by Howard Fast
“I wouldn’t blame you.”
“We live in a world of idiots, Masao.”
“It’s the occupational, disease of the human race, but if we could put a uniform in front of his building for the next day or two, it might help keep him alive. His office is in Beverly Hills?”
“Four-fifty North Roxbury. But that means putting a man on overtime.”
“Let’s be spendthrifts.”
“Yeah, what the hell, this case is tearing our budget to shreds, so we might as well go all the way, and I got to have a meeting with Abramson and the city attorney. We never had anything like this before. What the devil was Soames up to with a crazy play like that? And was he breaking the law or not—and who put the body away? I can’t make head or tail of this twin-brother business. Can you?”
“I get a glimmer, but then it won’t stay with me.”
“You know, Masao, I think you got to go out there to Fenwick and put it to Soames just flat out—how about the payment and who in hell cut the brake lines on Geffner’s car?”
“I was thinking of that. Of course, they’ll deny everything, and with Eve dead—”
“And I want to know what the devil Geffner was doing with her sister.”
“That’s touchy too. We have no right to question Geffner about anything in Montecito.”
“It ties in, doesn’t it?”
“Sort of. I suppose I can talk to Geffner.”
As he was leaving the room, Wainwright said to Masao, “Tomorrow’s poor Clint’s funeral. Ten o’clock, Church of Our Lady. He’s the first man killed on the force in five years, and it hasn’t been nice, Masao. It surely hasn’t been nice.”
“I have my own guilts.”
“Stifle your guilts. You didn’t know the car was wired any more than he did.”
Masuto told the operator that he did not know the man’s name, but that Edinburgh, like any other city, must have a chief of police. The operator was not at all sure that there was anyone with that title, and Masuto said he would settle for police headquarters. When a voice with a heavy burr informed him that this was Edinburgh Police, Masuto gave his own title and rank and said that he was calling from police headquarters in Beverly Hills, and since the police station was also by default police headquarters, Masuto was not straying from the fact. After a long, long pause, which Masuto estimated cost the City of Beverly Hills at least five dollars, another voice told him that he was speaking to Inspector Angus Macready.
“Now, are you putting me on?” Macready said to him. “Or am I really speaking to a policeman in Beverly Hills? Because, laddie, if this is your notion of a bloody joke, you will regret it.”
“No joke, sir. I am Detective Sergeant Masao Masuto of the Beverly Hills police force.”
“Devil take me! What kind of a name is that?”
“Japanese name because my parents were Japanese.”
“Would you spell it?”
“Masuto. M-a-s-u-t-o.”
“And you’re actually a policeman there in Beverly Hills?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Well, I will be damned! I cannot wait to tell my wife—Beverly Hills.”
“Inspector,” Masuto began.
“Tell me something. Suppose there I am, walking down the street in Beverly Hills, would I be likely to meet—oh, say, Paul Newman?”
“It could happen, yes. But, Inspector—”
“Robert Redford? Now, there’s someone I’d like to meet. Now, suppose my wife and I were to take one of those package trips—”
“Inspector,” Masuto said firmly, “I am calling on a most important police matter.”
“Of course. Sorry. It’s a habit of thinking Americans are very rich.”
“We are a small police department with a limited budget, and we are required to account for every long distance call. I would love to chat with you about Beverly Hills, but—”
“Of course. Please, I must apologize. What can I do for you, Sergeant—is it Masuto?”
“Masuto.”
“Odd name. Well, here I am at your service.”
“Thank you. I have a rather peculiar request, Inspector, but important in a homicide investigation we are conducting. I want to know whether in the year nineteen thirty twins were born to a couple named Mackenzie, or to several couples with that name, and if possible, what has been the history of those twins.”
“That’s it?”
“Just about.”
“Well, that’s a tall order, Sergeant. Mackenzie’s a common name in Edinburgh, but truthfully I have no notion of how common twins are.”
“Can it be done?”
“If our hospitals were computerized, it would be the work of an hour or so. I’m not sure myself what condition the records are in or if they ever segregated the twins. It does mean putting manpower into it, and since it is not a local matter, we should have to charge you.”
“How much?”
“Say I put a man on it, and say the job takes three days. It has to be overtime because we’re pretty tight. Could you put out six pounds an hour?”
“In dollars?”
“About eleven dollars an hour.”
Masuto sighed and shook his head. “Tell me something, Inspector. Why must we go to the hospitals? Don’t you have a city hall of some kind in Edinburgh where every birth is noted and filed? How do you people get birth certificates for passports and that kind of thing?”
“Well, sure, lad, we have a town hall. We are not savages out here.”
“Oh, no,” Masuto said quickly. “I didn’t mean that at all. But wouldn’t they have birth records?”
“And how would you know if they were twins or not?”
“If you give me the number, I’ll try.”
Masuto jotted down the number and thanked the inspector and then called the operator for charges.
“Forty-two dollars and fifty cents,” the operator said.
Masuto took a deep breath and then put through his call to the Town Hall at Edinburgh. He asked for birth records, and a cheerful feminine voice told him that he had reached the proper destination.
“This is Mrs. Gordon. What can I do for you?”
“My name is Masao Masuto, detective sergeant on the Beverly Hills police force. I am calling from California on a very important police matter which has to do with a homicide.” He got it all out in one breath, pressured by the fact that this was the second call and he had absolutely nothing.
“How exciting! Beverly Hills!” He was becoming used to the Scottish burr and had to strain less hard to understand it. But if he had heard the accent in California, he realized, he very likely would not have known that it was Scottish.
“And your name is Japanese,” Mrs. Gordon went on. “We had three seminars on Japanese influences in California and Hawaii. Absolutely fascinating. And since you have no accent except your American one, you must be a Nisei, as they say, and on the police force in Beverly Hills.” Mrs. Gordon did not bother to explain the seminars, or what they were, or where they were, but plunged right on into the wonders of long distance telephoning. “Because I do hear you as clearly as if you were in the next room—”
“Mrs. Gordon,” he begged her, “this is an urgent police matter.”
“Of course. But before you say another word—I’m not sworn to silence, am I? I can tell my friends?”
“Absolutely. Now, here’s the problem. I have to know whether in the year nineteen thirty, twins were born in Edinburgh to a woman whose name was Mackenzie.”
“Would you know the twins’ names?”
“One was named Robert. The name of the other I don’t know.”
“No problem. We file the birth proof alphabetically within each year. Oh, it might take ten minutes.”
“Really. And would it take much longer for the years twenty-eight and twenty-nine?”
“A few minutes more.”
“You know, Mrs. Gordon, I got through with a bit of luck. The overseas operator said it might tak
e an hour or so, but somehow I did get right through. If we keep this connection open, do you suppose you can come up with the information in ten minutes—all three years?”
“I think so.”
“I’ll hang on. Go to it and bless you.”
Masuto sat at his desk, phone in hand, staring at his wristwatch and hoping that Wainwright would not appear and demand to know what he was up to.
It did not take ten minutes. Nine minutes by his watch, the cheerful voice of Mrs. Gordon called him out of his reverie. “Sergeant Masuto—I am pronouncing it right, Masuto?”
“Yes, Mrs. Gordon.”
“No heather on the hills, as we say. Dry run. No Mackenzie twins in twenty-eight, twenty-nine, or thirty, not a one. I have Macwortels, Stevenson, Cavendish, MacSwains—just changed on all those. But no Mackenzie twins, and we do have a lot of Mackenzies here in Edinburgh. Are you terribly disappointed?”
“Not at all,” Masuto said. “It’s what I expected, and you are a charming and generous lady.”
The charges, Masuto learned from the operator, came to sixty-three dollars and sixty cents, and since he felt that a man must face what he must face, he went to Wainwright’s office.
“How much?”
“Two calls. Forty-two dollars and fifty cents and sixty-three dollars and sixty cents.”
“Two calls.”
“This,” Masuto said, trying to control himself, “is the richest city in the world.”
“I know that. I’m not taking it out of your pay.”
“Thank you.”
“What did you learn?”
“The Mackenzie twins were not born in Edinburgh, unless their name was some other than Mackenzie. Not in Scotland, I’m willing to swear. Captain, you’re always burned up when I say I know something and I don’t have a shred of proof to back it up. I knew Mackenzie was not a Scot, but I had to have some confirmation. Sure, he could have come from Glasgow or some other Scottish city, but if he did, why lie and say Edinburgh?”
“All right, if that’s what you wanted and you need it, you got your hundred dollars worth. I don’t see it, but it’s your case. What now?”
“Fenwick. I have to talk to Soames.”
“You watch your step, Masao. There’s money and power and the Pentagon involved with Fenwick. You don’t play games.”
“I have no death wish. I may feel guilty as hell that poor Clint died in my car, but I have no wish to join him.”
“Yes, but when you go up there, Masao, you’re on your own. I can’t send any cops up there with you. The sheriff’s department would eat my ass off. He’s always screaming that his four thousand deputies are as good as any cops. That’s bullshit. I wouldn’t leave it to his deputies to track a diarrhea victim to an outhouse, and if the deputies miss you, there’s the highway patrol.” He spread his hands. “We’re a small city with a handful of cops and we’re surrounded.”
“I’ll be careful.”
The telephone in his own office was ringing. It was Beckman, and he told Masuto that he finally got Judge Simpkins’s signature on the search warrant.
“Should I head in to the Mackenzie place now, Masao?”
“No, I’d rather we did it together. Anyway, I need a little life insurance. I’m going up to see Soames at Fenwick. Give me an hour, and then drive up there and tell them you were to meet me there. If they put you off or tell you that you can’t see me or tell you that I left before you got there, you raise all kinds of hell. But don’t go busting in there. Get the captain on your radio and tell him what happened and then sit tight.”
“You got to be crazy, Masao. Let’s go in there together.”
“I’m not crazy and I don’t think anything’s going to happen and I think they’ll be as polite as punch. So just do as I say, Sy. Wait an hour and then drive up there, which will give me thirty or forty minutes with Mr. Soames.”
Downstairs, the city mechanic was leaning against Masuto’s borrowed Ford. “I been waiting for you, Sergeant,” he said. “There are three places they’re likely to put a bomb, under the hood—” he raised the engine hood “—here or here. Mostly they don’t trigger it to the hood, but to the ignition, but even so, I’d raise the hood very slow, looking for wires.” He then got down on his knees and pointed under the car. “Place number two—right there under your seat. And place number three, back there against the gas tank. Then you really go out in a blaze of glory. You know what I would do if I were in your shoes, Sergeant?”
“Tell me.”
“You know, the people in the mob, they live with this kind of thing, so they developed a piece of mechanism small enough to fit in your pocket. You can stand a hundred feet from your car and turn on the ignition. You can buy it for forty-five bucks downtown in Meyer’s Hardware, and if you ask me, the department ought to pay for it.”
It had never occurred to Masuto that one could live like this for a lifetime. He thanked the mechanic and drove off. An hour later he was on the approach road to the Fenwick Works.
Begun forty years ago by Lyson Fenwick, who owned some four thousand acres of the hills to the east of Malibu Beach, the Fenwick Works was devoted at first to his dream of a plane with vertical takeoff. After Fenwick’s death, the direction of the plant was switched to esoteric guidance systems, bombsights, and target-seeking missiles. The plant, a complex of white stone buildings, was situated on a high bluff, overlooking the Pacific in one direction and the canyons of the coastal range on the other. The approach road, twisting up toward the plant, reminded Masuto of pictures of medieval castles, and the twelve-foot-high chain link fence that surrounded the place and the two ten-foot guardposts that flanked the gates did nothing to lessen the feeling. Two men, dressed in the gray uniforms of private guards, each of them armed with a holstered pistol, stopped his car and asked, very politely, what his business might be.
He identified himself and said that he wished to see Mr. Soames.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You’re a long way from Beverly Hills,” the other guard said.
“Suppose you call Mr. Soames and tell him I’m here.”
The two guards stared at him, their faces blank. There are no intelligence tests for armed guards, and Masuto could almost follow their laborious attempt to figure out which would bring them the good conduct medals, roughing him up and turning him away or calling Soames’s assistant, since Soames was beyond their level of direct approach. They decided for the latter and used the telephone, and then they opened the gate and told Masuto, “The big building on the left. Just park opposite and go in. Someone will meet you. Pin this on your lapel.” He handed Masuto a badge while the other guard stuck a card on the Ford’s windshield.
Masuto parked his car in the paved area opposite the big building that formed the center of the complex, and then he walked toward the entrance. As he approached the double doors, they opened and a pretty, young blond woman stepped out, smiled, and informed him that he was Sergeant Masuto. Masuto agreed with her conclusion, and nodded.
“I’m Marion Phelps, Mr. Soames’s secretary. He asked me to escort you to his office.”
“That’s very thoughtful of him,” Masuto said.
“Mr. Soames is a very thoughtful man.”
That ended their conversation. They entered the building, where Miss Phelps smiled at an armed guard who sat at a table covered with lights that blinked on and off, panels of switches, and two telephones; and then they turned to the left and went through a pair of glass doors into a room furnished in what might be called industrial modern: leather and metal chairs and couches, chrome, and polished stainless steel.
“If you will wait here just a moment,” Miss Phelps said.
Masuto remained standing, and it was no more than a minute until Soames appeared. He was absolutely genial. He shook hands with Masuto. “Glad you finally turned up,” he said. “I consider it an experience. Your reputation goes before you.”
“
We have reopened the Mackenzie case,” Masuto said with stiff formality.
Soames looked at his watch. He was one of those large, good-looking men who had learned and mastered all the gradations and inflections of graciousness, and who knew how and when to use them. “It’s twelve-forty,” he said. “I usually don’t lunch until one, but I’m sure you’re hungry, Sergeant, and it gives us time for one drink. We have our own dining room here, and I don’t think I’m boasting when I say that we set the best table in southern California.”
“I’m sure you do,” Masuto agreed, “and I’m most grateful. But I have luncheon plans, so why don’t we use the twenty minutes to talk.”
Soames regarded him thoughtfully before he said, “As you wish. My office is through this door.”
The office was large but not opulent. If anything, it was, Masuto decided, expensively severe. On the desk, no pictures of wife or child, and on the walls, large abstract paintings in tones of blue and gray. A controlled man, a man who never let the situation get out of hand. There would be no anger today, no rage, no raised voices.
“Please sit down, Sergeant,” Soames said. “Do you smoke? I have excellent Cubans, Romeo and Juliet, if you’re a cigar smoker. Or a cigarette?”
“Thank you. I don’t smoke.”
“And I am sure that you’d refuse a drink. Ascetics have always puzzled me.”
“I’m not an ascetic. I don’t drink on duty.”
“Of course. Then it’s not a part of being a Zen Buddhist?”
Masuto smiled. “Did you have me investigated, Mr. Soames? Do you also know my tastes in travel and women?”
“In any area that concerns us, we inform ourselves.”
“Yes, I am sure. But since your time is limited, could we get to the substance of what brought me here?”
“Of course.”
“You know who David Pringle is?”
“Yes. Of course. He’s a theatrical lawyer who took care of poor Eve’s affairs.”
“I spoke to him this morning. He told me a number of things that confirmed my own conclusions. Mine were simply conclusions from scanty evidence. He spoke of what he knew. He told me that the dead man in the bathtub in the Mackenzie home was not the Mackenzie you employ but his twin brother.”