I drove out of the Belters’, but headed away from the city at the end of the drive. Up the road I turned around and pulled over to wait.
My engine hardly had time to catch its breath when a small Japanese car pulled out of the Belters’ driveway and headed for Indianapolis. I couldn’t see clearly, but I was certain that it was being driven by a small Japanese woman.
I also was reasonably sure that I knew where the car was leading me.
We passed taxi stands and bus stops as we got closer to the centre of the city. They put me in mind of Bates’ description of tailing Vera Edwards, that she knew enough to change her means of transport to try to shake anyone who might be following. It struck me as a funny thing for a country girl to be knowledgeable enough to do. But a country girl who has learned to sing for her living gets to know a lot of funny things.
Tamae Mitsuki drove straight as an arrow to Tarkington Tower. She walked into the lobby hurriedly. I drew up outside the front doors to watch. She didn’t look back. She pushed a bell on the intercom unit, but then opened the locked door with a key.
I wondered if she would be expressionless with Normal Bates when he asked her whether I had followed her and she had to confess that she didn’t think to look.
I considered parking and joining them but decided not to. It was their time to adjust to the fact that their secrets were shared.
Instead I went to police headquarters.
Just inside the main entrance I ran into Leroy Powder.
He said, ‘Decided to give yourself up?’
‘I’ve come to see Miller.’
‘Got some more errands for him, gumshoe?’
‘I’m making progress. You want to hear about it?’
‘Have you found the rich lady that knocked off her old man yet?’
‘No.’
‘Then I’ll pass.’
I expected him to leave. But he didn’t. He said, ‘I had a trainee civilian in yesterday. Young kid. Stupid, but we got such a workload you got to try to use anything they send to you these days.’
‘Yeah?’ I said.
‘Supposed to know his way around computer information systems so I thought up a few make-work jobs for him.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I tried him on that houseboy, Mitsuki. See if he could get anything from California. Now, Christ, something like that ought to be easy enough, even for a trainee. Wouldn’t you think that, Samson? Wouldn’t you think that?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘So, did he come up with anything?’
‘I nearly had to do the whole thing for him myself He’s that bad.’
‘Did you find anything out?’
‘Oh. You in a hurry? Why didn’t you say so? We tracked down a Koichi Mitsuki that died of pneumonia in ’42 in a camp for Japanese called Manzano. We get the right one?’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘So there the trail ends for the missing houseboy. Unless you can track his wife and kid. You know he had a wife and kid?’
I nodded.
‘Name of wife Tamae Seto? Married September 20th, 1940?’
‘I didn’t have her maiden name,’ I said.
‘Kid named Hiroshi. That’s a boy. Only child.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Jesus, no flies on you, gumshoe,’ he said. ‘Born November 13th, 1940.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘I finally got to something interesting, huh?’ he said, smiling. ‘Didn’t know she had a kid who was seven months premature?’
‘No.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the Japanese never suffered from the same kind of Victorianism we did, so I read. Bit of a mover this Koichi Mitsuki?’
‘The kid wasn’t his,’ I said sombrely. Suddenly I felt a wall of my edifice of speculation crumbling. Maybe Koichi Mitsuki had needed no money to be offered the opportunity to marry quickly into Tamae’s family. The willingness to take on another man’s child might have given him the shortcut. And maybe also given Tamae Mitsuki reason to leave California after the war when she was alone, with a child and a history. Maybe her gratitude to Koichi was enough to make her want to go to the last place he was associated with. Maybe he had told her that Ella Murchison had been a friend to Vera Edwards and so might be to her.
Powder said, ‘Your eyes are glazed. Have you just had a stroke?’
‘My jigsaw pieces fit together in different ways and I don’t know which to choose.’
He laughed at me and shook his head slowly. ‘Poor gumshoe.’
I said, ‘Your trainee ought to have a chance to track someone in California all by himself, now you’ve shown him how to do it. He’ll never learn otherwise.’
Powder said, ‘What did you have in mind?’
‘Check for Vera Edwards.’
‘The rich lady,’ he said, starchily. ‘I remember.’ He glared.
‘It’s a reasonable place for a woman with money to lose herself. She was pregnant too. Your trainee could look for a birth somewhere, August through December 1940, to a mother named Vera or Daisy, Wert, Edwards or Wines.’
‘Any special reason to suspect California?’
‘I think she contacted Koichi Mitsuki.’
‘Contacted,’ he repeated.
‘Yeah.’
‘As in it could have been a telephone call?’
It could have been. I nodded.
‘Go waste somebody else’s time,’ Powder said.
I went upstairs to Miller’s office.
He wasn’t there and they didn’t know when he would be back.
Having enjoyed a certain heady feeling of accomplishment earlier in the day, I was dropping like a diver off the high board who was wondering whether there was really water in the pool down there after all.
A new slant wasn’t necessarily more right than an old one. But I was subject to the disquiet of wanting to know answers to things I didn’t even have the right questions for.
Before I left the police department I wrote a note asking Miller to call me, and I tried to talk to the duty detective about whether there had been any information from the reconstruction at the Biarritz.
But there had been no progress.
I went home. The snow was beginning to stick on the sidewalks.