Quicksilver nd-11

by Bill Pronzini

  The drive was lined on one side by eucalyptus trees planted as windbreaks. The ranch began its outward sprawl just beyond the trees-a familiar layout that gave me a vague, fleeting nostalgia because I had worked on a chicken ranch one summer in my teens, so long ago that the memory of it was faded and distorted, like a very old daguerrotype. The nearest buildings were a large white clapboard house, a tankhouse, and a garage with a wing tacked onto it that was probably a workshop. Opposite and beyond that little cluster was a small barnlike structure that was probably the grainery, where feed and supplies were kept and eggs were packed for shipment. The chicken houses came next, half a dozen of them, each one seventy-five-feet long-large enough for maybe a thousand laying hens-made of wood and built up off the ground, with a V-shaped roof and screened windows to let in light. Fenced-in yards stretched out alongside each of the houses, and in them hundreds of white leghorns pranced and pecked and drank from rain-swollen troughs.

  There were two cars drawn up in a little parking area near the fenced yard of the ranchhouse-a newish Isuzu and a mud-caked pickup truck. I parked next to the pickup. From over in the chicken yards I could hear a constant fluttering of wings, with cackling noises mingled in. But I didn’t look over there; I did not want to think about chickens any more. Or about eggs. They reminded me of my diet, and made me hungry again in spite of myself.

  I walked over to the front gate and along a crushed-shell path and up the stairs to the porch. I wasn’t trying to be quiet about it, but I must have managed just the same because the two people talking inside the house didn’t break off their conversation. I could hear them plainly; there was a closed screen door, but the front door behind it was standing open, evidently to allow fresh air to circulate. Their words sounded interesting. So instead of knocking right away, I stood there and listened. Occupational license. Private eyes were supposed to be keyhole snoopers and eavesdroppers, after all.

  “… don’t understand this at all, Johnny,” a woman’s voice was saying. It wasn’t the same woman I’d talked to on the phone; this one was much younger. “A mausoleum, and all those years of upkeep. Why would he have done a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know,” a man’s voice said. Also young, also unfamiliar. “How should I know?”

  “Well, there aren’t any Wakasas around here.”

  “Not now. Maybe there were after the war.”

  “Are you sure you don’t know who that woman was?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “I thought Father might have confided in you…”

  “Man-talk, eh? You think he had an affair with this Chiyoko Wakasa, don’t you?”

  “Sshh! Do you want Mother to hear?”

  I was listening good now. Chiyoko-Haruko’s middle name, and the name that had been written on the package containing the medallion.

  “Well?” the man’s voice said, a little more quietly. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

  “It’s what you think too.”

  “How do you know what I think? I don’t think anything. Maybe she was an old relative of the family or something.”

  “You know we don’t have any relatives named Wakasa.”

  “It could have been her married name…”

  “Oh God, Johnny, she wasn’t a relative and you know it!”

  “What difference does it make who she was? She’s been dead almost forty years. And now he’s dead too. What does it matter anymore?”

  “It matters,” the woman said stubbornly. “Are we supposed to keep on paying the upkeep on this… this stranger’s burial place?”

  “It’s only a few dollars a year. Father kept paying it; it must have been important to him. We should pay it in honor of his memory.”

  “I still want to know who she was. A mausoleum at Cypress Hill! Of all things!”

  “Come on, it’s not that strange.”

  “Isn’t it? Did you ever hear of anything like that around here?”

  “Plenty of Japanese are Catholics…”

  “But we’re not. I just don’t understand it.”

  “Janet,” the man said in exasperated tones, “you worry too much about little things. Worry about the big things for a change, like these files and papers. I don’t want to spend all night sorting them out.”

  A couple of seconds of silence. Then, “I guess you’re right. Do you want to see if Mother needs anything before we get back to it? Some more tea?”

  “Yes, okay.”

  The sound of footsteps, fading. Then silence. I shuffled my feet, making some noise, and reached out and knocked on the screen door’s wooden frame.

  The woman came after a few seconds and peered out at me, then drew the door open. She was thirtyish, slender, very attractive, with her black hair tied up tight on her head; wearing a black skirt and a black sweater-mourning clothes. “Oh, hello,” she said solemnly. Then she said, “I’m afraid we’re closed, if you want to buy something. There’s been a death in the family.”

  I feigned surprise. “I’m very sorry to hear that. I hope it wasn’t Mr. Kazuo Hama.”

  “Yes, it was. Did you come to see my father?”

  “On a personal matter, yes. May I ask when he passed away?”

  “Four days ago. His funeral was yesterday.”

  “A sudden illness?”

  “No. He… he was killed. A hit-and-run accident.”

  “Have the police found the person responsible?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  “On the road out front. He’d gone to get the mail.”

  “Then there were no witnesses?”

  “No. None.”

  “Did your father wear a white jade ring, by any chance?”

  “Yes, but it’s missing-” She broke off and frowned at me. “You said you came to see him on a personal matter?”

  “That’s right, Miss…?”

  “Mrs. Janet Ito. And your name, please?”

  I made one up-Allan Barker-and made up a profession to go with it. I didn’t like the idea of lying to her, lying in the face of grief, but it was easier and kinder and more prudent than telling her the truth; the truth would only have led to questions and stirred up a lot of ugly suspicion. “I’m a lawyer,” I said, “representing the estate of Mr. Simon Tamura in San Francisco.”

  The Tamura name didn’t seem to mean anything to her. She said, “Yes?” blankly.

  “Mr. Tamura and your father were old friends, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “He never spoke of Mr. Tamura?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “But surely he mentioned Sanjiro Masaoka?”

  She frowned again. “I don’t know that name either.”

  “Well, that’s odd,” I said. “Mr. Tamura kept an old photograph of the three of them on the wall of his office. He said they were very good friends as youths back in the forties.”

  “Oh,” she said, “the camp, maybe.”

  “Camp?”

  “The Tule Lake camp.” Her mouth wrinkled up as if the words tasted bitter.“The Tule Lake concentration camp. My father was incarcerated there during the war.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “For four years. He was a Nisei, as patriotic as any native with white skin. It was a terrible ordeal for him; he never really got over it. ”

  “I’m sorry about that too, Mrs. Ito.”

  She nodded as if she thought my response was a proper one. Not just from me; from all Caucasians of my generation, all the war hysterics in California and Washington who had been responsible for the displacement of more than a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans, for forcing them to sell or abandon their land and their belongings and then hauling them off to “relocation centers” like the one at Tule Lake, up in the northeast section of the state. And when Issei and Nisei were let out after the war, and allowed to return to what was left of their homes, there had been no reparation, no attempt at all to rec
tify any of the damage that had been done. Janet Ito had every right to be bitter about that shameful little episode in American history, even though she herself hadn’t been born at the time.

  I said, “Was your mother also interned at the Tule Lake camp?”

  “No. She was at Minidoka in Idaho. She met my father here in Petaluma just after the war.”

  “Could you give me the names of one or two of your father’s friends who were also at Tule Lake?”

  The frown reappeared. “Why are you asking all these questions?” she said. “Just what did you want to see my father about, anyway?”

  I had an answer ready, not a very good one, but I didn’t get to use it. There was the sound of footsteps again and a man materialized through a doorway behind Janet Ito. He gave me a curious look, hesitated, and then moved up to stand behind her left shoulder. He was about her age, maybe a couple of years younger, and you could see a marked resemblence between them. Same facial contours, same slenderness, same sort of quiet good looks.

  “Is Mother all right?” Janet Ito asked him. But her eyes were still on me.

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t ask who I was, but it was plain that he wanted to know. She sensed it, too. She said, “This is Mr. Barker, Johnny. A lawyer from San Francisco. He says he came to see Father on a personal matter of some sort.”

  He winced. “You tell him what happened?”

  “She told me,” I said. “Are you Mrs. Ito’s brother?”

  “That’s right. John Hama.”

  “I’m sorry about your father, Mr. Hama.” He nodded, and I went on, “The reason I’m here is that I’m trying to locate a young woman named Haruko Gage. That’s her married name, Gage; her maiden name was Fujita. A man named Simon Tamura died in San Francisco recently and left Mrs. Gage a substantial amount of money. I represent the Tamura estate, you see, and we’re having difficulty determining Mrs. Gage’s present whereabouts.”

  Blank, steady looks from both of them. John Hama said, “What does that have to do with us?”

  I gave him the same explanation I’d given his sister, saying that I’d hoped their father could offer me a lead to Haruko Gage. More lies; I did not care for myself too much just then. And like most lies, they got me nowhere. John Hama seemed never to have heard of Simon Tamura, Sanjiro Masaoka, or Haruko Gage nee Fujita. There were Fujitas living in the Petaluma area, he said, but he knew the families and none of the women was called Haruko. He did agree with his sister that Kazu Hama could have known Tamura and Masaoka at the Tule Lake camp. His father had almost never spoken of that period in his life.

  I tried the question on him that Janet Ito had refused to answer: “Could you tell me the names of one or two of your father’s friends who were also at Tule Lake?”

  He was not nearly as suspicious as she was. He said promptly, “Well, there’s old Charley Takeuchi. He and my father were working as chicken sexers for the Pioneer Hatchery when the war came; they went to Tule Lake together.”

  Chicken-sexing, I knew from my teen-age summer on the egg ranch, was a process whereby day-old chicks were examined to determine if they were roosters or pullets. The process had been invented by a Japanese and most chicken sexers, for whatever reason, were of that race.

  “Where would I find Mr. Takeuchi?” I asked.

  “Well, he’s retired now and lives in town with his sister. On Bassett Street, near the high school-number three-twenty-nine.”

  “Is there anyone else you can think of?”

  He lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “Janet? Can you think of anybody else?”

  “No,” she said. The frown and the suspicion were still on her face, and I thought that she was getting ready to ask me how talking to Charley Takeuchi about the Tule Lake camp was going to help me find Haruko Gage. I had no answer for that; or for questions about how I’d known her father had worn a white jade ring. And if she decided to ask for identification, which she probably would, I had none that said I was a lawyer named Allan Barker. I had found out all I could reasonably expect to; it was time for me to leave before trouble developed that all three of us didn’t need.

  I said, “Well. Thank you for talking to me. And I’m sorry again about your father; I know this must be a difficult time for you.”

  “It’s never easy when somebody you love dies,” John Hama said.

  That made me feel even worse. And yet, I told myself as I went down the steps and over to my car, the eavesdropping and the deception were excusable if they helped find out who had run down and killed Kazuo Hama. Sure they were. Unless the finding and its aftermath dragged some sort of ugliness in Hama’s past out into the open so his family would have to cope with it-ugliness that maybe involved a woman named Chiyoko Wakasa and a mausoleum in Cypress Hill Cemetery. Would it all be worth it then, the lies that led to the truth, the big hunt for justice?

  Questions like that were unsettling; I couldn’t deal with them, not now. I wasn’t a metaphysician, I was a detective. Detectives dealt in facts, not abstracts. Detectives had to believe in the big hunt for justice, because if they didn’t, what was the purpose of their existence? If truth and justice had no fundamental meaning, then their lives had none either.

  I got into the car and started the engine. When I glanced up at the house John Hama was gone but Janet Ito was still standing in the open doorway, looking after me. I backed the car up and took myself out of her life, at least for the time being.

  All right: facts. Simon Tamura, Kazuo Hama, and Sanjiro Masaoka had all been killed within a few days of each other, under questionable circumstances at best. A medallion that might have belonged to Tamura and a locket that might have belonged to Masaoka had been sent to Haruko Gage anonymously; something that might have belonged to Hama-the white jade ring-had also been presented to her. Why? What was the common denominator between Haruko and three dead men in their sixties, whom she claimed not to know, and who may or may not have known each other at the Tule Lake Relocation Center in the early 1940s?

  More facts: The name Chiyoku, Haruko’s middle name, had been written on the last package. Kazuo Hama had buried one Chiyoku Wakasa sometime after the end of World War II. What was the connection there? Was there one? And if there was, who was Chiyoku Wakasa? And how and why had she died? And why had Hama erected a mausoleum for her remains?

  Lots of facts now, lots of bright slippery mismatched beads waiting to be strung together. Yet the more of them I gathered, the more puzzling and complex the whole business became. It seemed I was no closer to grasping the truth now than I had been when I’d started.

  The long shadows of dusk were gathering; I switched on my headlights as I drove back toward Petaluma. The beams reflected off rainwater in a flooded culvert ahead and gave it, for just a second or two, the look of shimmering quicksilver.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Cypress Hill Cemetery fronted on Magnolia Avenue, a few blocks off Petaluma Boulevard on the northern outskirts of town. Another stop at a service station got me that information; it also got me directions to Bassett Street, where Charley Takeuchi lived. But the cemetery was closer and on the way, and the time was almost five o’clock, so I headed there first.

  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 ac
ross 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.”