Quicksilver (Nameless Detective) (22 page)

Art Gage opened the Victorian’s front door in answer to my ring and said, “Haruko’s not back yet.” He looked and sounded short-tempered; his eyes, under their blond brows, were hostile.

Don’t mess with me, kid, I thought. Not today. “I’ll wait inside. That is, if you don’t mind.”

“Why should I mind? Come on in.”

He took me into the familiar junk-filled parlor, said he had work to do upstairs in the studio, and started out. I said, “Wait a second. Is it all right if I use your phone?”

“What for?”

“To make some calls on. That’s what people generally use phones for, isn’t it?”

He made a prissy, disgusted noise with his lips. “What the hell, go ahead,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what I say, anyway.”

It would, I thought, if you had anything to say.

He went out of the room and I moved over to where the telephone sat on a wobbly-looking table with rails around the top. I glanced at my watch as I picked up the receiver. It was just one o’clock.

I made Information calls first, to get the numbers of the eight Wakasas living in California. Seven were listed; the one in Fresno either had an unlisted number or no phone at all. Then I called each of those seven, starting with the ones in Oakland and Palo Alto. I did all of it by direct-dialing; the Gages would have to pay message-unit and long-distance charges regardless of whether they were on the phone bill or on my expense list.

There was no answer at one of the Oakland numbers; the other one drew a blank—the woman I spoke to had never heard of Michio Wakasa or Chiyoko Wakasa. Another blank in Palo Alto. And another in Eureka. No answer at the Vacaville number. Two more blanks at the Wakasa households in Southern California. Five down, three to go.

By the time I finished the last of the calls, it was after one-thirty. And Haruko still hadn’t come home.

I began to feel the same edginess I had last night when I couldn’t get hold of her. I sat on one of the fake Victorian chairs. Got up pretty soon and paced for a while. Stopped pacing and called the Oakland and Vacaville numbers again, still without getting a response at either place. Sat some more. Paced some more. Went to the bay windows and stood staring out at the empty street, at a sky that was clouding up again, building more rain.

Two o’clock. No Haruko.

Two-fifteen.

No Haruko.

Gage came clumping downstairs, poked his head into the parlor, saw me alone and pacing again, and said, “Where’s Haruko?”

“She hasn’t come back yet.”

“What?” He came over to where I was and scowled at me, as if her not being there was my fault. And maybe, damn it, it was. “She should have been back by now, even on the Muni. She said she’d be here by one o’clock at the latest, because you were coming.”

“She took the bus, you say?”

“Yes. Parking is such a hassle downtown.”

“Does she usually call if she’s going to be late?”

“She always calls.”

“Where was this nine o’clock meeting of hers?”

“On Post Street. Post and Mason.”

“Somebody’s office, or what?”

“The Sundler Agency.”

“You have their number?”

“I can look it up.”

He did that; and I called the Sundler Agency and asked a woman with a nasal voice if Haruko Gage was still there. The woman said no, she wasn’t, and sounded surprised at the question. Mrs. Gage, she said, had left their offices before lunch, at about eleven-thirty.

I put the handset down and turned to Gage and repeated the information to him. He looked worried and upset now—but not half as worried and upset as I was.

“All this time,” he said. “Where the hell could she be?”

Yeah, I thought grimly. Where the hell could she be?

I left the Gage house at a quarter to three. Haruko still hadn’t shown up, and Art Gage was working himself into a manic state and getting on my nerves. He was the type who can’t handle a crisis, who always starts to unravel at the first sign of one. If I’d told him what I suspected, he’d have probably broken down into gibbering hysterics. As it was, the only things I did tell him where that I was going out looking for her and that he should stay put.

But
where
was I going to go looking for her? If she’d been kidnapped by her psychotic admirer, and I couldn’t see any other explanation, I still had no inkling of who he was. Or what lay behind his fixation with her—the reason he’d murdered three men. And the only lead I had at the moment were those three remaining Wakasas, the two that hadn’t answered their phones and the one in Eureka who wasn’t listed.

All the way downtown, I kept thinking: This is my fault. I should have gone to see her last night, as late as it was; I should have insisted then that she go away somewhere safe. The thought was pointless and counterproductive, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. If anything happened to Haruko ...

The only place I could think to go was the new office for a conference with Eberhardt and some more telephoning. When I came in he was hammering a nail into one of the walls, hanging my framed blowup of the
Black Mask
cover.

“Be with you in a second,” he said “Just let me get this up.”

The phones had been installed—old-fashioned black ones, thank God. I crossed to the one on my desk and called the Cage house. Artie answered instantly. He wasn’t happy to hear from me again so soon—he’d thought it might be Haruko catting—and I wasn’t happy that she still hadn’t turned up. I cut the conversation short so I wouldn’t have to listen to him break down some more.

Eberhardt was finished with the poster and watching me as I put the handset down. He said, “What’s going on? You look grim.”

I told him what was going on.

“Christ,” he said. “If you’re right and she’s snatched, it’ll be this time tomorrow before the boys at the Hall can act on it. She won’t be officially missing for twenty-four hours, not without an eyewitness or some other evidence of kidnapping.”

“And meanwhile,” I said, “she’s out there God knows where at the mercy of a lunatic.”

“Don’t jump down
my
throat, paisan. It’s a lousy deal, but it’s not my fault.”

“No,” I said. “I keep thinking it’s mine.”

“Why? You couldn’t have known he’d go after her so soon.”

“I suspected he might. I told you that last night, remember?”

“Bull. This’d be a hell of a world if we could run it by hindsight. You wops are as bad as us Jews when it comes to shouldering guilt.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So what’re you planning to do?”

“Keep trying to get through to the rest of the Wakasas. Call some of her ex-boyfriends, see what that gets me. And if none of it pans out ... hell, I don’t know. Go get that white jade ring and drive up to Petaluma and see if Kazuo Hama’s family can positively identify it. Maybe the cops up there will listen to me then. At least they can help me get a line on how the Wakasa woman died, if nothing else.”

“You seem convinced she’s the key,” he said.

I nodded. “I’ve got a feeling that if I can find out the how and why of her death, I’ll be able to put the rest of it together.”

I turned back to the phone and dialed the Oakland and Vacaville numbers again. Still no answer at either one. The telephone installer had left a couple of brand-new directories; I opened the white pages to the number of the Shimata Art Gallery in Japantown.

Eberhardt said, “I’ll go downstairs and get us some coffee. You look like you could use a cup.”

I looked at my watch. Three-thirty. “Okay, Eb, thanks—but make it quick, will you? If I’m still drawing blanks in fifteen minutes, I’d better get out of here and on the road to Petaluma. The rush-hour traffic’ll be bad enough as it is.”

He hustled out and I called the Shimata number. A woman’s voice answered; she said Kinji Shimata wasn’t there and was not expected back today. She wouldn’t tell me where I could find him. Maybe there was something in that, and maybe he was out playing golf or getting a tooth filled or any one of a hundred other mundane things.

I called Nelson Mixer’s house. No answer. Still at CCSF, maybe, which meant I couldn’t reach him by phone. But I called there anyway, on the chance that he might have left for the day and signed out at the registrar’s office. But as far as the woman I spoke to was concerned, he was presently conducting his three o’clock lecture on nineteenth-century U.S. history.

Ogada’s Nursery wasn’t listed in the San Francisco directory; I got the number from San Mateo County Information. No answer. Which didn’t have to mean anything either; Edgar and his father both might be out somewhere doing mundane things of their own.

I considered calling Ken Yamasaki’s number and decided that would be an exercise in futility. Even if the Yakuza had let him go with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, he didn’t figure to be the man I was after. The probable time of Haruko Gage’s abduction was between eleven-thirty and twelve, after she left the Sundler Agency and before she was able to board a bus for home, and at that time Yamasaki had been sitting and sweating in Hisayuki Okubo’s private compartment on the Kara Maru.

Frustration and a mounting sense of desperation made me try the unanswered Oakland number again, even though it had only been ten minutes since I’d last dialed it. But someone had come home in those ten minutes—a teenage girl from the sound of her voice, probably just in from school. She picked up on the fourth ring and said, “Hi. Andy?”

“Not,” I said, and identified myself and said it was urgent that I locate either a man named Michio Wakasa who had once worked as a gardener in Petaluma, or any of his relatives. Silence. I thought at first that it was because she was disappointed I was not someone named Andy, but that wasn’t it at all. Pretty soon she said, “My grandfather’s name was Michio. My dad’s father. He died about ten years ago.”

“Did he once live in Petaluma?”

“I think so.”

My hand was tight around the receiver now; I could feel the tension in my bad arm and across my back. “Did he have a daughter named Chiyoko?”

Pause. “That was my aunt’s name. How come you’re asking all this stuff about my family?”

“It’s complicated,” I said, “and I don’t have the time to explain it so it’ll make sense to you. But I’m a detective and I’m trying to find someone—a lady who’s in serious trouble.”

“She’s not in my family, is she? This lady?”

“No. You don’t know her. Tell me about your Aunt Chiyoko.”

“Well, I don’t know much about her. She died before I was born. In Petaluma, I think.”

“How did she die?”

“I don’t know. Nobody in the family ever talks about it.”

Damn! “When will your mother and father be home?”

“My father’s out of town on business. My mother’ll be home around six. She works in San Francisco.”

“She does? Where?”

“Embarcadero Center.”

“Where in the Embarcadero Center?”

“I don’t know if I should tell you that ...”

“Please, it’s very important.”

“Well ... Carnaby’s. That’s a shop in Number Two.”

“Thanks, honey,” I said. “Thanks very much.”

I was putting the receiver down when Eberhardt came back with the coffee. He read the look on my face and said, “You get something?”

“Looks that way. The name of Chiyoko Wakasa’s sister-in-law and the place where she works—right here in the city.” I took one of the styrofoam cups he was carrying, unlidded it, drank a slug of coffee, and then put the cup down on the desk and started for the door. “I’ll call you if it leads anywhere definite.”

“Luck, huh?”

“It’s not me who needs it,” I said. “It’s Haruko Gage.”

The Embarcadero Center is a four-block complex opposite the Ferry Building, and not far from my previous office on Drumm Street. It had been built progressively over the past several years—high-rise office buildings, with arcades on the lower two levels full of artwork and yellow crysanthemums and lots of shops and cafés. You could get from one block to another via covered and open-air areaways spanning the streets, but that wasn’t how I entered Number Two. I parked illegally on its Sacramento Street side, because it was four-thirty and raining again and the streets were full of departing office workers and both curbside and garage parking were time-consuming chores, and I went in through the main ground-floor entrance.

Carnaby’s, according to the lobby directory, was up on the first level. I took the escalator and found the shop easily enough. It was one of those places that sold package wrapping items, greeting cards, papercraft, decorator candles that sort of thing; now, because it was December, all the stuff was aimed at the Christmas trade. A music tape was playing “Jingle Bells” when I came in. As tense as I was right then, the holiday song grated on my nerves like a file screeching on metal.

The store was moderately crowded with after-work shoppers, and the three salesladies were busy. Only one of the three was Japanese —a short, harried woman with graying hair and big pendant earrings that danced every time she moved. She wasn’t working the cash register, which made it easier for me to coax her off to one side, confirm that she was Mrs. Wakasa, and then explain to her who I was and why I was there.