I went to the coffee machine, in the little cafeteria next to Latent Prints. All around the room were signs reading:

and:

The reason was that the SID teams used poisons, especially Criminalistics. There was so much mercury, arsenic, and chromium floating around that in the old days, officers had sometimes gotten sick by drinking from a Styrofoam cup that another lab worker had merely touched.

But these days people were more careful; I got two cups of coffee and went back to the night-duty desk. Jackie Levine was on duty, with her feet up on the desk. She was a heavyset woman wearing toreador pants and an orange wig. Despite her bizarre appearance, she was widely acknowledged to be the best print lifter in the department. She was reading Modern Bride magazine. I said, “You going to do it again, Jackie?”

“Hell, no,” she said. “My daughter.”

“Who’s she marrying?”

“Let’s talk about something happy,” she said. “One of those coffees for me?”

“Sorry,” I said. “But I have a question for you. Who handles videotape evidence here?”

“Videotape evidence?”

“Like tape from surveillance cameras. Who analyzes it, makes hard copies, all that?”

“Well, we don’t get much call for that,” Jackie said. “Electronics used to do it here, but I think they gave it up. Nowadays, video either goes to Valley or Medlar Hall.” She sat forward, thumbed through a directory. “If you want, you can talk to Bill Harrelson over at Medlar. But if it’s anything special, I think we farm it out to JPL or the Advanced Imaging Lab at U.S.C. You want the contact numbers, or you want to go through Harrelson?”

Something in her tone told me what to do. “Maybe I’ll take the contact numbers.”

“Yeah, I would.”

I wrote the numbers down and went back up to the division. Connor had finished the tape and was running it back and forth at the point where Sakamura’s face appeared in the mirror.

“Well?” I said.

“That’s Eddie, all right.” He appeared calm, almost indifferent. He took the coffee from me and sipped it. “Terrible.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“It used to be better.” Connor set the cup aside, turned off the video recorder, stood, and stretched. “Well, I think we’ve done a good evening’s work. What do you say we get some sleep? I have a big golf game in the morning at Sunset Hills.”

“Okay,” I said. I packed the tapes back in the cardboard box, and set the VCR carefully in the box, too.

Connor said, “What’re you going to do with those tapes?”

“I’ll put ‘em in the evidence locker.”

Connor said, “These are the originals. And we don’t have duplicates.”

“I know, but I can’t get dupes made until tomorrow.”

“Exactly my point. Why don’t you keep them with you?”

“Take them home?” There were all sorts of departmental injunctions about taking evidence home. It was against the rules, to put it mildly.

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t leave this to chance. Take the tapes with you, and then you can arrange the duplication yourself, tomorrow.”

I stuck them under my arm. I said, “You don’t think anybody at the department would—“

“Of course not,” Connor said. “But this evidence is crucial and we wouldn’t want anybody to walk by the evidence locker with a big magnet while we were asleep, would we?”

So in the end I took the tapes. As we went out the door, we passed Ishiguro, still sitting there, contrite. Connor said something quickly to him in Japanese. Ishiguro jumped to his feet, bowed quickly, and scurried out of the office.

“Is he really so scared?”

“Yes,” Connor said.

Ishiguro moved quickly down the hall ahead of us, head bent low. He seemed almost a caricature of a mousy, frightened man.

“Why?” I said. “He’s lived here long enough to know that any case we might have against him for withholding evidence is not strong. And we have even less of a case against Nakamoto.”

“That’s not the point,” Connor said. “He’s not worried about legalities. He’s worried about scandal. Because that’s what would happen if we were in Japan.”

We came around the corner. Ishiguro was standing by the banks of elevators, waiting. We waited, too. There was an awkward moment. The first elevator came, and Ishiguro stepped away for us to get on. The doors closed on him bowing to us in the lobby. The elevator started down.

Connor said, “In Japan, he and his company could be finished forever.”

“Why?”

“Because in Japan, scandal is the most common way of revising the pecking order. Of getting rid of a powerful opponent. It’s a routine procedure over there. You uncover a vulnerability, and you leak it to the press, or to government investigators. A scandal inevitably follows, and the person or organization is ruined. That’s how the Recruit scandal brought down Takeshita as prime minister. Or the financial scandals brought down Prime Minister Tanaka in the seventies. It’s the same way the Japanese screwed General Electric a couple of years ago.”

“They screwed General Electric?”

“In the Yokogawa scandal. You heard of it? No? Well, it’s classic Japanese maneuvering. A few years ago, General Electric made the best scanning equipment in the world for hospitals. GE formed a subsidiary, Yokogawa Medical, to market this equipment in Japan. And GE did business the Japanese way: cutting costs below competitors to get market share, providing excellent service and support, entertaining customers—giving potential buyers air tickets and traveler’s checks. We’d call it bribes, but it’s standard business procedure in Japan. Yokogawa quickly became the market leader, ahead of Japanese companies like Toshiba. The Japanese companies didn’t like that and complained about unfairness. And one day government agents raided Yokogawa’s offices and found evidence of the bribes. They arrested several Yokogawa employees, and blackened the company name in scandal. It didn’t hurt GE sales in Japan very much. It didn’t matter that other Japanese companies also offer bribes. For some reason, it was the non-Japanese company that got caught. Amazing, how that happens.”

I said, “Is it really that bad?”

“The Japanese can be tough,” Connor said. “They say ‘business is war,’ and they mean it. You know how Japan is always telling us that their markets are open. Well, in the old days, if a Japanese bought an American car, he got audited by the government. So pretty soon, nobody bought an American car. The officials shrug: what can they do? Their market is open: they can’t help it if nobody wants an American car. The obstructions are endless. Every imported car has to be individually tested on the dock to make sure it complies with exhaust-emission laws. Foreign drugs can only be tested in Japanese laboratories on Japanese nationals. Foreign skis were once banned because Japanese snow was said to be wetter than European and American snow. That’s the way they treat other countries, so it’s not surprising they worry about getting a taste of their own medicine.”

“Then Ishiguro is waiting for some scandal? Because that’s what would happen in Japan?”

“Yes. He’s afraid that Nakamoto will be finished in a single stroke. But I doubt that it will. Chances are, it’ll be business as usual in Los Angeles tomorrow.”

I drove Connor back to his apartment. As he climbed out of the car I said, “Well, it’s been interesting, Captain. Thanks for spending the time with me.”

“You’re welcome,” Connor said. “Call me any time, if you need help in the future.”

“I hope your golf game isn’t too early tomorrow.”

“Actually, it’s at seven, but at my age I don’t need much sleep. I’ll be playing at the Sunset Hills.”