The Case of the Murdered MacKenzie: A Masao Masuto Mystery (Book Seven) Read online

  The Case of the Murdered Mackenzie

  A Masao Masuto Mystery

  Howard Fast writing as E. V. Cunningham

  For Barbara, welcome

  Detective Sergeant Masao Masuto, his wife, Kati, his twelve-year-old son, Uraga, and his ten-year-old daughter, Ana, all departed for Japan on the very same day that Eve Mackenzie—as the subsequent indictment said—murdered her husband. The two events had no connection other than the fact that Masuto, had he been in Beverly Hills, would have investigated the murder. As it happened, Masuto was in a Pan Am plane, high over the Pacific, leaving the investigation to his partner, Sy Beckman, and to Beckman’s boss, Captain Wainwright.

  The trip to Japan was something that Masuto and his wife, Kati, had discussed through the years, not as any sort of reality, but as a pleasant fantasy. Every dollar they could put aside went into a fund for the children’s college education, and the stories they’d heard of astronomical hotel and restaurant prices, on top of very expensive airplane fares kept the Japanese excursion in the area of fantasy. Both Masuto and Kati were Nisei, which meant they were American-born of Japanese-born parents. Kati was less eager than her husband to visit the land of her ancestors. She was a nest-builder, and her own small universe—her cottage in Culver City, her two children, and her husband—satisfied her completely.

  Masuto, on the other hand, was a Zen Buddhist, and he had often dreamed of meditating in one of the Zen temples in Kyoto—or perhaps listening to the wisdom of some famous Roshi, promising himself that before that unlikely moment arrived, he would do something to correct his very poor Japanese. However, it arrived very suddenly. His greatuncle Ishu, who lived in San Jose and who was very old, and who had little faith in the inheritance laws, sent Masuto a gift of round-trip plane tickets to Tokyo for his entire family. For a whole evening, Masuto and his wife debated the pros and cons of the trip, the money that would have to be spent even if they went only to Tokyo and Kyoto—but what of other cities where there would be relatives who had to be visited as a minimal act of courtesy? In the end, agreeing that the opportunity might never come again, they decided to take the plunge. Masuto had a month of vacation time coming to him, and he managed to talk Captain Wainwright, his chief on the Beverly Hills police force, out of another month, and since it was already late in June, the children would miss only a few days of school.

  The family tour, like all family tours, was both wonderful and depressing. Masuto emerged with new respect for Kati, whose Japanese was so much better than his, and Kati willingly stayed with the children while Masuto was guest of honor at a police banquet where, alas, no wives were present.

  The prices were depressingly higher than anything either of them had anticipated—and for Masuto, his dreams of the pure beauty of Kyoto was brought down to earth by the sight of a bustling city of over a million people. As poor as Masuto’s spoken Japanese—and perhaps even worse—was his ability to read the printed Japanese characters; and since after a few weeks away from California he began to feel isolated and totally divorced from both past and present, it was indeed fortunate that Tokyo had several English-language newspapers. It was there, in the Japan Times that he first heard of the Mackenzie affair.

  Eve Mackenzie was one of five women who had appeared in a picture called The Old Gang, which was released in 1961. The picture was a great hit, and all five of the women, who played in a film about a high school reunion five years later, went on to a sort of stardom. Eve Mackenzie had married Robert Mackenzie just before the film was made. In the film she played under the name of Eve Hardin. She played in five more films, became pregnant, lost the child in the seventh month, appeared in a few more films after that, and then eclipsed. That was not unusual; indeed, that was in the nature of the new Hollywood. Stars were created and died in less than a lifetime.

  Robert Mackenzie, the victim of Eve’s passion or anger or frustration, was Scottish-born, an engineer, brilliant, and when alive employed at the Fenwick Works, which nestles in the hills to the east of Malibu and which, as they say, has more millions in war contracts than one can shake a stick at. The marriage had not been a happy one, and Eve’s friends told reporters that she had been driven to the act. Kati, reading the account of the crime to Masuto as he sprawled on a couch in their Tokyo hotel, responded indignantly to the suggestion that anyone might be driven to murder.

  “How inhuman! To solve anything with a murder!”

  “Yet it is done every day, my dear Kati.”

  “You justify it? How can you?”

  “Of course I don’t,” Masuto said. “You know me better than that, Kati. Yet our civilization, here as well as at home in the States, has laid the basis for the act and the justification.”

  “No! How?”

  “War. What else is war?”

  “You know I can’t argue with you about such things. You know that, and you make me feel so foolish.”

  “My dear Kati, I don’t mean to make you feel foolish. You’re not. You’re a very wise woman.” And then he went to her and held her in his arms, which proved his love if not his sincerity.

  But he knew that the crux of it was the fact that a murder of major consequence had taken place in Beverly Hills, where murder is certainly not an everyday occurrence, and he had been thousands of miles away. It was the first murder in Beverly Hills in eleven years that he had not investigated.

  In Morioka, where he had gone to speak with a Roshi who was an old friend of the Roshi at the Zendo in Los Angeles, he was unable to find an English-language newspaper.

  His irritation was such that it caused Bukko, the venerable Zen Roshi he had come to Morioka to meet, to ask Masuto whether there was some serious family difficulty or loss that disturbed him. This question served at least to bring Masuto to his senses.

  “I was so mortified before the Roshi,” Masuto explained to Kati later, “that I lied to him, and for that I cannot forgive myself.”

  “But from what you have told me about Zen masters,” Kati said gently, “he would know that you were lying.”

  “Of course he knew.”

  “Then did you explain to him?”

  “What was I to explain to him?” Masuto said unhappily. “It is bad enough to enter a temple and reveal that I am a policeman. Should I add to it the fact that I have become so irritable and unpleasant over a murder committed in Beverly Hills while I am here in Japan?”

  “But we are here in Japan,” Kati said, “and it is filled with such delightful things. Can we enjoy them—please, Masao?”

  “Of course. And I promise you, there will be no further mention of this Mackenzie business.”

  He kept his word, and he even rejected the notion of a long distance call to his partner, Sy Beckman. This for two reasons: firstly because of its cost, and secondly because he felt it would be both unprofessional and unfriendly to insert himself into the first homicide that Beckman had undertaken alone.

  But it was Beckman who brought up the matter of the Mackenzie case after Masuto had reported in on his first day back. Masuto shook hands with his colleagues, responded to the necessary jokes about geisha girls and massage, blew the dust off his desktop, and asked himself whether or not he was pleased to be back in sunny, smog-laced Beverly Hills. He could not help but contrast this quiet, orderly community with the turbulent, explosive and marvelously vital life in Tokyo; yet for all of its gilt-edged lethargy, Beverly Hills had a particular fascination for a policeman. For one thing; it was the largest per capita concentration of wealth in the entire world, and for another, with a population of thirty t
housand or so, it contained thirty-five banks, twenty savings and loans, and more jewelry stores than any comparable area anywhere on earth. The gross deposits in Beverly Hills banks amounted to over seven billion dollars, which made the work of a Beverly Hills policeman absolutely unique.

  Masuto was always aware of these facts. Rich people are a race, a subculture. Different. “Was he rich?” he asked Beckman, referring to the murdered man, Robert Mackenzie. It was the initial identification.

  “What’s rich? Compared to us? House on Lexington Road, house at Malibu—that adds up to a couple of million. A million more or so in securities. She’s well fixed. Pity she can’t use it.”

  “Pity?”

  “Damn it, Masao, I like the woman. And just between us, I don’t think she did it.” Beckman, a huge, overweight, overmuscled hulk of a man, shook his head with irritation.

  “You brought in the evidence,” Masuto said gently.

  “Hell, it was there. What could I do? So help me God, I wish you had been there, Masao.”

  “It’s your case, Sy. I don’t want to interfere.”

  “Bullshit. Anyway, you can’t interfere. Wainwright’s closed the book on it. She goes to trial tomorrow, and there’s at least a chance they’ll convict.”

  “The case is that good? You know, I’ve been dependent on the bits and pieces in the Tokyo English-language papers.”

  “It’s good, yes. Not great but good.”

  “Unseemly haste, as they say. Why so quick to go to trial?”

  “Very unseemly. You ask me, she has a pair of lousy lawyers—her husband’s lawyers. Can you beat that? Just imagine—her husband’s lawyers.”

  “They may believe she’s innocent.”

  “Not the way I hear it told,” Beckman said. “The gossip goes that they don’t give a damn and they’d just as soon see her put away for life. Evidently, they’ve snowed her in some way. Why on God’s earth does she use these lawyers? I just don’t understand it.”

  “Why do you think she’s innocent?” Masuto asked. “That’s more to the point. If you have anything, Sy, put it together and we’ll try to make something out of it. Wainwright won’t stand in our way.”

  “I got nothing—nothing. That’s why she’s on trial, Masao. Please—come into this.”

  “I’ll talk to Wainwright. But with nothing new in the way of evidence, he won’t welcome me.”

  “The woman’s on trial,” Captain Wainwright told Masuto. “You know, Masao, I damn near cabled you in Japan when this thing broke to tell you to cut off the vacation and come back here. You know the kind of flak we take when there’s a murder in Beverly Hills, and this one had to be a hotshot engineer working on some of the fanciest gadgets in the defense field. And done by a movie star. Well, just as well I resisted the temptation. Sy had a full-fledged investigation like this coming to him, and he put together enough for the indictment. It’s out of our hands now. We’ve closed the file.”

  “We could open it.”

  “What in hell are you after, Masao?” Wainwright asked angrily. “Because someone else did the investigation? Jealousy?”

  “That’s not fair, and you know me better than that. Sy thinks she’s innocent. He asked me to talk to you.”

  “You know Beckman when it comes to a beautiful woman. They can do no wrong. And this one’s beautiful.”

  “I also know that Sy’s a good cop. He has good insights.”

  Wainwright sighed and spread his arms. “Who knows? Maybe he’s right, maybe he isn’t. I got a police department, Masao, and I got to go by the book, and this is no longer a police matter. We made the arrest and we put together the evidence and we turned it over to the district attorney. Now it’s out of our hands. Let the court decide, which is why we got a thing called trial by jury. I don’t want to hear any more about it. I’m glad you’re back, Masao, but maybe getting into one of these damned arguments with you isn’t the best way to start off.”

  “No argument, Captain. It’s your position, and it’s plain enough.”

  Back in his office, where Beckman was waiting, Masuto shook his head. “No go. He says it’s out of our hands.”

  Beckman shrugged. “He’s right.”

  “I think he’s mellowing,” Masuto said. “Time was when he would have bitten my head off for even suggesting that a case in court should be reopened for investigation. Anyway, after that case where a film star took a few too many and then fell off a yacht and drowned, and the investigation was squeezed right out of existence—”

  “Not to mention the Belushi case—”

  “They were off our turf, but someone has to pay the piper, and I’m afraid it’s Eve Mackenzie. She’s the symbol of a blind justice that chooses no favorites, rich or poor or whatever, except when she’s already been hurt too much for the rich and famous.”

  “And don’t think the jury won’t be licking their lips over that.”

  “You think she’ll be convicted?”

  “And not with my smarts, Masao. She lined it all up against herself.”

  “Deliberately?”

  “No …” He hesitated. “No, I don’t think so. It just came together that way. You know, someone who’s not in our business will give you a lot of mathematical crap about the improbability of coincidence. But I’ve seen too many coincidences to look at it that way.”

  “And this case is loaded with them?”

  “You can say that again.”

  “There is one thing,” Masuto said thoughtfully. “The laws of probability are based on reality. Sometimes they appear to break down, but sometimes they’re tampered with.”

  Beverly Hills, a self-governing and independent city possessed of its own fire department, its own police department, its own school system, and its own table of social and civic services, is nevertheless totally surrounded by the City of Los Angeles. A number of communities in Los Angeles are in a similar situation—one which possibly exists nowhere else in the nation—and in the case of Beverly Hills, the judicial system reaches only as far as a municipal court. Criminal cases are tried in the nearest superior court, in this instance in Santa Monica, which nestles along the Pacific shore about ten miles from Beverly Hills.

  It was there, in Santa Monica, that Detective Sy Beckman had to appear as witness for the prosecution. As his superior in the tiny Beverly Hills homicide bureau, Detective Sergeant Masao Masuto went with him—tentatively, since he expected Wainwright to demand what the hell Masuto was needed for out there in Santa Monica.

  But Wainwright said nothing. It was a very quiet moment in the criminal history of Beverly Hills—no assaults, only two robberies, no purse-snatchings.

  “It’s routine,” Beckman said. “You’d be here anyway if we’d both done the investigation.”

  “No. He’s gone soft.”

  “Not Wainwright.”

  “Do you realize he’s given me the day off?”

  “Come on,” Beckman said. “You’re going to sit in that courtroom. What kind of a day off is that?”

  “The kind I’m looking forward to,” Masuto said.

  “You been reading. You think she’s innocent?”

  “I wish I could understand why you think so.”

  “Maybe I dream about leaving my wife and staking out a pup tent on Malibu Beach with Eve Mackenzie. God knows why!”

  Masuto knew Beckman’s wife. He could understand Beckman’s feelings, and recalling Eve Mackenzie’s beauty on the screen, he found that her films did not exaggerate the attraction of the living woman. How could one look at the comely and charming woman sitting at the defense table and think of her as a murderer? Beckman was outside in the witness room, which gave Masuto a chance to watch Eve Mackenzie undisturbed—the pale but good skin in this land of forced tan and sunburn, calm, wide gray eyes, ash-blond hair that might just have been natural, and no pretensions to less than her forty-one years. What would describe her? And then he caught an answer. Dignity. She was possessed of a calm and unusual dignity. Possibly she w
as playing a role, since she was a gifted actress; if so, she was playing it very well.

  Her lawyers arrived in court, one of them a heavyset, thick-featured man in his fifties—that would be either Cassell or Norman—and the other, one of those bright young men who finds a place in the best legal firms, cut from proper cardboard, with a proper head and nose and mouth, interchangeable with ten thousand others. As people filed into the courtroom, Masuto heard the name Cassell addressed to the heavyset man. But why Cassell? Why did the dead man’s attorneys choose to defend the accused murderer of their one-time client? Beckman’s explanation was that Cassell and Norman had been family attorneys; but that was hardly good enough to satisfy Masuto.

  The judge entered, Judge Harry Simpkins, firm but human as Masuto saw him. The jury was in place, eight women, four men—too many women, too many of them old and bitter. Everyone rose. The judge seated himself and the court sat down. The judge had white hair. Passion lay somewhere in his past.

  Today, Beckman was the first witness. “Call Seymour Beckman!” the clerk announced.

  It always gave Masuto a start to have Beckman identified as Seymour. The big, slope-shouldered detective went poorly with his name. He was big but not clumsy; he moved like an athlete as he came down the aisle and took his place in the witness box. The clerk took his oath, and then Mark Geffner, the district attorney, began the questioning. Masuto had worked with Geffner in the past. Geffner was not brilliant, but decent, straightforward, and honest.

  “State your name and position, please,” he said to Beckman.

  “Seymour Beckman, detective, Beverly Hills police force.”

  “How long have you been with the Beverly Hills Police Department?”

  “Sixteen years.”

  “And how long with homicide?”

  “When Detective Sergeant Masuto was assigned full-time to Homicide, I was given the assignment of working with him. When he needed me. That was nine years ago.”

  “And in the case of the Mackenzie murder, I take it that Detective Masuto was out of the country.”