Bill Pronzini - Quicksilver

Still nobody home at the Gage house.

I rang up Eberhardt. It took him six rings to answers, and when he did he sounded sleepy and disgruntled. “I feel asleep,” he said. “I was watching this movie, The Horse Soldiers, pretty good old Western with John Wayne, and I just corked off. Christ, I must be getting old.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Maybe I ought to stock up on some Geritol. So what’ve you been up to since Friday? The Yakuza still bothering you?”

“Still following me around, yeah. But it’s not the Yakuza I’m worried about right now.” And I told him what I’d been up to since Friday, what I was worried about.

He didn’t say much until I was finished. “Sounds like you might be onto something pretty hairy, all right,” he said then. “But where’s your proof all three of those Japanese guys were killed by the same. person? Where’s the motive? Hell, you can’t even prove murder in two of the deaths.”

“I know it,” I said. “But I can’t just sit on it, Eb. What if this loony decides to go after Haruko Gage next?”

“Talk to her. Tell her to take a little vacation.”

“I intend to. But she can’t stay on vacation indefinitely.”

“You got some leads to follow up. Maybe you can prove a connection between the Tamura homicide and the Gage woman.”

“I’ve got a connection, remember? The medallion. And that white jade ring links her to Kazuo Hama’s death. And the gold locket links her to Sanjiro Masaoka’s death.”

“So you say. But all McFate and the local boys are interested in is the Tamura case-unless you can show ’em hard evidence that it’s linked to the other two. Which means you got to establish those pieces of jewelry belonged to the three dead guys.”

“I thought maybe Jack Logan would listen to reason.”

“I doubt it. He goes by the book, the same as McFate. The same as I used to, for that matter. But I’ll tell you what: I’ll go talk to Jack myself in the morning, lay it out for him. He’s more liable to listen to me anyhow; and if he buys it, you can take it from there. Sound okay?”

“Sounds fine. Thanks, Eb.”

“ De nada.”

He asked me for the details again-names, dates-and wrote them down as I talked. I was feeling pretty kindly toward him just then. Maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad having Eberhardt for a partner after all. In fact, maybe it was going to be damned good having him around.

When I was done filling him in he said, “Check with me at the office after ten sometime; that’s when the telephone company guy’s coming in to install the phones. If you can’t get there for any reason, why don’t you call that custom-shirt outfit on the floor below? Slim-Taper Shirts, I think the name is. I’ll stop by there in the morning and ask them to send somebody up to get me if you call.”

“Good idea.”

“What color phone you want, by the way?”

“Any color,” I said, “except pimp yellow.”

Another call to the Gage house. Another dozen rings without a response. I was starting to get worried now, even though it was still relatively earty-not yet ten o’clock.

I went and ran some bathwater and got into the tub with a 1948 issue of New Detective. There were some good writers in that issue — John D. MacDonald, William Campbell Gault-but I was too tense to stay with any of the stories. I gave it up at a quarter to eleven, dried off, put on my old chenille robe, and headed for the phone again.

And this time, on the fourth ring, there was an answering click and I heard Haruko Gage’s voice.

I let out a breath and told her who was calling, resisting an impulse to ask her where the hell she’d been; it was none of my business, really, now that I knew she was safe. Then I asked her if the name Chiyoko Wakasa meant anything to her, and she said no, she didn’t know anyone named Wakasa. She sounded honestly puzzled.

“Do you know anybody who was at the Tule Lake Relocation Center during World War II?” I asked.

“No… well, yes, one or two people, I guess. Mr. Tamura was; Ken Yamasaki told me that. What does Tule Lake have to do with anything? And who is Chiyoko Wakasa?”

“I wish I knew. What I do know is too complicated to go into on the phone; suppose we let it wait until morning. I can come by your place around nine…”

“I have a business appointment at nine, downtown. With a representative of one of the companies Art and I design for. I could probably break it at the last minute, but…”

“How long do you expect it’ll last?”

“Until noon or so. I should be back here no later than one o’clock.”

“How about if I meet you at your place at one?”

“All right. Are you sure… I mean, there’s nothing I ought to know right away, is there?”

“No. Don’t worry, Mrs. Gage,” I said. “There isn’t anything to worry about.”

And I hoped I was telling her the truth.

In the morning, first thing, I called the registrar’s office at CCSF and asked the woman who answered if Nelson Mixer had recovered sufficiently-I didn’t say from what-to get back to his classes this week. She told me he had. When I asked her about his schedule she said he had a free period from ten to eleven and that I might be able to find him then in his office in Batmale Hall.

Coffee, two more eggs, and a piece of dry toast passed for breakfast. But my bathroom scale said I’d lost another pound, which made four now, so I was able to choke the food down with less difficulty than usual.

I hung around drinking second and third cups of coffee, waiting for nine-thirty so I could call the DMV. Fletcher wasn’t happy to hear from me again so soon, but when he got done bitching he agreed to run a computer list of all the Wakasas currently holding California driver’s licenses. He’d have it for me, he said, in an hour or so.

I put my overcoat on and went downstairs and out into the new day. Some more rain had fallen during the night, but the sky was clearing now: scattered stratocumulus clouds, intermittent sunshine, a cold gusty December wind. The air had a clean, scrubbed smell, the way it does after a long period of rain. It also had a sharp, crystal clarity; out around the Cliff House you would not only be able to see the Farallone Islands thirty-two miles at sea but you’d be able to make out the exact contours of each of them.

Not hurrying, I started off toward Laguna Street, which was where I’d parked my car last night. I expected to encounter the white Ford somewhere nearby-I was looking for it, in fact-but when I spotted it, parked so that the two kobun could watch both my car and the entrance to my building, I felt myself getting angry all over again. God, they were persistent bastards; throw them off and they came right back with the fixated determination of cats. It gave me a paranoid hunted feeling.

Batmale Hall, on the City College campus, was a rectangular building of grayish stone, several stories high, built into a hillside so that if you entered it on the upper level you were already on the fourth floor. That was the way I came in, at twenty past ten. There wasn’t any directory that I could see, so I stopped a couple of kids and asked them if they knew where Professor Mixer’s office was. One of them did: fifth floor.

Rather than wait for an elevator, I walked up. Mixer’s office was at the rear; I found it easily enough because it had his name framed alongside the door: NELSON MIXER-U.S. AND CALIFORNIA HISTORY. Below that were one listing of his office hours and another of his lecture hours in a different building, Cloud Hall.

The door was closed. I knocked on it, tried the knob, found it unlocked, and opened it and went inside. Mixer was there, alone, sitting behind a desk piled high with papers and books. Books were everywhere in the room-on the chairs and filing cabinets, stacked haphazardly on the floor, stuffed into shelves over two walls. Otherwise, the office was nondescript. Which made Mixer stand out even more than he would have in a crowd, because he was wearing a mauve-colored suit, a lemon-yellow shirt, and a mauve tie, all of which clashed violently with his wild red hair.