The Key to Midnight Read online

  “So am I.”

  She turned on her side.

  She slept.

  The only sound was the faint hum of the electric clock.

  Neither of us used the word “love,” Alex thought.

  After a while he kissed her forehead and left the room.

  22

  Mariko was sitting on the living-room couch. Mifuni had gone.

  “The sedative worked,” Alex said.

  “The doctor said she’ll sleep five or six hours. He’ll be back this afternoon.”

  “You’ll stay here with her?”

  “Of course.” She rose from the couch and straightened the collar of her shapeless brown robe. “Would you like tea?”

  “Thank you. That would be nice.”

  While they sat at the small kitchen table, sipping hot tea and nibbling almond wafers, Alex told Mariko Inamura about the Chelgrin case, about the burglar he had encountered in his hotel suite, and about the man who had followed him in the Gion a few hours ago.

  “Incredible,” she said. “But why? Why would they change the girl’s name ... change her complete set of memories ... and bring her here to Kyoto?”

  “I haven’t any idea. But I’ll find out. Listen, Mariko, I’ve told you all this so you’ll understand there are dangerous people manipulating Joanna. I don’t know what they’re trying to cover up, but it’s obvious that the stakes are high. Tonight when you opened the door for me downstairs, you didn’t ask who was there. You’ve got to be more careful.”

  “But I was expecting you.”

  “From now on, always expect the worst. Do you have a gun?”

  Frowning, she said, “We can’t protect her every minute. What about when she appears on stage? She’s a perfect target then.”

  “If I have anything to say about it, she won’t perform again until this is settled.”

  “But in spite of everything they’ve done to her, they’ve never hurt her physically.”

  “If they know she’s investigating her past and might learn enough to expose them, God knows what they’ll do.”

  She stared into her tea for a long moment, as if she had the power to read the future in that brew. “All right, Alex-san. I’ll be more careful.”

  “Good.”

  He finished his tea while she telephoned the taxi company.

  At the downstairs door, as he stepped into the street, Mariko said, “Alex-san, you won’t be sorry that you helped her.”

  “I didn’t expect to be.”

  “You’ll find what you’ve been looking for in life.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I thought I’d found it already.”

  “Men are the same.”

  “As what?”

  “Men of all cultures, societies, races are equally capable of being such fools.”

  “We pride ourselves in our dependability,” he said with a small smile.

  “You need Joanna as much as she needs you.”

  “You’ve told me that before.”

  “Have I?”

  “You know you have.”

  She smiled mischievously, bowed to him, and assumed an air of Asian wisdom that was partly a joke and partly serious. “Honorable detective should know that repetition of a truth does not make it any less true, and resistance to the truth can never be more than a brief folly.”

  She closed the door, and Alex didn’t move until he heard the lock bolt slide into place.

  The black taxi was waiting for him in the snow-skinned street. A few snowflakes still spiraled out of the morning sky.

  A red Toyota followed his cab all the way to the hotel.

  23

  Exhaustion overcame insomnia. Alex slept four hours and got out of bed at twenty past eleven, Thursday morning.

  He shaved, showered, and quickly changed the bandage on his arm, concerned that he wouldn’t be ready to meet the courier from Chicago if the man arrived on time.

  As he was dressing, the telephone rang. He snatched up the handset on the nightstand.

  “Mr. Hunter?”

  The voice was familiar, and Alex said, “Yes?”

  “We met last night.”

  “Dr. Mifuni?”

  “No, Mr. Hunter. You have my pistol.” It was the gaunt-faced man from the alleyway. “You’ll be receiving a message soon.”

  “What message?”

  “You’ll see,” the man said, and he hung up.

  After Alex hurriedly finished dressing, he removed the silencer from the 9mm automatic. He put the sound suppressor in an inside pocket of his suit coat and tucked the gun itself under his belt. He was sure that it was no more legal to carry a concealed handgun without a permit in Japan than it was in the U.S., but he preferred risking arrest to being defenseless.

  At six minutes past noon, just as he buttoned his suit coat over the pistol, a sharp knock came at the door.

  He went into the foyer. “Who’s there?” he asked in Japanese.

  “Bellhop, Mr. Hunter.”

  The view through the fish-eye lens revealed the bellman who had brought his luggage upstairs when he had checked into the hotel. The man was clearly distressed, fidgeting.

  When Alex opened the door, the bellman bowed and said, “I’m so sorry to disturb you, sir, but do you know a Mr. Wayne Kennedy?”

  “Yes, of course. He works for me.”

  “There’s been an accident. Almost fifteen minutes ago,” the bellman said anxiously. “A car, this pedestrian, very terrible, right here in front of the hotel.”

  Although Blakenship hadn’t mentioned the courier in the fax that he had sent yesterday, Kennedy was no doubt the man.

  The bellman said, “The ambulance crew wants to take Mr. Kennedy to the hospital, but every time they get close to him, he kicks and punches and tries to bite them.”

  Because they were speaking Japanese and because the bellman was speaking very fast, Alex thought he had misunderstood. “Kicking and punching, you said?”

  “Yes, sir. He refuses to let anyone touch him or take him away until he talks to you. The police don’t want to handle him because they’re afraid of aggravating his injuries.”

  They hurried to the elevator alcove. Another bellman was holding open the doors at one of the elevators.

  On the way down, Alex said, “Did you see it happen?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the first bellman. “Mr. Kennedy got out of the taxi, and a car angled through the traffic, jumped the curb, hit him.”

  “Do they have the driver?”

  “He got away.”

  “Didn’t stop?”

  “No, sir,” the bellman said, clearly embarrassed that any Japanese citizen could behave so lawlessly.

  “What’s Mr. Kennedy’s condition?”

  “It’s his leg,” said the bellman uneasily.

  “Broken?” Alex asked.

  “There’s a lot of blood.”

  The hotel lobby was nearly deserted. Everyone except the desk clerks was at the scene of the accident in the street.

  Alex pushed through the crowd and saw Wayne Kennedy sitting on the sidewalk with his back against the building, flanked by two blood-smeared and badly battered suitcases. The wide-eyed onlookers kept a respectful distance on three sides of him, as if he were a wild animal that no one dared approach. He was shouting furiously at a uniformed ambulance attendant who had ventured within six or seven feet of him.

  Kennedy was an impressive sight: a handsome black man, about thirty years old, six foot five, two hundred forty pounds, with fierce dark eyes. Cursing at the top of his voice, shaking one huge fist at the paramedics, he looked as if he might be constructed of concrete, iron, two-by-fours, and railroad ties, and in spite of his incapacity, he didn’t seem to be an ordinary mortal man.

  When Alex glimpsed the courier’s injuries, he was stunned and doubly impressed by all the shrieking, fist-shaking bravado. The leg wasn’t merely broken: It was crushed.

  Splinters of bone had pierced the flesh and the blood-soaked trousers. />
  “Thank God you’re here,” Kennedy said as Alex knelt beside him.

  The courier slumped against the wall as if someone had cut a set of supporting wires. He seemed to grow smaller, and the maniacal energy that had sustained him suddenly vanished. He was streaming sweat, shivering violently, in tremendous pain. It was amazing that he had summoned sufficient strength to hold everyone off for nearly a quarter of an hour.

  “Have you really punched at the medics?” Alex asked.

  “The bastards don’t speak English!” Kennedy said, as if Chicagoans faced with an injured tourist from Kyoto would have held forth in fluent Japanese. “Jesus, what I had to go through to find someone ... who could understand me. I couldn’t let them cart me off until I’d delivered ... the file.” He indicated one of the suitcases at his side.

  “Good God, man, the file isn’t that important.”

  “It must be,” Kennedy said shakily. “Someone tried ... to kill me for it. This wasn’t an accident.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Saw the stinking sonofabitch coming.” Kennedy grimaced with pain. “A red Toyota.”

  Alex remembered the car that had followed his taxi from the Moonglow Lounge earlier that same morning.

  “I stepped... out of the way ... but he turned straight toward me.”

  When Alex signaled the waiting paramedics, two men rushed in with a stretcher.

  “Two guys ... in the Toyota,” Kennedy said.

  “Save your strength. You can tell me about it later.”

  “I’d rather ... talk now,” Kennedy said as the paramedics cut open his pants leg to examine his injury and to stabilize the broken bones with an inflatable splint before moving him. “Takes my mind off ... the pain. The Toyota hit me ... knocked me into the wall ... ass over teakettle... pinned me there ... then backed off. The guy on the passenger side got out ... grabbed for the suitcase. We played... tug of war. Then I bit his hand ... hard. He gave up.”

  Alex had been warned to expect a message. This was it.

  With considerable effort—and a little lingering wariness—the paramedics lifted Wayne Kennedy onto the wheeled stretcher.

  The courier howled as he was moved. Tears of pain streamed down his face.

  The wheeled legs of the gurney folded under it as it was shoved into the van-style ambulance.

  Alex picked up both suitcases and followed Kennedy. No one tried to stop him. In the van, he sat on the suitcases.

  The rear doors slammed shut. One of the paramedics remained with Kennedy and began to prepare a bottle of plasma for intravenous transfusion.

  The ambulance began to move, and the siren wailed.

  Without raising his head from the stretcher, Wayne Kennedy said, “You still there, boss?”

  “Right here,” Alex assured him.

  Kennedy’s voice was twisted with pain, but he wouldn’t be quiet. “You think I’m an idiot?”

  Alex stared at the hideously crumpled leg. “Wayne, for God’s sake, you were sitting there bleeding to death.”

  “If you’d been in my shoes ... you’d have done the same.”

  “Not in a million years.”

  “Oh, yeah. You would’ve. I know you,” Kennedy insisted. “You hate to lose.”

  The paramedic cut away the coat and shirt sleeves on Kennedy’s left arm. He swabbed the ebony skin with an alcohol-damp sterile pad, then quickly placed the needle in the vein.

  Kennedy’s bad leg twitched. He groaned and said, “I’ve got something to say ... Mr. Hunter. But maybe I shouldn’t.”

  “Say it before you choke on it,” Alex told him. “Then please shut the hell up before you talk yourself to death.”

  The ambulance turned the corner so sharply that Alex had to grab at the safety railing beside him to keep from sliding off the pair of suitcases.

  Kennedy said, “You and me ... we’re an awful lot alike in some ways. I mean ... like you started out with nothing... and so did I. You were damned determined to make it ... to the top ... and you did. I’m determined... to make it ... and I will. We’re both smooth on the surface and street fighters underneath.”

  Alex wondered if the courier was delirious. “I know all that, Wayne. Why do you think I hired you? 1 knew you’d be the same kind of field op that I was when I started.”

  Grinding the words out between clenched teeth, Kennedy said, “So I’d like to suggest... when you get back to the States ... you’ve got to make a decision about filling Bob Feldman’s job. Don’t forget me.”

  Bob Feldman was in charge of the company’s entire force of field operatives, and he was retiring in two months.

  “I get things done,” Kennedy said. “I’m right ... for the job ... Mr. Hunter.”

  Alex shook his head in amazement. “I can almost believe you traveled around the world and arranged to be hit by that car just to trap me in here for this sales pitch.”

  “Bob Feldman ... retiring ... keep me in mind,” Kennedy said, his speech beginning to slur.

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll give you the job.”

  Kennedy tried to raise his head but couldn’t manage to do so. “You... mean it?”

  “I said it, didn’t I?”

  “Every cloud,” Kennedy said, “has a silver lining,” and at last he relinquished his tenuous grip on consciousness.

  24

  After Wayne Kennedy was taken into surgery, Alex used a hospital pay phone to call Joanna.

  Mariko answered. “She’s still asleep, Alex-san.”

  He told her what had happened. “So I’m going to stay here until Wayne comes out of surgery and the doctors can tell me whether the leg stays or goes.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Yes. So I won’t be able to get there by one o’clock, like I promised Joanna.”

  “You belong with your friend. She’ll understand.”

  “I don’t want her to think I’m backing out.”

  “She knows you better than that.”

  “Does Joanna have a spare bedroom?”

  “For your Mr. Kennedy?”

  “No. He’ll be staying here. The room would be for me. Neither you nor Joanna should be alone until this is finished. Besides, it’s better strategy to work out of one place. Saves time. I’d like to check out of the hotel and move in there—if it won’t ruin anyone’s reputation.”

  “I’ll prepare the spare room, Alex-san.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Keep the doors locked. And Mariko ... we aren’t quitting until we know what was done to Joanna and why.”

  “Good,” Mariko said.

  “We’re going to nail these bastards to the barn wall.”

  “Nail them to a barn wall? Whatever that means exactly, I think it will be most excellent,” Mariko agreed.

  Alex was far more energized than he’d been in years. Until this moment, he hadn’t fully realized that all his financial success had to some degree dampened the fire in him. His fortune, his twenty-two-room estate, and his pair of Rolls-Royces had mellowed him. But now, once again, he was a driven man.

  PART TWO

  CLUES

  The hanging bridge

  Creeping vines

  Entwine our life.

  —BASHO, 1644-1694

  25

  At six o’clock the chief surgeon, Dr. Ito, came to the hospital waiting room where Alex was pacing. The doctor was a thin, elegant man in his fifties. He had been working on Wayne Kennedy for five hours. He looked tired, but he smiled because he had good news: Amputation would not be necessary. Kennedy was not entirely out of danger; all manner of complications could yet arise. More likely than not, even without complications, he would have a pronounced limp for the rest of his life, but at least he’d walk on his own two legs.

  Dr. Ito was leaving the lounge when Mariko Inamura arrived to take over the vigil from Alex and free him to move his belongings from the hotel to the spare bedroom above the Moonglow Lounge. When Wayne Kennedy came out of anesthesia,
he would need to see a friendly face other than those of the nurses and physicians, and he would want someone close by who spoke fluent English. Dr. Mifuni was staying with Joanna until Alex could get to the Moonglow.

  Alex led Mariko to a corner of the waiting room. They sat on a yellow leatherette couch and spoke in whispers.

  “The police will want to talk to Wayne,” Alex told her.

  “Tonight? The way he is?”

  “Probably not until tomorrow when he’s got his wits about him. So when he wakes up and you’re certain he understands what you’re saying, tell him that I want him to cooperate with the police—”

  “Of course.”

  “—but only to a point.”

  Mariko frowned.

  “He should give them a description of the car and the men in it,” Alex said, “but he shouldn’t tell them about the file he was carrying from Chicago. He’ll have to pretend he’s just an ordinary tourist. He hasn’t any idea why they were trying to steal his suitcase. Nothing in it but shirts and underwear. Got that?”

  Mariko’s traditional Japanese upbringing had instilled in her a respect for authority that was as much a part of her as grain is a part of wood. “But wouldn’t it be better to tell the police everything and have them working for us? They have the facilities, the manpower—”

  “If Joanna is really Lisa Chelgrin, do you think her forged passport and phony identification are so convincing that no one’s ever doubted them? Not for a minute? No one?”

  “Well, I don’t know, but—”

  “Japan is insular. It doesn’t welcome non-Japanese immigrants with open arms. Yet the authorities have allowed this woman to take up residence and open a business, evidently with no serious check of her background.”

  “You’re saying this is some big international conspiracy? That the Japanese government might be involved? Alex-san, excuse me, but isn’t this paranoid?”

  “Joanna... Lisa isn’t just an ordinary missing person. This is a damned strange situation. We’re dealing with the daughter of a United States Senator. We don’t know what political forces and interests are at work in this.”

  “In Japan the police are—”