The Case of the Murdered MacKenzie: A Masao Masuto Mystery (Book Seven) (13 page)

Wainwright was so intrigued by the empty coffin that he forgot to complain about overtime for the gravediggers. Abramson, the city manager, had been in to see Wainwright about illegal parking around some of the larger hotels, and when he heard about Masuto's expedition, he decided to await his return. Like Wainwright, the notion of the big bronze coffin being empty fascinated him.

“Who ordered the burial and paid for it?” Wainwright asked.

Masuto shook his head. He had been in Japan. Beckman said, “That was Eve Mackenzie.”

“But why that coffin? You say it weighed a quarter of a ton.”

“Because it would still carry heavy, even without the body.”

“What does one of those things cost?”

“Plenty,” Abramson said. “I just buried my mother-in-law. She was a religious lady and specified a plain wooden box, but I priced a few of the fancy ones. You could be buried in a Cadillac for that kind of money.”

“Do you suppose we'll ever turn up the body, Masao?”

“No. They don't want the body or the prints found. They probably wrapped it in chains, took it out in a boat, and gave it to the sharks. No, we'll never see it.”

“Why?” Abramson demanded. “You keep saying
they
, Sergeant. Who are they?”

“I don't know. I know what they do, and I'm beginning to understand how they think, but who they are—”

“And now, with the body gone, the murderer goes free?”

“No, not quite, Mr. Abramson. What they say about the absence of a corpse doesn't apply here. We know the murder was committed. It doesn't matter whether the body is buried at Forest Lawn or at the bottom of the Pacific.”

“Then we can find the killer and convict him?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Masao,” Wainwright exploded, “is this another one of your damn tricks? Do you know who killed Mackenzie?”

“Even if I know, it doesn't help. We have no evidence, and before we're able to scrape some up, the killer will be dead.”

There was a long moment of silence while they all stared at Masuto, and then Wainwright said coldly, “What in hell are you talking about?”

Masuto was tired, close to exhaustion after a day that had been too long and too terrifying, and in no mood to argue or convince. “All things,” he said without enthusiasm, “have a pattern and a rhythm. We live in patterns and think in patterns and act in patterns. They have a pattern. Their minds are lazy but brutal. They kill for solutions. They act hastily. The charade in the bathtub was clumsy and hasty. They felt that the man in the tub was dangerous, so they killed him. Now they will kill the killer, because the killer is dangerous.”

“Goddamnit, Masao, if you know who it is, bring him in. We'll cook up a charge.”

“We can't do that,” Abramson said. “Not in Beverly Hills, Captain Wainwright. You know that.”

“It wouldn't matter,” Masuto said moodily.

“The hell with it,” Wainwright said. “Let's call it a day.”

“The mechanic's still there,” Abramson told them. “He'll check your cars.”

Walking out of the police station with Beckman, Masuto asked him, “About Mackenzie's birthplace—did you say Glasgow?”

“Edinburgh.”

“Where did you get that?”

“From Mrs. Scott. Fenwick confirmed it.”

“Ah, so! Very interesting. That they gave you, but not the fingerprints. Did you also get the date he arrived in America?”

“Nineteen sixty-one. He was thirty-one.”

“Also from Fenwick?”

“Oh, yes. They were cooperative.”

The mechanic informed them that both of their cars were clean.

“I'll see you in the morning, Sy,” Masuto said.

“By the way, I almost forgot. Polly said Doc Baxter would like to see you. He'll be working late. This late—well, I don't know.”

It was enough to prompt Masuto to drive to All Saints Hospital. In any case, he had no place to go. His home was empty; his wife and children were with Uncle Toda in San Fernando. It was a new situation for him. He was very much a householder, and his little cottage in Culver City was his rock. Now, suddenly, he was alone, homeless, for he had no desire to go home and sleep in an empty house—a place at this moment not only empty but very dangerous.

At the pathology room in the basement of All Saints a lonely figure sat at a laboratory table under a bright light; peering into a microscope. In all the years he had worked with Dr. Baxter, Masuto had never inquired as to whether the small, bitter medical examiner had a wife or a family. That was poor human behavior on his own part, he told himself, and even worse Zen behavior—at which point in Masuto's thinking, the doctor looked up and said, “It took you long enough to get here, my Oriental Sherlock. Did you expect me to wait all night?”

“You mean you were actually waiting for me?”

“I wasn't sitting here whistling Dixie. Now, listen to me. I was letting you and your boss, the brilliant Wainwright, who is possibly brain-damaged according to his behavior, run around in circles, and then my conscience took over and I reminded myself that we're on the same side. The point is, Masuto, you don't need an autopsy for what you want. I simply took some blood from Mrs. Mackenzie and I ran a lot of tests. She was not poisoned or drugged, unless you think of alcohol as both of those things, which it is. Eve Mackenzie was drunk—sodden, stinking drunk. She was absolutely loaded—with nothing but alcohol. Now, if you're going to ask me whether she could drive a car in her condition—well, I would have to know what kind of a drunk she was.”

“You just told me that,” Masuto protested.

“No, sir. I told you how much alcohol there was in her blood. What kind of a drunk she was is something else. There are folks who have that kind of alcohol level in their blood, and they would get up out of a chair and fall flat on their face. Someone else walks away and you don't even know he's loaded. Tell me, did her sister approve the autopsy?”

“No.”

“Now you know why.”

“You mean her sister knew she was an alcoholic, and she figured now that Eve is dead there's no need for the world to know.”

“That would be my guess.”

“And you think she could get in her car, start the motor, drive two or three miles, and then pass out?”

“Absolutely.”

“And you feel nothing more could be gained by an autopsy?”

Baxter shrugged. “What more do you want? Conceivable but not likely. I don't think she had any drugs. The liquor did it.”

Masuto thanked him. “I'm very grateful.”

“Tell that to Abramson. Remind him that what I'm paid by the richest city in America is a national disgrace.”

Back in his car, Masuto sat and brooded. He reminded himself of an ancient Zen story. The student comes to the Zen master and says to him, “Master, my father sends me here to study Zen, but why should I study Zen?” To which the Roshi replies, “So that when the times comes, you will not be afraid to die.”

Masuto did not know whether or not he was afraid to die. The times when he faced death left no moments for reflection, and he had always considered himself a very poor Zen Buddhist; but he was also a practical person, and he felt that to go home to his house in Culver City tonight would be foolhardy indeed. Instead, he drove downtown, taking precautions to see that he was not followed.

It was almost eleven o'clock when he reached the Zendo in downtown Los Angeles. The door to the meditation hall was always open, and he went in there, taking off his shoes first. The meditation hall was thirty feet long and twelve feet wide. Running the length of the room on either side, there was a section five feet wide and raised six inches from the ground. A single lamp lit the polished wood of the hall with a soft, flickering radiance.

Masuto took a pillow and mat from where they were piled at the end of the hall, set the small round pillow on the mat, took off his jacket, loosened his belt, and then settled himself into the lotus position. He began his meditation, and then found himself falling asleep. The soft light in the long empty hall had a hypnotic effect, and it had been an endless day since the bomb planted in his car blew Officer Clint into eternity. He fought to stay awake. Another Zen tale told of the monk who, having slept through his meditation, cut his eyelids off in remorse. A story Masuto hated, but which came to his mind now as he fought to remain awake—even resorting to the device of counting each breath.

It did not help, and a voice speaking in Japanese reached into his consciousness, saying, “Masao, Masao, what must I think to see a man pretending to meditate and sound asleep, with a gun under his arm in this place where no weapon is permitted?”

It was always difficult for Masuto to understand Japanese, and coming out of sleep even more difficult; and now he could only mumble, “Roshi, I slept in my meditation.”

“It is past midnight,” the old man who was the Roshi there told him. “Go home and sleep, Masao.”

“I sent my wife and children away. My home is a dangerous place.”

The old man shook his head unhappily. “Why must you earn a living this way, Masao?”

“It is my karma.”

“Don't talk nonsense to me!” he snapped. “It is your choice. Now, come to my house and I'll spread a mat on the floor for you. Sleep is not meditation, and I think you need sleep more.”

Masuto slept well on the floor of the little house behind the Zendo hall, and in the morning, after a bowl of rice and several cups of tea, he looked upon the world more cheerfully. He put through a call to Kati, who informed him that Uraga and Ana were already swimming in the holding pond and very happy, and Uncle Toda and his wife were darling to them, but that she, Kati, wanted to be home with her husband where she properly belonged.

“Another few days,” Masuto promised her.

“And you will be careful. Every time I think of the work you do, I die a little.”

“I am the most careful man in California.”

Since he was already in downtown Los Angeles, he stopped off at Fred Toyota's place for a shave. Toyota was a cousin of Kati's three or four times removed, somewhere in the tangle of relationships that Japanese families clung to, a plump, birdlike little man, who guessed that it was the Zendo that had brought Masuto down here “where a haircut is still five dollars—and just as good as the thirty-dollar cuts in Beverly Hills. But myself, Masao, I'm a Presbyterian. I have given up that old-country nonsense—”

“Very commendable. I'm in a hurry.”

“When I shave, I talk.”

Humbled but clean-shaven, Masuto drove to the police station in Beverly Hills. Beckman was sitting in his office, feet up on his desk, reading the sports section of the
Los Angeles Times
, and he greeted Masuto with the proposition that one can't say never. “I mean, Masao, that if anyone had told me that football players would form a union and strike, I would have said never. Absolutely never.”

“You're right,” Masuto said. “You can't say never. Now, tell me something. What's the situation at the Mackenzie house? From the time of his murder.”

“You know,” Beckman said, dropping his feet and putting the newspaper aside, “I never thought of that. It is goddamn strange.”

“What is?”

“Well, look—you heard the testimony the other day in court. The whole damn thing was Feona Scott's little ploy. Suppose Eve Mackenzie could have been found guilty. It would have been Scott who put her away. But Eve was out on bail, and there they were, both of them living in the Mackenzie house.”

“You're sure of that?”

“Yeah—”

“And you never thought it strange before?”

“I suppose I should have. But nothing in this case makes sense.”

“Or everything. I'll tell you what I want you to do, Sy. Go out to Santa Monica and see Judge Simpkins and get a search warrant for the Mackenzie house. Then go in there and find something that will give us a break in this case.”

“What?”

“I don't know. But there has to be something in that house that will shed a little light on the fact that a man who isn't Robert Mackenzie but who everyone wants to dispose of as Robert Mackenzie is murdered in a crazy Rube Goldberg manner, and everyone—accused, accusers—everyone loves everyone, except that someone wants to kill anyone who puts his nose into it. So, damn it, be careful! We've Clint's funeral tomorrow. I don't want to go to yours the next day.”

“Where will you be?”

“I'm going across to the library, and then I'll be back here.”

The Beverly Hills library is unique, one of the finest public libraries in California, and housed in a splendid building across the street from the police station. The quality of the library grew out of two things; the wealth of the town, and the patronage of motion picture and television people, who needed a well-equipped library close at hand. At the cost of twenty-five dollars a year, a non-resident could be a member, but Masuto's membership derived from his job. He was an assiduous reader and a familiar figure at the library, especially to Miss Clarissa Jones. Miss Jones confirmed Masuto's belief that marriages should be arranged. Miss Jones, slender, very attractive behind her glasses, tall, and possessed of a decent sense of humor, was still unmarried at age thirty-seven because, as she put it, she had never gotten around to it. Masuto always thought of it as a tragic waste, and even today the thought crossed his mind as he informed Miss Jones, the librarian he most preferred, that he was interested in Scotland.