sketches were nondescript. Almost blurry. As would’ve been the recollections of a handful of casino employees who probably spent most of their time during the robbery staring at the barrels of the pistols pointed at them. The one sketch was of a generic Caucasian. Pug nose, square face, short hair, eyes unseen behind opaque shades. The other was even less specific. Dark man, dark hair, dark shades. He could be a curly-haired Korean, a Hispanic, a swarthy Caucasian, or even a light-skinned black.
A group of American witnesses might’ve been able to figure out the man’s race. But to Koreans, all GIs are part of one race: foreigners. It was becoming apparent to me that these sketches were not going to be much help.
The Charge of Quarters even decided to be a smartass about the whole thing.
“These guys look more like you two than anybody else,” he said.
Ernie and I ignored him. I unrolled the sketch of the smiling woman. Both men leaned forward, mouths open, and for a moment I thought they might drool. When the CQ reached for the sketch, I slapped his hand away.
“Hey!” he said.
“Have you seen her or not?”
They both shook their heads and the CQ said, “I wish I had.”
I thanked the First Sergeant for his cooperation. In response, he grunted.
The United Seaman’s Service Club was our next stop. All the employees-the cooks, the waitresses, the bartenders-were Koreans, except for the American manager. He was a chubby, bald, middle-aged ex-merchant marine originally from New Jersey, and he definitely did not match the two young faces in the sketches. He claimed the KNPs had already been by and questioned everyone in the club about the robbery.
4
Still, at that time, they didn’t have the sketches. We showed the charcoal-limned faces to all the employees, and they all claimed they had never seen them before. The only ships in port currently were one Panamanian vessel manned by Filipinos, one Greek ship manned by Greeks, and a Japanese ship manned by Japanese. None of the crews frequented the United Seaman’s Service Club. The Filipinos and the Greeks because they were poor. The Japanese because they didn’t appreciate the food.
“Tonight’s special is prime rib,” the manager told us.
Ernie and I declined. No time for chow.
Then I unrolled the sketch of the smiling woman and showed it around. The Korean men seemed mildly interested, but the women uniformly crinkled their noses. I asked what was wrong. Most of the women wouldn’t answer, but one rotund waitress waggled her finger at the sketch and said, “She not Korean.”
“What is she?” I asked.
“Maybe…” She started to say something but then thought better of it and shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Everyone denied having seen the smiling woman.
In the cocktail lounge, an elderly Caucasian man lay with his face down on a table near the juke box. The man was red-nosed, unshaven, and snoring.
The Korean bartender stood at attention behind the bar.
“How long has this guy been here?” I asked him.
“We open, most tick he come.”
“Most tick” is a GI corruption of the Japanese word mosukoshi, which means “in a little while” or “soon” combined with an English expression of time, as in “ticktock.” Therefore, “most tick.”
“What time did you open?” I asked the bartender.
“Bar open eleven hundred hours.”
So this drunk had arrived here shortly after eleven a.m., during or shortly after the robbery of the Olympos Casino.
“Did the KNPs talk to him?” I asked.
The bartender crinkled his nose in disgust. “They no like.”
I was seeing a lot of crinkled noses today. Even a dedicated Korean cop is reluctant to talk to Americans. Especially drunk ones. They’re trouble. Either they start shouting and throwing their weight around or, if you arrest them, heat comes down from on high, asking why are you ruining the delicate interplay of Korean American relations. I could tell from the reek of the man’s breath that he’d probably been drunk since this morning and would’ve been considered an unreliable witness anyway.
Ernie and I glanced at one another, and he nodded and stepped forward. Using his left hand, Ernie held the back of the man’s head down on the cocktail table. With his right, he slipped a wrinkled wallet out of the drunk’s hip pocket. He handed it to me.
I rifled through the contents until I found a military ID.
“Retiree,” I said. “U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer. Wallace, Hubert K.”
Ernie shook Hubert K. Wallace awake. The startled man stared up at us with red-rimmed eyes. Confused. The bartender handed me a glass of water; I handed it to Ernie. Instead of offering the man a drink, Ernie tossed the contents of the glass flush into the face of retired CPO Hubert K. Wallace.
The man sputtered and sat up, clawing moisture out of his eyes, fully awake now.
“What the…”
“Okay, Wally,” Ernie said. “Give. What’d you see this morning?”
“See?”
“When you came in for your hair of the dog shortly after eleven hundred hours. You must’ve seen something. Something unusual going on at the Olympos.”
“Oh, yeah,” Wallace replied. “You mean those two guys.”
Ernie and I tensed. Wallace rubbed more water out of his eye sockets and continued.
“In a hurry,” Wallace said, “both of them. A big bag under their arm.”
“Under whose arm? The light-skinned guy or the dark one?”
Wallace crinkled his forehead. “The dark one, I think.”
“Where’d they go?”
“The dark one ran north.”
“Toward the train station?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“And the light one?” Ernie asked.
“He came here.”
“Here?” I said. “To the Seaman’s Club?”
“Well, not inside. There was a cab parked outside. He jumped in the back, said something to the driver.”
“Did you hear what he said?”
“No. I was too far away.”
“Which way did the car go?”
“South.”
“Toward the Port of Inchon?”
“Yeah. Toward the port.”
We questioned Wallace a little longer, but that was all he knew. Still, we’d come up with a witness. I jotted down the particulars from his military ID and prodded him for his address and told him that we might need to question him later. He asked us to buy him a drink.
“Things are a little tight right now,” he explained.
Ernie complied, slapping a buck on the bar.
Outside in the jeep we talked it over.
“The dark guy must’ve taken the money and jumped on the train to Seoul,” I said. “Before the KNPs had time to react.”
During the day, commuter trains from Inchon to Seoul depart about every fifteen minutes.
