Sins As Scarlet

by Nicolas Obregon

  They sat in funereal silence for a long while, Iwata’s eyes not leaving the woman’s hands. The ceiling fan quietly rattled and car horns could be heard distantly.

  Finally, Charlotte opened her bag and took out a photograph. With a liver-spotted hand, she slid it across the table. Iwata turned it over to see a woman – familiar somehow.

  ‘My boy,’ was all the woman said.

  Iwata realized it was Cleo’s younger brother. Julian had transitioned gender years ago, though Iwata had never been close with the Nichol family and did not know much beyond the fact that Julian was now Meredith.

  ‘Look at that face,’ Charlotte said, her bag pulled tight against her chest. Iwata already knew where this was going. The woman wouldn’t have ventured a thousand miles south from the Nichol home in Kennewick for anything other than calamity. With a bellyful of dread, he returned his gaze to the photograph.

  ‘Mrs Nichol –’

  ‘Look at it.’

  Iwata looked. Meredith was looking to camera, maybe in a restaurant somewhere. Her mouth was open, she was speaking – telling a joke, he guessed from her expression. A gold hoop earring peeked out behind brown, pampered hair. Though her forehead was broad and her jaw had some heaviness, her eyes were vivid blue and her lips had been rouged perfectly.

  When Iwata looked back up Charlotte Nichol was crying. He was used to that in this space, but the sight of his dead wife’s mother’s tears was unbearable.

  ‘Mrs Nichol …’ He shifted in his seat but she flung up a hand.

  ‘Don’t touch me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Don’t you ever touch me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re a son of a bitch.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Good,’ she wept. ‘Good.’

  Taking back the photograph, Charlotte Nichol caressed it. ‘My boy was murdered two weeks ago.’ She looked up at the ceiling fan and tears dropped on her lap. ‘The police have done nothing.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I –’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head angrily. ‘I don’t want that. Not from you. I’ve come here because Meredith was murdered and you’re going to do your work for me. Do you understand? You’re going to find the fucking person who did this. You owe me that much for Cleo.’

  Iwata looked at the floor. She was right. Charlotte Nichol had lost one daughter to him, and now another child to murder. The inequity of it was almost preposterous. A normal person might have felt sympathy for this woman, but Iwata’s overriding emotion was fear. A clear, crystalline terror at having to care once again. Apathy was all that could be contained within him now; anything more would cause him to split open. Iwata had surrounded himself with misery. He had cauterized his own wounds with the tears of this city. Tears that were real to Angelenos but, to Iwata, just business. Maybe it was an ugly way to get by in life but he didn’t know many better ones.

  Charlotte stood up. ‘You’re going to do this for me.’ It was decided.

  Iwata thought about his empty apartment. His Spanish classes. The quiet streets on his morning runs. Existing was simple these days. But now Cleo’s mother had come for him, like a faded ghost.

  Iwata closed his eyes. All he would ever be was a hunter of bad men.

  ‘All right.’ It was the only thing he could say.

  ‘I won’t ever forgive you for what you did to Cleo. But maybe you can still do some good in this world.’ Charlotte Nichol stood and placed two items on the desk. One was a large envelope. The other was a business card:

  LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT

  Joseph Avery Silke

  Detective II

  Robbery / Homicide Division

  ‘That’s the detective. He’s useless. The police have said some cruel things about my boy. All lies, of course. Julian was confused, that’s all. He was a good Christian who made mistakes in his lifestyle. But we all have our sins.’

  Iwata nodded.

  ‘Kosuke, you find the man that did this. If you can’t have him arrested, ruin him.’ She paused at the door. ‘That much I know you have a talent for.’

  Then she was gone.

  Iwata opened the envelope. It contained ten thousand dollars. He swivelled in his chair to look down on Wilshire Boulevard, which crept all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In the winter, it was a corridor for the cold to drift along, deep into the city. But today, the street was bleached white in the heat, the palm trees parched brown.

  Iwata saw a familiar face, caked in grime. He could read the man’s lips as he trundled along the street. ‘The best of luck! The BEST of luck!’

  Iwata couldn’t help but feel he was talking to him.

  It was 2 a.m. These were the good hours, mostly just drifters left. Benedict Novacek sat at the bar of Club Noir drinking a Rum Swizzle. He wore a black leather flat cap and, tight on his bearish frame, a blue Hawaiian shirt – a big jungle canvas of parrots and plumeria flowers. He was in his late forties, with short black hair, a greying box beard and, despite his size, an osseous face. He wore silver rings and tattoos on his hairy arms. On his forearm, in Latin, the words ‘Only God forgives’ were inked. Between sips of his Swizzle he nibbled on his fingernails, wide and circular, like old nickels he was testing for authenticity.

  Novacek liked this seat. The mirrored bar afforded him a perfect view of the dance floor without giving away the fact that he was looking. Under the brim of his flat cap, he could watch to his heart’s content, his raw-oyster eyes freely grubbing through the bodies. Sometimes he would sit here for hours, drinking slowly, saying nothing. He would stay until he found the right one. And Benedict Novacek usually did.

  It was a noir theme night, an entire room in mimesis of an ersatz era, a hundred femmes fatales and desperate dicks recreating a long-held fabrication – that there ever was a glorious age in the City of Angels. On the wall there was a framed print of Marilyn Monroe beneath which ran her words:

  HOLLYWOOD IS A PLACE WHERE THEY’LL PAY YOU A THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR A KISS AND 50 CENTS FOR YOUR SOUL

  Novacek whispered the words to himself as the woman sat down in the chair next to him. There were other seats free. She didn’t need to choose this one. He listened to her order a Sazerac. It was a good voice.

  Novacek looked her over in the mirror. The make-up was a little too heavy and he preferred ones that didn’t have so much mileage, but she was in good shape. It was a decent waist, and the tit-work obviously hadn’t been scrimped on. The package wasn’t thrilling, but she had, in a way, offered herself to him. That made things easier.

  Benedict Novacek took a sip of his Swizzle, padded his mouth dry with a napkin and pointed his cocktail cherry at the woman. Then he uttered the only sentence he ever needed.

  ‘How would you like to make a lot of money?’

  Tokyo – 1975

  Every year around Nozomi’s birthday there were meteor showers called the Perseids, or the Tears of St Lawrence to Catholics. She didn’t know who he was or why he cried, and she didn’t care all that much. She just wanted to get out of Tokyo, climb the nearest mountain and watch St Lawrence weep. Maybe she’d drink a beer and try not to get too big-headed that the universe was celebrating her existence once again.

  Sometimes, especially on her birthday, Nozomi had gloomy thoughts about death. In the newspaper recently she’d read about a company offering a space burial service, their client’s ashes blasted up into orbit. She imagined herself buried across the galaxy, circling the Earth for all time but for ever outside it. With no stones or relics left behind, it was nicer to imagine simply leaving the Earth, as if she had never been there.

  But Nozomi wasn’t feeling blue tonight. Even though she was working she was in a decidedly good mood – the kind that can only be brought on by clarity. She stopped sweeping now and blew her fringe out of her face.

  It was a warm, sticky night. The red paper lanterns bobbed in the soft, summer eddies. Neon signs fizzed. Three homeless men in the empty lot at the end of the street were deb
ating the advantages and disadvantages of the seventies as a decade. It sounded like the latter was winning out, as their conversation took in the Japanese Red Army, the Lod Airport massacre and the hijacking of Flight 351. Nozomi didn’t think the calendar itself could be blamed for any of those.

  Her father’s place was just a shabby little watering hole in the brick arches beneath the train tracks near Yūrakuchō Station, but it was always busy. The beer was cheap, the snacks were passable, and her father always had a funny line for regulars and new faces alike. Good with jokes, bad with life – that’s what Nozomi said to him. Her father, no matter what the customer was saying, would make it seem like they were always in the right.

  That’s the secret, Nozomi-chan. They might be morons everywhere else, but not here. Here they can do no wrong. That’s why they come back.

  In the summers they laid out plastic tables and overturned beer crates. The punters would cram in to complain about their wives or husbands before finally resigning themselves to the train home. Treachery, bad blood, deep love – growing up, Nozomi had heard it all. She had never been in love herself but it occurred to her that there were as many different types of it as there were routes home from Yūrakuchō.

  Yūrakuchō was wedged in between Ginza and Hibiya Park. Less flashy than its neighbours, it still offered a window into the old way. This little district contained countless izakaya and the prices ensured that salarymen would always find their way to Yūrakuchō, every night, like the migration of little black birds seeking winter sun.

  Her father was usually the last to close up. That meant Nozomi was usually the last person out on the street, sweeping up cigarette butts. She’d seen a few things in her time holding that broom.

  The Yamanote Line train passed by overhead now, the little bars beneath its girders trembling, as they always did. The electric lights from the train lit up a puddle by her feet, her reflection suddenly revealed to her. She thought of what her mother used to say before she left: How can you look so miserable, Nozomi? You’re just a child.

  But she wasn’t a child anymore. Today she was twenty-six: Christmas-cake age – nobody wanted one after the 25th. Well, that was fine by her. In truth, there was very little that bothered Nozomi. Very little except the idea of living out the life she was expected to live.

  There was no way she was going to take over the bar for a start. Nozomi liked people but had no interest in the business and certainly no interest in inheriting its debt. It wasn’t that she hated the bar, and she loved her father, though he could be stern and forgetful. She simply yearned for more. Or, perhaps ‘more’ wasn’t the right word. Just something else.

  On the TV lately there had been talk of traditional values and time-honoured characteristics but she could feel a change in the air the way you could tell rain was coming. That very morning she had heard on the radio that in just fifteen years the percentage of people who worked in agriculture in Japan had decreased from 40 per cent to 15 per cent. For better or worse, she thought, Japan is doing new things.

  And Nozomi had decided to do something new with her life too. Which was why, even sweeping up cigarette butts at 2 a.m., she was in such a good mood. She had decided to become a writer of horror fiction.

  Nozomi had always loved authors like Edogawa Ranpo and Yumeno Kyūsaku. Why couldn’t she do what they did? People often asked her if she was planning to go into modelling or perhaps air-hostessing. Yet Nozomi couldn’t imagine anything more boring. Being posed and positioned and pawed at by some creep, or serving box meals in a metal tube, day in, day out. No, she had decided she would be a slave only to inspiration.

  And as she sat at her little desk after work each night inspiration is what flowed through her – same as the dark freight trains whooshing past her bedroom window, her thoughts full of precious cargo, hurtling towards their destination.

  Nozomi loved the sounds of those tracks. To her, the trains were like pets, making the apartment shake all day and all night, like nervous little embraces. The noise didn’t bother her. Not usually. Though sometimes it reminded her of life passing by, just out of reach. Vendettas, job interviews, perversions, presents, poetry – all of it flowing under her window like a river of possibilities, and none of them belonging to her.

  Nozomi put away the broom now, locked up and switched off the lights. She went upstairs and carried out her nightly ablutions. Then, although exhausted, she sat at her desk, took out her writing book and flipped to the right page.

  A train thundered past, the rails screeching goodbye in the distance. Downstairs, the television was blaring. By the music, Nozomi could tell it was the cologne advert with Charles Bronson in it. At first he appeared in a desert, riding a horse. Then, magically, he was transported to a boardroom overlooking the Tokyo skyscraper-skyline – as if he worked there. Now, wearing a jacket and tie, he slapped the cologne on and growled: ‘Mmmmm, Mandom.’

  After that, it was a rerun of her father’s favourite show, Robot Detective K. Even for him, Nozomi thought it was ridiculous – a robot with eyes that changed colour according to its mood and which would often make deep, philosophical statements. Though its clothes were a little eccentric (yellow Gatsby cap, red blazer and white slacks), it fought crime as valiantly as any of the detectives in Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department. The thing her father liked best about the show was K’s car, a red Nissan Fairlady Z (which could fly). He usually fell asleep around the final act of the show, remote control in hand, mouth open, legs under the kotatsu. Often, she would have to tell him how the show had ended in the morning, or at least how she thought it had ended.

  The TV was the only thing that really brought them together these days. Sometimes, if he had been drinking, her father would point out women onscreen that looked like her mother. This was strange to Nozomi because it wasn’t as if she didn’t have her own memories. Even so, he would jut his chin at some model or news anchor and say, ‘Just like your mother.’ Nozomi’s mother had left when she was just a little girl and nobody had heard from her since. Some months were easier than others, but Nozomi and her father got along fine.

  Stretching, she looked down at her writing book. Nozomi had been playing around with her novella, The Mannequins, for the last month or so. Although she knew that there was a tendency for people to overestimate the quality of their own writing, she truly believed it had potential.

  The inspiration for it had come from a strange place. Last spring there had been a terrible fire in a department store, one of the worst in Japan’s history: over one hundred people had died. Inside the building there were various other businesses, including a haunted house and a cabaret. It was thought that a cigarette butt had caused the blaze and within ten minutes of the fire starting thick black smoke was seen pouring out of the entire third and fourth floors – the dresses in the ladies’ clothing departments helping it spread. It had taken firefighters three days to put it out. There had been no survivors. Many had died inside the cabaret; its fire escape had been locked. Those who had not burned to death, died from smoke inhalation or been trampled in the panic, had jumped out of the windows.

  Nozomi had followed all the news coverage closely and had bought three or four different newspapers each morning. She didn’t know what it was that fascinated her so much, but something about the fire had gripped her.

  Then she came across the picture. Inside the department store, in a charred corner, stood four mannequins, their kimonos singed by the heat, their fingers melted and drooping down to their waists. Their wigs had been scorched away, leaving only burnt scalps, and their heads were inclined, as if just noticing the photographer. Smiling demurely, their blackened, lidless eyes stared down the lens. The image took Nozomi’s breath away.

  What if they had caused the fire somehow? Scolding herself for such a ridiculous thought, she turned the page and tried to read what Osaka’s mayor had to say about the tragedy. But she quickly flipped back to the image.

  What if they had cursed that place?


  Nozomi imagined the mannequins silently whispering incantations, their lips unmoving, their eyes unblinking as the fire-escape bolt fell into place. As the smoke started to creep into the cabaret, she imagined background music playing through the empty, shining halls of the building. She imagined the muffled screams and desperate thudding at the cabaret doors.

  Nozomi returned her gaze to the mannequins. Looking over her shoulder, she tore out the image with quick, precise rips then stuck it on the first page of a new notebook. She looked at them. They looked back at her. What Nozomi Iwata could not have known was that this tiny little whim would change her life.

  4. Thirty-Five Thousand Choices

  Arriving at LAPD headquarters, Iwata asked for Detective Silke. After many wrong turns and terse referrals, he found him. He was a tall white man, the colour of sour milk, his fingernails dirty. His mouth was open wide in sleep, his head arched back, his hand still clutching a can of breakfast Red Bull. Iwata cleared his throat and Silke’s red eyes opened, his dark pupils jittery as they took the visitor in. ‘What?’

  Iwata held up his investigator’s licence. ‘Detective, can I talk with you for two minutes?’

  Silke spat into his wastepaper basket and necked the last of his Red Bull. ‘Men of few words are the best men.’

  Iwata sat across from Silke. ‘Detective, I’m here about Meredith Nichol. I know she was murdered a few –’

  ‘Woah, papa-san. Let me stop you right there. That’s an open case. You a reporter?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Show me that card again.’

  Iwata passed it over.

  ‘Professional investigator?’ Silke laughed. ‘That’s cute. Tell me something, if you’re a professional, what does that make me?’

  There was a short, caustic silence between them.

  ‘Sir, I know you don’t know me, but Meredith Nichol was family. My wife’s sister. If I could just briefly see the case file –’

  ‘That’s your play, huh? Sister-in-law. I say “sister” …’