“Oh, yeah, that one. What was it called?”
“‘No Head for My Short Bier.’ ”
“Uh-huh. Inspired titles back then.”
“Dumb titles, you mean. The writing’s good, though. Dancer was a craftsman in those days.”
“He was,” I said, and let it go at that. Dancer had, since the demise of the pulps in the early fifties, turned into a hack writer of paperback originals and a full-fledged alcoholic. One of the reasons was Kerry’s mother, Cybil, who was also an ex-pulp writer; Dancer had been in love with her back in the forties and had never gotten over it. I’d found that out during a pulp convention earlier in the year that had reunited the Wades and Dancer and a bunch of other pulpsters after thirty years, and at which I had met Kerry. The reunion had led to murder and a case of plagiarism, among other things ... but that was another story.
“I thought you were going to have something to drink,” Kerry said. “If you don’t want a diet soda, I can make coffee.”
“Not right now.” My stomach was jumpy enough as it was, looking for something to digest, without putting caffein into it. “Aren’t you going to ask me how my day was?”
“How was your day?”
“Lousy,” I said.
“How come?”
“Well, to start it off, Eberhardt found us an office.”
“Oh boy. Where?”
“On O’Farrell, near Van Ness.”
I told her about it. She laughed when I mentioned the brass testicles on the light fixture, but by the time I finished, she was wearing a serious expression.
“It doesn’t sound too bad, really,” she said. “But are you sure ... ?”
“No, I’m not sure. Let’s not get into that again, okay?”
“Okay. When does the partnership open for business?”
“On Monday. Eb went out shopping for office furniture today. Mine’s being delivered tomorrow afternoon.”
“Well, all I can say is I hope it works out.”
“Not as much as I hope so,” I said. “Meanwhile, I picked up a three-day job this afternoon—my last solo investigation.” I did not like the sound or taste of those last four words as I said them.
Kerry said, “Is it anything interesting?”
“Not particularly,” and I told her about Haruko Gage and her secret admirer.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Kerry said, “it sounds kind of interesting to me.
“Yeah? Why?”
“It appeals to my romantic nature. You know, the mystery of it. It’s a little frightening to have a determined secret admirer, but it’s also pretty exciting.”
“Mrs. Gage didn’t seem to think so.”
“Not that she let on. But then why did she wait so long to call in a detective?”
“She’s a materialist. She likes expensive jewelry.”
“I’ll bet that’s not all, though.”
“Maybe not. Listen, how would you like to go visit a bath with me tonight?”
“What?”
“A public bath. You know, with other people.”
“Are you being funny?”
“Nope. I thought I’d stop in and talk to one of Mrs. Gage’s ex-boyfriends for a few minutes; it happens he works evenings in a Japanese bathhouse on Pine Street.”
She made a face. Then her expression changed shape and became thoughtful. “A Japanese bathhouse?” she said. “I’ve never been inside one of those and I’ve always wondered what they’re like.”
“Likewise. So tonight we can both find out.”
“All right. But I’m not going to take any public bath. I’d be too embarrassed.”
“How about a private bath with me later on?”
“I don’t think we’d both fit in the tub.”
“There’s always the shower.”
“Mmm. We’ll see.”
Yeah, I thought, you bet we will.
She said, “But right now I’m hungry. I imagine you must be too.”
“Starving.”
“Well, we’d better go out somewhere. I don’t have much here. What do you want to eat?”
“Do I get a choice?”
“Within reason.”
“I want a New York steak about three inches thick,” I said. “With sautéed mushrooms and a baked potato loaded down with sour cream and chives and bacon bits. And some sourdough French bread. And a pint or two of good ale.”
“I’ll just bet you do. And how is your diet going, anyway?”
“Peachy keen,” I said.
“How much weight have you lost so far?”
“Two pounds.”
“Is that all? You should have lost more than that. You haven’t been cheating, have you?”
“No, I haven’t been cheating. I’ve been grazing a lot, according to your mad dictates. And eating eggs—cartons of eggs. Cluck, cluck.”
“That’s good. I mean that you’re not cheating. But you shouldn’t eat too many eggs.”
“What?”
“They’re full of cholesterol.”
“I thought you told me to eat eggs three times a day.”
“I did not tell you that. I said they were high in protein and you should have them once or twice a day. Two meals and four eggs, maximum. With grapefruit to counteract the cholesterol.”
“I hate grapefruit.”
“Does that mean you haven’t eaten any?”
“I didn’t know I was supposed to.”
“I told you. Don’t you ever listen?”
“Not when somebody’s trying to get me to eat grapefruit.”
“Selective hearing,” she said, “that’s what you’ve got.”
“Nuts,” I said. “I don’t care what you say, I’m going to have a steak tonight. Just the thought of one makes me weak.”
“I never said you couldn’t have a steak. It’s the baked potato with all the trimmings and the sourdough bread and the two pints of ale you can’t have.”
“Then what do I get with the steak?”
“Black coffee and a green salad with lemon juice.”
“Green salad with lemon juice. God.”
“It’s good for you. Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Just so long as we get there fast.”
We ate at a place in one of the large downtown hotels that specialized in steaks. They sliced any cut of meat to order right in front of you, as soon as you came in, and I told the chef I wanted a sixteen-ounce New York done rare. Normally I like my steak medium rare, but tonight I was after red meat, the bloodier the better. It made me feel primitive as hell, like a caveman out on his first date.
When the steak arrived at our table I managed to eat it like a civilized human being, if just barely. I was even able to get down most of the green salad with lemon juice. Kerry watched me with a little awe in her expression. You’d have thought she had never seen a starving man wolf food before.
After the waiter cleared away the remains we sat and talked for a while over coffee. My stomach was full and I was happy. It doesn’t take much to make me happy—just a good meal, an attractive woman, a pulp magazine to read, and a job to do. Maybe I was a primitive, after all.
I let her pay the check for a change. She could afford it; she was a highly paid copywriter for one of San Francisco’s largest ad agencies and I was only a poorly paid private eye who was going to be even more poorly paid once I had to start divvying with Eberhardt. Then we went and got my car and I drove over to Pine and straight out to Tamura’s Baths. The sooner I got my little talk with Ken Yamasaki over and done with, the sooner I could go have an Italian shower with Kerry. Italian showers were much better than Japanese baths. The kind I had in mind were, anyhow.
The building that housed the baths was nondescript enough—a narrow brick structure, two stories high, flanked by an apartment house and a corner grocery. I found a parking space two doors down and we walked over to it through a drizzle that was more mist than rain. A luminous clock in the window of the grocery sai
d that the time was 9:35.
At the door to the bathhouse, Kerry said, “Are you sure it’s all right for women to go in here?”
“You don’t see any signs that say otherwise, do you?”
“No, I guess not.”
The only sign of any sort was tacked up alongside the entrance. It said TAMURA’S JAPANESE BATHS • HOURS 10 A.M.-10 P.M. DAILY. I moved past it and opened the door and let Kerry precede me into a narrow, gloomy hallway illuminated by a single Japanese lantern. At the far end was a set of stairs leading upward.
It was quiet in there; I couldn’t hear anything except silence when I shut the door. The stairs took us into an anteroom that contained some rattan chairs, two more lanterns, and a reception desk with nobody behind it. To one side was a screened archway that probably led back to the baths.
We waited fifteen or twenty seconds and nothing happened: nobody came into the anteroom, nobody made any sounds anywhere else in the building. Finally I called, “Hello! Anybody here?” All that got me was an echo and more silence.
Kerry said, “Where is everybody?”
“Good question. The place can’t be closed; it’s not ten yet and the front door was unlocked.”
“Maybe we should go look behind that screen.”
“That must be where the baths are.”
“So? Are you afraid I’ll see something I’ve never seen before?”
“Fat chance of that.”
She stuck her tongue out at me.
I went over and around the screen, with Kerry at my heels. Another corridor, this one lighted by more lanterns, with several doorways opening off it and another doorway at the far end. The first few doorways opened into dressing cubicles, all of them empty, a couple in which towels had been carelessly tossed on the floor; the ones beyond opened into the bathing areas. There were four of these —large rooms separated by movable, opaque screens, each room containing a waist-deep sunken tile tub large enough for half a dozen people, with bamboo mats on the floor around the rim. None of the rooms was occupied, although a few of the mats appeared to be wet.
“So this is what a Japanese bathhouse looks like,” Kerry said. “It’s a little disappointing. I expected something more exotic.”
I didn’t say anything. Something was wrong here; I could feel it in the air now, like little stirrings of bad wind. The place shouldn’t have been empty, not with the front door unlocked. And if those towels on the floor and the wet mats were any indication, the people who had been here had left in a hurry. Not too long ago, either.
We were standing inside one of the bathing rooms. I said abruptly, “Stay here a minute, will you?”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“Just stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I left her before she could argue and went down to the end of the corridor. The door there was open about halfway; on the other side I could see part of a desk with a lamp burning on it and some filing cabinets. An office—Tamura’s, maybe, if somebody named Tamura still ran the place. I put the tips of my fingers against the door and shoved it open all the way.
The first thing I saw was that the desk chair had been overturned. Then I saw the scattered shards of broken glass, and the spots of red on the wall. And then, when I took two steps inside and another two sideways, I saw the rest of the blood, on the floor and on the lower part of the wall, and the Japanese whose blood it had been.
He was lying crumpled against the baseboard; there wasn’t any doubt that he was dead. The thing that had killed him was lying there too, bright-stained and gleaming in the light from the desk lamp.
He had been hacked to death with a samurai sword.
Chapter Five
My stomach turned over and the steak I’d eaten seemed to rise into the back of my throat in a bile-soaked lump. For a couple of seconds I thought I was going to throw it up. I looked away from the body, swallowed, and kept on swallowing until my throat unclogged.
Red meat, I thought, the bloodier the better ...
I wanted to get out of there, but I had been a cop too many years and I had walked in on too many homicide scenes; instinct took me a few steps closer to the dead man, to where the scatter of glass shards and the spatters and ribbons of blood began. He’d been in his sixties, bald, lean, wearing a shirt and tie and a pair of herringbone slacks. I had never seen him before.
The broken glass came from a framed, blown-up photograph, about fifteen inches square, that had either fallen or been pulled down from the wall. It lay face up, so that when I bent forward I could see that it was a grainy black-and-white print of three Japanese men, all in their late teens or early twenties, standing in front of a wire-mesh fence with some buildings behind it in the distance. They had their arms around one another and they were smiling. One of them, the man in the middle, wore an oddly designed medallion looped around his neck; he might have been the dead man on the floor thirty or forty years ago, but as hacked and bloody as the corpse was, I couldn’t be sure.
There was not much else to see in the office. Two closed doors,one in the side wall that was probably a closet, the other in the back wall that figured to be a rear exit. A few sheets of paper on the floor—what looked to be ledger pages with columns of numbers on them, dislodged from the desk. But there hadn’t been much of a struggle; the killer had come in with the sword, or found it here in the office when he arrived, and struck more or less without warning.
The body kept drawing my eyes, magnetically. I started to back away from it. It was warm in there, too warm: the radiator along the side wall was turned up and burbling faintly. And the smell of death was making me light-headed. They tell you blood has no odor, but you can smell it just the same—a kind of brackish-sweet stench. It was heavy in the air now, along with the lingering foulness of evacuated bowels. Always those same odors at scenes like this one, where blood has been spilled and someone has died by violence. Always the same overpowering smell of death.
Footsteps sounded behind me in the corridor. “Hey, where are you?” Kerry’s voice called. “What’s going on?”
Christ. I swung around to fill the doorway and block her view. “Don’t come in here.”
She stopped moving and stared at me. She could see it in my face, the reflection of what I’d been looking at on the office floor; fright kindled in her eyes.
“There’s a dead man in here,” I said. “Murdered with a sword. It’s pretty messy.”
“My God! Who—?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not the man you came to see?”
“No. Much older. Probably the proprietor.”
I got my handkerchief out, wrapped it around my hand, and then stepped into the corridor and pulled the door shut. I was afraid she might take it into her head to go have a look for herself. With Kerry, you never knew what she was liable to do.
She said, “Brr,” and hugged herself the way you do when you feel a sudden chill. “That must be why nobody’s here.”
I nodded. And why everybody left in such a hurry, I thought. Ken Yamasaki and whoever else was in the baths must have heard the commotion, maybe even seen who did the killing. And instead of hanging around to call the police, they’d all run scared. But why all of them? Why Yamasaki? He was an employee; the police would have no trouble finding that out, and that he’d been here tonight. There was no sense in him running off with the rest of them.
Unless he was the murderer ...
“Come on,” I said, and took Kerry’s hand and pulled her along into the reception area. I dipped my chin toward one of the rattan visitor’s chairs. “Sit down over there—and try not to touch anything.”
She did what I told her without saying anything. I moved over to the desk, used the handkerchief to lift the telephone receiver, and dialed the all-too-familiar number of the Hall of justice.
The first prowl-car cops got there in ten minutes, and the Homicide boys showed up fifteen minutes after that. The inspector in charge was a guy named McFate, Leo McFate. We kn
ew each other slightly, and were always civil in what little dealings we had—he’d been in General Works until Eberhardt’s retirement got him transferred to the Homicide Detail—but I sensed that McFate didn’t like me much. I had a pretty fair idea why, too, and it was none of the usual stuff that causes clashes between cops and private detectives; no jealousy or distrust or any of that. No, it had to do with the fact that McFate was a social climber. He went to the opera and the symphony and the ballet, and he got his name mentioned in the gossip columns from time to time, usually in connection with some local lady of means, and he dressed in tailored suits and hand-made ties and always looked like he was on his way to a wedding or a wake.
He didn’t like me because he thought I was a coarse, sloppy, pulp-reading peon. Which I was, and the hell with Leo McFate.
He had nothing much to say when he and the others breezed in, except for a curt “Where is the deceased?” Deceased, yet. He didn’t talk like a cop; he talked like Philo Vance. Or a political appointee in Sacramento, which was what he aspired to be someday, according to rumor. He had the demeanor for it, you couldn’t deny that. Tall, muscled, imposing; what my grandmother would have called “a fine figure of a man.” Dark brown hair going gray at the temples. A nifty brown mustache to go with a pair of nifty brown eyes. He even had a goddamn cleft in his chin like Robert Mitchum’s.
I showed him where the deceased was. McFate spent a couple of minutes looking at the body and the bloody sword and the other stuff on the floor. I watched him do that from out in the hallway; I had no inclination to go in there again, and from where I was, the office desk blocked my view of the dead man. Then McFate had some words with the assistant coroner and with one of the members of the lab crew. Then he turned and came back out to where I was standing.
“What time did you find him?” he asked.
“About nine-forty. Three or four minutes before I called the Hall.”
“When you got here, was the place this deserted?”
“Yes.” I told him the way I figured that, and he nodded.
Quicksilver (Nameless Detective) Page 4