The Key to Midnight (4 page)

“I’ll keep him in the dark. But, Alex ... if you’ve found her ... it’s very big news.”

“Very big,” Alex agreed. “Call me back after you’ve arranged things, and let me know when I can expect the file.”

“Will do.”

Alex put down the telephone and went to one of the living-room windows, from which he watched the bicyclists and motorists in the crowded street below. They were in a hurry, as though they clearly comprehended the value of time. As he watched, one cyclist made an error in judgment, tried to pass between two cars where there wasn’t sufficient space. A white Honda bumped the bike, and the cyclist went down in a skidding-rolling-bouncing tangle of skinned legs, bent bicycle wheels, broken arms, and twisted handlebars. Brakes squealed, traffic halted, and people rushed toward the injured man.

Although Alex was not superstitious, he had the eerie feeling that the sudden violence in the street below was an omen and that he himself was rushing headlong toward an ugly crash of his own.

At noon Alex met Joanna at Mizutani for lunch. When he saw her again, he realized that the mental picture of her that he carried with him captured her beauty no more accurately than a snapshot of Niagara Falls could convey the beauty of wildly tumbling water. She was more golden, more vibrant and
alive
—her eyes a far deeper and more electrifying blue—than he remembered.

He kissed her hand. He was not accustomed to European manners; he just needed an excuse to touch his lips to her warm skin.

Mizutani was an o-zashiki restaurant, divided by rice-paper partitions into many private dining rooms where meals were served strictly Japanese style. The ceiling wasn’t high, less than eighteen inches above Alex’s head, and the floor was of brilliantly polished pine that seemed transparent and as unplumbable as a sea. In the vestibule, Alex and Joanna exchanged their street shoes for soft slippers. They followed a petite young hostess to a small room where they sat on the floor, side by side on thin but comfortable cushions, in front of a low table.

They faced a six-foot-square window, beyond which lay a walled garden. That late in the year, no flowers brightened the view, but there were several varieties of well-tended evergreens, and a carpet of moss had not yet turned brown for the winter. In the center of the garden, water fountained from a seven-foot-high pyramid of rocks and spilled down the stones to a shallow, trembling pool.

They ate mizutaki, the white meat of a chicken stewed in an earthenware pot and flavored with scallions, icicle radish, and many herbs. This was accompanied by several tiny cups of steaming sake, delicious when piping hot but like a spoiled sauterne when cool.

Throughout lunch they talked about music, Japanese customs, art, and books. Alex wanted to mention the magic name—Lisa Chelgrin—because at times he had an almost psychic ability to read guilt or innocence in the reactions of a suspect, in fleeting expressions at the instant that accusations were made, in the nuances of a voice. But he wasn’t eager to discuss the Chelgrin disappearance with Joanna until he heard where she’d been born and raised, where she’d learned to sing, and why she’d come to Japan. Her biography might have enough substance to convince him that she was who she claimed to be, that her resemblance to the long-missing Chelgrin woman was coincidental, in which case he wouldn’t raise the subject. It was essential that he induce her to talk unselfconsciously about herself, but she resisted—evidently not out of any sinister motive but out of sheer modesty. Ordinarily Alex was also reluctant to talk about himself, even with close friends; curiously, in Joanna’s company, those inhibitions dissolved. While trying unsuccessfully to probe into her past, he told her a great deal about his own.

“Are you really a private detective?” she asked. “It’s hard to believe. Where’s your trench coat?”

“At the cleaners. They’re removing the unsightly bloodstains.”

“You aren’t wearing a shoulder holster.”

“It chafes my shoulder.”

“Aren’t you carrying a gun at all?”

“There’s a miniature derringer in my left nostril.”

“Come on. I’m serious.”

“I’m not here on business, and the Japanese government tends to frown on pistol-packing American tourists.”

“I’d expect a private detective to be ... well, slightly seedy.”

“Oh, thank you very much.”

“Tough, squint-eyed, sentimental but at the same time cynical.”

“Sam Spade played by Humphrey Bogart. The business isn’t like that any more,” Alex said. “If it ever was. Mostly mundane work, seldom anything dangerous. Divorce investigations. Skip tracing. Gathering evidence for defense attorneys in criminal cases. Providing bodyguards for the rich and famous, security guards for department stores. Not half as romantic or glamorous as Bogart, I’m afraid.”

“Well, it’s more romantic than being an accountant.” She savored a tender piece of chicken, eating as daintily as did the Japanese, but with a healthy and decidedly erotic appetite.

Alex watched her surreptitiously: the clenching of her jaw muscles, the sinuous movement of her throat as she swallowed, and the exquisite line of her lips as she sipped the hot sake.

She put down the cup. “How’d you get into such an unusual line of work?”

“As a kid, I decided not to live my life on the edge of poverty, like my parents, and I thought every attorney on earth was filthy rich. So with a few scholarships and a long string of night jobs, I got through college and law school.”

“Summa cum laude?”

Surprised, he said, “How’d you know that?”

“You’re obsessive-compulsive.”

“Am I? You should be a private detective.”

“Samantha Spade. What happened after graduation?”

“I spent a year with a major Chicago firm that specialized in corporate law. Hated it.”

“But that’s an easier road to riches than being a P.I.”

“The average income for an attorney these days is around maybe eighty thousand. Less back then. As a kid, it looked like riches, because what does a kid know. But after taxes, it would never be enough to put me behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce.”

“And is that what you wanted—a Rolls-Royce lifestyle?”

“Why not? I had the opposite as a child. There’s nothing ennobling about poverty. Anyway, after a couple of months of writing briefs and doing legal research, I knew the really enormous money was only for senior partners of the big firms. By the time I could have worked my way to the top, I’d have been in my fifties.”

When he was twenty-five, confident that the private security field would be a major growth industry for several decades, Alex had left the law firm to work for the fifty-man Bonner Agency, where he intended to learn the business from the inside. By the time he was thirty, he arranged a bank loan to buy the agency from Martin Bonner. Under his guidance, the company moved aggressively into all areas of the industry, including installation and maintenance of electronic security systems. Now Bonner-Hunter Security had offices in eleven cities and employed two thousand people.

“You have your Rolls-Royce?” Joanna asked.

“Two.”

“Is life better for having two?”

“Sounds like a Zen question.”

“And that sounds like an evasion.”

“Money’s neither dirty nor noble. It’s a neutral substance, an inevitable part of civilization. But your voice, your talent—that’s a gift from God.”

For a long moment she regarded him in silence, and he knew she was judging him. She put down her chopsticks and patted her mouth with a napkin. “Most men who started out with nothing and piled up a fortune by the age of forty would be insufferable egomaniacs.”

“Not at all. There’s nothing special about me. I know quite a few wealthy, self-made men and women, and most of them have every bit as much humility as any office clerk. Maybe more.”

Their waitress, a pleasant round-faced woman dressed in a white
yukata
and short maroon jacket, brought dessert: peeled mandarin orange slices coated with finely shredded almonds and coconut.

“Now we’ve talked too much about me,” Alex said. “What about you? How did you get to Japan, to the Moonglow? I want to hear all about you.”

“There’s not a lot to hear.”

“Nonsense.”

“My life seems boring compared to yours.”

She was either secretive about her past or genuinely intimidated by him. He couldn’t decide which, but he continued to encourage her until she finally opened up.

“I was born in New York City,” she said, “but I don’t remember it well. My father was an executive with one of those hydra-headed conglomerates. When I was ten, he was promoted to a top management position in a British subsidiary, so then I grew up in London and attended university there.”

“What did you study?”

“Music for a while ... then Asian languages. I became interested in the Orient because of a brief, intense infatuation with a Japanese exchange student. He and I shared an apartment for a year. Our affair didn’t last, but my interest in the Orient grew.”

“When did you come to Japan?”

“Almost twelve years ago.”

Coincidental with the disappearance of
Lisa
Chelgrin, he thought. But he said nothing.

With her chopsticks, Joanna picked up another slice of orange, ate it with visible delight, and licked away a paper-thin curl of coconut that clung to the comer of her mouth.

To Alex, she resembled a tawny cat: sleek-muscled, full of kinetic energy.

As though she had heard his thought, she turned her head with feline fluidity to gaze at him. Her eyes had that catlike quality of harmoniously blended opposites: sleepiness combined with total awareness, watchfulness mixed with cool indifference, and a proud isolation that coexisted with a longing for affection.

She said, “My parents were killed in an auto accident while they were on vacation in Brighton. I had no relatives in the States, no great desire to return there. And England seemed terribly dreary all of a sudden, full of bad memories. When my dad’s life insurance was paid and the estate was settled, I took the money and came to Japan.”

“Looking for that exchange student?”

“Oh, no. That was over. I came because I thought I’d like it here. And I did. I spent a few months playing tourist. Then I put together an act and got a gig singing Japanese and American pop music in a Yokohama nightclub. I’ve always had a good voice but not always much stage presence. I was dreadful at the start, but I learned.”

“How’d you get to Kyoto?”

“There was a stopover in Tokyo, a better job than the one in Yokohama. A big club called Ongaku, Ongaku.”

“Music, Music,” Alex translated. “I know the place. I was there only five days ago!”

“The club had a reasonably good house band back then, and they were willing to take chances. Some of them were familiar with jazz, and I taught them what I knew. The management was skeptical at first, but the customers loved the Big Band sound. A Japanese audience is usually more reserved than a Western audience, but the people at Ongaku really let down their hair when they heard us.”

That first triumph was, Alex saw, a sweet recollection for Joanna. Smiling faintly, she stared at the garden without seeing it, eyes glazed, looking back along the curve of time.

“It was a crazy place for a while. It really jumped. I surprised even myself. I was the main attraction for two years. If I’d wanted to stay, I’d still be there. But I realized I’d do better with my own club.”

“Ongaku, Ongaku is changed, not like you describe it,” Alex said. “It must’ve lost a lot when you left. It doesn’t jump these days. It doesn’t even twitch.”

Joanna laughed and tossed her head to get a long wave of hair out of her face. With that gesture, she looked like a schoolgirl, fresh, innocent—and more than ever like Lisa Chelgrin. Indeed, for a moment, she was not merely a Chelgrin look-alike: She was a dead ringer for the missing woman.

“I came to Kyoto for a vacation in July, more than six years ago,” she said. “It was during the annual Gion Matsuri.”

“Matsuri... a festival.”

“It’s Kyoto’s most elaborate celebration. Parties, exhibits, art shows. The beautiful old houses on Muromachi were open to the public with displays of family treasures and heirlooms, and there was a parade of the most enormous ornate floats you ever saw. Absolutely enchanting. I stayed an extra week and fell in love with Kyoto even when it wasn’t in the midst of a festival. Used a lot of my savings to buy the building that’s now the Moonglow. The rest is history. I warned you it was dull compared to your life. Not a single murder mystery or Rolls-Royce in the entire tale.”

“I didn’t yawn once.”

“I try to make the Moonglow a little like the Café Americain, in Casablanca, but the dangerous, romantic stuff that happened to Bogart doesn’t happen to me and never will. I’m a lightning rod for the ordinary forces in life. The last major crisis I can recall was when the dishwasher broke down for two days.”

Alex wasn’t certain that everything Joanna had told him was true, but he was favorably impressed. Her capsule biography was generally convincing, as much for the manner in which it was delivered as for its detail. Although she’d been reluctant to talk about herself, there had been no hesitation in her voice once she’d begun, not the slightest hint of a liar’s discomfort. Her history as a nightclub singer in Yokohama and Tokyo was undoubtedly true. If she’d needed to invent a story to cover those years, she wouldn’t have created one that was so easy to investigate and disprove. The part about England and the parents who’d been killed while on holiday in Brighton ... well, he wasn’t sure what to make of that. As a device for totally sealing off her life prior to Japan, it was effective but far too pat. Furthermore, at a few points, her biography intersected with that of Lisa Chelgrin, which seemed to be piling coincidence on coincidence.