Sayonara Slam (16 page)

As soon as he stepped out of the room, he noticed that someone had been standing by the doorway. Sally Lee, without her camera. She'd most likely been eavesdropping, spying on him the whole time. Mas lowered his head, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, but Sally called out to him, her voice stripped of its previous hard edges. “I have to apologize,” she said. “I was a bit harsh with you the other day. She's been so hurt by Japanese men in the past. I want to make sure it doesn't happen again.”

Mas grunted in reply. He didn't like to be stirred into the same pot as pieces of trash. Sally Lee didn't know him, and he didn't know her. But he was getting to know Mrs. Kim. And for her, he accepted the apology.

Mas returned to the waiting room, the baseball in his hand.

“What is that?” Jin-Won asked.

“Oh, found dat in outfield.” He tossed it to Jin-Won. Probably would make more sense in the pitcher's possession than in his. Neko looked on, but Yuki was nowhere to be seen.

“Where'su Yuki?”

“The police have him,” Neko said.

Mas's back stiffened.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that. They're here and they had some follow-up questions for him. I'm sure it's just routine.”

Mas breathed in and out. With police detectives, nothing was routine.

Neko and Jin-Won took turns holding the ball. They held it as Smitty had shown Mas, with the thumb down and the index and third fingers stretched out like a claw.

Neko kept shaking her head. “
Okashii
.” Strange? What was strange?

She turned to Mas. “The grip. It feels off. Maybe this ball is defective in some way. Hit too many times.” Yet the outside skin was perfectly white.

“Mista Mas, you have a knife?” Jin-Won asked.

Did Mas look like some kind of
bakatare
to bring a knife into a hospital? And then he remembered that he did in fact have his pocketknife with him.

Jin-Won took Mas's pocketknife, opened it, and started to cut into the skin of the ball.
This would not do
, Mas thought. Jin-Won's hands were worth millions, while Mas's garnered him a hundred dollars on a good day. “I'zu do it,” he said.

He jiggled the short blade for a while, and finally the insides of the ball were released. Mas was surprised to see many skeins of white yarn wrapped around an orange rubber center. Stabbing into the center revealed a cork. He wasn't sure how often professional players dissected their baseballs, but
it seemed like Jin-Won had done it before.

“This rubber,” Jin-Won fingered the solid core, “seems different. More compact.”

“What are you saying?” Neko asked. “That it's been tampered with?” She looked for the manufacturer of the ball on the loose leather skin. “That's a famous company. They wouldn't do illegal things.”

“How about the name? The baseball commissioner?” Jin-Won traced the signature of the Japanese professional league's leader.

“I don't know. I don't know,” Neko murmured. “Maybe a prototype or something.”

Mas then remembered the list of numbers in Itai's notebook. He pulled out the notebook, flipping the cover over to reveal what Itai had written.

“These numba and letters. Maybe how far ball was hit.”

“Could be.” Neko furrowed her brow. “T, Tanji. S, Sawada.” She went down the line, naming all the Japanese players. “So many home runs. Zahed is not mentioned, so maybe he was pitching?”

Mas remembered how Tanji had berated him for his performance at practice. Maybe it wasn't Zahed's fault. Maybe it was the ball's.

“I haven't played with a Japanese ball in long time,” said Neko. “Maybe it's just my imagination?”

Their attention to the dissected ball was interrupted by Yuki's return to the waiting room.

He fell into one of their uncomfortable chairs, his skinny legs stretched out on the linoleum. “They believe that
Itai-
san
killed himself. And I think I just confirmed it.”

“
Honto
?” Mas could not believe it.

For Jin-Won's benefit, Yuki attempted a few sentences in English. “He met a yakuza who owns a sushi bar in Rosu Angelesu on Monday night. Somewhere called San Fernando.” He continued in Japanese. “The police asked me if I had heard of him. I had. He'd been a source for one of Itai's stories five years ago.

“Apparently this yakuza has sold a bunch of drugs, in addition to being involved in some other illegal activities. I told the police that Itai-
san
wasn't into that. Then they tell me that they've been looking into Itai-san's finances. Hardly anything in his bank account. He'd taken out a sizable amount before he left for Los Angeles.”

“So?” Mas said.

“The police think that Itai-
san
was preparing to die here.”

“Was he?” Neko asked. “I didn't know him very well.”

“No, no, no. And that's what I told the detectives.”

“Did the yakuza kill him?” Jin-Won interjected, unaware of what had just been communicated in Japanese.

“I do not think so,” Yuki replied in English, and then in Japanese. “But Itai-
san
was indeed at a sushi bar in the San Fernando Valley on Monday night. They found video footage.”

The police were doing their due diligence
, Mas thought. And here he'd thought that Detective Williams and his disagreeable partner were just playing around.

“The yakuza told the police that Itai-
san
was just paying a
social call. But why would he go over there right after arriving in Los Angeles?” Yuki sat forward, cupping his chin with his hands. “And that's not even the worst of it. Some college kid was in there around the same time. Took a selfie of himself and his girlfriend and posted it on Facebook. Itai-
san
was in the background. They blew up the photo and yes, he was receiving some sort of envelope from the yakuza. The police think that's how Itai-
san
got the cyanide.”

“Maybe weezu go ova there,” Mas chimed in. This information was confusing. Might as well as get it from the horse's mouth.

“That's exactly what I was thinking,
Ojisan
.”

Mas was in a sense a Valley man, but his valley was the San Gabriel one, the valley held in by purple-tipped mountains. Old money—grand estates and libraries—had first attracted Japanese gardeners, domestics, and laundries to this valley, but now the area was a magnet for new Asian immigrants, not from Japan but from China, Taiwan, and Korea.

The more famous valley in Los Angeles was the San Fernando Valley, a sprawl that didn't seem to have a clear beginning or end. Northwest of San Gabriel, the San Fernando Valley was like a thoroughbred horse that galloped across the dust of Southern California. In places like Pacoima, Roscoe, and Tropico, Japanese farmers had once tended flower fields of ranunculus and anemone and rows of lettuces and carrots. That was all gone now, of course, long cleared to make way
for housing developments and shopping malls.

Mas had been to a ramen house in North Hollywood, but in general he tried to limit his time in the Valley. It was strange and unknown to him, filled with impatient, speeding motorists who were quick on their horns. One was currently on his bumper as he traveled west on the 101. And he was in the slow lane.

He and Yuki were on their way to see a yakuza, and Mas didn't know quite what to make of it. He had come across his share of
chimpira
, low-level gangsters in post-atomic Hiroshima. They specialized in the black market as well as drugs, most specifically
hiropon
, heroin. They lassoed young, aimless
hibakusha
who were uncertain about their futures in the rubble of Hiroshima. Once these men and women were caught, it was hard to leave the embrace of money, drugs, and/or pseudo family. The cost of escape was high.

Now they were voluntarily going to enter the den of a gangster. Maybe this was the appropriate way to close their investigation into the death of Tomo Itai. To discover that the demon that had ended the journalist's life was the journalist himself.

Yuki had downloaded directions to the restaurant onto Itai's laptop. Mas had to rely on Yuki to guide him. The off-ramp and main streets were all unfamiliar to him. If, somehow, they became separated from the power of the laptop, Mas would be trapped and hopelessly lost in this valley, which was as mysterious to him as the moon.

From the outside, the sushi bar more closely resembled a bar than a restaurant. Inside, it was the more of the same.
The walls were covered in dark wood; the carpet was a blood red. The expansive sushi bar must have originally been built to accommodate more mixed drinks than tuna rolls, and the bar was adorned with plenty of both. It was three-thirty, in between lunch and dinner, a time when the typical Japanese restaurant was closed. But this place was obviously not typical.

Yuki pointed to the
itamae-san
at the end of the bar. “That's him,” he whispered in Mas's ear. Mas wanted to tell the boy not to point, but it was too late now.

A
hakujin
couple—a woman in a low-cut top and leather pants and a man dressed all in black—sat in front of the yakuza chef. Mas was surprised to see that he was tattoo-less and slight. He probably weighed the same as Mas, give or take a few pounds. But he was at least half a foot taller, with wispy, shaggy hair and a faint afternoon shadow above his lip and on his chin.

Like all traditional sushi chefs, he wore all white, including a white apron that was tied high on his waist, but instead of the typical white skull hat, he wore a bandana that had an image of the rising sun.

After the diners finally left, Yuki and Mas took their places. The yakuza chef seemed surprised that they didn't wait to sit until the dirty plates were removed from the bar.

“
Irrashaimase
,” the chef said to welcome them, as a waitress hurriedly cleared the dirty dishes. “What will you have?”

“I am a friend of Tomo Itai,” Yuki said, skipping the small talk.

The chef scrunched up his long nose as if he smelled something rotten. “Get out,” he said. “The cops have already wasted enough of my time. You can speak to my lawyer if you want.”

“I worked as a reporter with Itai-
san
. On the same stories. I know you were a source for his series about yakuza in America five years ago. I'm sure your colleagues back in Japan wouldn't be too happy to hear about your cooperation.”

The chef picked up one of his knives. It looked freshly sharpened and glinted from the lights above the bar. “Follow me.” He headed toward the kitchen in back but then stopped, gesturing to Mas. “Not him.”

“I go where he goes,” Mas said in Japanese.

The chef's mouth curved into an ugly smile. “I was just trying to spare you,
Ojisan
. You want to play? C'mon.”

Mas swallowed and followed the chef into the kitchen, with Yuki pulling up the rear. The top of Mas's head barely touched the indigo blue
noren,
the rectangular fabric hanging from the kitchen's entryway. Inside were mostly Latinos, like in any restaurant in Southern California, busy cutting cabbage and washing dishes.

The chef led them into a back room. This was not good, Mas knew. Sure, there were workers just a few feet away, but they were the yakuza's employees, and they were probably used to ignoring illegal activities going on behind closed doors. Sure enough, as soon as Mas stepped inside, the chef pushed him against the bare wall, his sashimi knife grazing the stubble on Mas's chin.

“I'll slice this old man's throat,” the chef said, as if he
were boasting. Although the light was faint in the room, Mas noticed a scar by the chef's nose. He must have been cut some time ago. Violence was nothing new to this man. “I want you out of my place, and you will never bother me again. You say anything to the police or my friends in Japan, and I'll hunt this old man down.” He nodded toward the back door, an iron security gate, clearly expecting Yuki to immediately take the opportunity to leave.