Sensei

by John Donohue

  “Wouldn’t that mean a cut to the throat?” Art was paging through the M.E.’s report as I spoke, looking for details that would support or challenge my interpretation.

  I shook my head. “Buddhist monks wore a large scarf draped from the left shoulder diagonally across their body. The cut was supposed to follow that line.”

  “Charming.”

  “Yeah, well. It’s a basic technique, and if you do it with a blade, you can cut someone almost in half. With a wood sword, you would most probably break the clavicle.

  “Now, if Reilly also had sustained some damage to his right wrist,” I looked inquiringly to Art, who nodded, “he would have a hard time using the sword. You need two hands to use it well. With his clavicle busted, Reilly would have been in big trouble. You could use a real blade one-handed, but a bokken would not be very effective.”

  “So what are you saying?” Micky asked.

  “I think this guy had a duel with someone using a wooden weapon. The murderer could have been using a sword or a staff or a bunch of other weapons, but it seems like this was someone with some training.”

  “A duel?” Art was incredulous.

  The light went on in Micky’s head. He pointed at Art, snapping his fingers. “Sure, sure. Bobby Kay wasn’t too far off the mark. Reilly sets it up ahead of time, lets the guy in for the big showdown. Otherwise, why carry around a stick?”

  Art nodded. “Maybe.” He looked at me. “This Reilly know what he was doing?” I nodded. “OK. So he’s no virgin.” He thought a bit and said, almost to himself, “Been around the block a few times. Knows the cardinal rule of weapons.”

  “What’s that?” I was curious.

  “Contrary to all that Asian less-is-more crap you’ve been listening to,” Micky said, “with weapons, more is more.”

  “Or,” Art said, “to phrase it with some more elegance, ‘Never bring a knife to a gun fight.’”

  “So, if Reilly’s carrying a stick . . . “ Art began.

  “It’s a bokken,” I corrected.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Micky said.

  “ . . . then it must have been on purpose. Reilly knew someone was coming and he knew he would need the sword.”

  “But, he got in over his head,” Micky said. “A pop here, a pop there, the rest is history.”

  “What’s the motive?” Art asked.

  “Man, I’d be a lot happier if we had a theft here,” Micky suggested.

  “Yeah,” Art nodded, “but if it was just a smash and grab with a little witness cleanup attached, the whole sword thing seems a bit elaborate, ya know?”

  “I thought we agreed robbery wasn’t the motive,” I suggested.

  Micky and Art turned to look at me.

  “What you tend to find, Connor,” Art explained, “is that motives tend to be a mishmash of things.”

  I shrugged and went on. “Maybe here the duel itself was the murderer’s real interest. This wasn’t a robbery scheme that didn’t come off. Maybe the killer got what he came for.”

  They chewed on that quietly for a minute. Then Art looked at Micky. “Burke, your people are weird.”

  “Look,” I said, “whoever did this was trained. From what I hear, Reilly was pretty good.”

  Micky rolled his eyes toward the photos. “Not as good as he thought he was.”

  “No one’s as good as they think they are,” Art commented.

  Art had never met Yamashita, but I let it go.

  “Besides, if someone used Reilly to get into the Samurai House to rob it and then planned on killing him, don’t you think they would have brought something fairly lethal along?” I asked.

  “Looks like they did,” Art said. He had a point. One way or the other, the man was dead.

  I got back to my idea about the killing. “I mean that they would have brought a real weapon, Art, not a wooden replica of some sixteenth-century sword from halfway around the world. With these things, you’re essentially bludgeoning someone to death. Look at him lying there.”

  They both eyed the photos.

  “Reilly was an expert. If you had your choice, would you go three rounds with him?”

  Micky shook his head. “Not even on a good day. In my prime.”

  Art laughed. “Like you ever had a prime.”

  “Seriously, guys.”

  “Nah, you’re right.” Art’s eyes were narrowed as he sat and thought. “Typical MO would be to gain access in the middle of the night, get the stuff, and then point off to a corner and say, ‘Hey Reilly, check it out.’ He turns to look, and pow! A nine-millimeter in the back of the head. Simple.”

  “A little hard on the carpet, though,” Micky said.

  The two men exchanged glances, suddenly aware of new possibilities.

  “In each life,” Art commented in rounded tones with a raised finger, “a little brain must fall.”

  “If theft were the primary motive, the methodology would be . . . what?” I had seen the glint in my brother’s eyes and was trying to head off their usual routine.

  “Get in and get out,” Micky said.

  Art jumped in. “But here, the perp chooses a time when someone’s around. And there’s this duel.” He looked at me. “The M.E.’s report says this guy took some beating. How long you think it took?”

  “It’s hard to say,” I commented. “Theoretically it could have been over quickly. It depends on the skill levels involved.”

  “Was Reilly highly skilled?” he prompted.

  “He was pretty good,” I admitted.

  “Lots of lividity on the arms and torso. Looks like the victim put up quite a fight,” Art said. “So this did not go down quickly.” He paused and looked down at some of the still photos. Then he fished out a sheet of paper. “Here’s the report from the shrink liaison.” He glanced at me and answered the look on my face. “We got a revolving group of forensic psychiatrists on call. You get a murder like this, we use ‘em for profiling.”

  “Any good?” I asked them.

  Art squinted and looked at the wall like he was focusing on something in the distance. “Depends on the case,” he said noncommittally.

  Micky snorted. “They’re all a fucking pain in my ass.”

  Art just read the pieces of the report out loud.

  “ ‘What we have here,’ the good doctor concludes, ‘is an elaborate killing. It took some time. It was carefully thought out and carefully executed.’”

  “Nice pun,” Micky said.

  Art didn’t rise to the bait. He just droned on: “’The elaborate methodology, the apparent absence of other motives, the almost . . . ritual . . . staging. While the identity of the killer cannot be determined . . . ‘“

  “There’s a news flash,” Micky commented.

  Art didn’t bat an eye. “The profile is a male, between the ages of twenty-one and forty.” He looked up at me. “This is the profile of most murderers, Connor. So far, these guys are not impressing me.” He scanned the next sheet. “Ooh, wait, there’s more. ‘The killer is intelligent, probably highly so . . . ‘“

  “Unlike the writer of this report,” my brother snickered.

  “ ‘Doesn’t stand out in a crowd. Quiet, polite . . . even affable’.” I looked from one to the other to get their reaction. They looked like they had heard it all before.

  “Aha!” Art called. “Here it is . . . ‘Somewhere in this man’s past . . . in his childhood . . . behaviors of this type generated as a response to a life event . . . systematic abuse of some sort . . . often sexual.’”

  “Thank God they got that in. I was beginning to worry,” Micky said.

  “There’s more, Mick. Lemme see . . . ‘Deep-seated feeling of insecurity . . . spawns a pathological need to exert control. The more intense the need, the greater the response.’” He looked up again. “These jokers wet their pants over serial killers,” Art explained.

  “I sort of get that impression,” I said.

  “Which is all well and good,” Micky interrupted. “But
every time I visit the morgue, I got shrinks spinning these theories about bed-wetting psychos. Know what? Most of the time, the person who put the stiff in the cooler is a friend or a family member, drunk or strung out. You know most murderers, Connor, they’re not Hannibal Lechter. They’re people who made bad choices, or got their buttons pushed one too many times, or just took it a little too far.”

  “You gotta admit the duel thing is a little hinky, Mick,” Art said.

  “Maybe so. But when it was all over, we’re still zippin’ someone into a rubber bag.”

  That seemed to sum up the situation nicely.

  The door opened and another detective stuck his head in “Oh. There you are. Art, a call for you from the coast . . .”

  “Ooh, my big break.”

  “ . . . homicide guy named Schedel. Know him?” Art shook his head no. “Well, he says you’ll want to talk to him.”

  “Can you transfer it in here?”

  The cop looked offended. “Like I don’t have anything to do but hunt you two morons down,” he grumped as the door closed.

  “Thanks, Kramer,” Art called.

  Eventually, the state-of-the-art phone purred, a light blinked, and Art’s call got put through.

  Which was how we heard about the Ikagi murder.

  Detective Schedel, LAPD, gave a recital that was disengaged and clinical in that way cops have. Micky had him on speakerphone and the voice sounded like that of a bored guard coming from somewhere way in the back of a warehouse.

  “Pederson? I got the message you posted,” he began.

  Micky looked like he was going to ask something; Art shook his head silently.

  “You asked for anything we might have in the files . . .”

  “Martial arts related.” Art finished.

  “Buddy,” the voice from the cave said, “this is LA. I got freaks in ninja suits falling out of trees.”

  “The West Coast is like another world,” Art agreed.

  “Maybe not,” Schedel replied. “You also mentioned a crime scene with some sort of calligraphy left as a message.”

  Micky sat up a little straighter in his hi-tech chair.

  “What’ve you got?” Art prompted.

  “Eight days ago, some Jap karate instructor gets the shit ripped out of him with a jagged stick. Also something written on the wall. In blood.”

  “You know what it said?” Art asked.

  “Oh, yeah. One of the meat wagon guys is up on this kind of stuff. It was . . . “ You could hear the papers shuffling around on the other coast, even with the echo. “OK, I got it. ‘Ronin.’ Is that what you’re looking for?”

  “Bingo,” Art answered. “Where’d you go with the case?”

  “The usual,” Schedel replied. “Rousted the Asian gangs. Talked with the deceased’s family, friends, business associates . . . “

  “And?”

  “And nada. Nothing. Zip. The guy was a straight arrow. No problems we could find, and we turned over all the rocks. Dead end so far.”

  “Tough,” Art said without much conviction. They were both professionals and they had a pretty realistic feel for what was solvable and what wasn’t. Cops knew you cracked a homicide within forty-eight hours. After that, the odds got slim.

  “Yeah,” Schedel continued. “Look, if you’re interested in my notes and some crime scene shots, I can get ‘em to you. Probably quicker if I sent it over the Net. I’ve got it on disk.” Then his voice grew confidential. “Look. Pedersen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You turn up anything, let me know. This was my squeal, but it’s on the way to the cold case file, ya know?”

  Schedel hung up.

  “What gives Art?” Micky said.

  “I’ve been fooling around with the Internet at home. I got on this secure listserve for homicide departments, and I sent out a description of what we had to see whether anyone had seen anything like it.”

  “So now,” I said, “this detective Schedel tells us that we’ve got a similar type of murder taking place a few days ago on the other side of the country.”

  They both nodded.

  Micky was standing and looking at the crime scene photos. “This thing,” he said, “is getting interesting in a hurry.”

  “Just one thing, Connor,” Art said.

  “What?”

  The two of them looked at each other and gave me their patented cop look.

  “It’s still an open case in California. Don’t let Bobby Kay talk to the LAPD.”

  7. Things Not Said

  Yamashita couldn’t stand it anymore. “Cut him down,” he called fiercely, as he churned across the floor toward us. “Cut him DOWN!”

  The early morning training session is not heavily attended. Only the hard core tend to make it. As a result, Yamashita is usually a bit more approachable.

  But this morning his mood had altered. It wasn’t a lack of focus, exactly, but he seemed even more preoccupied. Yamashita’s perception was normally ratcheted up way above that of normal people. On days like today, he would stare off into the distance and seem frozen with effort, straining to identify the hint of something that was beyond the threshold of his students to sense.

  The nonverbal elements of communication and perception are highly valued by the Japanese; they prize their ability to grasp the essence of people and things using methods we can only guess at. They call this ability haragei . Yamashita has it. He can cross swords with a complete stranger and know the skill level of his opponent before they’ve begun. You can argue that it has to do with subtle physical clues people give off: a look in the eye, posture, breathing rates. The longer I train, the more I tend to agree. But there’s also more to it than that.

  On days when he’s really cooking, it seems as if Yamashita can actually read your mind. What’s scary is not that he knows what you’re going to do before you do, but that he does it by getting inside you somehow.

  I’ve experienced hints of it. The feeling is a weird, emotive certainty that washes up from the base of the neck and creeps over your scalp. It is often totally unexpected. And distracting.

  I knew my teacher too well to think that his mood that day was fueled by anything but this sensation. I had seen it before. It was something he did not speak about. But, of course, it was possible to call him back to the reality of heiho.

  I had been working with one of the more promising junior students. We had been going at it pretty hard and, although the late May morning wasn’t actually hot yet, we were both sweating and constantly adjusting the grip on our weapons. He had a bokken. I was using a short staff known as a jo, which, at about fifty inches in length, gives you a bit of a reach over a sword. Sam was big and fast and good. He’d come to us from one of the better kendo schools in the area. As a result, he had amazing reflexes, so I needed all the help I could get. Which was why I was using the jo.

  Far off, just on the edge of my attention, you could hear the sounds of another Brooklyn Saturday starting. The day was shaping up to be a busy one for me, and contemplating the details made my attention wander, which can be bad. Like trying to figure out the meaning of the distant whoop of a car alarm, it’s not going to prevent you from getting cracked across the skull with an oak sword. I caught myself drifting and refocused on the task at hand. I worked with Sam and evaded a number of strikes that came a bit too close. It takes a certain amount of patience to wait for an opening in a situation like this and I had to force myself to do it. It finally came, though, and when the opening appeared I simply reached out and tapped his wrist lightly and backed away. Which was when Yamashita blew in like a small tornado.

  “Burke,” the sensei demanded, “what are you doing?”

  “I had him, Sensei.”

  “You HAD him?” he asked incredulously.

  “Hai.” Yes. “It was over.”

  Yamashita took a glance at Sam, who was wisely not getting anywhere near this conversation.

  “Burke,” my teacher said tightly, “look at Sam. D
oes he look like he has been, as you put it, had?” Sam looked like a large piece of granite in a martial arts uniform. When Yamashita turned to face me, Sam gave me a mocking grin behind the teacher’s back.

  “No, Sensei,” I answered.

  “You must take the opportunity when it comes. More focus, Burke. More spirit. Project. Like this.”

  Yamashita suddenly jerked his whole body toward Sam. He didn’t really do anything—he wasn’t carrying a weapon and didn’t even raise his hands—but the force of Yamashita’s presence made Sam step back in alarm.

  “Hmm? So.” He looked from me to Sam and back again, motioning us to continue.

  We began again while Yamashita glided across the floor, his callused feet rasping along the wood. As he headed toward some other trainees he called out to the ceiling, not even looking at me, “And CUT HIM DOWN!”

  It made the rest of that morning pretty interesting for both Sam and me.

  Afterward, Yamashita brought me up to the living quarters he had in the loft portion of the dojo. He wanted to talk.

  This is not a common thing with my teacher. The Japanese are suspicious of people who talk too much. But I had mentioned the fact that I was helping out Micky with the investigation of the Reilly murder. The martial arts community was buzzing about it. I imagined that the senior sensei would be deeply concerned, but Yamashita’s reaction to my involvement was odd. It involved a hard narrowing of the eyes and a set of the mouth that told me I had displeased him in some way I couldn’t fathom.

  But when I followed him upstairs, he didn’t say much right away. I sat down and waited while that little bullet of a man fussed in the kitchen making coffee. Oddly enough, Yamashita is a coffee fanatic. A while ago, someone signed him up for one of those gourmet mail services for what they insist on calling “kaffe” and it was all over for Sensei. Every time he tries to cancel, they offer him some free item to continue, and he does. His kitchen is cluttered with mugs with the company logo, a coffee maker with the brand name on it, and, his latest addition, a little white ceramic canister to hold his gourmet grounds.

  Then, surrounded by the rich aroma of coffee harvested in one of those African countries whose name has changed about eight times since 1960, we sat and I filled him in on the Ronin case. He listened attentively, with the very intense focus he brings to things in general. But once again, I picked up a sense of agitation and displeasure from him. It was subtle and fleeting from a Western point of view, yet there nonetheless.