The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Chapter 1

Let’s get one thing straight at the start. He was a prince among men.

The guns are silent now. Their days of blood sacrifice are history. The world has moved on, and in great part it has forgotten.

The dead on the islands cannot remember. The living wanted to forget. The half-living will never forget. They are the gray shadows of that army that bought with its living flesh the luxury and freedom you take so much for granted.

They returned. They were carried back. Living, they are of the dead, shut away in government hospitals or in private homes. They are the shattered.

Nick Martin was one of these. He was born, he grew up, he became a Marine private after Pearl Harbor. He was a corporal when he went ashore on Iwo Jima. As a sergeant he went in with the assault waves on Okinawa.

There his luck ran out. He might have stretched it a little, but he knew what the cost would be to his company.

To him there was no decision to make. Sick as he was of the whole business, he stayed where he was. His platoon was wiped out. He held the position for another twenty minutes. It was time enough for Baker Company to get into position.

It was a little action, lost in the greater action-except to the men in Baker.

They found him with a burned-out submachine gun and grenade pins littering the ground around him. They thought at first he was dead. He had taken a machine-gun burst in the midsection as he threw the last grenade.

Nick would want you to enjoy your dinner. So I won’t go into detail about what those slugs did to his guts and spine. A case-hardened medic vomited as he loaded Nick onto a stretcher.

The years have passed now, a pleasant haze of memory for most of us. We’ve had to look for and dream up most of our troubles. We’ve worked, played, groused about bills, eaten like sultans, traded our shiny cars because there was a newer model.

For Nick the years have been about eight million minutes never far from pain. His calendar has been operating-room schedules in government hospitals. His country has never ceased trying to work a miracle over him. He was patched, pieced together, carved, remade. He came to dream of gleaming scalpels, the nightmare of sleep no more horrible than that of waking reality.

He was helped. He could use his hands. Later he learned to walk. Somehow, he endured.

Maybe it was because he was never completely alone. There was always Helen, his wife, living her own eight million minutes.

I hadn’t slept much since Nick and Helen Martin had disappeared day before yesterday. I wasn’t feeling kindly toward the world. The end for Nick looked as if it would be the final cruelty, the ultimate irony.

It had been a scorching day, such as you find only in Tampa. I’ve been in Florida nearly seventeen years, and

I’ve never got used to the heat. If you asked me why I stay, I guess I couldn’t give you a reason.

The lettering on my office door reads NATIONWIDE DETECTIVE AGENCY, SOUTHEASTERN OFFICE, AGENT IN CHARGE: ED RIVERS.

I was on the skids when I wandered into Tampa years ago. Nationwide gave me a break, a chance. So maybe there is a reason after all.

I’d looked everywhere for Nick. I don’t know what I hoped to do for him. Protect him somehow. Reach him before the cops did. Stop him from doing anything more foolish. The cops wouldn’t take chances, and I couldn’t blame them. You don’t take chances when you’re looking for a man who apparently has taken a souvenir samurai sword and chopped a whole family of Japanese-Americans in little pieces.

I came back to my apartment on the edge of Tampa’s Ybor City, the Latin quarter. In an old building spiced with the Spanish language and the lingering smell of Cuban sausage, the apartment is just a place to flop and eat. There is a day bed where I sleep, boiling in my own sweat, a second-hand TV I don’t watch very much, a kitchenette where I can cook a little, and a bathroom with gargling plumbing and an old-fashioned tub that’s big.

I ran the tub nearly to the brim with water from the cold tap, stripped off my baggy slacks and sweat-stained sport shirt. I’d left my lightweight jacket and the .38 in the bed-sitting room. I finished undressing by taking off my shoes, socks, shorts, and the knife I wear in a sheath at the nape of my neck. I’ve had need of the knife about once every five years. On each occasion, I’d have lost five years of living if the knife hadn’t been handy.

With sweat rivuleting down the creases in my face and through the heavy brush on my chest, I grunted my nearly two-hundred-pound bulk into the tub. I didn’t get a chance to soak out any of the heat. Somebody began banging on the door.

I yelled that I was coming. I dressed quickly and opened the door.

The caller was Lieutenant Steve Ivey. He was a quiet, clean-living, hard-working cop of middle age. About my size, though he didn’t have the slope shoulders, and he gave the false impression of being taller.

In the department set-up, Ivey had replaced a knife blade named Julian Patrick, who’d thought more of his personal ambition than of his city. A patient city had finally got rid of Patrick. Ivey was less brilliant, but his integrity made up for it.

Ivey had never dealt directly with me before. Now he studied me for a moment; the apartment that was my background; then me, personally and coolly, his eyes starting at my shoes, moving up the bearishness of my body, coming to rest on my face. My face usually gets a reaction. I’ve seen it fire the eyes of women with feelings ranging from acute distaste to hot hunger. It’s brought caution to some men, and a bristling, instinctive challenge to others.

Ivey was a man who was certain of himself, his strength, his capabilities. He accepted my face with a pleasant smile.

“Mind if I come in, Rivers?”

“You’re welcome any time.”

“Thanks.” He closed the door and took off his Panama. My gray-tinged brown mat is a little thin at the crown of my head, but Ivey was bald as a fresh-peeled egg. Top his fleshiness and mild good humor with the egg, and you felt he might be found in the front row at a girlie show. The only time he ever got close to one was when he led a raid.

“Beer?” I asked.

“Too hot. I sweat it out.”

“It helps for a minute,” I said. I stepped into the kitchenette, got a beer from the refrigerator, opened the can and came back sipping at it.

Ivey sat on the arm of the worn club chair near the day bed. “Figueroa is nursing some bruised feelings, Ed.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“He’s about the best man I’ve got when I want somebody tailed.” His tone was cool, but he was still smiling. “How’d you manage it? You look about as clumsy as a tired old elephant, yet Figueroa swears you were sired by an Everglades panther.”

“You don’t really want me to give away trade secrets, do you?”

“We won’t press the point.”

“That’s fine.”

“Did you see Nick Martin?” he asked.

“I couldn’t locate him. He’s so hot you’re on emergency in the department. Being his friend, I knew I’d be watched. If it’ll help Figueroa, tell him he’s the toughest man I’ve ever had to shake, but it didn’t do me any good. No food, no sleep — and no Nick Martin. Just blisters on my feet.”

“How good a friend, Ed?”

“Very good.”

“Tell me.”

“Why should I?”

“I’d just like to hear it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Once I was a cop, up in Jersey where I was born. I liked it. I worked at it. Life looked good. I had a girl. I thought she was about everything fine and decent molded into human form. Then she ran off with a punk I was trying to nail. Their car got in the way of a fast-moving freight train.

“I tried to pickle my troubles in alcohol. One morning

I woke up in a back alley. I was in Tampa, Florida. The alley was about as low as I could get. I got a job on the docks. Later, Nationwide gave me a chance. After the recent look I’d had of myself, I didn’t know whether I could handle it. There were times when I was afraid of myself, of the weakness I’d always despised and yet discovered inside of myself.

“Along about that time, Nick was sent to the vet’s hospital across the bay. Helen came down with him and took a little cottage outside Saint Petersburg.

“I was on a job when I met them. A fellow had passed some checks. Then he’d left town. His family wanted to avoid scandal. They were making the paper good, and I was out to find him and bring him home to Papa.

“I traced him to the neighborhood where Helen was living. I was asking questions. Nick was just out of the hospital. He and Helen didn’t give me any help, but it was the start of a friendship. Nick was down to about a hundred and fifteen pounds, his face all caves and bones. He was hungry for talk, for the sight of a face other than more sick faces. He and Helen needed somebody. I guess I did, too.

“In the years since then, we’ve seen each other off and on. Nick is pure twenty-four carat and Helen — Helen is everything to Nick, and like the person that I once read into a girl in Jersey.

“Okay, Ivey? Now you know my little confession and the way I feel about these people.”

“Despite a triple murder?”

I finished the beer, set the can on the window sill, and looked at the brassy heat of the day outside. “It makes no difference in the way I feel toward Nick and Helen, Ivey. Nick in his right mind would never do such a thing.”

“Right mind, wrong mind — that’s not for me to say, is it?”

“No.”

“Only we’ve got him dead to rights. And the Yamashitas were upstanding citizens, good Americans.”

“I know,” I said.

“Sadao Yamashita ran his import business honestly and well. His wife could have been a model for all wives, if they want to be a bit like old-fashioned homemakers. Then there was the son. Ichiro. Thirty years old. Never married. Worked in his father’s business. Considerably more modern in his outlook than his parents. Something of a good-time Charlie, but never a criminal blot on his record. Three people, Rivers. Their heads bashed in, then their bodies hacked with a samurai sword. Senseless, violent, brutal. You agree?”

“How could I disagree?”

“The sword is found crudely hidden in a mangrove tangle. Identified as Nick Martin’s. Only two cottages out there on Caloosa Point. The Yamashitas’, and the one the Martins were occupying. Now the Martins have disappeared. Anything wrong in our addition?”

I looked at him and wished he would get the hell out of there.

“I’m sorry, Ed,” he said, and he meant it. “I know what Nick Martin has been through, how long and terrible the years have been for him. I know what he and a few like him did for you and me and every living soul in this country... Damn it, what the hell good are words? There are too many other undeniable words, such as Yamashita’s spotless record. His business was in good order. He got along well with Victor Cameron, his partner, whose own military and civilian records are equally spotless. Ichiro’s little escapades were never serious enough to supply a motive. There is no motive, Ed — except in the mind of Nick Martin.”

He was standing now. We both simply stood for a few long seconds.

“He drank, didn’t he, Ed?” Ivey said softly. “Nick, I mean.”

“You grilling me?”

“Don’t get funny with me! I don’t need your testimony. There are more undeniable words. We’ve gone over this thing with a microscope.

“Day before yesterday, Helen Martin came downtown to do some shopping. Nick was alone in the cottage, just a few hundred yards from the house where some folks with yellow skins and slant eyes lived.

“Nick ordered a fifth of whisky from the package store out there near the Point. The deliveryman said Nick looked pretty haggard.

“We’ve learned a lot about Nick, Ed. For one thing, we’ve learned that when he drank he slipped back sometimes. To Okinawa. Or Iwo. They were coming at him, hordes of little men with the yellow skins and slant eyes. It was up to him to do the job that had been thrust upon his fear-crazed young shoulders, to kill and keep killing. Is the map drawn plainly enough, Ed?”

“About the drinking,” I said thickly, “there’s one thing you must know. He wasn’t a drunkard. Nick wasn’t even a good social drinker. But hospitals and operations and drugs, years of them, take their toll. Nick had a terrible dread of drugs. He’d seen men hooked on morphine and have to go back to the hospital to fight that. He drank only when the pain got really rough. Then he drank until he was anesthetized.”

“Until he was out killing Japs again,” Ivey said.

“No, you’ve got that wrong. It didn’t happen every time he drank.”

Ivey paused at the door. “It didn’t have to happen every time, did it?”

He stood a moment. “I came here wondering if Nick could really count on you, Ed. I think he can. You’ll call me immediately if you locate him?”

“I’d intended to do that,” I said. “I don’t want him doing anything that would force a cop to shoot him.”

“We’ll approach him with extreme caution and readiness,” Ivey admitted. “By the way, what happened on that old case? The one that caused you to meet Nick and Helen? What happened to the young guy who passed the bad paper?”

“I caught him,” I said.

“I figured as much. I’ve got another job I can put Figueroa on. When you go looking for Nick again, there won’t be a tail on you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “For nothing.”