Linnear 01 - The Ninja (24 page)

‘So that’s how it is,’ Tomkin said when they were alone. ‘Interesting.’ He eyed Nicholas. ‘My daughter must like you.’ Then his tone turned acid. ‘Either that or you’re a hell of a good lay. She hasn’t been with any man for more than two hours since I brought her back. That’s a long time for a girl of her age.’ Then, as an afterthought, he said, ‘She’s got problems.’

‘Everyone’s got problems, Mr Tomkin,’ Nicholas said drily. ‘Even you.’ As soon as he had said it, he regretted opening his mouth. His anger had caused that: not a good sign.

Tomkin sat back, sinking into the cushions. He squinted at Nicholas. ‘You’re an odd one. I do a hell of a lot of business with the Japs; even go over there three, four times a year.

Never met anyone there like you.’

‘I imagine that’s a compliment.’

Tomkin shrugged. ‘Take it any way you like.’ He leaned forward, depressed a hidden stud, and a small desk swivelled out on his side, complete with a miniature gooseneck lamp. Behind the desk was an accordion compartment built into the seat. Tomkin dipped a hand into this, extracted a sheet of paper. It was folded once across its width. He handed it to Nicholas. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘what do you make of this?’

It was a sheet of Japanese rice paper, very fine. Nicholas unfolded it carefully. On it was a symbol, brushed on the centre with black ink. There were nine’small diamonds surrounding a large circle like satellites about a sun. Inside the centre circle was the Japanese ideogram for tymuso, the beggar-ascetic.

‘Well?’ Tomkin demanded. ‘Do you know what it is?’

‘Tell me how you got this.’ Nicholas lifted his gaze from the crest, saw that those cold blue eyes were clouded with a kind of held-in anxiety.

‘It came in the pouch.’ And when he saw Nicholas looking at him uncomprehendingly, he added, somewhat irritably, ‘The pouch from Japan. Each of our foreign offices has a daily pouch for important messages, when phones are inconvenient or insufficient for relaying data. At first I thought it was some kind of a joke but now …” He shrugged. ‘Tell me what it is.’

‘It’s a crest,’ Nicholas said simply. He handed the sheet back to Tomkin, but he would not take it so Nicholas slid it onto the desk. ‘A crest for a ninja ryu - a school.’ He took a deep breath, weighing his next words carefully, but before he could open his mouth Tomkin was hammering at the smoked-glass partition. Blue-suit turned his head and a part of the glass opened. ‘Frank, I want to go to the tower.’

‘But, Mr Tomkin -‘

‘Now, Frank.’

Frank nodded, closed the partition. Nicholas could see him talking to the driver. The limo turned at the next corner, heading east. When they came to Park Avenue South, they made a left, headed north.

Next to Nicholas, Tomkin eyed the folded rice paper as if something inside it had come to startling life.

Detective Lieutenant Croaker was not happy as he left Captain Finnigan’s office early that morning. In point of fact he was on the verge of boiling over. He strode down the fluorescent-lighted corridor, crowded with officers and clerks, in long athletic strides.

‘Hey, Lew, wait till I -‘ But Croaker had already brushed past the sergeant without noticing him and the man shrugged, turned away. Croaker could be like that sometimes and it was best then to stay out of his way.

Reaching his frosted-glass-fronted office, Croaker swung in and pounded his fists against the laminated Formica desktop. Many was the time he had tried to burn holes in the thing with the end of his cigarette. To no avail. That was modern science for you.

He crashed down into the dark green swivel chair. He stared fixedly at the frosted-glass partition but what he was really seeing was Finnigan’s fat mick face, those soft dewy blue eyes staring up at him blankly.

‘I want to make this very plain to you, Croaker,’ the Captain had said. ‘The Didion case is a closed book.’ He raised his pudgy hands in front of his face, warding off Croaker’s expected protests. ‘I know, I know, I put you on it myself. But that was when I thought we could see some quick results. Everyone from the mayor down was howling for a quick arrest. Then the media jumped all over it; you know what they can do.’ His hands came down, lying flat on his desktop. Croaker thought they looked like hams ripe for roasting. ‘You know as well as I do the kind of people who live at the Actium House. People like Cardin and Calvin Klein don’t like that kind of thing happening where they live. There was an awful lot of pressure.’

Croaker closed his eyes for a moment, counting slowly, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, just as he had done when playing football on the streets of Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen when he was a kid. It was either that or belt Finnigan on his fat red nose. His eyes snapped open; they saw the Captain leaning back in his high-backed chair, his hands, fingers interlaced, sitting atop his ample stomach. Croaker wondered how many whiskies the old man had already downed. Inadvertently, he glanced at the spot where the lower right-hand drawer was, where the bottle always lay within easy reach. His gaze swung back to Finnigan’s red-veined face. His eyes seemed even more faded in the soft early morning light filtering through the closed shades. Outside, the towers of lower Manhattan rose like blocky giants.

‘I know all about that pressure, Captain.’ His tone revealed none of his hidden emotion. ‘I’ve lived with that ever since I joined the force ten years ago. What I don’t understand is this sudden switch, this about-face.’

‘You weren’t getting anywhere,’ Finnigan said equably. ‘I pulled the plug, that’s all.’

‘Bull! That’s a load of-‘

‘Don’t start this with me, Lieutenant.’ Finnigan’s eyes blazed and a thin line of spittle glistened on his protruding lower lip. ‘I’m in no mood for any of your grandstanding.’ He sat up, leaning forward, and now his small eyes seemed mean and bitter and altogether merciless. ‘You may enjoy a great reputation with the press. I allow that because it’s good for the department as a whole; the public responds well to one name, one face. But don’t you ever think that that gives you any special privileges in here or out there.’ His enormous thumb hooked back over his shoulder, indicating the streets of the city. ‘I’m onto your little game and it gets no points with me. You love that attention, the media play. You eat it up like a glutton. But that’s okay; that I can handle. What I won’t tolerate is you treating me as if I’m some kind of idiot, some kind of moral defective.’ He saw the look on the other’s face, jumped on it. ‘Yeah, that’s right: moral defective. You been on the force more than long enough to know the reason why some investigation or other gets snuffed. Someone high up “requested” it. Okay? So now I’ve spelled it out for you.’ His face was red now and the wattles beside his mouth were quivering. ‘Believe me, I have thought of getting rid of you so very often, transferring you to some other district. But you’re too valuable to me. You’re good for at least a couple of mayor’s citations for me each year. I don’t mind telling you I like that;

it’s good for my record.” He stood up now, his thick arms straight columns ending in bunched fists pressed so hard against the desktop that they had gone white. ‘But I’ll be goddamned if I’ll ever let you pull a stunt like you did with the Lyman thing. That was officially chocked and you went after it anyway. You made me look like a fool to these people here and I’m just lucky that the Commissioner didn’t hear about it.’ He lifted a finger as big around as a sausage, shaking it in Croaker’s direction. ‘You’ll take this Tanaka-Okura double murder and I don’t want to ever hear that you threw a case back at the precinct boys the way you did last night.’ He coughed thickly, wiped at his lips with a grey handkerchief. ‘What’s the matter? You got something against slants? No. So take it and be happy. Be happy that you’ve got a case to run with.’

Croaker turned to leave but, as his fingers grasped the knob, Finnigan said, ‘Oh and, Lieutenant, you know how things function around here. Next time don’t make me explain S.O.P. to you as if you were some rookie just off the streets, okay?’

It was at that point that Croaker had decided to continue with the Didion thing on his own. Now he knew that he had to do it all on his own. He could confide in no one at the office and, if he used their resources, which he surely would, he would have to camouflage his intent. He looked at his watch, then at the dregs of old coffee in the stained plastic cup on his desk. He was late for the Linnear pick-up but right now he did not much care; his mind was still on the Didion thing. Finnigan was right in one respect - he had nothing. But only up to a point. The girl had friends somewhere, it had just proved to be a bastard unearthing them. Now he was close to at least one of them. Matty the Mouth had come up with a lead. But he needed a name, an address, or it was useless to him. This was what he was waiting for now; this was why he was so sensitive to being pulled off the case. It was no good telling Finnigan what he had now; no good at all. It would be like talking to the wall. Which was why Croaker always kept his cases to himself; it was part of the reason why he got Finnigan his mayor’s citations each year-So it was the one thing Finnigan did not question. In any case, Finnigan could care less about M.O., it was results he craved. Talk about your gluttons, Croaker grunted as he swivelled round in his chair. Those results gave the whisky a fine race for the captain’s undivided attention.

Croaker cursed and got up. Time to pick up Linnear.

At approximately the same time, Vincent had been at work in the autopsy room. He had not, of course, been on duty when they had brought Terry’s and Eileen’s corpses in late last night but he had been called right away - Tallas had thought he should know; she had the soundest judgement of all the associates, he thought. Consequently he had arrived in time to hear the tail end of the argument between the two precinct patrolmen who had responded to the call, and the detective. He was a big burly sonofabitch and he was giving them a tongue-lashing. Vincent had not concerned himself with the noise or the rising tempers. He had wanted to make certain. Perhaps it had all been a ghastly mistake - one of the dojo’s instructors at Terry’s apartment - or … but it had been Terry and it had been Eileen. Dead. It was then dial he had remembered the frozen-line call. No one there. Could it have been Terry phoning him? He turned sadly away. It did not matter now.

He put them away for the morning, made sure all their clothes and personal effects were properly tagged and bagged for me detectives who would take the case. Then he had gone home to spend an uneasy night.

It had got to the point where he was content only down in the morgue. There he could work, logically problem-solving, sleuthing his way through the silent mayhem. Sometimes it worked and his report led directly to the arrest of the murderer; at other times he was the only one who could be of solace to the families of the dead who rolled past him each day.

They were like massive hieroglyphs, mute monoliths, waiting to have their arcane messages unearthed. And he the archaeologist of their past.

It was immensely satisfying to him to work here in the dead house, as many physicians called it. But it was such a misnomer, for here, every day, he and his colleagues were hard at work wresting secrets from death’s cold grip. They hacked at it, bringing it down to size, demystifying it, bit by bit, until much of its horror was dissipated. What job could claim more importance for the living?

This morning Vincent now stood in the central room, his back to the tiers of stainless-steel doors. A black man, naked and cool, his head at an angle, lay on a trolley to one side. He stood staring at the swing “doors leading into the autopsy room. Behind that barrier, he knew, lay his friend, Terry Tanaka; next would be Eileen. For the first time since coming here, he wondered whether he really wanted to push through those doors. It seemed, all at once, one death too many and he did not feel the same inside any more. He knew that he wanted to return to Japan. But he felt that to be impossible now, as if he had contracted some dread disease in the West, in the city, in New York, and now, transformed inwardly as well as outwardly, he felt as if the culture shock would be the death of him.

Yet, deep inside, he perhaps understood that his only salvation now was to go on. Death had returned to him as it had as a child, a solid wall too high for him to climb over. He knew that he must tear that wall down or go mad and his only path lay within the bright, tidy room inside. There death could be quietly dissected, the wall pulled down one brick at a time until, at last, and he would understand what had done this to his friends. For, he found, he wanted desperately to know.

Vincent shook himself and, pushing aside the swing doors, went in to work on the body. Japan, once a dream, had now departed.

The limo pulled out of the traffic flow in the low Fifties, slid quietly to a stop at the kerbside. Frank got out first and opened the rear door for them.

They were on a block dominated by the steel exoskeleton of a building that seemed perhaps three-quarters complete. It was set far back from the street and the pavement had been torn up in order to install brick-red tile. A wooden companion-way had been erected so that pedestrians would not be inconvenienced by the construction. On the south end of the block an enormous cement mixer was drawn up. Multicoloured polka dots had been painted on its revolving barrel. Beside it, an angular crane was in the process of elevating a number of girders.

Part of the building’s fashionable black stonework facade was up; chalk marks still crisscrossed some of the blocks, the white and yellow glyphs of the modern world. Still, fully one side was skeletonized like a transparent cocoon beneath which the chrysalis could be seen forming.

They walked along wooden planks laid out while, in the rubble beneath, men with bulging muscles and oil-streaked faces drilled with jackhammers like sullen dentists.

They came into the shade of the roofed walkway. The air was filmed with dust which hung chokingly, settling on their hair and their shoulders like dandruff.

A man with a lean dented face approached them. He wore a bright yellow hard hat. ‘Lubin Bros’ was stencilled across the front in blue. He smiled broadly when he recognized Tomkin, extended his hand. He led them off to the right into a mobile home which served as construction headquarters. Tomkin introduced him laconically as Abe Russo, the building foreman. Russo shook Nicholas’s hand with a firm cool grip. He handed out hard hats for all of them and they left.