Gasa-Gasa Girl (4 page)

The grass in front was freshly seeded, and the familiar smell of steer manure burned Mas’s nostrils. He was surprised that Lloyd didn’t use chemical fertilizer pellets—odorless and definitely high-technology. Mas didn’t want to admit it, but he was impressed that Lloyd had opted for the old way instead of the new. Stuck in the steer manure was a rectangular sign:

Waxley House and Garden
est. 1919
Operated by the Ouchi Foundation

The door to the front seemed to be ajar, but Mas felt funny about going through the house. Seeing a gate to the side, he chose instead to enter the garden through the back way, his favorite approach to a strange place.

A large, leafless oak stood on one side of the property, making it look nothing like a Japanese garden. A couple of dozen cherry blossom trees had been introduced to the property, but their branches drooped as if they were in mourning. Mas went forward for a closer look. What the hell? The trees had been massacred—the branches pulled down and broken.

Mas also noticed the outline of the koi pond for the first time. Undoubtedly because of the weather, the pond was dry, with no signs of either fish or water. It was, however, filled with debris and trash; the vandals had indeed hit again.

“The police were already here; you just missed them.”

Mas turned to face a woman who was the size of two Maris—at least widthwise. She had a round face and short reddish brown hair that was chopped at an angle. She must have been around forty but had at least three sets of earrings dangling from one earlobe. Something about her eyes seemed Japanese.

“You must be Mari’s father, right? Lloyd mentioned that you’d be coming—you look just like Mari. I’m Becca Ouchi. I work with Lloyd.” She reached out her hand, a heavy silver ring around her thumb. Mas tentatively squeezed the woman’s hand. It was soft yet firm, like a slightly overstuffed pillow.

“Lloyd and Mari have been so great. My father’s not the easiest person to work for, but they’ve really been so devoted. And we’re all wild about Takeo. He’s like a member of our family. My brother, Phillip, says sometimes it seems like K-
san
and I favor Takeo over his children.” Becca laughed and then glanced at her watch, which was shaped like a sundial. “K-
san
should be here soon—I’m sure he’d love to meet you. He must be running a little late. And Lloyd, too. Is he on his way?”

Mas grunted. He didn’t know how to answer the woman’s question. He took stock of the damage again. “Terrible,” he muttered. The woman, on the other hand, didn’t seem that rattled at first glance.

“I’m used to it now. It’s quite an adventure: what havoc will I discover at the garden today?” She was trying to make a joke, but Mas noticed that her eyes were filled with tears. “K-
san
is going to be so pissed. This is the last straw; he’s going to close it down for sure now. Phillip will be happy to hear that.”

Becca went on. “He doesn’t understand how important this place is, to both K-
san
and me.”

K-
san
was this Kazzy Ouchi, so this was the daughter? Why was she calling him by his nickname? Must be a strange New York practice.

Becca must have picked up on Mas’s reaction. “I didn’t grow up with my father, so I never really called him ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy.’ K-
san
just worked out better.”

Mas didn’t know why women—at least those not related to him—always wanted to tell him their troubles. He was usually minding his own business, raking leaves by a customer’s back door or buying cigarettes and beer at the local liquor store, when some lady would appear right next to him, ready to spill her guts. Was it because they knew that he would keep his mouth shut or that he had no one, at least no one who mattered, to reveal their secrets to?

Mas looked over the garden once again. It wasn’t large, maybe fifteen hundred square feet, but Lloyd seemed to have put up a valiant effort. Azalea bushes and sculpted pine trees had all been arranged artfully around the dry koi pond. A thatch of bamboo was planted in the left-hand corner—Lloyd should be careful that the bamboo didn’t crowd out the rest of the plants, Mas thought. Bamboo, which could spread as fast as wildfire, was hell to deal with. A
toro
, a cement Japanese lantern, had been placed on the north side of the path next to three good-sized rocks. By a wooden shed in the other corner was a pile of smaller rocks, most likely to be eventually used to outline the edge of the pond. The pond itself was shaped like a
hyotan
, or gourd—not the classic
kokoro
shape, but a popular choice nonetheless. It was simple and uncomplicated, almost like an hourglass figure of a shapely woman. A bridge, trimmed with cut bamboo poles, stretched over the pond.

“You should have seen it—all covered over,” said Becca, obviously noticing Mas’s study of the pond. “It had been used as a badminton court. When the Waxley House recently came back on the market, K-
san
bought it and unearthed the pond. He’s restoring it the way his father would have wanted it to be.”

Mas nodded.

“My grandfather was Mr. Waxley’s gardener. He built this garden in K-
san
’s honor. Look, there’s even a dedication to him carved into the base of the pond.”

Becca began to push through the debris with her bare hands, but Mas waved her off. No matter how much he didn’t want to get involved in this mess, it wasn’t right for a lady—even one with three holes in her ears—to go through trash. He removed a pair of work gloves that he had stashed in his inside pocket. He’d figured that New York would be cold, and he’d had no time to buy proper gloves. He told Becca to bring over a shovel and some gauze or tape from a first aid kit. Becca seemed confused by the second request, but went dutifully anyway toward the toolshed in the corner.

Meanwhile, Mas wheeled a couple of plastic trash cans from the gate to the pond. When Becca returned, Mas brought her to the trees and showed her how to tape the cut branches together again—a grafting technique that he was very familiar with from years of work for Mrs. Witt, a former customer who had a passion for hybridizing different types of persimmons. Mrs. Witt had moved and the grafted trees had been pulled out months ago, but Mas had taken a few seeds from a persimmon mix and planted them in his backyard. You’d never know what Mother Nature would bless and what she would curse.

As Becca attended to the trees, Mas shoveled out the trash from the pond. Plastic tofu containers, empty cartons of soy milk, orange peels, coffee grounds, balled-up Kleenex, Pepto-Bismol bottles—a strange mix of the health conscious with the sick. With each shovelful of trash, Mas could better appreciate the pool maker’s handiwork. The pool was shallow on the outside edges and progressively deeper toward the middle. Since koi, which sometimes grow heavier than cats, need a lot of water to swim around in, the pond was at least four feet high at its deepest point. Kazzy Ouchi’s father had obviously known what he was doing.

With one trash can overflowing, Mas squatted on the bridge and dug toward the middle of the pool. The tip of the shovel hit something more solid, but it wasn’t the concrete bottom. Mas kept poking, but he couldn’t come up with anything besides coffee grounds. He finally jumped down and reached into the debris with one gloved hand. Funny. A black shoe. But not the kind of shoe that you’d normally find thrown away. It was fancy leather and, aside from the coffee grounds, not at all damaged. Mas pulled at the shoe and then immediately dropped it. Heavy, as if weighted down—no, it couldn’t be.

Mas waded through the trash, suddenly spurred on.

“Mr. Arai, what are you doing?” Becca turned away from one of the cherry branches, the medical tape still in her hands.

As Mas pushed away some dead leaves and more coffee grounds, he could now see a man’s face. Mas had seen his share of dead people years ago in Hiroshima during the aftermath of the Bomb, but they had been scorched, not frozen like this in the cold. The man’s skin looked like old chicken skin, and his eyes were still open, a funny gray color, like steel wool smeared with cleanser. Mas knew who it was even before Becca came over and gasped, “K-
san
.”

chapter three

The police came within fifteen minutes—stocky men stuffed in blue uniforms and windbreakers. They spent most of their time speaking to Becca, whose nose and eyes had become red and swollen from her crying. They barely acknowledged Mas, who was used to and even happy being overlooked.

The policemen took Becca into the house. Mas stayed outside in a corner of the garden and watched as more men and women, their hands gloved and mouths covered with cloth masks, came in to retrieve the body. They walked into the concrete pool, and as they lifted Kazzy’s shoulders, Mas noticed that a piece of the back of his head was missing. A woman wearing rubber boots waded into the trash, picked up something the size of a smashed peach and stained with the color of chocolate syrup—no doubt blood—and placed it into a plastic bag.

Mas felt woozy, his mouth raw as if his teeth had been extracted again with a double dose of novocaine. He welcomed the numbness, postponing the time when memories of dead bodies, both past and present, would haunt his mind.

Kazzy was wearing a fancy gray suit, and even with bits of trash stuck to it, Mas could tell the suit was at least five cuts above the black polyester funeral version hanging in the back of his closet in Altadena. As the body lay on the gurney, Mas noticed that Kazzy had been tall for a Nisei, probably around five feet eight or so. Workers wearing jackets that said CORONER on the back covered the body in cloth and then lifted the gurney, causing something white, as large as Mas’s fist, to flutter down to the ground. Mas was ready to say something, but then thought better of it. It was probably nothing, another balled-up Kleenex. No sense in calling attention to himself now.

After the people from the coroner’s office left the garden, Mas knelt down to get a better look at the white object. Wasn’t discarded tissue paper but a flower. A huge gardenia, whose edges were still white. Mas took out an old pen from his jeans pocket and poked the back of the pen gently into the center of the flower. The petals were stiff, not from the cold but from wax coating. There was a dark hair in the middle, much longer than an eyelash, but shorter than a regular strand of hair. “
Okashii,
” Mas muttered to himself. Strange.

“Hey, you, get the hell away from there!” It was a tall man with a heavy moustache and full head of hair. Some kind of shiny badge dangled from his black jacket.

Mas backed away from the gardenia. He looked both ways for a place to escape back into anonymity, but it was too late. This man wasn’t going to forget about him. A couple of the uniformed officers were stretching yellow tape across the now empty pond. Even the trash had been bagged and taken away.

“Come over here, sir. We need to have a conversation,” the man said.

Mas felt his hands grow sweaty. I didn’t do nothing, he told himself.

“I’m Detective Ghigo.” Strange name, thought Mas, accepting the detective’s business card. The card said Ghigo worked for the Seventy-seventh Precinct—wherever that was. “I understand you were the one to discover the body.”

Mas nodded.

“You can speak English, right, sir?”

Mas cursed in two languages in his mind. He wanted to sneer, but instead bit down on his dentures. He nodded his head again.

“What’s your name?”

“Mas.”

“Mas? M-A-S? That’s Spanish, right?”

“Japanese,” Mas spouted out. “Izu Japanese.”

“Your full name?”

“Masao Arai.”

“Arai? So how do you spell that?”

“A-R-A-I.”

“Okay, so what do you have to do with this garden? Is this your place of work?”

Mas paused. Was it or was it not? “First day.”

“Well, what a way to start your first day of work, huh? Address?”

“Izu live in California.”

“California—that’s a long commute, Mr. Arai.”

Mas shook his head and took out his wallet. “Izu livin’ here now.” He took out a scrap of paper with Lloyd and Mari’s name, address, and phone number.

“Lloyd and Mari Jensen; I’m looking for them. What is your connection to them, Mr. Arai?”

“Daughter and son-in-law.”

“Well, where might they be? They were expected here this morning. In fact, about an hour ago.”

Mas hesitated. He knew by the tone of the detective’s voice that both Lloyd and Mari were under suspicion.

“They comin’, they comin’. Problems with their kid. Their son, Takeo.”

“Well, I called their house, and no answer. Cell phone, same thing.”

Mas licked his lips. It was so damn cold in this Brooklyn place.

“I don’t want you going anywhere, Mr. Arai. You just stay put here for a while.”

M
as had to warm up his joints, so he went into the house through the back door. There was a small room with a photocopy machine and shelves holding office supplies, most likely once a bedroom for the servants. Then a large tiled kitchen and, beyond that, an open living room with bright-colored paintings on the wall. At a long table sat Becca, who had been crying so hard that half circles of black makeup shadowed her eyes. A man in his mid-thirties was pacing the hardwood floors. “I told him that this project would only mean trouble. I told him, I told him. Now he’s fallen off the bridge and killed himself.”

“We don’t know that, Phillip. He was covered in trash. Somebody buried him. Probably the same people who were vandalizing the garden.”

Phillip’s face turned a chalky white. He suddenly noticed that Mas was in the room. “Who’s this guy?”

“Phillip, this is Mr. Arai, Mari’s father. Mr. Arai, this is my brother, Phillip.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“He’s come to help on the garden. To make sure that it’s ready by May.”

“Well, there won’t be any opening.” Phillip finally looked straight at Mas, who made note of the familiar steel gray eyes. “So we won’t be needing your services, Mr. Arai, or Lloyd’s.”

“You don’t know that, Phillip. The garden is part of the foundation, and it’s the foundation’s decision to make.”

“Well, we’re two of the five board members, not to mention Dad, and he’s not around to say one way or the other.”

“And I’m not for canceling anything. This was K-
san
’s dream. And I’m not going to let him down, especially now.” Becca began to cry again, and Mas was amazed that more tears could come out of her swollen eyes.

Phillip gripped Becca’s shoulder and glared at Mas. “Can you please give us some privacy?”

Before Mas could explain that he had been ordered by Detective Ghigo to stay put, Phillip practically pushed him out of the living room and then the kitchen and laundry room. Before Mas knew it, he was outside behind the closed back door.

M
as sat on the cement steps and sucked on another cigarette. The coldness from the stairs soaked through his jeans into his
oshiri
, but he didn’t care. He blew out smoke and was grateful for the quiet, aside from the steady hum of cars on the street. Detective Ghigo was back inside the house, questioning Kazzy’s two children. Where the hell were Mari and Lloyd? This didn’t look good, them disappearing and a dead man in Lloyd’s place of work. Mas didn’t know what kind of relationship Kazzy had with Lloyd and Mari, but knowing how his daughter felt about authority figures, it couldn’t have been too good. And where was the wife? Becca and Phillip acted like a pair of siblings who seemed unanchored to each other. Mas had a hunch that their mother was already dead—without the mother, the family was never the same.

Before Mas could start on his third cigarette, a young
hakujin
man came through the back gate. He was dressed in a black suit and black tie, but he was no businessman. First of all, he wore tennis shoes—the modern kind, with bright-red wafflelike soles and silly white swoops sewn into the leather. To top it off, his hair was whipped into tiny cones that dangled like baby sea eels stuck in a piece of coral.

“Hey,” the man said to him.

Mas just grunted back. He wasn’t going to waste any extra energy to say “hallo” to someone who was going to “hey” him.

“Got an extra smoke?”

Mas studied the man. He wasn’t homeless; some kind of working stiff. Mas held out his Marlboro package.

“Thanks.” The man slipped a cigarette into his mouth and returned the package to Mas. He flipped open a shiny metal lighter and leaned the cigarette into the flame. After a few puffs, the man attempted to make some conversation. “I’ve never seen you before.”

Well, never seen you before either, Mas thought. He had little patience for small talk, but here he had little choice. “Help wiz garden.”

“Oh, yeah? Were you here when they found—”

Mas nodded his head.

“No kiddin’. Right over there?” The man pointed his cigarette to the empty pond, the yellow police ribbon stretched across from the bamboo to a broken-down cherry blossom tree.

Mas nodded.

“Shit, gives me the creeps. I guess the police want you to hang around.”

Mas exhaled smoke from his nostrils. “You knowsu him— Kazzy?”

“Yeah, real nice guy. He lives in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, but he seemed to hang out here the most. Anytime I gave him a ride, he always gave me a good tip. Twenty dollars, even, for taking him a couple of blocks.” The man extended his hand. He wore ragged knit gloves with the tips of the fingers cut off. “I’m J-E. Miss Waxley’s driver.”

“Jay,” Mas repeated, not bothering to shake the man’s gloved hand or introduce himself.

“No, no. Jay-Ee. The letter J, hyphen, then E. J-E.”

Mas paid little attention to the driver’s detailed instructions on how to spell his name. What did he care? “Your boss live ova here?” Mas gestured toward the Waxley House.

J-E shook his head, causing his twisted tufts of hair to tremble. “Nobody lives there now. Just offices. Used to be Miss Waxley’s father’s place way back when, though. Miss Waxley’s here because she’s a member of the foundation board. By the way, how’s Becca taking it?”

Mas shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know the daughter that well, but from the looks of it, her response was not good.

“I call her ‘sweet,’ her brother ‘sour.’ Have you met the brother?”

Mas nodded.

“He thinks that he’s all that, you know. Conceited bastard. He thinks that he’s the only one who knows what’s going on. Becca and the rest of us are fools, he thinks.”

Mas didn’t care to listen to family gossip. He brought the conversation back to the garden. “Somebody must be out to get dis Kazzy. Or at least his garden.”

“Well, he’s a rich guy. Must have had his share of enemies. But the garden, what would anyone have against that? Doesn’t hurt anyone, you know?”

The back gate to the garden swung open and slammed shut. A bald
hakujin
man in an oversized sweater walked over to the stairs, his legs spread wide and his elbows out, as if he were challenging them to a gunfight at high noon. “Is that your damn Cadillac parked outside my house again?”

“Hey, it’s a free country. The street is public property,” said J-E.

“I’m expecting a special delivery today. I need the street clear today for my delivery guys.”

“Well, that’s not my problem. You don’t own the street.”