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
