“Suppose it was the medallion,” I said. “Do you have any idea why anyone would want to send it to you?”
“No. God, no.”
“Ken Yamasaki, maybe. Would he have a reason?”
She shook her head.
“Just how well do you know Yamasaki?”
“Not very well,” she said. “I told you that yesterday. We dated off and on for a few weeks, that’s all.”
“What does he look like?”
The question puzzled her, but she answered it without questions of her own. “He’s a year or two older than me, slim, sensitive-looking. He wears glasses.”
So neither of the two guys in the white Ford this morning had been Yamasaki, even though the car was registered in Yamasaki’s name. Curiouser and curiouser.
Haruko said, “You don’t think that Ken…?”
“I don’t think anything, Mrs. Gage,” I said. “I’m only trying to make some sense out of what’s going on. What broke things up between you and Yamasaki?”
“I don’t remember. Nothing specific; we just weren’t compatible and we drifted apart.”
“Did you know he and Simon Tamura were Yakuza?”
The word Yakuza had the effect of a small, sharp slap; she put a hand up to her face as if to rub away the sting. “Ken?” she said. “No, you must be wrong…”
“I don’t think so. It’s a certainty Tamura was one of them; take a look at today’s paper. Yamasaki worked for him, and he disappeared from the baths last night after Tamura was killed. This morning a couple of hard-looking guys followed me around for a while in Yamasaki’s car. I don’t know how that looks to you, but to me it means he’s connected.”
She wagged her head again, loosely this time, as if what I’d just told her was too much to absorb all at once. She backed away from me, bumped into the coffee table, made a kind of graceless sidestep around it, and flopped onto the claw-footed couch. I watched her sit there, waiting for her to say something. All I heard was the thin whispering rhythm of the rain outside.
After awhile I went over and sat on the other end of the couch. “I’m sorry if I upset you, Mrs. Gage,” I said. “But that’s the way things are. I don’t like them any more than you do.”
She nodded. “It’s just that… all of this about murder and the Yakuza…”
“I know, it scares me a little too.”
“I thought detectives didn’t get scared.”
“Some don’t, but I wouldn’t want to be one of them. Fearless people aren’t too bright, usually; they go banging around on their own little ego trips and wind up causing other people grief.”
For some reason that seemed to reassure her. She nodded again, and pretty soon she said, “If Ken is or was Yakuza he never said anything about it to me. And I never heard it from anyone else.”
“What about Tamura?”
“The same. I had no idea he was one of them.”
“The last time you saw Yamasaki… how long ago was it?”
“A few months. Late this past summer.”
“Before you started receiving the presents.”
“Yes.”
“How did he act toward you?”
“The same as always. A little shy; he didn’t talk much.”
“Did he give you any indication that he might still be interested in you?”
“No. We were only together a couple of minutes.”
“Did he mention Tamura at all?”
“Well, Mr. Tamura was there too.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. It was a Japanese festival, a local celebration of Bon Odori — the Feast of the Lanterns to commemorate the dead. A lot of people were there.”
“Did you speak to Tamura?”
“Just a few words, that’s all.”
“And you haven’t heard from Yamasaki since that day?”
Another headshake, and some more gnawing on her lower lip. She seemed to have undergone a subtle transformation in the past few minutes. The strength and determination were masked now by her anxiety and she looked young and vulnerable. I had a moronic impulse to lean over and pat her hand, but I did not give in to it. I was a detective, not a half-assed father figure.
Instead, I stood up. I had run out of questions to ask her; and this was not the time to probe for the names of other men in her life. I said, “I guess that’s all for now, Mrs. Gage,” and then dipped my chin at the gift box on the table. “I’d like to take the medallion with me, if you don’t mind.”
“Why? What are you going to do?”
“Talk to the police,” I told her. “If the medallion belonged to Simon Tamura, they’ll want it as evidence. I also want to find out if they’ve turned up Yamasaki yet and whether or not they think he had anything to do with Tamura’s murder. If he did, and if he’s your secret admirer, your troubles are over.”
“Why would he send me the medallion after all that expensive jewelry? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe it makes sense to him.”
She had not offered any protest, so I took the medallion out of the box, wrapped it in the tissue paper it had come in, and put it into my coat pocket. There wasn’t much chance of fingerprints, because she and probably Artie had handled it, but I was careful with it just the same.
I told her not to worry-an empty reassurance that seemed to linger in the stillness like a dying echo. She didn’t say anything, just kept sitting there with her hands in her lap and her eyes remote. Little girl scared, peering into the dark corners of her imagination as I went away into the rain.
Eberhardt and his new furniture were both sitting in the O’Farrell Street office when I walked in a few minutes before three. The desk was all right-simulated oak with a highly polished top and a lot of drawers-but the rest of it was the kind of white elephant stuff salesmen unload on people who don’t know what they’re buying. An old-fashioned swivel chair with a curved back that looked as if it had come out of somebody’s attic; a couple of filing cabinets painted a mustard yellow and made out of compressed particle board so that they probably weighed about five hundred pounds each; a metal typewriter table so shaky-looking I would have been afraid to set a pen on it, much less a typewriter. He had even bought a water cooler, one of those porcelain jobs with a trough at the bottom.
The desk was over in front of the side-wall window, the one that looked out on the blank brick wall of the neighboring building. The other stuff was over there too, everything except the cooler thing; that was sitting next to the door, waiting for somebody to haul in a bottle of Alhambra Water. He’d left me the space in front of the middle two windows, under the skylight-which was decent of him, I supposed, since that space was opposite the door and would put me in the position of authority. But I still felt depressed. I had felt depressed the instant I came in.
Eberhardt was tilted back in the swivel chair with his feet up on the desk and a styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand. He waggled a shoe at me and said, “So what do you think? Do I look like a private dick?”
“You look like a dick, all right. A big one.”
“You’re a hoot, you are. How do you like the furniture?”
“Just dandy. Except that your file cabinets clash with the paint on the linoleum.”
“Yeah, I don’t like that yellow color much. Looks like baby crap. But I got a good price and I can always paint ’em white or something.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You think my stuff will look okay with yours?”
“Terrific. The Pinkertons’ll be envious as hell.”
He finished his coffee and put the cup on the floor beside him. When he learned over like that you could see the scar behind his ear where one of the bullets had lodged back in August. “What’s eating you?” he said. “You getting your period, or what?”
