The Big Dive

by Bruce Most

  I didn’t believe this, but I was trying to comfort Ellen and head off any thoughts that might lead her to the ugly truths I’d already uncovered.

  “Then how does the blackmail note fit into this?” she asked.

  “We have no evidence it’s a blackmail note, Ellen,” I said.

  “It sure as hell wasn’t a party invitation,” she snapped. Color rose in her cheeks and she averted her eyes. “I’m sorry, I . . . ”

  “It’s okay, I understand.”

  The revelation shattered my previous theories about the newspaper clippings, Benedict’s possession of Raschke’s phone number, and Raschke insisting he’d never met Benedict. I’d speculated that Raschke was involved with the girl’s murder and Benedict was helping him stop the blackmailer.

  Or worse, Benedict was the blackmailer.

  The military records raised another possibility, one far more chilling.

  I know about November 23 1944 and the Jap woman.

  Benedict was the blackmail victim. What if he—not Raschke—was involved with the Jap woman’s death? Wrapping my head around that scenario was difficult. Despite the events at the pawnshop, I still wanted to believe in Benedict’s basic goodness. Being involved in a murder was beyond my comprehension. Yet his serving at the camp was another troubling revelation about someone I thought I knew. Being a blackmail target would explain the secret $3,500 bank loan. It would explain Benedict possibly committing burglaries to make money. What it wouldn’t explain was why someone, presumably the blackmailer, would kill the man paying him. It wouldn’t explain why the blackmail occurred seven years after the girl’s death, or whether Raschke’s death was connected to the camp.

  “What’s going on, Joe?” prodded Ellen. The color had drained from her cheeks.

  “Don’t make too much of this, Ellen. People don’t always lie for sinister reasons. Sometimes it’s for the most innocent of reasons.”

  At a stoplight on my way home, I pulled out the photograph of Raschke and the mystery man and pondered whether the bearded man held answers. Was he why Benedict kept the picture, and not Raschke? The challenge was how the hell I was going to find out.

  Chapter 21

  I decided to start with State Senator Crawford Kane. Mrs. Raschke claimed he, or his goons, likely killed her husband to stop his investigation of the McCarthy movement. Maybe he’d uncovered something shockingly incriminating. Something that got him killed. Yet Kane’s history with the professor went all the way back to the Japanese relocation camp. An increasingly suspicious history involving a murdered Jap skirt and my dead partner and maybe a bearded mystery man.

  When Crawford Kane wasn’t playing state legislator, he ran a greeting card company in Colorado Springs. According to his legislative office, he was in the Springs for the day. I headed south on the hour-long drive.

  Kane’s company occupied a large warehouse-like building on Mesa Road along the western edge of Colorado Springs, backing up against the slashing red sandstone hogbacks and knife-like spires of Garden of the Gods park. In the distance rose snow-crowned Pike’s Peak. Paula and I had visited the city park years ago, eating a picnic lunch and climbing around the eerie rock formations. My memory recalls it as a wonderful Sunday, before Derek Flemming was killed and my life changed forever.

  An American flag the size of a barn wall snapped over two-dozen cars parked in front of the building. A huge spread-winged American eagle burnt into a wooden sign, an American flag clutched in his talons, greeted me as I approached the building. Dark red letters spelled Eagle Greetings.

  Kane wasn’t in the office, but the receptionist pointed me to his home located seventy-five yards south of the building. Talk about never getting away from work.

  I hoofed over to the house, one of those new styles with the low asymmetrical roofline and a large picture window. A small woman with quiet eyes who identified herself as Mrs. Kane answered the door. I said I was a detective and needed to see her husband. She escorted me through the sprawling house onto a flagstone patio guarded by a full-grown husky sleeping under the shade of a table. The dog cracked an eyelid but never moved as we walked across the patio and out onto the yard.

  Mrs. Kane stopped beside a three-foot diameter concrete pipe protruding six inches above the mowed grass. A metal hatch was pulled back, like the turret hatch atop a Sherman tank, revealing a steel ladder descending into a deep hole. Mrs. Kane yelled down the hole. “Crawford, a detective to see you.”

  She strode off, not the least bit curious why a detective wanted to talk to her husband.

  Moments later the round-faced, boyish mug I’d seen in the newspaper popped out the hole. What the newspaper photos didn’t convey were the curly coppery hair and vivid blue eyes set against pale, almost translucent skin. Kane blinked in the sunlight as I leaned over to shake his hand. I needed a few minutes of his time concerning a murder investigation, I said. I used the same name I’d given Kim Raschke: Detective Lancaster from the Denver Police Department, and hoped like hell he’d never follow up.

  The blue eyes darkened. “Better come on down, then, detective.”

  I climbed down the ladder into a large square room of beige-painted concrete walls and green carpeting. Metal storage shelves lined two walls, loaded with canned goods, army rations, a Virginia ham, and several fifths of Gilbey’s Scotch. A storage room at first glance, until I spotted two bunk beds, a chemical toilet, a patterned easy chair, folding chairs, and a desk stacked with volumes of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and copies of the anti-communist newspaper Counterattack.

  “What is this place, a bomb shelter?” I asked.

  “That’s right! Designed it myself. The first one in the state, and I’d wager one of the best equipped in the nation.”

  Kane, dressed in a dark gray suit and standing a few inches shy of me, led a tour of the twenty-by-twenty-foot cement box, pointing with pride to a three-way portable radio, Sterno stove, Geiger counter, eight-inch thick walls, circulating water tank, protective clothing, face respirators, radiation charts, a toolbox, and two shotguns. All sealed off from the world by the thick steel cover he could close and lock.

  “A Russkie tank division couldn’t blow its way in here,” he asserted.

  I looked around the room again. “How long could you live down here?”

  “Two weeks for a family of four. Three if we stretch it. Our military will have them commies licked by then.”

  A lot of good that would do me. Paula and I didn’t even have a basement.

  Kane took down a fifth of Scotch, already opened, and offered a shot. I declined. On duty. He poured himself a healthy shot over ice in a cut-glass tumbler.

  “You really believe you’ll need this someday?” I asked.

  He smiled as though I were a child. “Oh, hell, yes, detective. Hell, yes. It’s a question of when, not if the commies hit us. They’re already crawling all over us. Look at that Raschke agent.” He tapped himself on his chest. “Only I’m going to be prepared. I’m going to stand on Stalin’s grave, not the other way around. You married, son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Children?”

  “A daughter.”

  “Good, good. We need our wives to raise wholesome citizens to become our Cold War warriors of the future. No deviants. That’s our best defense against the commies.”

  Shut me inside a hole like this for two weeks and I’d gladly open the hatch and embrace the nuclear radiation, I thought. “Don’t know if I could live down here for two weeks,” I confessed.

  “It’s not so bad,” he said. “The kids find it a great place to play after school. My wife stores her canned fruit down here. I think of it as the family room of tomorrow. Every red-blooded American family should have one on their property. I even use it as a part-time office, to get away from the noise and phones at the plant. So what’s this about a murder investigation, detective?”

  I dug out Benedict’s photograph and held it toward Kane. “Do you recognize this man?”
<
br />   He studied it for a moment, then said, “No, I don’t believe I do. Though a man in my position meets many people. He looks somewhat familiar, however. Who is he?”

  “Benedict Greene. He was the police officer murdered recently in the pawnshop.”

  Kane pointed his right forefinger toward the picture, the rest of his fingers wrapped around his glass of Scotch. A huge class ring winked at me. “Yes, that’s why he looks familiar. I attended his funeral, of course. I have a strong record of supporting law enforcement, as I’m sure you are aware.” Kane shook his head solemnly. “A vile crime, vile.” He paused and stared at me, puzzled. “I’m not clear why you’re here, however. Isn’t his killer dead?”

  “It appears that way,” I said evenly. “But now we’re investigating a possible link between the death of Officer Greene and the death of Marcus Raschke.”

  Kane recoiled. “Officer Greene, a communist? My god, if those damn Bolsheviks have infiltrated the Denver Police Department—”

  “No, no,” I rushed in to reassure him, envisioning cop-scandal headlines splattered across tomorrow’s front page along with my name. My fake name, anyway. “We don’t believe Officer Greene was connected in any way to the Communist party. But there is evidence he and Raschke knew each other, and the fact both men died violently—”

  “But that commie’s death was by his own carelessness,” asserted Kane. “Well-deserved, I would add.”

  “Regardless, we want to determine whether their deaths might be linked. Are you aware whether Officer Greene ever spoke to anyone in your office?”

  Kane shook his head. “About what?”

  “Perhaps to provide information on Raschke. One line of investigation is that Officer Greene may have been conducting a side investigation into the professor.”

  He snorted. “Many people were investigating the professor. I’ll question my aides, but I’m certain we didn’t obtain any information about Raschke’s commie links from the police. They’re kind of slow in that area, if you’ll excuse me for saying.”

  “Officer Greene’s investigation may not have been into Raschke’s communist ties.”

  His brow puzzled. “What then?”

  “It may have been connected to the professor’s administrative duties at Camp Amache.”

  Kane blinked hard and quickly turned away to refill his tumbler with a stiff belt of Scotch. “The Jap camp?” he said, his back to me.

  “Yes.”

  “Connected how?”

  “Raschke was involved in the investigation of the murder of a young Jap girl at the camp during the war. You were critical of the presence of the camp at the time.”

  Kane took a drink and faced me. “Yes. I remember her case. It was a disastrous mistake, bringing those Japs into the state. They were fifth columnists.”

  A tough job being a fifth columnist when you’re imprisoned in a desolate corner of the state, I thought. “Did you have any direct dealings with Marcus Raschke at the time of the investigation? In your capacity as a legislator?”

  “No. The U.S. military and local authorities ran the investigation. But I kept my eye on it.”

  “Any evidence not made public that suggests Raschke himself might have been involved with the girl’s death?”

  Kane took a belt but his eyes never left my face. “I didn’t like the man, but I have no reason to believe he was involved in her death. The evidence overwhelmingly pointed to those slant-eyed radicals.”

  “But none of them were prosecuted for her death, correct?”

  “That’s right. Why do you think I might have such evidence if it did exist?”

  “That’s the possible link I’m checking out. Perhaps Officer Greene uncovered evidence on Raschke from back then and brought it to your office, thinking you might be able to use it against him.”

  “I’ll check, but I don’t recall anything incriminating about Raschke and that murder investigation. It was the commie stuff that alarmed me.”

  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I sensed the senator being less than honest. Like politicians are.

  “Were you aware the professor was investigating the McCarthy movement?” I asked.

  “No,” he scoffed. “It was the other way around, detective. Raschke was the traitor, not Senator McCarthy.”

  “Where did you get the information for your assertion that Raschke was part of a commie cell planning to blow up schools, among other targets in the state?”

  “I can’t reveal that, detective. Powerful satanic forces and communist sympathizers remain in this state and this nation who would place loyal Americans in jeopardy of their lives if those Americans were exposed as our sources.”

  “Did you pass your information on Raschke on to Senator McCarthy?”

  Kane tipped his head up, as if taking an oath. “It is the duty of all righteous Americans to root out evil.”

  Yeah, like a rat roots out garbage.

  As I drove back to Denver, I considered the idea of going to Camp Amache. The camp was abandoned after the war, but I’d read that some internees stayed in the area rather than return to the West Coast after learning their homes and businesses were gone. Maybe some of them remembered details about the girl’s murder. Someone to give me insight into why Benedict had hidden yellowed clippings about her death and why he’d made a late-night visit to the camp’s former deputy administrator. Something to explain why State Senator Kane grew evasive when I brought up Raschke and the murdered girl.

  What I feared was what I might find there.

  Chapter 22

  My Studebaker rumbled along a two-lane highway in southeastern Colorado, past a scraggly landscape of prairie, patches of cottonwoods, and swirls of dust. Despite the dust, I kept my window down, the early afternoon air searing and dry for mid-May.

  “How much farther?” I asked the Japanese man sitting next to me.

  “Not far,” replied Henry Yamazaki around a chrome-bonded briar pipe, whose woody fragrance mixed with the sweet smell of sagebrush. His voice carried an unsettling calmness as he stared out the passenger window. I’d expected him to grow agitated or sad or angry as we drew near our destination.

  We were, after all, driving to where he once had been imprisoned.

  Yet I was the one growing agitated. Afraid that in my quest to solve Benedict’s murder I would unearth yet more betrayals and lies from the partner I once trusted.

  It didn’t help that I’d once again hauled out my assisting-homicide lie to Paula. Camp Amache was a full-day’s drive down and back from Denver, and Saturday was the only day I could go. She was not happy at my being away on a day off.

  Her anger boiled up again, forcing me to take a big risk.

  “Look, honey, if you want to complain to the brass, I understand,” I said. “Call Detective Bock on Monday. Luther Bock. He’s the one who requested my help. Remember him at Benedict’s funeral? Came up to me as we were leaving. The overweight slob who looks like he sleeps in his suit.”

  Paula didn’t indicate whether she’d call my bluff. If she did, I’d be in deep shit—with her and Bock. I just hoped my bluff was compelling enough to convince her not to bother, and to reinforce that my investigative work was the department’s doing, not my own demons.

  “We are almost there,” said Yamazaki as we passed through the spit of a town called Granada.

  I’d gotten Yamazaki’s name from the sheriff of Prowers County, Chad Crowell, whose shabby office was located in Lamar, ten miles west of the camp. Turned out Crowell was a deputy sheriff during the war and was familiar with the murder of the Japanese girl. Because her murder had occurred inside the military-controlled compound, the sheriff’s involvement was limited to investigative assistance conducted outside the camp. From what Crowell ascertained at the time, he figured it like the U.S. military—one of the hot-headed Jap boys in the camp. Maybe several of them. Yet there’d never been any arrests, he said, confirming what Raschke and Kane told me.

  “Coddled them Japs, is what
they did,” he snorted.

  He was puzzled why a Detective Lancaster came all the way from Denver to dig around in the seven-year-old murder of a Nip skirt. Tied to a current Denver murder investigation on which I could not comment, I explained. Was anyone living in the area who might be more familiar with the case?

  “Quite a few of them Japs from the camp still live around here,” he said, his large worn boots propped on his desk next to a paperback copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. “Don’t ask me why. You’d think they woulda hightailed it back to California or Oregon or better yet Japan or wherever the hell they came from to be with their own kind. But some of ’em was real shrewd, I’ll give ’em that. Went to work for the local farmers and business people after the war, and damned if some of ’em don’t own those farms and businesses.”

  Crowell directed me to Henry Yamazaki, one of the Japs who’d stayed. I found the man dressed in a white apron behind the counter of his small grocery store. Sheriff Crowell had said Yamazaki was in his fifties but he looked a decade older. Like Crowell, Yamasaki was puzzled why I was nosing into the girl’s death, and I gave him the same line I’d given Crowell. He thought for several moments, as if wrestling with whether he wanted to resurrect ghosts from his past. He agreed to talk, finally, but only on the condition we visited what remained of the camp.

  I protested that I didn’t need to see the camp. I just needed him to answer a few questions.

  “You will understand better what happened if you see,” he insisted. “Maybe our visit will help you determine who killed the young lady.”

  A knot of Herefords lazily watched us pass. Despite the heat, Yamazaki wore a high-collared charcoal-colored tunic, along with a small-peaked hat with a tiny bill. His shoulders slumped—from age or memories of the place, I couldn’t tell.

  “Where did you live before you came to the camp, Mr. Yamazaki?”

  Weathered hands took the pipe from his mouth but he kept staring off into the barren landscape. “I did not come to the camp,” he admonished. “I was forced here.”