The Case of the Sliding Pool Page 3

  “You mean, when we find out who John Doe is—”

  “Exactly. We find our killer. If John Doe was twenty-eight, somewhere there’s a man of fifty-nine, living with John Doe’s name and credentials.”

  But having recited this detailed program, Masuto felt ashamed of himself. He hated a childish display of cleverness in others, and he found it intolerable in himself. The dead man did not have to be twenty-eight at the time of his murder. He could have been two or three years younger or older. That the killer needed his identity was a guess; there could be other reasons why the body had been buried naked. And would they find the killer when they discovered who John Doe was?

  “He might be dead,” Beckman said, too worshiping of Masuto to list other flaws in his thinking.

  “Or he might be ten thousand miles away and we might discover nothing in the end,” Masuto admitted.

  Chapter 3

  MURDER

  MOST FOUL

  The City of New York includes five counties, and Chicago is synonymous with Cook County, whereby the belief is current that the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County are one and the same thing. But while the City of Los Angeles is enormous and sprawling, the County of Los Angeles is even more enormous—larger in fact than a number of European countries. Aside from the City of Los Angeles, there are in Los Angeles County dozens of other civic entities, small cities, villages, and unincorporated areas; and to make the situation even more confusing, many of these independent communities, such as Beverly Hills, Inglewood, Vernon, Culver City—to name only a few—are entirely surrounded by metropolitan Los Angeles. Each of these civic entities has its own police force, while the unincorporated areas are the domain of the county sheriff and his several thousand brown-clad deputies. No one planned this crazy quilt of authority; it just happened. And since it was Los Angeles, it happened uniquely. Yet one positive result of this weird complexity was an unusual amount of cooperation among the respective police forces, a fact which Masuto was grateful for when he found two Inglewood prowl cars parked in front of the house on Maple Street, the house where the contractor Alex Brody had once lived.

  On the other hand, he had a sinking feeling of unhappy anticipation, which combined with a wave of anger against his own insensitivity, the indolence and frustration which had permitted him to spend the previous day wandering with his family through Disneyland. Even as he parked his car an ambulance swung in ahead of him, and two men with a litter got out and were ushered into the small, aged, and rather shabby house by an Inglewood cop.

  Masuto showed his badge to the officer, who remarked that he was a long way from home and told him to go ahead inside. The small crowd on the street watched in silence.

  Whatever Alex Brody had been, he had not been rich. The living room that Masuto walked into was neat and clean, but the cheap furniture was old, the carpet worn, the walls discolored. It was crowded with another uniformed policeman, two plainclothesmen, the two ambulance men, two frightened women who sat huddled on a worn couch, and a corpse that the two attendants were lifting onto the stretcher.

  Masuto identified himself and asked to look at the corpse before they took it away.

  “Be our guest,” said one of the plainclothesmen. “My name’s Richardson. This is Macneil,” he added, nodding at the other. “What I want to know is how come a Beverly Hills cop gets here a half hour after that poor lady is killed?”

  Masuto was staring at the corpse. It was a very old lady, perhaps eighty years old, with thin white hair, pale, pleading blue eyes, and savage marks on her face and head.

  “She was beaten to death,” Macneil said. “God almighty, what the hell is this world coming to?”

  “Just two blows,” Masuto said. “Crushed her skull.”

  “We been looking for something in the room might have done it. Nothing.”

  “Brass knuckles,” Masuto said.

  “You sure or guessing?”

  “That’s how she’s marked.” He turned away and studied the room. The two ambulance men moved out with the body. “Nothing stolen,” Masuto said, more as a statement of fact than as a question.

  “What’s to steal? That old TV wouldn’t bring five bucks at a flea market. Her bag’s inside on the kitchen table. Three dollars and an uncashed social security check. I still want to know what brings you here, Masuto.”

  “Can we please go?” one of the ladies on the couch asked. They were both in their middle thirties, frightened, tearful.

  “Just a few minutes more, ladies.”

  “My kids will be coming home from school.”

  “It’s only one o’clock,” Richardson said. “You’ll be back home long before school’s out.”

  “What was the old lady’s name?” Masuto asked softly.

  “That was Mrs. Brody, God rest her soul,” one of the women on the couch said. “Never harmed no one, never bothered no one. Why do these things happen? This was once a decent place to live.”

  “How about it, Masuto?” Richardson reminded him.

  “Let’s go inside,” Masuto suggested.

  They sat down at the kitchen table, which was covered with a hand-embroidered blue and white cloth. A delft clock on the wall matched the cloth. The linoleum was scrubbed clean and worn through. As with the living room, the kitchen was spotless.

  “Cigarette?” Richardson asked.

  Masuto shook his head glumly.

  “You sure as hell look miserable, Masuto. Did you know the old lady?”

  “No, but she would have been alive now if I had used my head.”

  “You’d better explain about that.”

  “You read about the skeleton we found under where a swimming pool had been up in Beverly Hills?”

  “I read what the papers had to say.”

  “Well, the man who built that pool thirty years ago was Alex Brody. We got his name and address out of the town records. I imagine that he’s dead and the old lady was his widow.”

  “And you figure Brody for the man who put the body under the pool?”

  “Oh, no. No, indeed. I think the man who put the body there is still alive, and that he came here today and he killed Mrs. Brody. It was his style. He’s a man who long ago was trained to kill with his hands.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Some evidence, a lot of guesswork, educated guesses.”

  “You got a name for him?”

  “No.”

  “You got a name for the skeleton?”

  “No.”

  “Seems to me you don’t have a hell of a lot, Masuto.”

  “No, not a hell of a lot. Who are the two ladies outside? Did they see anything?”

  “Maybe. Let’s ask them,” Richardson said. “You figure maybe Mrs. Brody knew something about her husband’s business which might have led you to the killer?”

  “That’s why she’s dead.”

  “Still guessing. We ain’t that smart down here in Inglewood. We don’t make four until we got two and two.”

  They went back into the living room. “They live down the street,” Richardson explained. “This is Mrs. Parsons. This is Mrs. Agonian. They say they saw a man come out of the house in a hurry. They know the old lady and she don’t have many visitors. So they went to the door and the door was open and they found the body.”

  The two women began to sniffle.

  “Could you tell us something about the man?” Masuto asked kindly.

  “Only from the back. We were almost a block away.”

  “What was your immediate reaction to him? I mean, did you feel that he was a young man or an old man or middle-aged?”

  “He wasn’t an old man,” Mrs. Parsons said.

  “He wasn’t young. Maybe your age,” Mrs. Agonian said, pointing to Richardson, who appeared to be in his middle fifties. “I mean that he went down the street sort of half running, you know, walking very fast.”

  “To his car?” Masuto asked. “Did you see a car?”

  “No, he tu
rned the corner.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “A business suit. He wore a gray suit.”

  “How tall was he?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “Visualize it if you can. One always has an impression of height—just your first impression. Try to remember?”

  “He wasn’t small.”

  “I think he was a big man, I mean broad, not fat, broad,” Airs. Agonian said.

  “Is that all?” Richardson asked Masuto.

  “I think so.” He thanked the women. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “I hope you catch him,” Mrs. Parsons said. “She was a nice old lady. She never harmed a soul.”

  “One more thing,” Masuto said. “Did she ever talk about relatives? Did she have children?”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Agonian said.

  “I know, I mean whatever there is to know, because she once mentioned a daughter,” Mrs. Parsons told them. “But she hadn’t seen her daughter for years and years. They had a terrible fight years ago when her daughter married someone she and her husband didn’t want her to, and she didn’t even know where her daughter was living now.”

  “What was the daughter’s name?”

  “Henrietta.”

  “And her married name?”

  Mrs. Parsons shook her head.

  “Did she have any close friends in the neighborhood?”

  “Only Helen and myself. No one ever came to see her.”

  After the two women had left, Richardson said to Masuto, “It don’t pay to grow old, it sure as hell don’t. You got all you want? We got to seal up the place. We got a guy works on fingerprints, but he’s off today.”

  “You won’t find prints. I’d like to look around. Do you mind?”

  “Make yourself at home. I’ll tell them to hold it open until you leave.”

  It was a modest house, small, in the California bungalow style, with all the rooms on one floor—living room, kitchen, breakfast room, and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms had been converted into a kind of den and TV room; the other was used as the bedroom, and on the dresser was a picture of a young man and woman. A wedding picture. The date on it was 1922. They were an attractive couple, Masuto thought. Another photo in a small silver frame revealed a teenage girl with light hair and light eyes, smiling. Masuto went through drawers reluctantly, the worn clothing of the old lady, some child’s clothes, a rag doll and some other mementos, a sad, poverty-stricken past. What had happened to Brody the contractor? What misfortune? Why this awful poverty?

  Masuto was looking for records, payroll lists, tax reports. He found nothing. After half an hour of searching he gave it up and called the Beverly Hills police station. “What have you got?” he asked Beckman.

  “Nothing, Masao. Absolutely zilch. June, nineteen fifty, was a lousy month for disappearances in the state of California, if you don’t count lost kids. And only one of those is still missing, fourteen-year-old girl.”

  “What about the F.B.I.?”

  “Same there. Nothing that fits in. They have a millionaire who was kidnaped in Mobile, Alabama on the sixteenth of June that year, and his body never turned up, but he was only five foot six and most of his teeth were capped. What have we got here, Masao? Can a man just walk off into thin air and disappear, with nobody putting in a complaint or a missing person?”

  “It’s a big country. It happens.”

  “What do I do now?”

  “I want you to find out what services trained their men in close quarter killing during World War Two. I think the O.S.S. and the Rangers did, but there might have been others. I mean the hand-to-hand commando tactics. One thing we know about our man is that he’s proficient at killing, and since that was a time when killing did not go unrewarded, he may have earned himself a bronze star or an oak leaf cluster or even a medal of honor. Who knows! So see what you can dig up. It’s just a hunch, but all we got to play is hunches.”

  “What about Brody? Did you track him down?”

  “He’s dead, Sy, and an hour and a half ago, his wife was murdered.”

  “No!”

  “Two quick blows to the head and neck. Brass knuckles. Crushed her skull and broke her neck.”

  “He’s a real pro, isn’t he?”

  “When it comes to old ladies, he certainly is.”

  “Same address, Masao?”

  “The one you dug up, yes.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where are you off to now?”

  “Whittier. That’s were Kati’s Uncle Naga has a contracting business. It’s time I talked to a contractor.”

  But before he left the Brody house to go to Whittier, Masuto telephoned the Los Angeles Police Department and asked to speak to Lieutenant Pete Bones, who was in homicide, whose path had crossed Masuto’s a number of times in the past, and who had more than a little respect for Masuto’s ability.

  “What Chinese puzzle are you working out now?” Bones wanted to know.

  “I’m interested in homicide.”

  “Oh? Anything special?”

  “A killing without a gun. A knife or brass knuckles or even bare hands.”

  “What in hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m asking you whether you’ve had that kind of a homicide today,” Masuto said patiently.

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? You’re in homicide. You would know.”

  “So help me, Masuto, either you got a weird sense of humor or E.S.P. There was an old lady killed a couple of hours ago in Inglewood. We just got it from the Inglewood cops. Now what in hell are you up to?”

  “I know about that. I’m sorry. I should have mentioned it. I’m calling from her house.”

  “What in hell are you doing in Inglewood?”

  “It’s a long story, and I’ll give it to you first chance I get. I’m talking about another homicide with the same M.O.”

  “Tell me about it,” Bones said angrily.

  “There’s nothing to tell. I’m asking you whether it happened.”

  “Oh, you’re a doll, Masuto. You’re cute. Now will you tell me what in hell you’re talking about? Has someone been killed? Do you know about it? Or is someone going to be killed?”

  “The latter is a possibility,” Masuto agreed, forcing himself to be patient.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You call me up and tell me that someone is going to be killed and ask me whether it has happened yet, and you don’t know who?”

  “That’s about it. I’m sorry I bothered you, Pete.”

  “Get your head examined,” Bones snarled, slamming down the telephone. To Masuto, the click was more like a crash. He sighed and walked out of the house.

  Chapter 4

  NAGA ORASHI

  Naga Orashi, Kati’s uncle, was among the Japanese immigrants who were rounded up and put in concentration camps during World War II. It was a shameful incident, best forgotten yet not easily forgiven, and since Naga Orashi had been brought to America at age three, he was hardly in any real sense an immigrant. By now Orashi had almost forgotten the concentration camps. Actually, though he was seventy-eight years old, he had an excellent memory, and for the most part forgot only what he chose to forget.

  After the war, when he returned to Los Angeles, he built himself a cottage in Santa Monica, mostly with his own hands. By the time the house was complete his family had grown with the unexpected arrival of twins. He decided that the cottage was too small and he sold it for a substantial profit. He was then a carpenter; with the sale of the cottage he decided to become a builder and contractor, and in the years that followed he did well. His crowning achievement was to build a seventeen-story hotel in downtown Los Angeles for a group of Japanese investors. After that he turned over his building operation to his sons, content to sit on a rocking chair in the sun in the machine yard of his supply warehouse at the edge of Whittier, which i
s another one of the many independent towns that exist in Los Angeles County. It was there that Masuto found him, a small, wrinkled, brown-skinned man, smoking an ancient pipe and missing nothing that went on around him.

  He greeted Masuto formally, if critically, explaining that “A family, Masao, is not something to be lost like rice husk in the wind. It is the fabric of mankind, even if here in this land that fact is little known and less appreciated. Where is our family? It is a year since I have seen you.” He added, in Japanese, “It makes me unhappy, deeply unhappy.”

  “How can I apologize?” Masuto asked him. “My wife’s family is more important than my own.”

  “Your wife’s family is your family.”

  “Yes, and I am cursed with being a policeman, and time, which is so precious, is denied to me.”

  “Some of us have wondered about the life you chose.”

  “It is my karma.”

  “Don’t talk to me of karma,” Orashi said. “I am a Christian, as you know.”

  “A thousand apologies.”

  “I am being hard on you,” Orashi said, “but I still have affection for you—even though I know that it is your work and not your own affection that brings you here.”

  “So, it is true. What can I say?”

  “Nothing. I will tell you. You come here to talk about the skeleton found under the swimming pool in Beverly Hills.”

  “Yes, but how—”

  “Enough, Masao! I read the papers. I exist in the world. Who else will tell you anything about a house built thirty years ago?”

  “Of course.”

  “Have you been to see Mrs. Brody? I believe she still lives on Maple Street in Inglewood, though I have not been to see her since Alex died. So I am as culpable as you, Masao. She is very lonely, I imagine.”