Quicksilver (Nameless Detective) (24 page)

Mr. Ogada was sitting on a rickety wooden chair near her, his head bowed as if in prayer, his eyes squeezed shut. He seemed shrunken, much older than he was. The naked roof lights made the skin of his face look waxy, like that of a corpse.

I stepped out around the door and started toward him, moving silently on the balls of my feet. But I’d only gone five feet when some sense or other warned him. His head jerked up, he saw me, and a single convulsive moment brought him onto his feet.

I stopped walking. He stared at me without recognition, said something in Japanese. Then he realized who I was, or maybe just that I was a Caucasian, and he said in English, “Why are you here? I don’t want you here. Go away.”

“No, Mr. Ogada,” I said. “I’ve come for Haruko.”

“There is no one here by that name.”

“Her name is Haruko.”

“No. She is Chiyoku.”

“I know Chiyoko,” I said.

“How do you know her?”

“I know she’s dead, Mr. Ogada.”

“No,” he said, and shook his head. “No.”

“Is Haruko dead too? Did you hurt her?”

“Hurt her?” he said. “How could I harm such beauty? They harmed her, not I.” A string of words in Japanese. Then, “Chiyoko, Chiyoko.” His face was scrunched up now, as if he were about to weep.

I took a tentative step; he didn’t move. “Her name is Haruko Gage,” I said. “You kidnapped her, you brought her here against her will. I have to take her back to her husband.”

“No,” and there was more force behind the word this time. “She has no husband. She has only me.”

“Chiyoko Wakasa is dead; she has no husband. Haruko Gage is alive and married.”

“No!”

Another step. And another. I was almost to the wheeled cart now, less than thirty feet from where he stood blocking my way to Haruko.

“Stop,” he said. “You must not come any closer.”

I had no choice. Step. Step.

“You must not go near her!” And he darted away to his left, caught up a pair of shears propped against the inner wall, and came toward me.

There was not going to be any reasoning with him; his eyes had turned strange, feverish, with too much of the whites showing, and he moved with a kind of plodding implacability. I moved, too, but not to meet him; laterally to the nearest of the benches and slightly behind it. Only ten feet separated us now. He held the shears in both hands and cocked back under his right ear, so that the blades pointed straight at my face.

He was less than five feet away when he made his lunge. But I was ready, my hands down on the bench, touching one of the soil trays, and as soon as he slashed at me with the shears I swept the tray up and hurled it at him.

It hit him on the collarbone and the soil showered upward over his face, blinding him momentarily, throwing him off-stride. Leaving him vulnerable. I was already around the bench, and I swung a forearm at the exposed side of his head, like a football player taking a cheap shot at an opponent. It caught him solidly on the cheekbone, knocked him off his feet and bounced him sideways into the wheeled cart. The cart buckled, spilling plants and more dirt; one of the clay pots struck him a glancing blow and opened a gash on the back of his skull. He thrashed a little, flopped over onto his side, then quit moving altogether. But he was alive; I could see a vein throbbing in his neck when I moved over to stand above him.

I stayed there for a few seconds, not liking myself much, even though I’d had to do what I’d done. I had not wanted to hurt him. He’d been hurt enough already; too many people had been hurt enough.

Haruko, I thought. I went to where she lay. Unconscious but breathing more or less normally; no marks on her anywhere that I could see. I wondered if he’d given her something, some sort of drug, but that didn’t seem likely. I got down on one knee and chafed her hands and face, and pretty soon she began to stir. Fainted, I thought, that must be it. An overload of fear and out cold in self-defense.

I kept rubbing her hands and face. She groaned, and the muscles around her eyes rippled; the eyes popped open, blind with terror at first. Then they focused on me, recognized me. She made a choked sound and sat up and threw her arms around my neck, crying.

I held her for a time, until she started to quiet, then took a gentle grip on her arms and eased her away. She said thickly, “God, he ... where is he? He ...”

“Sshh, he can’t hurt you now. He
didn’t
hurt you, did he?”

“No. He ... I thought he was going to. He’s crazy ... he kept saying things in Japanese, calling me Chiyoko, telling me he loved me ...” She shuddered. More tears brimmed in her eyes.

I felt big and awkward and faintly sick at my stomch. I could still smell the cloying, funeral scent of the flowers in the other greenhouse, or thought I could. The damp earth, too. And the rain outside. And the sour-sweat stench of fear.

“He ... he was waiting for me,” she said, “when I started home this morning. He said Edgar wanted to see me. He was acting funny but I didn’t ... I never thought ... I always liked him, he was always so nice to me.... He brought me here, in here, and locked the doors and started talking to me like that ... Chiyoko, Chiyoko ... he made me lie down here ...” Another shudder. “I thought ... I thought he was going to rape me....”

Ah Jesus. “No,” I said, “no, that’s the last thing he would have done to you.”

I got her on her feet, and when I turned her against me, bracing her body, she saw him lying there and made that little choking sound again. I looked at him too, in spite of myself, before I led her out of the greenhouse. Small and old and crumpled, with a thin trickle of blood on his head where the falling pot had struck him. A living corpse, with that waxy skin. Not even a man anymore.

Poor bastard, I thought, poor lost soul. Responsible for so many crimes, too many crimes—three murders, kidnapping, others. But were any of them really his fault? They would not have happened if it hadn’t been for that other crime, the one he’d committed by accident so long ago. The crime that had put him in a prison and exposed him to the kind of violence such places breed. The crime that wasn’t a crime, except in one of those lunatic times called war.

The crime of being born Japanese.

Tuesday was another wet, dreary day. I spent most of it at the Hall of Justice and in the San Mateo County police station in Redwood City, making statements, answering questions. And finding out a few things, too.

Mr. Ogada had been taken to the county medical facility, where he was under treatment and under police guard. Edgar had gone with him last night; he was probably still there today. Haruko had as much as said she thought Edgar was irresponsible, but she’d been at least partially wrong. He had a fine sense of responsibility when it came to his father. He was a good kid; he’d get through this, and do a lot of growing up as a result of it.

After a night under heavy sedation, Mr. Ogada had been more or less coherent today and the cops had got enough out of him to pretty much substantiate how I’d pieced it together. He hadn’t known Chiyoko Wakasa was dead until this past summer; it had been Simon Tamura who’d told him, and who’d also told him where she was buried, when they ran into each other at the Feast of the Lanterns festival. Tamura had known of her suicide because he and Kazuo Hama had still been in touch back in 1947.

The news that Chiyoko was dead, coupled with his seeing Haruko again that same day, had been the catalyst that had broken Mr. Ogada down. He’d gone to Petaluma and got into the mausoleum and begun filling it with flowers. He’d sent Haruko the first two presents, the diamond pendant and the saphhire earrings, thinking of her as Chiyoko. But in his rational moments he understood Chiyoko was dead, that the gang rape by Tamura and the other two had been the cause. He’d known all along that they were the ones who’d attacked Chiyoko that night in 1945, but at the time he’d been too afraid to snitch on them. Guilt began to gnaw at him, until the idea came that he must avenge her.

Tracking down his victims hadn’t been difficult; he already knew where to find Tamura, and that Hama lived in Petaluma, and asking questions in the Japanese community had turned up Masaoka. Masaoka had been the first to die, struck on the head with a rock on Pillar Point. Then Kazuo Hama, run down by the pickup truck. Then, because Tamura had been the leader of the trio at Tule Lake, because Mr. Ogada hated Tamura the most, he’d gone to the bathhouse and hacked him to death with the samurai sword.

That should have been the end of it, but of course it wasn’t. He’d avenged Chiyoko, he’d proven his love, but he still couldn’t have her. On Sunday night he had gone to Cypress Hill Cemetery again, as he did periodically to bring new flowers, sneaking in over the back fence after the place was closed so the caretakers wouldn’t see him, and he’d found me just emerging from the mausoleum; he couldn’t have Chiyoko there either, not any more. But he had to have her; it was an obsession now. And so on Monday morning he’d gone to Haruko’s house, and seen her board the bus downtown, and followed the bus, and waited until she was finished with her appointment, and then talked her into coming with him to his nursery.

It was a pathetic story. Most crimes of passion and madness were pathetic when you stripped them down to their fundamentals, but that didn’t make them any less painful or any less tragic for everyone concerned.

Haruko was back with Artie, and presumably they would lead a normal life from now on. The Hama family in Petaluma would have to try to live down what their father had done a long time ago in a place he should not have been; and sooner or later, they would. Edgar Ogada would take over the nursery. The Yakuza would install another head of its
mizu shobai
operations in San Francisco, if they hadn’t already done so. I would share my new office with Eberhardt —for a while, at least—and there would be new jobs and the old ones would become memories, some good and some, like this one, very bad. Life goes on.

But that didn’t make it easy to take on days like today. Wet, dreary days. Dull days. Painful days. Days where the highlight was watching Leo McFate eat a little crow. That had been nice, but it was a transitory thing: he’d digest the crow and pretty soon he’d forget he had ever eaten it and he’d be the same old Leo McFate. I had a hunch we would lock horns again one of these days.

I was feeling low when I got home at five-thirty. The only call on my answering machine made me feel even lower: Kerry, saying she’d be late, she had another meeting that was probably going to last until around seven. Why didn’t I go ahead and have dinner without her.

Well,
damn
. I went into the kitchen, because the mention of dinner had set my stomach to growling in its empty, plaintive way, and opened the refrigerator and looked inside.

Eggs.

That was all that was in there—eggs.

I’d had eggs for breakfast, I’d had an omelette for lunch, I was sick of them. I was also sick of carrots and cucumbers and celery and lettuce and grapefruit and oranges and yogurt and cottage cheese and RyKrisp and tuna fish and hamburger patties, but mostly I was sick of eggs. I never wanted to eat another egg again. I never wanted to see another egg again.

I slammed the refrigerator door. And stood there for a time, hungry and frustrated. And went and got my coat and headed back out into the rain.

Kerry arrived a few minutes after eight. She rang the bell, but I didn’t go and buzz her in; I knew she’d come up anyway and use her key. Besides, I was lying on the couch and I had no inclination to get up, not even for her.

Pretty soon I heard the key scrape in the lock and she came in. She called, “Hello? Anybody home?” and then she saw me and she said, “Oh, there you are. Why didn’t you—?” Then she stopped talking, and stopped moving too, and stood with her mouth open a little, staring.

Not at me. What she was staring at was the stuff on the coffee table: the six empty Schlitz beer cans and the empty carton that had contained a jumbo deluxe Guido’s House Special pizza with everything on it including anchovies, shrimps, and garlic olives.

I got the stare transferred to me soon enough, at which point it became an accusing glare. “Pizza and beer!” she said. “You broke your diet!”

I gave her a sheepish grin across the distended, the eggless, the satisfyingly
full
mound of my belly.

“Well?” she demanded. “Don’t just lie there looking fat and complacent. Haven’t you got anything to say?”

“Burp,” I said.

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