Quicksilver (Nameless Detective) (23 page)

She didn’t want to talk to me at first. She kept telling me she was too busy, she couldn’t take the time, her boss would fire her, but the real reason was the topic itself; you could see the reluctance in her eyes, and something.else, too, that might have been a deeply ingrained sense of familial disgrace. But I kept after her, repeating how important it was, saying that the information might help save a woman’s life. And I got it out of her finally—in grudging little chunks, without all the details, but everything I needed to know.

“Chiyoko died by her own hand,” Mrs. Wakasa said.

“You mean she committed suicide?”

“Yes. Poison.”

“Why?”

“She couldn’t live with her shame.”

“What shame?”

“The thing that happened to her at the camp.”

“The Tule Lake camp, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to her there?”

“She was ... attacked.”

“Raped? She was raped?”

“By three boys. Not long before the war ended.”

“Who were the three boys?”

“She couldn’t identify them; it was too dark. Another boy heard her cries and chased them away, but it was too late.”

“Do you know who that other boy was?”

“I don’t remember his name.”

“Did he know Chiyoko before the attack?”

“Yes. They were friends.”

“Was she hurt? Physically, I mean.”

“They ... she could not have children.”

“Is that part of the reason she killed herself?”

“Yes. She wanted children very badly.”

“After she died, a man Kazuo Hama built a mausoleum for her to be buried in. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why he did it?”

“My husband’s father had no money and Mr. Hama did.”

“He was a friend of Chiyoko’s, then?”

“He knew her in the camp, he said.”

“But Mr. Hama wasn’t the one who chased away the three rapists?”

“No.”

That was all she had to tell me. But she also had one thing to show me—the last little quicksilver bead that put the whole thing together. I asked her if the family had kept any photographs of Chiyoko, and she said yes, she had one among other family photos in her purse, of her husband and Chiyoko taken just after they were released from Tule Lake, and she got her purse and showed it to me.

Chiyoko Wakasa and Haruko Gage looked enough alike to have been sisters.

Outside in the car, with the office workers and the rush-hour traffic streaming wetly around me, I sat remembering things.

I remembered a pickup truck with a bashed-in fender and a busted headlight. I remembered eyes that had the dull sheen of someone who had been burning a lot of midnight oil—or so I’d thought at the time. I remembered a son asking his father what had happened to some live seafoam and shooting-star miniatures, and thought that both those things could be types of roses. I remembered that same son telling me his mother had died this past summer and how rough her death had been on his father. I remembered that the Feast of the Lanterns had also taken place this past summer, and that it was a festival to commemorate the dead, and the names of those I’d been told were there.

And when I got done remembering these things, I was pretty sure I knew who had murdered Simon Tamura and Sanjiro Masaoka and Kazuo Hama, and who had sent those presents to Haruko Gage, and who had almost surely abducted her this afternoon.

The nursery man—Edgar Ogada’s father.

It was dark and raining heavily when I got to the Ogada Nursery. My headlights made a silver curtain of the rain as I came bouncing in on the boggy access road; they shone in thin bright spatters off the fiberglass walls of the greenhouses ahead. They also picked up somebody at the door of the nearest greenhouse, the only lighted one —somebody in a yellow slicker and rain hat.

The figure stood looking in my direction for a moment; then it moved away from the greenhouse door and broke into a run. I took the car over next to the potting shed, where its roof gave some shelter from the driving rain. When I stepped out, the running figure was only twenty yards away and slowing. Enough sidespill from the headlights let me recognize him: Edgar Ogada.

He had slowed to a walk by the time he got to me. He stopped and said, “Oh, it’s you,” and he sounded troubled. He looked troubled, too; his face was set in tight lines under the rain hat. “I thought you were my uncle; I called him a while ago and he said he’d be right over.”

“Something wrong at the greenhouse?”

Edgar hesitated. Then, “I’m not sure. My father’s got himself locked inside. He won’t let me in.”

“Is he alone?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t hear anybody else. But with the rain, it’s hard to tell. He was in there when I got home a half hour ago.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Who knows? Whatever it is, he keeps talking to himself while he’s doing it. In Japanese.”

“What is it he’s saying?”

“Mixed-up stuff; I couldn’t make out half of it. He ... well, he’s been acting weird lately. He works too hard.”

“Weird in what way?”

“Talking to himself, running around until two or three in the morning, not filling orders, selling stuff that’s already been sold. Or doing something with it; a lot of flowers have just disappeared.”

“What kind of flowers?”

“Mostly roses—bushes and cut pieces.”

“Edgar, was your father at the Tule Lake camp during World War II?”

“Tule Lake? Why do you want to know that?”

“Was he there?”

“Yeah. He was there.”

“Was he married to your mother at the time?”

“No, he was only fourteen when they put him in that place—eighteen when the war ended. He met my mother in 1948.”

“Did he ever speak of a woman he knew at Tule Lake named Chiyoko Wakasa?”

“Who? No. Chiyoko ... that’s Haruko’s middle name ...”

“Does your father also know that?”

“I guess so. I think I told him once, but—”

“All right, Edgar,” I said. “Go on over to the house. Wait for your uncle there.”

“Why should I? Say, what’re you doing here, anyway? I don’t—”

“Now, Edgar!”

I caught hold of his arm and turned him and gave him a push toward the house. I did not like getting rough with him, but there was no time for explanations; I’d wasted enough time already. And I wanted him out of the way when I went after his father.

I leaned into the car and shut off the engine and the headlamps and then got my flashlight. When I came out with it Edgar was standing twenty feet away in the rain, staring at me. But he wasn’t making any moves in my direction. I quit looking at him, pivoted away from the car, and hurried across toward the lighted greenhouse.

If anything, the rain was coming down harder now, chill against my bare skin. Ahead, diagonally in front of the greenhouse door and some distance away from it, I could see Mr. Ogada’s pickup truck. Crumpled fender, broken headlight—some of the hard evidence the police would need, because the damage had to have happened when he ran down and killed Kazuo Hama.

I had enough facts now to make reasonable guesses at the rest. Tamura and Masaoka and Hama had been the three boys who’d raped Chiyoko Wakasa at Tule Lake. Mr. Ogada had been the boy who’d heard her cries and chased the others off—Chiyoko’s friend, and probably in love with her. He hadn’t done anything about the three rapists at the time; maybe he hadn’t had a good look at them either in the dark, maybe he only suspected who they were. Or maybe he was afraid.

After the war he’d lost touch with Chiyoko. It was probable he hadn’t even known of her death; or that it had taken place in the same town where Kazuo Hama lived, and that Hama had realized he was partly to blame and had tried to salve his guilty conscience by erecting a mausoleum for her remains. “There the wicked cease from troubling and the weary be at rest.” I thought I understood that now, too. It hadn’t just been meant for Chiyoko Wakasa; Hama had meant it for himself as well. She had been the weary—he had been the wicked whose troubling would also one day cease. And now, all these years later, it had.

So Mr. Ogada had met someone else and gotten married and had a son named Edgar and started a wholesale nursery business. And Hama and Tamura and Masaoka had gone on with their lives over the next thirty-five years. And Chiyoko Wakasa might have remained a fading memory for all of them if a number of things hadn’t happened to freshen it, to slowly turn it into an obsession in Mr. Ogada’s mind.

If Edgar hadn’t met and started dating Haruko, who looked enough like Chiyoko to be her sister. If Mr. Ogada’s wife hadn’t died suddenly and left him lonely and depressed. If he hadn’t somehow found out about Chiyoko’s suicide, and why she had commited the act, and where she was buried. If he hadn’t made up his mind to belatedly avenge her rape and her death. If he had not begun to confuse Chiyoko and Haruko in his mind, to believe that Haruko was some sort of reincarnation of the dead woman he had once loved.

Three murders. The presents to Haruko, the last three taken off the victims and offered not just as tokens of his love but as symbols of his vengeance. And now the kidnapping, because he must believe with all his heart that she really was Chiyoko, and he loved her, and he wanted her with him ...

I passed between the pickup and the outer corner of the greenhouse, on my way to the door. The wind-hurled rain had begun to sting harder, and I realized that it was turning into hail. The pellets rattled like gravel against the fiberglass roof and walls of the greenhouse. With that sound and the shriek of the wind, there was no way I could hear anything that might be going on inside.

I paused at the door anyway, to find out if it was still locked. It was. Then I moved on to the adjoining greenhouse, stopped at that door and tried it. Also locked. But it was set into a wooden frame, which in turn was set into the sheet-metal front of the shed, and when I tugged on the knob the door moved loosely against its latch.

The hail kept rattling down; I could feel it smacking off my head, some of the pellets sliding inside the collar of my coat and cold along my neck. If I couldn’t hear anything from out here, I thought, neither could Mr. Ogada hear anything from inside. I stepped back, set myself, and kicked the door hard and flat-footed next to the latch.

It was not much of a lock and it gave immediately and the door went slapping inward. I went in after it a couple of paces—and it was like entering Chiyoko Wakasa’s mausoleum all over again. The smell was the same, only magnified: hundreds of flower blossoms sending out their cloyingly sweet fragrances, roses dominating. Funeral smell, death smell. Bile pumped into my throat. I had to swallow two or three times to keep from gagging.

I stood motionless, straining to see in the darkness. The fiberglass walls on my right showed some of the light in the adjoining greenhouse; but the panels were opaque, and the light made them gleam dully like a wall constructed of iridescent squares. I could make out the door over there, just barely, enough to tell that it was shut. But I could not see much between it and where I was—faint shapes and shadows, some of them bulky against the deeper black. I was going to have to use the flashlight if I wanted to get over there without breaking my neck or making enough noise to override the sound of the hail and alert Mr. Ogada.

I got out my handkerchief, used it first to wipe the wetness off my face, then covered the flash lens with it. When I switched the thing on, the diffused beam let me see some of the flowers: rose bushes in long rows, narcissus and daisies in clay pots, beds planted with a white-blooming bush I didn’t recognize. The beam also showed me that the way to the connecting door was like an obstacle course; most of the available ground space was occupied with flowers, tools, hoses like coiled green snakes.

It took me three or four minutes to cover a distance of no more than forty yards. When I neared the connecting door I shut the flash off and eased up the rest of the way in darkness. The constant drum of hail had slackened now. I pressed my ear against the door, but I still couldn’t hear anything. What was going on in there?

I got my hand around the door knob and rotated it slowly. It turned all the way, made a faint click; this one wasn’t locked. All right. I held it that way for a few seconds, still listening, still hearing nothing. Then I took a breath and inched the door open until I could look past the edge of it.

At first all I could see was the back wall of that greenhouse, where the sprinkler valves were; benches close by strewn with potting soil in sacks and trays, benches farther away jammed with already potted plants. I opened the door wider, moving with it, looking the opposite way around its edge. And I saw them then, both of them, down along the same wall beyond a wheeled cart loaded with more plants.

He’d made a kind of bed for her, or maybe it was an altar: blankets draped over fifty-pound sacks of the potting soil. She was lying on it, supine but half on one side, dressed in a dirt-smudged white pullover and a dark skirt, one shoe off and one shoe on like My Son John in the nursery rhyme. Not moving, just lying there. From this distance I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not.