“I hate grapefruit.”
“Does that mean you haven’t eaten any?”
“I didn’t know I was supposed to.”
“I told you. Don’t you ever listen?”
“Not when somebody’s trying to get me to eat grapefruit.”
“Selective hearing,” she said, “that’s what you’ve got.”
“Nuts,” I said. “I don’t care what you say, I’m going to have a steak tonight. Just the thought of one makes me weak.”
“I never said you couldn’t have a steak. It’s the baked potato with all the trimmings and the sourdough bread and the two pints of ale you can’t have.”
“Then what do I get with the steak?”
“Black coffee and a green salad with lemon juice.”
“Green salad with lemon juice. God.”
“It’s good for you. Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Just so long as we get there fast.”
We ate at a place in one of the large downtown hotels that specialized in steaks. They sliced any cut of meat to order right in front of you, as soon as you came in, and I told the chef I wanted a sixteen-ounce New York done rare. Normally I like my steak medium rare, but tonight I was after red meat, the bloodier the better. It made me feel primitive as hell, like a caveman out on his first date.
When the steak arrived at our table I managed to eat it like a civilized human being, if just barely. I was even able to get down most of the green salad with lemon juice. Kerry watched me with a little awe in her expression. You’d have thought she had never seen a starving man wolf food before.
After the waiter cleared away the remains we sat and talked for a while over coffee. My stomach was full and I was happy. It doesn’t take much to make me happy-just a good meal, an attractive woman, a pulp magazine to read, and a job to do. Maybe I was a primitive, after all.
I let her pay the check for a change. She could afford it; she was a highly paid copywriter for one of San Francisco’s largest ad agencies and I was only a poorly paid private eye who was going to be even more poorly paid once I had to start divvying with Eberhardt. Then we went and got my car and I drove over to Pine and straight out to Tamura’s Baths. The sooner I got my little talk with Ken Yamasaki over and done with, the sooner I could go have an Italian shower with Kerry. Italian showers were much better than Japanese baths. The kind I had in mind were, anyhow.
The building that housed the baths was nondescript enough-a narrow brick structure, two stories high, flanked by an apartment house and a corner grocery. I found a parking space two doors down and we walked over to it through a drizzle that was more mist than rain. A luminous clock in the window of the grocery said that the time was 9:35.
At the door to the bathhouse, Kerry said, “Are you sure it’s all right for women to go in here?”
“You don’t see any signs that say otherwise, do you?”
“No, I guess not.”
The only sign of any sort was tacked up alongside the entrance. It said TAMURA’S JAPANESE BATHS HOURS 10 A. M.- 10 P.M. DAILY. I moved past it and opened the door and let Kerry precede me into a narrow, gloomy hallway illuminated by a single Japanese lantern. At the far end was a set of stairs leading upward.
It was quiet in there; I couldn’t hear anything except silence when I shut the door. The stairs took us into an anteroom that contained some rattan chairs, two more lanterns, and a reception desk with nobody behind it. To one side was a screened archway that probably led back to the baths.
We waited fifteen or twenty seconds and nothing happened: nobody came into the anteroom, nobody made any sounds anywhere else in the building. Finally I called, “Hello! Anybody here?” All that got me was an echo and more silence.
Kerry said, “Where is everybody?”
“Good question. The place can’t be closed; it’s not ten yet and the front door was unlocked.”
“Maybe we should go look behind that screen.”
“That must be where the baths are.”
“So? Are you afraid I’ll see something I’ve never seen before?”
“Fat chance of that.”
She stuck her tongue out at me.
I went over and around the screen, with Kerry at my heels. Another corridor, this one lighted by more lanterns, with several doorways opening off it and another doorway at the far end. The first few doorways opened into dressing cubicles, all of them empty, a couple in which towels had been carelessly tossed on the floor; the ones beyond opened into the bathing areas. There were four of these — large rooms separated by movable, opaque screens, each room containing a waist-deep sunken tile tub large enough for half a dozen people, with bamboo mats on the floor around the rim. None of the rooms was occupied, although a few of the mats appeared to be wet.
“So this is what a Japanese bathhouse looks like,” Kerry said. “It’s a little disappointing. I expected something more exotic.”
I didn’t say anything. Something was wrong here; I could feel it in the air now, like little stirrings of bad wind. The place shouldn’t have been empty, not with the front door unlocked. And if those towels on the floor and the wet mats were any indication, the people who had been here had left in a hurry. Not too long ago, either.
We were standing inside one of the bathing rooms. I said abruptly, “Stay here a minute, will you?”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“Just stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I left her before she could argue and went down to the end of the corridor. The door there was open about halfway; on the other side I could see part of a desk with a lamp burning on it and some filing cabinets. An office-Tamura’s, maybe, if somebody named Tamura still ran the place. I put the tips of my fingers against the door and shoved it open all the way.
The first thing I saw was that the desk chair had been overturned. Then I saw the scattered shards of broken glass, and the spots of red on the wall. And then, when I took two steps inside and another two sideways, I saw the rest of the blood, on the floor and on the lower part of the wall, and the Japanese whose blood it had been.
He was lying crumpled against the baseboard; there wasn’t any doubt that he was dead. The thing that had killed him was lying there too, bright-stained and gleaming in the light from the desk lamp.
He had been hacked to death with a samurai sword.
Chapter Five
My stomach turned over and the steak I’d eaten seemed to rise into the back of my throat in a bile-soaked lump. For a couple of seconds I thought I was going to throw it up. I looked away from the body, swallowed, and kept on swallowing until my throat unclogged.
Red meat, I thought, the bloodier the better…
I wanted to get out of there, but I had been a cop too many years and I had walked in on too many homicide scenes; instinct took me a few steps closer to the dead man, to where the scatter of glass shards and 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.