Quicksilver (Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

the spatters and ribbons of blood began. He’d been in his sixties, bald, lean, wearing a shirt and tie and a pair of herringbone slacks. I had never seen him before.
    The broken glass came from a framed, blown-up photograph, about fifteen inches square, that had either fallen or been pulled down from the wall. It lay face up, so that when I bent forward I could see that it was a grainy black-and-white print of three Japanese men, all in their late teens or early twenties, standing in front of a wire-mesh fence with some buildings behind it in the distance. They had their arms around one another and they were smiling. One of them, the man in the middle, wore an oddly designed medallion looped around his neck; he might have been the dead man on the floor thirty or forty years ago, but as hacked and bloody as the corpse was, I couldn’t be sure.
    There was not much else to see in the office. Two closed doors,one in the side wall that was probably a closet, the other in the back wall that figured to be a rear exit. A few sheets of paper on the floor—what looked to be ledger pages with columns of numbers on them, dislodged from the desk. But there hadn’t been much of a struggle; the killer had come in with the sword, or found it here in the office when he arrived, and struck more or less without warning.
    The body kept drawing my eyes, magnetically. I started to back away from it. It was warm in there, too warm: the radiator along the side wall was turned up and burbling faintly. And the smell of death was making me light-headed. They tell you blood has no odor, but you can smell it just the same—a kind of brackish-sweet stench. It was heavy in the air now, along with the lingering foulness of evacuated bowels. Always those same odors at scenes like this one, where blood has been spilled and someone has died by violence. Always the same overpowering smell of death.
    Footsteps sounded behind me in the corridor. “Hey, where are you?” Kerry’s voice called. “What’s going on?”
    Christ. I swung around to fill the doorway and block her view. “Don’t come in here.”
    She stopped moving and stared at me. She could see it in my face, the reflection of what I’d been looking at on the office floor; fright kindled in her eyes.
    “There’s a dead man in here,” I said. “Murdered with a sword. It’s pretty messy.”
    “My God! Who—?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Not the man you came to see?”
    “No. Much older. Probably the proprietor.”
    I got my handkerchief out, wrapped it around my hand, and then stepped into the corridor and pulled the door shut. I was afraid she might take it into her head to go have a look for herself. With Kerry, you never knew what she was liable to do.
    She said, “Brr,” and hugged herself the way you do when you feel a sudden chill. “That must be why nobody’s here.”
    I nodded. And why everybody left in such a hurry, I thought. Ken Yamasaki and whoever else was in the baths must have heard the commotion, maybe even seen who did the killing. And instead of hanging around to call the police, they’d all run scared. But why all of them? Why Yamasaki? He was an employee; the police would have no trouble finding that out, and that he’d been here tonight. There was no sense in him running off with the rest of them.
    Unless he was the murderer ...
    “Come on,” I said, and took Kerry’s hand and pulled her along into the reception area. I dipped my chin toward one of the rattan visitor’s chairs. “Sit down over there—and try not to touch anything.”
    She did what I told her without saying anything. I moved over to the desk, used the handkerchief to lift the telephone receiver, and dialed the all-too-familiar number of the Hall of justice.

    The first prowl-car cops got there in ten minutes, and the Homicide boys showed up fifteen minutes after that. The inspector in charge was a guy named McFate, Leo McFate. We knew each other slightly, and were always civil in what