“I’m the type of person who likes to see things through,” I said.
“You should call her. Call her tonight, in fact. The Newberry hasn’t hired anyone to replace you yet, so maybe you can get your job back.”
It was too late for that, at least in my mind. I had moved on, committed to applying to nursing school. But I still wanted both of them as my friends. I glanced at the framed photo of Reggie.
“How is your brother, by the way?” I asked.
Phillis managed a smile. “He’s good. He’ll be back in Chicago soon. On medical leave.”
“I bet that you can’t wait to see him.”
Phillis nodded. “It will be good for him to be home. For my mother’s sake.”
Not to mention yours, I thought, but didn’t vocalize this opinion. I got to my feet. “I think I’d better go.”
Phillis walked me to the door. “Bye, Aki,” she said. The light of dusk reflected off of her face and I realized that Phillis, with her dark, observant eyes, was indeed beautiful. Why had it taken me so long to notice?
I left the Davis house, feeling like I had accomplished one piece of Aunt Eunice’s advice: I had opened my mouth.
When I got home, my parents were both asleep again. Pop had quit Aloha and taken a new job as a janitor at the Henrotin Hospital. He started his job at seven, so both he and Mom were now on the same schedule. I was relieved that he wasn’t making that trek through the illicit businesses of North Clark five days a week anymore.
It wasn’t too late to make a phone call, so I did. This time, Nancy answered instead of a member of her family. “Oh, Aki, it’s so good to hear your voice. Phillis told me that you might be calling.”
Nancy launched into breathless chatter about everything from her family to Professor Rip Van Winkle.
Like someone finding a break in a double Dutch jump-rope session, I inserted myself into the conversation when Nancy took a pause. “I’m sorry, you know. For getting you involved with the doctor.”
Enough time had elapsed that Nancy made light of it. “It was kind of interesting to be a jailbird. I made friends with the other girls in the paddy wagon, especially the doctor’s receptionist. Did you know that the police were blackmailing girls who had gotten abortions? Can you even imagine that?”
That revelation seeped into my brain. “Say that again.”
“The police would find out who had abortions and go over to the girls’ homes to extort money from them. The receptionist told me all about it.” Nancy was proud of this new friendship and prattled on about how she had consoled the young woman the whole time they were behind bars.
I couldn’t focus on the rest of the phone call. I only thought about the missing piece that Nancy had gifted me: the reason why Rose had been asking for money in May. And also why Sergeant Graves was attempting to sweep away any mention of Rose’s abortion.
First thing next morning, I went straight to Harriet’s apartment. I was thankful that Douglas was there when she opened the door. I saw his thin figure seated on her bed. He didn’t have his shoes on; somehow seeing his stockinged feet made me feel profoundly self-conscious.
After Harriet invited me in, I told them of Keizo’s observation that a policeman had been with Rose at the subway station before she died. I left out the part about the gun because, while I was beginning to be more open with them, I didn’t trust them completely. “I was told that the police responded fifteen minutes after the incident happened. If a police officer was already with Rose, why the delay? And why didn’t he explain what had happened?”
“It’s curious,” agreed Douglas. “But it’s been more than five months. Will this Keizo talk to the district attorney?”
I shook my head. “That would be impossible. But I have a feeling about who this police officer might be.”
Douglas took a deep breath. “You don’t have anything solid, Aki. If someone pushed Rose into the path of that subway car, I want them to be prosecuted as much as you do. But without a reputable witness, I don’t think you have much.”
“What if the officer admits to it?” I asked.
Harriet, who had been puckering her lips in thought, jumped in. “And why in the world would he do that?”
We went back and forth on this. Harriet thought the scheme that Douglas and I had come up with was absurd. Maybe it was. But I had to at least try.
When I returned to the apartment, I was surprised to see my parents were still at home, sitting at the dining-room table. On the surface of the table was our metal tea kettle sitting on a potholder, next to two handleless Japanese cups and a tiny blue box. My ring. I could not take my eyes off of the box.
“You left this on top of the dresser,” my mother said in Japanese. My father looked weary. His hair, which hardly had any gray back before the start of the war, was now completely white. The hair on top of his head was thin and I could see his scalp.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s from Art. We’re engaged.”
I expected that my mother would shriek in happiness, but she and my father sat like statues in our hard chairs.
“When are you planning to get married?” Mom asked.
“Maybe when he’s on his military leave.” I had no idea when that would be.
“Are you sure about this?”
I frowned. “I thought that you’d be happy. Especially you, Mom. All you’ve talked about with me and Rose is getting married.”
“I don’t want you to rush.”
“No runnin’ away because of Rose,” my father added in English.
“I like Art—we both like him,” my mother continued. “But there’s been so much change. Too much change. Maybe to add more change is not good right now.”
I swiped the box from the table. What do you know? I wanted to say to them. It’s not like you two got married for love. In the back of my mind, I knew that my mother was imparting a bit of truth, but I had no time to reflect on it.
Douglas hired a messenger to deliver an envelope addressed to Sergeant Graves to the police station. I had handwritten the note:
Dear Sergeant Graves:
I need you to come to my apartment at two o’clock today to discuss a most pressing matter involving my sister, Rose. I have evidence that her death was no accident. It was not suicide. Before I take this information to the press, I hope that you will meet me in person to discuss this matter.
Sincerely,
Aki Ito
Sergeant Graves had taken my note seriously; from the window I saw him walk toward our building a few minutes before two. He rapped on our door with authority. After I let him in, he walked past me, went into the hallway and checked the bathroom and bedroom. When he was convinced that we were alone, he took a seat across from me at the dining-room table. “What’s this about?” he asked. His face had lost all the warmth and decency that had been on display during our previous meetings.
I brought out Rose’s journal. “This is my sister’s diary. One that I had made for her in camp. Someone had ripped the back pages from it, so I had no idea what she had written during the last days of her life. Until her old roommate recently mailed them to me.” I brought out some bogus pages of the journal, which I had carefully folded to fit a standard-size envelope.
“She wrote down what you did to her. Blackmailed her for getting an abortion. She was asking everyone for money but she couldn’t raise enough.”
“What do you want?” Graves glowered at me with an intensity that normally would have shaken me. But not today.
“A witness has come forward. He told me that he saw you with my sister. In the Clark and Division subway station, moments before she was killed.”
Graves abruptly got up, pushing the chair back so forcefully that it almost toppled over. “I don’t know what you’re insinuating.”
I knew that I was on thin ice now. I had to be careful and
prove that I had enough evidence to be a threat. “I know that you lied to the coroner’s office and eliminated my sister’s abortion from her forensic records. You didn’t want anyone to be looking into her procedure.”
“Who is this witness? And the pages of a journal? Anyone can fabricate that.”
Graves was obviously not going to admit any of his crimes. I couldn’t stand it anymore. “You pushed my sister into that train at Clark and Division,” I shouted, loud enough for the neighbors to hear.
Graves shook his head, releasing curse words first softly and then more emphatically, like he was reciting an incantation. “Something’s wrong with you people. No one told her to jump in front of that train. I didn’t kill her. That was all her doing.”
His words rushed out before I could organize and process them in my mind. So wait—Rose had killed herself? Was it because she couldn’t come up with the money? Or because she couldn’t let Sergeant Graves get away with his blackmail scheme?
I was so stunned for a moment that I didn’t anticipate Sergeant Graves’s long reach to grab the fake pages of Rose’s diary.
He tucked them inside of his police jacket. “No one would believe you, anyway,” he said before making his way to the door. “I consider your sister’s death a closed case, Miss Ito. Don’t bother me anymore.”
“You won’t get away with this.” I wasn’t going to back down.
Graves released the doorknob and turned back to me. “I’ll tell you what I told your sister. If she got herself arrested, there would be no Chicago for the rest of the family. I could have prevented you all from coming. But I didn’t.”
Oh, what a humanitarian, I thought bitterly.
“I have the power to make your family’s life very difficult here. I’m sure you wouldn’t want anything to happen to the rest of your family, especially your father. He has a bit of a drinking and gambling problem.”
His words chilled me. The police sergeant had obviously been keeping tabs on us this whole time.
Graves grinned, perhaps in the same way that he had responded to Rose when she hadn’t been able to produce the blackmail money. I could see her there on the platform, listening to Graves’s threats against our family’s future and well-being.
She wasn’t going to let him win. She had obliterated his power over her by jumping in front of the train.
He left our apartment, the door closing quietly behind him. Still trembling, I walked to the window. When I saw that he was on the street, I finally opened the closet. Douglas’s friend Skip, a reporter with the Chicago Daily Tribune, stood crammed against our coats. Unlike Douglas, he was a heavy man with meaty jowls and unkempt clothes. Now that he had some light, he was madly writing in his notebook. I didn’t want to interrupt him, so I went downstairs to fetch Douglas from Harriet’s apartment.
“He’s left the building,” Douglas said as he appeared in the hallway. “Did you get it all down? Did the sergeant admit to killing Rose?”
I blinked away tears. “It wasn’t what I thought,” I murmured, and slowly climbed back up the stairs.
Douglas was right behind me. “What are you saying?”
Oh, Rose, you didn’t have to take it on all by yourself. But that’s what she had always done, carried our family on her back. There was even a Japanese word for it: onbu—short, sweet and powerful. Mom had told me that’s what her mother, the grandmother whom I had never known, had done in the rice fields. She put my infant mother inside the back of her kimono and secured her in place with a special long fabric sash. With her baby against her naked back, my grandmother could tell if her daughter was breathing and doing well.
The reporter was leaning back in a chair when we arrived.
“Well?” Douglas said.
The reporter smiled. He had the look of a big dog who had stolen a T-bone steak from his master’s dinner table. “He pretty much admitted that he blackmailed Rose Ito. And if these other girls confirm that they had been targeted for blackmail, we’ll have a story.”
“But killing Rose—” Douglas said.
Skip shook his head. “It wouldn’t make any sense, anyway. Why would he try to get rid of a potential source of more money?”
I had to agree, reluctantly. “Yes, I think that she did kill herself.” Saying it out loud was painful. “She did it for us.”
Chapter 27
The reporter worked fast. The story appeared later that week on the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune under Skip Cooper’s byline with the headline police blackmail scheme uncovered. Sergeant Graves was named by three anonymous females and one middle-aged housewife who went on the record. Rose’s name was left out of the article since she wasn’t alive to be quoted.
I called Skip to express my appreciation.
“Couldn’t have written the story without the interview with the receptionist and those other girls,” he said. I had Nancy Kowalski to thank for that. Nancy was the one who had convinced the receptionist to talk to Skip. The receptionist, in turn, provided him with sources who had been blackmailed by Graves, who threatened them with jail time for engaging in an illegal procedure.
“The DA is going to charge Graves with bribery,” Skip continued. “He’s bringing down other officers in the station.” It didn’t surprise me that Trionfo was one of them.
We said our goodbyes. I didn’t want to be late for my morning appointment at the WRA office.
Once I arrived, the same long line snaked out of the office. Even more Japanese Americans were entering Chicago; I had heard that it was in the several thousands. Where would the WRA place all these newcomers? There had been some conflicts between Nisei workers and established unions. Had we come to Chicago to work as low-wage laborers and take away American jobs? The only thing was, most of us were American-born, too.
Instead of waiting in the line, I stuck my head in the doorway and waved at Harriet, who was distributing a list of job openings. She gestured for me to enter and this time, unlike the first time I entered the office, I didn’t feel self-conscious. I had an appointment.
Harriet introduced me to a hakujin woman about my mother’s age. Her plaid suit accentuated the curves of her strong, wide body. Her curly hair was the color of pennies.
“This is Mrs. Sappenfield. She’s a representative of the National Japanese American Student Relocation program.”
“Well, hello there.” Mrs. Sappenfield warmly shook my hand. She wore no lipstick. Her bare face made me feel more at ease. As if she felt that she didn’t have to impress me. “You can call me Linda.” Of course, I wasn’t going to call her by her first name.
She began to open up brochures promoting various nursing programs and I felt my pulse quicken. I learned that quite a few hospitals were accepting Nisei women into their nursing programs and that through the US Cadet Nurse Corps, my tuition might be waived.
Mrs. Sappenfield gave me an application to fill out. “I understand that you were in the Manzanar hospital’s nurse’s aide training program.”
I nodded.
“We’ve placed a number of you in schools across the nation.”
A warmth spread throughout my chest. Was this what hope felt like?
My heart soaring, I promised to return with my completed application. Could this really be my new life? Once I stood on the street, I felt the full force of the autumn wind swirling trash and old leaves from the ground. I thought about my Manzanar friend, Hisako Hamamoto, the first person to tell me that I’d make a good nurse.
“Hisako, it’s happening,” I murmured, hoping that one day I could tell her face-to-face.
As I walked home, I stopped by the Mark Twain Hotel, my regular routine when I was around Clark and Division. The same snub-nosed hakujin clerk was at the desk. Georgina, her hair in curlers, was reading a magazine while sitting in a green armchair in the lounge.
“Oh, sweet Aki, what brings you here?
” she said.
“Have you seen Keizo?”
“Who?”
“You know, Keizo. The Nisei man who works the front desk.”
Georgina sucked on her bottom lip. “Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him for a few weeks.”
“He’s hurt some girls, women. Including my sister.”
Georgina put the magazine on her lap. “We’ll keep our eyes peeled. We’ll make sure that he doesn’t have a place on Clark and Division anymore.”
When I arrived back at the apartment, my parents were ready to go send Roy off. I put the brochures away in my drawer and picked up a letter that I had written to Art. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to us, but I had written the whole story about Rose. I even mentioned that his first visit to my apartment had been based on a lie—I hadn’t been sick. I had been recovering from the black eye that I had gotten at Aloha. I pictured Art in his mud-soaked khakis reading my multipage letter in Mississippi. Would the real Aki Ito still hold a place in his heart?
“Don’t be guzu-guzu, Aki,” my mother prompted me. “We don’t want to miss Roy.”
We splurged and took a taxi. Who knew when we would see Roy again? We ran into Union Station, the same place that Roy had met the three of us that miserable day in May. A tight knot of Nisei friends had already gathered to see him off. Ike and Kathryn were now officially a couple, leaving Chiyo out in the cold. When her parents arrived from Heart Mountain, Wyoming, Chiyo moved from the Clark Street apartment and, as she had predicted, was no longer able to attend as many Nisei dances and social events. She had become more involved in the new Buddhist temple a few blocks away, and there was even talk of a Young Buddhist Association chapter being formed there.
“I like how you let your eyebrows grow back,” I told her on the platform.
“Really? I think they look ridiculous. My mother said that my plucked eyebrows made me look like a call girl.”
Clark and Division Page 25