The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Chapter 7

The absent-minded men with the bushy heads have a lot of theories about time and space. One thing is certain. The sweep of time is not an endless, smooth process to the person living it. There are stopped moments in time, moments frozen in a human brain.

It was that way with Helen Martin. As we got out of the rented heap on Caloosa Point, she stood with her brain seeing the gory scene again, the echo of a muffled scream inside of her.

I didn’t rush her. I stood beside her until she was ready to walk from the car.

A hot, dead stillness lay over the Point. The water of the bay stretched heavy and turgid, like green-tinted glycerin under the crushing glare of the afternoon sun.

More than pocket change had been dropped on the Yamashita house. Made of California redwood and pastel brick, it sprawled comfortably and lazily behind its strip of private beach. A shift of the gaze brought into view the only other house on the Point, the white cottage Nick and Helen had leased for a summer’s rental. It belonged to a northern businessman who used it only occasionally in the winter.

Fiddler crabs went rasping for their holes as we walked across the sizzling white sand.

Helen’s fingers dug into my bicep as we approached the long gallery on the side of the Yamashita house.

“Here,” she said, pointing.

The ghost of a dainty old lady was draped across the porch railing, her fingernails painted with blood.

We stepped upon the porch. From this point the other cottage down the beach was visible.

I stood where the unknown had stood, and the obvious question came to my mind. Had the people in that other cottage witnessed the violent moment?

Ichiro in a bedroom.

The little old man smashed down in the living room.

The silk-screen lady in headlong flight, screaming perhaps. She’d been trapped before she could get off the porch.

But she’d reached the open, and now the unknown stood with that question tearing at the mind.

Still carrying the bludgeon, the unknown ends the moment of hesitation. Nothing matters except survival — murder piled relentlessly upon murder, if that is the price.

I imagined the shadow, moving quickly across the distance separating the two houses. No faltering now. The bludgeon is ready.

The shadow falls across a doorway, across a sleeping man, a one-time killer of Japs. He has seen nothing, heard nothing.

The shadow turns to go. Turns back again. The sleeping man is like a gift. The samurai sword is on the wall. The whisky bottle is on the floor beside the sleeper.

In the sleeper there is safety.

The sword is lifted down. Nerves are steeled for the final act. The unknown recrosses to the Yamashita house. The sword does its work. The weapon is carried to the stand of mangrove crowding the inlet a hundred yards downbeach.

Insects begin to sing again over the marshy inlet. The heat shimmers. The day is silent. The shadow is gone.

I turned from my view of the white cottage, took out the steel, and opened the front door of the Yamashita house. The living room was long and cool. There were Japanese paintings on the walls, tables of ebony that might have been the work of Japanese craftsmen. Couches and chairs were arranged to provide an air of quiet, casual restfulness.

Helen and I turned into a hallway. The first bedroom had belonged to the parents — a big double bed, men’s and women’s garments in the closets.

Farther down the hallway was the bedroom where the chain reaction had begun.

A pair of Ichiro’s slacks was thrown carelessly across a chair. His cigarettes and an initialed lighter were on the bedside table.

On the floor were chalk marks in the rough outline of a human body. He had been killed on the far side of the room, between the bed and the windows.

“We’re going over this room a square inch at a time,” I told Helen.

“What are we looking for, Ed, that the police might not have found already?”

“I don’t know. You’re a woman. I want you to look at it with a woman’s eyes. Remember that it was a man’s bedroom.”

Thirty minutes later, I’d drawn a blank.

Helen hadn’t.

I’d passed over the crumpled ball of pink tissue just as Steve Ivey had. It lay wadded in the heavy black glass ash tray on the bureau amid the butts and ashes.

With a feminine thoroughness, Helen picked up the small paper ball.

“Pink Kleenex,” she said.

She blew the cigarette ash from it, and with delicate motions of her fingers opened up the ball.

Standing beside her, I saw the faint lipstick smudge on the tissue.

“Was she blonde or brunette, Helen?”

“From the little I can tell of the color of the lipstick,” Helen said, “I’d guess she was blonde.”

I folded the rumpled Kleenex and slipped it in my wallet. We went to the living room.

There were several pictures of Ichiro around. I passed up the one on the book shelf and chose a small, clear one that rested on a table in a gold frame. I opened the back of the frame, took out the picture, and dropped it in my pocket.

As I turned, I glanced out the window. A movement down near the mangrove caught my eye. He had been watching the house from there. He was hurrying away, quickly passing out of my line of vision.

I hadn’t seen him clearly, but I was certain Prince Kuriacha had tailed us.

“Are we through here, Ed?”

“I think so.”

“Then let’s get away, please.”

I took her arm and guided her out of the house. “You’ve been a trouper. I’m going to take you home now. I want you to rest.”

I opened the car door for Helen. As I moved around the car I swept the landscape. There was no sign of Kuriacha.

I got in the car and we drove off. And the deathlike stillness returned to the Point.

It was a few minutes after six when I left Helen and returned downtown. I had a pint of beer and decided to eat later.

I walked around to Cass Street and entered the office building. The silence of it was broken only by a creak from the old girders and timbers, as some of the heat of the day seeped out.

It was a time for all good people to dine, relax, engage the evening.

I’d get my report out first.

I padded up the worn stairway. The building creaked.

My office creaked.

I jerked my hand away from the doorknob and stood listening.

It sounded as if a very big rat were scuttling around in the office.

I put my palm on the .38 and stood to one side of the doorway. I heard the metallic sound of a file drawer being closed. Footsteps slipped softly to the door. The latch clicked.

When he opened the door, I heeled to face him, the .38 still in my pocket, my fingers around it.

He pulled up on his toes, his face turning to pearl-gray suède. He was thin, sallow, nervous, unhealthy looking. His long, bony fingers were deeply stained from his chain-smoking habits. His thin, drab, brown hair had receded until the fore part of his narrow pate was a scaly half moon of baldness.

His name was Sime Younkers. He was a debarred private detective. I knew his appearance to be deception at its best. He had the principles, endurance, and agility of a cottonmouth.

He stood staring at me with eyes the color of scrambled eggs.

“I was looking for you, Ed.”

“I’ll bet.”

He made a move as if to close the door, reaching for the door with his right hand. It was his left hand that bothered me. I grabbed his left wrist, froze the hand in his pocket, and hit him in the face with my right fist.

He fell halfway across the office, tripped on his feet. A flare of pain lighted his face as he landed with his left arm twisted under him.

He pulled himself around. He sat up, holding his left shoulder, while blood seeped out of his thin nose.

I gripped the lapels of his coat and pushed the collar to his shoulders, forming a loose but effectively hampering restraint on his arms. The suit was a greasy Palm Beach, threadbare and smelling of old sweat. He sat unresisting.

I shook him down quickly. Whatever he’d copped from my file he’d put in his head, leaving the file so it would not arouse my suspicions.

I’d been wrong about his left hand. He was unarmed. He’d been reaching for a crumpled package of cigarettes. Being wrong didn’t make me feel sorry.

“At least,” I said, “you had sense enough to leave off the firearms with your license revoked.”

“I didn’t mean nothing, Ed. Honest.”

“Sure,” I said. “What did you find in the file?”

“Ed, I swear-”

“Now look, Sime. I’ve known you from away back. I don’t like you. I don’t like what your kind does to the profession. You’d pimp your own grandmother if there was a buck in it for you. The State of Florida was long suffering, Sime. You had to abuse your privileges repeatedly before your license was pulled. I’m not the State of Florida. I’m tired, hot, and hungry. I don’t like the world in general right now and you in particular. Now what the hell were you doing in my files?”

“I came to see you, that’s all. You’re not in, see? So I waited, and I got kind of curious, just idly curious, Ed.”

“So I’m the State of Florida,” I said. “One more chance, Sime.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“You just walked in the office, through a locked door.”

“No. I got the janitor to let me in, Ed. I still got an old photostat of my license. I let him think what he would.”

“You go through life asking for it, Sime.”

“I got to get along, Ed. I got to eat. Man dies if he don’t eat.”

“You’ll eat in Raiford, prison grub, you go around using that photostat to bully people. This is your last chance, Sime. The file, remember?”

“I didn’t hook nothing, Ed. You searched me. Look in the file if you like. You won’t find a thing gone. Just peeping, that’s all.”

I slapped his sore nose with the back of my hand.

“Ed,” he said dismally, “you got no call to do that.” He blinked the scrambled eggs at me. “You’re like the rest of the world. I’ve tried hard, but I never had a break. It ain’t my fault, Ed. See, I come here for a little help, and get a bust nose. Story of my life, that’s all.” He let the seepage of blood course around his mouth. A drop gathered on his pointed chin and fell to his dirty shirt. He seemed to be getting some kind of twisted pleasure from being a miserable spectacle.

“What kind of help?”

“I wanted to borrow a few bucks. I got a chance for a job, if I can get myself cleaned up and in shape.”

“What kind of job?”

“Ain’t I got no privacy at all?”

“Sure,” I said. “The privacy of my office. You’re lying all the way, Sime. You read the papers. You knew I was on the Yamashita case. There’s a deep-down dirtiness behind the case. I’m not surprised to find the worms starting to crawl from the rot. Who sent you here?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. His voice had gone sullen.

He sat waiting.

In his mind was something stronger than his fear of a beating.

“You’ve knocked off your chances like ducks in a shooting gallery,” I told him. “That’s your business. The Yamashita case is mine.

“Your chances are all used up, Sime. Nick Martin killed better men than you to keep this country decent and safe. You degrade what the Nick Martins did. You’ve taken what they gave you and befouled it.

“You’re only a snake’s belly above the person who would mutilate three bodies in order to frame Nick Martin. That’s the ultimate befoulment of the deeds of the Nick Martins, Sime. I can’t stomach it. I don’t want to stomach it. So go back to that person and tell them I can’t be bluffed, scared, or bought off. Then quit. Get out of it. Don’t put any hurdles in my way — or I’ll step on you the way I would a cockroach. Clear?”

“You got it all wrong, Ed,” he muttered as he crabbed his way to the door. “I got nothing against a poor sucker like Nick Martin.”

The toe of my shoe carried him into the hall. He was running before he got his full balance.

He went down the stair well like a crashing hod of bricks.