The Case of the Murdered MacKenzie

by Howard Fast

  “I needed this!” Abramson complained. “I needed this like a hole in the head. Why can’t they do these things in Pasadena or in Palos Verdes or in Bel-Air if they want a fancy neighborhood? We run a quiet city, we don’t push people around, we offer a decent place to live—oh, Lord, I want to put my head on the table and weep—unless you’re putting me on. Naked in the bathtub with a bullet in her head—you’re not putting me on?”

  “That’s it,” Masuto said.

  “Well, we have to figure out how to handle this. We’ve had enough bad publicity. I can’t repeat that story you told me. It’s just too insane. What happened two months ago was bad enough.”

  Wainwright turned to Masuto. “Come on, Masao, give us something.”

  “It’s not that much of a problem. The housekeeper, living here alone, was shot by an intruder and killed. That’s all you have to say.”

  “And when they come up with the story about the bathtub?”

  “You know nothing about any bathtub. We can keep our own men quiet, and if you talk to Baxter, he can put a lid on the ambulance people.”

  “It might just work.”

  “Worth a try.”

  “Where are you going, Masao?” Wainwright asked him.

  “I, Honorable Captain, am going to pack it in. I’m going outside and examine my car and see whether some demented idiot placed a bomb in it, and then when I prove to myself that I will not be blown up, I shall drive through the San Fernando Valley to where my Uncle Toda grows oranges and lives like a normal human being. I shall see my wife and children, who are refugees there, since I consider my home in Culver City unsafe, and I shall eat some excellent Japanese food and sleep like a baby, guarded by several intelligent German shepherds. More intelligent than most people. Saner, too.”

  “You won’t forget the funeral—ten o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Wainwright turned to the city manager, who nodded. “I’ll be there, Captain.”

  “And in uniform,” Wainwright said to Masuto. “And that goes for you too, Beckman. I want you both in uniform.”

  “Captain,” Beckman said, “I gained twenty pounds. I can’t get into my uniform.”

  “Then either lose the twenty pounds or open the seams.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Masuto walked with him to the door. “Tomorrow, Sy,” he said, “I want you with me all day, and then I want you to stay over at my house. Can you manage it?”

  “Culver City?”

  “It’s the only one I have.”

  “She won’t believe me, but I’ll manage.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  “Drive carefully.”

  Chapter 21

  Masuto felt increasingly foolish each time he looked under his car; nevertheless, he went through the routine of checking it out for bombs. He tried to form a picture in his mind of this man who wanted so persistently to kill him, but the picture eluded him. The only factor he felt reasonably sure of was that he was dealing with a professional. In that case, someone had hired him. But who?

  He had to know and he had to end this. He was a sensitive man. No one thought of policemen as sensitive men, but so many of them were. Even if he could go on living with the constant threat of death, he could not endure a life where Kati and his two children lived under the same threat.

  Absorbed in these thoughts, Masuto had turned into Coldwater Canyon to cross over the pass into the Valley. The rush hour, the bumper-to-bumper flood of cars out of Los Angeles and over the Coldwater pass to the endless rows of tract homes in the Valley, was over. Coldwater had become quiet again, and in this quiet, with only an occasional car in front of him and behind him, Masuto began to feel that he was being followed.

  For most of the distance between Beverly Hills and the San Fernando Valley, Coldwater Canyon is a two-lane road, with no way for one car to pass another, and in the deepening twilight, accentuated in the cleft of the canyon, it was not possible for Masuto to support his feeling. The car directly behind him was a Cadillac Seville, driven by a woman, he thought, and in any case a pro would not tailgate him. The car behind that appeared to be a Mustang, but he could not get a clear enough look at it to infer anything about the driver. But once over the mountain and out of the narrow, twisting road, it was four lanes to Ventura Boulevard, and now the Cadillac pulled into the right-hand lane and the Mustang took its place behind him. It was almost dark now and the Mustang had its lights on. His rearview mirror gave Masuto no image of the man behind the wheel, and he was inclined to dismiss his suspicions as the product of an active imagination.

  The light on Ventura Boulevard changed, and Masuto drove north on Coldwater Canyon Boulevard. The Mustang followed, but that was reasonable, Masuto decided. It made sense that anyone coming over Coldwater at this time of night would make for the Coldwater Canyon entrance to the Ventura Freeway, going either left toward the Valley neighborhoods or right toward Hollywood. Since Masuto intended to do neither of these but to drive past the freeway before turning left and then right on Woodman Avenue, he was grateful that here he could dispense with his suspicion.

  But the Mustang did not go into either entrance to the freeway. It continued north after Masuto, remaining fifty yards behind him. When he increased his speed, the Mustang increased its speed; when he slowed, the Mustang slowed.

  There was a street ahead of him that Masuto remembered, where the road ran for a quarter of a mile through a mesquite tract that had been in litigation for years and thereby undeveloped. Masuto turned his car into this street, slowing to ten miles an hour. When he saw the Mustang make the same turn, put on its bright lights, and increase its speed, Masuto braked to a stop and opened his door. As the Mustang came to a screeching stop alongside his car, Masuto rolled out of his seat and through the open door onto the ground. Simultaneously, two barrels of a sawed-off shotgun smashed into the driver’s seat of the Ford Masuto had been driving, and one barrel fired immediately after the other.

  Masuto moved with the speed of a snake striking, rolling over onto his feet, racing around the back of his car, and coming between the two cars after the second barrel had been discharged. The nose of the sawed-off shotgun still protruded from the open window of the Mustang, and Masuto grabbed it and yanked it toward him with all his strength. A yell of pain from the man in the driver’s seat told Masuto that he had probably broken the man’s trigger finger, a supposition that was confirmed later. Masuto flung the gun away, opened the door, and grabbed the wrist of the man’s left hand, which held an automatic pistol, the safety catch of which he was trying to release. With both hands Masuto twisted the wrist sharply. He heard the bone snap and the gunman screamed in pain, yelling, “You mother fucker, you broke my wrist! You lousy yellow bastard, you broke my finger and you broke my wrist.”

  “And I’ll break your neck if you don’t shut up,” Masuto said, dragging him out of the car. “Stand up!” The man was lean, well-dressed, about five foot ten, blond, blue-eyed. “Turn around and put your hands behind you!” Masuto cuffed him.

  “Goddamn you, you put that cuff on a broken wrist. I can’t stand it. My finger’s bleeding. I need a bandage. I could bleed to death.”

  “The world could just endure the loss. Now, I am arresting you, and I am making a statement of your rights. What follows is an admonition of your rights—”

  “Are you crazy? I need a doctor.”

  It sounded crazy to Masuto, standing there on that dark deserted road and saying, “You have the right to remain silent. If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak with an attorney and have the attorney present during questioning—”

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  But Masuto went on, calmly reciting until done. “Whereupon, I arrest you for the murder of Oscar Clint—”

  “Who the hell is Oscar Clint?”

  “The man who died in my car. And I arrest you for t
he attempted murder of Masao Masuto. Now, move.”

  The two shotgun blasts had left Masuto’s car a ragged mess of broken glass. Masuto put the gunman in the Mustang, where he whimpered and pleaded that his wrist hurt. He got in next to him, in the driver’s seat, and said quietly, “I want to concentrate on my driving. If you interfere with me in any way or make sounds that are intolerable, I will kill you. You are a professional hired assassin, so you must know that the act is not too difficult. In my case, since I am a karate expert, I will do it, if you provoke me, with a blow to your throat, which will crush your windpipe and give you a slow, lingering death.”

  “What the hell are you, some kind of crazy Chinese spook?”

  “I don’t like my driving interfered with.”

  “You got me cuffed behind. I’m leaning against a broken wrist and a finger bleeding all over my car seat.”

  “You won’t have much use for the car,” Masuto assured him, wondering how he could even invent that kind of bestial threat. He decided that he was not meditating enough, that he was falling too readily into the spell that violence and fear had cast over the country, losing the thought that even this sick, depraved specimen was human. It was too easy to fall into that, and when the pressure of this case eased up, ten or fifteen hours of seshin meditation would be called for, meditation that went on hour after hour and which would, if he were fortunate, restore his membership in the human race.

  His voice was less harsh when he asked the gunman his name.

  “Suck off, you bastard.”

  Masuto shrugged, and wondered whether he would actually kill the man if he tried a violent move—or was it simply an empty threat?

  At the Beverly Hills police station, Masuto had to help him out of the car. His finger had stopped bleeding but he insisted that the pain of his wrist was killing him. Masuto marched him inside and up the stairs and told Officer Purdy, who had night watch, to lock him in a holding cell. Sergeant Cooper was at the night desk, and he asked Masuto what he had there.

  “I think I have the man who killed Oscar Clint.”

  “No! You’re kidding.”

  “It looks damn like it. He tried to kill me tonight. He emptied both barrels of a sawed-off shotgun into the rental Ford I was driving and put it out of commission. Luckily, I could take him. I broke his wrist, so you’ll have to call Doc Baxter and persuade him over here.”

  “He’ll be sore as hell. He’ll take my head off. We could call the paramedics.”

  “I’d rather have Baxter.”

  “Masuto, I hope to God it was a righteous arrest and that you read him his rights.”

  “I did.”

  “Then why don’t we book him?”

  “Because I arrested him in Los Angeles. We were down in the Valley.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yes, and where do we stand? I think we can book him, but I’m not certain. That’s why I want to get Wainwright over here, and I want Sweeney here too, just in case the L.A. cops come for him. I want his prints. He won’t give his name.”

  “If the captain can’t make it, do we call anyone else?”

  “No, and for the moment I don’t want any of the media in on this. My car’s out in the Valley, shot to pieces and full of broken glass, and first crack of dawn, someone’s going to see it and report it to the L.A. cops.”

  “You’re entitled to hot pursuit wherever it takes you.”

  “I thought of that. Trouble is, he was in pursuit of me, and while I might fake it for a while, the L.A. cops are bound to ask why I was chasing him.”

  When a tired and provoked Wainwright got there, and when Masuto had repeated his story, the captain’s annoyance vanished and he shook his hand heartily. “There’s my blessing, Masao. If this is the loathsome son of a bitch who blew up Oscar Clint and tried to kill you, then this is one good day. But why didn’t you call the L.A. cops and let them make the collar?”

  “Because there’s no way they’d just hand him over to me and say, take him home and question him, Sergeant Masuto, and when you and Captain Wainwright have no more use for him, you can give him back to us. You know that. They’d take him downtown and book him and work him over and if what he came up with interacted with our murder yesterday, they’d inform us, but they might also inform the C.I.A. and the Justice Department.”

  “Sooner or later, we’ll have to hand him over.”

  “After we talk to him.”

  “Masao, do you think he killed Feona?”

  “Oh, no. Absolutely not.” He had considered the possibility that Feona had employed him. “Believe me, Captain, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind. Mackenzie killed Feona. But that doesn’t mean I can tie it together. I say to myself that I’ll sleep better, tonight anyway, knowing we have him caged. But tomorrow, they—whoever they are—can hire another gun. It occurred to me that Feona did the hiring, but not alone, and believe me, Feona is no housekeeper.”

  “Then what is she?”

  “What do you think?” he asked Wainwright. “I saw her dead in the bathtub, and that doesn’t tell me too much. But you interrogated her the first time, when the man in the tub was murdered. What was your impression of Feona Scott?”

  “She was in command,” Wainwright said. “You got the sense of what command means in the army, and it never leaves you. I would see a line officer killed, and the sergeant who should have taken over would turn into crud, and then some guy would step in and take command. It wasn’t that she dumped on Eve Mackenzie; she just took over and apparently she always took over wherever she was. At least, that was my feeling.”

  “She was no housekeeper, right?”

  “No, no way. She was a pro, Masao—but in what line I don’t know.”

  “Do you think she was his mistress?” Masuto asked.

  “Not in that sense. I mean not as a mistress. She was something else. Sex? That’s something else. Sure, maybe they had sex.”

  Sergeant Cooper interrupted to tell them that he had finally located Dr. Baxter, having dinner at La Scala.

  “He eats in fancy places. What do you want him for?”

  “Will he come?” Masuto asked.

  “When he finishes eating,” Sergeant Cooper replied. “He wasn’t very pleasant about being interrupted at dinner.”

  “Pleasant is a word he don’t know,” Wainwright said.

  “Captain, what do I do about this guy the sergeant brought in?”

  “We’ll let you know.”

  “What about Sweeney?” Masuto asked.

  “Be here in ten minutes.”

  “Let us know as soon as he arrives. I want his prints and I want them quickly.”

  Then he and Wainwright went to the room where the gunman sat under the observant eye of Officer Garcia. It was not an interrogation room. It would not have done for so civilized and quiet a place as Beverly Hills to have an interrogation room, but it served the same purpose, and the gunman sat backward on a wooden kitchen chair, his wrists still cuffed behind him.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he begged them, “take them damn cuffs off. They’re killing me. You the boss?” he demanded of Wainwright. “This goddamn Chinaman of yours, he broke my wrist and he broke my finger. Look at my pants—they’re soaked with blood.”

  “You don’t like pain, do you?” Masuto said. He went behind him and removed the handcuffs. Officer Garcia stood at the door.

  “Outside,” Wainwright said to Garcia. “Stay at the door.”

  “Can I take a leak?” the gunman begged them.

  “I don’t know,” Wainwright said plaintively. “I swear to God I don’t know what is happening to this country. Do you know who Norman Rockwell was, Masao? Or are you too young?”

  “I remember the covers he used to do for the Saturday Evening Post when I was a kid.”

  “Well, look at this loathsome turd sitting there, this miserable and disgusting imitation of a human being. He could have stepped out of one of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, with his pretty face and his b
lue eyes and his blond hair. If he isn’t a faggot already, they’ll turn him into one three days after he sets foot in San Quentin, but that won’t last. After he’s been gang-raped forty, fifty times, he goes to the gas chamber. After all, an easy way to die. Or do they keep them in solitary until the execution?”

  “I don’t know,” Masuto said. “You can’t be sure he’ll be executed. Maybe we can’t prove he killed Clint.”

  “You’ll prove it. He’s Masao Masuto,” he said to the gunman. “You know what his record is? There has not been a murder in this city over the past ten years that he hasn’t solved, not to mention attempted murder. You didn’t take the money you were paid to kill a nobody. Your contract was for someone special—and that is why you have a ticket to the gas chamber.”

  “I didn’t kill no guy named Clint! I don’t know anybody named Clint!”

  “Attempted murder,” Masao said thoughtfully. “That’s no problem. Two blasts from a sawed-off shotgun. We have the car, or what’s left of it, the gun, and this poor misguided fool here. What would he-get on the attempted murder, Captain? Fifteen to thirty?”

  “They’d bugger him to death the first six months, but we’re going to send him to the gas chamber.”

  “Well, if he cooperated—what’s your name?”

  “Hank Dobson.”

  “Your real name?”

  “I told you. Look, I got a right to a lawyer. I got a right to a doctor.”

  “I’m sure you have,” Wainwright agreed.

  Officer Garcia opened the door a crack and said, “Sweeney’s here.”

  “Come on in, Sweeney. Got your stuff?”

  “All right here. I’ll use this bench,” Sweeney said.

  “I want good prints,” Wainwright said. “You make any fuss, mister, we break the other arm.”

  “I’m not making any fuss,” he pleaded with Sweeney. “But my wrist is broken. It hurts like hell every time you touch my hand.”