Quicksilver (Nameless Detective) (2 page)

I looked at him. “You noticed, huh?”

“Sure. This morning, the first time I laid eyes on him. But we don’t have to deal with him much; he’s not the kind of landlord who comes around poking his nose into things. And I still say we lucked out.”

“Maybe so.”

“How about if we open shop next Monday?” he said. “The State Board’s approved my application for a license, so we don’t have to wait on that account. And we’ll have four days to get the stuff moved in.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I’ll ring up Ma Bell, make arrangements for the phones. Two, you think?”

“Any more and they’d think we were going to make book.”

He laughed. It startled me a little; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him laugh. “I’ll buy a desk for myself,” he said. “From one of those office furniture places on Mission that sells used. Anything else I should get?”

“Suit yourself.”

“What outfit did you store your stuff with?”

I told him.

“Can they get it delivered by Monday?”

“I don’t see why not. I’ll give them a call.”

“So then we’re just about set.”

“Just about.”

“Listen,” he said seriously, “it’s going to work out, you’ll see. I’ll carry my weight; and I won’t try to throw any of it around with you. You’re the boss—you tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew Eberhardt from way back; he was used to being in charge, he was stubborn, he had his own way of doing things and he always thought it was the right way, and on certain issues he was either blind or had tunnel vision. He meant what he said about following orders—at this moment. But later on, when push came to shove on this or that case? I didn’t want to think about that, because I was fairly sure I knew how it would go. What I didn’t know, and wouldn’t until it happened, was how I would handle it.

He got one of his scabrous pipes out of his overcoat pocket and clamped it between his teeth. “I don’t know about you,” he said around the stem, “but I’m starving. What say we go somewhere and put on the feed bag? Out to the Old Clam House, maybe, get some fried oysters ...”

Fried oysters, I thought, and my stomach lurched the way it had when Crawford blew his cigar smoke at me. But not for the same reason. “I can’t, Eb,” I said, not without reluctance.

“Why not? Ah, Christ, you still on that diet?”

“Afraid so.”

“You’re no fatter than you ever were,” he said. “What the hell do you want to lose weight for?”

“My health. It’s not good to have a gut like mine at my age.”

“You never worried about your gut before. Kerry’s behind this diet business, I’ll bet.”

She was—she’d been after me for months to take off fifteen or twenty pounds—but I didn’t want to tell him that. I hadn’t told him or anyone else about her abortive attempts to get me to go jogging on a regular basis and I shouldn’t have told him about the diet either. He was tall and slender, all angles and blunt planes, and he’d never had a weight problem. He didn’t understand the way it was for guys like me.

“Nah,” I said, “it’s not Kerry’s doing, it’s mine. I’m tired of having to lift up my belly every time I want to see what I’ve got hanging underneath.”

Eberhardt laughed again. It was a joke at my expense this time, but that was all right. At least it got him off the subject. I had enough trouble with the diet as it was, without talking about it. All that did was make me think about food.

I drove him back to O’Farrell Street, dropped him off at his car, and then went home to my flat in Pacific Heights. There was nothing else to do; I had no work right now. I wished to Christ I did—one more case that I could call my own, one last solo investigative fling. Well, maybe something would turn up today or tomorrow, something simple that I could dispose of before next Monday, without involving Eberhardt.

I had to park the car a block and a half away from my building, and even my underwear was wet by the time I let myself into the foyer. From inside the ground floor apartment that belonged to my friend Litchak, the retired fire inspector, I could smell something cooking. Stew, maybe, or some other Lithuanian dish with lots of garlic in it. My mouth began to water. And my stomach began to ache. All I’d had to eat today was two eggs and an orange for breakfast. For lunch I was supposed to have a green salad and some more eggs. Every day now for ten days, eggs for breakfast and eggs for lunch and sometimes even eggs for supper. Jesus Christ. What kind of food was that for a big, active man? Pretty soon I would start flapping and squawking and pecking the ground like an undernourished chicken.

I went and stripped out of my sodden clothes and got on the bathroom scale. Same reading as this morning and yesterday morning, too: 228 pounds. I had lost exactly two pounds in ten days. I said a nasty word. And then took a hot shower to get myself warm again. That was another thing about dieting; you were cold all the time, because you weren’t getting enough fuel to stoke the furnace.

My stomach kept growling. I didn’t want the eggs, I was beginning to hate eggs, but I was so hungry I could have eaten the carton. I couldn’t even fry the damn things, oh no, because there were too many calories in butter and margarine and oil; I had to softboil them. So I put water on and made a salad out of lettuce and cucumbers; no dressing, too many calories in dressing, just a little vinegar and some salt and pepper. I ate the salad while I waited for the water to boil. Rabbit food. Rabbits and chickens. Bah!

After I started the eggs cooking I went back into the bedroom and checked my answering machine. Two calls. The first one made me cringe a little; it was from Jeanne Emerson and she said she was back in town and wanted to know when we could get together to do our article. The article was supposed to be all about me and my career and the trials and tribulations I’d had in recent months; Jeanne was a photojournalist. She thought I represented “the common man’s struggle to maintain his ideals while working within a restrictive system.” Which was something of a crock as far as I was concerned, but she was pretty serious about it.

She was also pretty serious about me. Back in October, she’d kept calling and hinting around about us seeing more of each other, and it had made me uncomfortable. I wouldn’t have minded seeing
all
of her if she’d come into my life more than eight months ago, because she was a very good-looking Chinese lady; but as it was, I had my hands and my heart full of another very good-looking lady, Kerry Wade, who had come into my life exactly eight months ago. I didn’t want to do anything stupid to jeopardize my relationship with Kerry. So it had been a distinct relief when Jeanne picked up a lucrative magazine assignment and went off to the wilds of Mexico for six weeks.

Only now my reprieve had ended and here she was again, and I still didn’t know how to handle the situation. Do the article and run the risk of succumbing to temptation. Don’t do the article and offend Jeanne and lose some free publicity. Terrific choice. I needed more time to think about it. So I wouldn’t return her call right away, I decided. For all she knew, I might be out of town myself.

Some tough, brave private eye I was. Mix me up with a woman or two and I came apart like cardboard in a rainstorm.

The other call on the machine, coincidentally, was also from an Oriental woman—a Japanese this time, who said her name was Haruko Gage and that she needed the services of an investigator. That perked me up a little; maybe it was the job I’d been lusting after. I wrote down her number, then went back into the kitchen to rescue my eggs. I put them on a plate and looked at them for about ten seconds. Then I opened the refrigerator and got out a celery stalk and put that on top of the salad in my grumbling stomach. I wasn’t
eating
these days; I was either swallowing chicken fruit or grazing like a bloody horse.

Kerry, I thought, the things I do for you.

In the bedroom again, I dialed Haruko Gage’s number. A man answered, and when I asked for the lady he wanted to know who was calling; he sounded timid and wary. I told him. “Oh, right,” he said, and the wariness was gone and he sounded timid and unhappy. “Well, she had to go out for a few minutes, but she’ll be back before long. I’m her husband. Art Gage?” He made his name into a question, as if he wasn’t sure who he was.

“What is it your wife wants to see me about, Mr. Cage?”

“These presents she keeps getting.”

“Presents?”

“In the mail. It’s driving us crazy.”

“What sort of presents are you talking about?”

Pause. “I guess I’d better let Haruko tell you. It was her idea to hire a private detective.”

“All right. I’ll call back a little later, then—”

“No, no,” he said, “why don’t you just come over to the house? She’ll be back by the time you get here.”

“Where do you live, Mr. Gage?”

“On Buchanan, just off Bush.” He gave me the number. “It’s on the fringe of Japantown.”

The address was only about ten minutes from my flat. I looked out through the bedroom window to see if it was still raining so hard. It wasn’t, so I said, “I think I’ve got time to stop by. Give me about half an hour.”

“I’ll tell Haruko you’re coming.”

We rang off, and I put some dry clothes on and combed my hair. Then I called the outfit where my office stuff was stored and made arrangements for them to deliver it to O’Farrell Street tomorrow afternoon. And then I went back into the kitchen to eat those goddamn eggs.

Japantown was just off Geary Boulevard in the Western Addition, a few minutes from downtown—a miniature
ginza
where a high percentage of San Francisco’s 11,000 citizens of Japanese descent lived and worked, and where a good many Nippon tourists either stayed or congregated. Its hub, the Japan Center, was a five-acre complex built in 1968 that housed restaurants, a large hotel, a theatre, Japanese baths, art galleries, bookstores, banks, plenty of shops, and a pedestrian mall that was supposed to look like a mountain village in the old country, complete with a meandering stream, plum and cherry trees, and fountains. On the dozen or so other blocks of Japantown, you found small businesses, hotels, a bowling alley, a couple of Japanese-language newspapers, apartment houses, and not a few old—and for the most part refurbished—stick-style Victorian houses.

But the area surrounding the
Nihonmachi
wasn’t anywhere near as pleasant. There were a lot of low-income housing projects, and a lot of anger and frustration to go with them; Japantown and its residents and visitors were prime targets for young hoodlums. Security measures had been taken and police patrols increased, but it was still one of the city’s high-crime districts. That was a damned shame for several reasons, not the least of which was the fact that the Japanese were a polite, friendly, and law-abiding people. They could have given lessons to too many of the white and black population.

There wasn’t much doing in Japantown this afternoon because of the weather. Street parking was usually at a premium, even up around Bush and Buchanan, but I found a place half a dozen doors down from the address Art Gage had given me. That block of Buchanan was quiet, tree-shaded, flanked by well-kept Victorians painted in bright colors in the modern fashion. The Gage house was one of an identically restored group, like a row of architectural clones: light blue walls and stoop, dark blue trim, with accents in red and gold.

I hustled up onto the narrow porch, shook rainwater off my hat, and rang the bell. The door opened pretty soon and I was looking at a slender, almost fragile blondish guy of about thirty. He was handsome in an undistinguished sort of way, or he would have been if he hadn’t had a weak chin, liquidy blue eyes, and the too-white skin of a shut-in. He was wearing Levi’s, moccassins, and a blue Pendleton shirt.

He said, “You’re the detective?”

“Yes.”

“Come on in. Haruko’s in the front room.”

He took my coat and hat, then led me down a short hall and through an archway into 1920. Chairs with tufted velvet cushions, little round tables with fringed gold cloths, rococo lighting fixtures, a tiled Queen Anne fireplace above which were mirrored glass panels. There was too much furniture: china cabinets and a highboy and a secretary desk and a claw-footed mahogany couch, in addition to all the chairs and tables. It had the look of a room designed for show rather than comfort, like a private museum exhibit. But the problem was, none of the furnishings appeared to be a genuine antique; even I could tell that. They were an oddball mixture of reproductions, simulations, and garage-sale junk.

The woman sitting on the claw-footed couch looked out of place among all that ersatz Victorian stuff. She was in her mid-twenties, not much over five feet tall, small-boned, inclining to plumpness, with classically pretty Japanese features and silky black hair that would hang to her waist when she was standing. But there was none of the delicacy that you usually found in small Oriental women. I sensed instead a willful strength, a kind of sharp-edged Occidental determination. If appearances were accurate, there wasn’t much doubt as to who ran the Gage household.

She stood up as her husband and I crossed the room. Gage performed the introductions, and she gave me her hand and a small solemn smile. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you called back; I had to deliver some designs to one of our customers.”