Читать книгу Murder at the Tokyo American Club - Robert J. Collins - Страница 5

MURDER

at the

Tokyo American Club

It reminded him suddenly of the half-eaten cockroach in the ham-salad sandwich.

He couldn't have been more than four or five at the time, yet the event was sufficiently impressive to record itself permanently in the section of his brain responsible for cataloging, storing, and reproducing on otherwise slow evenings the fodder for a lifetime of nightmares.

On his best behavior, he sat in his assigned chair at one end of the table in the fancy department-store restaurant. His grandmother chatted merrily with her ladyfriends at the other end. A post-luncheon trip to the toy department was the promised reward for "good little boys who are seen but not heard." He was surrounded by quiet civility, the scent of lilacs, and blue hair.

The discovery of cockroach parts gave pause for a moment or two of thoughtful reflection upon the special crispiness of the sandwich as consumed so far. A piece of ham, or lettuce, was stuck in an area of the mouth until recently occupied by a perfectly good baby tooth.

It is altogether conceivable, he mused, that events can seem to be so awful that they can't possibly be real. A lifetime of listening to the tales of the Brothers Grimm had developed in him a healthy skepticism about perceived horrors visiting the good guys. In the stories, the good guys survive all terrors unscathed.

But here was the cockroach, or at least a portion of it, clearly in evidence. He felt an overwhelming urge to communicate directly with his grandmother, seated sedately at the other end of the table. It would appear that awful events could be real.

He remembers solving the breaking-into-her-conversation issue rather effectively. In fact, the attention he gained impressively overflowed the circle of his grandmother and her friends and rippled to the very edge of the fancy department-store restaurant. Still in his "best behavior" mode, he screamed at the top of his lungs.

And then for good measure, he threw up.

Now, some forty years later, the "could something so awful be real" question struck again. Standing at the window of the fourth and top floor of the Tokyo American Club, Gordon W. Sparks surveyed the scene below. Rows of neatly parked cars glimmered in the glow of lights surrounding the club's perimeter. On the other side of the parking lot wall stood the Soviet Embassy, a neighbor with whom the American Club shared a relationship fraught with complexity more on paper than in reality. As usual at this time of night, the embassy compound was dark, with only pinpoints of light randomly flashing through branches of the massive trees on the grounds.

Across the club courtyard stood the four-story recreation building, its white walls looking newer and cleaner under artificial illumination than in the harsh light of day. Behind the recreation building and beyond the property, high-rise office and apartment buildings dropped off into the middle distance below the club's hill. Traffic on elevated highways wove as pearls on strings through the masses of concrete that formed the world's largest city. In the far distance lay Tokyo Bay, and then the Pacific beyond.

In the middle of the courtyard was the architectural, and during most months of the year, social centerpiece of the club. The swimming pool and surrounding deck area were an extravagance in open space rarely found in Japan's population centers. On this evening in December, however, the pool area seemed strangely small without the deck chairs, umbrellas, tables, and people.

The underwater lights in the pool had been turned on—an aesthetic concession to club members attending the annual formal dinner-dance. The rippling water cast moving shadows on the recreation building's white wall. Gordon was surprised to notice how vivid the dark lane lines were on the blue bottom of the pool—one rarely saw them through relatively still water.

Without thinking, Gordon loosened his black bow tie and unbuttoned his tuxedo jacket. He started for the ballroom door, then returned to the window for one final check. The ham-salad-sandwich episode flashed into his consciousness. In a daze, he turned and entered the ballroom.

The chandeliers had been dimmed, dishes cleared, and the band members were positioning themselves on the stage. Elegant couples sat at tables decorated with red candles and holly, or sauntered through the groupings of tables to the dance floor. Gordon's table, and his wife, were on the far side of the room.

"Wait a minute!" he yelled to the bandleader, who was just turning away from the audience. The sound was lost to all but those in his immediate vicinity. "Wait a minute!" he bellowed again, still not attracting much attention. The bandleader was raising his arms to signal the downbeat when Gordon W. Sparks did what sort of came naturally. He screamed at the top of his lungs.

And to punctuate his announcement, he threw up.

Out in the courtyard pool, bobbing and rolling gently at the bottom of the shallow end, was a round object the size of a soccer ball. It was surrounded by murky water of a considerably darker hue than the light blue elsewhere in the pool. At the deep end, spread-eagled and looking strangely relaxed—and with another cloud of murky water trailing from it to the area under the diving board—was an object more immediately recognizable. It was the formally clad torso of what was left of a man.

* * * *

"Tim" Kawamura was the second of three children. He was five centimeters shorter than his older sister but five centimeters taller than his younger brother. He played center field on his junior high school baseball team, and wrestled as a middleweight on the high school judo team. He graduated from university ranked 201st in a class of 402.

Kawamura married the girl of his parents' choice at the age of twenty-eight years, six months. He and his wife now have exactly two children and, to keep things in balance, they are of each sex. Kawamura would rather spend his days sitting in a rowboat fishing than anything he could possibly imagine. He has seven years and ninety-two days to go until retirement at age fifty-five.

An awesome talent has dogged Tim Kawamura since his junior high school days. His special skill first displayed itself, to his own amazement, in contests in and around his native island of Kyushu. As word of his abilities spread to the main island of Honshu, Kawamura was soon packed off to appear in similar but broader contests throughout the country. Once, in 1960, he even appeared on national television. The prestige and acclaim he brought to his family and teachers was incalculable, and it led to a very tangible job offer and subsequent career in which his unique abilities are employed even today.

During the pre-Olympic months in 1964, the Olympic organizers, in coordination with the Japanese government, conducted a massive campaign to prepare the local citizenry for anticipated encounters with international visitors. People like Kawamura were in great demand.

Just out of school, he was brought to Tokyo, housed in a special dormitory, and outfitted in red slacks and a white blazer with a red sun on the breast pocket. Kawamura was one of hundreds of young men and women outfitted in red slacks and white blazers with red suns on the breast pockets. Performing well during rehearsals—that old talent again— he was given a prestigious assignment. He was christened by authorities with the name Tim (it being well-known that all foreigners called people by their given names) and entrusted with the responsibility of "Liaison Official" to the visiting United States Olympic team, specifically the javelin throwers.

When, after the Games, it was determined that Kawamura had acquitted himself particularly well—especially during a potentially disastrous misunderstanding involving the javelin throwers and their javelins, the young maidens from the International School of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, their Mother Superior, the stunned proprietor of a beer hall in the Ginza, and a local policeman on patrol in the neighborhood—he was approached by the Police Department with an offer of permanent employment. His assistance had been deemed to be significant, and his career was guaranteed. He was now a captain and his talent was still a special and relatively rare gift.

Tim Kawamura, in public or in private, before great crowds or small, while drunk or plain sober, was able to open his mouth and make sounds emerge in a torrent. And those sounds, apparently shaped by alien forces lurking deep in the brain's chemistry, were in mysterious but apparently well-understood. . . English!

Captain Kawamura was assigned to handle whatever it was that had happened among the foreigners at the Tokyo American Club.

* * * *

"Stand back everyone. Stand back."

J.B. Culhane III had been president of the Tokyo American Club for seven weeks. The mantle of authority rested uncertainly on his beefy shoulders—his most significant action as president had been his acceptance speech, in which he announced that jackets and ties would be henceforth required for entry to the mixed grill. It had been necessary for him the following week, however, to clarify by letter to all members that the pronouncement did not apply to women. "Women should wear, er, just nice things," he later explained to the Board of Governors.

Several dozen people had rushed down to the pool area after Gordy Sparks' spectacular revelation of things amiss in the water. Another three hundred or so remained in the building, crowding for space at the windows outside the ballroom, or descending to lower floors for a better view. None of the people in the pool area gave the slightest indication of doing anything but standing back.

"Stand back," J.B. roared, "wait for the police."

J.B. Culhane III was on, by his own admission, something resembling the "fast track" in his corporation. He had worked in three of four different areas of his head office, and these assignments had been interspersed with several postings to overseas corporate hot spots. "Jack," as he was known to his close friends, was both nimble and quick, and the relative frequency of his assignments allowed him to leap over the candlesticks which had burned several of his successors.

His rise in the hierarchy of the club was nothing short of phenomenal—the timing of transfers, job-changes, and expanding career responsibilities created a vacuum at the top which J.B. rose to from his former position of house committee chairman. "It will be good for business," J.B. told his head-office supervisors after his election, "and I get to write a column in the monthly club newspaper." What he did not mention, or even notice at first, was the headache of trying to satisfy thirty-five hundred members, not counting spouses and children, from forty-four different countries.

"Let's at least get the head out," said the Frenchman at J.B.'s elbow. "We can use the pool skimmer, I think."

In a way, it was amazing that the first question on everyone's lips was who the victim was, not what happened or why. The head was covered with white hair that floated silkily in the murky water, but the face remained resolutely down and out of sight.

"Or let's just poke it over to see," continued the Frenchman.

J.B. walked to the other end of the pool, telling people hovering against the bushes in the background to stand back, and looked at the torso. Unfortunately, tuxedos have a uniformity about them, making identification without living gestures, or heads, impossible. A large area of water around the body was clouded by the reddish-brown fluid issuing from the neck, and columns of the stuff were already twisting and sinking to the bottom of the pool.

Small red and blue tubes floated like strings from the neck of the torso, and their movement in the softly rippling water gave an appearance of life that was, under the circumstances, grotesque. Feeling a sudden revulsion that must have similarly affected poor Gordy Sparks upstairs, J.B. stepped back, took a deep breath, and looked up at the people staring down from the windows in the main building. The first sounds of a siren could be heard wailing in the distance.

"O.K.," said J.B. Culhane III to the Frenchman standing at the shallow end, "take the pole and nudge it over." Jack had made his second decision as club president. "Stand back everyone," he added for good measure.

J.B. watched the Frenchman gingerly prod the submerged head. It took several attempts to catch the end of the pole in the area around the ear. When the pole did catch, the nudge was too sharp. The head spun completely around, white hair revolving in a trail. A lady standing near the shallow end screamed, and her escort caught her as she fell in a faint.

J.B. wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and turned toward the white wall of the recreation building. People on the fast track, he reminded himself, should avoid swooning at all costs. A babble of concerned conversation arose behind him, mingling with the "mon Dieus" from the Frenchman.

"Excuse, please," said a voice so startlingly close that J.B. dropped his handkerchief. "My name is Tim Kawamura and I am at your service. And," he added, almost as an afterthought, "I am with the Azabu Police Department."

He and J.B. exchanged business cards and bowed to each other ever so slightly. J.B. picked up his handkerchief.

"Is something wrong here?" asked Tim Kawamura. His eyes were flicking back and forth along the length of the twenty-five meter pool. His gaze rested fractionally longer at the deep end.

"Yes, Captain Kawamura," said J.B. in his best executive voice. He had positioned the handkerchief back in his jacket pocket. "It would appear that our club general manager may have, er, passed away."

* * * *

Peter ("Call me Pete") Peterson had been, until sometime between 7:30 and 8:00 on this lovely December evening, manager of the club for nearly five years. Supervising a staff of four hundred employees in a bilingual, bicultural environment was an extraordinary challenge in itself, but coordinating their efforts against a background of continual "advice" from the board, committee chairmen, and several thousand concerned members required the patience, wisdom, and strength of Job, Solomon, and Hercules.

Pete began his career washing dishes at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. It was a part-time job during high school, but it led to bigger and better things on the kitchen staff until, by the time he entered college, Pete could handle most chores in the food-preparation arena to the satisfaction of any chef happening to look his way. (The sour-cream-in-the-vichyssoise episode during President Truman's visit to the hotel had not been his fault, Pete would swear over the years: "Someone mislabeled the container.") Despite an abrupt departure from the Palmer House, Pete's career path was clear. He enrolled in Cornell University's hotel-management program and graduated into a string of jobs encompassing virtually every aspect of hotel and club management. He crawled around boiler room pipes in Pittsburgh, managed front desks in Cleveland, made certain the greens were mowed and watered in Tampa, and estimated occupancy rates in San Francisco. He also, in a pinch, stood in for a pastry chef in New Orleans. (''The sugar-salt difficulty happens more often than is commonly known," Pete later was heard to explain.)

By the time he was hired by the Tokyo American Club, Pete had compiled an impressive resume of assignments and had accumulated all the generally accepted awards and certificates of advanced studies necessary for management in the big leagues. Other than being banned from the kitchen ("You'd be surprised how much corn starch looks like baking powder"), Pete was given the green light by the board. He ran the thirty-five-hundred-member club, and did a very good job. He had approximately 1,750 friends, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,750 enemies—not counting, of course, any of his three ex-wives. Or his current widow.

* * * *

Agatha Christie, Michael Innes, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Freeman Willis Crofts and others in the classic British detective genre would somehow contrive to assemble all suspects in the same room, or set of rooms, and "take statements." A ham-fisted, canine-loyal, happily-married-to-someone-named-Bess-who-was-always-good-for-a-late-night-plate-of-eggs-and-tea assistant would take copious notes with the stub of a pencil that he'd lick between sentences.

The notes would be reviewed—chapters of them— by the inspector and his assistant upon the conclusion of the interviews. Turns of phrases, little lapses in alibis, and sudden emotional tics would be carefully scrutinized. ("Poppycock, my good fellow," said the man with powder burns on his wrist who claimed to be out walking the dogs alone when all the nasty business was occurring. "I loved my evil damn stepmother.")

Tim Kawamura's mother had been given a collection of dog-eared British mystery books by the U.S. Army Occupation officer who was billeted briefly with the Kawamuras immediately after the war. In support of his burgeoning linguistic talents, Tim had devoured the stories in his youth and had become the first in his circle of junior high school friends to employ the expletive "drat." (Once, during a speech contest, he was able to work in the words "circumstantial" and "evidence," sending the judges scurrying to their dictionaries. He won that contest.)

Experience on the police force had taught Tim that crime in real life, or at least crime outside England, was never as neat as that depicted in his treasured stories. A great deal more random violence was involved, and the real or imagined slights of forebears toward each other rarely carried through the generations to the present. ("Had your grandfather not been the bastard son of Lord Harley and his scullery maid, Great Aunt Margaret, I'd be Squire of Wormsley." Bang!)

And the simple test-formula of "motive, means and opportunity" never really applied, at least in Japan. Motives, of course, are universal. Problems with love, or a lack thereof, top the list, followed by issues involving money, reputation, and retribution.

But the "means" element in the formula rarely if ever included guns and automatic weaponry, with all the attendant technology of ballistics, trajectory, and calibration. In Japan only criminals possessed guns, and they shot only each other with them. Real crime largely depended on baseball bats and kitchen knives—instruments of mayhem somewhat difficult to trace.

As for the "opportunity" element, in a nation where the equivalent of half the U.S. population exists in habitable space the equivalent of the flat parts of southern California—and all rub elbows at some time or other during the day or night—lack of opportunity was impossibly impossible. Paper walls could be walked through, and frequently were.

Still, the basic principles of detection, as exemplified in the heroics of Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Sir John Appleby, and Inspector Alleyn, would have to be applied. If he had learned nothing else in all his years on the police force, Tim Kawamura had at least mastered the art of individual interrogation.

"I think," he said to club president J.B. Culhane III, "you should make everyone go back inside."

"Everyone? Christ, there must be. . ."

"Everyone," interrupted Kawamura. "And that includes all employees."

"But there must be close to five hundred people all together. . . "

"It will be my pleasure," continued the detective, "to interview all of them."

* * * *

"The ambassadors go first," J.B. shouted into the microphone on the ballroom stage. "Stand back, the ambassadors go first."

Surprisingly, most people had allowed themselves to be led back up to the fourth-floor ballroom. Docile compliance was perhaps supported by intense curiosity as to what the hell was going on. The rumor that Pete Peterson was the man in the pool was confirmed by J.B. in his opening remarks on the stage.

"It seems," J.B. said, "that an accident has befallen our general manager, Mr. Peterson. The police wish to ask a question or two. I am authorized to advise you all to comply with this request."

Not everyone had agreed to return to the fourth floor however. The Russian ambassador—a surprise attendee at the gala ball—slipped with his entourage around the wall and into his compound. Glasnost notwithstanding, he was better off getting clear of the American Club with a developing situation certain to attract publicity and perhaps result in considerable embarrassment.

The American ambassador and his wife had also been driven from the scene immediately. The diplomatic license plates on the black limousine froze the policemen assigned by Kawamura to guard the entrance to the club. They saluted the retreating red tail lights.

Four other ambassadors did return to the ballroom. The governmental representatives of Canada, Australia, Mexico, and Pakistan pushed with their wives through the crowd to the stage.

"Stand back, everyone," boomed J.B., "and let the, er, honorable dignitaries through."

Kawamura had arranged to borrow a dressing room immediately offstage. There he positioned three of his subordinates who he knew had a basic command of English, and instructed them to obtain everyone's name, address, and a brief statement of activities since arriving at the club.

The subordinates sat behind a long table that normally served as a repository for random props and make-up kits. They spread out their papers, positioned lighters, cigarettes, and ashtrays, uncapped their pens, rolled up their sleeves, and began the familiar and very comfortable process of bureaucratic questioning. Among themselves, they agreed to each ask every guest the same three questions. The theory was that taking notes in English was tricky enough on the face of things, and three separate stabs at the three questions would produce at least a fairly representative composite which could be sorted out later.

It was observed that the guests began to lose patience with the second set of three questions, and more particularly with the third set of three questions. Kawamura's subordinates solved the problem by rotating themselves so that each spent time in the second and third chairs.

Meanwhile, Kawamura prowled the pool area as forensic experts and related scientists examined the scene of the crime. The body and head had already been whisked away to the police morgue where, among other things, the cause of death would be determined.

The fingerprint wizards in white gloves asked Kawamura permission to leave after about an hour on the job. They had covered about a quarter of the area and had already lifted over two thousand prints. It was determined, after a ten-minute conference, that other clues would have to be found if this puzzle was to be solved. Someone suggested draining the pool, and a patrol was sent to try and find the location of valves.

A breakthrough of sorts was discovered by one of Kawamura's trainees, who was assigned to the peripheral regions of the scene. Wandering around the kiddy pool and peering into the snack bar facilities on the patio, he noticed a laundry cart half full of towels. He began to rummage through the cart, and then he noticed that the towels were stained with blood. The means of transport to the pool of the head or body, or both, was now clear. Investigation shifted focus to the snack-bar area.

J.B. spent the intervening time roaming back and forth between the third and fourth floors of the main building. The employees, some two hundred of them that evening, had been ensconced on the third floor in various banquet rooms; their turn to be interviewed would come only after the members and guests had had theirs. Chatting with the employees still awake, J.B. gradually became aware that now, without the general manager, he was really in charge. Someone asked him if the club would open in the morning, and J.B. realized he wasn't even certain if the club ever opened in the morning. "Yes," he answered, figuring the odds at roughly the same as a coin flip. "Unless we don't open," he added as a hedge.

On the fourth floor, anarchy appeared imminent. Pete's widow had made her statement (thrice) immediately after the ambassadors, and had been led down to her apartment on the B-3 level of the building for sedation and rest. Arrangements had been made by the police department to borrow a young woman from the fire department to sit with Mrs. Peterson in her grief.

Upstairs, meanwhile, the effects of shock and horror were beginning to wear off. Certainly no one was larking about, but a party had been going on, a great deal of alcohol had been consumed, and now premature hangovers and mood swings related to fluctuating alcohol levels were beginning to exhibit themselves.

"Goddamit, J.B.," said the club secretary, "the Pakistan ambassador won't go home. He keeps pushing into line to report more details of his evening's activities to the police. He's been up there three times."

"J.B., I'm due to catch a plane to Korea tomorrow," announced a young man with an excessively frilled dress-shirt," and if I'm not out of here soon, I'm holding you responsible."

"I say, Culhane old chap, form and all that sort of thing are frightfully important, frightfully important indeed." The accoster was wearing medals on his tuxedo jacket. "But I'd be ever so grateful if you'd pop me ahead in line. My da—, ah, business associate here is concerned about her elderly parents, getting home and all that, and of course my wife is waiting, well you know, frightful evening, swimming pool and that sort of thing."

"Jacques," said Jacques, "my wife is going to have a babee. A babeeee," he emphasized (though Mrs. Jacques was perhaps three, three-and-a-half months pregnant.)

"Mr. Culhane, this is my boss and his wife visiting from Boston. They don't want to stay here any longer."

"Hey J.B., you bloody twit, if we're not out of here by midnight, you and Pete will soon be practicing chord progressions together on the bloody harp."

One of the problems, J.B. noticed, was that there was, in fact, a tendency toward volubility among people involved in official inquiries. To be on the safe side, folks were telling more than the inspectors probably wanted to know. Carrying the title of "president"—a carte blanche position in Japan—J.B. was able to wander at will in and out of the interview room.

Women tended to detail trips to the ladies room, men recounted bouts of table-hopping. Gordy Sparks began rambling on about a bug in his lunch, the Pakistan ambassador described his trip to the front desk for a cigar. The inspectors would periodically hop about switching chairs, lighters, and cigarettes—Americans demanded the opportunity to consult with their lawyers. By 11:30 p.m., there were still fifty or sixty people waiting to be interviewed.

J.B. went downstairs looking for his new pal Tim.

* * * *

"We think we know how Pete was murdered," confided Captain Kawamura to J.B. "Your chef informed to us that one knife and one, how you say. . . ," Kawamura made a quick chopping motion with his hand.

"Cleaver?"

"Creaver."

"Cleaver."

"Cleaver is missing."

The two men were standing in a small room off the corridor leading to the service elevator. The room was a temporary holding area for the service carts used to bring food from the B-1 main kitchen level to the banquet area on the top floors. The room was now empty except for two carts with broken wheels and a jumbled pile of large silver serving trays and domed lids in one corner.

"And that," continued Kawamura, pointing to brownish stains on the lower wall next to the room's entrance, "is blood."

J.B. and the police captain looked at the stains. Clearly, something had been splattered on the wall—almost as if a ripe tomato had been thrown against it at point-blank range.

"Are you sure? I mean, are you sure it's blood?" asked J.B. "It could be some kind of food like. . . a tomato."

"Or pumpkin?" suggested Kawamura, bringing to two the items neither man would be comfortable eating again.

"Yes, or a. . . well, never mind."

"It is no doubting blood," said Kawamura. "Those scrape marks came from our men's investigation. They have the way to judge."

"But if that's the case, how could what must have happened here really happen?"

"You mean cutting off of the head?"

"I guess so. I mean, there must be constant activity in here and out by the elevator. I don't see how such an. . . an accident. . ."

"Cutting off of the head."

". . . could go undetected."

"According to your chef, who is by the way a Spanish," said Kawamura, "elevator is a very busy place when food goes up and plates come down."

"That's what I mean. How could. . ."

"But in between," continued Kawamura, "no business is here."

"That means that. . . er, what must have happened here. . ."

"Cutting off of the head."

"Yes, must have happened while everyone was eating food upstairs."

J.B. tried to remember if he had seen Pete during the meal. With the welcoming speech, the raising and dimming of lights, the shuffling of late-arriving people, and the general commotion attendant with serving 350 meals all at once, Culhane realized that he couldn't even begin to pin down Pete's movements. He always seemed to be around, and then he wasn't.

"But there is strange thing," said Kawamura. "Your chef who is a Spanish said no one absolutely saw Pete down here."

"But surely, there must have been people from the kitchen wandering around the hallway, or something. Obviously Pete was here," said J.B. looking at the stain on the wall.

"That is not your Spanish chef's idea."

"How can he be certain?"

"Because," said Kawamura, "he made a strict instruction for everyone to tell to him if Pete comes here."

"And. . .?"

"No one told to him."

"I see."

"Because," said Kawamura, turning from the doorway and walking over to the stain on the wall, "your chef who is a Spanish said if Pete comes here, he will hit him with a. . . ," the captain made a chopping motion with his hand.

"A cleaver?"

"A cleaver."

"I see," said J.B.

* * * *

It was 2:30 in the morning when the interviews with the members, guests, and employees were finally over. J.B. sat with Kawamura in the nearly deserted ballroom and reviewed the lists. It was clear that the mass of information would have to be broken down and put on a computer if any sense was to be made of it.

Various plainclothes investigators and uniformed officers wandered in and out of the room delivering brief spurts of information to Kawamura, who took their intelligence with stoicism and apparent unconcern. Photographers, for some reason, were popping their flashbulbs around the dance floor, their chores at poolside and in the kitchen now finished.

J.B. and Kawamura were joined by Gordy Sparks, whose practical role in the affair seemed clear-cut and marginal, but whose official role, Discoverer of the Body—albeit from a height of four stories—was deemed significant. They were also joined by Butch Percy, the recreation director, who was judged to have been the last person too see Pete in the ballroom. The two men and their wives had shared a table near the side entrance.

"He was up and down a lot," reported Butch, "in fact I don't think he sat down for more than five minutes during the first half hour."

"What was he doing?" asked Kawamura yawning. "I mean, where did he go up and down?"

"He went, well, I don't know exactly, just everywhere to make certain arrangements were OK, and, like that."

"You stated earlier," Kawamura read from a crumpled note, "that you last saw him just before the soup was served."

"That's right."

"What happened?"

"He said, 'Excuse me.' "

"He said, 'Excuse me?' " asked J.B., puzzled.

"I'll handle this, Culhane-san."

"Call me J.B."

"Call me Tim."

"Good, I've been calling you different names all night."

"Ahem, he said, 'Excuse me?' " asked Kawamura, turning back to Butch.

"Yes, someone came up and whispered something to him. He said 'Excuse me,' got up, and left the table."

"Who was it?" asked Gordy suddenly.

"I'll handle this, Sparks-san."

"Call me Gordy."

"Call me Captain Kawamura. Who was it?"

"I don't know. I didn't even turn around and look. It was a man, I saw the arm of a tuxedo, and," Butch yawned, "that's all."

"It was about 7:30?"

"It was about 7:30."

Another policeman approached Kawamura, muttered a few sentences and Kawamura muttered a few back. The policeman walked toward the rear of the room and out the door.

"He said the autopsy report is being delivered in a few minutes."

"Autopsy report? I would have thought, I mean even from where I was standing," said Gordy, "that. . ."

"I know," said Kawamura, stifling a yawn, "but it makes things official."

"You know Tim," announced J.B., pausing to yawn, "I've been looking at this list your men made. A number of people I know were here tonight and they aren't on the list. Is it possible your men didn't question them all?"

"Impossible," stated Kawamura. "Isn't it?"

"Actually, a number of people, mostly those who went down to the pool area, left the club property through the back gate," said Butch. "My wife was one of them."

"You mean to say," said Kawamura, turning to look back in the direction of the interrogation room next to the stage, "that all the lists we made. . .?"

"I'm afraid so," said J.B. through the tail end of a yawn.

Kawamura threw his pencil on the table, slumped back in his chair, and closed his eyes. He opened them once to see J.B., Sparks, and Percy yawning, and closed them again. He was in the middle of a yawn of his own when a policeman with an official-looking document approached.

Kawamura looked up at the policeman after reading the document once. He looked at J.B. after reading the document a second time. He got up, walked around the table, and sat down again after reading it a third time.

"We have big mystery here at this club, J.B." said Kawamura reading the document a fourth time.

"You're telling me. Old Pete down there. . ."

"No, I mean big mystery," interrupted Kawamura.

"What. . .?"

'To be exact, the head does not fit on the body."

"But that's imposs. . ."

"The body," continued Kawamura, "is Japanese."

* * * *

Molecular biologists are learning more every year about the genetic code found in each human cell. The code, or DNA, which is in a part of the human cell called the mitochondrion, is particularly fascinating because it is inherited only from the mother. It is postulated that humans, as we know and love ourselves today (as opposed to the earlier Neanderthal, Homo erectus, and Homo habilis models), originated in Africa more than seventy thousand years ago, gradually migrated outward to the Middle East, then Europe, and finally the Far East, Australia, and America.

The theory, and it is still a theory, maintains that modern Homo sapiens developed in parallel with the older and certainly very worthy creatures, and that the development of modern man can be traced through the DNA connection to a single human, "Eve," who was found to have lived in Africa some two hundred thousand years ago.

Tens of thousands of years of adapting to the demands of the environment have created secondary physical characteristics distinguishing races as statistical groups, but due to numerous variations, the distinctions on an individual basis are not always so readily apparent. Under the skin, all humans are brothers. And Japanese skin is about as "yellow" as Caucasian skin is really "white."

J.B. Culhane's reflections on the matter were substantially less profound, however. It had never occurred to him that physical indicators beneath the head might have to be employed to sort out the thorny issues implicit in this particular racial situation. One heard rumors, of course, but an element of science must be involved.

J.B. stopped his new friend as they were about to enter their cars in the club parking lot. The sky in the east was beginning to glow with the new light of day.

"Can I ask you something, Tim?"

"Certainly J.B."

"First of all, you're certain that, er, Pete's head doesn't fit on that body?"

"We're certain, J.B. The neck wounds on both parts were made by different instruments. In addition, the head doesn't fit on the body. It's, ah, technical, J.B."

"I understand, Tim. But my real question, I mean, you don't have to answer it, but. . ."

"But what?"

"Well, if you don't mind telling me."

"I can't know until you ask," said Tim getting into his car. "What?"

"Well," said J.B., clearing his throat, "what exactly, or should I say, what approximately, er, how do you know the body is actually Japanese?"

"It's easy," said Tim, signaling his driver to start. "His wallet was in his pocket."

* * * *

The Tokyo American Club was founded in 1928 by a group of American and Japanese businessmen interested in establishing for themselves a facility for family dining and social intercourse. Americans were by no means the first foreign contingent of merchants and traders in Japan, but by the 1920s they were the largest. Oil companies, business-machine manufacturers, and banks were increasingly involved in successful ventures in the country, and the new American executives often arrived in Tokyo with wives and children.

The club was originally located in the old Imperial Hotel, an architectural wonder (it did not collapse during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923) designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. An indication of the modest circumstances surrounding the club's early operation is the fact that the twenty-three original members were each obliged to donate two chairs along with their incorporation fees. Dining and social intercourse was necessarily limited to the first forty-six people signing up for the scheduled festivities.

A major attraction at the club during the early years—major because Americans could not live without it and Japanese could not obtain it elsewhere—was the presence of meat on the menu. Shipped frozen from the States, steaks and chops were crucial to the club's success. The first recorded club employee, biculturally named Walter Watanabe, had as his duties "sweeping the floor, locking and unlocking doors, guarding the liquor, fixing the lights, and cooking the food carefully."

By the late 1930s, the club had established its own premises in an old office building near the hotel and had grown to several hundred members. Diplomats and newspapermen from over a dozen countries joined the Japanese and American businessmen in dining and social intercourse. Walter Watanabe became only one of thirteen employees on the payroll, and his responsibilities had shrunk to "keeping the billiard room neat at all times." The chef was listed as being Monsieur Adachi, and his job description omitted the adjective "carefully." He was merely charged with the responsibility of "cooking the food."

Later, suspicions that the club harbored spies, malcontents, revolutionaries, anti-militarists, seditionists, oppressors, fifth columnists, appeasers, constitutional democrats, and folks without a sense of humor about world affairs had gradually diminished the pleasure of the dining and social intercourse. (It seems that both Walter Watanabe and Monsieur Adachi had been drafted—their names disappeared from the roster.) Discretion being the better part of valor, the organization ceased operation during the 1941-45 misunderstanding.

In 1946, three Japanese attorneys—prewar members—popped up and presented the U.S. Occupation authorities with documents relating to the original club charter. The last prewar club president, older and definitely wiser, was prevailed upon to become the first postwar president. By 1947 the organization was off and running again. But the scope of operations rapidly surpassed anything that the collective imagination of the founders with the forty-six chairs might have conjured.

Today the club occupies several acres of its own land in a Beverly Hills-Park Avenue-Nob Hill equivalent of central Tokyo. The membership of thirty-five hundred hails from forty-four countries and totals, counting spouses and dependents, about eleven thousand individuals.

The organization runs thirty-eight adult-education classes and arranges tours all over Asia. There are youth activity programs, including baseball, soccer, basketball, swimming, and scouting. Hundreds of formal and informal business meetings occur at the club each week—about half the two thousand meals served each day in the six dining facilities are in the expense-account category. A successful candidate for the presidency of the United States initially announced his availability in the club—and a prime minister of Japan successfully announced his resignation in the club. And as confirmation of the role played by the organization at the core of the members' lives, the videotape library averages over a quarter-million checkouts each year.

Yet despite its humble beginnings, its checkered early history, a cook named Walter, its accidental position next to the Russian Embassy, the potpourri of membership, and the rogues galley of organizational geniuses, dedicated public servants, buffoons and madmen at the helm, the club had never dealt with a situation such as that currently at hand. No one, at least as far as records indicate, had ever whacked off the general manager's head and deposited it, along with an unidentified Japanese body, in the club swimming pool. (But then again, the pool wasn't built until 1974, and Walter's whereabouts remain unknown.)

* * * *

Angie Peterson awoke with a funny taste in her mouth and the chill of a horrible nightmare still tingling just below her consciousness. The low winter sun was streaming in the window and across her blanket. That's strange, she thought, Pete always closes the shades before going to bed. Stranger yet, the blanket was only used on the very coldest of nights. Rolling onto her stomach she realized that she was still wearing her brassiere. What on earth?

The pile of clothes in the armchair next to the bed suddenly moved. Wait a minute. Angie sat up, squinted her eyes into focus, and recognized the sleeping young lady from the night before. It was true. Good God, the dream was true. She howled, the young lady howled, and the next half hour was lost in a maelstrom of hysteria.

Angie and Pete had been married six years. Pete's first wife, a waitress at the Palmer House Hotel, was the mother of Peter Junior. He was born four months after the wedding and had enjoyed a stable family life for approximately six months. Pete's first child, now age forty, was one year older than Angie. Pete had only seen his first-born a half dozen times down through the years, and he had not seen his first wife, he maintained, since the day of the divorce.

Pete's second marriage lasted seventeen years and produced two daughters, both now married, who were the pride and joy of his life. Both had visited Japan within the last two years, both adored Angie, and both considered their father to be the finest human being on the planet. Their mother, to everyone's complete amazement, had suddenly picked up one day and walked out on the family and into the arms of a Swiss maitre d' employed by Pete at the Philadelphia Cricket Club. She still sent Christmas cards from Switzerland each year and, though divorced, still used the name Peterson.

Pete's third wife was a colossal mistake. Reeling from the shock of losing his helpmate of nearly two decades to a "yodeling gigolo," and traumatized by the prospect of raising two teenage daughters alone, he married a woman named Kate early one morning during a Club Managers of America convention in Las Vegas. The next day Pete helped the woman named Kate pack for the trip back to Philadelphia, got her on the plane, and got her off the plane in Philadelphia and to the club. The morning after that, Pete again helped the woman named Kate pack, got her on the plane, and never saw her again. As part of that divorce settlement he agreed to make child-support payments to an offspring he couldn't remember siring.

Angie met Pete in her bank. He would come into the bank once a week, and as the months went by he would manage more often than not to visit her teller's window. When the bank adopted the "express line" concept, the choreography of "timing" became crucial. Angie would stall customers at her window—counting and recounting bills—until Pete hit the front of the line. Her "next" would then ring loud and true.

Pete was considerably older, Angie knew, but he was good-natured and seemed quite virile in a mature and intriguing way. Her first husband, from whom she was divorced long before Pete began coming to her bank, had been a high-school classmate from Scranton. He and Angie graduated from school, and from going steady to marriage, on the same day.

Although Angie and her first husband had been married ten years, virility and maturity were not attributes he had brought to the relationship. It was as if, Angie came to realize, he had stopped growing and would always remain a nineteen-year-old. His interests were confined to playing Softball in the industrial league for machine-shop employers, and hanging around the neighborhood bar before and after the games. He and Angie spent time together, of course, but drinking beer in the car at outdoor movies had its social limitations. Without really knowing what it was, Angie began to believe that there was something better for her in life. She left her husband and started the search for something better the day he came home with a wedding anniversary present for her—a tattoo on his arm that said "Angie."

Angie and Pete dated for nearly eight months, and Pete proposed marriage slightly over six years ago during a Thanksgiving party at the club he was managing. The flowers, champagne, diamond ring, and whispered endearments were touches of class that overwhelmed the girl who had spent so many wasted hours at drive-ins. Angie accepted the proposal with only one small worry—that Pete thought she, né Angela Garcia, was a blonde.

Today, in fact, would have been their sixth anniversary. Aggie flopped back onto the bed and gave in to another bout of hysteria.

* * * *

"It's a big place," Tim Kawamura reported to the Chief of the Azabu Police Department at the 8:00 a.m. meeting. "There are four floors above ground, but five floors below ground. The club is built on the side of a hill."

"You had over thirty men there last night. I can't imagine that you couldn't spare a few of them to search the buildings."

"That's of course true, Chief, and I certainly," said Kawamura, "admit failure on that crucial point. But it wasn't until almost everyone had left that we knew there was a second body." or, I should say, second body and second head."

Chief Arai was a large man who tended to use his size as a weapon to intimidate in face-to-face encounters. Originally from the northern island of Hokkaido, it was rumored that Arai was part Russian, at least on his mother's side, and that in his youth he would amuse himself and stun his neighbors by picking up his playmates and throwing them across the road or over small buildings.

"You," Chief Arai bellowed down and about the head and shoulders of Kawamura, "take thirty men and go back to that club and stay there until we get some answers. I have to report to the ward office, the Tokyo city government, the Foreign Ministry, and the Diet. And they just think a foreigner's involved. Wait until the evening papers come out and reveal that the body of one of us is also involved. That makes it international!"

"Yes sir," said Kawamura, bowing and backing from the room. "Your advice as always is perfectly correct."

Returning to his corner cubicle one floor below the chiefs office, Tim Kawamura gathered his senior staff plus the other detectives involved in the "American Club thing" and began the ordeal of reviewing what was known and what was not. A half-dozen or so of his advisers were already occupying all the flat surfaces in his room, and another four or five—continual movement in and out the door kept the number in flux—perched on the edge of windowsills or leaned against filing cabinets.

"How long can we keep the club closed?" asked one of the sergeants, who had distinguished himself the previous evening by finding the valves that drained the pool. The sudden and unscheduled release of 185,000 gallons of water into the neighborhood sewage system had created spectacular flooding problems in the shops and houses at the bottom of the hill below the club. The reports on this episode, filed in triplicate by both the Department of Water and Department of Health, had yet to reach Chief Arai's desk.

"As long as we wish," answered Kawamura. "But I think we should plan on obtaining all the physical evidence today—it is Arai-san's fervent wish."

The men in the office grumbled assent as they shifted position, moved knees, and squeezed even closer together. Two tea girls in identical blue shifts and white blouses were now in the room distributing the steaming green liquid. They were followed by three fingerprint experts who brought chairs from the outer office and placed them in the doorway, trapping the tea girls inside. (The tea girls stood demurely against the windows for the duration of the meeting—empty trays clasped to their groins.)

"Let's first review all the relevant facts," suggested Kawamura. "It appears there were two murders and at least one of them occurred between the time the general manager was last seen at 7:30 and when his body—or excuse me, his head—was discovered at 8:00 in the pool."

Everyone nodded in agreement.

"And we have not recovered his body, but we can assume it's still on the premises," continued Kawamura.

Everyone nodded in agreement.

"We also know that the body in the pool belonged to someone named Yoshio Endo of Yokohama—at least that's what the identification in his pocket said."

Everyone nodded in agreement.

"And we don't have that body's head."

Everyone nodded in agreement. Kawamura stood up, paced the one step that the space in the room allowed, then sat down.

"Have we confirmed the identity of that body?" asked Kawamura.

"Yes," replied one of the fingerprinters. "And we confirmed his prints with his employers."

Kawamura looked up at the man. Although non-Japanese residents are mandatorily fingerprinted, Japanese rarely are, unless they have criminal records.

"His employers maintained records for everyone working there," continued the fingerprinters.

"Where?" asked Kawamura.

"Next-door," answered the man.

"Next-door to the police station?"

"No, next-door to the club," said the man. "The Russian embassy," he added.

Kawamura again rose from his chair, paced the one step back and forth for nearly a minute, and returned to his seat.

"Are you certain, I mean, that he works for the Russian embassy?"

"Yes, certain," said the fingerprint expert. "And the funny thing is that he was not invited to the party—in fact no one can imagine why he was there in formal dress. He was only a security guard."

Kawamura gazed at the man in silence, then shifted his eyes to the ceiling of his office.

"I will have to inform Chief Arai of this new development," he announced finally. "Then we will go to the club and find the other head, and the other body."

* * * *