Death in Little Tokyo (6 page)

8

H
ansen sat in a small room directly opposite me. Between us was a metal table covered with linoleum. At one corner of the table there was the microphone of a tape recorder, positioned unobtrusively. On Hansen’s side of the table was a large manila envelope. It had been a long afternoon.

“All right,” Hansen said. “Let’s go through your story one more time.”

He had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. The bright light from the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling framed his head and highlighted the fact that he was starting to go bald. The closely cropped hair had a definite shiny spot at the back of his head. Hansen had combed his remaining hair forward and to one side to help camouflage the receding hairline at the temples. His face was broad, with a wide chin. The scars of an adolescent problem with acne still pitted his cheeks.

I had already come to dislike Mr. Hansen intensely. He had a condescending manner that just made me bristle. I was raised to respect authority and to view good cops as heroes. Hansen may have been a good cop, but in my opinion he was a lousy human being. In life you come across all sorts of people. Some you like, some you don’t like, and most you don’t have strong feelings about one way or another. It’s terrible when you come across someone you instantly don’t like who has some power over your life. Hansen fit this description perfectly.

“You say you met Matsuda around eight?”

“That’s right.”

“And that he was not alone.”

“No. He had a woman in the room with him.”

“And that you took the woman to be a prostitute?”

“She acted like a prostitute. At least some of the things she said certainly suggested it. She said something about being a dancer, and even did a little pirouette.”

“Like a ballet dancer?”

“Yes, but she didn’t look like that kind of dancer. I told you she said something about waving a G-string, and the last time I looked ballet dancers don’t wear G-strings.” Hansen didn’t like my sarcasm, and I told myself that I shouldn’t let my dislike for him push me into acting like a smartass. “She had dyed red hair, was short, and a little plump. I’ve gone through this story twice before and told you exactly what she said.”

“You didn’t tell me about the little pirouette before. Just cooperate with us, Mr. Tanaka.”

“I’m sorry.” I shrugged. “I know you’re going over and over my story to see if it’s too pat, and therefore memorized, or too full of holes, and therefore inconsistent. But I’ve told you the truth and no matter how many times we go over the story it will come out more or less the same way each time.”

Hansen tapped the table with his fingers in irritation. He absently reached to his shirt pocket where he had a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He caught himself and actually scowled. Early in the interview he had asked me if I minded if he smoked. In the cooped-up little room I most certainly did mind, and Hansen had now gone a couple of hours without a smoke. “Let’s try a different topic for a while then. Why don’t you tell me more about this club that you belong to?”

“The L.A. Mystery Club is a group of mystery enthusiasts who get together monthly to solve crimes.”

“Crimes?” Hansen’s eyebrows angled quizzically.

“Not real crimes,” I added. “Some members of the club create the crime that’s going to be solved. The other members come on a Saturday and follow a trail of clues to see if they can solve the crime. Afterward there’s a dinner where the winners are announced and the solution is revealed.”

“So it’s sort of like kids playing Let’s Pretend,” Hansen said.

“No. It’s adults solving intellectual puzzles. Sometimes quite complicated intellectual puzzles. But to solve these puzzles you pretend to be something that you’re not. To solve the puzzles some members play roles like in a play. Sometimes we even hire professional actors. They act the parts of various characters in the mystery. The other members sometimes act out the parts of various favorite detectives.”

“Like what?”

“Like Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple, characters from detective literature. People like that.”

“It all sounds kind of silly to me,” Hansen said.

“Most recreation is. With you, solving crimes is a profession. With us, it’s a hobby. There’s a difference in your outlook when you’re doing something just for the fun of it.”

“It seems like there’s a more important difference,” Hansen said. “All these club crimes are just foolishness. What I’ve got on my hands is a real murder.”

I felt my face burn red. I hated Hansen’s attitude, and his remarks about the childishness of the L.A. Mystery Club were all the more infuriating because they had a germ of truth to them. Despite this truth, I felt my anger toward Hansen growing. In the back of my mind I wondered if this was a technique Hansen was using in an effort to make me lose my temper and perhaps say something that I normally wouldn’t.

“So because of this club activity, you rented the office and had business cards made up,” Hansen continued.

“Yes.” My voice now had a brittleness caused by anger.

“And you claim that this woman, Rita Newly, showed up at your office by mistake.”

“I assume it was a mistake. Initially I thought it might be another member of the L.A. Mystery Club playing a trick on me.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“Obviously not.”

“So she hired you to go get the package from Matsuda?”

“That’s right.”

“And you decided to play detective and do it.”

Once again I felt my face turning red with embarrassment and anger. My jaw clenched and I spat out, “Yes.”

“So apparently you weren’t able to differentiate between your little playacting and reality?”

“Apparently.”

“You didn’t get Newly’s address or telephone number?”

“No.”

Hansen sighed and sat back in his chair. “Not much of a detective, are you?”

“Apparently not.”

“By the way, what did you do with the package?” Hansen asked.

“I gave it to her,” I lied.

“Rita Newly?”

“The woman who called herself Rita Newly.” My anger made me lie about the disposition of the package, and I knew it was a mistake to make such a foolish statement as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I was about to retract the lie when I saw Hansen shaking his head with a patronizing smirk.

“So essentially you were a delivery boy and not a detective.”

“Yes, and please don’t call me a boy. I’m a full-grown man.” I stared at the black tube of the microphone sitting on the desk and wanted desperately to retract my lie, but I realized the entire interview was being recorded, and I didn’t know how to extricate myself gracefully from the situation I had just put myself in without giving Hansen a chance for more snotty comments.

Hansen lifted up the manila envelope. “I want to show you something.” He opened up the envelope and took out several large photographs. “These are pictures of the body and the room. Could you identify Matsuda if I showed them to you?”

“I only met him once. Aren’t you sure he was the one who was killed?”

“The fingerprints and photo matched his passport, so we’re sure who the victim was,” Hansen said. “But I want you to look at the pictures to make sure the man in the room you met was actually Matsuda.”

Hansen hesitated a second, then added, “It may be difficult to identify Matsuda’s face. The body was pretty well cut up. The doctors say a lot of it was done after he was already dead. It was a pretty violent murder.”

Hansen handed the photos to me. I looked at the first photo. My stomach gave an immediate lurch at the sight. It was in color; an eight-by-ten blowup.

Lying on the floor in a corner of the room, dressed in the same suit that I had seen him in, was the body of Matsuda, or what was left of it. Long red slices crisscrossed the head and shoulders, and flaps of skin, matted with blood and hair, hung loosely, exposing the white skull beneath. It was hard to identify the face with the multitude of slashes, but I could see a part of the birthmark on a patch of skin that still clung to the skull. Blood was splashed everywhere.

In my short time in Vietnam I can’t say that I know for sure that I ever killed someone. I shot at people but I never actually saw anyone get hit. I did see several people killed, however, including someone blown to pieces by a land mine. It was his second day in Vietnam, and he was just unlucky. The horror of that ripped-apart body in Vietnam was no worse than the slashed body before me in the pictures. But for some reason the situation with Matsuda struck me as somehow more terrible. The body in Vietnam was mutilated by the effects of mindless energy during a time of war; an explosion set off because a foot was placed on the wrong patch of earth. The body in the picture was ripped to pieces because someone had stood before it and slashed at it over and over again.

In the picture, one of Matsuda’s arms was twisted to one side, and the other arm was just a stump. A ring of blood soaked the end of the cut-off jacket sleeve where the rest of Matsuda’s arm should have been.

I shuffled the pictures. The second picture explained the mystery of the missing arm. Lying on the green rug of the hotel room was the severed arm, with the hand mutilated and missing some fingers. It seemed to be resting just inside the doorway, where someone entering the room would see it first. Next to the arm was a little slip of paper with a number written on it. It was some kind of identification number used by the photographer.

I turned to another picture to see one of the severed fingers lying on the carpet in a closeup shot. The curly nap of the green carpet was clearly visible, with the brown severed finger lying incongruously on it like some red and tan slug crawling across a curly green sea bottom. Another identification number flanked the finger.

The last picture was a closeup of the face. The flesh was sliced by dozens of blows that exposed bloody muscle and bone. I glanced at it without focusing on what I was seeing. I handed the pictures back to Hansen.

“It’s unbelievable,” I said, shaken.

“It’s not unbelievable because it happened. That’s the difference between your recreation and my job. The blows on the hands and wrists are characteristic of defense wounds; someone placing their hands and arms over their head to protect themselves. That’s how the fingers got sliced off and how the arm was hacked off, too. You can see the defense mechanism didn’t do much good, because even after Matsuda was dead someone continued to hack away at his head. The forensics boys say it was probably done with a long, sharp instrument. Maybe a sword.”

“A sword? It must be a maniac.”

Hansen shrugged. “Who knows. Some people do worse things for just a few bucks. But this was pretty bad. Whoever did this was not someone with just a casual grudge against Matsuda.”

“I can’t identify the face with all the head wounds, but it’s the same suit that Matsuda was wearing when I saw him earlier that evening, and I saw part of a birthmark on Matsuda’s cheek. Or at least that part of the cheek that is still attached to the skull.”

“And after seeing these,” Hansen said, touching the photographs, “do you have anything else you want to say to us about what happened?”

I shook my head, too upset to even remember my lie.

When I finally got out of Parker Center, the main police headquarters in L.A., I wanted to pick up Mariko, tell her what had happened, and ask her for advice.

9

I
don’t think Americans are an especially honest people. Cheating on taxes is endemic, and everyone speeds over sixty-five miles per hour. I admit to the latter, but I’m too scared to do the former. I used to have a friend call me every April to boast how little he was paying in taxes. He accomplished this through outrageous cheating, and he was proud of it. He stopped calling the year I told him that because of cheating bastards like him, stupid bastards like me were paying more taxes.

We like to think we’re honest, and old Frank Capra movies celebrate the innate honesty of Americans. We’re decent and frank and open and we often confuse all these traits with real honesty. Maybe Americans were more honest when Capra made movies in the 1930s, but now honesty is not as celebrated as shrewdness. Top government officials circumvent the law when it suits them, and Savings and Loan executives, lawyers, and car salesmen have the reputation for being so crooked that these professions have become a shorthand for what Capra would have called “sharp dealing.” It’s sad, but there you have it.

Having said all this, I must admit I was shredded by remorse about not telling Hansen the truth about the package. Dickens once said, “The law is an ass.” I thought Hansen was a supercilious ass, but he was still the law.

Mariko curled into the curve of my arm. We were both sitting on my dilapidated couch with our feet up on my equally dilapidated coffee table. “I’ve got to tell him about the package tomorrow,” I said.

Mariko looked thoughtful. “I think you’ve got to talk to my cousin Michael, first.”

“The lawyer?”

“Yes. Get his advice first, then tell Hansen about the package.”

“You really think that’s necessary? Consulting a lawyer, I mean?”

“You’re the one who was hauled downtown to talk about the murder. You let them look over your car and you sat for hours talking to them. You probably should have had a lawyer then and you shouldn’t have given up your rights, because you told me you certainly knew them. You said that Hansen rubbed you the wrong way. He’s just looking for a suspect in the murder and you might be it, Ken. I think you better get Michael’s advice before you just march down to the police and say you actually have the package.”

“Correction: You’ve got the package.”

“Well, it’s at the boutique.”

“Is it in a safe place?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it in a hatbox in the stockroom. It’s safe, unless we get hit by a hat burglar, as opposed to a cat burglar.”

“Very funny.” I paused. “I’m sorry I got you involved in this,” I told Mariko.

“Well, I am involved in it, at least because I have an investment in you that I don’t want to see wasted. After all the work I’ve been putting into you, I don’t want some gorilla named Bubba to reap the rewards of what I’ve done just because he ends up as your cell mate.”

“Meaning?”

Mariko reached up and patted my cheek. “Meaning those nights in prison can get awfully long and lonely, and you might start looking awfully good to some of those guys in there.”

“That’s a comforting thought.”

She smiled, “Well, it’s something to think about. I might not be the only one that finds your sweet buns attractive.”

I rolled my eyes.

“By the way, that Hansen guy sounds like a creep,” Mariko continued.

“I guess he’s just doing his job.”

“Do you think he was so snotty because you’re Japanese?”

That was an angle I hadn’t resolved. Racism doesn’t spring to mind whenever I have an unpleasant encounter with someone, but the insidious problem with racism is that once you’ve been stung by it you always have it lingering as a possibility.

When my marriage fell apart, I had a job programming at the Calcommon Corporation. With my personal life in shambles, I decided to concentrate on my career. I think now that I was embarrassed and hurt by the divorce more than I realized and simply wanted to divert my energies into something I viewed as an activity of the intellect instead of an activity of the heart.

Over time I noticed that I was not advancing in my career. Although my performance reviews were excellent, I was not made a supervisor or manager. I started taking business courses at UCLA in an effort to get into management, but that didn’t seem to advance my career, either.

I used to think that the world is color-blind. Maybe that’s my Hawaiian upbringing. Lately I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that race is becoming the defining factor of our lives. Maybe this is because I live in Los Angeles, which has degenerated into a collection of ethnic tribes instead of a community. Here all the racial groups are in deadly competition. Literally. This has consequences for all of us, no matter what our race is.

One consequence for me was the nagging doubt that maybe I wasn’t being promoted at Calcommon because I was an Asian. It would have been a relief if some third party I trusted would just tell me I wasn’t good enough to be made a manager, but that wasn’t the case. The difficult assignments I got showed I was performing my job, and I had no problems working in teams. My performance reviews were always outstanding.

One day, out of curiosity, I took out a Calcommon organization chart and marked down the races and gender of the corporation’s top management. There was one Latino (who was in charge of buying office supplies), one black (given the title of manager, but just in charge of the mail room), and only one woman (also given the title manager, but really in charge of employee activities like the annual picnic). The rest of Calcommon’s management structure was lily white and male.

If you’re a white male, this kind of research may bring a wince to your face. Some white males have been treated very unfairly in ham-fisted efforts to correct past racial and gender wrongs by perpetrating new wrongs. But traditional barriers to nonwhite and nonmale employees far exceed the new barriers to white males. That doesn’t make any barrier right, but it does mean that if you’re not a white male, you’re probably more likely to come into contact with prejudice.

In my own country I’ve been called a gook, a chink, a Jap, and a slope. I think “gook” was first applied to Koreans, “chink” to Chinese, “slopes” to Vietnamese, and “Jap” is both obnoxious and obvious. Asians in the U.S. get to learn the full range of ethnic slurs, no matter what their real ethnicity is. I’ve also been told to go back to my own country, even though America has been home to my family since 1896.

Like many people, I’m tired of some people excusing their personal conduct because of past injustices to their race, religion, sexual preference, or gender. Despite that, racial prejudice was a possibility when faced with the situation I was in.

I talked to my immediate supervisor about promotion and Calcommon’s racial policies, and he was very uncomfortable. He said he would talk to our department manager about my concerns, and eventually I was granted an interview with Calcommon’s white, male vice-president of human resources. Mr. VP gave me the usual song and dance and said that if my performance warranted it, I would certainly be considered for a supervisory or management position.

And then a strange thing happened. A few months later I got my first mediocre performance review at Calcommon.

I was angry and upset, and I remember my immediate supervisor wouldn’t look me in the eye when he gave me the review. I was transferred from software development to software maintenance. In the world of software, development is where the fun and challenge is. Maintenance is usually where you stick beginners and less-qualified programmers, who spend their days making minor changes to the work of others.

As I considered my options, the nagging voice of my mother reached out from the grave. Like a good second generation Japanese mother, she valued security above all else. When she was alive she’d counsel, “Don’t make waves” or “Play along” or “Don’t cause trouble,” and to my undying shame, as soon as the anger passed, that’s what I did.

About a year later Calcommon went through what the MBA types euphemistically call “downsizing,” and I was cut. So much for playing safe and not making waves. Calcommon did give me a generous severance package, but I regarded that as a payoff for being a “model minority.”

I was tired of being a model minority, but I didn’t relish the thought of having to confess to Hansen that I had misled him about the package. I decided to take Mariko’s advice and talk to her lawyer cousin Michael before I did anything more.

“You said the pictures of the body were pretty awful,” Mariko said.

“They were. I bet the television crews were mad as hell they couldn’t get into the room to film it.”

“You’re getting cynical in your old age.”

“Age has nothing to do with it. I was always cynical. As I get older I’m just getting braver about showing it. You know blood and gore make for big ratings. The only thing missing is sex, and maybe the prostitute in Matsuda’s room or Rita Newly will supply that.” I paused. “It really was awful to see those pictures, Mariko. But the way Matsuda died is in itself a clue.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the cops said that he was hacked up with something like a sword. People don’t go running around with swords these days. It’s hard to understand why you’d chose that weapon. Plus somebody had a real grudge against Matsuda or else they wouldn’t have taken the time and effort to slice him up the way they did.”

“It must have been a mess,” Mariko said.

“It was. They didn’t show me all the pictures, but I’m sure the entire room must have been splattered in blood. Whoever did it must have been covered in it. In fact, it’s amazing that they were able to get out of the hotel without someone seeing them covered with blood.”

Mariko touched my cheek. “You’re shaking.” We kissed. Her lips were cool and moist. I sank into their softness and, after a time, I stopped shaking. I’ll spare you the active details of our sex life. Just think of pounding surf, rearing stallions, heavy rain, and any other sexual cliché you like from old movies.

When we were done with our lovemaking, during that period when women like to cuddle and men just want to drift into unconsciousness, Mariko said, “Did you forget about tomorrow night?”

That snapped me awake. Women and men sometimes have trouble communicating, but even the dullest man learns when a woman is broadcasting a signal. This was not a question; it was a test. Men hate these tests, but women keep giving them because we men seem to keep failing them. “Of course not. It’s your first time speaking at an AA meeting, and I will be there for you,” I said with aplomb.

She snuggled closer to me. The test was not only passed, it was aced.