
“Yeah, we’re with MAG-Eleven,” the dark-haired
Marine answered. “You with the wing, too?”
“Naw,” Harris said, purposefully killing time,
keeping the two buddies occupied. “I work over at the press center.
You know, the PIO? I take pictures and shit.”
“You got stuff in the Sea Tiger?” the second
Marine said, smiling while holding on to his naked playmate.
“Yeah, that and Stars and Stripes,” Harris
said, making himself feel important.
“You going to do that for a living when you get
out? Take pictures and shit?” the dark-glasses Marine asked,
cupping his hands on his dancer’s breasts as she straddled his leg
and ground herself on his increasingly damp thigh.
“Yeah,” Harris lied, enjoying the role, “I’ve got a
job offer already with the Chicago Tribune, man. I rotate
out of this hole, and I go back home and live a good life. Taking
pictures of all the shit that goes on in Chicago.”
“Fuck, man, I wish I had a job like that,” the
second Marine said, grabbing a pull off a fresh bottle of 33 Beer
that Harris had the bartender set up with a snap and point of his
fingers. “What’s your name? So I can say I knew the dude back
when.”
“Rufus Potter,” Harris said, almost choking on the
beer that he gulped after saying it. He saw both men fighting back
laughs, and then narrowed his eyes at them. “You got a problem with
what my mother gave me?”
“Sergeant Potter, oh, shit, no, man,” the
dark-haired Marine said, and took off his sunglasses to show the
sincerity in his eyes.
Harris laughed and drank more beer. Then he looked
at the two men and scowled.
“That’s my father’s name, too,” Harris frowned. “So
I go by Junior. My nick. Junior Potter.”
He had just thought of it, and Junior had a much
better ring to him than Rufus, which he had typed on the green
identification card in his wallet and stamped on the two metal dog
tags hanging around his neck.
“When I go to taking pictures for the Chicago
Tribune, you want to see my name in that paper, you need to
look for Junior Potter,” Harris said, and then gulped down his beer
when he saw Bao step into the daylight outside the saloon’s front
door and give him a nod.
“Hey, check it out, I got to get back to the press
center,” Mau Mau said in a hurry, making an exaggerated glance at
his gold Rolex wristwatch and stepping away from the bar. Then, as
an afterthought, he reached in his pocket and laid a five-dollar
bill on the counter. “Let me catch another round for you guys, and
for your buddy, too, when he gets back.”
As the deserter nervously walked to the saloon’s
entrance, and then jogged to the street corner where the black
Mercedes sat with its engine running, waiting for him, he cursed
under his breath. His abrupt departure from the newfound friends,
and his clumsy exit raised a host of red flags in his mind. He
realized that the conversation with the two Marines had never
mentioned their third friend. The blond had already left the saloon
when Harris had joined the two playboys at the bar. Another
thought, too: buying two complete strangers a second round of beers
went overboard. Picking up the tab on the first serving seemed a
little odd to him, now that he thought about it. When their buddy
would eventually fail to return, and their search for him would
turn up nothing, they might smell the rat and connect Mau Mau to
his disappearance.
Speeding down a back street, Harris thought, “Why
should I give a shit? I’m out of here anyway. Soon as I kill that
rat bastard Elmore.” With a new life and fresh identity, and his
share of three million dollars, why should he ever worry?
However, as the car whisked out of the heart of Da
Nang, the bumping and kicking from the automobile’s trunk troubled
him.
A COOL BREEZE stirred from the South China Sea brought the marine layer ashore and shrouded the low-lying lands and river bottoms with fog south of Da Nang. Huong switched on the yellow lamps mounted on the front bumper, near the center of the Mercedes-Benz’s grill, as he followed a narrow dirt road westward alongside the Cau Do River.
Hidden by the fog and the night, at a spot where
the road branched north, a quarter of a mile east from its
intersection with Highway One, Huong shut off the lights and
stopped the car. He said nothing to James Harris, who sat in the
backseat, smoking a cigarette, but simply looked at his brother,
Bao, who got out of the car and opened the trunk.
Huong lifted the latch on the driver-side door and
stepped out of the car when Bao dragged the first victim to the
road’s edge, atop a steep bank, ten feet above the Song Cau Do’s
low-tide water. James Harris looked at the foggy silhouette of the
person the two cowboys had bound with communications wire and
gagged with a knot tied in an old T-shirt. While Bao held the short
man by the wrists, Huong put his .45 Colt to the back of the
fellow’s head and sent a bullet out his face. Just as the gunshot
popped, Bao let go of the dying cowboy’s hands and he splashed into
the mud at the water’s edge.
The younger Nguyen brother returned to the trunk
and pulled the young whore from it. Seeing her, James Harris jumped
out of the car.
“Oh, now, wait, man,” Mau Mau pled with Huong.
“That’s Wild Thing, man! She one of us!”
“She Benny Lam whore now,” Huong said, putting his
.45-caliber pistol at the back of the girl’s head as Bao held her
by the hands, and quickly pulled the trigger before the frantic
black deserter could do anything. Then the cool older brother
shrugged at the terrified American as he slipped his pistol back in
its waistband scabbard. “She talk too much. She tell anybody, all
this be no good then. No work. Not buy any time. CID keep looking.
Benny Lam cowboy, he talk, too. We no need anybody talking. You
understand?”
“Yeah, man, I understand,” James Harris said,
looking at the muddy edge of the river where the girl and her
watchdog lay dead, their hands and feet bound, and the rags tied
around their mouths. “It’s just, I liked that chick, you know?
She’s sweet.”
“Sweet like bamboo snake,” Huong said, taking a
pearl-handled straight razor from the dead girl’s black velvet
clutch purse with the long, thin gold chain shoulder strap. He
flipped open the weapon under James Harris’s nose and made a quick
swipe with it in front of his face. He snapped the blade shut and
then dropped it in Mau Mau’s shirt pocket as a souvenir. Then he
found the fifty dollars along with two more American twenty-dollar
bills and a ten plus three fives, and folded the cash into the two
hundred dollars he had recovered from Benny Lam’s watchdog. Turning
the small handbag inside out, spilling the whore’s wallet, compact,
and makeup onto the road, Huong dropped it over the side where it
landed in the mud next to the two bodies.
Harris followed Huong to the back of the car, where
Bao now pulled the bound feet of the unconscious blond Marine out
of the trunk and waited for his two cohorts to take the young man
by the shoulders.
“No, not here,” Huong told Bao in Vietnamese, and
pushed Harris’s hand away from their barely breathing victim. “We
no do here. Him dead someplace else much better.”
“You don’t want the cops to tie those two with this
guy, right?” Harris said, realizing that authorities finding the
three corpses together would naturally investigate the homicides as
connected, and eventually tie the identity of the blond Marine with
the missing man from the bar. As he climbed in the backseat and
Huong slammed the trunk shut, with their captive safely inside it,
Harris reminded himself that he had to think matters through
better.
“GUNNY JACKSON,” THE sandy-haired CID lieutenant called as he walked through the doorway of the III MAF Criminal Investigation Division work quarters where the gunnery sergeant with the gold badge pinned on his green utility uniform sat behind one of three desks crowded into the small office space. “Somebody took out the Snowman.”
“Oh, really?” the seasoned veteran criminal
investigator said, and leaned back in his chair, taking a sip of
hot coffee from a white mug with a gold Marine Corps emblem and the
name “Jack” painted on one side and gunnery sergeant chevrons
painted on the other. “You sure, sir, or are you just
supposing?”
“Supposing, I guess. We won’t be sure until they
confirm the ID on the body at Hickam Air Force Base, in Hawaii,”
the lieutenant said, pouring a cup of coffee and then walking to
his desk. “Graves and registration are packing him out today. We
may know something in a few weeks.
“Chief Toan claims it’s Brian Pitts for sure,
though. And you know, he knew him better than we ever did. A pair
of his patrolmen found the body this morning on the edge of
Dogpatch, not two blocks from the Snowman’s villa. Staff Sergeant
Lyons and Sergeant Knight got the call on it, about five o’clock
this morning. We’re going out to investigate the scene in the
daylight, as soon as they get in. Probably around noon. I let them
catch forty winks this morning, since they got hauled out of the
rack last night.
“Toan thinks that Benny Lam’s boys took out Pitts
last night after somebody, most likely the Snowman’s crew, whacked
one of Lam’s best whores and her watchdog. A patrol from Seventh
Marines found the two bodies in the tidal wash of the Cau Do River
this morning, near that big, green, iron bridge on Highway
One.
“So the chief concluded that Lam’s boys must have
caught Pitts trying to sneak back to his ranch, sometime after one
or two this morning, some six to eight hours after the whore and
the cowboy bought it, based on the time-of-death estimates, and
shotgunned our man Pitts in reprisal. Blew his face off with a
couple of blasts of twelve-gauge, ought-two man-stoppers.”
“You know, Lieutenant Biggs, Hickam will take a
hell of a lot longer than a few weeks. We could be sitting here
three or four months. Can’t we just run his fingerprints and make
an ID? The FBI can turn it around in two weeks flat,” the gunny
said, running his index finger down an incident report as he read
through its data.
“Be nice, Jack,” the sandy-haired CID lieutenant
named Melvin Biggs said, leaning back in his chair and sipping
coffee. “Apparently Pitts saw it coming, and put his hands in front
of his face. You know the typical defensive wound. Turned both his
mitts into hamburger.”
“Convenient if you’re Brian Pitts and want the
world to think you’re dead,” the gunny called Jack Jackson said,
drinking more coffee and tossing the report he had just read across
to the lieutenant’s desk. “Check out the description of this lost
soul, a newbee from MAG Eleven, one Lance Corporal Michael Jerome
Scott, age twenty-one, six-feet-nothing tall and 180 pounds. My
last sighting of our infamous Snowman, Corporal Brian T. Pitts,
matches this boy top to bottom.”
“That certainly casts a new light on the discovery
of Pitts’s dead body, doesn’t it,” Biggs said, picking up the
report passed to CID from the military police watch commander from
the previous night.
“You know, sir,” Gunny Jackson added, “we were
damned lucky to get that report you’ve got there in your hot little
hands. We wouldn’t have had a clue about this kid, otherwise, had
Scott’s two buddies not raised holy hell with the night watch,
demanding that they call out the cavalry because their newbee lance
corporal had gotten himself snatched.
“After these guys spent a couple of hours scouring
the area around that bar, searching for Lance Corporal Scott, they
beat feet to the MP shack and reported him kidnapped. That’s right,
kidnapped, right off the bat. No missing-person bullshit. And they
stuck to their guns about it being a snatch job, too, not just
another Marine in love suddenly gone native, like we see more often
than not.
“Given that this was the lance corporal’s first
trip to the ville, and that he was nervous about being out of sight
of his two buddies, the watch commander ordered a full sweep of
that area. Of course he turned up zipzilch, but because the
incident involves a possible kidnapping, it landed the report and
Scott’s description right in our hands this morning.
“Talk about dumb luck. If these guys would have
just gone back to the barracks, like so many other people would
have done, and let their buddy just get listed as absent, failing
to return from liberty, we wouldn’t know a damned thing other than
a body fitting the description of Pitts turned up dead.”
“Hmm, maybe our luck has changed,” the lieutenant
said and cracked a smile. “Any hope of getting our hands on some
physical records telling us a little more about Pitts?”
“I doubt it. I’d sure like to see his SRB, medical
and dental files, but most likely they got shipped to St. Louis
many moons ago, him being a longtime deserter and all,” Gunny
Jackson said. “Ten to one they’re not here, if our luck lately
holds true to course.”
“The body they found in Dogpatch this morning had
Pitts’s dog tags and ID card on it,” the lieutenant said, reading
the report on the corpse and then looking up with a big smile at
his noncommissioned officer in charge. “Besides religion, service
number, and name, a man’s dog tag has his blood type imprinted on
it, like his ID card.”
“Bingo!” the gunny said, and laughed. “I guess even
a blind hog finds an acorn now and then, doesn’t he? Maybe our luck
has changed! Be a hell of a note if the blood type of the body is
not the same as the blood type listed on Pitts’s ID card and dog
tags.”
“Tell you what I’m going to do,” the lieutenant
said, snatching the telephone on his desk and putting it to his
ear. “I’m having a copy of this Lance Corporal M. J. Scott’s
medical and dental files sent to Hawaii with that body. We may not
have Pitts’s records right now, but we do have this missing lad’s.
At least they can bounce the physical data they collect from the
body to what this boy has on his medical and dental charts. If it
matches, then we’ve located our missing soul, and it answers the
Pitts identity question, doesn’t it.”
BY NOONTIME, THE March heat in Da Nang had both the lieutenant’s and the gunny’s uniforms soaked with perspiration. Staff Sergeant Tommy Lyons and Sergeant Billy Knight also sweated in their civilian clothes as they walked behind the uniformed officer and senior NCO. Two Vietnamese policemen stood watch over the section of Dogpatch dirt alley while a Naval Investigative Service detective who had arrived ahead of the four CID Marines squatted next to a dried blood puddle, poking the ground with his pocket knife.
“Mister Walters, I see you’re hard at it,”
Lieutenant Biggs called to the man as he ducked under the ropes
strung across the alley, barricading the crime scene.
Special Agent Bill Walters looked up and smiled.
“Good job here by your sergeants. They roped off the area
immediately, and preserved the scene intact before Major Toan’s
hamsters could fuck it up beyond value.”
“Gunny Jack taught them well,” Lieutenant Biggs
said, and then knelt by the NIS investigator. “What you digging
up?”
“Blast particles from the shotgun,” Walters said,
and then showed the Marine officer the speck of black residue he
had plucked from the ground. “Our man was shot lying down. Check
out the splatter pattern. We have body materials spread in a
twelve-foot circle. Right here, we have spent powder and other
debris from the shotgun blasts. Definitely, our guy died lying on
his back right here.”
“Could he have been dead beforehand, and just
shotgunned here?” the lieutenant suggested, and then looked around
at the many windows that viewed the alley. “Of course, no
witnesses, right?”
“Nobody’s talking, and I don’t expect any of the
good citizens of Dogpatch to step forward either,” the
forty-year-old naval investigator grumbled. “I guess it is possible
that he died elsewhere, but judging from the massive volume of
blood puddled here, it leads me to believe that his heart pumped
for a while after he took the two blasts to the face and
hands.”
“Unconscious then,” the lieutenant said, surveying
the bloody scene as the three sergeants stood above him.
“Could be that he got hit from behind, knocked to
the ground, and then shotgunned,” Walters said, standing and giving
Gunny Jack a smile and a handshake. “Probably the most likely
scenario. Then, too, just about as likely, someone could have
clubbed the guy elsewhere, kept him alive, and brought him here to
kill him. A lot of trouble to go through to stage a pretty scene
for us.”
“My thoughts from the get-go,” Gunnery Sergeant
Jackson said. “This ain’t Brian Pitts we’re talking got clipped
here. We’re talking about a kid named Michael Scott who looks a lot
like Brian Pitts, and they killed him here to throw us off Pitts’s
trail so he can beat feet out of the area.”
Bill Walters slapped the gunny on the shoulder and
smiled at the lieutenant. “The man has a point. It also explains a
hell of a lot more than that dirt-bag Toan’s hare-brained theory of
a reprisal over a dead whore and a cowboy.”
“We never turned up even a shoebox of money stashed
in that villa of Pitts’s, either,” Jackson said, looking at the
lieutenant. “Elmore the magnificent claimed the Snowman had a room
full of seabags stuffed with American cash. How many seabags is yet
to be seen, but I think the snitch may have a basis of truth
underlying his bullshit. Pitts did have a major corner in Dogpatch,
and did a lot of dope business, so we’ve come to learn. We check
his hooch and find no dope and no money. Just a nervous old broad
with a string of whores. My point is this: he saw us coming and got
his shit out of Dodge. He killed this poor kid to try to throw us
off his trail. Somewhere, he’s out there with a shitload of cash,
and maybe a bunch of dope, too, and he needs to get someplace where
it can do him some good.”
BRIAN PITTS CLOSED his eyes, pulling the
rice-straw conical hat over his face, shielding it from the
afternoon sun as he bounced in the center of the bench seat inside
the cab of the baby-blue dump truck loaded with pig manure atop the
half-dozen duffel bags stuffed with three million dollars in
American cash, zipped inside nylon-reinforced, black polyurethane
body bags. Once the truck had made its way past Duc Pho and Phu
Cat, the fugitive crime lord relaxed and began to doze off, sitting
between Chung, who drove the old diesel, and Ty, who rode shotgun.
The Snowman felt much safer once they had entered the central
military region of South Vietnam, overseen by U.S. Army forces and
ARVN units from its Second Army Corps headquartered at Pleiku.
Here, these soldiers didn’t know him, weren’t looking for him, and
cared nothing about Brian Pitts.
When the blue diesel finally rolled through Nha
Trang and turned southwestward toward Saigon, the Marine deserter
felt euphoric. Seeing a seafood restaurant on the outskirts, he had
Chung pull to the roadside, and the trio strolled inside the
establishment and casually ate a magnificent dinner of broiled
prawns and fish stew. A few more hours down Highway One, and they
would make the turn westward toward a village near Cu Chi and their
new home where Huong, Chung, and Bao’s grandparents and his two
uncles awaited their arrival.
While Brian Pitts, Chung, and Ty enjoyed their
seafood dinner with ample cold beer to wash it down, James Harris,
Huong, and Bao ate warmed-over rice with salt pork for
flavoring.
“This shit, hangin’ out in the hooch ain’t cuttin’
it, man,” Harris complained, choking down the rice dinner. “Why we
ain’t got some beer and real food?”
Huong looked at Mau Mau and then tossed a hunk of
salt pork from his bowl to Turd. Bao took a kettle of hot tea from
the stove and refilled Huong’s cup and then his own. He took a step
toward James Harris, to refill his cup, but the black man glared at
him so he stopped, and set the kettle back on the stove.
“This tastes like your sister washed her hair in
it,” Mau Mau said, sipping the last of his tea, and then setting
his cup on the floor next to where he sat in one of the
straight-back chairs. He fought back his inclination to throw the
cup across the floor, along with his bowl of rice. His memory of
the day he saw Huong kill the cowboy for cheating at mah-jongg kept
him from any excessive belligerency.
Turd wagged his tail, and James Harris fed him his
piece of salt pork, too. Huong smiled at the gesture as he scraped
his rice bowl clean.
“When we goin’ to find that rat fuck Elmore?”
Harris then said to Huong.
“We do soon,” Huong said, sipping his tea and going
to the wooden porch across the front of the frame house with the
thatched roof. “We need know where Elmo stay now. Then we see if we
can make good plan. We kill him then.”
“What if they got him protected?” Harris said,
walking outside, too. “I ain’t gonna just walk off.”
“We kill Elmo if we can do,” Huong said, and then
looked cooly at James Harris. “We no kill him if no can do.”
“Fucking double-talking motherfucker!” Harris
exclaimed, and glared at Huong. “Why ain’t you talkin’ English that
makes some sense? We kill if we can do it, we no kill if we no can
do it. That’s just bullshit. We gonna kill that motherfucker. I
make sure of that!”
“No do if no can do,” Huong said and walked away
from Harris.
“There ain’t any no can do, motherfucker,” Harris
snarled.
Huong wheeled at Mau Mau and pulled his .45 Colt
semiautomatic pistol as he moved. He had it cocked and pointed
under Harris’s chin before the deserter could take another
step.
“We no fucking kill Elmo if we no get fucking
chance, motherfucker!” Huong snarled, pausing between each word so
that his American cohort could clearly understand him. “Pitts say
we no take chance. We kill Elmo if we can do okay, but not if it
make us big trouble. You no like? Then maybe I kill you,
motherfucker.”
The pistol’s barrel left a circular imprint under
Harris’s chin as the Vietnamese cowboy took it away from the
man.
“Hey, man, you shoot me and Turd won’t have a
daddy,” Harris said, offering a smile with his attempt at humoring
the cowboy. He knew that Huong would kill him in a heartbeat.
“LANCE CORPORAL ELMORE!” Gunny Jackson shouted as he walked inside the hooch in the Marine Aircraft Group Eleven compound where James Elmore lived. The frightened dope dealer turned snitch had erected barricades of footlockers, wall lockers, and wooden freight boxes around his cubicle and bunk. When he peeked around the corner, he smiled his gold front tooth at the two men he saw approaching.
“Yo, gunny,” Elmore said, and stepped from behind
the wall of wooden boxes. Then he recognized the Marine captain who
entered with the CID gunnery sergeant.
“You remember your lawyer, Captain O’Connor,” Gunny
Jackson said, pointing to Terry O’Connor.
“Sho, man,” Elmore said and put out his hand.
“How’s it hangin’, Skipper?”
Terry O’Connor looked at the gunny. “You mind if we
have some private time?”
“Sure, sir, take your time,” Jackson said, “I’ll
just have a smoke outside. However, sir, please remember we have a
chopper flight to catch.”
“Where you goin’?” Elmore asked, ushering Terry
O’Connor inside his rabbit-warren cubicle.
The smell of the stagnant air within the confined
space and the stench of the man’s pile of filthy clothes left the
lawyer wanting to talk outside the rancid den. O’Connor tried to
stomach the odor but finally broke down.
“Tell you what, let’s step outside, too,” O’Connor
said, and led James Elmore out the back of the hooch, where the two
men then stood on a gravel walkway.
“Now to answer your question a moment ago,”
O’Connor said, looking around to see who watched them, “I’m not
going anyplace. You are moving to Chu Lai.”
“Ho, man, whoa! No I ain’t goin’ down at Chu Lai,”
Elmore squalled.
“We think that Brian Pitts may be dead, or he may
have committed a murder to make it appear that he is dead, all in
the aftermath of your informing on him,” O’Connor said to the lance
corporal who flicked out a Kool cigarette from a flip-top box and
popped it between his lips.
“What else is new?” Elmore quipped, flipping open
the top of a Zippo lighter and igniting a four-inch-high flame that
made the smart-talking snitch flinch back from it as he lit his
smoke.
“If Pitts is not dead, but has murdered a Marine in
an attempt to make us believe the corpse is his, then it is highly
likely he will be looking for you,” O’Connor said, and finally
snatched Elmore’s chin with his hand so he could lock eyes with the
man.
“Yo, man, I heard you!” Elmore shouted, and pulled
away from O’Connor’s grip. “I know he be lookin’ for me the day I
give his ass up.”
“If Pitts is not dead, he could be anywhere, just
waiting for the chance to kill you. Does that make sense to you?”
O’Connor said, stepping in front of the elusive lance
corporal.
“Yeah, man, I heard that,” Elmore said, and then
looked at the captain. “No word on Mau Mau?”
“You mean James Harris?” O’Connor said.
“Yeah, man, Harris,” Elmore said, sucking on his
cigarette.
“No word on him or the several cowboys loyal to
Pitts,” O’Connor answered, fighting back his frustration.
“See, I told these motherfuckers,” Elmore said,
looking in every direction, wondering who might watch him without
his knowledge. “Pitts might try to kill me if I step in the open
while he still loose. That Mau Mau, he one crazy motherfucker,
though. He might try comin’ on base, lookin’ for my young
ass.”
“That’s why we want to move you to Chu Lai. No one
will know you’ve gone there,” O’Connor said, now holding the man’s
attention. “Are you high or something?”
James Elmore laughed, and looked at the
captain.
“You too cool, man,” Elmore said, and laughed more.
“Fuck, yeah, I’m high. How you think I deal with this shit? Fuck
yeah, I be stayin’ high, too. I got my peas and my bros here, man.
They cover my ass. I stay here.”
“No, you have to go to Chu Lai, because Pitts and
Harris both know where you live. You cannot stay here because they
will kill you,” O’Connor snapped back. “Pack your shit, now! That’s
an order, lance corporal.”