“Wainwright calls that kind of talk my Charlie Chan routine,” Masuto replied sourly.
“Ah so. He does not distinguish between the Chinese and the Japanese. A Western failing. Did you know that Roshi Azuki is in Los Angeles? Tomorrow he will attend za-zen at the Zen Center. Can you join us?”
“Tomorrow I’ll be looking for a homicidal maniac.”
“Yes. Of course. Your botulism man.”
“Man?” Masuto demanded. “Why man? Why not woman?”
“Because no woman would kill in such a manner.”
“Why not?”
“I have been in this room for twelve years,” Omi said. “The poison homicides and suicides of the whole state reach me eventually. There are patterns. Strychnine is the most common and the most frequently used by women. Now what is a poison, Masao? Strictly but generally speaking, it is any substance that causes change in the molecular structure of an organ. That’s not difficult. It’s less a question of substance than of quantity. Alcohol, morphine, cocaine, nicotine are all deadly in sufficient quantity. But according to my records, ninety-five percent of women murderers do not plot bizarre poisonings. Driven to desperation, they take whatever is at hand, arsenic, found in Paris green, phosphorus in rat poison, and of course strychnine, easily come by. The fancy poisoning is done by men, and by golly this botulism of yours is the fanciest I’ve seen in a long while. Now take this bacillus botulinus. Why do we see so little of it? Why are whole populations not ravaged by its poisonous toxin? Thank mother nature, who always gives with one hand and takes away with the other. In other words, bacillus botulinus is anaerobic.”
“Which means what?”
“Simply that it will not grow in the presence of air. It requires low temperature and airlessness. Now don’t think that you can take a piece of meat, let it putrefy, exclude the air, and grow a botulin. Maybe yes, maybe no-most likely no. To grow a botulin, you require the botulism bacillus, and since it cannot live in the presence of air, the likelihood is that you won’t get it. The only place it seems to turn up these days is in canned goods, and even there it’s only one out of a thousand bad cans that produces a botulinus. But here, honored cousin, here we have something unique-not the putrefaction which produces the botulinus, which in turn produces the deadly toxin, no indeed-here we have the toxin itself, no putrefaction, no source, simply the deadly poison. And that, my dear Masao, is the work of a chemist. Find the chemist and you find your murderer.”
“Thank you,” Masuto said without delight.
“Or conceivably a pharmacologist.”
“I am most grateful.”
Masuto bade his cousin good-bye and descended to the floor below, moving through the vast machinery of the Los Angeles Police Department, wondering how it might be to work for an organization like this rather than for the police force of a small town of thirty thousand population. He found Lieutenant Pete Bones at his desk, painfully pecking out a report on his typewriter. Bones, a heavy-set, thick-necked man in his forties, turned his pale blue, suspicion-clouded eyes on Masuto and then grinned.
“Ah, my favorite Oriental sleuth. How goes it in the pastures of the rich?”
“Too much time on their hands. The result is murder most foul.”
“That’s a quote from somewhere. I retire in two years. The wife and I have a cabin, if you can call it that, up at Mammoth. I’m going to read all the books I never read being a cop. You’ll come and visit us, Masao.”
“With pleasure.”
“And what can I do for you now?”
“Can you set the machinery to work? I’m looking for a chemist or a pharmacologist with a criminal record, probably in this area, but maybe upstate.”
“Masao, you can make a San Francisco request as easy as we can. I can put it into work here. I’ll tell you this. We got to come up with at least ten names, maybe more.”
“I can narrow it,” Masuto said. “The one I’m looking for-well, I think he’ll be killed, either today or tomorrow or the next day.”
“What!”
“Possibly yesterday, but more likely today or tomorrow.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute! You’re asking me to look for a chemist with a criminal record who’s going to be murdered? Come on, Masao, come on! Who’s going to kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know who this chemist is, or maybe he’s a pharmacist, but you don’t know who he is or where he is or which he is, but you know he’s going to be killed, but you don’t know who’s going to kill him. Do you know how crazy that sounds?”
“Pretty crazy, yes.”
“Then how in hell do you know he’s going to be killed?”
“I don’t know. I said I think so. I’m dealing with a killer, and I try to put myself into his mind and think the way he thinks. It’s not easy. You get a crime of passion or violence, and you can understand it. They are crimes done by human beings who have momentarily lapsed. But this is something coldly plotted by a man who has stopped being human. So I try to approximate that kind of mind. I have to. It’s all we have, not one damn thing more. If I can find this chemist while he’s alive, it will help, maybe wind the thing up. Even dead, it will help.”
“Okay,” Bones agreed. “I’ll set things moving in the county. You can line up the San Francisco cops from Beverly Hills.”
“I don’t think it’s up there. I think it’s right here in L.A.”
At that moment, a uniformed policeman approached them, looked at Masuto curiously, and then asked, “Are you Sergeant Masuto, Beverly Hills P.D.?”
Masuto nodded.
“We got a call for you.”
Bones picked up his telephone and told them to put through Sergeant Masuto’s call. He handed the phone to Masuto, and Beckman’s voice said, “Masao, is that you?”
“What’s up, Sy?”
“Can you get away now?”
“If it’s important.”
“It’s important. I’m up on Mulholland Drive, half a mile west of Laurel Canyon. You’ll see my car and a sheriffs car and an L.A.P.D. car. I’m trying to get them not to touch anything or move anything until you get here, and they’re giving me a hard time because it’s their turf, not ours. But I think I can hold them if you get here in half an hour.”
“What have you got?”
“I got a body. But get up here and we’ll talk about it.”
4
The Chicano Kid
Mulholland Drive is a narrow, twisting, badly-paved two-lane road that runs across the ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Hollywood Hills, from Cahuenga Canyon in the east to Topanga Canyon in the west. Although it is almost entirely contained within the city limits of Los Angeles, it presents a vista of wild brush and mesquite-covered hills as well as breathtaking views of both the city of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley-providing one drives it on a day when the smog is light enough to see anything at all. Nevertheless, its illusion of wilderness, combined with the fact that it bisects one of the most heavily populated cities in the United States, makes it a favorite scenic drive for tourists and a weekend outing place for the local residents.
At least twice a year, preferably during the winter months when there was little or no smog, Masuto’s wife Kati would pack a picnic lunch, and he would drive her and the two children to one of the lookout points on Mulholland. There they would eat their lunch and marvel at the great vista of valley and mountains spread out before them. He thought of this now as he raced along the Hollywood Freeway, his siren screaming-a sound he disliked intensely-his old Datsun shivering in protest against eighty miles an hour. He had to cut his speed as he turned off for Mulholland. Not quite half an hour, but forty-one minutes from the time he had received Beckman’s phone call in downtown Los Angeles to the cluster of cars on Mulholland was not bad time at all.
From a group of uniformed officers-there was a sheriff’s deputy and three L.A.P.D. cops, while a fourth uniformed officer waved the traffic on-Masuto heard Beckman’s booming voice: “There’s Masuto now. So you let the body lay there for an extra half hour. The kid’s dead. He’s not going to be any more dead.”