Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

A Piece of Rice Cake by Martin Limón

It seemed that half our blotter reports lately had something to do with gambling.

Maybe it was the beautiful autumn in Korea, when the green leaves of summer turn to orange and yellow and brown and people realize that they are heading for that long cold winter we call death.

“Take a chance! You only go round once.”

Not what Buddha or Confucius would have said, but this is the modern Korea and the rules are changing. And the GI’s stationed over here have got nothing better to do anyway than throw away their money.

I thumbed through the blotter reports. A Korean businessman busted in a poker game on the compound; an NCO Club bartender rifling the night’s receipts to cover his “flower card” losses; a GI collared running a shell game in the barracks.

And so when the first sergeant called me and my partner, Ernie Bascom, into his office and gave us our assignment, it didn’t come as much of a surprise.

“Somebody stole the football pool on the army and navy game over at the Officer’s Club.”

We stared in mock horror. Ernie spoke first.

“Has the 8th Army been put on alert?”

“Yeah, wise guy. On alert. This may not seem too serious to you two, but the 8th Army chief of staff is about to soil his shorts. ‘Besmirching the honor of the army-navy tradition,’ he said.”

Whenever they start talking tradition, honor, or country, look out for your brisket.

“How much money did he have invested?” I said.

The first sergeant sighed, took a sip of his lukewarm coffee, and ignored me.

“I’d put Burrows and Slabem on the case — they got more respect for the officer corps than you two guys — but they’re on a case out at ASCOM City right now. So all I got left is you two.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Top.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The first sergeant set down his coffee and smiled at us. There was a warning in that smile. Something about not screwing up.

“The pool money was collected by the bartender, Miss Pei...”

“A female bartender? On a military installation? I thought the union didn’t allow that.”

“Normally they don’t, but this is the Officer’s Club and the union honchos want to keep the 8th Army staff happy.”

“At the Enlisted Club, all we got to look at is that crusty old Mr. Huang.”

“You should have gone to Officer’s Candidate School.”

“Too late to become a brown-noser,” Ernie said.

The first sergeant shook his head. “All right, Bascom. And you too, Sueño. I don’t care what your personal feelings are about the Officer’s Club. This is a simple matter, and I want you to keep it that way. No nosing around for things that don’t concern you, and no mouthing off to those officers over there.”

Ernie pointed to his chest and mouthed a silent, “Us?”

“Yeah, you! Miss Pei is over there now, tending bar for the lunch crowd. At about thirteen hundred I want you to check it out and give me a complete report. Keep it simple, keep it neat, and don’t get yourselves into any trouble.”

“Piece of rice cake,” Ernie said. “Not to worry, Top.”

The first sergeant frowned as we got up and walked towards the door. All I could think about was the number of times I’ve gagged on a wad of thick chewy rice cake.

Terrible stuff.

Halfway down the carpeted hallway of the 8th Army Officer’s Club I was slapped with the familiar aroma of stale beer, sliced lemon, and liberally sloshed disinfectant.

Home.

Miss Pei was behind the bar, cleaning up and doing her post-lunch-hour inventory. There weren’t any officers left in the bar, as the chief of staff keeps the place closed during the afternoon.

Miss Pei stood up and looked at us as we approached. Her face was flushed, and she appeared nervous. It hadn’t been a good day. A wisp of straight black hair hung down across her forehead, and she brushed it back with her chubby hand and short brown forearm.

“You C.I.D.?” she asked.

“That’s us,” Ernie said. “Criminal Investigation Division, Yongsan Detachment.”

Miss Pei wore a neatly pressed white blouse and a red skirt. She was a very attractive young lady and I could see why the chief of staff preferred this young flower gracing his cocktail lounge to some old curmudgeon like Mr. Huang.

“All the money is back,” she said. “I made a mistake. There is no problem.”

We looked at her for a moment, not sure what to say, and then a tall thin American in a baby blue three-piece suit hustled out of the hallway and wound through the cocktail tables.

“George! Ernie! I tried to get in touch with you, but your first sergeant told me you’d already left. It was all a mistake. We found the money locked in the liquor cabinet and it’s all there and there’s nothing to worry about, but I’m glad you guys came anyway. Can I buy you a drink?”

“I thought the bar was closed?”

“For chumps. For you guys it’s always open.”

“I’ll take a beer,” Ernie said.

I shrugged. What the hell. It wasn’t often that Freddy bought anything. Not unless you had him over a barrel. I turned to Miss Pei.

“I’ll take a Falstaff.”

“Two Falstaff?” She held up two short stubby fingers. Ernie nodded.

I looked at Freddy. “How the hell did you get over here? They kick you out of the NCO Club?”

“Naw, nothing like that,” Freddy said. “That mush-for-brains Ballard was losing money here, so they sent me over two months ago. Already we’re back in the black. Made a profit of two thousand dollars last month, and we’re climbing.”

“You must know how to handle these officers.”

“Nothing to it. Tell ’em that they’re smart and make them feel like they’re getting something for free and they’ll let you manage the place like you want to manage it.”

“You mean, steal the club blind.”

“Come on, George. You know better than that. We’re audited all the time.”

“A guy like you, Freddy, should be able to outsmart an auditor any day of the week.”

His eyes sparkled at that, but he didn’t say anything.

Ernie finished his beer and got another one from Miss Pei. As long as it was free, he didn’t have time to talk.

“You say it was a mistake?”

“Yeah,” Freddy said. “This new clown of an assistant manager I got, fresh out of club management school, he didn’t look hard enough and told the chief of staff about it before he got his head out of his ass and checked with me. It was just misplaced, that’s all. I counted it myself. It’s all there.”

“Miss Pei said that the money had been ‘put back.’ ”

Freddy shot her a look. She froze, like a squirrel in front of a hunter.

“Just a figure of speech she uses, that’s all.”

“Let me see the money, Freddy.”

“Sure. No sweat, George. No sweat.”

He snapped his fingers, and Miss Pei bent down into her liquor cabinet and soon reappeared with a gigantic brandy snifter full of crisp green bills.

“And I’ll need the chart, or whatever you used to record the money put into the pool.”

Freddy went around behind the bar and helped Miss Pei take down a large cardboard poster that was taped to the mirror.

She laid it on the bar, and I studied it for a moment. A hundred squares, ten by ten, were drawn on the board. Across the top and down the left side, each square was numbered zero to nine. For a set amount you bought a square, and if your numbers were, say, three and seven, and the final score of the game turned out to be twenty-three to seventeen, the two last digits matched yours and you won the pool — the total amount of money bought in for. If each square cost a dollar, and they were all sold, your take would be a hundred dollars. In this case it was a little steeper.

“Five dollar pool,” I said. “These guys were getting serious.”

“The army-navy game,” Freddy said. “Half these guys were cadets at West Point way back when Christ was a corporal. It’s like a religion to them.”

I noticed a number of entries marked “SMF” in red felt pen. The chief of staff’s initials.

First I started to count the number of blocks that were filled in with somebody’s signature, but there were so many of them that I just counted the empty blocks. There were five. Ninety-five were filled in. That meant there should be a total of four hundred and seventy-five dollars in the brandy snifter. The bills were crisp, and I had to peel them off of one another carefully. Twenty-three twenties, a ten, and a five. It was all there.

“It balances out, Freddy.”

“You want another beer?”

“Yeah.”

Miss Pei served us both, deftly and silently.

I could have let it go. All the money was there, each square in the poster was accounted for, but there was the crispness of the bills. They hadn’t been collected by the bartender as she went along during the workday over the weeks preceding the game; a five dollar bill here, a twenty dollar bill there. These bills had all been put in together. Even the serial numbers were in sequence. Fresh stuff. Right out of the Finance Office. My guess was that when somebody blew the whistle on him, Freddy had hustled into his cashier’s cage, gotten the money, and replenished the brandy snifter so everything balanced.

“You mind if I take a look at the liquor cabinet?”

“No. Go ahead.”

I walked around behind the bar. Stepping on the planks, I realized that I towered over Miss Pei. She was much more in control when us foreign monsters were seated on the other side of the counter. The liquor cabinets had sliding wooden doors with hasps and padlocks. None of them appeared to have been tampered with, and there was no evidence of any recent repair work. Whoever had gotten to the brandy snifter had access to the area while the liquor cabinets were open or used a key.

While I was down there checking, I noticed Miss Pei’s clipboard with her daily bar inventory on it. It listed all the various types of liquor and beer served in the 8th Army Officer’s Club. She had accounted for each shot poured, multiplied that total by the cost per drink, and compared the grand total to the amount of money taken in during her shift. It matched to the penny. Not an ounce of liquor had been wasted.

I stood up and rotated my back to loosen it up. “No sign of tampering with the locks.”

“I told you,” Freddy said. “It was all a mistake. The money’s all here, what are you worried about?”

I ignored him and walked to the front of the bar. “Let’s check the cashier’s cage, Freddy.”

As I walked towards the front lobby, Freddy followed. “You don’t have a right! You came here to check out the football pool, not to rummage around in my cashier’s cage.”

I stopped when we got out in the hallway and put my finger up to Freddy’s nose. “I’m in the middle of an investigation, Freddy, in a government-owned facility. If you try to interfere, I’ll arrest you.”

Freddy stared at me, his thin brown mustache quivering with rage.

“You’re an idiot, George.”

Ernie passed us on his way to the cashier’s cage, his Falstaff still in his hand. “That’s what everybody tells him. Doesn’t do any good, though. He’s still the same.”

The middle-aged bespectacled woman in the cashier’s cage stood up as we entered. I went right to work. The total amount of operating funds for the club was posted on the side of the safe and signed by the Yongsan Director of Personnel and Community Affairs. The total was eight thousand Five hundred dollars in U.S. money and fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of Korean won. Any monies above that would be cash receipts and would have to be accounted for with a form called the Daily Cashier’s Record.

The big safe was open, and the money was neatly arranged. With Freddy and the cashier standing there watching us, we counted it quickly. It was all there with the addition of the two hundred seventy-three dollars and eighty-five cents taken in by the bar and the six hundred forty-seven dollars taken in by the kitchen during the just completed lunch hour.

There was only one problem. Instead of fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of won, the Korean operating bank had nineteen hundred seventy-five dollars’ worth of won and the U.S. dollar operating bank was depleted by exactly four hundred seventy-five. It all balanced out, but they had too much Korean money and hot enough U.S. money. And the difference was exactly the amount found in the big glass brandy snifter.

“You took up a collection, didn’t you, Freddy?”

“Not me.” Freddy put his hand to his chest and took a step out of the small office. “I don’t know nothing about it.”

“Or maybe you didn’t want to know nothing about it.”

“What the employees do with their own money is up to them. I had nothing to do with it.”

Ernie snorted.

Freddy turned and fled back to his office.

Talk about standing up for your staff.

The situation didn’t look too serious. Apparently what had happened was that Miss Pei noticed that the football pool money was missing from the brandy snifter, informed the new assistant manager, and he told the chief of staff, who is also the head of the Club Council, about the missing money when he came in for lunch. The chief of staff, of course, got on the horn and told the C.I.D. to get down here right away. Hot stuff. Money missing from the army-navy football pool. Some of it his.

Meanwhile, Freddy and the club employees got wind of the situation and for some reason decided to take up a collection in won, the Korean currency; change it into U.S. dollars at the cashier’s cage; and replace the money in the brandy snifter. Why they did this I didn’t know. One reason could have been to keep the heat off the club. Those bar inventories looked too precise to account for normal human activity. Bartenders sometimes spill liquor or open the wrong can of beer, or a customer sends a drink back because it isn’t what he ordered. Inventories shouldn’t come out even, down to the last ounce of liquor and the last can of beer. Not real inventories. But when you’re pulling a scam, you might decide to make everything balance out perfectly so you don’t attract attention. So you won’t have a couple of nosy C.I.D. agents wandering around your club.

Or maybe they had collected the money for some other reason. I didn’t know. But most important, I couldn’t figure who had stolen the money in the first place.

I looked at the cashier. “Who took the money out of the brandy snifter?”

She put her head down and stared at the floor. Slowly she began to shake her head. I tried again.

“Where did all this extra won come from? Did you take up a collection?”

Still she said nothing, as if she were tremendously ashamed, and just kept shaking her head.

I stood up. I knew I wasn’t going to get anything here. Ernie stood up and threw his empty beer can into the wastebasket, and we walked out into the hallway.

Ernie said, “They’re trying to cover something up.”

I said, “You got that right.”

Two cute young Korean girls, bundled in sweaters and scarves, bounced down the hallway towards the main exit. Lunch hour waitresses, just heading home.

I stopped them and spoke in Korean.

“Young lady. Who is the head of the union here?”

They both stopped abruptly, breathless and wide-eyed.

“Mr. Kwon. The bar manager.”

I thanked them; they giggled and continued on their way.

Ernie looked after them. “Nice legs.”

“That’s all you could see of them.”

“That was enough.”

We wandered down the red carpeted hallway, took a couple of lefts, and found the bar manager’s office. Mr. Kwon stood up when we walked in. He was a tall man for a Korean, close to six feet, maybe in his mid-fifties, and he had the scholarly air of someone who works with books and ledgers all the time. Not like most of the bartenders I was used to back in the States. He wore slacks and a white shirt with a black tie. His hair was oiled and combed straight back. I tried to imagine him in the white pantaloons and tunic of the ancient Korean with his hair long and knotted on the top. He looked like a Confucian scholar caught in modern times.

His eyes widened slightly. “Yes?”

“It’s about the money you collected,” I said, “to replace what was missing from behind the bar. Why?”

Mr. Kwon sighed and indicated the chairs against the wall across the small cubicle. “Have a seat,” he said.

We sat. And waited.

“This morning when Miss Pei came to me and told me the money was missing, we decided to take up a collection and replace it.”

“We?”

“The Korean employees here. It is not good to leave something shameful like the disappearance of money unattended to. This is our home. We take care of it.”

“But Miss Pei had already told one of the Americans. The assistant manager.”

“A mistake. We should not have bothered you about this matter.”

“Who took the money?”

Mr. Kwon looked down for a second and then up at me. “The money is back now. There is no reason to worry about who took it.”

“Maybe not. But I need to know. Otherwise, I won’t know whether to worry or not.”

“And besides,” Mr. Kwon said, “now that the chief of staff is interested in this matter, you are nervous and if you don’t find out the truth it could be bad for you.”

Bingo. I wasn’t hardly admitting it to myself. If this had been the Enlisted Club and the money had been returned and none of the 8th Army honchos had known about it, I wouldn’t have bothered to look any further. As it was, the first sergeant would be breathing fire if we didn’t wrap this thing up.

Ernie jumped in. “Don’t you worry about the chief of staff. You just tell us who stole that damn money.”

Mr. Kwon looked at him steadily. “One of our waitresses stole it. Miss Lim.”

Ernie said, “Why haven’t you turned her in?”

“We will take care of it. Our own way.”

There was something about this situation that was bothering me. If they had a bad apple among them who was embarrassing everybody by stealing the army-navy football pool money, I could understand their trying to get rid of her quietly in order to save face for the entire Korean staff. But what I couldn’t understand was why they would donate their hard-earned money to cover for her. Their chances of getting their donations reimbursed were nil. So why not just admit the thievery, run her out of town, and forget it? Were they that embarrassed that they’d shell out cash to avoid the wrath of the 8th Army chief of staff? I knew I wouldn’t. Of course, years of doing without in East L.A. had taught me to be somewhat parsimonious. But the Koreans had risen from the ashes of a devastating war less than two decades ago. They were even thriftier than I was. It didn’t make sense.

“What is it about this Miss Lim,” I said, “that makes you want to protect her?”

Mr. Kwon shifted in his seat and then looked back at me. Maybe he decided that we weren’t going to give up so he might as well lay it on the table.

“We know why she stole the money,” he said. “She had a baby and the baby is sick and she had to take it to the hospital.”

“What about her husband?”

“She’s not married.”

I waited. Mr. Kwon continued.

“There was an officer here. Not a good man. I warned her. She stayed with him while he spent his year in Korea. He told her that he would divorce his wife and return for her and the baby. After he left for the States, he wrote to her maybe two or three times, sent her a little money, and then stopped writing. I’ve seen it many times. I’ve seen many young Korean girls with their hopes too high. They are blinded by their love for the United States.”

“Not their love for the GI?”

“No.” Mr. Kwon’s face didn’t move.

Ernie pulled out a stick of chewing gum, unwrapped it, and after a few chomps got it clicking. He didn’t believe that line any more than I did. Shooting for sympathy. With a half-American baby yet.

“Where does this Miss Lim live?”

Mr. Kwon sighed again. He lifted the phone on his desk, dialed, barked a question, and then wrote something on the notepad in front of him. After he hung up the phone, he ripped the paper off the pad and handed it to me.

“Do you read Korean?”

“If you write it clearly.” It was an address.

“This is where Miss Lim lives?”

“Yes.”

I thanked him; we stood up and left the room. He looked after us as we walked down the long hallway. Maybe it was his resigned manner. Maybe it was the ancient cast of his features. But something told me that he’d been through this before.

Unlike the lush gentility of the 8th Army compound, Itaewon was alive with milling people and rows of produce, chickens, hogs, and fish wriggling in murky tanks. Miss Lim’s alley was right off the Itaewon Market, but the noise of commerce shut off abruptly as we slid into the narrow walkway. Ten foot high brick and stone walls loomed over us. I checked the numbers on the gateways to the homes. They didn’t seem to be in order, as if things had changed too much over the centuries for a simple one, two, three, four. Finally I found the gateway to 246-15 and pounded on a splintered wooden gate. Hens squawked as an old woman put on her slippers and shuffled towards us.

“Yoboseiyo?” she said.

“Miss Lim,” I said. “We’re looking for Miss Lim.”

The old woman opened the door. Trusting. We were Americans, not thieves.

“Ae Kyong ah!” She called for someone. I thought it would be Miss Lim, but it turned out to be an interpreter. A woman, about thirty, in blue shorts and a red T-shirt emerged from her hooch.

“Are you Miss Lim?” I said.

“No. She went to the hospital. Her baby is very sick.”

“Which hospital?”

She spoke to the old woman in rapid Korean and then turned back to me. “The MoBom Hospital in Hannam-dong.”

“Which room does she live in?”

“The one on the end. There.”

Ernie and I walked over. It was just a hovel. Raised foundation, little plastic closet in the corner, folded sleeping mats on a vinyl floor, and a small potbellied stove in the center of the room with rickety aluminum tubing reaching to the ceiling. An officer in dress greens stared at me out of a framed photograph. He looked in his mid-thirties, maybe twenty pounds over his fighting weight, with curly brown hair and a big jolly smile. Gold maple leaves on his shoulder glittered along with his white teeth.

I turned back to the women. “How long has Miss Lim been gone?”

“She came home from work late last night. The baby never stopped crying. She waited until the curfew was over and then left for the hospital.”

“Before dawn?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s been there ever since?”

“Yes.”

The old woman waited patiently, not understanding. I smiled at her, thanked them both, and we turned to go. The woman in the blue shorts and red T-shirt called after me.

“Hey!”

We stopped and turned around.

“Why you GI always make baby and then go?”

I didn’t have an answer for her. Ernie stopped clicking his gum. We turned around and left.

The waiting room of the MoBom Hospital was packed. An attractive young Korean woman with a snappy white cap pinned to her black hair sat behind a counter near the entrance. Behind her was a list of basic fees. It was ten thousand won, up front, to see a doctor. Fourteen bucks.

I told her about Miss Lim and her sick baby and asked where we could find her. She thumbed through a ledger but kept shaking her head. She wanted to know Miss Lim’s full name. I told her she was the woman with the half-American baby. She perked right up.

“Oh, yes. She is in Room 314. The stairway is over there.”

The room held about thirty tiny beds with plastic siding on them. Miss Lim sat next to one of the tiny beds on a wooden chair, her face in her hands. I showed her my identification.

“Hello, Miss Lim. We’re from the C.I.D.”

It seemed that her face was about to burst with redness. She was a plain woman, young and thin with a puffy face that looked even more bloated from crying.

“Is your baby going to be all right?”

“The doctor is not sure yet. I must wait.”

Ernie didn’t like it there. He fidgeted with the change in his pocket and then drifted back towards the door. My signal to wrap it up quickly.

“The money you took from behind the bar. It has already been replaced. I will talk to everyone. Explain your situation. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

Her head went back into her hands, and this time she clutched her red face as if she were trying to bury it in her palms. I couldn’t be sure, but I think her shoulders convulsed a couple of times. I looked down at the baby. It was scrawny. Unconscious. Sweat-soaked brown hair matted against its little head.

We left.

Neither one of us spoke as the sloe-eyed stares followed us out of the hospital.

Ernie zigzagged his jeep through the heavy Seoul traffic as if he were in a race to get away from the devil.

“Well,” he said. “We wrapped up another one.”

“I’m sure they won’t do anything to her,” I said. “I’ll type up the report to make her look as good as possible. Even the 8th Army chief of staff’s got a heart.”

Ernie didn’t say anything. I turned to him.

“Right?”

He shrugged. “If you say so, pal.”

The chief of staff didn’t want to prosecute, but in his capacity as the president of the Officer’s Club council he did demand that Miss Lim appear before the next board meeting and explain her actions. The word we got was that he was upset with her because she could have come to the Club Council any time and they would have helped her out. Thievery wasn’t necessary, according to him.

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.