Quicksilver (Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  There were two cemeteries, actually, a newish-looking one and then an older and more interesting one, both built on small wooded hillsides and both surrounded by low cyclone fences. The older one was Cypress Hill. Just inside the entrance drive were stone caretakers’ buildings, and a sloping green lawn opposite with neat little gravestones laid flat to mark the graves that dotted it—a current burial fashion, apparently devised to make a cemetery look like a visually ascetic garden instead. Either that, or to make it easier to mow the grass. Up beyond the lawn was an older section where tombstones and monuments jutted up among the shadows of cypress, palms, live oaks. In the gray-purple twilight I could also make out the blocky shapes of at least three small mausoleums.

  It was just five o’clock when I turned in at the entrance. One half of the gate barred the way across the drive and there was an old green Plymouth parked in front of it. An elderly guy in a raincoat and hat was getting ready to close the other gate-half, but he stopped when my headlights picked him up. He stood there with a padlock in one hand, squinting in my direction.

  I set the brake and got out without shutting off the engine. When I came up to him he said, “Sorry, neighbor. Closing up now; you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

  “I won’t be here tomorrow,” I said. “I’m a stranger in town.”

  “Too bad,” he said, but not as if he meant it.

  “I only need five to ten minutes. I want to take a look at one of the mausoleums.”

  “Can’t spare the time. Another night, maybe, but I got to be out to Penngrove by five-thirty. Lodge doings.”

  “Well, maybe you can tell me what I need to know. That is, if you’re the regular caretaker here.”

  “Now who else would I be? A graverobber?” He thought that was funny and laughed to prove it. “A graverobber,” he said, and waited like a stand-up comic for his laugh.

  I obliged him, just to keep him friendly. “I’m trying to find out about a woman named Chiyoko Wakasa—”

  “Who?”

  “Chiyoko Wakasa. One of the mausoleums is hers.”

  “Oh, yeah, the Jap woman. Can’t tell you nothing about her, neighbor. She was before my time.”

  “You remember the date of her death, offhand?”

  “No. Look, I got to take off now. Else I won’t make Penngrove by five-thirty.”

  Now that I was here, I was reluctant to leave empty-handed. So I said, “How would it be if you went to Penngrove and I went in and took a look at the Wakasa mausoleum? I won’t be more than a few minutes and I’ll padlock the gate for you when I go.”

  He shook his head. “Can’t do that, neighbor. Against the rules. Besides, I don’t know you.”

  “What do I look like?” I said. “A graverobber?”

  I laughed and he laughed with me. Then his expression got crafty; and that was good, because it meant he was going to be the one to bring up money. “Well now,” he said, “if it’s that important to you, and if you was to show me some identification, and if you was to maybe pay me a little something to ease my conscience, I guess maybe I could allow it.”

  “How does five dollars sound?”

  “Five dollars always sounds good, neighbor. But ten dollars sounds even better.”

  “Then again,” I said, “Five dollars sounds a lot better than nothing at all.”

  We grinned at each other like a couple of sly vultures. And I got my wallet out and showed him my driver’s license and then watched him produce a scrap of paper from his pocket and write down my name and the license number of my car. After which I gave him the five dollars, and he said, “A pleasant evening to you, neighbor,” and handed me the padlock.

  He didn’t leave right away; he waited until I drove inside, got out again, and shut the other half of the gate. Then he was satisfied. The Plymouth disappeared, and I headed up the cypress-lined drive toward the cemetery’s older section.

  Up there, the graves were laid out in big squarish plots with raised cement borders, some family and some communal, like lots in a miniature housing development. Narrow roadways and narrower paths, all rough and unpaved and strewn with storm residue, made a kind of irregular grid pattern over the grounds. It was pretty dark now, and there wasn’t any form of night-lighting; but the mausoleums were still visibly outlined against the restless sky. I turned toward the nearest one. My headlamps splashed wobbles of light over the dark looming shapes of the trees, over tall marble obelisks and squat stone monuments and ancient wooden markers like bleached bones imbedded in the earth.

  When I came abreast of the first mausoleum I unclipped the flashlight I keep under the dash and went to look at the inscription over the door. Not the right one. I got a bearing on a second mausoleum, higher up and back toward the rear perimeter fence, and moved behind the wheel again and drove up there.

  This was the oldest part of Cypress Hill, judging from the condition of the plots and the look of the tombstones. The grave next to the mausoleum had buckled and collapsed in the middle from the encroachment of tree roots; moss grew thickly in the chips and cracks of the cement. The headlights were aimed at the stone marker when I braked to a stop, and I could read part of its date: DIED 1875. AGED 44 YEARS, 9 MONTHS.

  The burial vault itself bulked up in the shadows of a pair of live oaks. It was about the size of a large shed, made out of cut-stone blocks, its entrance flanked by two Corinthian columns and two sculpted stone urns overflowing with moss. It looked as though it had been there for a good many years. I took it to be the final resting place of one of Petaluma’s pioneering families—the town had been founded back in the 1850s, on land that had once belonged to the Mexican general Vallejo-but I got out with the flashlight to make sure.

  And it turned out I was wrong. This was the mausoleum I was looking for, the one Kazuo Hama had built not so long ago. Words and dates cut into the stone above the entrance read:

  CHIYOKO WAKASA

  1924—1947

  “THERE THE WICKED CEASE FROM TROUBLING,

  AND THE WEARY BE AT REST”

  I stood for a time, holding the flash beam on the inscription. She’d been twenty-three years old when she died. Twenty-three was too young for death; she had hardly even lived. Who was she? What had happened to her?

  “There the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary be at rest.” I wasn’t familiar with the quotation, though it was probably Biblical. An odd sort of inscription for one Japanese-American to put on the tomb of another—almost as odd as erecting the mausoleum itself. Did it imply that Chiyoko Wakasa had been wicked and weary both, at the age of twenty-three?

  I made a circuit of the building, to see if there were any other markings. There weren’t. A stained-glass window had been set into the rear wall—a religious cross in yellow and red, indicating that Chiyoko Wakasa had been a Catholic—but that was all I found. Back at the entrance again, I paused and played my flash over the decorative iron gate that barred the door. Then, without any conscious purpose, the way you do things sometimes, I reached out and tugged at one of the bars.

  The latch made a clicking noise and the gate popped open in my hand.

  I hadn’t been aware of the wind before, but now I felt it like a cold caress on the back of my neck. There were marks, scratches, on the gate’s side; I could see them in the torchlight. Not brand-new scratches, but not old ones either. I moved the flash over to the latch plate set into the wall. Marks there, too, gouges in the metal and chips in the stone. The gate had been forced open with some kind of tool, probably a crowbar, and then reclosed so the caretakers and groundsmen wouldn’t notice the tampering.

  Kazuo Hama wouldn’t have done it, I thought. There would not have been any need; he’d built the mausoleum and that meant he’d had a key, or at least access to a key. The person who’d killed Hama and the others, then? But why? Why break into a mausoleum?

  The door was made out of some kind of heavy wood bound with iron strips. I switched the flash to my left hand and reached down and caught hold of
the handle. Nothing happened when I pulled on it. But when I shoved against the door, it creaked open like the one on the old “Inner Sanctum” radio program.

  I smelled the flowers immediately, even before I saw them in the flash beam. The fragrance seemed to rush out at me like something sentient that had been trapped in there—a musty-sweet, cloying fragrance, intensified by the cold night air, that made you think of death and slow decay. Then the light picked up the flowers, and it was like looking into a dark room in a funeral parlor, the room where they lay a body out in its coffin so mourners can look at it.

  Roses, mostly—yellow and pink, red and white. Cut roses in cans of water, some fresh and some dry and blackened and rotting. Small rose bushes in planter tubs. Carnations, gladiola, lilies, two or three other varieties I couldn’t identify. Covering most of the floor space in there, leaning against the walls, draped over the stone bier set under the stained-glass window.

  Smelling the flowers, seeing them in there by torchlight, made my hackles rise. It was eerie; and it smacked of aberration and madness. No sane mind could have broken into the mausoleum of a woman dead for thirty-six years and filled it with all those floral tributes.

  I moved inside, using the light to guide my way so I wouldn’t trip over any of the cans or tubs. When I got to the bier I circled it, playing the flash over its surfaces, looking for any signs of tampering there. But the burial crypt was still sealed. The person responsible for the flowers was not a ghoul, at least.

  There wasn’t anything else to see in the narrow confines of the vault. And the musty-sweet odor was starting to make me queasy. I followed the light out into the cold, fresh air, shut it off, and then pulled the door shut. I was reaching for the gate when I heard the noise.

  It wasn’t much of a noise—a crackling, sliding sound that came from some distance away, but clear in the night-hush that lay over the cemetery. Still, as I swung around toward it, the hackles went up again on my neck. It had come from beyond my car, where the hillside leveled off and there were no more graves, just trees and underbrush lining the perimeter fence. But all I could see up there were thick shadows: tree branches swaying in the wind, nothing that seemed to be moving at ground level.

  An animal, I thought. A raccoon or a skunk or something. I let out the breath I’d been holding, took a step toward the car.

  The crackling and scraping came again, and this time I saw something move that wasn’t a tree branch—something big, a man-shaped shadow that detached itself from the other shadows for an instant before blending back into them.

  Impulsively, I ran over to the car, around behind it so I wouldn’t be illuminated in the headlight glare, and then up a soggy path past a couple of oaks and the last of the crumbling old graves. I could see the fence, then, and more movement on the other side of it, somebody running away into a thick stand of eucalyptus. I kept on going across open ground, through wet grass and rotting humus, switching the flash back on as I ran; but the beam wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the darkness more than thirty yards ahead, and the running figure was a good fifty yards away from me now.

  At the fence I hesitated, thought about climbing over and continuing the chase, and decided it was a foolish idea. I didn’t know those woods; I could blunder around in them and get myself lost. Or ambushed, for that matter. Besides, it didn’t have to have been Chiyoko Wakasa’s belated mourner. It could have been a tramp. Or a kid; kids were always hanging around cemeteries, looking for mischief.

  It wasn’t a tramp or a kid, I thought.

  I turned around and started back toward the path. And behind me, then, a long way off, I heard a car engine start up and then the faint shriek of rubber on pavement.

  No, it hadn’t been a tramp or a kid at all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Three-twenty-nine Bassett Street was maybe ten blocks from downtown, three blocks from City Hall and the police station, and half a block from Petaluma High School. The house itself was an old frame job, painted white, with a glassed-in porch to the right of an old-fashioned walled staircase. Lights burned on the porch, and rattan blinds were only partially drawn over the windows; when I went up the stairs I could see a short, thin, wispy-haired old man sitting in there with his feet on a hassock, watching a television program.

  I could still see him as I pushed the doorbell. He sat up, swiveled his head around, blinked at me from behind thick glasses, then got to his feet and blinked at me again and disappeared. Ten seconds later the door opened on a chain and he looked out at me warily. He appeared to be between seventy and eighty; his face was as wrinkled as a raisin. He didn’t say anything.

  “Mr. Takeuchi? Charley Takeuchi?”

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  “No, sir, you don’t. John Hama gave me your name and address.”

  His expression softened a little; the grief that came into his eyes gave them a liquidy look, like chocolate pudding. “You know his father was killed?”

  “Yes. That’s part of the reason I’m here.”

  “Kazuo and I were friends forty-five years. That’s a long time.”

  “Yes, it is. I’m sorry, Mr. Takeuchi.”

  “Shikata ga nai, ” he said. “Did you know Kazuo?”

  “I’m afraid we never met.”

  “A good man. A good friend.” His eyes fluttered behind his glasses. “What is it you want with me?”

  “To ask you about some people Mr. Hama used to know. Friends of his back in the forties.”

  “The forties,” Mr. Takeuchi said. “The war. That was a bad time.”

  “Wars are always bad times.”

  “But that one, that war ...” He shook his head.

  “The two men are Simon Tamura and Sanjiro Masaoka.”

  He repeated the names, slowly. Then he nodded and made a wry mouth and said, “Oh, those two. They weren’t Kazuo’s friends. He thought they were, but they weren’t. They only got him in trouble.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “Trouble,” he said, and shrugged.

  “When was this? During the war?”

  “Yes, the war.”

  “At the Tule Lake camp?”

  His mouth pinched up; the look that crossed his expressive face this time was one of pain. “That place,” he said. “Makura moto!”

  “I don’t understand, Mr. Takeuchi.”

  “A terrible place to sleep. To live.”

  “And that was where Simon Tamura and Sanjiro Masaoka got Mr. Hama in trouble?”

  “It was. Stealing, making insults, blowing bugles before dawn. Other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “I don’t know. I never wanted to know.”

  “Mr. Hama didn’t speak about them?”

  “Not about them, not about that place. He was a good boy after the war; he worked hard with his chickens. I worked hard too. And now I’m old and I have no money and my sister takes care of me.” He shrugged again.

  “Did Mr. Hama have a girlfriend at Tule Lake?”

  “Girlfriend? No, I don’t think so.”

  “Did he know a woman there named Chiyoko Wakasa?”

  Mr. Takeuchi was silent for ten seconds or so; he seemed to be searching his memory. “I don’t remember,” he said finally. “I don’t believe I ever knew a woman called Chiyoko.”

  “She was about Mr. Hama’s age. She died in 1947, here in Petaluma or somewhere nearby.”

  “There was a Wakasa family here once. Yes, Michio Wakasa—a gardener. But they moved away.”

  “Did Michio Wakasa have a daughter?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “When did the family move away?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Could it have been in the late forties?”

  “It could have been.”

  “Do you know where they moved to?”

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  “Did you and Mr. Hama talk much recently?”

  The question seemed to confuse
him. “Recently?”

  “Before he died. The past few weeks.”

  “Sometimes we talked. He came to visit sometimes.”

  “Did he ever mention a woman named Haruko Gage? Or Haruko Fujita?”

  “All these names, all these questions,” he said. The confusion was still in his eyes. “Why do you want to know so many things?”

  For the second time that day I lied into the face of grief—the same lies I had told Janet Ito and John Hama. And this time, they got me nothing at all. They didn’t even get me invited inside Charley Takeuchi’s house, where I might have been able to chip a little more out of his memory; instead, they had the opposite effect.

  “Lawyers,” he said, and made the wry mouth again. “I don’t like lawyers. I had trouble with lawyers once, when my wife died. Questions, questions, and then legal tricks and all my money was gone.”

  “I’m not that kind of lawyer, Mr. Takeuchi—”

  “That’s what they said. You leave now. My sister will be home soon; I have to help her cook dinner.”

  And he shut the door gently, almost politely. A moment later I heard the snicking sound of a dead-bolt being thrown inside.

  I went back down to the car. I would have liked to look through the back files of Petaluma’s newspaper—the Argus-Courier; I’d seen the building on Petaluma Boulevard North—for some mention of how Chiyoko Wakasa had died in 1947. I would also have liked to make the rounds of Japanese families in the area until I located somebody who had either known Chiyoko Wakasa or who had been at the Tule Lake camp during the war and could tell me more about the Tamura-Hama-Masaoka triumvirate. But I couldn’t reasonably do either of those things tonight, and I had no desire to stay over because there were also things I wanted to do in San Francisco. Like getting Haruko to give me the white jade ring, the gold locket, and the medallion, then turning them over to the police and pleading with either Jack Logan or McFate to run a check on the items that would verify their origins. And like finding out more background on the Tule Lake Relocation Center, from a man who ought to know and who I’d been planning to talk to again anyway: Nelson Mixer.