Quicksilver (Nameless Detective) (5 page)

“No. Edgar comes and goes as he pleases. You are a friend of his?”

“We’ve never met. I have a small personal matter to discuss with him.”

“Come back tomorrow afternoon,” Mr. Ogada said. “After twelve o’clock. The poinsettas will be delivered by then.”

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

He shut the door and I ran back to the car. So far I had not accomplished much in the way of earning my fee; I hadn’t even been able to track down Yamasaki, Mixer, or Edgar Ogada yet. What with the rain and the hunger pains that were starting up again in my stomach, not to mention Eberhardt and the new office, it had not been an all-star day.

But there was still time to salvage it. I could talk to Ken Yamasaki later tonight, for one thing. And much more important than that, I was going to spend the evening with Kerry. The whole night with her, maybe.

Like the song says: Who could ask for anything more?

Kerry was reading a pulp magazine when I got to her apartment on Diamond Heights. She had it open in her hand as she let me in —an early forties issue of
Midnight Detective,
one of a batch I had loaned her at her request. I recognized it from the garish cover painting of two Caucasian guys getting ready to blow up an Oriental in a mandarin robe; they had two sticks of dynamite apiece and the Oriental had a hatchet in one long-nailed claw and a big automatic in the other, and there was a half-naked girl lying on the ground to one side, tied up and looking terrified. It was a typical pulp cover: none of it made much sense.

She shut the door, gave me a quick kiss, and started to poke her nose back into the magazine. I said, “Is that all I get?”

“For now.”

“Must be a pretty interesting story you’re reading.”

“It is. One of Russ Dancer’s.”

“Good old Russ.”

“Mmm. I’ll be done in a minute; I only have two more pages to go.” She turned back toward the living room.

“I think I’ll have a beer,” I said casually.

“No you won’t,” she said. “There’s diet soda in the fridge. Tab and Fresca.”

Tab and Fresca, I thought. Fifty-four years old, I come in from a hard day on the job, and what am I supposed to drink? Crap with saccharine in it that had croaked a lot of laboratory animals. Tab and Fresca. Bah.

Instead of making for the kitchen, I followed Kerry into the living room and watched her curl up on her modernistic couch with the copy of
Midnight Detective.
She was nice to watch—anytime, anywhere, no matter what she was doing. Tall, willowy without being skinny, terrific legs, and a fanny to start a monk drooling into his cowl. Shoulder-length auburn hair; dark green chameleon eyes that changed shades according to her moods; humor lines crinkled around the eyes and a wide, soft mouth. Fifteen years younger than me, a fact which upset the hell out of her father, an ex-pulp writer called—by me, anyway—Ivan the Terrible. The thought of old Ivan being upset made me smile. I liked Ivan about as much as I liked being on a diet.

As for Kerry—hell, I
loved
her and I didn’t care who knew it.

She finished the story pretty soon and put the magazine down. “That,” she said, “was pure hokum. But I loved every word of it.”

I couldn’t remember which of Dancer’s stories was in that issue. I asked, “One of the Rex Hannigans?”

“No. Straight suspense, not a private eye story. All about midgets and burial crypts and a four-foot headless ghost that really isn’t a ghost at all.”

“Oh, yeah, that one. What was it called?”

“‘No Head for My Short Bier.’ ”

“Uh-huh. Inspired titles back then.”

“Dumb titles, you mean. The writing’s good, though. Dancer was a craftsman in those days.”

“He was,” I said, and let it go at that. Dancer had, since the demise of the pulps in the early fifties, turned into a hack writer of paperback originals and a full-fledged alcoholic. One of the reasons was Kerry’s mother, Cybil, who was also an ex-pulp writer; Dancer had been in love with her back in the forties and had never gotten over it. I’d found that out during a pulp convention earlier in the year that had reunited the Wades and Dancer and a bunch of other pulpsters after thirty years, and at which I had met Kerry. The reunion had led to murder and a case of plagiarism, among other things ... but that was another story.

“I thought you were going to have something to drink,” Kerry said. “If you don’t want a diet soda, I can make coffee.”

“Not right now.” My stomach was jumpy enough as it was, looking for something to digest, without putting caffein into it. “Aren’t you going to ask me how my day was?”

“How was your day?”

“Lousy,” I said.

“How come?”

“Well, to start it off, Eberhardt found us an office.”

“Oh boy. Where?”

“On O’Farrell, near Van Ness.”

I told her about it. She laughed when I mentioned the brass testicles on the light fixture, but by the time I finished, she was wearing a serious expression.

“It doesn’t sound too bad, really,” she said. “But are you sure ... ?”

“No, I’m not sure. Let’s not get into that again, okay?”

“Okay. When does the partnership open for business?”

“On Monday. Eb went out shopping for office furniture today. Mine’s being delivered tomorrow afternoon.”

“Well, all I can say is I hope it works out.”

“Not as much as I hope so,” I said. “Meanwhile, I picked up a three-day job this afternoon—my last solo investigation.” I did not like the sound or taste of those last four words as I said them.

Kerry said, “Is it anything interesting?”

“Not particularly,” and I told her about Haruko Gage and her secret admirer.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Kerry said, “it sounds kind of interesting to me.

“Yeah? Why?”

“It appeals to my romantic nature. You know, the mystery of it. It’s a little frightening to have a determined secret admirer, but it’s also pretty exciting.”

“Mrs. Gage didn’t seem to think so.”

“Not that she let on. But then why did she wait so long to call in a detective?”

“She’s a materialist. She likes expensive jewelry.”

“I’ll bet that’s not all, though.”

“Maybe not. Listen, how would you like to go visit a bath with me tonight?”

“What?”

“A public bath. You know, with other people.”

“Are you being funny?”

“Nope. I thought I’d stop in and talk to one of Mrs. Gage’s ex-boyfriends for a few minutes; it happens he works evenings in a Japanese bathhouse on Pine Street.”

She made a face. Then her expression changed shape and became thoughtful. “A Japanese bathhouse?” she said. “I’ve never been inside one of those and I’ve always wondered what they’re like.”

“Likewise. So tonight we can both find out.”

“All right. But I’m not going to take any public bath. I’d be too embarrassed.”

“How about a private bath with me later on?”

“I don’t think we’d both fit in the tub.”

“There’s always the shower.”

“Mmm. We’ll see.”

Yeah, I thought, you bet we will.

She said, “But right now I’m hungry. I imagine you must be too.”

“Starving.”

“Well, we’d better go out somewhere. I don’t have much here. What do you want to eat?”

“Do I get a choice?”

“Within reason.”

“I want a New York steak about three inches thick,” I said. “With sautéed mushrooms and a baked potato loaded down with sour cream and chives and bacon bits. And some sourdough French bread. And a pint or two of good ale.”

“I’ll just bet you do. And how is your diet going, anyway?”

“Peachy keen,” I said.

“How much weight have you lost so far?”

“Two pounds.”

“Is that all? You should have lost more than that. You haven’t been cheating, have you?”

“No, I haven’t been cheating. I’ve been grazing a lot, according to your mad dictates. And eating eggs—cartons of eggs. Cluck, cluck.”

“That’s good. I mean that you’re not cheating. But you shouldn’t eat too many eggs.”

“What?”

“They’re full of cholesterol.”

“I thought you told me to eat eggs three times a day.”

“I did not tell you that. I said they were high in protein and you should have them once or twice a day. Two meals and four eggs, maximum. With grapefruit to counteract the cholesterol.”

“I hate grapefruit.”

“Does that mean you haven’t eaten any?”

“I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

“I told you. Don’t you ever listen?”

“Not when somebody’s trying to get me to eat grapefruit.”

“Selective hearing,” she said, “that’s what you’ve got.”

“Nuts,” I said. “I don’t care what you say, I’m going to have a steak tonight. Just the thought of one makes me weak.”

“I never said you couldn’t have a steak. It’s the baked potato with all the trimmings and the sourdough bread and the two pints of ale you can’t have.”

“Then what do I get with the steak?”

“Black coffee and a green salad with lemon juice.”

“Green salad with lemon juice. God.”

“It’s good for you. Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Just so long as we get there fast.”

We ate at a place in one of the large downtown hotels that specialized in steaks. They sliced any cut of meat to order right in front of you, as soon as you came in, and I told the chef I wanted a sixteen-ounce New York done rare. Normally I like my steak medium rare, but tonight I was after red meat, the bloodier the better. It made me feel primitive as hell, like a caveman out on his first date.

When the steak arrived at our table I managed to eat it like a civilized human being, if just barely. I was even able to get down most of the green salad with lemon juice. Kerry watched me with a little awe in her expression. You’d have thought she had never seen a starving man wolf food before.

After the waiter cleared away the remains we sat and talked for a while over coffee. My stomach was full and I was happy. It doesn’t take much to make me happy—just a good meal, an attractive woman, a pulp magazine to read, and a job to do. Maybe I was a primitive, after all.

I let her pay the check for a change. She could afford it; she was a highly paid copywriter for one of San Francisco’s largest ad agencies and I was only a poorly paid private eye who was going to be even more poorly paid once I had to start divvying with Eberhardt. Then we went and got my car and I drove over to Pine and straight out to Tamura’s Baths. The sooner I got my little talk with Ken Yamasaki over and done with, the sooner I could go have an Italian shower with Kerry. Italian showers were much better than Japanese baths. The kind I had in mind were, anyhow.

The building that housed the baths was nondescript enough—a narrow brick structure, two stories high, flanked by an apartment house and a corner grocery. I found a parking space two doors down and we walked over to it through a drizzle that was more mist than rain. A luminous clock in the window of the grocery said that the time was 9:35.

At the door to the bathhouse, Kerry said, “Are you sure it’s all right for women to go in here?”

“You don’t see any signs that say otherwise, do you?”

“No, I guess not.”

The only sign of any sort was tacked up alongside the entrance. It said TAMURA’S JAPANESE BATHS • HOURS 10 A
.
M
.-
10 P.M. DAILY. I moved past it and opened the door and let Kerry precede me into a narrow, gloomy hallway illuminated by a single Japanese lantern. At the far end was a set of stairs leading upward.

It was quiet in there; I couldn’t hear anything except silence when I shut the door. The stairs took us into an anteroom that contained some rattan chairs, two more lanterns, and a reception desk with nobody behind it. To one side was a screened archway that probably led back to the baths.

We waited fifteen or twenty seconds and nothing happened: nobody came into the anteroom, nobody made any sounds anywhere else in the building. Finally I called, “Hello! Anybody here?” All that got me was an echo and more silence.

Kerry said, “Where is everybody?”

“Good question. The place can’t be closed; it’s not ten yet and the front door was unlocked.”

“Maybe we should go look behind that screen.”

“That must be where the baths are.”

“So? Are you afraid I’ll see something I’ve never seen before?”

“Fat chance of that.”

She stuck her tongue out at me.

I went over and around the screen, with Kerry at my heels. Another corridor, this one lighted by more lanterns, with several doorways opening off it and another doorway at the far end. The first few doorways opened into dressing cubicles, all of them empty, a couple in which towels had been carelessly tossed on the floor; the ones beyond opened into the bathing areas. There were four of these —large rooms separated by movable, opaque screens, each room containing a waist-deep sunken tile tub large enough for half a dozen people, with bamboo mats on the floor around the rim. None of the rooms was occupied, although a few of the mats appeared to be wet.