Woman with a Blue Pencil

Also by Gordon McAlpine

Hammett Unwritten
(as Owen Fitzstephen)

Published 2015 by Seventh Street Books®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

Woman with a Blue Pencil.
Copyright © 2015 by Gordon McAlpine. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopy­ing, re­cord­ing, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, ex­cept in the case of brief quotations em­bodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover images: paper © siloto / Shutterstock; scribble © Can Stock Photo, Inc. / maryloo; man © Media Bakery; hand © Babii Nadiia / Shutterstock

Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

McAlpine, Gordon, author.

Woman with a blue pencil : a novel / Gordon McAlpine.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-63388-088-7 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-63388-089-4 (e-book)

1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.

I. Title.

PS3563.C274W66 2015

813'.54—dc23

2015023614

Printed in the United States of America

To my compañero, Roy Langsdon

CONTENTS

THE REVISED—CHAPTER ONE

THE REVISED—CHAPTER TWO

THE REVISED—CHAPTER THREE

THE REVISED—CHAPTER FOUR

THE REVISED—CHAPTER FIVE

THE REVISED—CHAPTER SIX

THE REVISED—CHAPTER SEVEN

THE REVISED—CHAPTER EIGHT

THE REVISED—CHAPTER NINE

Post Script

About the Author

December 7, 1941:

353 fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes launched from six aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy attack without warning the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing over 2,400 Americans, decimating the US Pacific fleet, and instigating America's entrance to the Second World War.

February 19, 1942:

Executive Order 9066 authorizes local American military commanders to designate “exclusion zones,” in the USA from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” Along the Pacific coast, this results in the relocation to internment camps of 110,000 people of Japanese heritage, most US citizens.

August 30, 2014:

A dusty lockbox is found and removed from the attic of a house scheduled for demolition in Garden Grove, California. Inside the lockbox are three items. The first is a pulp spy thriller published in 1945 under the pen name William Thorne. The second is a sheaf of letters from the book's editor, primarily addressed to its author, dating from 1941–1944. The last is an unpublished novella handwritten by the same author on 102 sheets of WWII-era, GI-issue writing paper, mud-splattered and bloodied in some spots. It is signed with the author's real name, Takumi Sato, and is titled “The Revised.”

THE REVISED—CHAPTER ONE

By Takumi Sato

. . . he'll never understand the nature of his sudden alienation, because he's never known that he is a fictional character. He still doesn't know. So how can he grasp what's happened to him, that he's been cut from a novel-in-progress, excised from his world, which from this point forward carries on around him even though it contains neither memory nor record of his ever having existed? In short, how can he understand that he is the abandoned creation of a conflicted author, whose tossing of typewritten pages into a trash can has not snuffed out everything and everyone written on them?

—Aldous Huxley, overheard in conversation
at Clifton's Cafeteria, Los Angeles

On the evening of December 6, 1941, Sam Sumida shifted in his seat at the crowded Rialto Movie House in downtown Los Angeles. It was about a third of the way into the new picture,
The Maltese Falcon
, and on screen Humphrey Bogart knocked the gun from Peter Lorre's hand and began slapping the smaller man silly. Sumida knew the scene was coming. He'd read the novel. In the past weeks, he'd read everything Hammett had ever written, having concluded, after a short period of research, that no other writer possessed either the background or the willingness to depict the PI business realistically. And, since the unsolved murder of Sumida's wife, Kyoko, eleven months before, it had become critical to him that he discern
some
source from which to draw instruction in the art of detection. (All those How-to-be-a-Private-Eye primers had proved little more useful as practical manuals than the outdated, sanitized crime fantasies of S. S. Van Dine or the absurdly plotted puzzles of those famous lady-novelists from England.)

Hammett told it straight, Sumida believed.

And he needed some straight instruction. A PhD in Oriental Art History, which, until recently, he'd taught as a part-time instructor at three local colleges, hardly prepared him for work as a gumshoe. Before that, his mother and father, who'd emigrated from Nagasaki to Long Beach a year before he was born, had raised him to rely on modesty rather than bravado to get by in the white man's world. This had worked well enough for the first thirty years of his life. Intelligence, wit, and an instinct for knowing just the right moment to gracefully leave his Caucasian colleagues to their private diversions had resulted in success in the art history field. He'd bought a small house in Echo Park—quite impressive for the son of a fisherman. But then somebody put a .22 slug in his wife's brain and dumped her body into the harbor at San Pedro, stumping a disinterested LAPD in the process. So, now, Sumida, who'd come alone to the Rialto, watched Humphrey Bogart with a concentrated attention unlike that of others in the Saturday night crowd (most of whom were here either on dates or as respite from an afternoon spent shopping in the nearby garment or jewelry districts, Christmas 1941 being less than three weeks away). Sometimes, Sumida leaned so far forward, unconsciously straining toward the screen, that his face almost brushed against the coiffed head of the woman in the row ahead of his.

In this way, he noted the boldness with which Bogart's Sam Spade put questions to even the most formidable adversaries . . . the heedless way Spade diverted questions when they were put to him, even by the cops . . . Spade's seeming disregard for the possibility of failure. Of course, Sumida knew that studying fictional gumshoes had its limitations. But the cops had never wanted him around and the licensed PIs he'd subsequently hired, who consumed whatever cash he'd managed to save, likewise wanted him out of the way during their futile investigations. So Sam Sumida's opportunities to learn were limited. Now, all that was left to him were fictions. But he did not lack for native intelligence, could converse with almost anyone in a manner simultaneously persistent and polite, was as physically courageous as the next guy, and possessed self-defense skills, developed in boyhood, which far exceeded those of most. Additionally, and most importantly, his motivation was personal.

Still, quitting his teaching positions to devote all his time to investigating Kyoko's murder may have been rash.

His aunt and uncle had told him it had been mad.

But, truly, what else mattered?

Unfortunately, Sumida had made little or no progress in the weeks since he'd taken up the investigation. He'd begun, reasonably enough, by gathering copies of the police report and the scattershot notes from the three PIs he'd hired and fired, settling down for the better part of a weekend with the documents spread on his dining room table like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Might he discern a lead among the summarized interviews and scrawled lists detailing Kyoko's routines—a lead that had eluded the professionals? No. There was, of course, the “revelation” that for the final months of her life she had been carrying on an adulterous affair. Sumida had suspected this long before the LAPD confirmed it. Some nights, she hadn't come home at all. So what else was he to think, particularly when she answered his increasingly passionate queries only with stubborn silence? Still, he never stopped loving her.

He hadn't stopped yet.

He knew that for the past few years he'd been distracted with his work, flattered by offers to lecture at various colleges or to publish articles in journals. And he knew Kyoko's life managing a dental office hadn't been nearly so fulfilling for her. Now, he couldn't imagine ever again taking the same egoistic pleasure in career accomplishments, a secondary reason he'd resigned his positions.

Immediately after the crime, the uncovering of her adultery naturally threw suspicion on Sumida (the cuckolded spouse is always the first suspect). But at the time of the murder Sumida had been in Berkeley at the University of California to give a series of visiting lectures on the art of the Edo period. Absent husband, the adulterous lover was next on the list of suspects. Who else had had access and potential motive? It was at this point that the investigations all hit dead ends. Both the police and the PIs got positive identifications of Kyoko from half a dozen hotel desk clerks in downtown LA (“Beautiful Oriental girl with a streak of white in her black hair”), but none of these desk clerks had been able to offer more than a cursory description of the man who'd been with her—just a six foot tall Caucasian of unspecified hair and eye color. The names signed in the hotel registers were always absurd fabrications: “Mr. and Mrs. G. Washington,” “Mr. and Mrs. A. Lincoln,” etc. Sumida later called again on the hotel desk clerks who'd recognized Kyoko, but he got nothing more from them than had the other investigators (except for admonitions that he should have kept better watch on such a woman). Canvassing additional downtown hotels, as well as inns and motor lodges up and down the coast from Malibu to Laguna Beach, he found no other desk clerks who recognized Kyoko.

Sumida's next stop had been the scene of the crime, San Pedro. A harbor town with a racially mixed population (including many Japanese) and a chip on its shoulder as wide as the blue Pacific. The police report indicated the particular pier against which Kyoko's body had washed up, though exactly where along the harbor she'd been shot and dumped was impossible to figure due to tides and the churning and stirring of so many commercial boats. When Sumida asked locals whether they remembered hearing a gunshot on the night of January 11—almost eleven months before—he was met only with incredulous expressions.

And now, on the big screen at the Rialto, Humphrey Bogart gave the pistol back to Peter Lorre, whom Bogart did not consider formidable enough even to pay the respect of keeping disarmed.

Such sublime confidence . . .

Did Sumida really think he could gain such qualities just from observing a movie detective—even a good one, like Spade?

No.

The truth was he'd come here, in large part, because he simply didn't know what else to do with himself; tonight, the pain of yet another solitary dinner in what had been
their
kitchen had felt too much to bear, almost dangerous.

So this was the first movie he'd allowed himself since Kyoko's murder. The first respite.

The detective-theme alleviated some of his guilt.

But he'd always loved movies of all kinds. Sure, he chose
The Maltese Falcon
because it
might
contain a detail of detective work that could be useful to his investigation. And he may have noted Spade's techniques and mannerisms with more focus than did those around him. Nonetheless, he smiled with the rest of the audience when the ineffectual Peter Lorre aimed his recently returned pistol again at the bigger, tougher man, repeating his original demands. Bogart could disarm Lorre as easily as before, but now the chuckling gumshoe seemed charmed by the audacity of his diminutive opponent. Watching the movie made Sumida almost happy.