At the same time that my mother was telling me about Eve Adams having lunch at Woolworth’s, Mr. Yabu Tamazaki of the Daily News was sitting at the kitchen table in his apartment, in another part of the city, poring over the passenger manifest of the cruise ship on which, in October 1961, Mrs. Renata Kolshak had booked what turned out to be her death voyage.
Because he was continuing his investigation against the wishes of his superiors at the newspaper, Mr. Tamazaki had proceeded slowly and with caution. He had been delayed, as well, by avenues of inquiry that had proved to be dead-ends. After considerable patient effort, he had found a contact inside the cruise-ship company, Mrs. Rebecca Tremaine, formerly Rebecca Arikawa.
In 1942, at the age of twelve, Rebecca was removed from a foster home and sent to Children’s Village, the camp orphanage at Manzanar. The following year, she was raped by a nineteen-year-old internee who was a member of a gang. The rapist was transferred to the more secure camp at Tule Lake, where he stood trial. Late in 1944, at the age of fourteen, Rebecca was returned to her foster parents, Sarah and Louis Walton, who began the process of adoption. With the help of a loving family, she overcame the trauma of rape and eventually married.
On the advice of its attorneys, the cruise line kept passenger manifests of every voyage for ten years. Although that list of names and addresses was proprietary information—a source of likely future customers—Rebecca was persuaded that Mr. Tamazaki, a man of honor, had no intention of harming her employer in any way.
The passenger manifest contained 1,136 names. Mr. Tamazaki did not expect to find Lucas Drackman on it, and indeed he didn’t. He was looking for a suspicious name—comparable to Eve Adams—or any suggestion of falsity in an address, or the initials L.D., because both criminals of limited intelligence and those who were smart but cocksure often used aliases with that connection to their real names.
Because Renata Kolshak had booked early, she was passenger number fifty. As he proceeded through the manifest, Mr. Tamazaki marked a few lines with a red pencil, for later reconsideration, but when he reached passenger number 943, he was all but certain that he had found his man. The name Douglas T. Atherton struck him as being familiar, but he couldn’t say why. The passenger’s home address was also of interest: Charleston, Illinois, which turned out to be about twelve miles east of Mattoon, where Lucas Drackman had attended and graduated from a private military academy.
A quick check of the case file confirmed that the provost of the military school at that time had been Douglas T. Atherton.
The hour was not so late that a phone call would be ill advised. Daring to identify himself as “with the Daily News,” Mr. Tamazaki asked to speak to the provost and was told that he should call back during school hours. He took the further risk of saying that he had an important question to ask, that it involved a capital crime, and that he needed only two minutes of Mr. Atherton’s time, whereupon he was transferred to the line at the provost’s on-campus house.
“I assure you, Mr. Tamazaki, I wasn’t traveling alone in the Caribbean in October of 1961, or at any other time, for that matter,” the provost said. “Ever since my marriage, nineteen years ago, I have never vacationed without my wife.” He couldn’t quite keep the note of regret out of his voice. “Furthermore, I would never take a two-week cruise during the school year. I’d consider it a dereliction of duty, considering what some of these hellions might likely get up to in my absence.” Evidently, the provost didn’t know that the mother of a former student had gone missing from a cruise ship two and a half years after that student’s graduation. “You must be seeking another Douglas Atherton.”
Mr. Tamazaki believed the provost. It seemed entirely within Lucas Drackman’s character to have fun with the alias that he used to commit murder, a puerile joke that would amuse no one but him and those of his co-conspirators who were equally immature.
Using the provost’s name—which had been supported with false ID—wouldn’t convict Lucas Drackman. It didn’t qualify as evidence admissible in court, because as yet no link existed to prove who had booked the cruise in that name. If anything could be learned about who rented the post-office box in Charleston to which the cruise line sent the ticket, the case against Drackman might be advanced.
When Mr. Yoshioka was informed, both he and Mr. Tamazaki thought that this discovery seemed promising and that with luck justice might find its way to young Mr. Drackman, the Cassidy twins, Aaron Kolshak, and anyone else associated with them—which might include my father. If that were to happen, they would cease to pose any threat to me or my mother or Mr. Yoshioka.
In retrospect, the argument could be made that Mr. Tamazaki’s discovery marked the moment when the storm began to form that, not long thereafter, would change all our lives, and not for the better.
50