Michael Crichton - Rising Sun

by Rising Sun [lit]

  "I wonder if you'd mind if I asked Mr. Phillips one or two questions."

  "No, Captain. Go right ahead."

  "Perhaps you'd take notes."

  "Good idea, Captain."

  He released my shoulder. I got out my notepad.

  Connor sat on the edge of the table and said, "Have you been with Nakamoto Security long, Mr. Phillips?"

  "Yes, sir. About six years now. I started over in their La Habra plant, and when I hurt my leg — in a car accident — and couldn't walk so good, they moved me to security. In the plant. Because I wouldn't have to walk around, you see. Then when they opened the Torrance plant, they moved me over there. My wife got a job in the Torrance plant, too. They do Toyota subassemblies. Then, when this building opened, they brought me here, to work nights."

  "I see. Six years altogether."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You must like it."

  "Well, I tell you, it's a secure job. That's something in America. I know they don't think much of black folks, but they always treated me okay. And hell, before this I worked for GM in Van Nuys, and that's . . . you know, that's gone."

  "Yes," Connor said sympathetically.

  "That place," Phillips said, shaking his head at the memory. "Christ. The management assholes they used to send down to the floor. You couldn't believe it. M.B. fucking A., out of Detroit, little weenies didn't know shit. They didn't know how the line worked. They didn't know a tool from a die. But they'd still order the foremen around. They're all pulling in two hundred fucking thousand a year and they didn't know shit. And nothing ever worked right. The cars were all a piece of shit. But here," he said, tapping the counter. "Here, I got a problem, or something doesn't work, I tell somebody. And they come right down, and they know the system — how it works — and we go over the problem together, and it gets fixed. Right away. Problems get fixed here. That's the difference. I tell you: these people pay attention."

  "So you like it here."

  "They always treated me okay," Phillips said, nodding.

  That didn't exactly strike me as a glowing endorsement. I had the feeling this guy wasn't committed to his employers and a few questions could drive the wedge. All we had to do was encourage the break.

  "Loyalty is important," Connor said, nodding sympathetically.

  "It is to them," he said. "They expect you to show all this enthusiasm for the company. So you know, I always come in fifteen or twenty minutes early, and stay fifteen or twenty minutes after the shift is over. They like you to put in the extra time. I did the same at Van Nuys, but nobody ever noticed."

  "And when is your shift?"

  "I work nine to seven."

  "And tonight? What time did you come on duty?"

  "Quarter to nine. Like I said, I come in fifteen minutes early."

  The original call had been recorded about eight-thirty. So if this man came at a quarter to nine, he would have arrived almost fifteen minutes too late to see the murder. "Who was on duty before you?"

  "Well, usually it's Ted Cole. But I don't know if he worked tonight."

  "Why is that?"

  The guard wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and looked away.

  "Why is that, Mr. Phillips?" I said, with a little more force.

  The guard blinked and frowned, saying nothing.

  Connor said quietly, "Because Ted Cole wasn't here when Mr. Phillips arrived tonight, was he, Mr. Phillips?"

  The guard shook his head. "No, he wasn't,"

  I started to ask another question, but Connor raised his hand. "I imagine, Mr. Phillips, you must have been pretty surprised when you came in this room, at a quarter to nine."

  "You damn right I was," Phillips said.

  "What did you do when you saw the situation?"

  "Well. Right away, I said to the guy, 'Can I help you?' Very polite but still firm. I mean, this is the security room. And I don't know who this guy is, I've never seen him before. And the guy is tense. Very tense. He says to me, 'Get out of my way.' Real pushy, like he owns the world. And he shoves past me, taking his briefcase with him.

  "I say, 'Excuse me, sir, I'll have to see some identification.' He don't answer me, he just keeps going. Out the lobby and down the stairs."

  "You didn't try and stop him?"

  "No, sir. I didn't."

  "Because he was Japanese?"

  "You got that right. But I called up to central security — it's up on the ninth floor — to say I found a man in the room. And they say, 'Don't worry, everything is fine.' But I can hear they're tense, too. Everybody is tense. And then I see on the monitor . . . the dead girl. So that's the first I knew what it was about."

  Connor said, "The man you saw. Can you describe him?"

  The guard shrugged. "Thirty, thirty-five. Medium height. Dark blue suit like they all wear. Actually he was more hip than most of them. He had this tie with triangles on it. Oh — and a scar on his hand, like a burn or something."

  "Which hand?"

  "The left hand. I noticed it when he was closing the briefcase."

  "Could you see inside the briefcase?"

  "No."

  "But he was closing it when you came in the room?"

  "Yes."

  "Was it your impression he took something from this room?"

  "I really couldn't say, sir."

  Phillips's evasiveness began to annoy me. I said, "What do you think he took?"

  Connor shot me a look.

  The guard went bland: "I really don't know, sir."

  Connor said, "Of course you don't. There's no way you could know what was in somebody else's briefcase. By the way, do you make recordings from the security cameras here?"

  "Yes, we do."

  "Could you show me how you do that?"

  "Sure thing." The guard got up from the desk and opened a door at the far end of the room. We followed him into a second small room, almost a closet, stacked floor to ceiling with small metal boxes, each with stenciled notations in Japanese kanji script, and numbers in English. Each with a glowing red light, and an LED counter, with numbers running forward.

  Phillips said, "These are our recorders. They lay down signals from all the cameras in the building. They're eight-millimeter, high-definition video." He held up a small cassette, like an audio cassette. "Each one of these records eight hours. We change over at nine p.m., so that's the first thing I do when I come on duty. I pop out the old ones, and switch over to the fresh ones."

  "And did you change cassettes tonight, at nine o'clock?"

  "Yes, sir. Just like always."

  "And what do you do with the tapes you remove?"

  "Keep 'em in the trays down here," he said, bending to show us several long, thin drawers. "We keep everything off the cameras for seventy-two hours. That's three days. So we keep nine sets of tapes all together. And we just rotate each set through, once every three days. Get me?"

  Connor hesitated. "Perhaps I'd better write this down." He produced a small pad and a pen. "Now, each tape lasts eight hours, so you have nine different sets . . . ."

  "Right, right."

  Connor wrote for a moment, then shook his pen irritably. "This damn pen. It's out of ink. You have a wastebasket?"

  Phillips pointed to the corner. "Over there."

  "Thank you."

  Connor threw the pen away. I gave him mine. He resumed his notes. "You were saying, Mr. Phillips, that you have nine sets . . ."

  "Right. Each set is numbered with letters, from A to I. Now when I come in at nine, I eject the tapes and see whatever letter is already in there, and put in the next one. Like tonight, I took out set C, so I put in set D, which is what's recording now."

  "I see," Connor said. "And then you put tape set C in one of the drawers here?"

  "Right." He pulled open a drawer. "This one here."

  Connor said. "May I?" He glanced at the neatly labeled row of tapes. Then he quickly opened the other drawers, and looked at the other stacks of tapes. Except for the different letters, all th
e drawers looked identical.

  "I think I understand now," Connor said. "What you actually do is use nine sets in rotation."

  "Exactly."

  "So each set gets used once every three days."

  "Right."

  "And how long has the security office been using this system?"

  "The building's new, but we've been going, oh, maybe two months now."

  "I must say it's a very well-organized system," Connor said appreciatively. "Thank you for explaining it to us. I have only a couple of other questions."

  "Sure."

  "First of all, these counters here— " Connor said, pointing to the LED counters on the video recorders. "They seem to show the elapsed times since the tapes began recording. Is that right? Because it's now almost eleven o'clock, and you put in the tapes at nine, and the top recorder says 1:55:30 and the next recorder says 1:55:10, and so on."

  "Yes, that's right. I put the tapes in one right after another. It takes a few seconds between tapes."

  "I see. These all show almost two hours. But I notice that one recorder down here shows an elapsed time of only thirty minutes. Does that mean it's broken?"

  "Huh," Phillips said, frowning. "I guess maybe it is. 'Cause I changed the tapes all one after another, like I said. But these recorders are the latest technology. Sometimes there are glitches. Or we had some power problems. Could be that."

  "Yes. Quite possibly," Connor said. "Can you tell me which camera is hooked to this recorder?"

  "Yes, of course." Phillips read the number off the recorder, and went out to the main room with the monitor screens. "It's camera four-six slash six," he said. "This view here." He tapped the screen.

  It was an atrium camera, and it showed an overall view of the forty-sixth floor.

  "But you see," Phillips said, "the beauty of the system is, even if one recorder screws up, there are still other cameras on that floor, and the video recorders on the others seem to be working okay."

  "Yes, they do," Connor said. "By the way, can you tell me why there are so many cameras on the forty-sixth floor?"

  "You didn't hear it from me," Phillips said. "But you know how they like efficiency. The word is, they are going to kaizen the office workers."

  "So basically these cameras have been installed to observe workers during the day, and help them improve their efficiency?"

  "That's what I heard."

  "Well, I think that's it," Connor said. "Oh, one more question. Do you have an address for Ted Cole?"

  Phillips shook his head. "No, I don't."

  "Have you ever been out with him, socialized with him?"

  "I have, but not much. He's an odd guy."

  "Ever been to his apartment?"

  "No. He's kind of secretive. I think he lives with his mother or something. We usually go to this bar, the Palomino, over by the airport. He likes it there."

  Connor nodded. "And one last question: where is the nearest pay phone?"

  "Out in the lobby, and around to your right, by the restrooms. But you're welcome to use the phone here."

  Connor shook the guard's hand warmly. "Mr. Phillips, I appreciate your taking the time to talk to us."

  "No problem."

  I gave the guard my card. "If you think of anything later that could help us, Mr. Phillips, don't hesitate to call me." And I left.

  ☼

  Connor stood at the pay phone in the lobby. It was one of those new standing booths that has two receivers, one on either side, allowing two people to talk on the same line at once. These booths had been installed in Tokyo years ago, and now were starting to show up all over Los Angeles. Of course, Pacific Bell no longer was the principal provider of American public pay phones. Japanese manufacturers had penetrated that market, too. I watched Connor write down the phone number in his notebook.

  "What are you doing?"

  "We have two separate questions to answer tonight. One is how the girl came to be killed on an office floor. But we also need to find out who placed the original call, notifying us of the murder."

  "And you think the call might have been placed from this phone?"

  "Possibly."

  He closed his notebook, and glanced at his watch. "It's late. We better get going."

  "I think we're making a big mistake here."

  "Why is that?" Connor asked.

  "I don't know if we should leave the tapes in that security room. What if somebody switches them while we're gone?"

  "They've already been switched," Connor said.

  "How do you know?"

  "I gave up a perfectly good pen to find out," he said. "Now come on." He started walking toward the stairs leading down to the garage. I followed him.

  "You see," Connor said, "when Phillips first explained that simple system of rotation, it was immediately clear to me that there might have been a switch. The question was how to prove it."

  His voice echoed in the concrete stairwell. Connor continued down, taking the steps two at a time. I hurried to keep up.

  Connor said, "If somebody switched the tapes, how would they go about it? They would be working hastily, under pressure. They'd be terrified of making a mistake. They certainly wouldn't want to leave any incriminating tapes behind. So probably they'd switch an entire set, and replace it. But replace it with what? They can't just put in the next set. Since there are only nine sets of tapes all together, it would be too easy for someone to notice that one set was missing, and the total was now eight. There would be an obvious empty drawer. No, they would have to replace the set they were taking away with an entirely new set. Twenty brand-new tapes. And that meant I ought to check the trash."

  "That's why you threw your pen away?"

  "Yes. I didn't want Phillips to know what I was doing."

  "And?"

  "The trash was full of crumpled plastic wrappers. The kind that new videotapes come wrapped in."

  "I see."

  "Once I knew the tapes had been replaced, the only remaining question was, which set? So I played dumb, and looked in all the drawers. You probably noticed that set C, the set Phillips removed when he came on duty, had slightly whiter labels than the other sets. It was subtle, because the office has only been active two months, but you could tell."

  "I see." Somebody had come into the security room, taken out twenty fresh tapes, unwrapped them, written new labels, and popped them into the video machines, replacing the original tapes that had recorded the murder.

  I said, "If you ask me, Phillips knows more about this than he was telling us."

  "Maybe," Connor said, "but we have more important things to do. Anyway, there's a limit to what he knows. The murder was phoned in about eight-thirty. Phillips arrived at quarter to nine. So he never saw the murder. We can assume the previous guard, Cole, did. But by a quarter of nine, Cole was gone, and an unknown Japanese man was in the security room, closing up a briefcase."

  "You think he's the one who switched the tapes?"

  Connor nodded. "Very possibly. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this man was the killer himself. I hope to find that out at Miss Austin's apartment." He threw open the door, and we went into the garage.

  ☼

  A line of party guests waited for valets to bring their cars. I saw Ishiguro chatting up Mayor Thomas and his wife. Connor steered me toward them. Standing alongside the mayor, Ishiguro was so cordial he was almost obsequious. He gave us a big smile. "Ah, gentlemen. Is your investigation proceeding satisfactorily? Is there anything more I can do to help?"

  I didn't get really angry until that moment: until I saw the way he toadied up in front of the mayor. It made me so mad I began to turn red. But Connor took it in stride.

  "Thank you, Ishiguro-san," he said, with a slight bow. "The investigation is going well."

  "You're receiving all the help you requested?" Ishiguro said.

  "Oh, yes," Connor said. "Everyone has been very cooperative."

  "Good, good. I'm glad." Ishiguro glanced at the mayor, and sm
iled at him, too. He was all smiles, it seemed.

  "But," Connor said, "there is just one thing."

  "Just name it. If there is anything we can do . . ."

  "The security tapes seem to have been removed."

  "Security tapes?" Ishiguro frowned, clearly caught off guard.

  "Yes," Connor said. "Recordings from the security cameras."

  "I don't know anything about that," Ishiguro said. "But let me assure you, if any tapes exist, they are yours to examine."

  "Thank you," Connor said. "Unfortunately, it seems the crucial tapes have been removed from the Nakamoto security office."

  "Removed? Gentlemen, I believe there must be some mistake."

  The mayor was watching this exchange closely.

  Connor said, "Perhaps, but I don't think so. It would be reassuring, Mr. Ishiguro, if you were to look into this matter yourself."

  "I certainly will," Ishiguro said. "But I must say again. I can't imagine, Captain Connor, that any tapes are missing."

  "Thank you for checking, Mr. Ishiguro," Connor said.

  "Not at all, Captain," he said, still smiling. "It is my pleasure to assist you in whatever way I can."

  "The son of a bitch," I said. We were driving west on the Santa Monica freeway. "The little prick looked us right in the eye and lied."

  "It's annoying," Connor said. "But you see, Ishiguro takes a different view. Now that he is beside the mayor, he sees himself in another context, with another set of obligations and requirements for his behavior. Since he is sensitive to context, he's able to act differently, with no reference to his earlier behavior. To us, he seems like a different person. But Ishiguro feels he's just being appropriate."

  "What burns me is he acted so confident."

  "Of course he did," Connor said. "And he would be quite surprised to learn that you're angry with him. You consider him immoral. He considers you naive. Because for a Japanese, consistent behavior is not possible. A Japanese becomes a different person around people of different rank. He becomes a different person when he moves through different rooms of his own house."

  "Yeah," I said. "That's fine, but the fact is he's a lying son of a bitch."

  Connor looked at me. "Would you talk that way to your mother?"