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,"
