Quicksilver (Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “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.

  I gave it up. I went back down the stairs and got into the car and used my handkerchief for a rain towel. Now I knew what Alice felt like after she’d spent some time in Wonderland; it was as if I had just done verbal battle with the Mad Hatter. Or, more appropriately, it seemed, the Mad Lecher.

  Cross Mixer off the list? What with Clara and Darlene and Christ knew how many others eager for his tutoring, it didn’t seem likely that he would be writing anonymous love notes and blowing a wad of money on fancy jewelry for Haruko Gage. Still, he was a screwball; and you never know what a screwball might do. I wanted at least one more session with Mixer, under different and more conventional circumstances, before I wrote him off.

  The thing about him that bothered me most was his ability to attract Haruko and Clara and Darlene and presumably a whole dewy-eyed and horny legion of college-age females. What the hell did any of them see in a scrawny, color-blind, unlovely specimen like him? Why would women even consider dropping their drawers for the Nelson Mixers of the world?

  It was nagging little questions like this that made you wonder about life’s fundamental equity.

  Somebody was tailing me.

  I spotted the car six blocks from Mixer’s house, when it followed me into a turn east on Geary Boulevard. White Ford about two years old, with one of those whip antennas that CB subscribers have on their vehicles. Two people in it, but that was all I could tell; they hung back pretty good and stayed in another lane and the rain made it difficult to see clearly through the rear window. I couldn’t make out the license plate either.

  Well, I was getting old. In my salad days, even though these guys appeared to be doing all the things you’re supposed to do to conduct a successful shadow job, I would have tumbled to them within five minutes of leaving Pacific Heights. My flat was where they’d picked me up, of course; I remembered seeing the Ford as I headed down Laguna to Geary. They’d hung around on 46th Avenue waiting for me to get done with Mixer, and now here they were again.

  But hell, the last thing I’d have expected today was a tail. The idea of it annoyed me—and made me a little uneasy. Who were they? What did they think they were going to find out by shagging me around the city?

  I swung over into the far left lane and made a left turn on 30th Avenue; drove past Presidio Middle School and turned right on Clement and went down to 25th Avenue and turned left again. The white Ford stayed with me all the way, still hanging back far enough so that I couldn’t get a look at the occupants or read the license plate. No doubt at all now that the Ford was there to keep me company.

  I drove straight down 25th at a nice easy pace and passed between the stone pillars that marked the entrance to Seacliff, one of San Francisco’s ritzier residential districts. Left on Scenic Way and left again on Seacliff Avenue, past a lot of elegant homes strung out along the cliffside and commanding panoramic views of the Golden Gate. The street forked after a few blocks, with the main branch blending into El Camino del Mar and leading up to Land’s End; Seacliff Avenue hooked to the right and dead-ended after about a block and a half. I stayed on Seacliff. The Ford was two blocks behind me as I veered that way.

  On my left were more houses and on my right was a parking area bounded by a long cyclone fence. Beyond the fence, a steep slope fell away to China Beach—a narrow inlet that had been a campsite for Chinese fishermen last century and now was a locally popular sunbathing spot. Nobody was down there today, in the rain and with the surf crashing heavy and white over the offshore rocks; the beach was all but invisible under the high tide. And the parking area was empty.

  I cut into the lot, made a fast U-turn, and slid out onto the street pointing the way I’d come. I had timed it right: the Ford had already veered in and slowed to a crawl, and there was no place for them to go. I got the license number and I got a good look at their faces as I drove by—making it obvious so they’d be sure to know I was on to them. Two men, big and tough-looking, the driver wearing a mustache and a startled look, the passenger with a nose like a blob of brownish putty.

  Both of them were Japanese.

  I kept on going past them, turned right on El Camino del Mar, went up the hill to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and drove past it and through the Lincoln Park Golf Course—a loop that took me back to Geary. There was no sign of the white Ford. Either they’d given it up on their own or they’d used the CB and whoever they’d called had told them to lay off. But this wasn’t going to be the end of it. I had a bad feeling that they would be back pretty soon, and maybe not just to follow me around.

  One word kept running around inside my head. It scared me some and made me nervous and puzzled the hell out of me because I had no idea of the why of it.

  The word was Yakuza.

  Chapter Seven

  I stopped at a service station on Geary and 25th Avenue and called Harry Fletcher, my contact at the local office of the Department of Motor Vehicles. I relayed the license number of the white Ford and asked him to run it through the computer and find out who the car was registered to. He said he’d do that as soon as he could, give him half an hour.

  I glanced at my watch as I hung up: a couple of minutes after eleven. Too early to head down to South San Francisco for a talk with Edgar Ogada; his father had told me Edgar wouldn’t be around until after noon sometime. Too early for lunch, too, but to hell with standing on ceremony. My stomach was yamme
ring for something its juices could go to work on. Funny thing about tension: sometimes it robs you of your appetite and sometimes it makes you ravenously hungry. The damned diet had tipped the scales to ravenous this time, Yakuza or no Yakuza.

  There were some good restaurants on outer Clement, only a few blocks away, so I drove over there and found a café I’d eaten in before. They had several things on the menu that looked inviting—steak sandwich, Reuben sandwich, bacon cheeseburger—but I girded myself and ordered cottage cheese and fruit with RyKrisp. I would have had the diet plate, which included a ground sirloin patty, but that made me think of red meat and the way Simon Tamura’s bloody corpse had looked there on the floor of his office. I wanted nothing to do with red meat for a while. I’d had enough bad dreams last night as it was.

  The cottage cheese and fruit weren’t bad, considering; at least they eased the hunger pangs. While I ate I tried to come up with an answer to why the Yakuza would have had me followed. Because I was the one who’d found Tamura’s body? Well, maybe. That, plus the fact that I was a private investigator, might have made them wonder what I’d been doing at the bathhouse; that part of it hadn’t been in the papers, evidently. But I had figured the killing for a vendetta job and so had McFate. If it was, why would the Yakuza be sniffing around me? And if it wasn’t, why not just brace me somewhere and ask me if I knew anything? Why the tail instead?

  All very mysterious and unsettling. And it got even more so when I used the café’s public phone to ring back Harry Fletcher at the DMV.

  The white Ford was registered to Kenneth Yamasaki, 2610 California Street, San Francisco.

  There was plenty of activity at the Ogada Nursery when I got there just past noon. Half a dozen vans and two pick-up trucks, some with the names of prominent florists painted on their sides, were pulled up on the blacktopped area fronting the greenhouses; and a mix of Caucasian and Oriental men were loading and unloading potted plants and flowers, clay pots, sacks of loam and mulch and fertilizer. They all seemed to be in a hurry, either because it was the lunch hour or because of the weather. The rain had stopped for the moment, but the dark threatening clouds to the west said it would begin again before long.

  I parked out of the way and wandered over to one of the workers and asked him if Edgar Ogada was around. He told me to go look in the greenhouse, and pointed to the first building in the nearest row.

  It was cold and damp inside the big, high-roofed enclosure, and smelled thickly and richly of moist earth and growing things. Ferns and other house plants filled it—rows upon rows of them, in beds and in pots on long benches or hanging from a latticework of wire strung horizontally some eight feet off the ground. The only person in evidence was Ogada Senior; he was back toward the rear, doing something with one of the valves that operated a sprinkler system.

  He looked at me without recognition when I reached him and said, “Afternoon, Mr. Ogada.” He appeared even more tired than he had yesterday; his eyes had the dull sheen of someone who has been burning a lot of midnight oil. “I was here yesterday afternoon to speak with your son.”

  “Hai, he said, and nodded. “Yes, I remember.”

  “Would Edgar be here now?”

  Another nod. “In the next shed ... So. Here he comes.”

  I half-turned to follow the direction of his gaze. A young guy had just come through a door in the opaque fiberglass wall that adjoined the next greenhouse. As he approached I saw that he was about thirty, tallish, wiry, good-looking in a careless sort of way. Bristly mustache, hair that fanned down over his shoulders, eyes that had the light of mischief in them. He wore running shoes and faded Levi’s and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off; on the front of the sweatshirt were the words NO NUKES in bright red letters.

  “Hey, Pop,” he said, “what happened to those live seafoam and shooting-star miniatures? I don’t see them anywhere.” Pop, like Number One Son addressing Charlie Chan. He didn’t even glance at me.

  “Gone,” his father said.

  “Gone? You mean you sold them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pop, I told you yesterday morning the Crawley brothers wanted them. What’s the matter? You going senile on me?”

  Mr. Ogada didn’t say anything. So I said, “Everybody forgets things now and then, particularly when they’ve been working hard.”

  The young guy, Edgar, put his eyes on me for the first time. There was no hostility in the look, nor even any annoyance; it was just a look with a question: Who are you?

  I said, “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes, if you don’t mind. A personal matter.”

  “The washers in this valve need to be changed,” Mr. Ogada said, “Will you do it, Edgar? I have invoices to prepare.”

  “If I’ve got time.”

  “Hai,” Mr. Ogada said, and bowed slightly in my direction, and went away toward the outside door.

  Edgar said, “What’s this personal matter you want to talk about?”

  “A former girlfriend of yours. Haruko Gage.”

  His forehead wrinkled slightly; that was the extent of his reaction to Haruko’s name. “Why?” he said. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “A private detective.” I gave him my name and showed him the photostat of my license. “Mrs. Gage hired me to investigate a little problem she’s having.”

  “You mean Haruko’s in trouble?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  I told him what the problem was, and he didn’t react much to that either. A little surprise and a little puzzlement, nothing else.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “Anybody who’d do something like that has to be nuts.”

  “That’s what Haruko is afraid of.”

  “But why talk to me? I don’t know anything about it.” He paused and frowned again. “Hey, she doesn’t think I’m the one who’s doing it, does she?”

  “No. Your name was one of several she gave me—old boyfriends, men who’ve been serious about her in the past.”

  “Well, that lets me out. I’ve never been serious over any girl. There’s too many of ’em, you know? Too many sakana in the umi.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We had some fun, Haruko and me,” Edgar said. He grinned. “I brought her here once and we were, you know, getting it on over at the house and Pop almost caught us. That would have been a heavy scene. Pop’s old-fashioned; he doesn’t think people ought to screw unless they’re married.”

  “Is that how your mother feels too?”

  The grin vanished. “My mother’s dead,” he said in a different, softer voice. “She died last summer. It’s been rough on Pop; that’s why he works so hard.”

  Rough on Edgar, too, judging from his tone. I said, “How do you feel about Haruko now that she’s married?”

  “Same as I’ve always felt about her. We’re still friends, only without the sex.”

  “No regrets about that?”

  “A few, sure. I wouldn’t mind getting it on with her again if she ever dumps Art the Fart; we were good together, real good. But it’s no big deal. A guy can always get laid.”

  “I take it you don’t like her husband much.”

  “He’s a jerkoff. I don’t know why she married him, unless it’s because he lets her tell him what to do. Or maybe he’s Clark Kent with his clothes on and Superman in the sack.” He shrugged. “Who knows why women do anything? I never could figure ’em out.”

  That makes two of us, brother, I thought. “Do you know Ken Yamasaki?”

  “Sure. Not too well, though. He thinks he’s an intellectual; I don’t think I am.”

  “Could he be Haruko’s secret admirer, do you think?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “How about Kinji Shimata?”

  “Shimata ... no, never heard of him.”

  “Nelson Mixer?”

  “Is that somebody’s name?”

  “Yes. A history teacher at City College.”

  “I didn’t go to college,” he said and
shrugged again.

  I thanked him for his time, and he said, “Sure, I hope you find the nut,” and I left him and went out of the greenhouse. Most of the vehicles and workers had disappeared; so had Ogada Senior. The black-veined clouds were overhead now, scudding along in front of the sharp west wind like bales of gangrenous wool.

  The rain started again, hard driving bullets of it, before I was halfway to my car.

  With the exception of Ken Yamasaki, I had exhausted the list of names Haruko Gage had given me and I hadn’t learned much of anything so far. I had Yamasaki’s address, but I couldn’t look him up until I cleared it with Leo McFate. After having had my license suspended for a time five months ago, even though I hadn’t done much of anything wrong to deserve it, I could not afford to get the cops miffed at me again. And I couldn’t go down to the Hall to see McFate until four o’clock; he’d answered the homicide squeal last night, which meant he was working the four-to-midnight swing this week.

  Another talk with Haruko seemed to be the only tack I had left. I could find out if she knew about Ken Yamasaki’s apparent Yakuza connections, and I could ask her some more questions about her past, maybe get a few more names worth checking out.

  I came back into San Francisco on the 19th Avenue exit off Highway 280, drove straight to Japantown, and managed to find the same parking spot near the Gage Victorian that I’d occupied yesterday. When I went up and rang the bell, Haruko herself opened the door. She was wearing a tight white sweater today, and a pair of form-fitting designer slacks, and her glossy black hair was piled high on her head and held in place by a lacquered Oriental comb. Artie must have licked his chops when he saw her dressed up like that. Even I had to admit that she looked pretty sexy.

  “Oh, good,” she said when she saw me. “Did you get my message?”

  “Message?”

  “The one I left on your answering machine.”

  “No, I didn’t get it. I haven’t been home.”