The Case of the One-Penny Orange: A Masao Masuto Mystery (Book Two) (5 page)

“No. Or so they say. He was a loner.” Williams looked around the apartment. “They must have searched the place first. After they killed him, they took off.”

“What was on his person?”

“Keys and wallet. You want to see it?”

Masuto nodded. Williams took a brown envelope out of his pocket and handed it to Masuto. Wainwright dropped into a chair, sighed deeply, and half closed his eyes. The deputy who had been at the door returned.

“Well?” Williams demanded.

“Some say two feet, some say four feet, some say six feet — which means one person or two or three.”

“I could have never figured that out,” Williams said.

“What did Cindy Lang say?” Masuto asked. He was going through the wallet: Master Charge, driver's license, insurance card, but no bills. Three keys.

“If he had bills, they took them,” said Williams. “I don't think they were after money, but it's a habit with hoods. They didn't want his credit card.”

“Who's Cindy Lang?” the deputy asked.

“You got a brain like a sieve,” Williams said disgustedly. “She's the kid who called us. The blond in apartment F.”

“Oh.”

“Well, what did she say?”

“She says she thinks there were three of them.”

Masuto nodded. Wainwright was dozing now. The photographer gathered his stuff and left.

“What killed him?” Masuto asked Williams.

“Skull fracture, over the left temple.”

“Brass knuckles?”

“That's what the doctor thinks.”

“You mind if I look around?”

“Be my guest. But this place has been searched like an earthquake hit it.”

“They didn't find what they were looking for,” Masuto said. “So they decided to beat it out of Haber. Except that he didn't have it.”

“What?”

“Who knows?”

“Then how the hell do you know he didn't have it?”

“They killed him.”

“Maybe after they took it.”

“Maybe.” Masuto went into the bedroom. The search was thorough, bedclothes torn off the bed, mattress turned over, pictures ripped off the walls — and in the bathroom, bottles emptied, toothpaste tube slit open. He went to the closet. Haber had been in his shirt-sleeves at the time of the murder. His jacket hung in the closet. Masuto took the jacket and spread it out on the bed. Wainwright had finished his nap, and he and Williams were watching now. Masuto folded back the lining, and there, attached to it with two strips of Scotch tape, was a small plastic envelope containing a single stamp.

“I'll be damned,” Williams whispered.

Wainwright said nothing.

“Goddamn it, Sergeant, how did you know where that was?”

“I didn't know. I tried to crawl into Haber's mind — a little.”

“Is that what they were after? That stamp?”

Masuto took the stamp out of the envelope carefully and examined it. “No.”

“Masao, how do you know?” Wainwright demanded.

It's a ten-cent black 1847 George Washington, and it's worth about three thousand dollars. They weren't after this and they weren't after three thousand dollars, because if they were he would have given it to them.”

“What are you, a stamp expert?” Williams snorted.

“I don't know a thing about stamps. Haber told me about this stamp yesterday. He invented some cock-and-bull story.” He turned to Wainwright. “Either Haber knew the stamp was in Gaycheck's pocket and took it before he called us, or it was in the safe and he knew the combination of the safe and he was lying.”

“How about him killing Gaycheck for the stamp, and then we let the sheriff worry about it.”

“No way,” said Masuto.

“Anything else here?”

Masuto shook his head, replaced the stamp in the plastic envelope, and gave it to Williams. “I guess it belongs to Gaycheck, and he's dead. What about it, Captain?”

“Hold it for evidence. Let's see what happens. Anyway, I'm hungry. Let's get some breakfast, Masao.”

“All right. But I want to talk to Cindy Lang.”

Masuto called his wife first. It was almost seven o'clock, and she had not slept since the telephone awakened both of them. “Masao,” she said, “you must have a night's sleep and you must rest and we don't even see you anymore.”

He tried to soothe her.

“Masao, I was reading a book on Women's Liberation, and first I was provoked, but now I am not sure. Not at all.”

He put down the phone and told Wainwright that his wife was reading books on Women's Lib. “I always felt I should have married a Japanese girl. Now you're shaking my dream,” Wainwright said. “Let's find Cindy Lang.”

They walked down the hall and knocked at the door of apartment F. It opened the width of the safety chain, and Masuto had the impression of straight blond hair and suspicious blue eyes.

“We're from the Beverly Hills police,” he said. “This is Captain Wainwright. I'm Detective Sergeant Masuto.”

“Well, this is not Beverly Hills. I talked to the local fuzz. I told them what I know, which is nothing. I don't know Haber.”

“If you could spare us a few minutes,” Masuto said gently. He showed her his badge.

She thought about it for a moment or two. Then, “Okay — but I got to get to work. I'm due in at seven-thirty.” She dropped the chain and opened the door, and they entered the apartment: one room, a studio bed still unmade, some bright prints on the wall, and a rag rug. Cindy Lang was in her twenties, a slight, pretty girl wearing blue jeans and a blouse — a girl little different, Masuto thought from a hundred others he would see on the streets of West Hollywood — where blue jeans and loose yellow hair, dyed or real, were almost required uniform.

“You called the sheriff last night?” Masuto asked her.

“That's right. It sounded like they were killing someone, so I called the fuzz. Does that make me anything?”

“It makes you part of the human race. No one else called them.”

“All right, so I'm part of the human race. Now can I go to work?”

“You told the deputy that three people ran past here. How did you know it was three?”

“It sounded like three.”

“What sounds like three?”

“Three people. Why don't you do your thing, Sergeant, and I'll do mine. I'm a waitress, and it's a lousy job but it's mine and it's all I got. If I'm late, I get my ass burned.”

“I think you saw them. I think you opened your door and saw them.”

“I think I didn't.”

“If you saw them,” Masuto said kindly, “then you may be the only one who did. That would be very important.”

“Sure. You want to know what's important? Cindy's important, because if I don't take care of her, there ain't nobody else going to. You know where you are? You're in West Hollywood — not in Beverly Hills. This place is lousy with kinky creeps. Who's going to call the cops if they decide to beat up on me?”

“We can arrange with the sheriff …” Wainwright began, but she interrupted.

“Don't sell me those lousy deputies. I was coming home the other night and one of them stops me and tries to shake me down for twenty bucks and tells me my car stinks of pot, and I never touched a stick for two months, and then he pulls me in on suspicion of being a hooker, and I got to get my girl friend out in the middle of the night to swear I don't solicit, so don't tell me about deputies. They stink.” She held the door open. “Now I got to go to work.”

“I like her,” Masuto said as they walked down the stairs to the street.

“I'd like her more if she talked.”

“She talked. She told us there were three of them. Where do you want to eat?”

“Ben Frank's — up the Strip.”

Masuto had ordered eggs, hot cakes, and sausage. From behind his two boiled eggs, Wainwright regarded him gloomily and asked how he ate that way and remained thin.

“Genes, metabolism.”

“I don't like this, Masao — I don't like this whole rotten business. We got two murders. That stinks.”

“One is the sheriff's.”

“Like hell it is! The newspapers and the goddamn TV will tell the world that a Beverly Hills stamp dealer and his assistant were murdered. They always got us harboring a war criminal. I swear I don't want to go back to my office, because the city manager will be there, and the mayor, who's got nothing else to do but nitpick the cops, and what have you got besides that smug Oriental look on your face?”

“Nothing.” Masuto was hungry. He kept eating.

“Boiled eggs. Why the hell don't you level with me?”

“Because my guesses would only show me off as a smartass Oriental, as you like to put it, and last night I learned that I'm about as Oriental as Jimmy Carter, and anyway, fifty percent of the time I'm wrong.”

“And fifty percent of the time you're right.” Wainwright looked at his watch. “It's seven forty-five, and the guy from the safe company will be on North Canon at eight o'clock. I want to be there when he opens the safe.”

“It's open,” Masuto said between bites.

“What's open?”

“The safe.”

“What! What in hell are you trying to tell me, Masao?”

“You were pushing me for brilliant Oriental guesses. I made one.”

“You're guessing?”

“I'm guessing.”

“You're telling me that someone opened the safe and cleaned it out?”

“Only the first part. I'm guessing that last night someone opened the safe. If you want another guess, I would guess that it was empty, that Haber opened it and cleaned out whatever was worth cleaning out before he called the police. The second guess is easy, because no one will ever be able to prove whether I'm right or wrong.”

“Then why in hell didn't you tell me that and tell me to put a man on the store?”

“Because I didn't know until I found the stamp in Haber's jacket, and then it was too late.”

Wainwright rose.

“Where are you going?” Masuto asked.

“To the store.”

“You haven't finished your eggs.”

“Take the eggs and stuff them.” Wainwright tossed two dollars on the table and stalked out.

Masuto finished eating without haste. He was puzzling over the fact that there were three keys in Haber's pocket. He had simply presumed that one of them was the key to the store, but if that were the case — no, it couldn't be. He paid his check and drove back to the house on Lapeer. Williams was just leaving, getting into his car when Masuto pulled up.

“Could I see the keys again?” Masuto asked him.

“You had your breakfast. I been in that lousy hole for five hours.”

“Please forgive me.”

Williams handed him the keys. He separated the car key and tried one of the door keys in the outside door of the apartment, the door that would be opened by a responsive buzz. It fit.

“The other one is to the apartment upstairs?” he asked Williams.

“Right. Why didn't you ask me? I could have told you.”

“I like to do things the hard way,” Masuto said. “Thank you.”

Then he drove to Beverly Hills, to the store on North Canon. There was a prowl car parked in front, and behind it, Sy Beckman's car. Officer Frank Seaton opened the door for him. The place was a shambles, the cases broken open, stamps scattered everywhere.

“I thought you patrolled these streets,” Masuto said.

“For Christ's sake, Sergeant, don't lean on me. I took enough chickenshit from the captain. Anyway, those velvet drapes were drawn, and anyway I didn't come on duty until seven o'clock this morning.”

Beckman came out of the back room. “One lousy morning, Masao. What in hell's been going on?”

Haber's been beaten to death in his place in West Hollywood.”

“So I'm told. The captain's burning. What's eating him?”

“This and that. Is he here?”

“He went back to the station. He says for you to get your ass over there as soon as you turn up.”

Masuto nodded and went into the back room, followed by Beckman and Seaton. “They had the key to the front door,” Seaton said. “Maybe if they had jimmied it open, someone would have noticed it.”

“I'll tell them,” Beckman said sourly. “Where do you suppose they got the key, Masao?”

“From Haber.” He was staring at the safe. It was not a very good safe to begin with, but it was no professional job that had opened it. Neither was it strictly amateur, but rather somewhere between the two. They had drilled holes around the dial, torn off the dial, then forced the door open.

“What was in it?” he asked Beckman.

“Nothing. They cleaned it out and dumped the stuff on the floor with everything else.” He motioned to the broken cabinets, the emptied desk drawers, the litter of stamps and papers. “Nothing that means anything. It's one hell of a mess, isn't it? I only got here half an hour ago and I got to straighten out this mess. You'd better get over to the station, Masao.”

When Masuto entered Wainwright's office, a small, hawk-faced man of about fifty was already there, facing Wainwright, who sat behind his desk and greeted the detective without pleasure.

“This is Mr. Zev Kolan, the Israeli consul general in Los Angeles.” And to the hawk-faced man, “This is Detective Sergeant Masao Masuto. He's in charge of the case.”

Masuto shook hands — a very strong grip for so small a man. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“Give me some proof that Ivan Gaycheck is actually Gaylord Schwartzman.”

“I told him that we sent the prints to Interpol and they made the identification,” said Wainwright.

“Yes,” said Mr. Kolan. “I am sorry to trouble you, but this has happened before. The Interpol records of Nazi officials are not dependable. There was just too much confusion and chaos at the end of the war. We would very much like to lay hands on Captain Gaylord Schwartzman, preferably alive, but if it is so, then dead. My government would like to know for certain.”