Quicksilver nd-11

by Bill Pronzini

“Next week.”

  “He would have been better off if he’d stayed on the force.” McFate smiled as if to take the sting out of the words and then added, “If you don’t mind my saying so.”

  I let it blow by. Assholes pass bad wind all the time; that was what you had to remember in dealing with them.

  He said, “Do you know where Yamasaki lives?”

  “No. He’s not listed in the phone book.”

  “Did you know Simon Tamura when he was alive?”

  “No. I never even heard of him before today.”

  “And you’ve had no recent case involving the Yakuza?”

  “I’ve never had any case involving the Yakuza.”

  “So be it,” McFate said. “Why don’t you go sit with your lady friend for the time being. I may have more questions a little later.”

  “Sure. As long as we can get out of here before midnight.”

  I left him and went back into the reception area and plunked myself down in the rattan chair next to Kerry. She said, “What’s the matter? Why are you scowling?”

  “Something McFate just told me,” I said. “The dead man back there was Yakuza.”

  “What’s Yakuza?”

  “Japanese gangster outfit. Sort of like the Mafia.”

  “Oh God,” she said.

  “Take it easy. It’s not as ominous as it sounds.”

  “No?”

  “No. I don’t know much about them, but they’re big in Japan and East Asia and they’re starting to get a foothold over here. Prostitution, extortion, that sort of thing. But they only prey on other Japanese-merchants and tourists, mostly.”

  “Oh. Then the dead man… do you know his name yet?”

  “Simon Tamura. He ran this place, I imagine.”

  “Then he was killed by other Yakuza? One of those underworld execution things?”

  “Looks that way,” I said. “The Yakuza are supposed to believe that they’re descendants of samurai warriors. And Tamura was murdered with a samurai sword. A ritual killing, maybe, to avenge some breaking of the Yakuza code.”

  “Well, thank God you’re not mixed up in it, for a change. It’s bad enough that you had to find the body. And that I had to be here with you.”

  “No argument about that.”

  “One murder case after another ever since I’ve known you,” she said. “One of these days…”

  “One of these days what?”

  “You know what I was going to say.”

  “Yeah. But I’ve lived this long; I intend to go on living a good while longer.”

  “I hope so. Sometimes… damn it, sometimes you scare hell out of me.”

  “Sometimes, babe,” I said, “I scare hell out of myself.”

  We lapsed into silence, but it was all right between us because Kerry reached over after a few seconds and took hold of my hand. Her fingers were dry and chill-unlike the room itself, which was as warm as Tamura’s office. It started me sweating, and I stood up finally and fumbled with the knob on the radiator until I got the heat shut down.

  Cops went in and out, and what seemed like a long time later two white-outfitted interns clumped in with a body bag. Almost immediately after they disappeared toward the office, McFate reappeared and headed toward Kerry and me. We both got on our feet.

  “Tamura was definitely Yakuza,” McFate said without preamble. “He had one of their tattoos on his chest-a samurai warrior battling a dragon. And his desk is full of incriminating evidence. He was a local mizu shobai kingpin.”

  I had no idea what that last meant, but I was not going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. I figured he’d tell us anyway, and he did.

  “ Mizu shobai means ‘water business,’ ” he said in his supercilious way. “Extortion from Japanese bars, restaurants, and night clubs in the Bay Area-a variation on the old protection racket. Very lucrative.”

  “Which means he probably had rivals.”

  “Probably. We’ll find out.” He paused. “Do you still plan to talk to Ken Yamasaki?”

  “That depends,” I said, “on whether or not he had anything to do with Tamura’s death.”

  “Then you had better not try to contact him until you find out.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Good. You don’t intend to do any investigating into Yakuza activities, do you?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “You shouldn’t, if what you told me earlier is true.”

  “It’s true. I don’t lie to the police, McFate.”

  “But you do go off on tangents now and then.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you lost your license once,” McFate said, “and it would be a shame if it happened again. So I’d advise you to confine your present activities to tracking down secret admirers. Leave the Yakuza to us.”

  I could feel myself getting hot; he was rubbing salt into old wounds now. But making an issue of it with him was not going to buy me anything except trouble. I made myself say, “You don’t have to worry about me,” in a neutral voice. “Is it all right if we go now?”

  “You can go, but I want to ask Ms. Wade a few questions before she leaves. For the sake of corroboration.”

  Kerry looked at me. I said, “I can use some fresh air. I’ll wait for you in the car.”

  She nodded, and McFate gave her one of his charming smiles, and I beat it out of there before I did or said something stupid. There were a couple of reporter types hanging around out front, but they didn’t seem to know who I was; I glared at them the way cops do and they didn’t bother me. I walked up to the end of the block, letting the wind and the steady drizzle cool me off. When I came back to the car I sat behind the wheel, with the window rolled down a little, and watched the clock in the grocery store window.

  Five more minutes passed before Kerry came out. She said as she slid in beside me, “Whew, am I glad to get out of there!”

  “Did McFate give you a hard time?”

  “Not really. But the way he kept looking at me, I was afraid he might try to make a pass. What’s the matter with him, anyway?”

  “He’s an asshole,” I said, and let it go at that.

  We didn’t take a shower together that night. We didn’t do anything together that night, primitive or otherwise. The combination of the murder and McFate had knocked out all of my amorous feelings and intentions, and Kerry wasn’t much interested either. So we said good night in the car in front of her building, and I drove home and crawled into bed alone.

  Some day, all right. A real prizewinner.

  Chapter Six

  I was up at eight-thirty in the morning, and showered and shaved and in the kitchen for breakfast before nine. The thought of eggs in any form, particularly accompanied by grapefruit, started an unpleasant burbling in my stomach. So I hunted around in the refrigerator for something else nonfattening to eat, but all I could come up with were celery stalks and carrots and some yogurt that Kerry had bought for me. Pineapple yogurt, the container said, fruit on the bottom. Yeah, I thought, but not on the bottom of my stomach. I put it back into the fridge, along with the celery stalks and the carrots, and opened a can of V-8 juice. I could get some solid food into me later on.

  The telephone rang while I was pouring coffee. I went into the bedroom and hauled up the receiver, and Eberhardt said, “Find any more bodies this morning? Or is the day still too young?”

  “Not funny,” I said. “You heard about last night, huh?”

  “Me and a few million others. You ought to start reading the papers regularly; you get mentioned in them enough these days.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I don’t read them. Front-page stuff this time?”

  “Sure. A guy gets hacked up with a samurai sword-that’s good copy. In particular when he’s a big noise in the local branch of the Yakuza.”

  “How many times did my name get taken in vain?”

  “Only once. Not much ink at all. Just that you and Kerry found the body.”

&nb
sp; “Kerry got mentioned, too? Damn McFate. I thought he might at least leave her out of it.”

  “Leo likes to see his name in the papers,” Eberhardt said. “He figures everybody else does too.”

  “Listen, Eb, I’m not mixed up in Simon Tamura’s murder. Or with the Yakuza. I went to those baths to talk to one of the employees-not Tamura, another guy-on a minor domestic case.”

  “Did I ask?”

  “I just wanted you to know.”

  “Well, I thought it was something like that. I figured you’d have told me if you were messing with anything as big-league as the Yakuza. Besides, you’re not dumb enough to take Kerry into a place that fronts for a gang of thugs.”

  “Thanks-I think.”

  “Don’t mention it. You going to be busy today?”

  “Some. Why?”

  “I bought a desk and a chair and a couple of other things yesterday,” he said. “They’re being delivered this afternoon. I thought maybe you’d want to help me move things around.”

  “What time is the delivery?”

  “Sometime after two.”

  “Well, that ought to work out okay. My stuff’s coming out of storage and over to the office around that time. I should be able to get there by then.”

  “Good,” he said. “Looking forward to it, paisan.”

  That makes one of us, I thought.

  I dialed Kerry’s number, to find out if she’d read the newspaper thing too, but there was no answer. She’d already left for Bates and Carpenter, the ad agency where she worked.

  So I took the directory out of the nightstand drawer, looked up the number of the registrar’s office at City College and then punched it out. The woman who answered said that Nelson Mixer was still out sick. I found Mixer’s home number, and when I called it a man’s voice came on after five rings. He sounded a little miffed, as if I had interrupted him at something. Sleeping, maybe, or taking medicine; his voice was hoarse. I asked him if he was Nelson Mixer and he said he was and I said, “I wonder if you’d be interested in purchasing some aluminum siding at a premium price-” and he hung up on me. I grinned as I cradled the receiver. Now I knew where to find him this morning.

  I drank my coffee in the kitchen, trying not to listen to the empty noises my stomach was making. Then I spent ten minutes doing the exercises the muscle therapist had given me to strengthen the damaged motor nerve in my left arm and shoulder. The same gunman who had put Eberhardt in a coma for seventeen days back in August had pumped a bullet into me, too. I had had a lot of stiffness in the arm for a while, and I still had some off and on, particularly after any kind of physical activity. But it wasn’t so bad any more, as a result of time and the muscle therapy. Most days I had no pain or stiffness at all and I was reminded of the trouble only when I tried, without thinking, to use the arm for something. I still had a three-or four-percent impairment, according to the therapist. The goal was one percent, which was as close to normal as the old wing was going to get.

  My watch said it was just nine-thirty when I shrugged into my overcoat and put on my hat and left the flat. I hoped Nelson Mixer had something useful to tell me. As things stood, with Ken Yamasaki unavailable to me for the time being, the only other name on my list was Edgar Ogada. And I wanted very much to find out the identify of Haruko Gage’s secret admirer. Not because it was any big deal; it wasn’t. Just because I wanted my last solo investigation, my last little fling, to be a successful one.

  Nelson Mixer’s residence turned out to be a small house on 46th Avenue, just off Balboa and not far from either Sutro Heights Park or the ocean. It was one of the stucco rowhouses that a builder named Dolger had strung out over the avenues in the 1930s-the kind Malvina Reynolds had referred to as “ticky-tacky houses” in her sixties protest song, “Little Boxes.” Each one attached to its neighbors, like links in a giant chain, with a little patch of ground in front and a garage under the living room windows. When the garage was open it would look like a gaping mouth under a couple of bulging rectangular eyes.

  Two things set Mixer’s house off from those of his neighbors. One was the fact that it was painted a bilious urine-yellow color uncompli-mented by bright green trim. The other was the Christmas tree prominently displayed in one of the front windows: pink-flocked, decorated with silver tinsel and sparkly blue ornaments. If there had been a city ordinance against visual pollution-and there ought to have been-they could have slapped Mixer with a hell of a fine.

  The curb in front was empty; I put my car there and stepped out into the same kind of light, steady drizzle we had had last night. December in San Francisco usually brings decent weather, but not this year. It had been raining off and on for three weeks now and I was pretty sick of it. I was starting to feel like an overwatered houseplant: much more of this and I would start to rot.

  I ran up the yellow stucco staircase to one of those burglar-proof wrought iron gates that protected the front stoop. It kept me standing out in the rain while I pushed the doorbell and waited for somebody to respond. I waited a good minute before that happened; then the door clicked open and eased inward and a face peered at me around the edge. It was a white face, sort of vulpine, topped with a wild shock of red hair that clashed painfully with the yellow walls and green trim. It peered at me being rained on outside the gate, blinked a couple of times, and poked out a little farther from behind the door on a long scrawny neck.

  “Yes?” the face said warily. “What do you want?”

  “Are you Nelson Mixer?”

  “I am. Who are you?”

  I told him who I was and what I did for a living. His eyes got wide and popped a little, as if I’d told him I was Benito Mussolini come back from the dead; the white skin turned even whiter. He yanked the door open all the way, more a reflex action than anything else, and I was looking at the rest of him. There wasn’t much to see, really. He was about five-six and weighed in at a strapping one-twenty, all of which was encased in a royal blue bathrobe with gold-leaf dragons emblazoned on it. He could have been thirty-five or he could have been forty-five. He could also have been slightly screwball, if the way he was gawping at me was any indication.

  “Private detective?” he said. “My God! What do you want? Who sent you?”

  “Nobody sent me, Mr. Mixer. I-”

  “Clara’s father? Is he the one?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know anyone named-”

  “Well, you tell him I never touched her. You hear me? It’s all a pack of lies. All I did was tutor her.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Tutor, tutor. You know what tutor means, don’t you?”

  “Of course I know what-”

  “There was never anything between Clara and me. No physical contact of any kind. I don’t even find her attractive; I’ve never liked women with big behinds. Tell him that, the old fool.”

  “Look, Mr. Mixer…”

  “Nellie!” a woman’s voice called from somewhere inside the house. “Nellie, what are you doing out there?”

  “Oh my God,” Mixer said. He glanced over his shoulder, looked back at me again. Sudden guilt had spread like jam over his vulpine features.

  “ Nell ie?”

  He half-turned. “Stop that yelling!” he yelled. “I’ll be there in a minute, Darlene.”

  “It’s pretty wet out here,” I said when his attention returned to me. “How about buzzing me in so we can talk?”

  “Hah,” he said. “I don’t care if you drown out there.”

  “You’re all heart. Who’s Darlene?”

  “What?”

  “Your friend inside. Darlene.”

  “She’s not my friend,” he said quickly. “She’s one of my students.”

  “I called up City College a while ago,” I said. “They told me you were too sick to teach today.”

  “Too sick to leave the house. Yes, that’s right. I was just, ah, tutoring Darlene.”

  “In your bathrobe?”

  He looked down at himself as if he’d
forgotten he was wearing the robe. Little red splotches appeared on his cheeks; they matched the color of his hair. “I, ah… that is, I… coffee, I spilled coffee on myself while we were…” He quit sputtering all of a sudden, drew himself up, bared his teeth in a foxy snarl, and said, “I don’t have to explain anything to you. Go away. Go tell Clara’s father I’ll sue him if he doesn’t stop harassing me.”

  “I’m not working for Clara’s father,” I said, getting it out fast because he had started to shut the door. “I don’t know anybody named Clara. I’m here about Haruko Cage.”

  The door stayed open about halfway. “Who?”

  “Haruko Gage. She’s been-”

  “Who the hell is Haruko Gage?”

  “You don’t remember her, is that it?”

  “Nellie!”

  “No,” Mixer said, “I don’t remember her. Who is she?”

  “A former student of yours. You asked her to move in with you about three years ago.”

  “I did what?”

  “Or don’t you remember that either?”

  “Nellie!”

  “Haruko Gage? Good God,” he said, “not Haruko Fujita? The little Japanese girl who was studying art?”

  “Probably; Gage is her married name. Or do you routinely ask Japanese girls to live with you?”

  That got me another foxy snarl. “You can’t talk to me like that. I won’t allow it.”

  “You can’t let me stand out here in the rain, but you’re doing it anyway. Haruko Gage has been receiving anonymous presents in the mail-expensive jewelry, one with a love note. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “Nel-lie!”

  “Goddamn it,” Mixer said. “Be quiet, Darlene!”

  “Well, hurry up, can’t you?” the woman’s voice called. She sounded young. “I’m getting cold sitting around here like this. Besides, I can’t get your stupid movie camera to work right.”

  The red flush came back into Mixer’s face, dragging the guilt along with it. He said something that sounded like “Gah,” jerked his head back, and slammed the door.

  I shoved my finger against the doorbell button, kept it there. At the end of thirty or forty seconds the door opened and Mixer said, “Go away, leave me alone! I’ll call the police!” And the door banged shut again.