“Now who’s a hoot? No, it’s this damn case I’m working on. I don’t like the way it’s shaping up.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Yeah, I do. We’re partners now; we might as well start confiding in each other.” I cocked a hip against the far corner of his desk. The light from the upside-down grappling hook overhead reflected off one of the clusters of brass balls, so that it looked like the damned things were winking at me. “Besides, I’m going to need your help.”
“How so?”
“I’ve got to go down to the Hall and talk to Leo McFate pretty soon. I’d like you to come with me.”
“Why? You’re not in trouble again, are you?”
“Not with the Department.”
“Who, then?”
“Maybe the Yakuza. I’m not sure.”
He swung his feet off the desk and sat up. “Christ, I thought you told me-”
“Eb, when I talked to you this morning I honestly believed there wasn’t any connection between Tamura’s death and the case I’m working on; now I think there might be one after all. But it only concerns me indirectly. I know that, but the Yakuza might not.”
“You expect me to make any sense out of that?” he said. “Start at the beginning.”
So I started at the beginning and told him the whole thing in detail. He didn’t interrupt; he’d been a good cop and good cops are good listeners. He stayed silent until after I’d shown him the damascene medallion. Then he spread his hands and said, “Well, it doesn’t look so bad to me.”
“No?”
“No. The Yakuza angle’s a little dicey, sure. But the rest of it
… I don’t know, maybe you got Mrs. Cage all stirred up for nothing.”
“You don’t buy a connection between the medallion in the photograph and this one?”
“I can see where it’s possible,” he said. “But only if this Ken Yamasaki is both the killer and Mrs. Gage’s unknown admirer. And even then I can’t figure a motive for him swiping the medallion and sending it to her.”
“Maybe he’s a psycho,” I said. “Pyschos only need reasons for doing things that satisfy themselves.”
“Also possible. But it still looks to me like you’re trying to make a big mystery out of two separate cases. Hell, you were pretty shook last night when you found Tamura; you admitted that. And you didn’t take a good close look at that photograph. The two medallions might not be the same at all.”
“They’re the same, Eb. You’ll see for yourself when you look at the photo. McFate’ll have had it tagged and brought in from the baths, probably.”
“Uh-huh. Now I get it.”
“Get what?”
“Why you want me to go down to the Hall with you,” he said. “You figure McFate might not believe this theory of yours and if he doesn’t, and you’re there alone, he won’t let you see the photo. Or tell you how his investigation is going. But if I’m there it makes you look better, gets you some answers, and buys your way into the Property Room. Right?”
“Same old Eb,” I said. “Sharp as a tack.”
He told me what I could do with a sharp tack. But that and the scowl that went with it were just for show; he was enjoying himself, enjoying the idea of the two of us working together and of getting back into harness himself. Same old Eb, all right-finally. It was good to see.
So how come I still felt depressed?
“You coming to the Hall with me or not?” I asked him.
He pretended to consider it some more. Then he said, “I guess I might as well. Keep you out of any more hot water. But don’t count on me having much influence now that I’m retired. Especially with McFate; we never did get along too good.”
Somebody started pounding on the office door. “That’ll be my furniture,” I said, and got up and went to admit the storage company guys.
It took them the better part of an hour to move in my belongings: secondhand oak desk, matching chair, a trio of chrome visitors’ chairs, two metal file cabinets, the blowup poster of an old Black Mask cover I used as a wall decoration, typewriter and stand, hot plate, and two packing boxes of miscellaneous junk. Eberhardt helped me shift the stuff around until the place looked halfway presentable. My desk covered up most of the paint stains on the linoleum, which left only the ceiling fixture and those mustard yellow file cabinets to be dealt with.
“Not too bad, is it?” Eberhardt said when we were done. “Looks kind of homey.”
“Yeah,” I said. It didn’t look too bad at that. It was a hell of a lot more my style than the last set of offices I’d occupied, down on Drumm Street, where I’d had to put up with venetian blinds and pastel walls and a pimp-yellow phone-all because I’d had the dumb idea that I needed to project a more modern image.
Eb said, “You’re not having any second thoughts, are you?” and I realized that he’d suddenly grown serious. “About the partnership, us making a go of it together?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“Well, you look kind of broody. And I want this to work out-I want it real bad.”
“Same here.”
“Not just for my sake. For yours too. Because… hell, you been a good friend and I don’t want to let you down again.”
“Eb…”
“No, I mean it. And I got to say it. If it hadn’t been for you I don’t know where I’d be right now. Or if I’d be anywhere. You… well, if I had a brother… ah hell, I’m no good with words,” and he stuck out his hand.
I took it, and we looked at each other for a time, and I felt a little tight in the throat. And no longer depressed. The mood had peeled away all at once, like a strip of dead skin. I grinned at him finally, and he grinned back, and I said, “Come on, let’s get out of here,” the way they do in the TV cop shows.
We went.
Chapter Nine
Ken Yamasaki evidently had not been the one who’d used the samurai sword on Simon Tamura. Nor did the police have any concrete leads yet to the man who had used it.
Those were the first two things we found out when we got to the Hall of Justice. Not from McFate; he wasn’t in yet, and he didn’t show up until after five. We learned them from Jack Logan, who for years had worked under Eberhardt on the Homicide Detail and who had been promoted to lieutenant and been given Eb’s old office when he retired. I knew Logan from way back, too; we’d worked together for a while when I was on the cops twenty years ago, and he’d stood up for me during that bad time a few months back when my license got suspended. The three of us sitting in the office talking was like old home week.
Yamasaki had been turned up this morning, at his apartment on California Street, and questioned extensively. He’d admitted to being at the bathhouse when Tamura was murdered; but he’d been in the company of two customers, both of whom had also been located and questioned and who had corroborated his story. At about nine-fifteen that night the three of them had heard screams and sounds of violence coming from Tamura’s office, had gone to investigate, had got a glimpse of somebody running down the back stairs — somebody they said they couldn’t identify or describe-and then had panicked and beat it out of there, along with the two other people present at the time. Yamasaki had also admitted to knowing that Tamura was a Yakuza chieftain, and to being a Yakuza runner himself; that was all McFate had been able to get out of him. He and the others had eventually been released with the usual warning to keep themselves available.
Logan seemed interested in why I was there, but in the same skeptical way Eberhardt was. Maybe Yamasaki was Haruko Gage’s secret admirer and maybe he wasn’t; it just didn’t add up to police business, now that Yamasaki had been alibied for the time of Tamura’s death. And no, as far as he knew the killer hadn’t taken a medallion or anything else off Tamura’s body or from anywhere in the office. All the police knew for sure was that the murder weapon had belonged to Tamura and been kept on display on the office wall; that the “perp”-the new slang term,
