Quicksilver

Chapter Five

My stomach turned over and the steak I’d eaten seemed to rise into the back of my throat in a bile-soaked lump. For a couple of seconds I thought I was going to throw it up. I looked away from the body, swallowed, and kept on swallowing until my throat unclogged.

Red meat, I thought, the bloodier the better…

I wanted to get out of there, but I had been a cop too many years and I had walked in on too many homicide scenes; instinct took me a few steps closer to the dead man, to where the scatter of glass shards and the spatters and ribbons of blood began. He’d been in his sixties, bald, lean, wearing a shirt and tie and a pair of herringbone slacks. I had never seen him before.

The broken glass came from a framed, blown-up photograph, about fifteen inches square, that had either fallen or been pulled down from the wall. It lay face up, so that when I bent forward I could see that it was a grainy black-and-white print of three Japanese men, all in their late teens or early twenties, standing in front of a wire-mesh fence with some buildings behind it in the distance. They had their arms around one another and they were smiling. One of them, the man in the middle, wore an oddly designed medallion looped around his neck; he might have been the dead man on the floor thirty or forty years ago, but as hacked and bloody as the corpse was, I couldn’t be sure.

There was not much else to see in the office. Two closed doors, one in the side wall that was probably a closet, the other in the back wall that figured to be a rear exit. A few sheets of paper on the floor-what looked to be ledger pages with columns of numbers on them, dislodged from the desk. But there hadn’t been much of a struggle; the killer had come in with the sword, or found it here in the office when he arrived, and struck more or less without warning.

The body kept drawing my eyes, magnetically. I started to back away from it. It was warm in there, too warm: the radiator along the side wall was turned up and burbling faintly. And the smell of death was making me light-headed. They tell you blood has no odor, but you can smell it just the same-a kind of brackish-sweet stench. It was heavy in the air now, along with the lingering foulness of evacuated bowels. Always those same odors at scenes like this one, where blood has been spilled and someone has died by violence. Always the same overpowering smell of death.

Footsteps sounded behind me in the corridor. “Hey, where are you?” Kerry’s voice called. “What’s going on?”

Christ. I swung around to fill the doorway and block her view. “Don’t come in here.”

She stopped moving and stared at me. She could see it in my face, the reflection of what I’d been looking at on the office floor; fright kindled in her eyes.

“There’s a dead man in here,” I said. “Murdered with a sword. It’s pretty messy.”

“My God! Who-?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not the man you came to see?”

“No. Much older. Probably the proprietor.”

I got my handkerchief out, wrapped it around my hand, and then stepped into the corridor and pulled the door shut. I was afraid she might take it into her head to go have a look for herself. With Kerry, you never knew what she was liable to do.

She said, “Brr,” and hugged herself the way you do when you feel a sudden chill. “That must be why nobody’s here.”

I nodded. And why everybody left in such a hurry, I thought. Ken Yamasaki and whoever else was in the baths must have heard the commotion, maybe even seen who did the killing. And instead of hanging around to call the police, they’d all run scared. But why all of them? Why Yamasaki? He was an employee; the police would have no trouble finding that out, and that he’d been here tonight. There was no sense in him running off with the rest of them.

Unless he was the murderer…

“Come on,” I said, and took Kerry’s hand and pulled her along into the reception area. I dipped my chin toward one of the rattan visitor’s chairs. “Sit down over there-and try not to touch anything.”

She did what I told her without saying anything. I moved over to the desk, used the handkerchief to lift the telephone receiver, and dialed the all-too-familiar number of the Hall of justice.

The first prowl-car cops got there in ten minutes, and the Homicide boys showed up fifteen minutes after that. The inspector in charge was a guy named McFate, Leo McFate. We knew each other slightly, and were always civil in what little dealings we had-he’d been in General Works until Eberhardt’s retirement got him transferred to the Homicide Detail-but I sensed that McFate didn’t like me much. I had a pretty fair idea why, too, and it was none of the usual stuff that causes clashes between cops and private detectives; no jealousy or distrust or any of that. No, it had to do with the fact that McFate was a social climber. He went to the opera and the symphony and the ballet, and he got his name mentioned in the gossip columns from time to time, usually in connection with some local lady of means, and he dressed in tailored suits and hand-made ties and always looked like he was on his way to a wedding or a wake.

He didn’t like me because he thought I was a coarse, sloppy, pulp-reading peon. Which I was, and the hell with Leo McFate.

He had nothing much to say when he and the others breezed in, except for a curt “Where is the deceased?” Deceased, yet. He didn’t talk like a cop; he talked like Philo Vance. Or a political appointee in Sacramento, which was what he aspired to be someday, according to rumor. He had the demeanor for it, you couldn’t deny that. Tall, muscled, imposing; what my grandmother would have called “a fine figure of a man.” Dark brown hair going gray at the temples. A nifty brown mustache to go with a pair of nifty brown eyes. He even had a goddamn cleft in his chin like Robert Mitchum’s.

I showed him where the deceased was. McFate spent a couple of minutes looking at the body and the bloody sword and the other stuff on the floor. I watched him do that from out in the hallway; I had no inclination to go in there again, and from where I was, the office desk blocked my view of the dead man. Then McFate had some words with the assistant coroner and with one of the members of the lab crew. Then he turned and came back out to where I was standing.

“What time did you find him?” he asked.

“About nine-forty. Three or four minutes before I called the Hall.”

“When you got here, was the place this deserted?”

“Yes.” I told him the way I figured that, and he nodded.

“How did you get in?”

“The front door was unlocked; we just walked in. We took a look around back here when we didn’t find anybody at the reception desk.”

“We?”

“Me and the lady out there. Kerry Wade.”

“Am I to understand you came here to use the baths?” The words were innocent enough, but he managed to make them sound faintly supercilious, as if he were amused at the idea of rabble like me indulging in a Japanese bath.

I said, “No, we didn’t come here to use the baths. We came here because I wanted to talk to one of the employees on a business matter.”

“Which employee? Tamura?”

“Is Tamura the dead man?”

“Yes. Simon Tamura.”

“How do you know that already?”

“Because we have a file on him. He was Yakuza.”

“The hell he was,” I said, surprised.

“The hell he wasn’t.”

“So that’s it. A gang killing. No wonder everybody got out of here in a hurry, including the employees.”

“Mmm,” McFate said. “Which employee did you come here to see?”

“Ken Yamasaki.”

McFate repeated the name. He wasn’t writing down any of this conversation; he had a photographic memory and he was proud of the fact that he could quote verbatim interrogations that had lasted thirty minutes. I knew that about him because it had been in one of the gossip columns, back when I was still reading the newspapers. “What sort of business did you have with Yamasaki?” he asked.

“Nothing that involves the Yakuza,” I said. “Or Tamura’s death.”

“Suppose you let me be the judge of that.”

I was beginning to like him even less than he liked me. But the world is full of assholes, and you have to be tolerant if you want to keep the peace. So I told him in a nice, even, tolerant voice that Ken Yamasaki was an old boyfriend of Haruko Gage, who had hired me to find out the name of the secret admirer who was sending her presents in the mail.

It must have sounded silly to McFate; it even sounded a little silly to me, the way I explained it. He gave me a look that was half patronage and half watered-down pity. “The detective business must have fallen on hard times,” he said, “if that’s the kind of case you’re taking on.”

“You take what you can get these days,” I said evenly.

“I understand Eberhardt is going into business with you,” he said. “Soon, isn’t it?”

“Next week.”

“He would have been better off if he’d stayed on the force.” McFate smiled as if to take the sting out of the words and then added, “If you don’t mind my saying so.”

I let it blow by. Assholes pass bad wind all the time; that was what you had to remember in dealing with them.

He said, “Do you know where Yamasaki lives?”

“No. He’s not listed in the phone book.”

“Did you know Simon Tamura when he was alive?”

“No. I never even heard of him before today.”

“And you’ve had no recent case involving the Yakuza?”

“I’ve never had any case involving the Yakuza.”

“So be it,” McFate said. “Why don’t you go sit with your lady friend for the time being. I may have more questions a little later.”

“Sure. As long as we can get out of here before midnight.”

I left him and went back into the reception area and plunked myself down in the rattan chair next to Kerry. She said, “What’s the matter? Why are you scowling?”

“Something McFate just told me,” I said. “The dead man back there was Yakuza.”

“What’s Yakuza?”

“Japanese gangster outfit. Sort of like the Mafia.”

“Oh God,” she said.

“Take it easy. It’s not as ominous as it sounds.”

“No?”

“No. I don’t know much about them, but they’re big in Japan and East Asia and they’re starting to get a foothold over here. Prostitution, extortion, that sort of thing. But they only prey on other Japanese-merchants and tourists, mostly.”

“Oh. Then the dead man… do you know his name yet?”

“Simon Tamura. He ran this place, I imagine.”

“Then he was killed by other Yakuza? One of those underworld execution things?”

“Looks that way,” I said. “The Yakuza are supposed to believe that they’re descendants of samurai warriors. And Tamura was murdered with a samurai sword. A ritual killing, maybe, to avenge some breaking of the Yakuza code.”

“Well, thank God you’re not mixed up in it, for a change. It’s bad enough that you had to find the body. And that I had to be here with you.”

“No argument about that.”

“One murder case after another ever since I’ve known you,” she said. “One of these days…”

“One of these days what?”

“You know what I was going to say.”

“Yeah. But I’ve lived this long; I intend to go on living a good while longer.”

“I hope so. Sometimes… damn it, sometimes you scare hell out of me.”

“Sometimes, babe,” I said, “I scare hell out of myself.”

We lapsed into silence, but it was all right between us because Kerry reached over after a few seconds and took hold of my hand. Her fingers were dry and chill-unlike the room itself, which was as warm as Tamura’s office. It started me sweating, and I stood up finally and fumbled with the knob on the radiator until I got the heat shut down.

Cops went in and out, and what seemed like a long time later two white-outfitted interns clumped in with a body bag. Almost immediately after they disappeared toward the office, McFate reappeared and headed toward Kerry and me. We both got on our feet.

“Tamura was definitely Yakuza,” McFate said without preamble. “He had one of their tattoos on his chest-a samurai warrior battling a dragon. And his desk is full of incriminating evidence. He was a local mizu shobai kingpin.”

I had no idea what that last meant, but I was not going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. I figured he’d tell us anyway, and he did.

“ Mizu shobai means ‘water business,’ ” he said in his supercilious way. “Extortion from Japanese bars, restaurants, and night clubs in the Bay Area-a variation on the old protection racket. Very lucrative.”

“Which means he probably had rivals.”

“Probably. We’ll find out.” He paused. “Do you still plan to talk to Ken Yamasaki?”

“That depends,” I said, “on whether or not he had anything to do with Tamura’s death.”

“Then you had better not try to contact him until you find out.”

“I won’t.”

“Good. You don’t intend to do any investigating into Yakuza activities, do you?”

“No. Why should I?”

“You shouldn’t, if what you told me earlier is true.”

“It’s true. I don’t lie to the police, McFate.”

“But you do go off on tangents now and then.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you lost your license once,” McFate said, “and it would be a shame if it happened again. So I’d advise you to confine your present activities to tracking down secret admirers. Leave the Yakuza to us.”

I could feel myself getting hot; he was rubbing salt into old wounds now. But making an issue of it with him was not going to buy me anything except trouble. I made myself say, “You don’t have to worry about me,” in a neutral voice. “Is it all right if we go now?”

“You can go, but I want to ask Ms. Wade a few questions before she leaves. For the sake of corroboration.”

Kerry looked at me. I said, “I can use some fresh air. I’ll wait for you in the car.”

She nodded, and McFate gave her one of his charming smiles, and I beat it out of there before I did or said something stupid. There were a couple of reporter types hanging around out front, but they didn’t seem to know who I was; I glared at them the way cops do and they didn’t bother me. I walked up to the end of the block, letting the wind and the steady drizzle cool me off. When I came back to the car I sat behind the wheel, with the window rolled down a little, and watched the clock in the grocery store window.

Five more minutes passed before Kerry came out. She said as she slid in beside me, “Whew, am I glad to get out of there!”

“Did McFate give you a hard time?”

“Not really. But the way he kept looking at me, I was afraid he might try to make a pass. What’s the matter with him, anyway?”

“He’s an asshole,” I said, and let it go at that.

We didn’t take a shower together that night. We didn’t do anything together that night, primitive or otherwise. The combination of the murder and McFate had knocked out all of my amorous feelings and intentions, and Kerry wasn’t much interested either. So we said good night in the car in front of her building, and I drove home and crawled into bed alone.

Some day, all right. A real prizewinner.