The Case of the Kidnapped Angel: A Masao Masuto Mystery (Book Six) Page 2

  “I am not going to work in the garden. In two minutes, I shall drive off in that truck parked in front of the house.”

  “The gardener’s truck?”

  “Yes.”

  Kati shook her head bewilderedly.

  “I have not become a gardener. It’s a costume for my assignment. I’ll tell you about it tonight. Until then—” He spread his hands.

  “Ah, so. We are man and wife, but still I’m not to be trusted. Very old Japanese, Masao,” she said, shaking her head. Kati was the gentlest of souls, but since she had joined a group of nisei women in the process of consciousness raising, she had developed a vocabulary of protest and disapproval. “Old Japanese” was a part of it. Masuto kissed her, refused to argue the point, and left the house, reflecting that as a Zen Buddhist he was poorly developed indeed. He should have been able to see her point of view. Well, one day he would change all that—one day when he had completed his twenty-two years on the force and was in a position to receive his pension. When that time came, he would spend at least six hours a day in meditation in the Zendo in downtown Los Angeles. Until then, unfortunately, he was a policeman.

  Or was he just that, a policeman and no more? What was the point, the focus of his existence? With all his years of meditation, he had not experienced enlightenment, or satori, as the Japanese called it. He was more romantically inclined than people suspected. His wife, Kati, knew that her husband was a most unusual man, but even she did not suspect that there were times when he saw himself as a member of the ancient samurai. That was sheer fantasy. His family was not of the samurai, but out of plain peasant people, for all their success here in this new country; but at a moment in history Zen Buddhism had been the religion of the samurai, and for all of his failings, Masuto was a Zen Buddhist—and how so different from the samurai? The film the Japanese had made, which was titled The Seven Samurai, fascinated Masuto. He had seen it three times, brooding over the mentality of these seven men who must save a village, even at the cost of their lives, a village where they had no connection—except perhaps the human connection. That was very Zen.

  And was that why he lived out the role of a policeman?

  Or did he live simply for the occasional puzzle that broke up the dull routine of robberies? In all truth, he loved his work. That was his burden, his karma, to make his life out of the bleakest, the most horrifying aspects of what is euphemistically called civilization. Be that as it may, his problem now was to go disguised as a Japanese gardener, to the home of a film star, and to try to find out why said film star was unwilling to involve the police in the kidnapping of his wife. Wainwright would have seen it differently; he would have insisted that Masuto’s responsibility was to find the kidnapper and to protect Angel Barton—if, conceivably, she could be protected. Why, Masuto wondered, did a part of his own mind reject that notion?

  Then he put his thoughts aside. It was best not to think, not to speculate. More must happen.

  Mike Barton’s home was on Whittier Drive, north of Sunset Boulevard, at the extreme western edge of Beverly Hills. In a wealthy and elegant city, this was one of the wealthier and more elegant neighborhoods, enormous houses of twenty and thirty rooms sitting in manicured jungles of exotic tropical plantings. Barton’s house suited the neighborhood, a strange combination of oversized Irish cottage and French chateau, painted white, surrounded by a whitewashed stone wall. A high iron gate opened to the driveway, and as Masuto turned into the entrance, the gate opened, indicating that someone was expecting him and had noted his approach. He drove around to the back of the house, as a gardener would, and as he got out of the car, Bill Ranier, Barton’s business manager, came out of the back door to meet him.

  “All right, Sergeant, you’re here,” Ranier said. “I don’t know how good this idea is, but since your people insist, Mike agreed to go along with it. Just remember that he’s pretty damn disturbed, so don’t try to break him down. He’s going to do this his own way, and any pressure or strongarm tactics can only hurt Angel—maybe kill her.”

  “I don’t use strongarm tactics,” Masuto said softly, “but it might be worth noting that in Italy, where the payment of ransom is forbidden by law, people have tried to operate this way, without the police. It doesn’t help. The same number of kidnap victims are killed. If Barton would cooperate, we might get both the kidnappers and his wife and a million dollars to boot.”

  “Well, he won’t. He’s going to do it his way.”

  “Is the money here?”

  “Inside. McCarthy got here a few minutes ago.”

  “In what form? What kind of bills?”

  “Fifties and hundreds. We have the numbers, but hell, there’s no problem with laundering it. Billions of petrodollars floating around the world, so I guess we can kiss it good-bye.”

  “Possibly. I think now I’d like to talk to Barton. By the way, how many servants are in the house?”

  “He keeps three in help, Joe Kelly chauffeurs and doubles as a butler when he has to, Freda Holtz—she’s the cook—and Lena Jones, the maid.”

  “Does Kelly do the gardening?”

  “No, Mexican gardener comes in twice a week, not today. Now look, here’s the scenario we worked out. I tell Mike you’re here. He yells and puts up a fuss. I calm him and tell him he might as well talk to you. That’s for any big ears. I tell him it will help to pass the time and ease the waiting. Then he comes outside and walks with you through the plantings. He’s got a small greenhouse at the other end of the property, so you can go in there and talk. It should make some sense to anyone who might be listening.”

  “You only mentioned the three in help. Are there any others?”

  “Just his secretary, Elaine Newman.”

  “Is she here today?”

  “Not yet. She comes in around ten, but she could be early or late. Mike doesn’t hold her to strict hours.”

  “Does she know about the kidnapping?”

  “No, and we decided not to tell her. When she comes in, I’ll send her over to my office to get some papers and my secretary will keep her waiting there and then she has to pick up a manuscript for Mike. That will keep her out of it until noon. This is still off the record, and according to the kidnapper, we have to keep it that way.”

  “All right.” Masuto nodded. “I’ll wait right here for Barton.”

  Mike Barton

  Masuto had occasionally speculated on what makes a “bankable” star, a term very expressive in Hollywood if nowhere else in America. Certainly it was not theatrical talent, not appearance—though appearance was important—not beauty, not brains, but rather an indefinable thing which some called charisma for want of a better name. It was not connected with the way an actor lived his life, treated the other sex, was or was not a doper, a drunk, a liar, or a thief. It was something that cut through all that, recognizable yet undefinable—and whatever it was, Mike Barton possessed it. He was onstage as he stepped out of his house, and he strode over to Masuto with a kind of assurance reserved for his narrow clan, yet lacking, Masuto felt, any of that tired inelasticity that comes from fear and sorrow. He was a star, but not a very good actor.

  He shook hands and said, “Let’s walk, Sergeant. My house has big ears.”

  “Whose ears?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Kidnapping for ransom is planned. It’s not decided on the spur of the moment. Someone must have known that your wife would spend the night at the beach house.”

  “Who? I didn’t know it myself. Angel didn’t know. We decided that she should show up at the party because Netty’s a dear old friend. I had a splitting headache and I felt too rotten to trek over to Malibu. I told Angel that if the party was a drag, she should cut out of there at ten o’clock or so, but if she was having fun and decided to stay on, she shouldn’t try to drive back here. Hell, that’s what the beach house is for.”

  “But the people at the party would know that she planned to stay overnight.”

  “Some of the
m, maybe. I suppose Netty would know. Where the hell is all this leading, Sergeant?”

  “The woman who gave the party, Netty Cooper—did you talk to her?”

  “Come on, come on. My wife was in trouble.”

  “Still,” Masuto persisted, “someone must have known that she would be at the party—”

  “Sure. People knew that.”

  They were at the greenhouse now. “I guess we ought to step inside,” Barton said, “just in case someone’s watching. It’ll make some sense for me to be walking in the garden with you.”

  Inside the greenhouse Masuto asked him, “Who might be watching?”

  “Goddamnit, Sergeant, you get me at the worst moment of my life and ask me questions that make no damn sense.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “All I want is to get back into the house and wait for the phone to ring.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Then it makes no sense for me to be out here talking to a gardener. You keep asking me who is watching. How the hell do I know? But someone knows every move I make and every move Angel makes, and they’re going to think it’s funny as hell for me to be out here with you. Furthermore, let me tell you this: If anyone follows me when I make the drop and Angel is hurt, I swear to God I’ll sue Beverly Hills for every dollar they got in their treasury.”

  “No one will follow you.”

  “Then I suggest you get your truck out of here.”

  Masuto nodded, reflecting that to be a policeman in Beverly Hills was quite different from being a policeman anywhere else in the world. He watched Mike Barton stride across the garden to the house, the stride and bearing of a thoroughbred horse, and then Masuto walked to his truck, got in, and drove out of the place. A few minutes later he parked the pickup at the police station on Rexford Drive, ignored a uniformed cop who wanted to know whether he had changed his profession, and then climbed the stairs to Wainwright’s office.

  “Back already?” Wainwright asked sourly.

  “He didn’t want me there. He raised hell and told me to get out.”

  “Great. We pay a hundred dollars to rent the truck for a day and we get ten minutes out of it.”

  “Beverly Hills can afford it.”

  “They don’t pay for it. It comes out of our budget. Did you get anything?”

  “Not really. Some impressions.”

  “Well, just sit on them. The city manager was in here and he wants us to keep hands off. Ranier and McCarthy are out there with Barton, and they’ll be in touch with us once Barton pays the ransom. When Angel is returned, we can move in and investigate.”

  “And if Angel isn’t returned?”

  “Let’s take it one thing at a time.”

  “I’d like to go out to Malibu now,” Masuto said.

  “What for?”

  “I want to see his beach house and I want to talk to Netty Cooper, the lady who gave the party where Angel spent last night.”

  “The Malibu cops are handling that.”

  “I know, Captain. Nevertheless, she resides here. The Malibu cops would expect us to stick our noses into it.”

  “I don’t want trouble with the brass, Masao. They want us to keep hands off.”

  “Absolutely. I’m not tailing Barton or interfering with him. I’m looking at a place where a crime was committed, a break-in and a kidnapping. It would be derelict on our part not to look into it, and it would undoubtedly open us to various charges that—”

  “All right. Do it. I’m sick of being told when to be a cop and when not to.”

  “I’d like to take Beckman with me.”

  “What for? You need the company?”

  “For protection. He’s bigger than I am.”

  “Take him and get the hell out of here!”

  His desk still covered with files, Beckman was talking into the telephone when Masuto entered. He put down the phone, and Masuto told him, “Come take a ride. We’ll drive over to my house, I’ll change clothes, and then we’ll head out to Malibu. Unless you got something out of this morning?”

  “We’ll talk in the car,” Beckman said. He was a big man, three inches taller than Masuto’s six feet, heavy-set and slope-shouldered. He sat in Masuto’s old Datsun scrunched over and observed that when you scratched the surface of anyone, what came up was pretty damn strange.

  “How’s that?”

  “You want to know about Angel. Well, I put out every line we have. I called Gloria Adams at the L.A. Times and I called Freda Mons at the Examiner. Between them they know about every celebrity in the country, when they pee and when they cut their fingernails and who they’re in bed with, and I even called Elsie Binns at S.A.G., who knows practically every actor in the world, and do you know that none of them could come up with even a license tag for Angel Barton. That is, before two and a half years ago, which was when she moved in with Mike Barton. So who is she and where was she and where does she come from?”

  “How about her maiden name?”

  “That, Masao, is a lulu. Nobody, but nobody, has the vaguest notion what her maiden name was, or whatever her last name was, maiden or not.”

  “What did they call her? They must have called her something.”

  “They called her Angel.”

  “What about the Motor Vehicles Bureau?” Masuto demanded. “Did you try them? If she drove a car before she was married, she had a license.”

  “I’m slow but not stupid, Masao. Sure I tried them. They’re a pretty lousy organization to begin with and they don’t break their backs doing things for the Beverly Hills cops, and when I told them that all I had was a first name and an address, they didn’t exactly applaud me. Nothing. So I called the L.A. cops who got some good computers. Zilch. Zilch wherever I turned. Two and a half years ago, that lady just didn’t exist.”

  “She existed. Now what about Barton?”

  They were at Masuto’s cottage now, and Beckman suggested that they save Barton for the ride out to Malibu. “Otherwise, we got to talk about the weather, which doesn’t change, and football, which ain’t your game anyway.”

  It was after eleven now, and Kati, delighted to see her husband at midday, immediately began to prepare food. “I’m not hungry,” Masuto said. “I’ll change and then we’ll have to go.” Beckman was hungry, and Kati fried a large hamburger, which he wolfed down with a glass of milk. “I expected tempura,” he explained to Masuto when they were back in the car. “You didn’t expect me to pass up an offer of Kati’s tempura.”

  “You ate hamburger.”

  “That’s what I got. I’d have to be a pig to turn it down and ask for tempura.”

  “I guess you would.”

  It was about twenty-five miles from Masuto’s home in Culver City to the old Malibu Road, the location of the Bartons’ beach house. When they were on the Pacific Coast Highway heading north, Masuto reminded Beckman about Barton. “You said his real name might just be Brannigan. Why ‘might just be’? A good many film actors change their names. It’s no great secret.”

  “It is and it isn’t, Masao. In the old days Jewish and Italian and Polish actors used to sit on their real names, and sometimes their real names were absolutely secret, actors like Leslie Howard and Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis to name only a few. But after the war things changed and you got people like George Segal and Sylvester Stallone who don’t give a damn and lots of others too. But with Barton, it’s different.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, think about the way he looks, a kind of a cross between Robert Redford and Ronald Reagan. He’s got to be Irish or Wasp, so you don’t think of him changing his name. But his past is as blurred as the Angel’s. He turned up here in Hollywood in 1964 and it seems that for two years he did everything except act—washed dishes, waited on tables, pumped gas. Then he got some bit parts in TV, and then he pulled off a major role in a series—and from there, zoom. He’s one of the top ten. But who is he? Nobody seems to know.”

  “A hundred million peopl
e have seen his face. How does he hide?”

  “Maybe he don’t have to hide. You hide if you’re on the run, if there’s a want out for you. If it’s just a background you’re maybe ashamed of, or some kind of nastiness that won’t help the image, or maybe even something you want to forget, you change your name.”

  “Then where did the Brannigan notion come from?” Masuto reminded him.

  “I talked to Gloria Adams at the L.A. Times. She says that in the interviews with fan magazines and such, Barton just blurs his past—admits to being an Easterner from upstate New York, but she mentioned that two years ago she got a letter from back East. She tells me her column is syndicated all over the country, and this letter says that Barton’s real name is Brannigan and that he comes from Schenectady in New York. So she asked Barton, and he says it’s a lot of hogwash, so she just forgot about it, because crazy mail is a part of her job. She wanted to know how come the Beverly Hills cops were suddenly interested in Mike Barton, but I put her off and told her that if something broke, she’d be the first to know.”

  “Did you call the Schenectady cops?”

  “I did that, but they don’t have fancy computers, and they said that for anything seventeen or eighteen years ago it would take a couple of days to get into their old files.”

  Masuto nodded. “That’s good work, Sy. From here on we’ll just take it as it comes.”

  “You think he’ll ever see Angel again?”

  “Somehow, I do.”

  “It’s almost noon. By now Barton’s made the drop.”

  “I would presume so.”

  It was just past twelve when they turned left off the Pacific Coast Highway at old Malibu Road and pulled up in front of the Malibu police station. Joe Cominsky, the Malibu chief of police, had started out as a uniformed cop with Sy Beckman when they were both members of the Los Angeles police, and now he shook his hand warmly. “It’s been a long time, Sy, many moons.”