Death in Little Tokyo (16 page)

18

M
ariko and I had dinner at the Ginza Gardens Coffee Shop. Then she asked me if I wanted to come to her place. “Maybe later,” I told her. “I’ve been spending so much time on real mysteries that I’m falling behind on preparing for the L.A. Mystery Club’s mystery. If I don’t start working on it, there will be more than a few club members willing to kill me. How about I go back to the office for an hour or so, then I stop by your apartment?”

“Okay, but don’t keep me waiting.”

I returned to the office, and as I unlocked the door and walked in, a voice said, “You really should get a better lock for your front door.”

I jumped from surprise and spun around. There, standing on either side of the door, were the two Asians who had scared Rita away. The small man gave me a grin, showing off some of the gold-capped teeth that festooned his mouth.

“We didn’t want to wait in the hall,” he added. “So we let ourselves in and made ourselves comfortable. The lock on your front door is ridiculously easy to open.”

“Never mind the lock on my front door, what the hell are you two doing here?” I said.

“That’s not a very warm greeting for two potential clients,” the little man said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the sign on the door says you’re a detective,” the little man answered. “And we want you to find someone for us. Rita Newly.”

“What do you want her for?”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s very good,” the little man said.

“What are you talking about?”

“When you said you don’t know, it had just the right ring of sincerity combined with anger at finding us in your office.”

“Look, I’m not playing a game when I say I don’t know what the hell’s going with you two and Rita Newly.”

The small man shrugged. He reached into his suit pocket and pulled out the two warranty forms. “These say different. It was careless to leave them in this office. Just because we searched it once, that doesn’t mean we weren’t going to search it again.”

I calculated the odds of making it through the office doorway past the men. As if reading my mind, the larger of the two men stepped into the doorway, blocking it. He closed the door. The lousy latch made an ominous click, and despite what I had been told about how poor a lock it was, it sounded solid enough to me. Especially with a miniature gorilla standing in front of it.

“I wouldn’t try it,” the little man said. “My companion is very strong and quite good at the martial arts. More importantly, even if you were able to subdue him, you would then have to deal with me.”

I shot a glance of surprise at the small man for this declaration of bravado. The man caught my glance and smiled once again. He reached into his other pocket and pulled out a small automatic pistol. The ugly blue-black barrel of the automatic pointed squarely at my midsection without a waver or a hint of hesitation.

“This makes me equal to just about anybody,” the small man said. “Please don’t do anything rash. This isn’t one of the pieces of junk that Rita sold to my father in Japan. This is a pistol that I purchased right here in the United States, and I’m quite a good shot with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I can kill you if I choose to or simply blow out your kneecaps and cripple you for life.”

I felt I was in some kind of grotesque comedy. I explained myself. “I didn’t ask your meaning to find out if you’re a good shot. I was asking about what kind of junk Rita sold to your father.”

“Surely, you know.”

I sighed. I was scared and playing for time in the desperate hope that some bright idea would occur to me. “I really don’t. Maybe I could help you if you’d explain to me what the hell’s going on.”

“Rita sold a shipment of pistols to my father in Japan. In Japan, firearms are strictly prohibited, and a good supply of guns is rather hard to come by. A four-hundred-dollar gun in the U.S. is worth five thousand dollars in Japan, to the right people. Rita arranged for a supply of pistols to be sent to Japan packed in a container of ball bearings. How she arranged that is her business, but what finally arrived in Japan turns out to be my business. The guns are junk, almost worthless. All of them are worn out, and some of them don’t even work. They were probably destined to be sold as scrap. Instead, they were sold to us at quite a premium because of the difficulty of getting such merchandise into Japan.” He held up the invoices. “Now we want to get the payment for that merchandise back. We also wanted to have a talk with Rita to explain to her that it’s not nice to play such tricks on my father and to also ask her what she knows about the death of Matsuda-san.”

“You weren’t involved in that?”

“Of course not. Matsuda-san was a valuable member of our organization. That’s why we want to talk to Rita about it.”

“But not to me?” I didn’t know if I should believe him about not being involved in Matsuda’s killing. If he did confess to it, it was probably a bad sign for me because it meant that I probably wouldn’t be around to tell anyone about it.

“You, too. Matsuda-san called us after he delivered the package to you. He was the one who gave us your name and address. He said you were simply a messenger boy and it made him suspicious that Rita didn’t come by to pick up the package herself, or at least didn’t send someone she worked with.

“Matsuda-san was no fool. He suggested that we should immediately contact Japan and have them check over the shipment of guns. He concluded that there might be something wrong with the shipment. The reason Rita hired someone to come by and pick up the payment was because she was afraid we might have discovered that the guns delivered were no good.”

“Your English is very good,” I said incongruously.

“Thank you,” the small man said, pleased. “I went to USC. That’s one of the advantages of having wealthy parents in Japan.”

At my look of surprise, the small man grinned again. “It’s hard to get into Japanese colleges, and private U.S. schools are so much more accommodating if you can pay the fees. It just takes wealth. Our wealth, of course, was attained through the Yakuza. In fact, you might say that I’m now following through with the family business, running the U.S. operations while my father continues to run things in Japan.”

I looked at the bigger man. “And don’t you ever say anything?”

The man looked back impassively, still blocking the door.

“No, he doesn’t talk too much,” the smaller man said. “But he can be very persuasive when he wants to be. As much fun as this conversation has been, I believe it’s time that he does become very persuasive with you. Now, where can we find Rita and where can we find the rest of the warranty claims?”

With the smaller man holding the gun, I calculated the odds of getting out of the office were almost nil even if I was able to get past the stocky man in the doorway. I was actually surprised at how coolly rational my brain was working even as my body was making me feel sick with fear.

The small man shrugged. “I can see things are going to be difficult,” he said with a sigh of what seemed like genuine regret. “I suppose you feel like the thing to do would be not to cooperate. I really don’t think that’s very smart, but some people have to learn the hard way.”

He said something in Japanese to the stockier man, who strode forward, put his hand on my chest, and shoved me backward until I finally flopped into the chair behind the desk. The smaller man raised the gun to cover me as he said, “I wouldn’t suggest you try anything.”

The bigger man loosened my belt and slipped it out of the belt loops, then he used it to tie my hands behind my back, around the back of the chair. He pulled it tight, and the edges of the belt cut into the flesh of my wrists. When I was securely tied to the chair, the smaller man lowered his pistol.

“I wish you’d cooperate,” the smaller man said reasonably. “I’ve been involved with several of these, and sooner or later people tell you what you want to know.”

When the stocky man started the beating, he showed no pleasure in inflicting pain. In fact, he showed no emotion at all. It seemed like it was a rather boring job to him as his large callused fist came smashing down on my face. The force of the first blow was so sudden and jarring that I was more stunned than in pain. I wondered if my nose was broken, but I decided since the first blow had landed to the side of my face instead of straight on, that it was more likely that my cheekbone would be broken instead. Small comfort.

By the time the second blow was delivered, the anesthetic of fear and concussion had worn off and the pain started.

By the fourth blow, I started losing count. It looked as if the stocky man could continue pummeling me all evening with no apparent sign of fatigue. I remembered glancing over to the smaller man, to see him sitting at the edge of the desk looking very detached and patient. These men were professionals, I thought. They don’t give a damn if I live or die, or if they beat me to death to get what they want to know. Another blow. But they probably won’t beat me to death and they probably won’t let me die. At least not yet. They’ll just keep escalating to higher levels of pain until I finally tell them what they want to know.

Another blow. This one was so hard that I saw black spots in front of my eyes. There was a buzzing in my head. Through a red haze of pain I heard the smaller man talking in Japanese. I moved my head and pain shot through the left side of my face, causing me to groan. In my mouth I could taste blood.

I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness. I told myself I should give them Rita’s address and stop all this. It was easy enough. The address was on a little slip of paper in my pocket and I’d just have to tell them about it. I actually wanted to speak up, but I couldn’t because I was passing out. As I started slumping in the chair, I could hear Mrs. Kawashiri’s voice from our earlier phone conversation ringing in my head. “It’s not right, it’s just not right. . .”

My face was being slapped, not brutally, but my cheeks were so bruised that it felt like I was being hit with a red-hot piece of iron. I was being revived from unconsciousness so the beating could start again.

When I was fully revived, the big Yakuza started hitting me again. I groaned from pain.

“Wait a minute,” the small man said. He hopped off the desk and started looking through my pockets. I was almost grateful when he came across the note with Rita’s address and phone number.

“Things are often simple,” the small man said philosophically. “We were able to find the warranty forms in your desk, but I really should have searched you first. We might have been able to save ourselves a considerable amount of time and you a considerable amount of pain and grief. I just hope you’ve been getting some from Rita because I can’t figure out why else you wouldn’t tell us what we wanted to know.”

He exchanged some words in Japanese to the stocky man. Then he said in English, “This is an old building without too many tenants, and it’s nighttime. What I think we’ll do is just leave you here with the doors closed, and I’m sure by tomorrow someone will find you. I don’t think there will be anybody in the building to find you tonight.”

He said a few more words to the stocky man, and they both walked out of the office, closing the door behind them.

I sagged in the chair. It took me several minutes to realize that I was crying. The hot tears ran down my face and dripped to my shirt front, which was splattered with my blood. I couldn’t figure out if I was crying from the pain or from relief that they were gone and that I was still alive.

It seemed a long time before I heard pounding at the office front door. I heard a muffled, “Ken, are you in there?”

“Mariko,” I croaked. My voice sounded oddly muffled, and the effort to shout her name left a strange ringing in my left ear. “Mariko,” I tried again.

I could hear the outer office door rattling. They must have locked it behind them. I hoped that Mariko would be persistent enough to find a locksmith to get the door open.

There was some fumbling with the front door, and a few seconds later the door burst open. Mariko stood there, looking at me in shock and horror. “Oh, Ken,” she said.

“Let me loose,” I said. The words came out mumbled.

Mariko didn’t understand exactly what I said, but she did understand what I wanted. She rushed across the room, and I could feel her fingers tugging at the knots in the belt that bound my hands. After a few seconds she stood up, opened the desk drawer, and rummaged through the desk until she found a pair of scissors. She used the scissors to gnaw at the belt until she finally cut through it and released my hands.

“I got worried when you didn’t show up,” she said. “I’ll get an ambulance.” She reached for the phone.

“No, not yet,” I said. This time she was able to understand me. She looked confused and indecisive, unsure if she should follow my instructions or go ahead with her instincts.

I tried to think, trying my best to remember the phone number Rita had given me. “Got to call Rita Newly,” I mumbled. “Those guys are going there next.”

I put the phone up to my ear and winced as the receiver made contact with my bruised skin. I dialed, trying to think of alternative combinations just in case I didn’t have the number right. I was lucky.