Death in Little Tokyo (7 page)

10

T
he phone rang. I picked it up and recognized Mariko’s voice. It was unusual for her to call me early in the morning.

“There’s a big write-up about your murder in the
L.A. Times,”
she said.

“My murder? If it’s about my murder, then like Mark Twain said, my death has been greatly exaggerated!”

“Gee, the wonders of a sixth-grade education.”

“Never mind the sarcasm. What are you talking about?”

“There’s a big write-up in the
Times
about Matsuda’s murder,” Mariko said. “It talks about Matsuda and then discusses how other Japanese businessmen have been victimized by crime in Little Tokyo. You know, muggings and things like that.”

“Why don’t you read it to me?”

“Read it to you? It’s about half a page long. It wouldn’t kill you to go out and get a paper.”

“Ever helpful.”

“Well, I’m trying to be,” Mariko answered. “I thought you might be interested in it. Besides, you’re mentioned in the article.”

“I am?”

“Sure, I’ll read you that part, at least. ‘The police say they are following up on various clues and checking out the stories of suspects.’ I figure that’s you,” Mariko announced.

“You’re not going to think it’s so funny if it turns out to be true, and you end up bringing me gift baskets at some maximum security prison. Remember ‘Bubba’?”

Mariko’s voice was much less animated. “Do you think that will actually happen?”

“Well, I hope not. But it has happened in the past, and I certainly don’t want to put it to the test in this case. You know the cops can start feeling the heat just like anybody else. And if there’s a lot of pressure being put on Hansen to make an arrest, there’s no telling what he might do.”

“I was kidding.”

“I hope you’re kidding, too. I just want you to know you shouldn’t go around joking about me being a suspect because it’s probably true.”

“Now you’ve got me worried sick,” Mariko said.

“About me?”

“Of course.”

“I thought you were worried that I might say that you were the mastermind behind the whole thing.”

“Don’t tease about this, Ken.”

“I’m like you. I sort of vacillate between macabre humor and outright hysteria. I’ll go down and read what the
Times
has to say about the case, then I’ll call you back later this afternoon. Will you call your lawyer cousin and set up a time for me to see him? I want to get rid of the package as soon as possible.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, Mariko?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“Finally some sense comes out of your mouth.” She hung up.

I went down to the corner doughnut shop and got a
Times.
Back in my apartment I read the story about the murder. It had a short interview with Nachiko Izumi, the maid who found the body, but the actual details of the murder were pretty sketchy. I did learn that the police confirmed the weapon was probably a sword, based on the wounds inflicted on the body. And I was fascinated to read a little bit about Matsuda’s background.

Matsuda had been raised in the United States, but he went to Japan right after World War II and renounced his U.S. citizenship. Since that time, he had been in the United States frequently, acting as a sales agent for a variety of companies.

The article went on to talk about other crimes in Little Tokyo, with visiting Japanese businessmen as their victims. The crime rate in the United States is much higher than in Japan, and despite a lot of publicity in Japan about it, many of the visitors simply weren’t trained to cope with the Los Angeles urban jungle.

A favorite technique seemed to be going from room to room in hotels that catered to the Japanese businesspeople, knocking on doors and mugging or robbing the residents when they opened the door to see who was there. Welcome to America.

After reading the paper and having some breakfast (this time, cornflakes, not sushi), I decided to call Ezekiel Stein, the president of the L.A. Mystery Club. Ezekiel was a manager in the Water Quality Division of the L.A. Department of Water and Power (DWP). He was a thin man in his fifties, with a small beard and thick, black-rimmed glasses.

Ezekiel actually got me involved in the L.A. Mystery Club, and I met him in kind of a funny way. The Los Angeles DWP has this mania for covering open reservoirs. They like to take restful blue water and spread a plastic cover over it in the name of water improvement. In fact, the way to improve water is to filter it, not just cover it, but covering is cheap and the City of L.A. likes cheap.

Residents and environmentalists opposed the covering of the reservoirs, arguing that if the DWP really wanted to improve water quality they should take steps that will achieve that aim, instead of taking a halfway measure that destroyed the open reservoirs without making any substantive improvement in water quality. The Silver Lake district of L.A. got its name from the open reservoirs that form its geographic and emotional center. Like most people in Silver Lake, I joined the effort to stop the covering.

I met Ezekiel at a community meeting to discuss ways to keep the reservoirs uncovered. I noticed that Ezekiel had placed some flyers on a table when he entered the meeting, and I strolled over to see what they were. They advertised an upcoming L.A. Mystery Club weekend event, and I talked briefly with Ezekiel about the event and what was involved. I was surprised when later I saw Ezekiel sitting as part of a panel representing the DWP. When you view people as part of the opposition on an issue, you don’t often view them as having aspects to their lives that you might share an interest in.

I decided to give the mystery weekends a try and found them fun. As I got more involved with the club, I got to know Ezekiel better. I still thought his views about covering the reservoirs were a sacrilege, but I also learned that it shouldn’t prevent me from working with him on things of interest to both of us.

Ezekiel was an engineer, which explained some, but not all, of his eccentricities.

For instance, for fun he would calculate the center of gravity for all sorts of things, such as automobiles or oranges. As near as I could tell, knowing the center of gravity is only useful for things like airplanes or sailboats, but Ezekiel calculated it for just about anything that struck his fancy: chairs, tables, phone booths, and myriad other objects. He once proudly showed me a database he kept on a laptop computer that had all his center of gravity computations, along with a scanned photo or sketch of the object. He had literally thousands of entries, and he told me he had been doing this since college.

Ezekiel would also get involved in long tiffs with bureaucracies (and L.A. has many, what with all the city, county, and state agencies, not to mention agencies with adjacent cities). If some bureaucratic rule seemed illogical to him, he would sometimes spend months trying to get it changed, even when the change he wanted seemed to have no practical effect. Working for the world’s largest municipally owned utility, he should have known the difficulties in getting any bureaucracy to change, but he always had a half dozen little skirmishes going on.

His trait of most interest to me was his voracious reading about crime.

His phone rang and I heard the familiar voice answer, “Hello.”

“Ezekiel. Ken Tanaka here. What do you know about recruiting American women to entertain in Japan?” With Ezekiel it was unnecessary to go through the normal social amenities. In fact, it was often counterproductive to do something like ask him how he felt. Ezekiel would tell you, in excruciating detail, including (I once learned to my sorrow) a report on his latest schedule of bowel movements and stool condition.

“There’s been sporadic complaints about it. Often the Japanese don’t comply with the terms of the contracts they sign with the women, which causes problems.”

“Have you ever heard of a woman being blackmailed once she returned to the States?”

“Blackmail?” A pause. I could just see the gears turning in his mind while he thought about that one. “No, I’ve never heard of a case of blackmail once the woman returned to the United States. Why do you ask.”

“I think I might be involved with one.”

“You mean a real one?”

“Yes. And that’s not the half of it. I’m also involved with that Japanese businessman that was killed at the Golden Cherry Blossom last night.”

“The one reported in the
Times?”

“Yes.” I gave Ezekiel a brief rundown on my meeting with Rita and Matsuda. I left out the part about still having the package. When I was done, I asked, “Any ideas?”

“Obviously the woman didn’t want to pick up the package herself because she was trying to put something over on Matsuda. For five hundred bucks she bought herself a sacrificial goat.”

“So who killed Matsuda?”

“Not enough information,” Ezekiel said. “Can’t figure things like this out without information.”

“Yeah, I’m finding that out,” I said. “Say, do you know a good criminal lawyer?”

“I know of several lawyers who are criminals.”

I gritted my teeth and rephrased my question. Ezekiel was not trying to be funny. When people laughed at things he said, he’d sometimes get puzzled and hurt. It was just the way his brain worked. “Do you know of any lawyers who are good at representing criminals?”

“Just what I read in the paper. Do you need one?”

“I might. Mariko has suggested her cousin Michael, but I don’t know him and I want to make sure I talk to someone who knows what he’s doing.”

“You need Mary Maloney. That woman can find out anything. She’ll know how to find out what you want to know about Mariko’s cousin. Anything else?”

“No, not now.”

“Okay, but talk to me more about this when you have the time.”

The phone was dead. It was typical of Ezekiel to hang up without saying good-bye, and I wasn’t offended by it. I replaced the receiver and decided to drive down to the detective office before I called Mary.

I parked my car in the lot I normally used and walked to the office. I noticed the posters advertising Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week festival on the telephone poles. A
Nisei
is a second generation Japanese in the U.S. I was a third generation, which made me a
Sansei.

Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week celebration was started in 1934 by a bunch of enterprising Nisei looking for a way to drum up jobs. It usually coincided with the Japanese
O-bon,
which is held in late summer. Before coming to L.A., I had never heard of Nisei Week, but O-bon was something we used to celebrate in Hawaii. In the way we Americans have of homogenizing ethnic events until they lose their toothiness, the L.A. version of O-bon consists of a parade with street dancing, plus the usual kitsch things like a beauty pageant and plenty of chicken lunches for businessmen. I don’t think most people know that the festival has its roots in a Buddhist religious festival.

I walked into the office building and summoned the slow elevator. The building where I rented the office had one supreme virtue: the rents were dirt cheap. Otherwise, it was a pit. Like most old office buildings, it had a smell of age clinging to it, like the stale ghost of the past. When the building was new and bustling with commerce it was home to dentists and lawyers and several small accounting firms. Now it housed small-time import/export businesses and nondescript enterprises with names like “John Smith, Inc.”

My office was on the second floor, and in the few days I had occupied the office I rarely saw anyone else walking the halls of this floor. I put the key in the door and turned the lock.

The scene that greeted me was chaos. Every file cabinet drawer had been opened, removed from the cabinet, and dumped on the floor. The desk drawers had been treated in a similar fashion. Even the four pictures I had hung on the wall had been taken down and dumped facedown on the desk. It took me a few moments to realize that someone was looking at the backs of the pictures, to make sure nothing had been taped to them. So much for my idea to do precisely that with the package.

Since they were all props and stage furniture, most of the drawers were empty. The one exception was the top drawer of the desk, where I kept my notes about the mystery weekend, along with short biographies I had written for each of the characters in the mystery. These were scattered on the top of the desk. Someone had apparently read them and I wondered what they made of them.

The phone started ringing and I was at a loss to find it for a few seconds. I finally went to where the cord was plugged into the wall and followed the cord until I found the phone sitting under a file drawer. I sat on the floor and answered it.

“Hello?”

“Mr.Tanaka?”

“Yes.”

“This is Rita Newly. I’ve been calling for two days now to make arrangements to pick up my property.” Her tone was brittle and sharp.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been in the office. A good part of the time I was with the police.”

“The police?” Her tone was now more wary than surprised.

“Yes. Mr. Matsuda was murdered soon after I picked up the package for you.”