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

little dealings we had—he’d been in General Works until Eberhardt’s retirement got him transferred to the Homicide Detail—but I sensed that McFate didn’t like me much. I had a pretty fair idea why, too, and it was none of the usual stuff that causes clashes between cops and private detectives; no jealousy or distrust or any of that. No, it had to do with the fact that McFate was a social climber. He went to the opera and the symphony and the ballet, and he got his name mentioned in the gossip columns from time to time, usually in connection with some local lady of means, and he dressed in tailored suits and hand-made ties and always looked like he was on his way to a wedding or a wake.
    He didn’t like me because he thought I was a coarse, sloppy, pulp-reading peon. Which I was, and the hell with Leo McFate.
    He had nothing much to say when he and the others breezed in, except for a curt “Where is the deceased?” Deceased, yet. He didn’t talk like a cop; he talked like Philo Vance. Or a political appointee in Sacramento, which was what he aspired to be someday, according to rumor. He had the demeanor for it, you couldn’t deny that. Tall, muscled, imposing; what my grandmother would have called “a fine figure of a man.” Dark brown hair going gray at the temples. A nifty brown mustache to go with a pair of nifty brown eyes. He even had a goddamn cleft in his chin like Robert Mitchum’s.
    I showed him where the deceased was. McFate spent a couple of minutes looking at the body and the bloody sword and the other stuff on the floor. I watched him do that from out in the hallway; I had no inclination to go in there again, and from where I was, the office desk blocked my view of the dead man. Then McFate had some words with the assistant coroner and with one of the members of the lab crew. Then he turned and came back out to where I was standing.
    “What time did you find him?” he asked.
    “About nine-forty. Three or four minutes before I called the Hall.”
    “When you got here, was the place this deserted?”
    “Yes.” I told him the way I figured that, and he nodded.
    “How did you get in?”
    “The front door was unlocked; we just walked in. We took a look around back here when we didn’t find anybody at the reception desk.”
    “We?”
    “Me and the lady out there. Kerry Wade.”
    “Am I to understand you came here to use the baths?” The words were innocent enough, but he managed to make them sound faintly supercilious, as if he were amused at the idea of rabble like me indulging in a Japanese bath.
    I said, “No, we didn’t come here to use the baths. We came here because I wanted to talk to one of the employees on a business matter.”
    “Which employee? Tamura?”
    “Is Tamura the dead man?”
    “Yes. Simon Tamura.”
    “How do you know that already?”
    “Because we have a file on him. He was Yakuza.”
    “The hell he was,” I said, surprised.
    “The hell he wasn’t.”
    “So that’s it. A gang killing. No wonder everybody got out of here in a hurry, including the employees.”
    “Mmm,” McFate said. “Which employee did you come here to see?”
    “Ken Yamasaki.”
    McFate repeated the name. He wasn’t writing down any of this conversation; he had a photographic memory and he was proud of the fact that he could quote verbatim interrogations that had lasted thirty minutes. I knew that about him because it had been in one of the gossip columns, back when I was still reading the newspapers. “What sort of business did you have with Yamasaki?” he asked.
    “Nothing that involves the Yakuza,” I said. “Or Tamura’s death.”
    “Suppose you let me be the judge of that.”
    I was beginning to like him even less than he liked me. But the world is full of assholes, and you have to be tolerant if you want to keep the peace. So I told him in a nice, even, tolerant voice that Ken Yamasaki was an old boyfriend of Haruko Gage, who had hired me to find out the name of the