Windy City Blues (31 page)

“I see. Okay. What happened today?”

Welland scratched his beard. He had bushy, arched eyebrows which jumped up to punctuate his stronger statements kind of like Sean Connery. I found it pretty sexy. I pulled my mind back to what he was saying.

“I got here around one-thirty. I think three games were in progress. This guy”—he jerked his thumb toward the dead man—“arrived a bit later. He and I played a game. Then Mr. Hito arrived and the two of them had a game. Dr. Han showed up, and he and I were playing when the whole thing happened. Mrs. Takamoku sets out tea and snacks. We all wander around and help ourselves. About four, this guy took a swallow of tea, gave a terrible cry, and died.”

“Is there anything important about the game they were playing?”

Welland looked at the board. A handful of black-and-white stones stood on the corner points. He
shook his head. “They’d just started. It looks like our dead friend was trying one of the Takamoku
josekis.
That’s a complicated one—I’ve never seen it used in actual play before.”

“What’s that? Anything to do with Mr. Takamoku?”

“The
joseki
are the beginning moves in the corners. Takamoku is this one”—he pointed at the far side—“where black plays on the five-four point—the point where the fourth and fifth lines intersect. It wasn’t named for our host. That’s just coincidence.”

Sergeant McGonnigal didn’t find out much more than I did. A thickset young detective, he had a lot of experience and treated his frightened audience gently. He was a little less kind to me, demanding roughly why I was there, what my connection with the dead man was, who my client was. It didn’t cheer him up any to hear I was working for the Takamokus, but he let me stay with them while he questioned them. He sent for a young Korean officer to interrogate the Koreans in the group. Welland, who spoke fluent Japanese, translated the Japanese interviews. Dr. Han, the lone Chinese, struggled along on his own.

McGonnigal learned that the dead man’s name was Peter Folger. He learned that people were milling around all the time watching each other play. He also
learned that no one paid attention to anything but the game they were playing, or watching.

“The Japanese say the go player forgets his father’s funeral,” Welland explained. “It’s a game of tremendous concentration.”

No one admitted knowing Folger outside the go club. No one knew how he found out that the Takamokus hosted go every Sunday.

My clients hovered tensely in the background, convinced that McGonnigal would arrest them at any minute. But they could add nothing to the story. Anyone who wanted to play was welcome at their apartment on Sunday afternoon. Why should he show a credential? If he knew how to play, that was the proof.

McGonnigal pounced on that. Was Folger a good player? Everyone looked around and nodded. Yes, not the best—that was clearly Dr. Han or Mr. Kim, one of the Koreans—but quite good enough. Perhaps first
kyu
, whatever that was.

After two hours of this, McGonnigal decided he was getting nowhere. Someone in the room must have had a connection with Folger, but we weren’t going to find it by questioning the group. We’d have to dig into their backgrounds.

A uniformed man started collecting addresses while McGonnigal went to his car to radio for plainclothes reinforcements. He wanted everyone in the room tailed and wanted to phone in the command in privacy.
A useless precaution, I thought: the innocent wouldn’t know they were being followed, and the guilty would expect it.

McGonnigal returned shortly, his face angry. He had a bland-faced, square-jawed man in tow, Derek Hatfield of the FBI. He did computer fraud for them. Our paths had crossed a few times on white-collar crime. I’d found him smart and knowledgeable, but also humorless and overbearing.

“Hello, Derek,” I said, without getting up from the cushion I was sitting on. “What brings you here?”

“He had the place under surveillance,” McGonnigal said, biting off the words. “He won’t tell me who he was looking for.”

Derek walked over to Folger’s body, covered now with a sheet, which he pulled back. He looked at Folger’s face and nodded. “I’m going to have to phone my office for instructions.”

“Just a minute,” McGonnigal said. “You know the guy, right? You tell me what you were watching him for.”

Derek raised his eyebrows haughtily. “I’ll have to make a call first.”

“Don’t be an ass, Hatfield,” I said. “You think you’re impressing us with how mysterious the FBI is, but you’re not, really. You know your boss will tell you to cooperate with the city if it’s murder. And we might be able to clear this thing up right now, glory for everyone. We know Folger worked for Hansen
Electronic. He wasn’t one of your guys working undercover, was he?”

Hatfield glared at me. “I can’t answer that.”

“Look,” I said reasonably. “Either he worked for you and was investigating problems at Hansen, or he worked for them and you suspected he was involved in some kind of fraud. I know there’s a lot of talk about Hansen’s new Series J computer—was he passing secrets?”

Hatfield put his hands in his pockets and scowled in thought. At last he said, to McGonnigal, “Is there someplace we can go and talk?”

I asked Mrs. Takamoku if we could use her kitchen for a few minutes. Her lips moved nervously, but she took Hatfield and me down the hall. Her apartment was laid out like mine and the kitchens were similar, at least in appliances. Hers was spotless; mine had that lived-in look.

McGonnigal told the uniformed man not to let anyone leave or make any phone calls, and followed us.

Hatfield leaned against the back door. I perched on a bar stool next to a high wooden table. McGonnigal stood in the doorway leading to the hall.

“You got someone here named Miyake?” Hatfield asked.

McGonnigal looked through the sheaf of notes in his hand and shook his head.

“Anyone here work for Kawamoto?”

Kawamoto is a big Japanese electronics firm, one of Mitsubishi’s peers and a strong rival of Hansen in the megacomputer market.

“Hatfield, are you trying to tell us that Folger was passing Series J secrets to someone from Kawamoto over the go boards here?”

Hatfield shifted uncomfortably. “We only got onto it three weeks ago. Folger was just a go-between. We offered him immunity if he would finger the guy from Kawamoto. He couldn’t describe him well enough for us to make a pickup. He was going to shake hands with him or touch him in some way as they left the building.”

“The Judas trick,” I remarked.

“Huh?” Hatfield looked puzzled.

McGonnigal smiled for the first time that afternoon. “The man I kiss is the one you want. You should’ve gone to Catholic school, Hatfield.”

“Yeah. Anyway, Folger must’ve told this guy Miyake we were closing in.” Hatfield shook his head disgustedly. “Miyake must be part of that group, just using an assumed name. We got a tail put on all of them.” He straightened up and started back toward the hall.

“How was Folger passing the information?” I asked.

“It was on microdots.”

“Stay where you are. I might be able to tell you which one is Miyake without leaving the building.”

Of course, both Hatfield and McGonnigal started yelling at me at once. Why was I suppressing evidence, what did I know, they’d have me arrested.

“Calm down, boys,” I said. “I don’t have any evidence. But now that I know the crime, I think I know how it was done. I just need to talk to my clients.”

Mr. and Mrs. Takamoku looked at me anxiously when I came back to the living room. I got them to follow me into the hall. “They’re not going to arrest you,” I assured them. “But I need to know who turned over the go board last week. Is he here today?”

They talked briefly in Japanese, then Mr. Takamoku said, “We should not betray guest. But murder is much worse. Man in orange shirt, named Hamai.”

Hamai, or Miyake, as Hatfield called him, resisted valiantly. When the police started to put handcuffs on him, he popped a gelatin capsule into his mouth. He was dead almost before they realized what he had done.

Hatfield, impersonal as always, searched his body for the microdot. Hamai had stuck it to his upper lip, where it looked like a mole against his dark skin.

“How did you know?” McGonnigal grumbled, after the bodies had been carted off and the
Takamokus’ efforts to turn their life savings over to me successfully averted.

“He turned over a go board here last week. That troubled my clients enough that they asked me about it. Once I knew we were looking for the transfer of information, it was obvious that Folger had stuck the dot in the hole under the board. Hamai couldn’t get at it, so he had to turn the whole board over. Today, Folger must have put it in a more accessible spot.”

Hatfield left to make his top-secret report. McGonnigal followed his uniformed men out of the apartment. Welland held the door for me.

“Was his name Hamai or Miyake?”

“Oh, I think his real name was Hamai—that’s what all his identification said. He must have used a false name with Folger. After all, he knew you guys never pay attention to each other’s names—you probably wouldn’t even notice what Folger called him. If you could figure out who Folger was.”

Welland smiled; his busy eyebrows danced. “How about a drink? I’d like to salute a lady clever enough to solve the Takamoku
joseki
unaided.”

I looked at my watch. Three hours ago I’d been trying to think of something friendlier to do than watch the Bears get pummeled. This sounded like a good bet. I slipped my hand through his arm and went outside with him.