Quicksilver (Nameless Detective) (17 page)

“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 rectify 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.

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 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.