The Case of the Murdered MacKenzie: A Masao Masuto Mystery (Book Seven) (20 page)

“Because there's no way they'd just hand him over to me and say, take him home and question him, Sergeant Masuto, and when you and Captain Wainwright have no more use for him, you can give him back to us. You know that. They'd take him downtown and book him and work him over and if what he came up with interacted with our murder yesterday, they'd inform us, but they might also inform the C.I.A. and the Justice Department.”

“Sooner or later, we'll have to hand him over.”

“After we talk to him.”

“Masao, do you think he killed Feona?”

“Oh, no. Absolutely not.” He had considered the possibility that Feona had employed him. “Believe me, Captain, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind. Mackenzie killed Feona. But that doesn't mean I can tie it together. I say to myself that I'll sleep better, tonight anyway, knowing we have him caged. But tomorrow, they—whoever they are—can hire another gun. It occurred to me that Feona did the hiring, but not alone, and believe me, Feona is no housekeeper.”

“Then what is she?”

“What do you think?” he asked Wainwright. “I saw her dead in the bathtub, and that doesn't tell me too much. But you interrogated her the first time, when the man in the tub was murdered. What was your impression of Feona Scott?”

“She was in command,” Wainwright said. “You got the sense of what command means in the army, and it never leaves you. I would see a line officer killed, and the sergeant who should have taken over would turn into crud, and then some guy would step in and take command. It wasn't that she dumped on Eve Mackenzie; she just took over and apparently she always took over wherever she was. At least, that was my feeling.”

“She was no housekeeper, right?”

“No, no way. She was a pro, Masao—but in what line I don't know.”

“Do you think she was his mistress?” Masuto asked.

“Not in that sense. I mean not as a mistress. She was something else. Sex? That's something else. Sure, maybe they had sex.”

Sergeant Cooper interrupted to tell them that he had finally located Dr. Baxter, having dinner at La Scala.

“He eats in fancy places. What do you want him for?”

“Will he come?” Masuto asked.

“When he finishes eating,” Sergeant Cooper replied. “He wasn't very pleasant about being interrupted at dinner.”

“Pleasant
is a word he don't know,” Wainwright said.

“Captain, what do I do about this guy the sergeant brought in?”

“We'll let you know.”

“What about Sweeney?” Masuto asked.

“Be here in ten minutes.”

“Let us know as soon as he arrives. I want his prints and I want them quickly.”

Then he and Wainwright went to the room where the gunman sat under the observant eye of Officer Garcia. It was not an interrogation room. It would not have done for so civilized and quiet a place as Beverly Hills to have an interrogation room, but it served the same purpose, and the gunman sat backward on a wooden kitchen chair, his wrists still cuffed behind him.

“For Christ's sake,” he begged them, “take them damn cuffs off. They're killing me. You the boss?” he demanded of Wainwright. “This goddamn Chinaman of yours, he broke my wrist and he broke my finger. Look at my pants—they're soaked with blood.”

“You don't like pain, do you?” Masuto said. He went behind him and removed the handcuffs. Officer Garcia stood at the door.

“Outside,” Wainwright said to Garcia. “Stay at the door.”

“Can I take a leak?” the gunman begged them.

“I don't know,” Wainwright said plaintively. “I swear to God I don't know what is happening to this country. Do you know who Norman Rockwell was, Masao? Or are you too young?”

“I remember the covers he used to do for the
Saturday Evening Post
when I was a kid.”

“Well, look at this loathsome turd sitting there, this miserable and disgusting imitation of a human being. He could have stepped out of one of Norman Rockwell's paintings, with his pretty face and his blue eyes and his blond hair. If he isn't a faggot already, they'll turn him into one three days after he sets foot in San Quentin, but that won't last. After he's been gang-raped forty, fifty times, he goes to the gas chamber. After all, an easy way to die. Or do they keep them in solitary until the execution?”

“I don't know,” Masuto said. “You can't be sure he'll be executed. Maybe we can't prove he killed Clint.”

“You'll prove it. He's Masao Masuto,” he said to the gunman. “You know what his record is? There has not been a murder in this city over the past ten years that he hasn't solved, not to mention attempted murder. You didn't take the money you were paid to kill a nobody. Your contract was for someone special—and that is why you have a ticket to the gas chamber.”

“I didn't kill no guy named Clint! I don't know anybody named Clint!”

“Attempted murder,” Masao said thoughtfully. “That's no problem. Two blasts from a sawed-off shotgun. We have the car, or what's left of it, the gun, and this poor misguided fool here. What would he-get on the attempted murder, Captain? Fifteen to thirty?”

“They'd bugger him to death the first six months, but we're going to send him to the gas chamber.”

“Well, if he cooperated—what's your name?”

“Hank Dobson.”

“Your real name?”

“I told you. Look, I got a right to a lawyer. I got a right to a doctor.”

“I'm sure you have,” Wainwright agreed.

Officer Garcia opened the door a crack and said, “Sweeney's here.”

“Come on in, Sweeney. Got your stuff?”

“All right here. I'll use this bench,” Sweeney said.

“I want good prints,” Wainwright said. “You make any fuss, mister, we break the other arm.”

“I'm not making any fuss,” he pleaded with Sweeney. “But my wrist is broken. It hurts like hell every time you touch my hand.”

“You can make it hard on yourself or you can make it easy on yourself,” Masuto said.

“I told you, I don't know nobody named Clint.”

“Who hired you?”

“I don't know.”

“You know something,” Wainwright said. “If you had killed an L.A. cop and they had you like this, incognito so to speak, you'd never walk out of that door alive—”

“Pray none of this ever gets to the L.A. cops,” Masuto said to himself.

“—but here in Beverly Hills,” Wainwright went on, “well, it's a different picture. We can't use torture or force, but suppose you have to go two or three days with that broken wrist. Maybe you'd never use that hand again. Now the sergeant here, he wants to be kind to you. I don't know why. Maybe it's all this Oriental crap he's mixed up in.”

“I'd like to help him,” Masuto said. “A human being—”

“A turd!” Wainwright interrupted. “A shitheel!”

“Come on, come on, Captain. You're being too hard on him. He's human. If we can help him, we should.”

“If he lets us.”

“Got ten beautiful prints,” Sweeney said.

“Put them on the wire for the F.B.I. Get everything they have.”

“Help us help you,” Masuto said to the gunman. “Who hired you?”

“I don't know. I told you I don't know. I wasn't lying.”

“What you're saying makes no sense,” Masuto said ingratiatingly. Wainwright allowed Masuto to take over now. “We know you're a pro. That shotgun thing tonight was absolutely the work of a pro. So when you say you don't know who hired you—well, it makes no sense at all.”

“I don't.”

“You know, you could do a lot of good for yourself. It's not that we don't care about you. We do. But our real interest is in the people who hired you. I'm not saying you're not in trouble; you are neck-deep in trouble, but wouldn't it be a nice thing for you if we could go to the district attorney or even to the judge and say, this fellow—what did you say your name was?”

He didn't slip. “Hank Dobson.”

“Okay, we say to them, this fellow Hank Dobson, you know, without him we never would have made the bust, and we really busted somebody. That would help.”

“Look, Sergeant, I keep a place in San Francisco. I don't mind telling you because I figure there's no bail anyway, and anyway I don't keep a place very long. People in the business know about my place, and you work by recommendation. Three days ago, I got a phone call—”

“Man or woman?”

“Man.”

“Any accent?”

“Careful, correct talk. He was a foreigner, but that's just a guess. Asks me if I'm free and can take on a job. I say it depends. He tells me it's a Beverly Hills cop. I tell him that's thirty thousand dollars. A half hour later, a messenger comes with the money and your name.”

“That's a sleazy story,” Masuto said, “full of loose ends. I don't buy it. How did you know where to find me? How did you know I'd be up in Malibu Canyon? How did you find out which was my car? Nobody followed me to the Mackenzie house. You were sitting there waiting. And where's the money?”

“Shit on all that,” he said, and grinned and shook his head.

Wainwright went to the door and called for another cop named Sandy, and told the two of them to search Dobson, pile his possessions, and then stay with him. At the same time, a very short-tempered Dr. Baxter entered the room.

“I'm a medical examiner, not a doctor. Who's going to pay for this, that miserable chintzy city you work for? And why was I led to believe it was a corpse?”

“I can take care of that, Doc, if it's going to make you happy. This is the bag of human garbage murdered Oscar Clint. He'd be a lot prettier as a corpse.”

“What is this?” Dobson shouted at Wainwright. “You going to leave me with these creeps?”

“He has a broken wrist, Doc.”

“And a broken finger.”

“Then why don't you take him to the hospital?”

“He likes it here.” Wainwright drew Baxter out into the corridor. “We have a problem. He doesn't belong to us. He belongs to the L.A. cops. But we're pretty certain that he killed Clint by setting that bomb, and he tried to kill Masao here tonight.”

“Did he?” Baxter asked, smiling evilly. “You don't have a scratch, Sergeant. He's a bungler.”

“That's very amusing,” Masuto said. “Nevertheless, we have a problem. The captain will have enough explaining to do downtown. We've had some run-ins in the past, and they don't exactly love me, so we have to put our best foot forward—”

“Did you break his wrist?” Baxter demanded.

“It was unavoidable.”

“Patch him up nicely,” Wainwright said. “The cops downtown will jump on anything, and what we don't need is any charge that we're torturing that miserable offal in there.”

Baxter shook his head in disgust. “Cops,” he said. “Cops.”

“I can't figure him,” Wainwright said as they went into his office. “All these years he worked for the city and I still can't figure him.”

“He's a complex man,” Masuto said.

In Wainwright's office, he telephoned Kati at his Uncle Toda's house, and she said to him, “We were expecting you, and then when you didn't come I called the police station. They said that someone had destroyed your car but you were all right.”

“What idiot told you that?”

“I don't know, Masao, because I was too frightened even to ask his name, and all I could think of was how poor Oscar Clint had died in your car—”

“Please don't cry,” he said to her. “I'm all right. I don't have a scratch on me. Please, Kati, don't cry.”

“Will you come?” she begged him.

“If I can find a car—”

“Take one of the prowl cars,” Wainwright said. “Bring it back in the morning and we'll find you a rental.”

“In about an hour,” Masuto said to Kati.

“Have you eaten?”

“I'm not hungry.” In his state of tension and excitement, food was the last thing on his mind. “How are the children?”

She was crying again as she told him that the children were fine.

“You can't blame her,” Wainwright said. “I never had anyone put a price on me. I don't know how I'd take it. But maybe since we got that blond turd inside, you can rest easy.”

“Not until we find out who hired him and why.”

“Then for God's sake, be careful.”

“I'm always careful,” Masuto said.

Sweeney came into the room with the F.B.I. response to the fingerprints. “They also sent the stuff on your question about the social security card.” He handed two sheets of paper to Wainwright.

“Well, you were right about his name,” Wainwright said to Masuto. “According to the F.B.I., his name is Albert Dexel, and he's got a reputation on several continents. They've never been able to hang it on him here at home, but they want him for murder in Paris and in Copenhagen, and they think he has some connection with the P.L.O. That's pretty good for something out of a
Saturday Evening Post
cover. And it also gives me a shoe-in with the L.A.P.D. We'll hand the collar over to them, and it's just classy enough for them to forget that you busted the creep on their turf. Now, this one—” He was reading the report on Feona Scott. “I'll be damned. Feona Scott was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1941. She died in a car crash in Dallas, Texas. So the good Feona's card was not only a forgery, it was a forgery based on an actual card. How the hell do they do that?”

“Either steal the original or have access to the records.”

“Either way, the F.B.I. wants, us to file a report on why we made the inquiry and on anyone using the card. Masao, what in hell are we dealing with?”

“I intend to find out.”

“Well, try to stay alive until you do—if that's not too much to ask.”