Woman with a Blue Pencil
Page 1
Also by Gordon McAlpine
Hammett Unwritten (as Owen Fitzstephen)
Published 2015 by Seventh Street Books®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
Woman with a Blue Pencil. Copyright © 2015 by Gordon McAlpine. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover images: paper © siloto / Shutterstock; scribble © Can Stock Photo, Inc. / maryloo; man © Media Bakery; hand © Babii Nadiia / Shutterstock
Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke
Inquiries should be addressed to
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
McAlpine, Gordon, author.
Woman with a blue pencil : a novel / Gordon McAlpine.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-63388-088-7 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-63388-089-4 (e-book)
1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3563.C274W66 2015
813'.54—dc23
2015023614
Printed in the United States of America
To my compañero, Roy Langsdon
CONTENTS
THE REVISED—CHAPTER ONE
THE REVISED—CHAPTER TWO
THE REVISED—CHAPTER THREE
THE REVISED—CHAPTER FOUR
THE REVISED—CHAPTER FIVE
THE REVISED—CHAPTER SIX
THE REVISED—CHAPTER SEVEN
THE REVISED—CHAPTER EIGHT
THE REVISED—CHAPTER NINE
Post Script
About the Author
December 7, 1941:
353 fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes launched from six aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy attack without warning the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing over 2,400 Americans, decimating the US Pacific fleet, and instigating America’s entrance to the Second World War.
February 19, 1942:
Executive Order 9066 authorizes local American military commanders to designate “exclusion zones,” in the USA from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” Along the Pacific coast, this results in the relocation to internment camps of 110,000 people of Japanese heritage, most US citizens.
August 30, 2014:
A dusty lockbox is found and removed from the attic of a house scheduled for demolition in Garden Grove, California. Inside the lockbox are three items. The first is a pulp spy thriller published in 1945 under the pen name William Thorne. The second is a sheaf of letters from the book’s editor, primarily addressed to its author, dating from 1941–1944. The last is an unpublished novella handwritten by the same author on 102 sheets of WWII-era, GI-issue writing paper, mud-splattered and bloodied in some spots. It is signed with the author’s real name, Takumi Sato, and is titled “The Revised.”
THE REVISED—CHAPTER ONE
By Takumi Sato
. . . he’ll never understand the nature of his sudden alienation, because he’s never known that he is a fictional character. He still doesn’t know. So how can he grasp what’s happened to him, that he’s been cut from a novel-in-progress, excised from his world, which from this point forward carries on around him even though it contains neither memory nor record of his ever having existed? In short, how can he understand that he is the abandoned creation of a conflicted author, whose tossing of typewritten pages into a trash can has not snuffed out everything and everyone written on them?
—Aldous Huxley, overheard in conversation
at Clifton’s Cafeteria, Los Angeles
On the evening of December 6, 1941, Sam Sumida shifted in his seat at the crowded Rialto Movie House in downtown Los Angeles. It was about a third of the way into the new picture, The Maltese Falcon, and on screen Humphrey Bogart knocked the gun from Peter Lorre’s hand and began slapping the smaller man silly. Sumida knew the scene was coming. He’d read the novel. In the past weeks, he’d read everything Hammett had ever written, having concluded, after a short period of research, that no other writer possessed either the background or the willingness to depict the PI business realistically. And, since the unsolved murder of Sumida’s wife, Kyoko, eleven months before, it had become critical to him that he discern some source from which to draw instruction in the art of detection. (All those How-to-be-a-Private-Eye primers had proved little more useful as practical manuals than the outdated, sanitized crime fantasies of S. S. Van Dine or the absurdly plotted puzzles of those famous lady-novelists from England.)
Hammett told it straight, Sumida believed.
And he needed some straight instruction. A PhD in Oriental Art History, which, until recently, he’d taught as a part-time instructor at three local colleges, hardly prepared him for work as a gumshoe. Before that, his mother and father, who’d emigrated from Nagasaki to Long Beach a year before he was born, had raised him to rely on modesty rather than bravado to get by in the white man’s world. This had worked well enough for the first thirty years of his life. Intelligence, wit, and an instinct for knowing just the right moment to gracefully leave his Caucasian colleagues to their private diversions had resulted in success in the art history field. He’d bought a small house in Echo Park—quite impressive for the son of a fisherman. But then somebody put a .22 slug in his wife’s brain and dumped her body into the harbor at San Pedro, stumping a disinterested LAPD in the process. So, now, Sumida, who’d come alone to the Rialto, watched Humphrey Bogart with a concentrated attention unlike that of others in the Saturday night crowd (most of whom were here either on dates or as respite from an afternoon spent shopping in the nearby garment or jewelry districts, Christmas 1941 being less than three weeks away). Sometimes, Sumida leaned so far forward, unconsciously straining toward the screen, that his face almost brushed against the coiffed head of the woman in the row ahead of his.
In this way, he noted the boldness with which Bogart’s Sam Spade put questions to even the most formidable adversaries . . . the heedless way Spade diverted questions when they were put to him, even by the cops . . . Spade’s seeming disregard for the possibility of failure. Of course, Sumida knew that studying fictional gumshoes had its limitations. But the cops had never wanted him around and the licensed PIs he’d subsequently hired, who consumed whatever cash he’d managed to save, likewise wanted him out of the way during their futile investigations. So Sam Sumida’s opportunities to learn were limited. Now, all that was left to him were fictions. But he did not lack for native intelligence, could converse with almost anyone in a manner simultaneously persistent and polite, was as physically courageous as the next guy, and possessed self-defense skills, developed in boyhood, which far exceeded those of most. Additionally, and most importantly, his motivation was personal.
Still, quitting his teaching positions to devote all his time to investigating Kyoko’s murder may have been rash.
His aunt and uncle had told him it had been mad.
But, truly, what else mattered?
Unfortunately, Sumida had made lit
tle or no progress in the weeks since he’d taken up the investigation. He’d begun, reasonably enough, by gathering copies of the police report and the scattershot notes from the three PIs he’d hired and fired, settling down for the better part of a weekend with the documents spread on his dining room table like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Might he discern a lead among the summarized interviews and scrawled lists detailing Kyoko’s routines—a lead that had eluded the professionals? No. There was, of course, the “revelation” that for the final months of her life she had been carrying on an adulterous affair. Sumida had suspected this long before the LAPD confirmed it. Some nights, she hadn’t come home at all. So what else was he to think, particularly when she answered his increasingly passionate queries only with stubborn silence? Still, he never stopped loving her.
He hadn’t stopped yet.
He knew that for the past few years he’d been distracted with his work, flattered by offers to lecture at various colleges or to publish articles in journals. And he knew Kyoko’s life managing a dental office hadn’t been nearly so fulfilling for her. Now, he couldn’t imagine ever again taking the same egoistic pleasure in career accomplishments, a secondary reason he’d resigned his positions.
Immediately after the crime, the uncovering of her adultery naturally threw suspicion on Sumida (the cuckolded spouse is always the first suspect). But at the time of the murder Sumida had been in Berkeley at the University of California to give a series of visiting lectures on the art of the Edo period. Absent husband, the adulterous lover was next on the list of suspects. Who else had had access and potential motive? It was at this point that the investigations all hit dead ends. Both the police and the PIs got positive identifications of Kyoko from half a dozen hotel desk clerks in downtown LA (“Beautiful Oriental girl with a streak of white in her black hair”), but none of these desk clerks had been able to offer more than a cursory description of the man who’d been with her—just a six foot tall Caucasian of unspecified hair and eye color. The names signed in the hotel registers were always absurd fabrications: “Mr. and Mrs. G. Washington,” “Mr. and Mrs. A. Lincoln,” etc. Sumida later called again on the hotel desk clerks who’d recognized Kyoko, but he got nothing more from them than had the other investigators (except for admonitions that he should have kept better watch on such a woman). Canvassing additional downtown hotels, as well as inns and motor lodges up and down the coast from Malibu to Laguna Beach, he found no other desk clerks who recognized Kyoko.
Sumida’s next stop had been the scene of the crime, San Pedro. A harbor town with a racially mixed population (including many Japanese) and a chip on its shoulder as wide as the blue Pacific. The police report indicated the particular pier against which Kyoko’s body had washed up, though exactly where along the harbor she’d been shot and dumped was impossible to figure due to tides and the churning and stirring of so many commercial boats. When Sumida asked locals whether they remembered hearing a gunshot on the night of January 11—almost eleven months before—he was met only with incredulous expressions.
And now, on the big screen at the Rialto, Humphrey Bogart gave the pistol back to Peter Lorre, whom Bogart did not consider formidable enough even to pay the respect of keeping disarmed.
Such sublime confidence . . .
Did Sumida really think he could gain such qualities just from observing a movie detective—even a good one, like Spade?
No.
The truth was he’d come here, in large part, because he simply didn’t know what else to do with himself; tonight, the pain of yet another solitary dinner in what had been their kitchen had felt too much to bear, almost dangerous.
So this was the first movie he’d allowed himself since Kyoko’s murder. The first respite.
The detective-theme alleviated some of his guilt.
But he’d always loved movies of all kinds. Sure, he chose The Maltese Falcon because it might contain a detail of detective work that could be useful to his investigation. And he may have noted Spade’s techniques and mannerisms with more focus than did those around him. Nonetheless, he smiled with the rest of the audience when the ineffectual Peter Lorre aimed his recently returned pistol again at the bigger, tougher man, repeating his original demands. Bogart could disarm Lorre as easily as before, but now the chuckling gumshoe seemed charmed by the audacity of his diminutive opponent. Watching the movie made Sumida almost happy.
Then the black-and-white scene skidded and slipped sideways on the movie screen. For a moment, the sprockets on the film stock became visible, sliding up and off the screen with the last of the black and white images.
The screen became blindingly white. The rat-a-tat-a-tat of the spinning reels in the projectionist’s booth replaced the soundtrack.
The film had broken.
The projectionist shut the machine down, casting the theater into darkness.
Excerpt from a letter dated December 10, 1941:
. . . so, in light of last Sunday’s tragic events at Pearl Harbor, we must return your book proposal and opening chapters. Despite my initial enthusiasm, its publication is now impossible. While this is doubtless disappointing, I feel you cannot be much surprised. The world has changed. Even Marquand’s successful Mr. Moto series is bound to come to a screeching halt. Nonetheless, we believe you are a talented writer and we encourage you to further develop your craft.
Our accounting department will anticipate your immediate return of the $350 advance we sent with our most recent correspondence.
Sincerely,
Maxine Wakefield
Maxine Wakefield,
Associate Editor,
Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc.
P.S. If you were to consider revising your work to avoid the obvious issues, which would include cutting and replacing not only your Japanese hero Sumida but also the Caucasian villain, I would be willing to take a second look. Of course, I understand that this amounts to your writing a different book. But since you’ve completed only three chapters to date, your investment of time and effort have been relatively small and so re-envisioning may be a viable option for you, Mr. Sato.
Thinking aloud . . . Perhaps you could still employ an Oriental as your protagonist, a Korean or Chinese. I don’t mean to offend by suggesting that Oriental races are in any way interchangeable, but, frankly, what most fascinated me in your initial submission was the groundbreaking challenge of pulling off an Oriental protagonist in a popular genre. After all, as you likely already know, Earl Der Biggers’s Charlie Chan books do not actually feature Chan as the protagonist, and the same is true of Marquand’s Mr. Moto novels. These books remain Caucasian-centric, even if the crimes are ultimately “solved” by the secondary characters, Chan and Moto. So you may still have the opportunity to break new ground!
Now, even if you were to change your protagonist’s nationality, I believe current events dictate that your new Korean or Chinese hero be far more American/Apple pie than your discarded character, the grieving Nisei academic, Sumida. Actually, you might even position your new Oriental hero against Japanese Fifth Columnists. Yes! Patriotism will sell in the coming period. A spy novel . . . Just musing here, you understand. These are your decisions. I would never tell an author what to write, particularly a young and talented one just starting to make his way. However, I want you to know that if you chose to write something along the lines I’ve outlined above, I’d be delighted to see it and just possibly we’d be able to work together after all.
Whatever you decide, best of luck.
P.P.S. One last thought is that you’d need to set the book firmly in our current, post-Pearl Harbor world to give more immediate context to your new protagonist’s challenges.
Excerpt from chapter one of The Orchid and the Secret Agent, a novel by William Thorne
Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1945
. . . Jimmy Park slipped his .45 into one pocket of his raincoat, though he suspected his Taekwondo fighting skills would render use of the weapo
n unnecessary. Besides, the modus operandi of Jap agents here in Los Angeles tended more toward sneaking and plotting than man-to-man confrontation. They were generally too weak to settle things physically, unlike real Americans. And even when they did put their inferior Karate techniques to use, it still remained all about deception and unruly kicking. Jimmy Park was of Korean ancestry but, having been raised in Glendale, California, among whites, he was as American as they came—with one exception: he had learned Taekwondo at a tiny dojang on Brand Boulevard from a kwan jang nim, or grandmaster, of Korean fighting. Like Jimmy and his parents, the grandmaster had arrived on these shores before the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924. Now, Jimmy was nearly a Taekwondo Master himself. Nonetheless, his heroes were American boxers: Jack Dempsey was his favorite. And the Negro Joe Louis also inspired him, as Jimmy was not prejudiced. In any case, his own lightning fast hands and feet had proven more than sufficient on many occasions.
Still, these sneaky Fifth Columnists, who smiled one moment and then stabbed you in the heart the next, were dangerous, in the manner of night-crawling scorpions. Their brutal, decades-long occupation of Park’s ancestral Korean peninsula was bad enough. But Pearl Harbor truly indicated the Jap nature. A surprise attack . . . Jimmy grieved for all those sailors’ bodies entombed in the sunken USS Arizona. He wasn’t ever going to forget. Or forgive.
He reached for his hat but was interrupted by a familiar rap at the front door of his comfortable Echo Park bungalow. It was Sergeant Joe Lucas of the LAPD, who often stopped by Jimmy’s house on his way home from work to share a snort of his Korean pal’s good Templeton rye.
Jimmy Park opened the door.
“What’ya got your coat on for?” the youthful, blue-eyed Lucas asked, stepping past his friend and straight into the house. “You can’t go out in this rain now that I’m here for company.”
“You’re dripping everywhere,” Jimmy observed.