Quicksilver (Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  “Same old Eb,” I said. “Sharp as a tack.”

  He told me what I could do with a sharp tack. But that and the scowl that went with it were just for show; he was enjoying himself, enjoying the idea of the two of us working together and of getting back into harness himself. Same old Eb, all right—finally. It was good to see.

  So how come I still felt depressed?

  “You coming to the Hall with me or not?” I asked him.

  He pretended to consider it some more. Then he said, “I guess I might as well. Keep you out of any more hot water. But don’t count on me having much influence now that I’m retired. Especially with McFate; we never did get along too good.”

  Somebody started pounding on the office door. “That’ll be my furniture,” I said, and got up and went to admit the storage company guys.

  It took them the better part of an hour to move in my belongings: secondhand oak desk, matching chair, a trio of chrome visitors’ chairs, two metal file cabinets, the blowup poster of an old Black Mask cover I used as a wall decoration, typewriter and stand, hot plate, and two packing boxes of miscellaneous junk. Eberhardt helped me shift the stuff around until the place looked halfway presentable. My desk covered up most of the paint stains on the linoleum, which left only the ceiling fixture and those mustard yellow file cabinets to be dealt with.

  “Not too bad, is it?” Eberhardt said when we were done. “Looks kind of homey.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It didn’t look too bad at that. It was a hell of a lot more my style than the last set of offices I’d occupied, down on Drumm Street, where I’d had to put up with venetian blinds and pastel walls and a pimp-yellow phone—all because I’d had the dumb idea that I needed to project a more modern image.

  Eb said, “You’re not having any second thoughts, are you?” and I realized that he’d suddenly grown serious. “About the partnership, us making a go of it together?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “Well, you look kind of broody. And I want this to work out—I want it real bad.”

  “Same here.”

  “Not just for my sake. For yours too. Because ... hell, you been a good friend and I don’t want to let you down again.”

  “Eb ...”

  “No, I mean it. And I got to say it. If it hadn’t been for you I don’t know where I’d be right now. Or if I’d be anywhere. You ... well, if I had a brother ... ah hell, I’m no good with words,” and he stuck out his hand.

  I took it, and we looked at each other for a time, and I felt a little tight in the throat. And no longer depressed. The mood had peeled away all at once, like a strip of dead skin. I grinned at him finally, and he grinned back, and I said, “Come on, let’s get out of here,” the way they do in the TV cop shows.

  We went.

  Chapter Nine

  Ken Yamasaki evidently had not been the one who’d used the samurai sword on Simon Tamura. Nor did the police have any concrete leads yet to the man who had used it.

  Those were the first two things we found out when we got to the Hall of Justice. Not from McFate; he wasn’t in yet, and he didn’t show up until after five. We learned them from Jack Logan, who for years had worked under Eberhardt on the Homicide Detail and who had been promoted to lieutenant and been given Eb’s old office when he retired. I knew Logan from way back, too; we’d worked together for a while when I was on the cops twenty years ago, and he’d stood up for me during that bad time a few months back when my license got suspended. The three of us sitting in the office talking was like old home week.

  Yamasaki had been turned up this morning, at his apartment on California Street, and questioned extensively. He’d admitted to being at the bathhouse when Tamura was murdered; but he’d been in the company of two customers, both of whom had also been located and questioned and who had corroborated his story. At about nine-fifteen that night the three of them had heard screams and sounds of violence coming from Tamura’s office, had gone to investigate, had got a glimpse of somebody running down the back stairs —somebody they said they couldn’t identify or describe—and then had panicked and beat it out of there, along with the two other people present at the time. Yamasaki had also admitted to knowing that Tamura was a Yakuza chieftain, and to being a Yakuza runner himself; that was all McFate had been able to get out of him. He and the others had eventually been released with the usual warning to keep themselves available.

  Logan seemed interested in why I was there, but in the same skeptical way Eberhardt was. Maybe Yamasaki was Haruko Gage’s secret admirer and maybe he wasn’t; it just didn’t add up to police business, now that Yamasaki had been alibied for the time of Tamura’s death. And no, as far as he knew the killer hadn’t taken a medallion or anything else off Tamura’s body or from anywhere in the office. All the police knew for sure was that the murder weapon had belonged to Tamura and been kept on display on the office wall; that the “perp”—the new slang term, and abbreviation of perpetrator—had gotten away through the rear entrance, leaving a trail of Tamura’s blood in his wake; and that so far nobody in or out of the Yakuza claimed to know anything about the slaying. But maybe McFate had turned up something new, Logan said; he’d had a four o’clock appointment with a Japantown informant—which explained his absence from the Hall.

  As for the two Japanese guys in Yamasaki’s white Ford, I had no proof they were Yakuza. And even if they were, they hadn’t tried to do anything to me or threatened me in any way. There was no statute on the books forbidding anybody from simply following anybody else around; they had as much right as I did to drive where they pleased. Unless they did hassle me, there wasn’t much the Department could do about them.

  None of that made me happy. If I’d gotten it from Logan I was sure as hell going to get the same thing from McFate. Well, if the police wouldn’t pursue the medallion angle I saw no reason, as long as I was careful about it, why I shouldn’t. That was what Mrs. Gage was paying me for, after all.

  I badly wanted another look at that photograph, and with Eberhardt’s support I might have been able to get permission from Logan. But McFate showed up just then and that put an end to the office bull session.

  McFate didn’t have an office; all he had was a desk in one corner of the squadroom, under a window that looked out on the freeway approach to the Bay Bridge. But you’d have thought that corner was the Chief’s private sanctum, the way he held court. He told Eberhardt and me to pull up chairs and sit down, then stood over us so we’d have to look up at him. He was dressed in a sort of irridescent blue-gray suit today, with a pearl-colored shirt and a blue two-tone tie fastened by a pearl tack. The only thing that spoiled his elegant image was the scowl he wore on his face; he was not exactly overjoyed to see either of us.

  “You’re looking spiffy as hell these days, Leo,” Eberhardt said. “The good life must be agreeing with you.”

  “I have no complaints. And you, Eb?”

  “I got complaints, but you wouldn’t be interested.You put on some weight, huh? You’re a little thicker around the gut since the last time I saw you.”

  “I haven’t put on an ounce,” McFate said stiffly.

  Eberhardt said, “Hunh. Must be the cut of your suit,” and got out his disreputable pipe and one of those little tamper things pipe-smokers carry. Either he liked McFate even less than I did, or it was just that he had no use in general for people who thought they were better than the rest of us. Whatever the reason, he had the needle out and honed sharp.

  “I take it you’re not here on a social visit,” McFate said. He sounded annoyed now. “State your business. I have work to do.”

  “I like the way you talk, Leo. ‘State your business.’ I like that.”

  “Well?”

  “The Tamura case,” Eberhardt said. He leaned over, scraping at his pipe bowl with the little tamper thing, and managed to dislodge ash and dottle onto McFate’s pristine desktop. When he tried to blow it off he succeeded in spreading it out over more of the surface.


  McFate glared at him. “Can’t you be more careful with that pipe?”

  “Sure, Leo. Sorry. But you know how it is with us old retired guys. We get a little clumsy sometimes.”

  McFate had had enough of Eberhardt; he switched his attention to me. “What about the Tamura case?” he said. “Did you forget to tell me something?”

  “No,” I said. “But some things have happened since last night.”

  “Yes? What things?”

  I told him about the two guys who’d been following me in Ken Yamasaki’s car. I told him about the medallion, and how I was sure Simon Tamura had been wearing one like it in the old photograph, and outlined my theory that Tamura’s death was somehow linked with Haruko Gage’s secret-admirer problems. I took the medallion out of my pocket and unwrapped it and showed it to him. And when I got all done he looked me in the eye and said, “Nonsense.”

  I didn’t say anything. But Eberhardt said, “How come, Leo? You got to admit it’s possible.”

  “Anything is possible,” McFate said. “But Simon Tamura’s murder was Yakuza-related—a simple, straightforward gang killing. I’m satisfied of that.”

  “You are, huh? Why?”

  “Because of certain facts that I’ve learned.”

  “What facts?”

  “I don’t think I ought to discuss them.”

  “Come on, Leo. Who do you think we are? Spies for the Yakuza? Undercover Chronicle reporters?”

  “I don’t find that funny,” McFate said.

  “That’s because you got no sense of humor. What’re these facts you turned up?”

  McFate stayed silent for ten seconds or so, with his scowl pulling his eyes and mouth down at the corners. Then, grudgingly, he said, “Tamura was in trouble with the local gang heirarchy. It appears he had been skimming off part of the take from his mizu shobai operation.”

  “So you think the bosses put out a contract on him.”

  “What amounts to a contract in the Yakuza, yes. My informant was surprised it took them this long to purge him.” He looked at me again. “Paid assassins don’t stop to steal medallions off the men they’ve murdered, and they certainly don’t send little mementos of their handiwork to women, anonymously or otherwise. They are not that sort of psychopathic personality.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But if you’re right about it being a contract hit, how do you explain those two guys following me around today?”

  “In the first place, you don’t know they were kobun—”

  “What?” Eberhardt said. “What’s kobun, Leo?”

  McFate sighed in a way that said he wished to God he didn’t have to suffer fools as well as knaves. “Low-level soldiers. Hired muscle.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And in the second place,” McFate said to me, “you don’t know that their reason for following you has anything to do with the Tamura homicide. It could be something else entirely.” He paused. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, then.”

  “What about the medallion? I’m sure this one matches the one Tamura was wearing in that photograph.”

  “And if it does? What does that prove? It’s probably a common enough Japanese trinket.”

  “Haruko Gage says it isn’t.”

  “She could be wrong, you know.”

  “She could also be right. At least compare this medallion to the one in the photo.”

  “I’ll say it again,” McFate said, as if he were talking to a contentious and not very bright kid. “Even if they match, what does it prove?”

  “All right. So how about letting me compare them? For my own satisfaction.”

  “I don’t see what purpose that would serve. Besides, you’ve wasted enough of my time already. I have work to do.”

  Eberhardt stirred. He’d been loading up his pipe again and he was getting ready to light it. “Leo, for Christ’s sake unbend a little,” he said. “Let him look at the photograph. You had it brought in, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I had it brought in.”

  “And it’s back from the lab by now, right?”

  “Yes. It’s in the Property Room. But I told you—”

  “So you don’t even have to go along. Just call down and tell them we’re coming. It’s no big deal.”

  McFate scowled as if it was.

  “Come on, Leo,” Eberhardt said. “Be a mensch. ”

  McFate was a mensch, if just barely. He said, “As a favor, then,” in reluctant tones and made the call.

  When he hung up I asked him, “Are you satisfied that Ken Yamasaki isn’t involved in the homicide?”

  “I’m satisfied he isn’t directly involved. Why?”

  “I’d like your permission to talk to him.”

  “About what?”

  “The case I’m working on. The secret admirer.”

  “All right. But just that. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  Eberhardt had finished lighting his pipe with one of the little wooden matches he uses. He made a show of looking around for an ashtray that wasn’t there, then threw the match in the general direction of the wastebasket. But his aim was off by about ten feet: the match landed in the middle of McFate’s upholstered chair and lay there smoldering.

  McFate made a wounded noise when the match landed, lunged at the chair, picked the match up, and hurled it into the wastebasket. “For God’s sake!” he said. “Can’t you be more careful?”

  “Sorry, Leo,” Eberhardt said blandly. He got to his feet, and I followed suit. “I won’t bring my pipe next time I stop by for a chat.”

  We left McFate looking exasperated and walked out of the squadroom to the elevators. I said, “Now you know what it’s like on the other side of the fence.”

  “Yeah. And I think I’m going to like it on your side.” He grinned a little. “Especially when Leo’s around.”

  “You really did a number on him in there. How come?”

  “Like I told him, he’s got no sense of humor. I always did enjoy getting a rise out of him.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  He gave me a sidewise look. “What do you think?”

  “I think McFate is an asshole.”

  “Bingo,” he said.

  We rode the elevator down to the Property Room, where the SFPD keeps evidence, weapons, and confiscated items of all types, among other things. The sergeant in charge was a friend of Eberhardt’s, and he was the one who’d taken McFate’s call, so we had no trouble getting through security. The sergeant brought the photograph out and stood by while Eb and I bent over one of the tables, peering at it.

  The medallions seemed to match, all right, when I laid the one I’d gotten from Haruko Gage next to the one in the print. As grainy as the old photo was, the blowup of it made the medallion and its odd design clearly visible.

  Eberhardt grunted. “So they’re the same,” he said. “I hate to sound like McFate, but what does it prove?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  I studied the photo itself for a time. The three men, Simon Tamura in the middle, their arms around one another and their faces split by wide grins. The wire-mesh fence behind them, and the distant, blurred buildings beyond. None of that told me anything.

  Who were the other two men? I wondered. And then I turned the photograph over and slipped it out of its broken frame, and I had my answer. Simon Tamura was one of those people who write information on the backs of photos; there were some Japanese characters drawn in ink, and also some words in English. The English words said: With Sanjiro Masaoka and Kazuo Hama—1945.

  I wrote the names down in my notebook. Then I turned the photo over again and looked at it a while longer, fixing the two faces that flanked Tamura’s in my mind. Then I said to Eb and to the sergeant, “Okay, that should do it,” and a couple of minutes later we were on our way out of the building.

  Eberhardt asked, “What next, mastermind?”

&n
bsp; “Nothing, today.” It was six o’clock and dark and still raining; I’d had enough of today as far as work went. “Tomorrow I go see Ken Yamasaki. And run a check on those two names in the photo; there might be an angle there if Masaoka and Hama are still alive and still living around here.”

  “Uh-huh. You sure you’re not running off half-cocked on this thing?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not sure.”

  “But that won’t stop you from going ahead, right?”

  “If it ever does I’ll get out of the business.”

  “I figured. Anything else you want me to do?”

  “I guess not. I’ll take it from here, Eb. Thanks.”

  I dropped him at his car on O’Farrell Street and drove on up to Pacific Heights. There was no sign of the white Ford, or of any other car full of Japanese, in the vicinity of my building. I circled the block a couple of times to make sure. So maybe they’d given up on me, after the little episode out by China Beach this morning. I hoped so; I did not want to be anybody important or even interesting as far as the Yakuza was concerned.

  The first thing I did when I entered the flat was to check the telephone book for a local listing on either Sanjiro Masaoka or Kazuo Hama. No luck; it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  My answering machine had one message on it—from Jeanne Emerson, asking again if I would please call her as soon as possible. No, I would not please call her as soon as possible. I would call her tomorrow—maybe. On the other hand, if I ignored her she might just go away; and that might be the best solution for all of us. Especially for me, craven coward that I was when it came to women.

  I called Kerry instead and asked her if I could come over and tell her about my day and maybe continue our discussion on primitive mating habits. She said, “I know you, you’ve got lust in your heart,” and I said, “Yup,” and she said, “All right, then, I’ll risk it. Come ahead. I’ll see what I can find for dinner.”