5

It took another hour to get everything settled at the site. And the chief wanted our reports by the end of the day, so afterward we had to go down to Parker to do the paperwork.

It was four o’clock before we went across the street to the coffee shop next to Antonio’s bail bond shop. Just to get away from the office. I said, “Why did Ishiguro kill the girl in the first place?”

Connor sighed. “It’s not clear. The best I can understand it is this. Eddie was working for his father’s kaisha all along. One of the things he did was supply girls for visiting dignitaries. He’d been doing that for years. It was easy—he was a party guy; he knew the girls; the congressmen wanted to meet the girls, and he got a chance to make friends with the congressmen. But in Cheryl he had a special opportunity, because Senator Morton, head of the Finance Committee, was attracted to her. Morton was smart enough to break off the affair, but Eddie kept sending her in private jets to meet him unexpectedly, keeping the thing alive. Eddie liked her, too: he had sex with her that afternoon. And it was Eddie who arranged for her to come to the party at Nakamoto, knowing that Morton would be there. Eddie was pushing Morton to block the sale, so Eddie was preoccupied with the Saturday meeting. By the way, on the news-station tape you thought he said ‘no cheapie’ to Cheryl. He was saying nichibei. The Japanese-American relationship.

“But I think Eddie just intended for Cheryl to meet Morton. I doubt he had any idea about the forty-sixth floor. He certainly didn’t expect her to go up there with Morton. The idea of going there must have been suggested during the party by someone from Nakamoto. The company left the floor accessible for a very simple reason: there’s a bedroom suite up there that executives sometimes use. Somewhere in the back.”

I said, “How did you know that?”

Connor smiled. “Hanada-san mentioned he had once used it. Apparently it’s quite luxurious.”

“So you do have contacts.”

“I have a few. I imagine Nakamoto was probably just being accommodating, too. They may have installed cameras up there with the idea of blackmail, but I’m told there were no cameras in the bedroom suite. And the fact that they had a camera right in the conference room suggests to me that Phillips was right—the cameras were placed to kaizen the office workers. Certainly they couldn’t have expected the sexual encounter to occur where it did.

“Anyway, when Eddie saw Cheryl going off with Morton to another part of the Nakamoto building, it must have alarmed the hell out of him. So he followed them. He witnessed the murder, which I believe was probably accidental. And Eddie then helped out his friend Morton, calling him over, getting him out of there. Eddie went back to the party with Morton.”

“What about the tapes?”

“Ah. You remember we talked about bribery. One of Eddie’s bribes was to a low-level security officer named Tanaka. I believe Eddie supplied him with drugs. Anyway, Eddie had known him for a couple of years. And when Ishiguro ordered Tanaka to pull the tapes, Tanaka told Eddie.”

“And Eddie went down and got the tapes himself.”

“Yes. Together with Tanaka.”

“But Phillips said Eddie was alone.”

“Phillips lied, because he knew Tanaka. That’s also why he didn’t make more of a fuss—Tanaka said it was all right. But when Phillips told us the story, he left Tanaka out.”

“And then?”

“Ishiguro sent a couple of guys to clean out Cheryl’s apartment. Tanaka took the tapes someplace to get them copied. Eddie went to the party in the hills.”

“But Eddie kept one.”

“Yes.”

I thought it over. “But when we talked to Eddie at the party, he told a completely different story.”

Connor nodded. “He lied.”

“Even to you, his friend?”

Connor shrugged. “He thought he could get away with it.”

“What about Ishiguro? Why did he kill the girl?”

“To get Morton in his pocket. And it worked—they got Morton to change his position on MicroCon. For a while there, Morton was going to allow the sale to go forward.”

“Ishiguro would kill her for that? For some corporate sale?”

“No, I don’t think it was calculated at all. Ishiguro was high-strung, under great pressure. He felt he had to prove himself to his superiors. He had much at stake—so much, that he behaved differently from an ordinary Japanese under these circumstances. And in a moment of extreme pressure, he killed the girl, yes. As he said, she was a woman of no importance.”

“Jesus.”

“But I think there’s more to it than that. Morton was very ambivalent about the Japanese. I had the sense there was a lot of resentment—those jokes about dropping the bomb, all that. And having sex on the boardroom table. It’s… disrespectful, wouldn’t you say? It must have infuriated Ishiguro.”

“And who called in the murder?”

“Eddie.”

“Why?”

“To embarrass Nakamoto. Eddie got Morton safely back to the party, and then called in. Probably from a phone somewhere at the party. When he called, he didn’t know about the security cameras yet. Then Tanaka told him about them, and Eddie started to worry that Ishiguro might set him up. So he called back.”

“And he asked for his friend John Connor.”

“Yes.”

I said, “So Eddie was Koichi Nishi?”

Connor nodded. “His little joke. Koichi Nishi is the name of a character in a famous Japanese movie about corporate corruption.”

Connor finished his coffee and pushed away from the counter.

“And Ishiguro? Why did the Japanese abandon him?”

“Ishiguro had played it too fast and loose. He acted too independently Thursday night. They don’t like that. Nakamoto would have sent him back pretty soon. He was destined to spend the rest of his life in Japan in a madogiwazoku. A window seat. Somebody who’s bypassed by corporate decisions, and stares out the window all day. In a way, it’s a life sentence.”

I thought it over. “So when you used the car phone, calling the station, telling them what you planned… who was listening?”

“Hard to say.” Connor shrugged. “But I liked Eddie. I owed him one. I didn’t want to see Ishiguro go home.”

Back in the office there was an elderly woman waiting for me. She was dressed in black and she introduced herself as Cheryl Austin’s grandmother. Cheryl’s parents died in a car crash when she was four, and she had raised the little girl afterward. She wanted to thank me for my help in the investigation. She talked about what Cheryl had been like, as a little girl. How she had grown up in Texas.

“Of course, she was pretty,” she said, “and the boys surely did like her. Always a bunch of them hanging around, you couldn’t shake them off with a stick.” She paused. “Of course, I never thought she was entirely right in the head. But she wanted to keep those boys around. And she liked them to fight over her, too. I remember she was seven or eight, she’d get those kids brawling in the dust, and she’d clap her hands and watch them go at it. By the time she was teenage, she was real good at it. Knew just what to do. It wasn’t real nice to see. No, something was wrong in the head. She could be mean. And that song, she always played it, day and night. About lose my mind, I’d think.”

“Jerry Lee Lewis?”

“Of course, I knew why. That was her Daddy’s favorite song. When she was just a little bit of a thing, he’d drive her to town in his convertible, with his arm around her, and the radio making that awful racket. She’d have her best sun-dress on. She was such a pretty thing when she was a child. The image of her mother.”

Then the woman started to cry, thinking about that. I got her a Kleenex. Tried to be sympathetic.

And pretty soon she wanted to know what had happened. How Cheryl had died.