He walked back to his car and drove to his home in Culver City. It was only one o’clock, and Kati was both alarmed and delighted.
“This is my spiritual and physical nourishment for today. I have eaten wretched food, and tonight I shall not be home before midnight. I have a half hour, dear Kati. Can you prepare something?”
It was a sudden descent and an imposition. She had just fed her two children and sent them back to school, and now she was in the midst of her ironing. The nisei women in her consciousness-raising class, which she had begun to attend a full year ago, would have voted to send Masuto out to a lunch stand. But since none of them were witness, Kati embraced her husband, and after she had assured herself that no injury or other tragedy had sent him home, prepared the tempura from the night before with amazing speed.
She sat opposite him, watching him eat. In spite of her consciousness-raising class, it was her pleasure to watch him eat.
“We live in a wilderness,” he said.
“It’s those terrible murders. I was listening to the news this morning, after the children left for school.”
“Death is always terrible. But this is a sickness.”
“Why do they do it, Masao?”
“Money, hatred, revenge.”
“It frightens me so,” Kati said. “Not because I expect anything to happen to me. I’m not afraid of such things. I wasn’t afraid of that skinny Chicano boy who was such a foolish burglar. But because I lose my faith in the whole world.”
“One should neither have faith nor lose faith. What is faith? This is the way things are.”
“But why? Why are things this way?”
“Because we lose touch with what is real and then we invent what is not real.”
“That’s Zen talk,” Kati said with irritation. “I don’t understand it.”
“Perhaps I don’t understand it myself,” Masuto said gently. “I need a few minutes to myself, a few minutes to sit and meditate.”
But Kati’s food helped more than the meditation, and driving back to Beverly Hills, he felt better, reflecting on what a primitive thing a man is, that a bellyful of good food could color the whole world differently. When he entered the police station, Beckman was waiting for him.
“Bingo,” Beckman said to him. “Do you want to hear about it?”
“In a few minutes. First, where’s Wainwright?”
“In his office. I got something for both of you to hear.”
In Wainwright’s office Masuto closed the door and faced Beckman and Wainwright.
“You’re getting them tonight-all of them,” Wainwright growled. “And so help me, Masao, you’d better come through!”
“Ah, so,” Masuto said. “Would the honorable captain listen and stop shouting at me?”
“Not if you give me that shogun crap.”
“I am trying to inject a note of lightness into a very miserable affair. I have been to All Saints Hospital, and I have been lectured to by our Dr. Baxter. It would appear that the Angel was a heroin addict. The glass of whisky that was handed to her when she returned was laced with chloral hydrate-”
“A Mickey,” Beckman said.
“Exactly. And when she passed out, someone came into her room and shot her full of heroin.”
“That would do it,” Beckman agreed.
“More to come. The Angel was a man.”
When Masuto had finished giving them every detail of Baxter’s story, they still were unwilling to accept the facts.
“I just don’t buy it,” Wainwright said. “You can’t turn a man into a woman-yeah, maybe into some kind of freak, but the Angel was no freak. She was one of the most beautiful dames I ever saw. She’s been photographed and interviewed.”
“She was stacked,” Beckman said. “Those weren’t falsies. Hell, that dressing gown didn’t half cover her. She was all woman and built like something out of a Playboy centerfold.”
“And she started out as a man. We may hate Baxter, but he’s no fool. I saw the autopsy. So let’s not waste time arguing about it. Now we know what she held over Mike Barton and what she blackmailed him with. As he saw it, if word got out that he had married a man, and that’s the way they would have put it, he was done, finished as a star.”
“No question about that,” Beckman said.
“Perhaps, perhaps not. But that’s the way he saw it.”
“Didn’t he know? I mean, when he married her?”
“Would you know?”
“You mean they could have slept together?” Wainwright asked.
“So Baxter tells me.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Do you think they knew?” Beckman asked. “I mean, the others.”
“Maybe. If they did, they all lied. But maybe they didn’t know-except-”
“Except who?”
“Kelly,” Masuto said. “Well, we’ll see. You said they’re all coming?”
“That’s right.”
“Sy and I will get there by eight-thirty. We still have a few things to do.”
Back in his own office Masuto said to Beckman, “All right, Sy, let’s have it.”
Beckman was still bemused. “What was she, a man or a woman?”
“Baxter calls it sexual reassignment. It’s a long, complicated operative and hormonal procedure, and he says it’s been done thousands of times.”
“But how could Barton-”
“Come on, Sy. How could you? How could everyone else?”
“You tell me. It gives me the creeps. Was she an addict?”
“Yes.”
“Heroin?”
“Yes.”
“You know, Masao,” Beckman said, “if anyone else was working with you, and you say to him, go out and search, he might just ask you what he was searching for.”
“All right, you found it,” Masuto said, looking at his watch.
“Well, why the hell didn’t you tell me what I was looking for?”
“Because I didn’t know what you were looking for.”
“And now you know?”
“That’s right.”
“You are one weird son of a bitch, Masao. All right. I turned that place upside down. I found these in a jar of cold cream.” He took three small ampules, each covered with a stretched rubber top, out of his pocket and placed them on Masuto’s desk. “You know what they are?”
“Heroin?”
“Prepared stuff. I had Sweeney run a test. High grade, pure heroin, medicinally prepared, according to Sweeney, and legally imported from England.”
“Illegal. I don’t think a doctor can prescribe it in California, but I suppose that if you pay enough, you can get it. Well, that’s what killed her, that and the whisky and the chloral hydrate.”
“Where’s the fourth ampule?”
“In the garbage at the Barton place, I imagine, or in a garbage dump somewhere. It wouldn’t help us. Everyone’s too smart about fingerprints these days. That was good work, Sy, damn good. Now what about the war records?”
“I unloaded that one on Keller. You were very nice to him, so he was very glad that we don’t hate the FBI the way the L.A. cops and the New York cops do. I explained that we were a very small outfit and that we appreciated what the FBI could do for us. He said he’d call in the information as soon as Washington worked it up.”
“Today?”
“That’s what he said, this afternoon.”
Masuto looked at his watch again. It was twenty minutes to three. “How long to get to the bank from here?”
“Our bank? Five minutes.”
Masuto dialed the number of the Barton house. Elaine Newman answered, and Masuto said to her, “About that suitcase of money-did you see it open? Did you see the money?”
“Yes.”
“Can you remember the bills on top? Tens, twenties, fifties?”
“They were twenties. I think-no, I’m pretty sure. I heard them talk about it after Mike left. Twenties.”
Masuto did some quick calculations, and then he said to Beckman, “Sy, Polly has a draft for a thousand dollars waiting for us at the desk. Take it to the bank and get fifty twenty-dollar bills. Then stop at a stationery supply place and get ten reams of twenty-pound bond paper.”
“How do I pay for the paper?”
“Tell them to bill us. Better hurry.”