by Dean Koontz
I let myself out of the apartment, intending to loiter on the fifth floor to listen for activity in Mr. Yoshioka’s apartment. I had heard nothing from him since I’d gone to Metropolitan Suits on Thursday morning, three days earlier. I was anxious to know if he had learned anything or had any ideas about what we should do next.
As I locked the deadbolts, I noticed a three-by-five envelope propped against the baseboard to the left of the door. There was no return address and no indication for whom the contents were intended. I opened it and withdrew a note card on which four words were neatly printed: INFORMATION HAS BEEN OBTAINED.
On the fifth floor, when Mr. Yoshioka opened the door, I smelled coffee brewing. “Happy new year, Jonah Kirk.”
“Happy new year, sir. I’m thinking of calling myself Skinny Bledsoe.”
As he closed the door, locked the deadbolts, and engaged the security chain, he said, “Is that how you wish to be addressed?”
“Not yet. I’ll probably have to be eighteen to get my name legally changed.”
“Then I will restrain myself until you have done the deed. We will convene in the kitchen.” He led me there. “Would you care for anything to drink?”
“I smell coffee. I thought you drank tea.”
“I do drink tea. And coffee. I drink as well water, orange juice, the occasional soft drink, and numerous other beverages.”
“But not martinis.”
“No. I merely buy martinis and leave them untouched to perplex the managers of nightclubs. Would you like the usual tea and honey?”
“I’m allowed coffee now and then.”
“How do you prefer it—cream, sugar, both?”
“Black like me.”
“I am impressed.”
We sat at the kitchen table with mugs of black coffee. The brew was strong but flavorful.
Mr. Yoshioka said, “Mr. Yabu Tamazaki, who calls himself Robert and even Bobby but never Bob, has worked for seventeen years at the Daily News. He is an acquaintance of mine and a reliable person. At my request, he spent some time in their morgue, looking into the Drackman murders.”
“Morgue? They keep dead people at the Daily News?”
“The morgue is the name they give to the file room in which they preserve back issues of the newspaper.”
“Cool.”
“Because Mr. and Mrs. Drackman were wealthy and prominent in the Chicago arts community, their murder became nationwide news. Even our rather self-involved city was fascinated by the story. They were murdered in a suburb of Chicago on the night of October seventh, 1958, a little more than eight years ago. The coroner estimated the time of death at between one and three o’clock in the morning. The crime was never solved.”
I shook my head. “Their son, Lucas Drackman, he killed them. Like I told you, I saw it in the dream.”
“When he was a sophomore in high school, this Lucas Drackman’s parents sent him to a private military academy located a few miles south of Mattoon, Illinois.”
“What kind of name is Mattoon?”
“I did not ask Bobby Tamazaki to research the origin of the name Mattoon.”
“Yeah. Okay. I guess it doesn’t matter.”
Mr. Yoshioka didn’t consult any notes, having committed the entire report to memory. “Young Lucas Drackman remained at the academy during summers and came home only on a few selected holidays. On the night that his parents were murdered, he was a senior at the academy, which is one hundred and ninety miles from the Drackman residence—a drive that police estimate would have taken three and a half hours, seven hours round-trip.”
“Maybe he didn’t obey the speed limits.”
“Lucas Drackman had no access to a vehicle.”
“Maybe he stole one.”
“At ten o’clock, when bed check was conducted, Lucas Drackman was in his room.”
“Maybe it was a dummy of him, like in one of those prison-break movies.”
Mr. Yoshioka gestured with his right hand, as if chasing away an annoying fly, though the fly was me with all my maybes. “He spoke to the dorm master at bed check, face-to-face. Thereafter, he would have had to pass through security to leave the dormitory, and he did not. What is more, Lucas Drackman reported to breakfast, in uniform, at seven-thirty in the morning.”
“Well, so, that’s still nine and a half hours,” I protested. “Time enough.”
“He lived with two roommates. Both of them told the police that the three remained up far past the turn-in hour. They played cards by flashlight until almost one o’clock in the morning. That would leave only a meager six and a half hours to complete a seven-hour drive and two murders.”
“Maybe the roommates lied. People lie, you know. They lie all the time, even to protect a murderer.”
After sipping his coffee and savoring it, Mr. Yoshioka said, “I wonder how a nine-year-old boy can have become such a suspicious soul so young.”
“I’m almost as close to ten as to nine.”
I gazed down into my mug. A distorted reflection of part of my face floated on the coffee, a gargoyle peering up at me, as though the full truth of myself could not be seen in an ordinary mirror but only indirectly, as in the undulating surface of the coffee.
Spooked, I said, “When you told me you believed me about the dream, I thought you really did.”
He smiled. “I did believe you, Jonah Kirk. For reasons that I explained. And I still do believe your dream showed you the truth.”
“You do?”
A moment before he spoke, I saw that, in his way, he had been teasing me. “One of the two roommates was a young man named Felix Cassidy.”
43
Felix Cassidy. Fiona Cassidy.
“How can you be sure they’re related?” I asked.
“Mr. Yabu Tamazaki is a most thorough man. He did some research beyond what he was able to find in the Daily News morgue. Felix and Fiona Cassidy are twins. Not identical twins, of course, fraternal twins. Interestingly, like Lucas Drackman, they are now orphans.”
Until this point, I’d had the impression that Mr. Yoshioka, though allowing himself no expression, was on the verge of a smile, as if it pleased him to watch my reaction to his revelations. But now, although his face remained placid, I sensed that his mood had become solemn, darker.
“Like Lucas Drackman, Felix Cassidy was seventeen then and is twenty-five now. Two years later, when Mr. Cassidy and his sister were nineteen, their parents, who lived in Indianapolis and who were also people of means, died in their sleep of carbon-monoxide poisoning caused by a furnace malfunction.”
He watched me, waiting for a response. Considering that he had called me a suspicious soul, I figured he expected me to be skeptical of the circumstances of those deaths. “It was murder.”
“Curiously, police were initially reluctant to conclude that these were accidental deaths. They took more than a year to reach that conclusion. Perhaps you should be a detective.”
“I’ll stick with the piano. Bad guys hardly ever shoot at a piano man.”
“I am pleased that you are not just a particularly suspicious young man but also prudent.” He got up to fetch the coffeepot. “May I refresh yours, Jonah Kirk?”
“I was already kind of nervous even without coffee.”
“Do not expect that I will offer you a martini instead.”
I hesitated. “Thank you, yes, I’ll take a little more.”
When he returned to his chair, he said, “Felix and Fiona inherited everything, but they would not seem to have been under suspicion. At the time of the deaths, he was in New York City, and she was in San Francisco. Their alibis were ironclad.”
“Where was Lucas Drackman?”
“That would have been interesting to determine. But two years had passed since the Drackman murders. The Cassidy deaths were not in the same state. No one would have thought to make a connection. But that is not the end of it.”
“The end of what?”
“Perhaps, by virtue of the time we ha
ve spent together, you have inspired me to become no less suspicious than you. And now, because of me, poor Mr. Yabu Tamazaki at the Daily News has become no less consumed by suspicion than the two of us. He may never be the same. Do you recall that Lucas Drackman had two roommates at the academy?”
“Yes.”
“The second was Aaron Kolshak. His family lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Did you know Wisconsin is called America’s Dairyland?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you know that Milwaukee is called the Machine Shop of America because of its industrial capacity?”
“I didn’t know that, either.”
“I imagine it must be stressful to be a citizen of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and have to do your part every day to ensure that the state and city live up to those honorable titles. Mr. Aaron Kolshak’s father died when Aaron was eleven, perhaps from the stress. The boy became something of a delinquent, and his mother sent him off to the academy in Mattoon, Illinois, when he was thirteen.”
“I guess the family was wealthy, huh?”
“As usual, your suspicion serves you well. Mr. Kolshak had been a most successful real estate developer, and his widow proved to be equally adept at the family business.”
When he paused to savor his coffee and left me sitting in an expectant silence, I began to suspect that Mr. Yoshioka had once aspired to be a storyteller of some kind, perhaps a novelist, before fate had made of him a tailor.
He resumed: “Mrs. Renata Kolshak, the widow, greatly enjoyed vacationing on cruise ships. I assume, Jonah Kirk, that you have never vacationed on a cruise ship.”
“No, sir.”
“Neither have I. A year after Mr. and Mrs. Cassidy suffocated in their sleep, Mrs. Kolshak was aboard a Caribbean cruise when she went missing and was eventually determined to have fallen overboard and drowned. Lost at sea. No body ever found.”
“Holy Jeez,” I said and accused myself of profanity and quickly made the sign of the cross and said, “Jeez,” again, and had to do it all a second time. “I bet no one thought to ask where Lucas Drackman was.”
“If he was aboard the same vessel, sampling the delights of the Caribbean, he most likely was wise enough to travel under a false identity. But poor Mr. Yabu Tamazaki of the Daily News has become so curious that he is looking into that.”
My host was intent on my reaction, but I gave him some of his own medicine and savored my coffee for a minute. Finally I said, “So in return for Cassidy and Kolshak giving Lucas an ironclad alibi on the night he murdered his parents, he must’ve made a pact with them to murder theirs, you know, after enough time passed not to raise suspicion.”
“We can spin up all kinds of theories, but under the law, the suspect is always presumed innocent until proven guilty.”
I remembered Manzanar and said, “Maybe not always. Shouldn’t we go to the police?”
“Ah, but which police? None of these crimes was committed in this city or state. Police here have no jurisdiction. Two murders occurred in Illinois, two more in Indiana, and Mrs. Kolshak was out of the country when she was perhaps thrown overboard.”
“Maybe it’s an FBI thing.”
“Maybe it is indeed. But I believe that it would be most unwise to approach the authorities until it can be proved that Mr. Lucas Drackman was on that cruise ship with Mrs. Kolshak or in Indianapolis around the time that Mr. and Mrs. Cassidy died.”
“Why wouldn’t it be wise? The police, FBI, all those guys know how to prove things.”
“Inevitably, Lucas Drackman would be alerted that he was being investigated for some reason. He is not likely to think it is about all those killings, because that is behind him. Criminals think only in the short term. They live in the now, not in the past or future, which is why they always think crime pays, for in the now they are still free.”
I looked in my coffee mug again. Then I pushed it aside. “Do you know Mr. Moto?”
“I am sorry to say that I have never made his acquaintance. Who might he be?”
“Never mind.”
He folded both hands around his coffee mug, as if to warm them. “The danger is that if Mr. Drackman were to be alerted, he might put two and two together.”
“What two and two?”
“Miss Fiona Cassidy believes that you were suspicious of her. She warned you off. Now you turn up across the street from The Royal when Drackman is leaving there with your father.”
“He didn’t know it was me.”
“If he describes you to Miss Cassidy, she will confirm that it was you.”
“He won’t remember anything but my red-and-white toboggan cap. All little black kids probably look alike to him.”
“But if they do not all look alike to him, then once he has been put on alert by an investigation, he might come looking for you.”
I recalled Drackman in the dream, his eyes wide and wild, his tongue ceaselessly licking his full lips, and I thought of him on the farther side of the chain-link fence, his breath smoking from his mouth as if, should he wish, he could breathe fire.
“If we don’t report him to the cops or the FBI, how would we ever prove that he was on the cruise ship or in Indianapolis?”
“We must wait for Mr. Tamazaki of the Daily News and hope that in his obsession he can find proof.”
“I hope he’s quick about it.”
“Be prepared that he might find nothing.”
That was unthinkable. “Anyway, what’re Drackman and my father doing together? What are they up to? That’s pretty darn scary.”
“If you and your mother were to be killed,” Mr. Yoshioka said, “would your father inherit millions?”
“How could he inherit millions? We don’t have anything. Anyway, he divorced my mom.”
“Exactly. Whatever your father and Lucas Drackman are involved in, it surely has nothing to do with you. We can afford to let poor Yabu Tamazaki take his time with his investigation. But you should never again wear that toboggan cap.”
44
Assuming that Mr. Yoshioka had told me everything, I pushed my chair back from the table and got to my feet.
I wanted to ask him about Manzanar. I had at least a hundred questions. But I didn’t know how to broach the subject.
“One more thing, Jonah Kirk. Another acquaintance of mine, Mr. Toshi Katsumata, who calls himself Thomas or Tom but never Tommy, has worked for nineteen years in city hall, as head clerk of municipal-court records. The final divorce papers that your mother received gave your father’s address as 106 Marbury Street, which is actually the address of his rather less than reputable attorney, because he wished to keep his true residence from you and your mother. However, while the court allows your father that privacy, it must have his real address in the case file. Poor Mr. Katsumata has a sterling record and is a man of honor, so I am certain that it pained him to violate the privacy assured by the court and provide me with your father’s true address. Nevertheless, he is also a man of his word, and he values friendship.”
This development baffled me. “Why would I want Tilton’s address? I don’t want it. I never want to see him again. He’s never been a father to me.”
“I had made that assumption some time ago,” said Mr. Yoshioka. “But considering that you saw your father with the dangerous Mr. Drackman last week, I thought it essential that we know his address. He lives on the north side, quite far from here, a distance that I am certain you would not be allowed to travel on your own. But I will keep the address in case we should ever need it.” He got up from his chair. “There is yet one more thing you should know—well, two.”
He carried his coffee mug to the sink and stood with his back to me as he rinsed it.
When he shut off the water, he gazed out of the window above the sink as he said, “I must apologize if the first of these two things I have to tell you will in any way cause you pain or embarrass you, but it is information you must have.”
“What is it?”
He hesitated, and just then snow flurri
es blew down through the day and danced along the window glass. He said, “ ‘Shiraume ni / Akaru yo bakari to / Narinikeri.’ ”
I figured he must know that I didn’t understand Japanese, even though the nuns at Saint Scholastica expected us to learn everything. But when only silence followed those words, I said, “Mr. Yoshioka?”
“A haiku, a poem by Buson. It means, ‘Of late the nights / Are dawning / Plum-blossom white.’ It seems to fit the moment. Petals of plum blossoms are white like snow, and night is soon coming.”
“It sounds kind of sad.”
“Every snow is beautiful and joyful … and sad, because every snow will melt.”
Lyrics are poetry; therefore, poetry is part of music, but just then I was less a piano man than I was a confused and frightened boy. Impatient, I said, “What two things do you have to tell me?”
“Sharing the apartment with your father is the magazine writer and would-be novelist, Miss Delvane.”
It wasn’t the prospect of my embarrassment that made him turn his back to me while making this revelation; it was his embarrassment on my and my mother’s behalf.
“But Miss Delvane lives here on the fifth floor.”
“No longer. She moved out on Thursday. I would not feel the need to tell you this, Jonah, but it has become necessary because of what I was told by Mr. Nakama Otani, who calls himself Nick or Nicholas but never Nickie. When I learned on Friday morning where your father now lives and with whom, I asked poor Mr. Otani to see if he could conspire to cross her path and, as they say, chat her up. He is very good at chatting people up. He managed to encounter Miss Delvane at a nightclub last night, New Year’s Eve, before your father joined her there. He learned much useless information about cowboys and rodeos and about the stingy nature of magazine editors. But he also learned that the man she lives with was recently divorced, that his one child is in the custody of his ex-wife … and that he talks constantly about one day getting his son back.”