Quicksilver (Nameless Detective) (13 page)

The white Ford stayed behind me all the way down.

The road that led into Princeton angled off Highway One and skirted the edge of the small Half Moon Bay airfield. There wasn’t much to the central part of the village—an old inn, a grocery store, a couple of restaurants, and some craft stores that catered to tourists. Straight ahead was a communal pier and the white-flecked water of Pillar Point Harbor, where a bunch of fishing boats rocked at anchor and geometrically laid out rock jetties marked the channels.

Off to the west were a fish-processing plant and a boatyard and three or four square blocks of private houses. I turned that way in front of the inn. All the rough-paved streets were named after colleges; West Point Avenue was one of the longest and easy enough to find. I crawled along it in deference to its potholes, past a variety of houses ranging from comfortable old frame to tumbledown shacks; past bright green, fieldlike lots and boggy yards full of boats large and small, some up on drydock davits and some that were little more than rotting hulks.

Number 72 was near the inner sweep of the harbor—a smallish two-story shingled house painted box-car red, shaded in front by a line of cypress trees and enclosed by a mossy woodstake fence. In the yard behind the fence I could see stacks of cordwood and old tree stumps, and the rusted skeleton of a bus that appeared to serve now as a shed or workshop. The bus had once belonged to a tribe of hippies, judging from the remnants of flower decals that decorated its sides; it sat there like a relic from some ancient and curious civilization. And in a way, maybe it was.

I parked in front, between a pair of rain puddles that resembled miniature ponds. The air had a sharp salt tang mingled with the smell of ozone; it was going to rain again pretty soon. As I approached the gate I could see that all of the house’s facing windows, downstairs and upstairs both, had shades drawn over them. It gave the place a closed-up, abandoned look.

The gate was latched; I reached over and opened it and went inside along a short muddy path. The porch stairs made little popping, creaking noises as I climbed them. Except for the distant racket of gulls, those pops and creaks were the only sounds in the heavy quiet.

On the front door was one of those old-fashioned doorbells that you have to twist to ring, like winding up an alarm clock. Nobody answered the ratchety summons. I tried it again, with the same nonresults, and decided Sanjiro Masaoka was somewhere else this morning and that maybe one of his neighbors could tell me where that might be. I turned from the door, took one step, and immediately quit moving again.

There was a dog down at the bottom of the porch stairs, sitting on its haunches and staring at me with bright yellow eyes.

It was a Doberman and it was big and it looked menacing as hell, even though it wasn’t doing anything except sitting there. The hackles went up on my neck. Usually I get along all right with dogs, as long as they’re kept on leashes and not allowed to crap all over sidewalks and people’s lawns. But a Doberman is something else again. Dobermans stir up some sort of primitive fear in me; I don’t like them one bit and I steer clear of them whenever our paths happen to cross.

Neither of us moved. We just kept looking at each other for what seemed like a long time. Where the hell had he come from? I’d closed the gate behind me, so he hadn’t wandered in off the street. Which meant he’d been on the property the whole time, somewhere out back. Which in turn probably meant that he belonged here—Sanjiro Masaoka’s dog—and if
he
belonged here, he knew I didn’t.

I worked up some saliva, swallowed it to lubricate my throat, and said, “Easy, boy. Easy. Nice dog,” to see what would happen.

The Doberman pricked up his ears. Then he began to growl low in his throat. Otherwise he didn’t move; his little stub of a tail was as stiff as if it was welded onto his rump.

Oh, fine, I thought. Dogs that growled instead of barked and didn’t wag their tails were dangerous dogs. So why hadn’t Masaoka put out a BEWARE OF DOG sign so people like me wouldn’t wander in and maybe get themselves chewed on?

I looked away from the Doberman, out toward the street. The white Ford had pulled up about fifty yards behind my car, in front of a weathered neighboring house with a screened-in front porch, and the two Japanese guys were staring in my direction. I had a momentary impulse to call out to them. But even if they had been inclined to help me, which they no doubt weren’t, any loud noise like a shout might set the Doberman off. You never knew with high-strung dogs like that, even if they were trained, what was liable to trigger them.

He quit growling after another few seconds, but he didn’t take his eyes off me. I kept looking around for some avenue of escape or somebody to come along, but the former didn’t exist and the latter didn’t seem to either. The muscles in my neck and back and bad arm began to cramp up with tension. I met the dog’s gaze again and tried some man-staring-down-dumb-beast stuff. It didn’t work; he had a more forceful will than I did when it came to confrontations like this.

A good five minutes went by. The Doberman kept staring, the Japanese guys kept staring, the cramps got worse, and I began to grow more irritated than anxious. The hell with it, I thought finally, and I took a slow, careful step toward the stairs.

The Doberman got up, spread his forepaws, and commenced snarling.

I froze in place. Those yellow eyes were all hot now and full of what I took to be bloodlight. I forgot about being brave and annoyed and got anxious again. Christ, how long was I going to have to stand here before somebody rescued me or the goddamn dog decided to attack?

As it turned out, I had to stand there worrying about three more minutes. Then the screen door at the weathered house next door opened and a woman came out and down her porch steps. She stopped at the foot of them, put her hands on her hips, and peered at the white Ford. Pretty soon she moved in a purposeful way to her front gate and said something that I didn’t catch to the two
kobun.
But it must have been a threat—to call the county cops on them for loitering in front of her house, maybe—because it wasn’t long before the Ford’s engine revved up and the car pulled out and went past me and the Masaoka house. Not far, though; it turned the corner at the nearest intersection and angled off onto the verge again.

The woman had also followed the Ford’s progress and that allowed her to notice me. She peered in my direction the way she had peered at the Ford, then walked out through her gate and came down the street and stopped before Masaoka’s gate. She was around sixty, sun-cured and bony and gray-haired, wearing a tattered sweater with suede elbow patches. A tough old bird. Which suited me just fine.

“Hey, you,” she said. To me, not to the Doberman. “What’re you doing in there?”

What does it look like I’m doing? I thought. I’m standing here waiting for the Hound of the Baskervilles to tear out my throat. But I said quietly, so as not to stir up the dog, “I came to see Mr. Masaoka on a business matter. There’s nobody home except Fido here.”

“Oh,” she said in a funny kind of voice. Then she said, “His name’s Tomodachi. That means ‘friend’ in Japanese.”

“Yeah,” I said, “sure.”

“What’d you do, just walk in on him?”

“I didn’t see him. Or any Beware of Dog sign.”

“Used to be a sign. Some kids stole it.”

“Look, ma’am, you suppose you could do something about getting me out of here? I don’t like the way he keeps staring at me.”

“Well, he can be vicious sometimes,” she said. “Tomodachi! Get away! Leave the man alone!”

The Doberman turned his head and gave her a quick look. But he didn’t obey; he swung his gaze back to me and snarled some more and shuffled his front paws. I got ready to defend myself, but nothing happened.

“Damn,” the woman said. “I never could talk to him. Or get near him unless Sanjiro was around. Might be a way, though. I’ll be right back; you stay where you are.”

Lady, I thought, where am I going to go?

She trotted away to her own property, disappeared inside her house for about two minutes, reappeared, and came hurrying back to the Masaoka gate. When she neared it I could see what it was she was holding in one hand: a couple of beaten-up old tennis balls.

“Tomodachi likes to play ball,” she told me. “He likes it more than just about anything.”

“More than attacking strangers, I hope.”

“I’ll try to get him to fetch,” she said. “Then I’ll open the gate and you make a run for it.”

“Like a world-class sprinter,” I said.

“Ball!” she said loudly to the Doberman. “Ball, Tomodachi! Let’s play ball!”

It got his attention. His ears pricked up again, his head came around, and his tongue rolled out of his mouth like a flag unfurling. The woman showed him one of the tennis balls, kept on chattering at him until she succeeded in getting him half turned around and dividing his attention between the two of us. At which point she pulled her arm back and yelled “Fetch!” and uncorked a throw Willie Mays would have been proud of, over toward where the tree stumps were piled.

The Doberman wheeled, she got ready to yank open the gate, I got ready to run like hell ... and the dog ran five feet and stopped and came back and snarled at me some more.

The woman said, “Shit.” Which were my sentiments exactly.

So we had to go through the whole thing again, only longer this time, like extended foreplay, in order to get the dog all hot and bothered over the idea of playing fetch. She teased him with words, juggled the ball from one hand to the other, pretended three or four times that she was going to throw it. The last time she cocked her arm, he scooted away a few feet in anticipation; he was as ready then as he would ever be. And so was I.

The woman glanced at me, and I nodded, and she hauled her arm back again and yelled “Fetch!” and let fly, in the general direction of the hippie-relic bus. The Doberman and I both took off at the same time. I sailed down over the four porch steps without touching any of them, stumbled when I landed, saw that the woman had the gate open, saw that the dog had put on the brakes and was starting to twist back toward me with his fangs bared, caught my balance, and charged ahead slipping and sliding on the muddy path. I got to the opening just as the dog launched himself at my backside, and went galumphing through. The woman slammed the gate shut; the Doberman must have barreled right into it because I heard him yelp. But if he got his dignity wounded, so did I : I had been running so fast that I couldn’t slow down soon enough and I caromed off the side of my car, did a crazy pirouette to one side, tripped, and splashed down into one of the rain puddles.

I said some things that ought to have blistered the paint off the car. The woman didn’t even flinch; she’d come over to the edge of the puddle and was trying not to laugh at me. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m just dandy.” I got onto my feet and sloshed to the car and leaned against the front fender. The Doberman was making lemme-at-him noises and glaring at me through the wood-stake fence; I glared back at him in the same malevolent way. Dogs. Phooey.

The woman said, “Come on over to my place. I’ll let you use a towel.”

“Thanks. And thanks for the rescue.”

“Always glad to be neighborly,” she said. She was still trying not to laugh at me.

We went to her house and she gave me the towel and the use of her bathroom to repair some of the damage to my suit. When I came out she had a cup of coffee for me. She said her name was Ethel Pinkham, grimaced to let me know she hated both ends of it, and told me to call her Pink. Everyone did, she said, and went on to explain that when her late husband was alive he’d been Pink One and she’d been Pink Two. I gave her my name, but not what I did for a living or what my business was with Masaoka. And she didn’t ask.

She said, “Poor Tomodachi. I been feeding him—scraps over the fence; he won’t let me come in the yard either. But he needs care and a new home. One of Sanjiro’s cousins was supposed to come pick him up three days ago. If she doesn’t get here by tomorrow morning I’m calling the SPCA.”

“I don’t follow, Pink. Why does the dog need a new home?”

“Oh, that’s right—you don’t know. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come looking for Sanjiro.”

“Don’t know what?”

“He’s dead,” she said. “Been dead eight days now.”

It took me a couple of seconds to absorb that. Then I said, “How did he die?”

“Some kind of fall. Nobody knows for sure.”

“Where did it happen? His house?”

“No. Out toward the point. He’d been abaloneing by himself, like usual, and he must have fallen off the rocks. One of those freak accidents.”

“This happened eight days ago, you say?”

She nodded. “Early in the morning. Couple of kids found him wedged in amongst the rocks. Hadn’t been dead more than a few hours at the time.”

“Was he married?”

“Widower. His wife died three ... four years back.”

“So he lived alone?”

“Just him and Tomodachi.”

“What about this cousin? Does she live around here?”

“Nope. Over in Fresno.”

“Where she and Masaoka close, do you know?”