“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.