“I’ve got another question or two.”
“Maybe I’m tired of talking.”
I glanced at Helen. “Call the police.”
“Now wait a minute!” Kuriacha said. “I’m a respectable man. I’ve got my reputation to think about. Newspaper reporters are always after a guy in my position. They say it makes for colorful copy. You got no call to make trouble for me. It was you who started the scrap.”
“I’ll get over the scrap,” I said, “in time. No grudges. You’re making trouble for yourself. I just want some answers.”
Without shifting a muscle he seemed to assume a crouch. His eyes regarded me balefully, reading a possibility of mayhem in my future.
“The camera story is pretty thin,” I said.
“I don’t give a damn! It’s true. The truth is sometimes thin, ain’t it?”
“Why didn’t you pick up the camera before?”
“Geez,” he said in disgust, “and you cops are supposed to be smart. In the first place, the Yamashitas were killed just three days ago. I knew them. I was shocked. I didn’t think of the camera right away. When I did think about it and how I just had my word to prove it was mine, I came around here. The cops had the place staked out. I guess it was routine for them to keep an eye on the place until they picked up Nick Martin. Incidentally, lady,” he said to Helen, “your husband sounded like a right guy who just had a wrong minute. I’m sorry about it.”
Helen murmured a thanks.
Kuriacha lowered his compress and looked at his handkerchief. He seemed relieved that it showed no blood.
“When did you last see the Yamashitas?” I asked.
“Listen, you can’t tie me into—”
“Let’s not weary each other. Give me some more of that simple, direct action — a simple, direct answer.”
He studied the .38 for a moment. “Well, I haven’t seen Mrs. Yamashita in some time, maybe a month or more. She stayed home mostly. I saw Mr. Yamashita a week or ten days ago at his place of business. I stopped by there to go to lunch with Ichiro.”
“Your friendship with Ichiro was your real connection with the family?”
“Mainly, I guess you could say. I liked the old folks, though. I never had a family. I liked them a lot.”
“You counted Ichiro among your closest friends?”
“I don’t know whether you could say that. We palled around together. He seemed to like to have me around, said I was colorful. He was always out for something different. Once at a party he’d bought some small horseshoes, the kind they put on ponies. He got me to twist them out of shape with my bare hands and gave them to his guests for souvenirs of the shindig. He got a charge out of stuff like that.”
“I guess he had a string of women.”
Kuriacha’s face darkened. “Ichiro and his women is a long story, buster. I’m not acquainted with all the details. You’ll have to get them someplace else.”
“Jewels while he had a fancy to them, dirt when his fancy drifted?”
Kuriacha shrugged. “I told you, you’ll have to ask somebody else.”
“Any of them hate him enough to kill him?”
“Nick Martin killed him.”
“Nick Martin is said to have killed Ichiro and his parents as well. As a matter of fact, Nick Martin didn’t kill anybody.”
“No?”
“Someone else went to the Yamashita summerhouse that afternoon.”
“It ain’t the way the paper reads.”
“Newspapers revise from edition to edition. You watch later editions.”
“Yeah? If you know so damn much, why don’t you go to the cops and have Nick Martin released?”
“I’m still fishing.”
“For what?”
“The identity of the person who went to the Yamashita house.”
Kuriacha decided his recovery was well nigh complete. He got out of the chair, standing solidly on his bandy legs. “Well, I can’t be baited, buster. I sure as hell didn’t go out there and I don’t know who did. Now you better put the popgun away. I’m going out of here and if you use it you’ll find yourself in a lot of trouble.”
With a beautifully direct simplicity, he turned his back and walked out of the apartment.
Helen looked at the closed door a moment. “Did you mean what you said to him, Ed, about someone else going out to the Yamashita house that day?”
“Is Nick innocent?”
“Of course!”
“Then someone else had to go out there.”
“With a — desire to kill three people?”
“That’s the element creating the confusion,” I said. “Dispose of it for a moment and you see the outlines of a different pattern, a fresh possibility. Someone went out there with no desire to harm the parents. He, or she, was after Ichiro.”
“Yet the parents were killed.”
“Because it was their misfortune to arrive while the murderer was still there. They had to be silenced.”
“You can prove this, Ed?” she said, hope wild in her eyes.
“No. But the positions of the bodies, the way they were clothed when they were discovered, make me think I’m right.”
“Then instead of a motive for a triple killing, you’re looking for a motive for a single murder.”
“Right. Ichiro’s. Something he did sometime in his spotty past made someone want to kill him.”
“Lord, Ed, he knew so many people, got around so much. Whatever he did might have been done in secret, known only to Ichiro and the person he did it to.”
The brief flare of hope was gone from her eyes. I took her hand in both of mine and held her cold fingers for a moment.
“We’ll think of one thing at a time,” I said. “We’ll keep chipping away. The way Nick would do.”
She drew in a breath, held it for a moment. Then she said steadily, “Right.”
Chapter 7
The absent-minded men with the bushy heads have a lot of theories about time and space. One thing is certain. The sweep of time is not an endless, smooth process to the person living it. There are stopped moments in time, moments frozen in a human brain.
It was that way with Helen Martin. As we got out of the rented heap on Caloosa Point, she stood with her brain seeing the gory scene again, the echo of a muffled scream inside of her.
I didn’t rush her. I stood beside her until she was ready to walk from the car.
A hot, dead stillness lay over the Point. The water of the bay stretched heavy and turgid, like green-tinted glycerin under the crushing glare of the afternoon sun.
More than pocket change had been dropped on the Yamashita house. Made of California redwood and pastel brick, it sprawled comfortably and lazily behind its strip of private beach. A shift of the gaze brought into view the only other house on the Point, the white cottage Nick and Helen had leased for a summer’s rental. It belonged to a northern businessman who used it only occasionally in the winter.
Fiddler crabs went rasping for their holes as we walked across the sizzling white sand.
Helen’s fingers dug into my bicep as we approached the long gallery on the side of the Yamashita house.
“Here,” she said, pointing.
The ghost of a dainty old lady was draped across the porch railing, her fingernails painted with blood.
We stepped upon the porch. From this point the other cottage down the beach was visible.
I stood where the unknown had stood, and the obvious question came to my mind. Had the people in that other cottage witnessed the violent moment?
Ichiro in a bedroom.
The little old man smashed down in the living room.
The silk-screen lady in headlong flight, screaming perhaps. She’d been trapped before she could get off the porch.
But she’d reached the open, and now the unknown stood with that question tearing at the mind.
Still carrying the bludgeon, the unknown ends the moment of hesitation. Nothing matters except survival — murder piled relentlessly upon murder, if that is the price.