“Among other things. We are only part of a keiretsu, a, how would you say it, a consortium of businesses.” Nakamura gave a slight bow. “But please, call me Johnnie. We like things on a first-name basis here.” He put out his hand, and everybody shook. “So, what brings you boys to Palm Springs? You are looking for a little fun in the sun?”
Eddie slanted a look at Tom, waiting for a cue. “We’re detectives,” Tom said. “Private detectives.”
“Ah.” Nakamura shook his head knowingly. “Now I understand. You are the San Francisco duo.”
“Jesus,” Tom said, “everybody in town knows we’re here. Did someone send out Indian runners?”
Nakamura laughed softly. “It is a small town. And a murder….” He turned his hands palms up. “It may surprise you to know this is a quiet town. Most of what happens here is discreet. And you are very big news. Not Indian runners, no, but the telephones have been very busy.”
Tom was staring hard at Nakamura. He was a man of medium height and stocky build. Jet-black hair framed a craggy, intense face with dark, flinty eyes that seemed to see everything at once.
“Funny,” Tom said. “I have this feeling I know you from somewhere. Ever been to San Francisco?”
“Many times.” Nakamura grinned. “But that is perhaps not why I look familiar to you. Maybe if you saw me with a ponytail?” He put his hands up, tugged his neatly styled hair back from his temples, and scowled fiercely.
Tom looked hard at him for a moment and snapped his fingers, recognition dawning. “You’re the samurai. The movie guy.”
Nakamura laughed, looking pleased. “I was. You watch samurai movies, Mr. Danzel?”
“Tom has every samurai movie ever made,” Stanley said.
“Well, probably not all of them,” Tom said, “but a lot. You did, let me think… Samurai Times Seven and….” He paused, thinking.
“And Samurai Fourteen and Samurai Endless… which is a sort of good description of my career.” He looked apologetically around the circle. “What Mr. Danzel is trying to say, politely, is that I was a hack.”
“No, no, I thought you were terrific,” Tom said. Nakamura gave him a doubtful look. “Okay, some of the movies weren’t, well, they weren’t the best. But you were kick-ass, it looked like to me. You looked authentic. Authentic samurai, I mean. Course, I’m no expert, but it looked real to me.”
“Thank you. I took my part in them seriously, but the movies were mostly mediocre, though. Which is why I moved on into the business end of things. Still, a part of me will always be samurai, I suppose.”
“I wouldn’t apologize for that. The samurai way is pretty impressive, even in a B-movie.”
Nakamura smiled faintly and nodded. “If you appreciate things samurai, Mr. Danzel, perhaps you would do me the honor of stopping by my house while you are in the area. If I may say so myself, I have a quite good collection of swords and other memorabilia.”
“I’d like that a lot,” Tom said with evident enthusiasm.
“Excellent. Can we say tomorrow for lunch? I will give you directions.” He signaled the bartender for pen and paper.
“Uh, lunch….” Tom hesitated. “This isn’t going to be more of that, what’d you call it, Stanley, Pacific Rim food, is it?”
Nakamura laughed. “Not if it is not to your taste. Let me say, in your honor, I will tell my chef to prepare macaroni and cheese. Is that American enough for you? And I have some excellent ham. That goes with macaroni, does it not? I have been waiting for someone to share it with.” He looked around the group, and his face lit up as if inspired. “But perhaps you would all honor me and come as well? Eddie? Mr. Korski? Larson? Mister… uh….”
“Rafferty,” Chris supplied.
“Mr. Rafferty, of course, how boorish of me not to remember. Yes, we will make a party of it. My chef will be pleased. I fear I have rather neglected his talents of late.”
“I’ll have to take a rain check,” Larson said with genuine regret in his voice. “I’ve got plans for tomorrow.”
“Ah, so,” Nakamura said. “We shall miss your presence.”
After he’d written the directions down for Tom, Nakamura gave each of them a slight bow and moved on. Eddie looked over Tom’s shoulder at the slip of paper.
“Gosh,” Eddie said. “Big-time. That address is in Palm Desert. Where the really serious money lives.”
“He is really serious money,” Larson said, staring after the departing businessman. “And a very private man. I’ve never known anyone to be invited to his house before.”
“Do you know this guy well?” Tom asked Eddie.
“Well? No, hardly at all, but everybody in Palm Springs knows who he is. He’s very wealthy. And that samurai business—did you notice that tattoo on the back of his hand?”
“A peony, wasn’t it?” Stanley said. “Somehow I’ve always associated the peony with the Chinese culture.”
“Yes, but it’s big with the Japanese too,” Eddie said. “Hanakotoba, the flower language, is an important part of Japanese culture. The old princes and lords embroidered flowers on their kimonos to show their status. The kigiku, for instance, the yellow chrysanthemum, was the symbol of royalty, but every flower says something. Sometimes the meaning changes with the color. Giving someone a white lily, for instance, means you think they are pure or chaste, but flinging an orange lily at him signifies hatred and anger.”
“And the peony means…?” Tom asked.
“In general it symbolizes daring and risk-taking, but it is very common among the samurai, for whom it represents the samurai mind-set, that each day may be his last. The samurai live by that tenet. But you must know that.”
“I guess I never put it in so many words. Interesting,” Tom said in a voice that suggested he didn’t really think so. He stuffed the note into his pocket and said to Larson, “Right now, though, I’m more interested in seeing where this Palmer kid lived. Think you can find the place?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Larson said.
Tom finished his beer and set the bottle down on the bar with a loud thunk. “Let’s do it,” he said.
“Uh, should we talk to Hammond about this?” Stanley asked.
“Better not. Don’t want to step on any toes.”
Chapter Eleven
LARSON, CHRIS, and Eddie led the way in Eddie’s Toyota, Tom and Stanley following in Tom’s truck. The street Larson brought them to was on the fringe of the desert in one of the plainer sections of town—not a slum, exactly, but more than merely a few blocks distant from the palatial homes of the rich.
Eddie slowed and turned into the driveway of a small bungalow, then stopped in the visitor’s parking area. Tom turned off his lights and parked at the sidewalk just before the drive, then looked around with care. Palm trees provided deep shadows here on the street and in front of the bungalow, and the nearest house was thirty feet away and dark. The sidewalks were deserted, nobody out walking, no dogs on leashes.
They were off the main street, so there were no passing cars either, and only a faint rumble of traffic from the nearby interstate. The only other vehicle to be seen was a pickup with faded green paint, smaller than Tom’s, sitting at the curb across the street, facing in the opposite direction—but it was empty, its lights off.
Tom got out and walked over to Eddie’s Toyota, signaling for him to lower his window.
“Are we going in?” Chris asked, eyes excited.
“We are. You guys are going back to the club.”
“But we—” Chris started to object.
“No buts. That’s crime scene tape, the yellow stuff. If you go under it, you’re breaking the law. You could get into all sorts of hot water.”
“So could you and Stanley,” Eddie said.
Tom smiled. “We’re ace detectives. No one’s going to spot us. We’re going to sneak in unnoticed, but it’s hard to sneak inside with a whole crowd of people in tow. Go.”
The three in the Toyota looked decidedly disappointed, but Edd
ie put up his window and backed out of the driveway. Tom waited until his taillights had disappeared around a corner. Stanley, watching them go, was thinking he’d rather be with them. He hated doing stuff like this.
“Do you really think…?” he started to object.
“Piece of cake,” Tom said. “No outside lighting to speak of, except what that streetlight back there casts, and that only reaches part of the parking lot. Nobody’s going to see us. I just didn’t want all the guys trooping around. If there’s anything to be seen inside, they were more likely to mess it up than pin it down. Crowds are never a good idea for a crime scene, especially crowds of amateurs.”
He approached the bungalow’s front door and lifted the tape for a reluctant Stanley to scoot under it. Tom followed him through.
Tom was an old hand at picking locks, and he had his picks with him—but in this case, it wasn’t necessary. As a matter of routine, he tried the door first, and to his surprise, it opened. He stood motionless in the doorway for a minute, listening to the darkness within.
“What?” Stanley asked in a whisper.
Tom stepped inside. “Someone just went out the back way, trying to be very quiet.” He moved quickly to the front window, pulled aside the wispy curtain, and looked out in time to see a shadowy figure dash around the corner of the building and across the shadows of the driveway. He disappeared into the night, and a few seconds later a car door slammed. An engine roared to life, and the green pickup that had been parked at the curb took off down the street, headlights still off.
Tom had brought the big Maglite from the truck, but the ambient light was enough to let them walk through the house without using the flashlight. In the kitchen at the rear, the back door stood open, swinging faintly in the evening breeze. Tom went to it, glanced out just to be safe, and closed the door, latching it.
“You think it was a burglar?” Stanley asked.
“Of sorts. Somebody looking for something, that’s for sure,” Tom said.
“We must have scared him off. I wonder who it was?”
Tom grunted. “I know who it was. What I’m wondering is what Randy Patterson thought he would find here at the dead kid’s house.”
“Randy who?” Stanley asked.
“Patterson. The cowboy from the bar. The one who tried to buy me a glass of piss.”
He turned on his flashlight and played the beam around the kitchen. Not much to be seen. The cupboard doors were open, revealing a few chipped dishes, a box of cereal, a tin of coffee. The refrigerator held some milk, gone sour, and a half-empty carton of orange juice.
“Didn’t do a lot of eating in,” Tom said.
“It sounded like most of his meals were bought for him.”
“Probably.”
The living room was sparsely furnished—a futon, a television with a DVD player, a big bowl used as an ashtray with a couple of roaches in it. The bedroom beyond wasn’t any more luxurious, box spring and mattress on the floor, rumpled sheets, a battered dresser—again, with the drawers open. A box of neon-colored condoms had been spilled on the floor. The air smelled stale, like windows too long unopened.
“Patterson was looking for something, that’s for sure,” Tom said, flashing the light at the gaping drawers. He looked in them, shifting their contents around carefully. Socks, bikini briefs, a selection of tees and pullovers—one or two sweaters, a yellow-stained jockstrap, stretched large. Stanley lifted that out of the drawer and gave it a tentative sniff.
“Boy, I know some guys would pay big-time for this,” he said.
“Stanley,” Tom said in a disapproving voice.
“Hey, I’m just looking for clues.” He put the jockstrap back, fingered a robin’s egg sweater. “Cashmere,” he said. “Good cashmere too.”
“There’s bad?”
“No, there isn’t any bad, but there’s cheap and expensive. That yellow number I have that you like me to wear when we, you know….”
“Yeah, it feels sexy. Makes me horny.” Stanley gave him a look. “Especially horny,” Tom amended.
“Well, that sweater’s the cheap stuff. Ninety-nine dollars at Macy’s. This is the expensive stuff. Six hundred or so, at Neiman’s. Big difference.”
Tom fingered the sweater as well. “Huh,” he said. “Might be worth the investment. You know, for, well, for whatever. Maybe your birthday.”
“My birthday’s not until summer.”
“Oh, sure, your real birthday. I meant… you know. For a celebration.” Tom pushed the drawer closed. “I’ll bet these were presents from the johns.”
“Most likely.”
“Still….” Tom paused, shined the light around the room, stepped to the door of the bathroom, and glanced in there. Not much to be seen but a hamper overflowing with dirty clothes, a balled-up towel on the floor. The door to the medicine chest stood open, revealing glass shelves, mostly empty. And dirty. “For a hustler as popular as he was supposed to be—and as expensive—it doesn’t look like much, does it?”
“Maybe he was saving the money up for… well, for something. Maybe even to get out of here. I know if I lived here, I’d be looking for an escape hatch.”
“Maybe. But where is it? The money, I mean? We can ask Hammond, but he didn’t say anything about finding a stash of cash. I think he’d have mentioned it if he had.”
“Maybe the cowboy found it.”
“Instead of the cops? They’re pros when it comes to doing a search. Cops can screw up same as anybody, but I’d guess they gave the place a good once-over.”
“Maybe the cowboy knew where to look.”
“Maybe. But it sounded like he was still searching when we came in. I heard a drawer scrape just before he ran. And I’m curious how he got in. Did he pick the lock? Or did he have a key? And if he had a key, what does that tell us?”
“That he and Palmer were involved?”
“He said not.”
“If you believe him.”
“Oddly enough, I do. About that, at least. He sounded downright resentful of the fact.” Tom flashed the light around the room again and sighed. “I’d say there’s not much to see here. Let’s go.”
“To the club? The cowboy might head back there.”
“I doubt it. He must have seen us arrive. If he did, he saw who we were. Most likely he won’t want to bump into us again tonight.”
Tom looked around the room one last time. It was not much shy of squalid. But if the information they had gotten was to be believed, Palmer must have been making a thousand, two thousand dollars a day. Two or three—or more—johns a day, five hundred bucks a pop—had to add up.
What had happened to the money?
Chapter Twelve
THE MORNING newspaper gave minimal attention to the death at the Winter Beach Inn—only a brief mention on the second page that a young man had been found dead, the apparent victim of a rattlesnake bite earlier.
“Someone’s got a lot of influence,” Tom said. “Even in San Francisco, this would have gotten front-page headlines.”
“Those toes Hammond doesn’t want us to step on must be very important,” Stanley said.
“Seems so. Might make things more difficult.”
THE DRIVE to lunch later that day was the same arrangement as before, but without Larson, Tom and Stanley bringing up the rear in Tom’s truck, Chris and Eddie leading in Eddie’s Toyota.
Eddie took them through the shopping district on El Paseo, which Stanley suspected was merely a show-off detour, past high-end jewelry stores, shops with famous names on them, coffeehouses where espresso sold for four dollars a cup. A Rodeo Drive look-alike. Palm Desert at its most pretentious.
After their look at the town’s expensive retail scene, Johnnie Nakamura’s house was something of a disappointment. The neighborhood was grand, certainly, with big expensive-looking houses sitting in elegant isolation from one another.
Nakamura’s house was large enough, but the exterior was decidedly plain, nothing more than a stone-slab box
set back from the street beyond a giant cactus and a jacaranda tree.
“It’s the Japanese way,” Eddie explained as they went up the walk together. “Everything important is saved for the inside. The Japanese meet the world in the same way, the face carefully masked, no clue to what’s going on inside. It’s all about appearances.”
Nakamura himself greeted them at the front door and invited them in. “Hajimemashite,” he said, bowing low. “How do you do? Welcome to my humble home, please.”
Eddie had warned them in advance of one thing they should expect.
“The Japanese do not like outside shoes worn inside the house. They believe it brings in too many germs.”
“Probably they’re right,” Stanley said. “I remember reading somewhere that shoes are the biggest source of germ contamination in the typical house.”
“Yes. Anyway, we’ll almost certainly be expected to leave our shoes at the door,” Eddie said.
“And spend our time barefoot?” Tom asked.
“Usually the host provides some sort of slippers. But yes, if need be, barefoot, or in our stocking feet.”
In this instance, a row of paper slippers were lined up by the wall just inside the door. Heedful of Eddie’s advice, everyone had worn slip-on shoes. Their host watched, pleased, as they discarded shoes, lining them in a row along the wall, and donned paper slippers.
It was obvious at a glance that Eddie had been right about the house too. The interior of the house was as lavish as the outside was plain, expensively furnished but without ostentation, spare, really. A single red peony—the symbol of the samurai—stood in a black glass vase atop a carved teak table in the foyer. Hidden speakers played a Mozart string quartet in the background. The living room into which Nakamura led them from the foyer was white—white walls, white carpeting on tiled floors, white furniture. For contrast, a terra-cotta fireplace, conically shaped, stood on an umber hearth of Mexican tile in one corner.
“Let me guess, that’s in case the temperature drops below ninety,” Tom said, indicating the fireplace.
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