Bill Pronzini - Quicksilver

Both of them were Japanese.

I kept on going past them, turned right on El Camino del Mar, went up the hill to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and drove past it and through the Lincoln Park Golf Course-a loop that took me back to Geary. There was no sign of the white Ford. Either they’d given it up on their own or they’d used the CB and whoever they’d called had told them to lay off. But this wasn’t going to be the end of it. I had a bad feeling that they would be back pretty soon, and maybe not just to follow me around.

One word kept running around inside my head. It scared me some and made me nervous and puzzled the hell out of me because I had no idea of the why of it.

The word was Yakuza.

I stopped at a service station on Geary and 25th Avenue and called Harry Fletcher, my contact at the local office of the Department of Motor Vehicles. I relayed the license number of the white Ford and asked him to run it through the computer and find out who the car was registered to. He said he’d do that as soon as he could, give him half an hour.

I glanced at my watch as I hung up: a couple of minutes after eleven. Too early to head down to South San Francisco for a talk with Edgar Ogada; his father had told me Edgar wouldn’t be around until after noon sometime. Too early for lunch, too, but to hell with standing on ceremony. My stomach was yammering for something its juices could go to work on. Funny thing about tension: sometimes it robs you of your appetite and sometimes it makes you ravenously hungry. The damned diet had tipped the scales to ravenous this time, Yakuza or no Yakuza.

There were some good restaurants on outer Clement, only a few blocks away, so I drove over there and found a cafe I’d eaten in before. They had several things on the menu that looked inviting-steak sandwich, Reuben sandwich, bacon cheeseburger-but I girded myself and ordered cottage cheese and fruit with RyKrisp. I would have had the diet plate, which included a ground sirloin patty, but that made me think of red meat and the way Simon Tamura’s bloody corpse had looked there on the floor of his office. I wanted nothing to do with red meat for a while. I’d had enough bad dreams last night as it was.

The cottage cheese and fruit weren’t bad, considering; at least they eased the hunger pangs. While I ate I tried to come up with an answer to why the Yakuza would have had me followed. Because I was the one who’d found Tamura’s body? Well, maybe. That, plus the fact that I was a private investigator, might have made them wonder what I’d been doing at the bathhouse; that part of it hadn’t been in the papers, evidently. But I had figured the killing for a vendetta job and so had McFate. If it was, why would the Yakuza be sniffing around me? And if it wasn’t, why not just brace me somewhere and ask me if I knew anything? Why the tail instead?

All very mysterious and unsettling. And it got even more so when I used the cafe’s public phone to ring back Harry Fletcher at the DMV.

The white Ford was registered to Kenneth Yamasaki, 261 °California Street, San Francisco.

There was plenty of activity at the Ogada Nursery when I got there just past noon. Half a dozen vans and two pick-up trucks, some with the names of prominent florists painted on their sides, were pulled up on the blacktopped area fronting the greenhouses; and a mix of Caucasian and Oriental men were loading and unloading potted plants and flowers, clay pots, sacks of loam and mulch and fertilizer. They all seemed to be in a hurry, either because it was the lunch hour or because of the weather. The rain had stopped for the moment, but the dark threatening clouds to the west said it would begin again before long.

I parked out of the way and wandered over to one of the workers and asked him if Edgar Ogada was around. He told me to go look in the greenhouse, and pointed to the first building in the nearest row.

It was cold and damp inside the big, high-roofed enclosure, and smelled thickly and richly of moist earth and growing things. Ferns and other house plants filled it-rows upon rows of them, in beds and in pots on long benches or hanging from a latticework of wire strung horizontally some eight feet off the ground. The only person in evidence was Ogada Senior; he was back toward the rear, doing something with one of the valves that operated a sprinkler system.

He looked at me without recognition when I reached him and said, “Afternoon, Mr. Ogada.” He appeared even more tired than he had yesterday; his eyes had the dull sheen of someone who has been burning a lot of midnight oil. “I was here yesterday afternoon to speak with your son.”

“ Hai, he said, and nodded. “Yes, I remember.”

“Would Edgar be here now?”

Another nod. “In the next shed… So. Here he comes.”

I half-turned to follow the direction of his gaze. A young guy had just come through a door in the opaque fiberglass wall that adjoined the next greenhouse. As he approached I saw that he was about thirty, tallish, wiry, good-looking in a careless sort of way. Bristly mustache, hair that fanned down over his shoulders, eyes that had the light of mischief in them. He wore running shoes and faded Levi’s and a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off; on the front of the sweatshirt were the words NO NUKES in bright red letters.

“Hey, Pop,” he said, “what happened to those live seafoam and shooting-star miniatures? I don’t see them anywhere.” Pop, like Number One Son addressing Charlie Chan. He didn’t even glance at me.

“Gone,” his father said.

“Gone? You mean you sold them?”

“Yes.”

“Pop, I told you yesterday morning the Crawley brothers wanted them. What’s the matter? You going senile on me?”

Mr. Ogada didn’t say anything. So I said, “Everybody forgets things now and then, particularly when they’ve been working hard.”

The young guy, Edgar, put his eyes on me for the first time. There was no hostility in the look, nor even any annoyance; it was just a look with a question: Who are you?

I said, “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes, if you don’t mind. A personal matter.”

“The washers in this valve need to be changed,” Mr. Ogada said, “Will you do it, Edgar? I have invoices to prepare.”

“If I’ve got time.”

“ Hai,” Mr. Ogada said, and bowed slightly in my direction, and went away toward the outside door.

Edgar said, “What’s this personal matter you want to talk about?”

“A former girlfriend of yours. Haruko Gage.”

His forehead wrinkled slightly; that was the extent of his reaction to Haruko’s name. “Why?” he said. “Who are you, anyway?”

“A private detective.” I gave him my name and showed him the photostat of my license. “Mrs. Gage hired me to investigate a little problem she’s having.”

“You mean Haruko’s in trouble?”

“No, nothing like that.”

I told him what the problem was, and he didn’t react much to that either. A little surprise and a little puzzlement, nothing else.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Anybody who’d do something like that has to be nuts.”

“That’s what Haruko is afraid of.”

“But why talk to me? I don’t know anything about it.” He paused and frowned again. “Hey, she doesn’t think I’m the one who’s doing it, does she?”

“No. Your name was one of several she gave me-old boyfriends, men who’ve been serious about her in the past.”

“Well, that lets me out. I’ve never been serious over any girl. There’s too many of ’em, you know? Too many sakana in the umi.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We had some fun, Haruko and me,” Edgar said. He grinned. “I brought her here once and we were, you know, getting it on over at the house and Pop almost caught us. That would have been a heavy scene. Pop’s old-fashioned; he doesn’t think people ought to screw unless they’re married.”