The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Chapter 4

The file on the murder had started lustily and grown fatter as each edition came off the presses. I waded through the gory pictures and details. Most of it I knew. Like all authentic horror, the story was too simple and stark to need much embellishment for effect.

Photographic coverage had been extensive. Price had an innate sense of taste under his cynicism which had kept him from running some of the worst of the pictures.

From a particularly gruesome group, I got one fresh detail. At the time of death, Ichiro, the thirty-year-old son, had been wearing Bermuda shorts, sport shirt, and barefoot sandals. Both parents had been fully clothed in street wear. The garb of the parents jibed with a small detail in one of the stories, to the effect that Mr. and Mrs. Yamashita had had a restaurant reservation for dinner that night but had canceled it.

I added one more small detail. Ichiro had a private apartment in town. My mental camera dollied to give me a glimpse of the afternoon of violence from a new angle. Ichiro choosing the cottage for some purpose of his own, believing he would have privacy until after dinnertime. The parents changing their minds, returning to the cottage, and being murdered for the very simple reason that they showed up at an inopportune moment.

I passed on to the Victor Cameron file. It was thin. There was a shot of him as reporters had broken the news to him the day of his partner’s death.

The photo showed Cameron as a big, gray, tired-looking man. There was some semblance of military bearing and discipline in his shoulders and face, but it was a quality that had almost faded from existence.

I compared the recent shot with one taken over ten years ago when he’d come to Tampa and the import enterprise had been written up in the Sunday business section.

He had changed considerably. Ten years ago even a camera could catch his air of command. He’d looked brisk, efficient, intolerant, and superior. I wondered if in the intolerance and superiority there had been the seeds of inner anxiety and uncertainty, that had grown to bring the change in him.

The spread gave some accounting of his background. He came from an old and well-known New England family. A colonel, he had filled a desk post in Washington during the war. Sent to Japan during the Occupation, he had left his wife and small daughter in the United States. He had returned to the States after the accidental death of his wife. He had brought his daughter to Florida to live, eventually entering the import business with Yamashita.

I assumed that Cameron was valuable to Yamashita as a partner, being an American who also possessed the fine qualification of having good connections in Japan.

Two points itched me. Why Cameron had stayed such a long time in the Orient without his family, and the kind of accident that had killed his wife. The explanations were probably perfectly innocent, but anything that veers from the norm bothers me.

I drove a rented car out to the Cameron address. It was on Davis Islands, the plush development pumped from the bottom of the bay during the boom of the 1920’s.

Across the bridge linking Davis Islands to the mainland boulevard, I cruised down a wide, beautiful street lined with tall royal palms. Behind the neat lawns, the houses were big, Spanish, heavy with wealth.

I came abreast of a pair of white stone pillars hugging a driveway and linked overhead by filigreed ironwork. The number 76 was on one of the pillars, in black block form. I turned into the drive.

A screen of flowering shrubs and Australian pines hid the house until I rounded a bend in the driveway.

I parked the rented heap and got out.

A single light glowed softly in the fore part of the house. I mounted the pillared veranda and pressed the door buzzer.

I tried a second and third time. No one answered. I walked to the edge of the veranda. The moonlit night was quiet. From somewhere back of the house came the sudden sound of a loud splash.

I dropped from the veranda and walked around the side of the house. The short-clipped grass was so luxuriant it was like tiny springs under my feet, a rich green carpet for the shrubs and trimmed hedges of the landscaping.

Rounding the rear corner of the house, I saw moonlight glinting on water. The pool was large enough to have done credit to a small-town country club. It was in pale tile, with a diving board and tower at my end.

The wake of ripples reached the far end of the pool, reversed direction and came back. The strokes of the swimmer were slow, easy, graceful. She came out of the water dripping and gleaming in the moonlight. She stood on the edge of the pool, small, perfectly made, vibrant as a kitten. She took off her bathing cap, taloned her fingers, and scratched her boyish-cut black hair into a careless jumble.

She saw me when she started from the pool’s edge toward the house. She stopped, her manner showing no fright.

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I was looking for Mr. Cameron. I heard your last dive and came around to see if maybe it was him.”

“You might try the doorbell,” she said. She had a lazy, soft voice with boredom and insolence resting in its depths.

“I did. Three times.”

She walked toward me with her careless, abandoned stride. She stopped about four feet away, tilted her head, and studied me. “I’m Rachie Cameron,” she said. “Who are you, ugly man?”

“The name is Ed Rivers,” I said. “When will Mr. Cameron be home?”

“He’s inside now. He said he was going to shower and retire early. You just didn’t give him time to get to the door, that’s all.”

She let her hips swing as she walked ahead of me toward the house. Her one-piece white bathing suit was adequate, even prim, but she managed to transform its lines to something less than bikini.

We crossed a flagstone patio decorated with beach chairs, outdoor grill, white, wrought-iron table and chairs.

She opened twin glass doors, turned on a soft overhead light. We were in a long playroom. She went to the bar at the farther end. “Drink?”

“A beer if you have it.”

She laughed. “Beer, of course. I should have known, looking at you. I’ll have the same.”

She went behind the bar, came across the room with two beers in tall, cone-shaped glasses.

She offered one of the glasses. She didn’t let it go right away, and we both stood holding it for a second.

“What kind of business are you in, ugly man?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“Really?” She seemed interested, but not in my occupation.

She stepped back. The bored, vacant look was gone from her dark eyes for a moment. “Good old plebeian beer,” she said. “Here’s to big, ugly men who drink beer.”

She took a long pull at the beer, set the glass on a table, and reached for a beach robe lying on a rattan chair. She slipped the robe over her shoulders and put her feet in Oriental sandals that were on the floor near the chair.

She sat down with her legs stretched before her. They were slim, lithe, deeply tanned.

“My father hire you?”

“No.”

“Of course you’d say that.”

“Any reason why he should?”

“Me,” she said.

“Really?”

“I’m a bad one.” She grinned. “Sure he didn’t retain you to keep me out of trouble?”

“Positive. Have you ever been in trouble before?”

“No. I’m careful.”

“I guess that pays.”

She motioned toward a chair. “Why don’t you sit down? I won’t bite.”

“I came to see your father,” I reminded her.

“He’s probably knocked himself out with a double dose of Seconal. Do you take sleeping pills?”

“I’m afraid it’s a modern habit I’ve not adopted.”

“Shake, pal. It means you don’t give a damn.”

“That one curved right out of my mitt,” I said.

She shrugged. “It’s just people who give a damn who can’t sleep.”

“Rachie,” I said, “you’ve been reading too many books. You’ve got a corkscrew in your thinking.”

“Really?” she smiled. “I’d like to hear your views sometime.”

“I’m afraid they’d be a little old-fashioned for you.”

“How nice!” she said with animation. “A virtuous American! A big, ugly, virtuous American male! I’ll bet you stand at attention when the flag goes by.”

“I manage to get my hat off,” I said. “If you’ll tell your father I want to get in touch with him...”

“Why?” Cameron demanded.

I turned, and he was standing in the doorway behind me. The bigness of him was clothed in the finest slacks and sport shirt. The shirt was open at the throat. His iron-gray hair was still damp from his shower. He tried to look solidly commanding. He couldn’t quite pull the tired edges together.

I introduced myself, pulled out my wallet, and showed him the photostat of my license, as his strap sandals padded into the playroom.

“I can’t imagine what business you have here, Mr. Rivers.”

“I’m working on the Yamashita case.”

“Oh? In what capacity?”

“I’ve been retained by the man the police have in custody.”

“I should think you’d be ashamed to take his money,” he said, “but I suppose to a man like you a job is a job.”

“You can suppose anything you like. It’s your privilege.”

“If you feel you have to go through the motions,” he said, “you may report to your employer that you made a call here. Good night, Mr. Rivers.”

“I think you’d better get one thing straight. I never make motions for their own sake.”

“I see.” A glint of caution came to his gray eyes. He turned brusquely and made deliberate movements to the bar. He poured himself a stiff hooker of whisky.

Rachie stretched and said, “Pour a drink for me, Papa.” She broke the final word in two, pronouncing it as I understand the French do.

“You drink too much,” he told her. “I want you to go to your room.”

“I prefer not to,” she said with a hateful simplicity.

As they faced each other, the room was tainted with a sense of old battles, many battles. Their wills wrestled for a moment. Then Cameron tossed off his drink angrily.

“Well,” he shouted at me, “don’t stand there like the caricature of a phlegmatic Buddha! The door’s open and waiting for you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I came hoping to learn something about the Yamashitas, not witness a man’s defeat by an incorrigible daughter.”

“Bravo, ugly man!” Rachie said with a little pip of delighted laughter.

Cameron turned deep red. Clear across the room I could hear him pulling in his breath.

“Whoever you are, Rivers, I don’t like you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My first disappointment in you,” Rachie said. “An apology from the ugly man. You’re trying to butter him up.”

“Keep out of this,” Cameron said to her.

“Papa, I shall say whatever I damn well—”

“You heard him,” I said.

Her eyes caught mine. I felt my nostrils flare. She didn’t curl herself in the chair, but she gave that impression. “Yes, sir,” she said.

I turned my attention to Victor Cameron. “You certainly can’t mind a few questions about the Yamashitas.”

“I can, and do.”

“I don’t mind,” Rachie said.

The old lion’s tail had been twisted until the spirit had been milked out of him. As Cameron looked at his daughter, at the twisted excitement and pleasure in her, I could feel the gray shadows closing over his spirit.