MY HAND STILL HURT LIKE HELL AS I RODE upstairs in the Belltown Terrace elevator. My plan was to go to bed early and try to get some sleep, but I knew that idea was screwed the minute the elevator door opened and I smelled the garlic.
Ames was inside my apartment and up to one of his culinary shenanigans. Several times now I’ve accused him of being a closet Italian with heavy investments in a multinational garlic-growers cartel. He denies it, but whenever Ralph Ames starts dabbling in the gourmet kitchen he helped design for me, he goes crazy with the garlic.
I stood outside the door for a moment, wondering if there was any way I could gracefully get out of dinner by pleading a combination of illness and fatigue. Then I heard voices. Not only was Ames cooking dinner, he had invited company.
Ralph popped his head out of the kitchen when he heard the door open. “There you are. I was hoping you’d get here in time to eat. Come on out to the kitchen. I want you to meet a friend of mine.”
Plastering a reasonable facsimile of a smile to my face, I went into the kitchen disguised as Mr. Congeniality himself.
The place was in total uproar. Generally speaking, Ralph Ames is a very precise, well-contained individual, but he lets his hair down completely when he cooks Italian. His preferred method is to start with enough boiling water to deliver several babies. He continues from there, cutting and chopping with increasingly wild abandon. The majority of the ingredients end up in the pots, but debris tends to fall where it may and stay there.
Once the cooking is over, Ames has the enviable ability to turn out the lights in the kitchen, shut the door on the chaos, and go into the dining room, where he eats with obvious enjoyment, without giving the least thought to the disaster area he’s left behind. My whole problem with cooking is that I hate cleaning up, and I never forget, not even for a minute, that the mess in the kitchen is sitting there, waiting for me. Waiting and congealing. I still don’t have nerve enough to leave one of my cooking catastrophes for Florence Cooper, my cleaning lady, to straighten up.
Tonight Ames’ culinary masterpiece was linguini primavera. The pasta had boiled over on the stove, leaving a huge dark brown stain across and around the burner. Both the pasta and the sauce had evidently progressed through a series of smaller pots to larger ones, so that the whole counter was littered with empty but nonetheless dirty cooking utensils. And at the far end of the kitchen sat a man I didn’t know, a man with a glass of wine in his hand.
He didn’t sit so much as he lounged, his back against the partially opened kitchen window. He appeared to be about Ralph’s and my age. His short gray hair was tightly permed into a frizzy halo. He wore a yellow silk shirt with the top two buttons unfastened, revealing an expanse of tanned chest as well as a single gold chain. His shoes were expensive and polished to a mirror shine. On his face was a look of bemused detachment as he observed Ralph’s frenetic meal preparations.
Ames stopped in the middle of the room, waving a slotted spoon in one hand. “Beau, I’d like you to meet an old college chum of mine, Raymond Archibald Winter, III. This is my friend and client, Detective J. P. Beaumont.”
Winter put down his wineglass, held out his hand, and grinned a white-toothed, wolfish grin. “How do you do, Detective Beaumont. My friends call me Archie. Any friend of Aimless is a friend of mine.”
“Aimless?” I asked, puzzled.
“That’s what we used to call old Ralphy here when we were in school together. He was always too damn serious. We tried to lighten him up a little, you know?”
I almost choked, stifling a hoot of laughter. “Did it work?”
Winter grinned again. “Not at all. At least not for him. Did for me, though. You should have turned the tables and called me that, Ralphy. I’ve been through at least a dozen careers since I left law school. Never gets boring that way, though. I’m still having fun.”
Ralph Ames frowned as he stirred the bubbling pot of linguini. He seemed to be taking a dim view of his friend’s teasing. He certainly didn’t encourage it. “The mail’s in on the table,” he said. “Dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes.”
“Time enough to shower?” I asked.
“As long as you get a move on.”
Suddenly I found myself looking forward to dinner. Anybody who could get away with calling Ralph Ames “Aimless” or “Ralphy” couldn’t be all bad. With a cheery wave in Archibald Winter’s direction, I said, “I’ll be right back,” and ducked out of the kitchen. I paused long enough to collect the mail, then headed for the shower, shuffling through the letters as I went.
They were mostly department-store bulk flyers with a small core of first-class mail, most of them bills. At the top of the stack was an envelope from Swedish Hospital. The next one came from a place called Orthopedics Associates with a street address on Madison. With a happy but silent “Eureka,” I ripped open the envelope from the hospital. It was a bill all right, inarguably exorbitant, with a computer printout detailing emergency room charges, X-rays, and splints. The second one, equally outrageous, was from a doctor I had never heard of before, someone named Herman Blair, for professional services rendered.
Never in my life have I been so happy to receive two outrageously expensive bills. After smashing my hand on the desk, it had continued to throb without a hint of letting up. I was beginning to have a niggling worry in the back of my mind that maybe the problem with my hand was something more serious than I had supposed. That thought combined with the ongoing pain had finally convinced me that I would see a doctor the next day, no matter what. Now, thanks to the bills, I at least knew which doctor to call for an appointment.
Taking the telephone number from the top of the billing statement, I went to the bedroom phone and dialed. It was after five. Naturally, the doctor’s office was closed, but his answering service took the call.
In theory, answering services are supposed to protect doctors and other important people from being pestered by insignificant people—patients in this case. The lady on the phone was determined to give me the brush off. I was equally determined not to be brushed. After all, I had been searching unsuccessfully for Dr. Blair for the better part of a week. In the end, my inherent stubbornness paid off.
“Give me your number,” the woman snapped at last. “I’ll see if the doctor can call you back.”
He did. Within minutes, but he, like his answering service, was none too cordial.
“You know, Mr. Beaumont, you were supposed to be in my office early Tuesday morning to have those bandages changed and get the hematomas drilled. What happened?”
“I was out of town on a case,” I said lamely. “Get what drilled?”
“Your subungual hematomas. That’s what’s causing all the pain. Drilling will relieve it. I couldn’t do it the other night. They hadn’t filled up that much yet.”
“Filled? With what?”
“With blood. It’s pooled under your nails just like I told you it would, remember?”
I didn’t remember, but I said, “Right,” and tried my best to make it sound convincing.
“So how bad is it?” Blair asked, after a pause.
Real men don’t eat quiche, and they don’t whine to their doctors, either. “Not that bad,” I said.
“Can it wait until morning? Otherwise you’re looking at another emergency room charge.”
“It can wait.”
“Be at my office at nine sharp tomorrow morning. We’ll take care of it then. Meantime, take a couple of aspirin if you need to. By the way, who’s your regular doctor?”
“I don’t have one.”
“A man your age ought to,” he said. “See you tomorrow. Nine o’clock.”
“Yes,” I replied meekly. “I’ll be there.”
Feeling like I’d been thoroughly put in my place by Dr. Herman Blair, I climbed into the shower, got dressed, and finally ventured out into the dining room to see if dinner would be any less demeaning.
Somehow, the very word Sotheby exudes an aura of staid men wearing understated suits and conservative ties. Raymond Archibald Winter, III, with his yellow silk shirt and expensive gold chain, didn’t at all resemble my idea of a Sotheby’s oriental artifacts guru. He looked more like the Hollywood stereotype of a big-hitting movie producer.
He may not have looked the part, but Winter was obviously knowledgeable in the area of ancient Japanese artifacts. He spoke of them with the easy assurance of someone whose expertise is unassailable.
“It’s a genuine Masamune all right,” he said, holding a newly filled wineglass up to the light and gently swirling the golden liquid. We were drinking some kind of French wine whose name I couldn’t pronounce and didn’t recognize. I had one glass. It was very dry and seemed dangerously close to champagne. I worried about doing a repeat performance of Sunday’s boondoggle.
“You’ve seen it then?” I asked.
Winter nodded. “Ralph here finagled an appointment with George Yamamoto this afternoon, right after he picked me up from Sea-Tac. Mr. Yamamoto was kind enough to show us the sword. Extraordinary, finding it this way. It’s like having a long-lost Michelangelo turn up in some little old lady’s attic.”
He paused long enough to take a sip of wine. “I wouldn’t say the sword is priceless. Everything has its price. But it is exceedingly valuable, and it certainly shouldn’t be sitting on some shelf in George Yamamoto’s property room. He’s aware of the sword’s value, of course, and he seems to be taking some extra precautions, but we all know that evidence rooms aren’t nearly as secure as they ought to be.”
“Not nearly,” I agreed.
“You see,” Winter continued, “we’re talking about a museum-quality piece here, one that had long been thought lost. By rights it ought to be in a vault somewhere, preferably one that’s climate and humidity controlled.”
“You know about it then?” I asked. “I mean, about this piece in particular?”
I had declined a second glass of Winter’s wine and had switched back to my usual regimen of MacNaughton’s and water. I congratulated myself on learning from my mistakes for once. At least I was reaping some small benefit from my champagne-induced disaster.
“Let’s just say the sword was thought to exist, was believed to exist. I’m relatively sure it’s part of a set that belonged to a family named Kusumi, an old and much-honored samurai family, who evidently refused to relinquish their weapons and sword furniture when ordered to do so in the mid eighteen hundreds. And I can see why. As far as sword makers go, Masamune was the master. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to part with it.”
“I know about Masamune,” I said. Arching one eyebrow, Winter regarded me quizzically over the rim of his glass.
“Do you know about things samurai?” he asked.
“Not really. Only enough to be dangerous. Tell me more.”
“My guess is that no one outside the immediate Kusumi family knew that the set still existed. The sword itself is over seven hundred years old, but I imagine the rosewood box dates from the time during the mid nineteenth century when the Kusumi family decided to conceal their treasures rather than give them up.
“You see, even though the handle design was lovingly copied on the cover of the box, the inlay work isn’t nearly the same quality as that on the sword. In addition, a box like that would never have been part of traditional samurai sword furniture.”
“How do you know this particular set belonged to that particular family?”
“There is still written record of the set being designed and forged by Masamune for Yoshida Kusumi. The record, in the samurai archives of the University of Tokyo, includes a complete description of the handle design, but the set itself didn’t come to light until two years after the end of World War II, when a number of pieces were discovered buried in radioactive rubble at Nagasaki. Only the metal pieces remained. If there were other boxes like the one here in Seattle, they were destroyed in the firestorm that swept the city after the explosion.”
“Nagasaki?” I blurted, remembering Machiko Kurobashi saying that she was originally from Nagasaki.
Winter looked at me questioningly. When I offered no explanation, he went on. “It’s a miracle that the swords themselves weren’t totally destroyed as well, although they were badly damaged. Once they were discovered, an extensive search was instituted to find any possible heirs, but as far as I know, no surviving family members were ever located. After undergoing decontamination, all the remaining pieces were reconditioned as much as possible and ended up at the Tokyo National Museum at Ueno.
“The curators there suspected that a matching tanto or short sword had existed at one time, but they assumed it had been lost if not earlier, then certainly at the time of the bombing.”
“You’re convinced then, that this is part of the same set?”
Winter nodded. “Of course I’m sure. I’ve seen the other surviving pieces in Japan. They’re not in nearly as fine shape as this one, but it’s clearly the same set. I have only one question. Why the devil is that tanto sitting in Dr. Yamamoto’s evidence room?”
“It’s part of a murder investigation,” I explained. “It may not be the murder weapon, but it certainly was used to manipulate evidence at the scene, and that makes it part of the official investigation.”
Winter waved his hand impatiently. “I understand that, Detective Beaumont, but how did it get here, to the States? How did it get from wartime Nagasaki to Seattle, Washington? Where has it been for the past forty plus years? And how did the dead man, this Kurobashi fellow, come to be in possession of it?”
I was struggling manfully to get a mound of slippery linguini to stay on my left-handed fork long enough to make the treacherous journey from plate to mouth. It wasn’t working. I am not and never have been the least bit ambidextrous. Finally, disgusted with my clumsiness, I dropped my fork onto my plate and left it there. It was impossible for me to talk and manage the fork at the same time.
“Kurobashi’s wife—” I stopped and corrected myself. “Kurobashi’s widow is named Machiko. I have no idea what her maiden name was, but she did mention that she was originally from Nagasaki.”
“I see,” Winter said, nodding thoughtfully. “So the sword could have been hers all along. Do you suppose she’d be interested in selling it?”
I remembered what Machiko had said about wanting the sword back, wanting it for Kimi.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said. “Once she gets it back, I believe her intention is to give it to Kimiko, her daughter, although it may not be that important to Kimi. According to her, she never saw the sword before the night of her father’s death, never even knew it existed.”
“Strange, wouldn’t you say?” Winter asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked, although I had already reached the same conclusion myself.
“Why keep it hidden all this time? Even from close family members.” Winter shook his head before adding, “Not only that, Ralph mentioned something about the Kurobashi family being in dire financial straits, that they were being forced to file bankruptcy proceedings. Keeping the sword hidden doesn’t make sense when you consider how much the sword would have brought if they had sold it.”
“How much would that be?” I asked.
Winter took a slow sip of wine before he answered. “It could be as much as several million,” he said deliberately. “Especially if some of the museums get into a bidding war over it. But you still haven’t told me how the sword came to be in this country in the first place.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “We’ll need to ask Machiko about that.”
“Where is she?”
“Over in eastern Washington.”
“Do you think it would be possible for me to talk to her?” Winter looked at me appraisingly. “After all, if the mother does decide to put the sword on the market, I’d very much like to be involved. I can assure you, it would be beneficial for all concerned.”
What he said made sense. Any way you sliced it, Machiko and Kimi Kurobashi were probably going to be in a bind for money. If they did decide to sell the sword, simply being represented by Sotheby’s, one of the world’s biggest and most respected dealers in fine arts, would automatically up the ante.
“I’ll speak with her about it,” I said. “She may be interested, but I don’t know.”
I picked up my fork and tried again. Winter paused with his own fork halfway to his mouth, watching my struggle. “What did you do, slam your hand in a door?” he asked.
“You must be psychic,” I said, and let it go at that.
Before Ames had a chance to get in his two cents worth about my hand, Andrew Halvorsen rescued me from the table with a perfectly timed telephone call.
“They caught him,” he announced triumphantly. “I just got word from a detective back in Schaumburg, Illinois.”
“Caught who?”
“David Lions. He tried to buy a television set at a place called Woodfield Mall. They say it’s close to the airport. The Visa people alerted the store as soon as they called in for credit approval. Lions made a run for it, but a security guard happened to be walking past in the mall. Lions practically fell into his arms.”
“A television set?” I asked. “What the hell would he want with a television set?”
“Beats me. It was one of those big-screen color jobs, too. At least that’s what the dick from Schaumburg told me. He called a few minutes ago looking for a rap sheet. I told him we didn’t have one.”
My first thought was for Dana Lions, David Lions’ daughter, waiting at home in Kalama. By now her father had probably already called, asking her to post his bail.
“Have you talked to the daughter yet?” I asked.
Halvorsen paused. “No, not yet. I thought I’d let you do that since you were the one who talked to her to begin with.”
“Gee thanks,” I muttered. “That’s big of you.”
Minutes later, I was on the phone with Dana Lions, giving her the bad news. She took it stoically, like someone who has been through it all before, like someone far too familiar with the ropes when it comes to bailing a family member out of scrapes with the law.
“Thanks for calling and letting me know, Detective Beaumont. I’ll phone back there right away and see what’s what.”
I was still sitting beside the telephone looking at my hand and feeling it throb when the phone rang. It was Dana Lions. Again.
“It’s not my dad,” she said, relief bubbling in her voice. “They arrested somebody else.”
“Somebody else? Who?”
“I don’t know, but the man they arrested is black. My father definitely isn’t black.”
“But he was using your father’s credit card?”
“That’s right. The guy finally admitted that he bought the card from someone selling stolen cards at the United Terminal in O’Hare. I don’t understand, Detective Beaumont. What does it all mean?”
I had a pretty good idea what it meant, but I didn’t want to go into it right then. Dana Lions was still nurturing a small spark of hope for her father. I refused to douse it with bad news until absolutely necessary.
“You’ll let me know if you hear from him?” I asked.
“Sure will,” she said.
I considered calling Halvorsen back to let him know what Dana had learned, but I decided against it. My hand was still throbbing like mad. Instead of having another drink of any kind, I took the aspirin Dr. Blair had recommended.
By this time, Ames and Winters had left the dining room and returned to the kitchen. Despite his silk shirt, Winters was soon up to his elbows in soap suds as he tackled the trail of cooking pots Ames had left in his wake.
They were both talking and scrubbing away, happy as two little clams. They didn’t look as though they needed or wanted any help. I thanked Ames for dinner, wished them both a good night, and excused myself. Before I crawled into bed, I called Machiko Kurobashi at Honeydale Farm.
I more than half expected her to be in bed asleep, but she listened carefully to my halting explanation of who Archie Winter was and what he wanted. When I finished, her response wasn’t what I expected, either.
“Have him call,” she answered gravely. “We talk.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
Padding barefoot back down the hall to the almost clean kitchen, I handed a scrap of paper to Archie Winter. “Here’s Mrs. Kurobashi’s number,” I said. “I told her what you wanted, and she said you’re welcome to call.”
With that, I returned to the bedroom and crawled into bed.