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.”
“Mmm,” McFate said. “Which employee did you come here to see?”
“Ken Yamasaki.”
McFate repeated the name. He wasn’t writing down any of this conversation; he had a photographic memory and he was proud of the fact that he could quote verbatim interrogations that had lasted thirty minutes. I knew that about him because it had been in one of the gossip columns, back when I was still reading the newspapers. “What sort of business did you have with Yamasaki?” he asked.
“Nothing that involves the Yakuza,” I said. “Or Tamura’s death.”
“Suppose you let me be the judge of that.”
I was beginning to like him even less than he liked me. But the world is full of assholes, and you have to be tolerant if you want to keep the peace. So I told him in a nice, even, tolerant voice that Ken Yamasaki was an old boyfriend of Haruko Gage, who had hired me to find out the name of the secret admirer who was sending her presents in the mail.
It must have sounded silly to McFate; it even sounded a little silly to me, the way I explained it. He gave me a look that was half patronage and half watered-down pity. “The detective business must have fallen on hard times,” he said, “if that’s the kind of case you’re taking on.”
“You take what you can get these days,” I said evenly.
“I understand Eberhardt is going into business with you,” he said. “Soon, isn’t it?”
“Next week.”
“He would have been better off if he’d stayed on the force.” McFate smiled as if to take the sting out of the words and then added, “If you don’t mind my saying so.”
I let it blow by. Assholes pass bad wind all the time; that was what you had to remember in dealing with them.
He said, “Do you know where Yamasaki lives?”
“No. He’s not listed in the phone book.”
“Did you know Simon Tamura when he was alive?”
“No. I never even heard of him before today.”
“And you’ve had no recent case involving the Yakuza?”
“I’ve never had any case involving the Yakuza.”
“So be it,” McFate said. “Why don’t you go sit with your lady friend for the time being. I may have more questions a little later.”
“Sure. As long as we can get out of here before midnight.”
I left him and went back into the reception area and plunked myself down in the rattan chair next to Kerry. She said, “What’s the matter? Why are you scowling?”
“Something McFate just told me,” I said. “The dead man back there was Yakuza.”
“What’s Yakuza?”
“Japanese gangster outfit. Sort of like the Mafia.”
“Oh God,” she said.
“Take it easy. It’s not as ominous as it sounds.”
“No?”
“No. I don’t know much about them, but they’re big in Japan and East Asia and they’re starting to get a foothold over here. Prostitution, extortion, that sort of thing. But they only prey on other Japanese-merchants and tourists, mostly.”
“Oh. Then the dead man… do you know his name yet?”
“Simon Tamura. He ran this place, I imagine.”
“Then he was killed by other Yakuza? One of those underworld execution things?”
“Looks that way,” I said. “The Yakuza are supposed to believe that they’re descendants of samurai warriors. And Tamura was murdered with a samurai sword. A ritual killing, maybe, to avenge some breaking of the Yakuza code.”
“Well, thank God you’re not mixed up in it, for a change. It’s bad enough that you had to find the body. And that I had to be here with you.”
“No argument about that.”
“One murder case after another ever since I’ve known you,” she said. “One of these days…”
“One of these days what?”
“You know what I was going to say.”
“Yeah. But I’ve lived this long; I intend to go on living a good while longer.”
“I hope so. Sometimes… damn it, sometimes you scare hell out of me.”
“Sometimes, babe,” I said, “I scare hell out of myself.”
We lapsed into silence, but it was all right between us because Kerry reached over after a few seconds and took hold of my hand. Her fingers were dry and chill-unlike the room itself, which was as warm as Tamura’s office. It started me sweating, and I stood up finally and fumbled with the knob on the radiator until I got the heat shut down.
