by Emma Lathen
“I can see that their relationship was open to discovery,” Inspector Hayakawa said restively, “but who cared that she was a loose woman?”
“Nobody did.” Thatcher searched for a telling example. “If you go into partnership with the man who will actually run the business, you don’t hire his wife to protect your interests. The minute that Alderman released his results, Carl would have known he was in exactly that position.”
“I sure would have,” announced the new Kruger. “I would have torn the place apart.”
Looking at that outthrust jaw, Thatcher realized that Pamela Webb’s next move had been inevitable.
“She decided that Alderman had to go before he did irretrievable damage, but she was still determined to use Recruit as cover. The Matsuda note was more than a lure. If Alderman had been found dead with that note in his pocket, we would have been sucked into another diplomatic brouhaha.” Matsuda gasped as he realized he had been the beneficiary of more than one near miss. “If I had not been the victim, everyone would have assumed I was the murderer. That she-devil! That unprincipled harpy!” His feelings threatened to overcome him. “And she wasn’t even a competent planner. Both attempts on Alderman were fiascos.”
“But not by much,” Thatcher said before Matsuda could boil over. “After all, if Khan had made it safely back to the cottage, they would have alibied each other. And don’t forget, we had two other people in the MR group associated with motorcycles.”
Fleming and Rick Iwamoto exchanged glances that were more congratulatory than alarmed.
“By the way, John,” Gene asked, “what was your reaction when they told you that someone in a green windbreaker and fatigues had sped from the scene of the crime?”
“I realized that, alert as usual, you were in hot pursuit,” Thatcher said blandly.
Fleming projected skepticism. “I’ll bet.”
Hastily Thatcher reverted to Pamela Webb. “The final irony is that Bennet Alderman would never have understood the financial implications of her involvement with Khan.”
“That really is incredible,” Gene marveled.
“No more so than insane chases by middle-aged men who ought to have more sense,” Haru said dispassionately.
Her husband eyed her warily. “They make it sound more dramatic than it was,” he muttered.
The men were all too craven to venture into an area of marital discord, but Audrey Kruger proved that some things transcend the minor variations of East and West.
“It was two motorcycles roaring around in the dark, wasn’t it?” she challenged. “And you did say your oldest daughter has graduated from college?”
Gene grinned at her. “You’re trying to tell me I should be acting like a grandfather.”
“Why not? She tells me that all the time,” Kruger said affectionately.
Audrey soared above these trifles. “How could Bennet have seriously believed there was anything between Carl and Pamela? I always thought he was simply jealous of her importance.”
At this display of conjugal trust, Kruger preened himself too soon. “Benny didn’t know me like you do, honey.”
“It’s not that you’ve never strayed,” she said severely. “But not with crisp efficiency and a mind like a steel trap. They’ve never been your weakness.”
Before she could tell them what his weakness was, Thatcher came to the rescue. “There had been a good deal of gossip when Pamela first joined Lackawanna. The reason it never died down was the absence of another man in her life. I suspect that made her uneasy with Alderman, even if she felt safe with Carl and Don.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hodiak demanded.
Thatcher grinned maliciously at his contemporaries. “Those of us in the grandfather generation grew up in a simple corporate world. The executives were men, and most of them were married. The others were quiet about their arrangements. But Pamela and Alderman belonged to a different society. She should have been living openly with someone. As she didn’t want Alderman wondering about that, she fostered his belief in the gossip. I noticed she was different in Audrey’s presence, but that was all too explainable.”
Audrey sniffed. “She could never have fooled me.”
“She had enough sense not to try,” Thatcher said gravely.
In the face of this generosity, Audrey admitted her own error. “Pamela was always so quiet about her personal life, I just assumed there was a married man somewhere. I guess I belong to my generation too.”
Neither Kruger nor Hodiak was particularly grateful for this analysis.
“All right, all right, so we’re decrepit,” Hodiak growled. “But Pamela wasn’t so smart, either, tying herself up to a guy who committed murder at the first sign of pressure. She must have been out of her mind when she realized what she was dealing with.”
Thatcher shook his head. “I meant it when I said they were two of a kind. Khan may have lashed out in a panic at MITI, but when Pamela scented danger from Alderman, she responded with a cold-blooded trap. Just look at the development. The morning after the trade show, she learned from you of Alderman’s threats against her. At eleven this is confirmed at the fax station. By five the note intended to incriminate Mr. Matsuda is waiting in Alderman’s mail.”
“And Khan didn’t have to be in a panic to be vicious,” Gene Fleming added. “I’ll never forget the way he lined up Aiderman in that parking lot.”
“They must have been living on their nerves for days by then,” Kruger commented. “I’d sent Pamela up to Birmingham, where she couldn’t take another crack at Benny.”
Inspector Hayakawa had a confession of his own. Turning to Kruger, he said apologetically: “When we read Alderman’s correspondence that night, I had last-minute doubts. It seemed possible that if Miss Webb had told you what was in that letter, you might have tried to kill him.”
“It’s not surprising you were confused,” Kruger conceded. “By that time I was scared stiff. If Benny had engineered the disclosure of that Shima export violation, he was a lot cozier with Yonezawa’s boys than I’d realized. But when I blew up at him, damned if he didn’t turn the tables on me. He said I’d practically admitted I blew the whistle on Shima. Of course I thought it was just Benny trying to weasel his way clear.”
Rick Iwamoto was tolerantly superior. “How come you overlooked the obvious? Back at Shima we were never in any doubt that Yonezawa was responsible for our troubles.”
“It was just like Mr. Arai to take out some insurance,” Gene Fleming agreed. “He probably got the goods on you the minute you became his big opposition. Then he kept it at the ready in case of need.”
“Well, that dummy of ours in San Francisco handed him a gift package,” Iwamoto concurred.
They could speak freely, as Yonezawa was not represented at the table. Mr. Arai had barely waited to append his signature to the agreement before flying off.
“Never mind about the Shima scandal,” Audrey Kruger said to Hayakawa. “You mean you seriously suspected Carl because Bennet was up to his dirty tricks?”
For some strange reason, Audrey never put a foot wrong with Mr. Matsuda. She was in some danger of becoming his ideal of Western womanhood.
“I am sure it was a momentary lapse on the inspector’s part,” he now said soothingly.
“After all, we had just learned of Alderman’s murder, and the letter was mostly about Carl,” Thatcher said, continuing the good work. “But the inspector soon remembered that Pamela had seen only the first page.”
Hayakawa was far too sensible not to accept shelter from wifely indignation. “Besides, as soon as I paused to think, I realized the murder method made Mr. Khan the major suspect.”
“Exactly,” said Thatcher. “Khan made the arrangements with the TV crew, knowing that any mention of their presence would bring Alderman to the scene, and he made sure that they would fill the executive parking strip. He was also the only one familiar enough with Birmingham to know where he could steal a motorcycle, where he could
abandon it, and where the rally was.”
Don Hodiak still had more trouble with the relationship between Pamela and Ali than with their criminal conspiracy. “Even if they were in it together, what the hell made you think they’d gotten married?”
“If Pamela Webb was the kind of woman I thought she was, she would have looked around for protection before she agreed to take risks. In their situation, marriage made a good deal of sense. It not only shielded them from testifying against each other; it enabled her to weld their financial arrangements so tightly that neither of them could simply walk away.”
“They couldn’t keep it a secret forever,” Hodiak objected.
“They didn’t have to,” Thatcher told him. “By complaining about the Japanese, Khan was laying the groundwork to leave
MR. Probably Pamela intended to join him at a new company. Her friends could say she preferred entrepreneurial risk to the corporate hierarchy. Others, like Alderman, could say that having failed to hook a man at the top, she was settling for one on his way.”
Frowning, Audrey said doubtfully: “And then they’d live happily ever after?”
“Just so,” Thatcher said briefly.
He preferred not to consider the prospect of two murderers locked together forever.
Fortunately Gene Fleming, still gnawing at his own personal bone, prevented any exploration of this topic. “All that business about being familiar with the speedway, knowing about the rally, and being able to steal a bike didn’t point just to Khan. I was right on the spot, and you could say it applied to me.”
“I couldn’t,” Inspector Hayakawa said instantly. “Not when they told us what you were riding. After all, I spent my first two years with the police on a motorcycle.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than Rick Iwamoto was subjecting him to narrow-eyed appraisal. “Let’s see, that must have been about twenty years ago,” he calculated. “So if you were with the Tokyo prefecture, you were using our model FJ-4.”
Hayakawa nodded enthusiastically.
“That was it. It was a wonderful bike,” he recalled on a wave of nostalgia, “except for one thing. When it came to cornering at high speed—”
“I always said that was its weakness,” Gene Fleming interrupted. “When we were designing our TX-1 to compete with it, we tried . . .”
Within seconds all three of them were positioning salt shakers and cutlery in a complex discussion that unconsciously slipped into Japanese. Even Haru Fleming was sucked in when she responded to a query from her husband. At the same time, Don Hodiak and the Krugers were retreating into a low-voiced conversation about their forthcoming return to Lackawanna.
It remained for Thatcher to shoulder the burden of entertaining the guest of honor. This was not difficult in view of the generalized benignity with which Matsuda was gazing on the world.
“An extraordinary tale,” he was saying. “And while mistakes were made, the original conviction that foreigners were responsible has been more than justified.”
“Moreover, MITI emerges untarnished,” Thatcher murmured, acknowledging the unspoken priorities.
“On the whole, it has been a pleasure doing business with the Sloan Guaranty Trust,” Matsuda said, matching cordiality with cordiality. “Perhaps the occasion will arise again.”
For a moment Thatcher did not reply. Unbidden, his mind had unreeled the past and frozen the frame of Pamela Webb and Ali Khan jogging into the Tokyo Hilton. There they were, preserved for all time as the incarnation of glowing youth. Beneath that bright, shining surface, however, lurked the common impulse that had carried them beyond the claims of honesty or decency or compassion. Haru Fleming would say that they had been insufficiently socialized. Whatever its name, their fatal flaw had drawn them remorselessly into a spiral of tragedy.
But murder and embezzlement, like the promise of youth, are ephemeral. The gross national product of Japan is not.
Rallying, Thatcher answered in a voice of unmistakable sincerity.
“I certainly hope so!”