by Frankie Bow
I didn’t feel like telling Emma about Stephen’s early morning phone call. I was glad I’d stood up for myself, but I shouldn’t have even engaged him. Emma would have simply hung up on him.
“You see the police car out there when you parked?”
“I did.”
“It’s harassment, is what. I should call the ACLU. So what’s new?”
I followed Emma into the kitchen, which smelled pleasantly of coffee.
“I went to my first Business Boosters yesterday.” I pulled out a chair and sat down. “I sat with Tatsuya Masumoto and his wife Trudy. Coffee smells good.”
“You want some coffee? Was that a hint?”
“Yes, please.”
Emma pulled out a green mug emblazoned with the logo of a large and infamous chemical company, and poured me a cup.
“And then?” Emma set the coffee in front of me, along with a carton of cream.
“I escaped before Trudy could try to set me up with some guy who runs a lunch shop. Then I went home. Went to bed early.”
“And what else?” Emma sat down across from me and narrowed her eyes. “Something’s up, Molly. I can tell. Eh, careful, you’re gonna use up all my cream.”
“I’ll buy you another carton. Um, there was one thing. Stephen called.”
“Oh naw. I knew it. You took him back.”
“No, I did not. I told him we were through. I tried to get back to sleep afterward, but I couldn’t. It was already early morning. So I got up and started going through my boxes.”
“The ones in your spare room that you never unpacked yet?”
“Yes. I found a copy of an old weekly newspaper. It was the one where our band was on the cover.”
“Oh yeah. Back when you were a mad punk rocker. You told me about it.”
“You know, it’s mostly because of Stephen that I never kept up with my guitar. I mean, yes, I was busy with the new job and everything, but he’d always sneer at the idea of my playing music. As far as he was concerned, I had no business doing anything creative, because I was the big sellout who’d taken a job in the business school.”
“Whatta putz. So it’s really over with him?”
“Yes. Stephen and I are definitely through.”
“Well that’s the best news I’ve heard all year. Okay, you get to your guitar lesson, and I gotta get down to paddling practice. But we still gotta fix this.”
Emma jerked her thumb at the living room window. The parked police cruiser was clearly visible.
“Do you want to have lunch tomorrow?” I asked. “A Council of War, as Amelia Peabody might say?”
“Who?”
“Crimefighting Egyptologist.”
“You know some of the weirdest people. Invite Iker Legazpi to lunch too, okay? He must have all the latest on Kent Lovely’s da kine. Embezzling, yah? If we could find out what Kent was up to, and who was working with him, maybe we could figure out who killed him.”
“Bearing in mind we’re keeping this all extremely low-profile, because we don’t want to alert the murderer. Right?”
“Look, babooz, I’m not gonna send in any more tips to Island Confidential, okay?”
“Good. I’ll stop by the Accounting Department tomorrow morning and invite Iker to have lunch with us. So where is Jonah?”
“Vedging in his room I bet. JONAHHH.”
I winced and rubbed my ears.
“What’s wrong with you?” Emma demanded. “You hung over?”
“No, you were just kind of loud.”
“Where’s your guitar?”
“I assumed Jonah would have one I could use. Should I just…” I pointed at the guest room.
“Yeah, try knock.” She headed for the front door.
“The lessons are in Jonah’s room?” I called after her. “Isn’t it a little, you know?”
“Nah. Lessons are in the laundry room. And you guys gotta keep the door closed. The noise bothers Yoshi. If there’s a load washing, just pause it. Make sure you start it again before you leave. Have fun.”
The drying clothes hanging from the ceiling filled the laundry room with detergent perfume. A Yngwie Malmsteen poster was taped to the wall above the electrical panel, corners curled from the damp. Jonah brought in two folding chairs and set them up, and then went to fetch two guitars. He handed me one, and I set it on my lap and tried tuning it.
“How long since you played?” he asked.
“Years.” The guitar strings felt like cheese-cutter wire on my finger pads. Jonah pondered this for a moment.
“Okay,” he said, “I know what we’ll start with.”
He left me alone in the laundry room. I got as comfortable as I could on the metal folding chair and tried to remember how to play something.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jonah walked back in carrying his own guitar and a stack of lesson books. He placed the books on the washing machine and sat down on his folding chair, facing me.
“How’s it feel?” he asked.
I examined my left hand and flexed it.
“It’s already kind of sore. And I’ve only been playing for a few seconds.”
He took my hand and rubbed his thumb over my fingertips.
“It’ll take time. Your finger pads are soft. Emma said you used to play in a band?”
“It was back in grad school. Before I moved to Mahina. I was working on my dissertation, Reproducing and Resisting: Hegemonic Masculinities and Transgressive—”
I noticed Jonah starting to glaze over.
“Sorry, you don’t need to hear the whole title of my dissertation. It had to do with punk rock, basically, and competing narratives of masculinity, how the privileging and/or marginalization of—anyway. When I got to my fieldwork, I was interviewing all of these kids who were playing in their own bands, and I thought, well this looks like fun, and how hard could it be? So a few of us from my cohort got together, and there we were.”
“Your band have a name?”
I shrugged dismissively. “It was some postmodern in-joke. I can’t really remember it now.”
Calling ourselves “Phallus in Wonderland” hadn’t been my first choice. But Melanie Polewski, our lead singer, was really into Lacan at the time, and had lobbied hard for her idea of an all-female band with “phallus” in the name. As usual, Melanie got her way.
“Okay, before we start.” Jonah handed me a sheet of paper. “Here’s the price list for the lessons.”
“Is that the price per month? I guess that seems fair.” It seemed high to me, but I supposed it was worth it to support Emma and get my guitar practice back on track. You can’t put a price on nourishing your soul, right?
“Oh. No, sorry,” he said. “It’s per lesson.”
I tried not to look shocked.
“So how many students do you have?”
“Less than before. I’m not really keeping track. Still teaching a few lessons every day. Four or five, I guess.”
Let’s say four students, five days a week, an hour each. That would be…. not a bad living at all. And certainly enough for Jonah to afford his own place.
Jonah tuned his guitar, then handed it to me and took the one I was holding. Somehow, he intuited what I was thinking.
“It’s enough to help Emma with the mortgage.” He plucked strings and twisted keys, making nearly imperceptible changes to the pitch.
“Emma charges you rent?” The way Emma talked about her brother had always made him sound like a world-class freeloader.
“Sure, I pay rent. I’m not some freeloader. They need the money. Yoshi doesn’t have a job.”
“What? I thought with his fancy MBA, Yoshi could get a job anywhere.”
Jonah shrugged.
“Yoshi? Mister Failure-Isn’t-An-Option? He’s unemployed?”
“I don’t think he’s trying that hard. He doesn’t like Mahina. No job here’s good enough for him. He says he can’t live in a place where no one can tell he’s wearing a five thousand dollar watch.”
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“If it’s so important to him, he should just leave the price tag on.”
“That’s what Emma said. He misses the big city, though. Eh, gotta do what makes you happy, yeah?”
Jonah played some difficult, twiddly riffs on his guitar, the kind only other serious guitar players enjoy listening to.
“Let’s start with a D chord,” he said.
“Major, or minor?”
“D-major. Let’s get an idea of your comfort level.”
I strummed awkwardly at first, and then with a little more confidence. As I repeated the chord, Jonah picked out a rambling melody that harmonized nicely. When he played, he seemed transported. That’s the point I wanted to get to. Where everything was in muscle memory, and I could enjoy the music flowing through me.
Of course I wasn’t going to be achieving that blissful flow state if my guitar teacher got hauled off to prison for murder. Emma wanted me to investigate. I might as well start here.
“Jonah, I hope you don’t mind my asking. What do you think really happened to Kent?”
Jonah kept playing, eyes down. His melody became more agitated, and then veered off into the atonal.
“Sorry, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But Emma keeps pestering me to help her get to the bottom of it. She’s worried about you, and she says you both want your lives back. Do you know anything about it?”
Jonah herded the disjointed notes into an unexpected but satisfying conclusion.
“No.” He rested his hands on the guitar and looked up at me. “Wasn’t me, is alls I know. Emma was the one who was upset about my classes getting cancelled. She’s the one who sent the story in to Island Confidential. I shoulda just kept my mouth shut and not made the report. And I should never’ve told Emma about it.”
“Jonah, you did the right thing, reporting it. Someone had to.”
“Yeah, too bad it was me. I regret it every day, believe me. Here, see if you can follow this one. On your own this time.”
He set a sheet of guitar tablature in front of me. It was a simple three-chord progression. I could do this. I arranged my fingers into A-major, which required a little more stretch than the D.
“At least Fujioka’s made out,” Jonah said.
“Fujioka’s Music and Party Supply?”
“It’s where Kent was spending all the department’s money.”
“How infuriating.” I tried to strum evenly as I talked. “In my office? I’m sitting on a yoga ball because there’s no budget for office furniture. How did Kent manage it anyway? Doesn’t someone have to approve university purchases?”
“I dunno. Someone put him in charge of the department budget. Okay, you sound like you know what you’re doing. Let’s try something a little more challenging.” He pulled one of the lesson books from the stack on the washing machine and opened it to the first page.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Jonah said your lesson went good yesterday.” Emma picked over the cafeteria’s sparse display of plastic bento boxes, apparently not finding much to her liking. The wet drywall smell from the recent construction lingered unappetizingly.
“My fingers feel like horses have been walking on them.” I rubbed the fingertips of my left hand together. “I really need to toughen up. All my callous is gone.”
Emma picked up a bento box and examined the contents through the clear plastic top. A fried chicken katsu fillet, a chunk of fried fish, and wrinkly beef strips lay across a bed of white rice.
“Please decide on something, Emma. Iker’s waiting for us.”
Iker Legazpi had brought in his own lunch from home. He had volunteered to sit at one of the cafeteria tables and save seats for us while Emma and I went to buy our food.
“How long we got, like forty five minutes to pick Iker’s brain before we gotta go to that search committee meeting?”
“Could you please not use that horrible expression when we’re about to eat lunch? This cafeteria is enough of an appetite obstacle course.”
“Yah, tell me about it.” Emma put the bento box back down.
“This is such a waste of our summer. I can’t believe we have to start the whole search again from scratch. You know, I hate to say I told you so—”
“You love to say I told you so,” Emma interrupted. “Eh, how did you know that what’s his name wasn’t gonna pass the background check? Seriously. Tell me.”
I picked up the paper napkin from my tray and dabbed my forehead. The cafeteria’s aging air conditioning was no match for summer in Mahina.
“Let me think. What was it? I know. It was because he reminded me of Voltore.”
“Who’s that?” Emma asked. “One of your relatives?”
“A character from a Ben Jonson play. The Vulture. A greedy, immoral, dissembling liar. Why would you think it was one of my relatives?”
“You don’t need to get all defensive. So whatever that superpower is of yours, Molly, try put it to good use. Fix this thing with Jonah. I’m sick of that police cruiser parked outside my house.”
“Maybe they don’t know what else to do. No one else seems to have a motive. Hey, where’s the milk for the coffee?”
“Over here.” Emma indicated a bowl full of white packets labeled For Your Coffee. “I don’t think they put milk out in the summer when it’s so warm like this. What about Kent’s ex-wives? Any one of them coulda killed him.”
I picked up a packet and saw a long ingredient list in typeface so small I had to squint and hold it at arm’s length. I decided to take my coffee black. Meanwhile, Emma had opened up the drinks cooler and was perusing the selection.
“Emma, are you going to stand in front of that open cooler all day? Poor Iker, his lunch is going to get cold.”
“Nothing’s getting cold in this place. Wish I could stand here all day.” She chose a poisonous-looking pink can and closed the frosty glass door.
“An energy drink? Emma, really?”
“Energy drinks aren’t what killed Kent. Too many of these would overload you with caffeine and other stimulants, and would make your heart give out. Kent Lovely died of kidney failure. It’s a totally different thing.”
“I’m ready to go,” I said. “Should I go pay and meet you at the table?”
“Maybe I’ll just get the veggie plate. What, one bag of almonds? That’s your whole lunch, Molly?”
“Nothing else looked good. Especially compared to what Iker brought. Grilled lamb and poached asparagus.”
Emma raised her eyebrows in approval. Not much at our cafeteria is poached or grilled, the preferred cooking methods being either microwaving until chewy, or deep-frying in some kind of industrial lubricant.
We got in line at the single open cash register, right behind Rodge Cowper. He turned around and lit up when he saw Emma.
He grinned at Emma’s raw veggie plate. “Hey Emma-Lou, you on a diet now?”
“Rodge,” I said, “I wouldn’t—”
Rodge archly shook a finger at Emma’s veggie plate. “Don’t lose too much weight now, Emma-Lou, or you’ll be way too pretty to be a college professor.”
Rodge paid for his loco moco and turned back to wink at Emma.
“Catch you later, beautiful.”
“Eh babooze,” she called after him. “I’m married, ah?”
“That’s not your ring finger, Emma.” I eased her arm down.
Emma, Iker, and I had the table to ourselves. As a rule, students will only sit next to faculty if there are absolutely no other available seats.
I tore open my bag of almonds and was already eating when I noticed Iker saying grace. I put the bag down and waited until Iker had crossed himself and started eating. Iker doesn’t mean to, but he always makes me feel like an inadequate Catholic.
“So.” Emma popped open her energy drink. “We all agree Jonah didn’t do it, right?”
“I’m sure Jonah is innocent,” I agreed. I couldn’t imagine the diffident Jonah Nakamura as a murderer. A fatal poisonin
g would be have to have been motivated by hatred. Or greed. Or at the very least, some kind of strongly held opinion.
“I mean, first degree murder takes some planning and initiative,” Emma said. “That should clear my brother right away. Eh, wanna know who really had a motive? That schmuck Rodge. Mister Don’t lose too much weight, Emma-Lou. Right, Iker?”
“I do not know.” Iker resumed nibbling on an asparagus stalk.
“Rodge Cowper?” I said. “Why would he want to get rid of Kent? They were best friends!”
Emma leaned forward, recklessly planting her bare forearms on the hibiscus-print oilcloth. Rings of sticky liquid glinted under the fluorescent lighting.
“Rodge wanted the teaching award. And Kent, who was just a part timer remember, beat ’im out. That hadda hurt.”
“Oh, good point. Part-timers aren’t usually eligible for these things.”
“Yeah, not unless they’re shtup—friendly with the Vice President.”
Emma stole a quick glance at Iker, but he was occupied with his grilled lamb. He had packed real silverware, and was dining in the European style, keeping his fork in his left hand as he ate. Instead of trimming the fat off and just eating the meat, Iker sliced off a cross-section and popped the whole thing into his mouth, jiggly fat and all.
“I don’t know about Rodge,” I said. “I mean, you just said first degree murder requires some action and initiative. Rodge’s whole purpose in life is to expend as little effort as possible. You know he barely gets assigned to committees anymore? Whenever he gets put on a committee, all he has to do is show up and tell one of his jokes, and they immediately yank him out and send him to sensitivity training.”
Iker set his utensils down on his plate and gently cleared his throat.
“It is true,” he said. “Since Roger Cowper received tenure, he has published not one word. And he gives only the A grades to students. In this way, he avoids the burden of marking papers, and guarantees there will be no contesting of grades. I do not wish to complain about a colleague. But when one man abuses his freedom, we are all in danger the freedom will be taken away.”
“But Iker,” I asked, “do you think Rodge is capable of murder?”