by Emma Lathen
Hayakawa had listened with mounting concern. Now he flashed an unspoken message toward Thatcher, who was still reluctant to voice an accusation that could never be retracted.
“But surely there’s no long-term problem, Superintendent,” he temporized. “The thing that’s holding you up is the absence of so many people. Sooner or later they will return, and presumably only one of them will bear signs of having been in an accident.”
McLeod snorted. “What makes you think they’ll all return? If I were this killer and I could manage it, I’d already be on my way to the first plane out of the country.”
Thatcher was relieved to have a newcomer interrupt their proceedings.
“Mr. Thatcher,” the hotel manager announced. “There’s an urgent call from your London office. They asked me to interrupt you.”
With a last cautionary glance at Inspector Hayakawa, Thatcher rose and left. As he plodded down the corridor, he realized that he was not immune to McLeod’s reasoning. Let the killer escape, and the damage that remained might be irreparable. If the police could act tonight, there would still be a terrible price, but at least it would be confined to the guilty.
Shaking his head, he accepted the phone.
“Is that you, John? I’ve been trying to get you all evening. And now they tell me you’re with the police.”
Toby Lemieux, bright as a penny, sounded like a voice from another planet. Fortunately he did not wait for an answer but rattled on.
“My man reported back at five. You were absolutely right, John!”
Until that moment Thatcher had not realized he was holding his breath. He was only conscious of a great weariness. The pathos of the whole situation was growing almost unendurable.
“Just tell me what he found,” he said somberly. Any weapon that could shorten this ordeal was welcome; nonetheless Lemieux’s cheeriness still jarred.
Simmering down, Toby read from his notes. Then, when this elicited only silence, he said cautiously: “Someday you must tell me what put this extraordinary notion in your head.”
“Tomorrow, Toby,” promised Thatcher, hanging up without further explanation. After all, the first news bulletin that Lemieux heard would make it clear why voices emanating from Birmingham were brusque and unforthcoming.
For a moment Thatcher braced himself. Further delay was out of the question. Slowly he retraced his steps, to offer McLeod his single, damning fact. He arrived to find the superintendent still outlining a grim future.
“And what if they do all turn up? If the injuries aren’t immediately apparent, I can’t have them all stripped.”
Thatcher’s moment, like it or not, had come.
“That won’t be necessary, Superintendent,” he said, making heads swivel. “I think I can tell you where the murderer is right now.”
Thatcher could not provide the exact address, but McLeod already knew it. Within twenty minutes, the three of them were in a large, unmarked police car, piloted with reckless speed. Behind them was a backup crew. As they raced out of Birmingham, Thatcher occupied himself by wondering about their destination.
“Two miles beyond Lower Nettleby,” the driver announced, slewing the sedan off the main road onto a narrow, twisting lane. Progress slowed, and they were almost at a crawl when they sighted a beacon to steer by.
Only when they came to a halt did it resolve itself into an ordinary country cottage, several hundred yards beyond its nearest neighbor. It blazed with light—from the windows, from the lantern beside the front door, and from the door itself, which stood open to the driving rain.
Swiftly and silently McLeod moved up the path, with the others keeping pace. On the threshold, they were stopped short. Beyond the hall they saw a warm and beckoning living room, where bowls of yellow roses glowed. It was as unreal as a mirage.
Because in the damp, chill hallway, a woman with crazed eyes was slumped against the foot of the stairs. Blood stained the front of her simple dress as she rocked back and forth, cradling a man’s body.
“Ali’s dead,” said Pamela Webb without looking up. “He crawled inside, then he died. He died in my arms. I tried . . . but . . .”
She did not know what she was saying. When one of McLeod’s men tried to remove her, she began to scream. She was still screaming when they led her off.
“What’s the connection between Ali Khan and this Webb woman?” someone asked brutally.
“According to public records,” said Thatcher, “she was his wife.”
McLeod had a long list of things to do. “Pity,” he said perfunctorily.
“Yes,” said Thatcher slowly. “A very great pity.”
Chapter 32
“It’s hard to believe,” said Don Hodiak at the end of a crowded week. “That Pamela and Ali milked MR to the tune of five million!”
Inspector Hayakawa nodded. “That very simplicity misled us all.”
“It also constituted the major threat to Khan and Pamela Webb,” Thatcher remarked. “Once you stripped away all the Recruit atmospherics, what was left? Two relatively insignificant men had been murdered. Mr. Ushiba had expressed public doubts about the accounting statements from Midland
Research and was killed within hours. Bennet Alderman proposed to investigate Pamela Webb and was attacked the next day. If you recalled that she had financial oversight of MR, the situation deserved investigation—to say the least.”
“That’s easy enough to see now,” Gene Fleming said ruefully. “But with everybody worried to death about Recruit, it was hard just to forget about it.”
At his side, Rick Iwamoto agreed. “It looked like a question of identifying which company had tried to buy MITI. Anything else didn’t make sense.”
“Why not?” Thatcher challenged. “Why should it be harder to imagine employees of Lackawanna embezzling than to imagine Mr. Matsuda accepting a bribe?”
Everyone turned to look at Mr. Matsuda, who was in the chair of honor, flanked by Mr. and Mrs. Kruger. Theoretically they had gathered to celebrate the successful conclusion of the MR hearings and the future flow of Lackawanna goods to Japan. But Matsuda had other reasons for joy. Apologies in many forms were arriving on his doorstep, and some of them were taking very meaningful forms. In Western parlance, today he would not call the king his cousin.
Inclining his head graciously, he said: “I confess I was totally bewildered. Nobody had even approached me with a bribe. And only a foreigner, abysmally ignorant of MITI, would have been foolish enough to deal with Mr. Ushiba.”
“We all dismissed Mr. Ushiba too quickly, but then we had all been preconditioned,” Thatcher pointed out. “It was not only the Japanese government that was absorbed by the problems of Recruit. Everyone planning to do business in Japan was subjected to crash courses on the topic. Stan Zaretski was emphasizing its importance to Lackawanna, while Gene instructed us at the Sloan. Even you, Haru, helped lead everybody down the garden path by explaining how the workplace has become a primary source of affiliation.”
“I said that about Japanese men,” Haru replied indignantly. “I never pretended to understand what motivates somebody like Pamela Webb.”
“Nonetheless,” Thatcher continued, “if the rest of us had never heard of Recruit or uchi, we might have set off in the right direction.”
“Even the police were puzzled,” Hayakawa remarked. “In spite of the length of this scandal, there has never been any violence. Not until foreigners appeared.”
“Then,” Thatcher rejoined, “it would have been logical to search for non-Japanese motives. In other words, to remember that great pools of money lying around are an inducement to theft, as well as to bribery. But we had an expert at smoke screens taking full advantage of our preconditioning.”
Mr. Matsuda adjusted his glasses and assumed the air of a scholar. “If, during your great Watergate scandal, a body had been discovered in the offices of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, it would have been difficult to ignore the political implications. Nonetheless I blame m
yself for not paying attention to Mr. Ushiba. I was simply annoyed at his failure to understand what was germane to MITI. When he questioned MR’s lack of profitability, I should have realized he was disturbed by the magnitude of their expenditures.”
Matsuda received assistance from an unlikely quarter.
“Hell, Ushiba said he was working on Pamela’s numbers in front of me, and I never gave it a second thought,” Don Hodiak said handsomely.
He had accepted the fact that Lackawanna had carried its own problems to Tokyo. The lesson was coming harder to Carl Kruger.
“But who could think of Pamela as behind all this?” he burst out.
In the midst of his triumph, Kruger was not sharing the general euphoria. As soon as the hearings had concluded, the voice of duty had compelled him to make a prison visit. He had been despondent ever since.
“I’m afraid she stuck out like a sore thumb as soon as one began thinking along the right lines,” Thatcher said gently. “Quite apart from her financial association with MR, she was noted for her skill at diversions. That made her a prime candidate once you accepted the fact that someone had deliberately cast the mantle of Recruit over the murder of Mr. Ushiba.”
Curiously enough, Rick Iwamoto was enjoying the party more than his host, even though he had lost his battle to keep Kruger’s generators out of Japan. Shima had been publicly absolved of any wrongdoing at MITI, and Iwamoto knew he would live to fight another day.
“Given the times we live in, the fear about bribery was a natural mistake, wasn’t it?” he suggested.
“But it wasn’t left to chance,” Thatcher pointed out. “Because if there was no bribe, that Swiss letter had to be a plant.”
“Even though its authenticity was proven beyond a doubt,” Hayakawa hastened to remark.
“The letter could be genuine and still have nothing to do with MITI. Only the MR notation suggested a bribe.”
“All right, all right,” agreed Hodiak. “But even if you spotted Pamela, why drag in Ali?”
To Thatcher, the question seemed to answer itself.
“For one thing, in Birmingham, he was very much the man in charge. But the main reason is that they were a natural team.”
“A team?” Hodiak gulped. “They didn’t have a thing in common.”
Audrey Kruger removed her concerned gaze from her husband long enough to snort. “Oh, come on, Don!”
“I mean it. They lived on two different continents. She was American, he was Pakistani; she was a vice-president, he was . . .” Hodiak’s voice died away uncertainly.
“Exactly what was he?” Thatcher asked. “I think you may have underestimated him because he was climbing a different ladder. But in fact, they had both come a great distance in a short time, soaring past their contemporaries. She was an officer of Lackawanna. His advance in robotics was the focus of international bidding. And that was simply the outward measure. On a personal level they were two of a kind. They were overwhelmingly self-confident, and above all, they were convinced that the world was theirs for the taking.”
Kruger might have been reviewing his own past as he said reflectively: “A lot of people think like that until they get straightened out.”
“The process seems to have been delayed with them,” Thatcher retorted. “Calling them high achievers is bowing to current jargon. What they really shared was the quality of being the brightest sixth grader in school. They were convinced they were cleverer than everybody else. Of course they presented themselves differently. Pamela openly paraded her ability and even her sense of mischief. Ali, on the other hand, preferred to play the provincial.”
“Are you trying to say they enjoyed their little scheme?” Hodiak asked incredulously.
“Until they had a murder on their hands, I’m sure they did. Ali relished the knowledge that he was outsmarting you all. To make matters worse, he was a man with a grievance. In his book, the corporate world had tried to steal his work.”
“I didn’t steal anything from him,” Kruger protested.
“According to our London manager, the damage was done before you got him.”
Mollified, Kruger admitted there was some merit in this reading of Ali Khan.
“In a way you’re just saying what Pamela told me this afternoon,” he said dejectedly. “When Ali was down-and-out, everybody told him that money simply had to be poured into MR to save it. He figured that if people were so damn free with their cash, they’d never miss what he took.”
Audrey reached for her husband’s hand.
“I know it wasn’t easy to see Pamela, honey, but you’d be feeling even worse if you hadn’t.”
“I suppose so,” he said. “But I hardly recognized her. She’s so broken up by Ali’s death, she talks about everything else as if it happened twenty years ago. Do you realize this all started the first time she came over to MR? She discovered Ali’s hand in the till, and the only thing that bothered her was the chicken feed he was taking! They were already in love, and she figured that together they could skim enough to seed a new company. She made it sound like the most normal decision in the world.”
“To her it probably was,” Thatcher observed. “The reason the Japanese investigation was so ineffective was that they were dealing with two rampant egotists who acknowledged no outside loyalties.”
Mr. Matsuda was shocked. “That would be impossible in Japan. Passion may overtake unfortunate individuals. But if there is no appropriate solution, they simply commit suicide.”
His stately assurance was too much for a firm believer in a changing Japan.
“Maybe in the past,” said Haru Fleming, wrinkling her brow doubtfully, “but I wouldn’t rely on it these days.” Thatcher would not have been surprised to hear her explain that being raised with one’s own bedroom made suicide unacceptable, but she was forestalled.
“To hear Pamela tell it, everybody else should have gotten out of her way.” Kruger was still troubled by the unknown woman he had met that afternoon. “Mostly she sounded half dead. The only time she showed any emotion was when she was blaming other people. There wouldn’t have been any problem if Ushiba had known his job. And poor Benny had no right to dig into her personal life. But the one who really got to her was Mr. Matsuda. If he hadn’t come nosing around, Alderman would have been killed in London and Ali would still be alive. Nobody had any rights except her. How the hell did I fail to notice this before?”
“Maybe because she adopted company coloration when you first knew her?” Thatcher suggested. “She was planning to do her climbing at Lackawanna then.”
Rick Iwamoto was more interested in facts than in personality profiles. “Just a minute,” he directed. “I still don’t know any of the details. What exactly did happen?”
Shima’s president had been far too busy with the future to spare time for the past. After the media explosion, one of the first voices to break through from the outside world had come from Anchorage, Alaska. Len Ridgeway was eager to sign on the dotted line. And in the burst of jubilation from Tokyo, the Japanese penalty against Shima had gone virtually unnoticed.
“I expect it all started when Mr. Ushiba queried the amounts flowing through Midland Research,” Thatcher hazarded.
Mr. Matsuda could not contain the old exasperation with his incompetent subordinate. “Ushiba was too limited to understand Miss Webb’s irreproachable analysis, so he just looked at the end result.”
“Yes, but after you snubbed him, he was probably afraid he had overlooked something obvious,” said Thatcher. “So when Khan came back from lunch early, Ushiba would have drawn him aside to ask for an explanation. It was a fatal mistake. Over the years, Khan had accepted Pamela’s assurance that her paperwork could defy examination by Lackawanna. Suddenly everything had changed. MR was about to be sold, Khan was summoned overnight to Japan, and then, out of the blue, a clerk with imperfect English was announcing suspicions. Knowing just how valid those suspicions were, Khan lost his head and attacked.”
Ric
k Iwamoto was frowning. “If Khan was in such a panic, how come he set up that red herring about the bribe?”
“He didn’t,” Kruger half groaned. “That was my clever Pamela.”
“Khan would have raced to the women’s coatroom to warn her,” Thatcher reasoned. “And she certainly demonstrated her ability to think on her feet. She must have had the notification from their Zurich agent with her. So she scrawled the initials MR and slipped it into Ushiba’s drawer. Then she sauntered into the meeting, casually referring to the distance she had to cover. It was a brilliant stroke. After that letter surfaced, the Japanese government was so consumed with its own jeopardy it could think of nothing else.”
Matsuda could scarcely believe his ears. “She might have toppled not only the Prime Minister but the LDP!”
“All she cared about was entangling Ushiba’s murder with Recruit. When I sat next to Khan on the plane to Anchorage,”
Thatcher recalled, “I accepted his explanation for taking a very roundabout route home. Of course he simply wanted to reach foreign soil as rapidly as possible.”
Matsuda was tepid in his appreciation. “I admit that her feint succeeded. Why, then, did she start sending messages that purported to come from me?”
“Because she had taken immense pains to create a scheme that would elude the auditors, but she never contemplated being investigated by detectives,” Thatcher replied. “I’m sure she and Khan exercised normal discretion about their association, but they were vulnerable to a real probe.”
“You can say that again,” said Kruger, who seemed to be grunting his way back to equanimity. “When I first heard about all this, it seemed so incredible I did a little checking. And sure enough. When Pamela went to the Bahamas for a week, so did Ali. And they were both in the south of France last summer.”
Audrey nodded in a knowing fashion. “And I’ll bet they relaxed when they were in England. After all, Ali lived outside of town. So Pamela probably felt free to come and go. That’s the kind of thing that people do, and it works until somebody starts really digging.”