Quicksilver nd-11

by Bill Pronzini

  “Did he ever speak of a woman he knew at Tule Lake named Chiyoko Wakasa?”

  “Who? No. Chiyoko… that’s Haruko’s middle name…”

  “Does your father also know that?”

  “I guess so. I think I told him once, but-”

  “All right, Edgar,” I said. “Go on over to the house. Wait for your uncle there.”

  “Why should I? Say, what’re you doing here, anyway? I don’t-”

  “Now, Edgar!”

  I caught hold of his arm and turned him and gave him a push toward the house. I did not like getting rough with him, but there was no time for explanations; I’d wasted enough time already. And I wanted him out of the way when I went after his father.

  I leaned into the car and shut off the engine and the headlamps and then got my flashlight. When I came out with it Edgar was standing twenty feet away in the rain, staring at me. But he wasn’t making any moves in my direction. I quit looking at him, pivoted away from the car, and hurried across toward the lighted greenhouse.

  If anything, the rain was coming down harder now, chill against my bare skin. Ahead, diagonally in front of the greenhouse door and some distance away from it, I could see Mr. Ogada’s pickup truck. Crumpled fender, broken headlight-some of the hard evidence the police would need, because the damage had to have happened when he ran down and killed Kazuo Hama.

  I had enough facts now to make reasonable guesses at the rest. Tamura and Masaoka and Hama had been the three boys who’d raped Chiyoko Wakasa at Tule Lake. Mr. Ogada had been the boy who’d heard her cries and chased the others off-Chiyoko’s friend, and probably in love with her. He hadn’t done anything about the three rapists at the time; maybe he hadn’t had a good look at them either in the dark, maybe he only suspected who they were. Or maybe he was afraid.

  After the war he’d lost touch with Chiyoko. It was probable he hadn’t even known of her death; or that it had taken place in the same town where Kazuo Hama lived, and that Hama had realized he was partly to blame and had tried to salve his guilty conscience by erecting a mausoleum for her remains. “There the wicked cease from troubling and the weary be at rest.” I thought I understood that now, too. It hadn’t just been meant for Chiyoko Wakasa; Hama had meant it for himself as well. She had been the weary-he had been the wicked whose troubling would also one day cease. And now, all these years later, it had.

  So Mr. Ogada had met someone else and gotten married and had a son named Edgar and started a wholesale nursery business. And Hama and Tamura and Masaoka had gone on with their lives over the next thirty-five years. And Chiyoko Wakasa might have remained a fading memory for all of them if a number of things hadn’t happened to freshen it, to slowly turn it into an obsession in Mr. Ogada’s mind.

  If Edgar hadn’t met and started dating Haruko, who looked enough like Chiyoko to be her sister. If Mr. Ogada’s wife hadn’t died suddenly and left him lonely and depressed. If he hadn’t somehow found out about Chiyoko’s suicide, and why she had commited the act, and where she was buried. If he hadn’t made up his mind to belatedly avenge her rape and her death. If he had not begun to confuse Chiyoko and Haruko in his mind, to believe that Haruko was some sort of reincarnation of the dead woman he had once loved.

  Three murders. The presents to Haruko, the last three taken off the victims and offered not just as tokens of his love but as symbols of his vengeance. And now the kidnapping, because he must believe with all his heart that she really was Chiyoko, and he loved her, and he wanted her with him…

  I passed between the pickup and the outer corner of the greenhouse, on my way to the door. The wind-hurled rain had begun to sting harder, and I realized that it was turning into hail. The pellets rattled like gravel against the fiberglass roof and walls of the greenhouse. With that sound and the shriek of the wind, there was no way I could hear anything that might be going on inside.

  I paused at the door anyway, to find out if it was still locked. It was. Then I moved on to the adjoining greenhouse, stopped at that door and tried it. Also locked. But it was set into a wooden frame, which in turn was set into the sheet-metal front of the shed, and when I tugged on the knob the door moved loosely against its latch.

  The hail kept rattling down; I could feel it smacking off my head, some of the pellets sliding inside the collar of my coat and cold along my neck. If I couldn’t hear anything from out here, I thought, neither could Mr. Ogada hear anything from inside. I stepped back, set myself, and kicked the door hard and flat-footed next to the latch.

  It was not much of a lock and it gave immediately and the door went slapping inward. I went in after it a couple of paces-and it was like entering Chiyoko Wakasa’s mausoleum all over again. The smell was the same, only magnified: hundreds of flower blossoms sending out their cloyingly sweet fragrances, roses dominating. Funeral smell, death smell. Bile pumped into my throat. I had to swallow two or three times to keep from gagging.

  I stood motionless, straining to see in the darkness. The fiberglass walls on my right showed some of the light in the adjoining greenhouse; but the panels were opaque, and the light made them gleam dully like a wall constructed of iridescent squares. I could make out the door over there, just barely, enough to tell that it was shut. But I could not see much between it and where I was-faint shapes and shadows, some of them bulky against the deeper black. I was going to have to use the flashlight if I wanted to get over there without breaking my neck or making enough noise to override the sound of the hail and alert Mr. Ogada.

  I got out my handkerchief, used it first to wipe the wetness off my face, then covered the flash lens with it. When I switched the thing on, the diffused beam let me see some of the flowers: rose bushes in long rows, narcissus and daisies in clay pots, beds planted with a white-blooming bush I didn’t recognize. The beam also showed me that the way to the connecting door was like an obstacle course; most of the available ground space was occupied with flowers, tools, hoses like coiled green snakes.

  It took me three or four minutes to cover a distance of no more than forty yards. When I neared the connecting door I shut the flash off and eased up the rest of the way in darkness. The constant drum of hail had slackened now. I pressed my ear against the door, but I still couldn’t hear anything. What was going on in there?

  I got my hand around the door knob and rotated it slowly. It turned all the way, made a faint click; this one wasn’t locked. All right. I held it that way for a few seconds, still listening, still hearing nothing. Then I took a breath and inched the door open until I could look past the edge of it.

  At first all I could see was the back wall of that greenhouse, where the sprinkler valves were; benches close by strewn with potting soil in sacks and trays, benches farther away jammed with already potted plants. I opened the door wider, moving with it, looking the opposite way around its edge. And I saw them then, both of them, down along the same wall beyond a wheeled cart loaded with more plants.

  He’d made a kind of bed for her, or maybe it was an altar: blankets draped over fifty-pound sacks of the potting soil. She was lying on it, supine but half on one side, dressed in a dirt-smudged white pullover and a dark skirt, one shoe off and one shoe on like My Son John in the nursery rhyme. Not moving, just lying there. From this distance I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not.

  Mr. Ogada was sitting on a rickety wooden chair near her, his head bowed as if in prayer, his eyes squeezed shut. He seemed shrunken, much older than he was. The naked roof lights made the skin of his face look waxy, like that of a corpse.

  I stepped out around the door and started toward him, moving silently on the balls of my feet. But I’d only gone five feet when some sense or other warned him. His head jerked up, he saw me, and a single convulsive moment brought him onto his feet.

  I stopped walking. He stared at me without recognition, said something in Japanese. Then he realized who I was, or maybe just that I was a Caucasian, and he said in English, “Why are you here? I don’t want you here. Go away.”r />
  “No, Mr. Ogada,” I said. “I’ve come for Haruko.”

  “There is no one here by that name.”

  “Her name is Haruko.”

  “No. She is Chiyoku.”

  “I know Chiyoko,” I said.

  “How do you know her?”

  “I know she’s dead, Mr. Ogada.”

  “No,” he said, and shook his head. “No.”

  “Is Haruko dead too? Did you hurt her?”

  “Hurt her?” he said. “How could I harm such beauty? They harmed her, not I.” A string of words in Japanese. Then, “Chiyoko, Chiyoko.” His face was scrunched up now, as if he were about to weep.

  I took a tentative step; he didn’t move. “Her name is Haruko Gage,” I said. “You kidnapped her, you brought her here against her will. I have to take her back to her husband.”

  “No,” and there was more force behind the word this time. “She has no husband. She has only me.”

  “Chiyoko Wakasa is dead; she has no husband. Haruko Gage is alive and married.”

  “No!”

  Another step. And another. I was almost to the wheeled cart now, less than thirty feet from where he stood blocking my way to Haruko.

  “Stop,” he said. “You must not come any closer.”

  I had no choice. Step. Step.

  “You must not go near her!” And he darted away to his left, caught up a pair of shears propped against the inner wall, and came toward me.

  There was not going to be any reasoning with him; his eyes had turned strange, feverish, with too much of the whites showing, and he moved with a kind of plodding implacability. I moved, too, but not to meet him; laterally to the nearest of the benches and slightly behind it. Only ten feet separated us now. He held the shears in both hands and cocked back under his right ear, so that the blades pointed straight at my face.

  He was less than five feet away when he made his lunge. But I was ready, my hands down on the bench, touching one of the soil trays, and as soon as he slashed at me with the shears I swept the tray up and hurled it at him.

  It hit him on the collarbone and the soil showered upward over his face, blinding him momentarily, throwing him off-stride. Leaving him vulnerable. I was already around the bench, and I swung a forearm at the exposed side of his head, like a football player taking a cheap shot at an opponent. It caught him solidly on the cheekbone, knocked him off his feet and bounced him sideways into the wheeled cart. The cart buckled, spilling plants and more dirt; one of the clay pots struck him a glancing blow and opened a gash on the back of his skull. He thrashed a little, flopped over onto his side, then quit moving altogether. But he was alive; I could see a vein throbbing in his neck when I moved over to stand above him.

  I stayed there for a few seconds, not liking myself much, even though I’d had to do what I’d done. I had not wanted to hurt him. He’d been hurt enough already; too many people had been hurt enough.

  Haruko, I thought. I went to where she lay. Unconscious but breathing more or less normally; no marks on her anywhere that I could see. I wondered if he’d given her something, some sort of drug, but that didn’t seem likely. I got down on one knee and chafed her hands and face, and pretty soon she began to stir. Fainted, I thought, that must be it. An overload of fear and out cold in self-defense.

  I kept rubbing her hands and face. She groaned, and the muscles around her eyes rippled; the eyes popped open, blind with terror at first. Then they focused on me, recognized me. She made a choked sound and sat up and threw her arms around my neck, crying.

  I held her for a time, until she started to quiet, then took a gentle grip on her arms and eased her away. She said thickly, “God, he

  … where is he? He…”

  “Sshh, he can’t hurt you now. He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  “No. He… I thought he was going to. He’s crazy… he kept saying things in Japanese, calling me Chiyoko, telling me he loved me

  …” She shuddered. More tears brimmed in her eyes.

  I felt big and awkward and faintly sick at my stomch. I could still smell the cloying, funeral scent of the flowers in the other greenhouse, or thought I could. The damp earth, too. And the rain outside. And the sour-sweat stench of fear.

  “He… he was waiting for me,” she said, “when I started home this morning. He said Edgar wanted to see me. He was acting funny but I didn’t… I never thought… I always liked him, he was always so nice to me… He brought me here, in here, and locked the doors and started talking to me like that… Chiyoko, Chiyoko… he made me lie down here…” Another shudder. “I thought… I thought he was going to rape me…”

  Ah Jesus. “No,” I said, “no, that’s the last thing he would have done to you.”

  I got her on her feet, and when I turned her against me, bracing her body, she saw him lying there and made that little choking sound again. I looked at him too, in spite of myself, before I led her out of the greenhouse. Small and old and crumpled, with a thin trickle of blood on his head where the falling pot had struck him. A living corpse, with that waxy skin. Not even a man anymore.

  Poor bastard, I thought, poor lost soul. Responsible for so many crimes, too many crimes-three murders, kidnapping, others. But were any of them really his fault? They would not have happened if it hadn’t been for that other crime, the one he’d committed by accident so long ago. The crime that had put him in a prison and exposed him to the kind of violence such places breed. The crime that wasn’t a crime, except in one of those lunatic times called war.

  The crime of being born Japanese.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Tuesday was another wet, dreary day. I spent most of it at the Hall of Justice and in the San Mateo County police station in Redwood City, making statements, answering questions. And finding out a few things, too.

  Mr. Ogada had been taken to the county medical facility, where he was under treatment and under police guard. Edgar had gone with him last night; he was probably still there today. Haruko had as much as said she thought Edgar was irresponsible, but she’d been at least partially wrong. He had a fine sense of responsibility when it came to his father. He was a good kid; he’d get through this, and do a lot of growing up as a result of it.

  After a night under heavy sedation, Mr. Ogada had been more or less coherent today and the cops had got enough out of him to pretty much substantiate how I’d pieced it together. He hadn’t known Chiyoko Wakasa was dead until this past summer; it had been Simon Tamura who’d told him, and who’d also told him where she was buried, when they ran into each other at the Feast of the Lanterns festival. Tamura had known of her suicide because he and Kazuo Hama had still been in touch back in 1947.

  The news that Chiyoko was dead, coupled with his seeing Haruko again that same day, had been the catalyst that had broken Mr. Ogada down. He’d gone to Petaluma and got into the mausoleum and begun filling it with flowers. He’d sent Haruko the first two presents, the diamond pendant and the saphhire earrings, thinking of her as Chiyoko. But in his rational moments he understood Chiyoko was dead, that the gang rape by Tamura and the other two had been the cause. He’d known all along that they were the ones who’d attacked Chiyoko that night in 1945, but at the time he’d been too afraid to snitch on them. Guilt began to gnaw at him, until the idea came that he must avenge her.

  Tracking down his victims hadn’t been difficult; he already knew where to find Tamura, and that Hama lived in Petaluma, and asking questions in the Japanese community had turned up Masaoka. Masaoka had been the first to die, struck on the head with a rock on Pillar Point. Then Kazuo Hama, run down by the pickup truck. Then, because Tamura had been the leader of the trio at Tule Lake, because Mr. Ogada hated Tamura the most, he’d gone to the bathhouse and hacked him to death with the samurai sword.

  That should have been the end of it, but of course it wasn’t. He’d avenged Chiyoko, he’d proven his love, but he still couldn’t have her. On Sunday night he had gone to Cypress Hill Cemetery again, as he did periodi
cally to bring new flowers, sneaking in over the back fence after the place was closed so the caretakers wouldn’t see him, and he’d found me just emerging from the mausoleum; he couldn’t have Chiyoko there either, not any more. But he had to have her; it was an obsession now. And so on Monday morning he’d gone to Haruko’s house, and seen her board the bus downtown, and followed the bus, and waited until she was finished with her appointment, and then talked her into coming with him to his nursery.

  It was a pathetic story. Most crimes of passion and madness were pathetic when you stripped them down to their fundamentals, but that didn’t make them any less painful or any less tragic for everyone concerned.

  Haruko was back with Artie, and presumably they would lead a normal life from now on. The Hama family in Petaluma would have to try to live down what their father had done a long time ago in a place he should not have been; and sooner or later, they would. Edgar Ogada would take over the nursery. The Yakuza would install another head of its mizu shobai operations in San Francisco, if they hadn’t already done so. I would share my new office with Eberhardt — for a while, at least-and there would be new jobs and the old ones would become memories, some good and some, like this one, very bad. Life goes on.

  But that didn’t make it easy to take on days like today. Wet, dreary days. Dull days. Painful days. Days where the highlight was watching Leo McFate eat a little crow. That had been nice, but it was a transitory thing: he’d digest the crow and pretty soon he’d forget he had ever eaten it and he’d be the same old Leo McFate. I had a hunch we would lock horns again one of these days.

  I was feeling low when I got home at five-thirty. The only call on my answering machine made me feel even lower: Kerry, saying she’d be late, she had another meeting that was probably going to last until around seven. Why didn’t I go ahead and have dinner without her.

  Well, damn. I went into the kitchen, because the mention of dinner had set my stomach to growling in its empty, plaintive way, and opened the refrigerator and looked inside.