“Nellie!”
“Haruko Gage? Good God,” he said, “not Haruko Fujita? The little Japanese girl who was studying art?”
“Probably; Gage is her married name. Or do you routinely ask Japanese girls to live with you?”
That got me another foxy snarl. “You can’t talk to me like that. I won’t allow it.”
“You can’t let me stand out here in the rain, but you’re doing it anyway. Haruko Gage has been receiving anonymous presents in the mail-expensive jewelry, one with a love note. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Nel-lie!”
“Goddamn it,” Mixer said. “Be quiet, Darlene!”
“Well, hurry up, can’t you?” the woman’s voice called. She sounded young. “I’m getting cold sitting around here like this. Besides, I can’t get your stupid movie camera to work right.”
The red flush came back into Mixer’s face, dragging the guilt along with it. He said something that sounded like “Gah,” jerked his head back, and slammed the door.
I shoved my finger against the doorbell button, kept it there. At the end of thirty or forty seconds the door opened and Mixer said, “Go away, leave me alone! I’ll call the police!” And the door banged shut again.
I gave it up. I went back down the stairs and got into the car and used my handkerchief for a rain towel. Now I knew what Alice felt like after she’d spent some time in Wonderland; it was as if I had just done verbal battle with the Mad Hatter. Or, more appropriately, it seemed, the Mad Lecher.
Cross Mixer off the list? What with Clara and Darlene and Christ knew how many others eager for his tutoring, it didn’t seem likely that he would be writing anonymous love notes and blowing a wad of money on fancy jewelry for Haruko Gage. Still, he was a screwball; and you never know what a screwball might do. I wanted at least one more session with Mixer, under different and more conventional circumstances, before I wrote him off.
The thing about him that bothered me most was his ability to attract Haruko and Clara and Darlene and presumably a whole dewy-eyed and horny legion of college-age females. What the hell did any of them see in a scrawny, color-blind, unlovely specimen like him? Why would women even consider dropping their drawers for the Nelson Mixers of the world?
It was nagging little questions like this that made you wonder about life’s fundamental equity.
Somebody was tailing me.
I spotted the car six blocks from Mixer’s house, when it followed me into a turn east on Geary Boulevard. White Ford about two years old, with one of those whip antennas that CB subscribers have on their vehicles. Two people in it, but that was all I could tell; they hung back pretty good and stayed in another lane and the rain made it difficult to see clearly through the rear window. I couldn’t make out the license plate either.
Well, I was getting old. In my salad days, even though these guys appeared to be doing all the things you’re supposed to do to conduct a successful shadow job, I would have tumbled to them within five minutes of leaving Pacific Heights. My flat was where they’d picked me up, of course; I remembered seeing the Ford as I headed down Laguna to Geary. They’d hung around on 46th Avenue waiting for me to get done with Mixer, and now here they were again.
But hell, the last thing I’d have expected today was a tail. The idea of it annoyed me-and made me a little uneasy. Who were they? What did they think they were going to find out by shagging me around the city?
I swung over into the far left lane and made a left turn on 30th Avenue; drove past Presidio Middle School and turned right on Clement and went down to 25th Avenue and turned left again. The white Ford stayed with me all the way, still hanging back far enough so that I couldn’t get a look at the occupants or read the license plate. No doubt at all now that the Ford was there to keep me company.
I drove straight down 25th at a nice easy pace and passed between the stone pillars that marked the entrance to Seacliff, one of San Francisco’s ritzier residential districts. Left on Scenic Way and left again on Seacliff Avenue, past a lot of elegant homes strung out along the cliffside and commanding panoramic views of the Golden Gate. The street forked after a few blocks, with the main branch blending into El Camino del Mar and leading up to Land’s End; Seacliff Avenue hooked to the right and dead-ended after about a block and a half. I stayed on Seacliff. The Ford was two blocks behind me as I veered that way.
On my left were more houses and on my right was a parking area bounded by a long cyclone fence. Beyond the fence, a steep slope fell away to China Beach-a narrow inlet that had been a campsite for Chinese fishermen last century and now was a locally popular sunbathing spot. Nobody was down there today, in the rain and with the surf crashing heavy and white over the offshore rocks; the beach was all but invisible under the high tide. And the parking area was empty.
I cut into the lot, made a fast U-turn, and slid out onto the street pointing the way I’d come. I had timed it right: the Ford had already veered in and slowed to a crawl, and there was no place for them to go. I got the license number and I got a good look at their faces as I drove by-making it obvious so they’d be sure to know I was on to them. Two men, big and tough-looking, the driver wearing a mustache and a startled look, the passenger with a nose like a blob of brownish putty.
Both of them were Japanese.
I kept on going past them, turned right on El Camino del Mar, went up the hill to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and drove past it and through the Lincoln Park Golf Course-a loop that took me back to Geary. There was no sign of the white Ford. Either they’d given it up on their own or they’d used the CB and whoever they’d called had told them to lay off. But this wasn’t going to be the end of it. I had a bad feeling that they would be back pretty soon, and maybe not just to follow me around.
One word kept running around inside my head. It scared me some and made me nervous and puzzled the hell out of me because I had no idea of the why of it.
The word was Yakuza.
Chapter Seven
I stopped at a service station on Geary and 25th Avenue and called Harry Fletcher, my contact at the local office of the Department of Motor Vehicles. I relayed the license number of the white Ford and asked him to run it through the computer and find out who the car was registered to. He said he’d do that as soon as he could, give him half an hour.
I glanced at my watch as I hung up: a couple of minutes after eleven. Too early to head down to South San Francisco for a talk with Edgar Ogada; his father had told me Edgar wouldn’t be around until after noon sometime. Too early for lunch, too, but to hell with standing on ceremony. My stomach was yammering for something its juices could go to work on. Funny thing about tension: sometimes it robs you of your appetite and sometimes it makes you ravenously hungry. The damned diet had tipped the scales to ravenous this time, Yakuza or no Yakuza.
There were some good restaurants on outer Clement, only a few blocks away, so I drove over there and found a cafe I’d eaten in before. They had several things on the menu that looked inviting-steak sandwich, Reuben sandwich, bacon cheeseburger-but I girded myself and ordered cottage cheese and fruit with RyKrisp. I would have had the diet plate, which included a ground sirloin patty, but that made me think of red meat and the way Simon Tamura’s bloody corpse had looked there on the floor of his office. I wanted nothing to do with red meat for a while. I’d had enough bad dreams last night as it was.
The cottage cheese and fruit weren’t bad, considering; at least they eased the hunger pangs. While I ate I tried to come up with an answer to why the Yakuza would have had me followed. Because I was the one who’d found Tamura’s body? Well, maybe. That, plus the fact that I was a private investigator, might have made them wonder what I’d been doing at the bathhouse; that part of it hadn’t been in the papers, evidently. But I had figured the killing for a vendetta job and so had McFate. If it was, why would the Yakuza be sniffing around me? And if it wasn’t, why not just brace me somewhere and ask me if I knew anything? Why the tail instead?