Bill Pronzini - Quicksilver

He was lying crumpled against the baseboard; there wasn’t any doubt that he was dead. The thing that had killed him was lying there too, bright-stained and gleaming in the light from the desk lamp.

He had been hacked to death with a samurai sword.

My stomach turned over and the steak I’d eaten seemed to rise into the back of my throat in a bile-soaked lump. For a couple of seconds I thought I was going to throw it up. I looked away from the body, swallowed, and kept on swallowing until my throat unclogged.

Red meat, I thought, the bloodier the better…

I wanted to get out of there, but I had been a cop too many years and I had walked in on too many homicide scenes; instinct took me a few steps closer to the dead man, to where the scatter of glass shards and the spatters and ribbons of blood began. He’d been in his sixties, bald, lean, wearing a shirt and tie and a pair of herringbone slacks. I had never seen him before.

The broken glass came from a framed, blown-up photograph, about fifteen inches square, that had either fallen or been pulled down from the wall. It lay face up, so that when I bent forward I could see that it was a grainy black-and-white print of three Japanese men, all in their late teens or early twenties, standing in front of a wire-mesh fence with some buildings behind it in the distance. They had their arms around one another and they were smiling. One of them, the man in the middle, wore an oddly designed medallion looped around his neck; he might have been the dead man on the floor thirty or forty years ago, but as hacked and bloody as the corpse was, I couldn’t be sure.

There was not much else to see in the office. Two closed doors, one in the side wall that was probably a closet, the other in the back wall that figured to be a rear exit. A few sheets of paper on the floor-what looked to be ledger pages with columns of numbers on them, dislodged from the desk. But there hadn’t been much of a struggle; the killer had come in with the sword, or found it here in the office when he arrived, and struck more or less without warning.

The body kept drawing my eyes, magnetically. I started to back away from it. It was warm in there, too warm: the radiator along the side wall was turned up and burbling faintly. And the smell of death was making me light-headed. They tell you blood has no odor, but you can smell it just the same-a kind of brackish-sweet stench. It was heavy in the air now, along with the lingering foulness of evacuated bowels. Always those same odors at scenes like this one, where blood has been spilled and someone has died by violence. Always the same overpowering smell of death.

Footsteps sounded behind me in the corridor. “Hey, where are you?” Kerry’s voice called. “What’s going on?”

Christ. I swung around to fill the doorway and block her view. “Don’t come in here.”

She stopped moving and stared at me. She could see it in my face, the reflection of what I’d been looking at on the office floor; fright kindled in her eyes.

“There’s a dead man in here,” I said. “Murdered with a sword. It’s pretty messy.”

“My God! Who-?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not the man you came to see?”

“No. Much older. Probably the proprietor.”

I got my handkerchief out, wrapped it around my hand, and then stepped into the corridor and pulled the door shut. I was afraid she might take it into her head to go have a look for herself. With Kerry, you never knew what she was liable to do.

She said, “Brr,” and hugged herself the way you do when you feel a sudden chill. “That must be why nobody’s here.”

I nodded. And why everybody left in such a hurry, I thought. Ken Yamasaki and whoever else was in the baths must have heard the commotion, maybe even seen who did the killing. And instead of hanging around to call the police, they’d all run scared. But why all of them? Why Yamasaki? He was an employee; the police would have no trouble finding that out, and that he’d been here tonight. There was no sense in him running off with the rest of them.

Unless he was the murderer…

“Come on,” I said, and took Kerry’s hand and pulled her along into the reception area. I dipped my chin toward one of the rattan visitor’s chairs. “Sit down over there-and try not to touch anything.”

She did what I told her without saying anything. I moved over to the desk, used the handkerchief to lift the telephone receiver, and dialed the all-too-familiar number of the Hall of justice.

The first prowl-car cops got there in ten minutes, and the Homicide boys showed up fifteen minutes after that. The inspector in charge was a guy named McFate, Leo McFate. We knew each other slightly, and were always civil in what little dealings we had-he’d been in General Works until Eberhardt’s retirement got him transferred to the Homicide Detail-but I sensed that McFate didn’t like me much. I had a pretty fair idea why, too, and it was none of the usual stuff that causes clashes between cops and private detectives; no jealousy or distrust or any of that. No, it had to do with the fact that McFate was a social climber. He went to the opera and the symphony and the ballet, and he got his name mentioned in the gossip columns from time to time, usually in connection with some local lady of means, and he dressed in tailored suits and hand-made ties and always looked like he was on his way to a wedding or a wake.

He didn’t like me because he thought I was a coarse, sloppy, pulp-reading peon. Which I was, and the hell with Leo McFate.

He had nothing much to say when he and the others breezed in, except for a curt “Where is the deceased?” Deceased, yet. He didn’t talk like a cop; he talked like Philo Vance. Or a political appointee in Sacramento, which was what he aspired to be someday, according to rumor. He had the demeanor for it, you couldn’t deny that. Tall, muscled, imposing; what my grandmother would have called “a fine figure of a man.” Dark brown hair going gray at the temples. A nifty brown mustache to go with a pair of nifty brown eyes. He even had a goddamn cleft in his chin like Robert Mitchum’s.

I showed him where the deceased was. McFate spent a couple of minutes looking at the body and the bloody sword and the other stuff on the floor. I watched him do that from out in the hallway; I had no inclination to go in there again, and from where I was, the office desk blocked my view of the dead man. Then McFate had some words with the assistant coroner and with one of the members of the lab crew. Then he turned and came back out to where I was standing.

“What time did you find him?” he asked.

“About nine-forty. Three or four minutes before I called the Hall.”

“When you got here, was the place this deserted?”

“Yes.” I told him the way I figured that, and he nodded.

“How did you get in?”

“The front door was unlocked; we just walked in. We took a look around back here when we didn’t find anybody at the reception desk.”

“We?”

“Me and the lady out there. Kerry Wade.”

“Am I to understand you came here to use the baths?” The words were innocent enough, but he managed to make them sound faintly supercilious, as if he were amused at the idea of rabble like me indulging in a Japanese bath.

I said, “No, we didn’t come here to use the baths. We came here because I wanted to talk to one of the employees on a business matter.”

“Which employee? Tamura?”

“Is Tamura the dead man?”

“Yes. Simon Tamura.”

“How do you know that already?”

“Because we have a file on him. He was Yakuza.”

“The hell he was,” I said, surprised.

“The hell he wasn’t.”

“So that’s it. A gang killing. No wonder everybody got out of here in a hurry, including the employees.”