Quicksilver

Chapter Six

I was up at eight-thirty in the morning, and showered and shaved and in the kitchen for breakfast before nine. The thought of eggs in any form, particularly accompanied by grapefruit, started an unpleasant burbling in my stomach. So I hunted around in the refrigerator for something else nonfattening to eat, but all I could come up with were celery stalks and carrots and some yogurt that Kerry had bought for me. Pineapple yogurt, the container said, fruit on the bottom. Yeah, I thought, but not on the bottom of my stomach. I put it back into the fridge, along with the celery stalks and the carrots, and opened a can of V-8 juice. I could get some solid food into me later on.

The telephone rang while I was pouring coffee. I went into the bedroom and hauled up the receiver, and Eberhardt said, “Find any more bodies this morning? Or is the day still too young?”

“Not funny,” I said. “You heard about last night, huh?”

“Me and a few million others. You ought to start reading the papers regularly; you get mentioned in them enough these days.”

“That’s one of the reasons I don’t read them. Front-page stuff this time?”

“Sure. A guy gets hacked up with a samurai sword-that’s good copy. In particular when he’s a big noise in the local branch of the Yakuza.”

“How many times did my name get taken in vain?”

“Only once. Not much ink at all. Just that you and Kerry found the body.”

“Kerry got mentioned, too? Damn McFate. I thought he might at least leave her out of it.”

“Leo likes to see his name in the papers,” Eberhardt said. “He figures everybody else does too.”

“Listen, Eb, I’m not mixed up in Simon Tamura’s murder. Or with the Yakuza. I went to those baths to talk to one of the employees-not Tamura, another guy-on a minor domestic case.”

“Did I ask?”

“I just wanted you to know.”

“Well, I thought it was something like that. I figured you’d have told me if you were messing with anything as big-league as the Yakuza. Besides, you’re not dumb enough to take Kerry into a place that fronts for a gang of thugs.”

“Thanks-I think.”

“Don’t mention it. You going to be busy today?”

“Some. Why?”

“I bought a desk and a chair and a couple of other things yesterday,” he said. “They’re being delivered this afternoon. I thought maybe you’d want to help me move things around.”

“What time is the delivery?”

“Sometime after two.”

“Well, that ought to work out okay. My stuff’s coming out of storage and over to the office around that time. I should be able to get there by then.”

“Good,” he said. “Looking forward to it, paisan.”

That makes one of us, I thought.

I dialed Kerry’s number, to find out if she’d read the newspaper thing too, but there was no answer. She’d already left for Bates and Carpenter, the ad agency where she worked.

So I took the directory out of the nightstand drawer, looked up the number of the registrar’s office at City College and then punched it out. The woman who answered said that Nelson Mixer was still out sick. I found Mixer’s home number, and when I called it a man’s voice came on after five rings. He sounded a little miffed, as if I had interrupted him at something. Sleeping, maybe, or taking medicine; his voice was hoarse. I asked him if he was Nelson Mixer and he said he was and I said, “I wonder if you’d be interested in purchasing some aluminum siding at a premium price-” and he hung up on me. I grinned as I cradled the receiver. Now I knew where to find him this morning.

I drank my coffee in the kitchen, trying not to listen to the empty noises my stomach was making. Then I spent ten minutes doing the exercises the muscle therapist had given me to strengthen the damaged motor nerve in my left arm and shoulder. The same gunman who had put Eberhardt in a coma for seventeen days back in August had pumped a bullet into me, too. I had had a lot of stiffness in the arm for a while, and I still had some off and on, particularly after any kind of physical activity. But it wasn’t so bad any more, as a result of time and the muscle therapy. Most days I had no pain or stiffness at all and I was reminded of the trouble only when I tried, without thinking, to use the arm for something. I still had a three-or four-percent impairment, according to the therapist. The goal was one percent, which was as close to normal as the old wing was going to get.

My watch said it was just nine-thirty when I shrugged into my overcoat and put on my hat and left the flat. I hoped Nelson Mixer had something useful to tell me. As things stood, with Ken Yamasaki unavailable to me for the time being, the only other name on my list was Edgar Ogada. And I wanted very much to find out the identify of Haruko Gage’s secret admirer. Not because it was any big deal; it wasn’t. Just because I wanted my last solo investigation, my last little fling, to be a successful one.

Nelson Mixer’s residence turned out to be a small house on 46th Avenue, just off Balboa and not far from either Sutro Heights Park or the ocean. It was one of the stucco rowhouses that a builder named Dolger had strung out over the avenues in the 1930s-the kind Malvina Reynolds had referred to as “ticky-tacky houses” in her sixties protest song, “Little Boxes.” Each one attached to its neighbors, like links in a giant chain, with a little patch of ground in front and a garage under the living room windows. When the garage was open it would look like a gaping mouth under a couple of bulging rectangular eyes.

Two things set Mixer’s house off from those of his neighbors. One was the fact that it was painted a bilious urine-yellow color uncompli-mented by bright green trim. The other was the Christmas tree prominently displayed in one of the front windows: pink-flocked, decorated with silver tinsel and sparkly blue ornaments. If there had been a city ordinance against visual pollution-and there ought to have been-they could have slapped Mixer with a hell of a fine.

The curb in front was empty; I put my car there and stepped out into the same kind of light, steady drizzle we had had last night. December in San Francisco usually brings decent weather, but not this year. It had been raining off and on for three weeks now and I was pretty sick of it. I was starting to feel like an overwatered houseplant: much more of this and I would start to rot.

I ran up the yellow stucco staircase to one of those burglar-proof wrought iron gates that protected the front stoop. It kept me standing out in the rain while I pushed the doorbell and waited for somebody to respond. I waited a good minute before that happened; then the door clicked open and eased inward and a face peered at me around the edge. It was a white face, sort of vulpine, topped with a wild shock of red hair that clashed painfully with the yellow walls and green trim. It peered at me being rained on outside the gate, blinked a couple of times, and poked out a little farther from behind the door on a long scrawny neck.

“Yes?” the face said warily. “What do you want?”

“Are you Nelson Mixer?”

“I am. Who are you?”

I told him who I was and what I did for a living. His eyes got wide and popped a little, as if I’d told him I was Benito Mussolini come back from the dead; the white skin turned even whiter. He yanked the door open all the way, more a reflex action than anything else, and I was looking at the rest of him. There wasn’t much to see, really. He was about five-six and weighed in at a strapping one-twenty, all of which was encased in a royal blue bathrobe with gold-leaf dragons emblazoned on it. He could have been thirty-five or he could have been forty-five. He could also have been slightly screwball, if the way he was gawping at me was any indication.

“Private detective?” he said. “My God! What do you want? Who sent you?”

“Nobody sent me, Mr. Mixer. I-”

“Clara’s father? Is he the one?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anyone named-”

“Well, you tell him I never touched her. You hear me? It’s all a pack of lies. All I did was tutor her.”

“Pardon me?”

“Tutor, tutor. You know what tutor means, don’t you?”

“Of course I know what-”

“There was never anything between Clara and me. No physical contact of any kind. I don’t even find her attractive; I’ve never liked women with big behinds. Tell him that, the old fool.”

“Look, Mr. Mixer…”

“Nellie!” a woman’s voice called from somewhere inside the house. “Nellie, what are you doing out there?”

“Oh my God,” Mixer said. He glanced over his shoulder, looked back at me again. Sudden guilt had spread like jam over his vulpine features.

“ Nell ie?”

He half-turned. “Stop that yelling!” he yelled. “I’ll be there in a minute, Darlene.”

“It’s pretty wet out here,” I said when his attention returned to me. “How about buzzing me in so we can talk?”

“Hah,” he said. “I don’t care if you drown out there.”

“You’re all heart. Who’s Darlene?”

“What?”

“Your friend inside. Darlene.”

“She’s not my friend,” he said quickly. “She’s one of my students.”

“I called up City College a while ago,” I said. “They told me you were too sick to teach today.”

“Too sick to leave the house. Yes, that’s right. I was just, ah, tutoring Darlene.”

“In your bathrobe?”

He looked down at himself as if he’d forgotten he was wearing the robe. Little red splotches appeared on his cheeks; they matched the color of his hair. “I, ah… that is, I… coffee, I spilled coffee on myself while we were…” He quit sputtering all of a sudden, drew himself up, bared his teeth in a foxy snarl, and said, “I don’t have to explain anything to you. Go away. Go tell Clara’s father I’ll sue him if he doesn’t stop harassing me.”

“I’m not working for Clara’s father,” I said, getting it out fast because he had started to shut the door. “I don’t know anybody named Clara. I’m here about Haruko Cage.”

The door stayed open about halfway. “Who?”

“Haruko Gage. She’s been-”

“Who the hell is Haruko Gage?”

“You don’t remember her, is that it?”

“Nellie!”

“No,” Mixer said, “I don’t remember her. Who is she?”

“A former student of yours. You asked her to move in with you about three years ago.”

“I did what?”

“Or don’t you remember that either?”

“Nellie!”

“Haruko Gage? Good God,” he said, “not Haruko Fujita? The little Japanese girl who was studying art?”

“Probably; Gage is her married name. Or do you routinely ask Japanese girls to live with you?”

That got me another foxy snarl. “You can’t talk to me like that. I won’t allow it.”

“You can’t let me stand out here in the rain, but you’re doing it anyway. Haruko Gage has been receiving anonymous presents in the mail-expensive jewelry, one with a love note. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“Nel-lie!”

“Goddamn it,” Mixer said. “Be quiet, Darlene!”

“Well, hurry up, can’t you?” the woman’s voice called. She sounded young. “I’m getting cold sitting around here like this. Besides, I can’t get your stupid movie camera to work right.”

The red flush came back into Mixer’s face, dragging the guilt along with it. He said something that sounded like “Gah,” jerked his head back, and slammed the door.

I shoved my finger against the doorbell button, kept it there. At the end of thirty or forty seconds the door opened and Mixer said, “Go away, leave me alone! I’ll call the police!” And the door banged shut again.

I gave it up. I went back down the stairs and got into the car and used my handkerchief for a rain towel. Now I knew what Alice felt like after she’d spent some time in Wonderland; it was as if I had just done verbal battle with the Mad Hatter. Or, more appropriately, it seemed, the Mad Lecher.

Cross Mixer off the list? What with Clara and Darlene and Christ knew how many others eager for his tutoring, it didn’t seem likely that he would be writing anonymous love notes and blowing a wad of money on fancy jewelry for Haruko Gage. Still, he was a screwball; and you never know what a screwball might do. I wanted at least one more session with Mixer, under different and more conventional circumstances, before I wrote him off.

The thing about him that bothered me most was his ability to attract Haruko and Clara and Darlene and presumably a whole dewy-eyed and horny legion of college-age females. What the hell did any of them see in a scrawny, color-blind, unlovely specimen like him? Why would women even consider dropping their drawers for the Nelson Mixers of the world?

It was nagging little questions like this that made you wonder about life’s fundamental equity.

Somebody was tailing me.

I spotted the car six blocks from Mixer’s house, when it followed me into a turn east on Geary Boulevard. White Ford about two years old, with one of those whip antennas that CB subscribers have on their vehicles. Two people in it, but that was all I could tell; they hung back pretty good and stayed in another lane and the rain made it difficult to see clearly through the rear window. I couldn’t make out the license plate either.

Well, I was getting old. In my salad days, even though these guys appeared to be doing all the things you’re supposed to do to conduct a successful shadow job, I would have tumbled to them within five minutes of leaving Pacific Heights. My flat was where they’d picked me up, of course; I remembered seeing the Ford as I headed down Laguna to Geary. They’d hung around on 46th Avenue waiting for me to get done with Mixer, and now here they were again.

But hell, the last thing I’d have expected today was a tail. The idea of it annoyed me-and made me a little uneasy. Who were they? What did they think they were going to find out by shagging me around the city?

I swung over into the far left lane and made a left turn on 30th Avenue; drove past Presidio Middle School and turned right on Clement and went down to 25th Avenue and turned left again. The white Ford stayed with me all the way, still hanging back far enough so that I couldn’t get a look at the occupants or read the license plate. No doubt at all now that the Ford was there to keep me company.

I drove straight down 25th at a nice easy pace and passed between the stone pillars that marked the entrance to Seacliff, one of San Francisco’s ritzier residential districts. Left on Scenic Way and left again on Seacliff Avenue, past a lot of elegant homes strung out along the cliffside and commanding panoramic views of the Golden Gate. The street forked after a few blocks, with the main branch blending into El Camino del Mar and leading up to Land’s End; Seacliff Avenue hooked to the right and dead-ended after about a block and a half. I stayed on Seacliff. The Ford was two blocks behind me as I veered that way.

On my left were more houses and on my right was a parking area bounded by a long cyclone fence. Beyond the fence, a steep slope fell away to China Beach-a narrow inlet that had been a campsite for Chinese fishermen last century and now was a locally popular sunbathing spot. Nobody was down there today, in the rain and with the surf crashing heavy and white over the offshore rocks; the beach was all but invisible under the high tide. And the parking area was empty.

I cut into the lot, made a fast U-turn, and slid out onto the street pointing the way I’d come. I had timed it right: the Ford had already veered in and slowed to a crawl, and there was no place for them to go. I got the license number and I got a good look at their faces as I drove by-making it obvious so they’d be sure to know I was on to them. Two men, big and tough-looking, the driver wearing a mustache and a startled look, the passenger with a nose like a blob of brownish putty.

Both of them were Japanese.

I kept on going past them, turned right on El Camino del Mar, went up the hill to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and drove past it and through the Lincoln Park Golf Course-a loop that took me back to Geary. There was no sign of the white Ford. Either they’d given it up on their own or they’d used the CB and whoever they’d called had told them to lay off. But this wasn’t going to be the end of it. I had a bad feeling that they would be back pretty soon, and maybe not just to follow me around.

One word kept running around inside my head. It scared me some and made me nervous and puzzled the hell out of me because I had no idea of the why of it.

The word was Yakuza.