Japantown (8 page)

“She was a housewife.”

“Any major events in their lives recently? Death, a falling-out with a partner, lovers’ quarrel?”

“No.”

“Can you think of any reason why someone might want to kill them?”

“None.”

“How about you? You must have enemies.”

“No one who would do that.”

“You sure?”

“Of course.”

“Right. Why should this be simple?”

Maybe one of the victims had an unpleasant secret,
I thought.

Hara drummed his fingers on his knee. “One more thing. I’ve asked my younger daughter to fly in from New York so you can interview her. She was close to her sister.”

“Fine.”

“Do you know her?” he asked casually, an odd mixture of pride and suspicion in his voice. The pride was there because Lizza Hara was a brat-pack-type celebrity in her home country, the suspicion because the ongoing feud between father and daughter made headlines regularly.

“I read the papers.”

“She’s not that well known in the West yet.”

“Who said anything about Western papers.”

“Excellent,” the tycoon said, rising. “I can see I’m in good hands. I’ve got a full agenda this trip, so I must go, but we’ll talk again soon.”

With the regal formality of his status, he gave a brief bow and departed, his bodyguard picking himself up and trailing after.

As the two men wound their way between the tansu chests and folding screens to the front of my shop, I thought about how easily Hara had found me. If Hara could do it, so could others. And there was nothing to prevent a clever person from doing it faster.

Particularly if he didn’t have to fly in from Tokyo.

CHAPTER 12

T
HE M&N
Tavern and Grill squatted on the northwest corner of Fifth and Howard like a toad on a rock, compact and colorless and wallflower-perfect for a police lieutenant seeking a low profile.

“Nice table,” I said, pulling out a chair.

“My regular.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

Staking out an isolated two-seater against a wall of dark walnut paneling, Renna had selected a roost separated from the rest of the tables by an aisle leading to the bar. If we kept our voices down, no one would be within earshot once a waitress took our order, and Renna could watch the front door while staying out of sight of any passersby who might glance in the window.

Renna caught my faint limp. “You cut yourself shaving?”

“Ran into a punk with a blade.”

“File a police report?”

“No. I figure you guys have a few higher priorities at the moment.”

But after Hara’s departure, I had hobbled over to Dr. Shandler’s on the next block, where he informed me that I’d managed the remarkable feat of reopening the wound
and
lengthening the cut. My victory over the Great Wall cost me fifteen stitches and a bill the good doctor told me he would take in trade. Shandler’s tastes ran to high-end Japanese lacquer-ware and I had several new additions, including an elegant pair of red-and-black
neguro
trays I’d bet a month’s earnings he would salivate over.

“There’s one more thing,” I said, and filled Renna in on the flurry of activity at my shop and home after Japantown.

“Food for thought,” he said, “I’ll look into it. You know the menu?”

“What’s to know? Just coffee for me.”

The M&N was a San Francisco relic. It serves Middle American fare with solid home fries and the occasional regional eccentricity like boiled Louisiana crawfish and corn. Otherwise you got burgers, barbecued chicken, and truck-stop omelets. One day a food critic with an itchy pen and a looming deadline would probably wander in and write the place up as a retro diner, using words like
unassuming
and
disarmingly quaint,
and regulars like Renna would have to wait out a wave of newcomers, unless a wrecking ball found the place first.

Renna’s lips twitched. “What is it? Mieko?”

“Mieko, little Miki, the mother. All of them.”

“Something like Japantown will burn a hole in you if you’re not careful.”

“A family, Frank. A whole goddamn family.”

At the bar, two postmen in their summer-weight uniforms glanced our way.

Renna ran thick fingers through his hair. “Keep it down, will you? Look, you never forget, but you learn to live with it. If you’re lucky, in the morning your hash browns still taste like hash browns. But hell, you know that, Brodie. You’re no virgin. Otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“True enough.”

Survival around South Central was an endless dance, deadly and primordial. You could never let your guard down. If you got careless, you got hurt. I’d seen the battered and the bruised and the dead. But until last night I’d never seen a whole family slaughtered.

—

A blond waitress arrived with pen poised and I ordered coffee, Renna a coke and cheeseburger. When our drinks arrived, Renna watched me without comment.

I said, “You mind telling me why you’re so hot for this case?”

“You don’t think the five-count is enough?”

“I know it’s not.”

Last night I’d seen more in his eyes. I just couldn’t decipher what I’d seen.

Renna glanced at the wall, which held framed black-and-white stills of workmen erecting towering steel beams, from a time when San Francisco was eager and proud and raising her bridges. Stout men with hard hats and T-shirts hauled melon-thick cables into position, navigating catwalks suspended hundreds of feet above churning bay waters.

“Last year we bought Christine a dress just like the one Miki Nakamura was wearing, only blue. It’s why I became a cop. I won’t run from this.”

I nodded slowly. With a senseless killing, you never knew what would get under your skin. What might strike too close to home.

Renna leaned forward, eyes inflamed. “Listen, I’ll keep you informed, but I want you to stay on it. For as long as it takes. Can you do that?”

“Easily.”

“Even if the kanji’s not Mieko’s?”

“After what I saw? Not a problem. Till death do us part,” I said, thinking of Mieko.

“Good.”

Renna withdrew an envelope from his jacket pocket and extracted two pieces of paper, spreading them on the table between us. One was the scrap from the crime scene encased in a cellophane evidence bag, the other an enlarged photocopy. “The kanji cleaned up like you said.”

One look at the full array of black strokes shimmering on the textured Japanese paper and I felt my heart stutter. Before me lay an exact
copy of the character I’d seen on the sun-bleached sidewalk in Los Angeles. Not similar. Not off by a line or two, but a dead-on duplicate; a stroke-for-stroke replication. Designating Japantown as the fourth known strike by the same killer.

“Well?” Renna asked.

I found my voice with difficulty. “It’s the same. Exactly the same.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Renna said. “You want, I could push the LAPD to reopen Mieko’s file.”

My breath caught in my throat. For the longest time, I’d hoped for just such a scenario, but now that the offer was on the table, I hesitated. More than two years had passed. Down south, the evidence was nothing but cold cinders. Motivation would be lacking.

“Will anything come of it?”

He shrugged. “My guess, the ball’s in our court. We catch the perp, we wrap up your wife’s case too.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Good,” he said again, his voice dropping half an octave without losing clarity, “then here’s what I want. First, the Japantown shoot cranks things up a notch, so I need you to look for the kanji under new rocks. And this time I need answers. Lots of answers.”

I rubbed the paper with the J-town kanji between my fingers. “Well, for starters, the stock is standard Japanese calligraphy parchment. Mass-produced. Machine-made. Not a local handmade
washi
.”

Washi is the traditional Japanese paper you expect to see with calligraphy. It also features in scroll paintings, lanterns, and shoji screens. The best-quality paper is still made by hand in a way that has survived hundreds of years: a tray lined with wire mesh is dipped into a vat of pulped plant fiber suspended in water. The mesh captures a layer of pulp, then the papermaker hauls it up and allows the captured pulp fiber to solidify into a textured sheet.

Renna cut me a look that suggested I’d have to do more than recite a few cultural nuggets to earn my keep.

I said, “I take it your lab rats already told you that.”

“Hours ago.”

“Try this, then. Commercial washi is sold all over Japan and in many stores here. Handmade washi is made in limited quantities by
individuals and is easy to trace by its style, which varies by region. Your labbies tell you that?”

“No.”

“So if this paper was intentionally left by the shooter, then using commercial washi suggests caution.”

“Okay. What about the character?”

“Your boys can’t make any sense of it either?”

“It’s being handled through channels. I want answers before the next ice age sets in, global warming permitting. Tell me
why
you can’t read the thing.”

“It’s not
joyo
or
toyo
or recent historical kanji.”

“You want to translate that into English?”

“Means the character isn’t current, immediate pre- or postwar, or anything commonly used as far back as, say, the mid-seventeenth century.”

“You call the seventeenth century recent history?”

“When you’re talking about a culture that traces its roots back two thousand years, yes.”

“Don’t like the sound of that. What else you got?”

“The writer is a male in his sixties or seventies.”

Renna shot up in his seat. “You sure?”

“Very. The hand is masculine and mature.”

“Is it Japanese?”

“It’s a Japanese character written by a Japanese, if it’s anything. Not Chinese. But the writing’s off somehow.”

“Maybe it’s a forger or an imitator.”

“No, it was written by a Japanese. The lines are full and well proportioned and that’s impossible to do unless you’re Japanese or studied in Japan for years
and
from a very young age.”

“Why?”

I brushed the strokes in the air with my finger. “Because writing kanji with all the components properly balanced takes practice. And then there’s the stroke order that’s got to be memorized. The order here is correct, and the balance is as it should be, which means the kanji wasn’t copied or traced cold from an existing manuscript by an imitator. This was written by a Japanese with a special brush or brush-tipped pen.”

“Then how is it off?”

“The writing is shaky. Uneven in places. As is the ink.”

“Maybe the old man had a few too many.”

“No, the style’s tight. I’m thinking that whoever penned the kanji doesn’t write it often. Or he has arthritis or some other age-related disability.”

Renna brightened. “That’s good too. Anything else?”

“That’s all for now.”

Renna leaned back in his chair, hands webbed over his belly, momentarily sated with the crumbs I’d fed him. “You know, we catch a lucky break, we might close this quick.”

I gave him a doubtful look. “What’s that? The party line?”

Renna’s face collapsed. “It’s what I thought last night. Now I think Japantown is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I’m still going to bag the bastard, but the thing’s already tail-spinning. People are spooked.”

Renna’s voice nosedived as he spoke, startling me. He never talked doomsday.

“This isn’t witchcraft, Frank.”

“Late-night murders and unreadable ciphers? You know how suspicious cops get. They’re saying J-town’s one to steer away from. They’re saying the case’s gonna sink in forty-eight, taking everyone down with it.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I’m going to ride it out no matter what. Now tell me what the hell I’m looking at and why this goddamn kanji’s got my people squirming like they’ve seen the devil. I need to crawl inside this bastard’s brain.”

CHAPTER 13

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

H
ELENA
Spengler was disgusted with the pair of creepy Asian men lounging uninvited in her sitting room.

“Christoph, do you know these gentlemen?” the Swiss banker’s wife asked. Serena, that worthless heifer, had shown them in ahead of her master’s return, then vanished into the back rooms.

“Vaguely, dear. I met one of them last week.”

The older Asian, with funny orangeish skin and narrow eyes, sat erect on the Louis XV settee with the Aubusson tapestry. He, at least, showed some respect. The one with the ponytail slouched in Christoph’s easy chair as if he owned it, long limbs hanging over all the wrong places.

“Should I have coffee brought or . . . ?” She left the sentence unfinished, the implication being that she would have no qualms about ringing the local constable.

Which was when Lawrence Casey, the younger Asian, appeared behind her without warning. Slinging one arm across her chest, he locked her in a hold while his free hand curled around from the other side and pressed a handkerchief to her face. As she struggled, Mrs. Spengler found herself mystified.