There must be something tokubetsu about those dolls. But what?
Driving home, Mas knew that to piece together this puzzle, he’d have to sit down and make peace with Haruo. They said two heads—even considering Haruo’s lackluster one—were better than one.
As soon as he turned onto McNally and into his driveway, he noticed something familiar from Mari’s childhood days. The front door and even the screen door were akkepanashi, wide open, inviting any wandering flies or robbers to enter. “Sonafagun,” he said to himself. Recollections of all of Haruo’s annoying traits, as bad as a teenager’s, washed over him again.
Carrying out the six-pack of room-temperature Coke and the can of cashews, Mas slammed the driver’s door. “Haruo!” he called out, walking onto the front porch. The stink of something burning filled his nostrils, and a film of smoke obscured his vision.
“Haruo!” Mas bellowed again, but nothing. He went straight into the kitchen, where the smoke was thickest, and heard water rushing from the faucet. A figure standing in front of the kitchen sink turned. The Buckwheat Beauty, holding a pan, charred and damaged beyond repair.
To find his best friend’s nemesis in the middle of his faded kitchen was a shock indeed. “Whatchu doin’ here?”
“Uh, saving your ass and your house from going up in flames,” Dee shot back. “Don’t you know better than to leave the house while dinner’s on the stove?”
Mas went to the sink and turned off the faucet. What nerve this woman had to be in another’s man’s house! “Not cookin’ nuttin. You the one makin’ dis mess.” And I expect you to clean it, too, he added silently.
“Look, I came here to talk to Haruo. When I got here, the front door was wide open and smoke was blowing out onto the street. Nobody was home.”
“Sonafagun,” Mas muttered. A couple of sliced carrot rounds sat on the white synthetic cutting board, and a crushed cardboard package for curry blocks had been tossed in the trash can. Haruo, no doubt, had started to make dinner. But why would he leave without finishing what he started? Before he could figure out what happened, Mas needed to clear his head of Spoon’s daughter. “Orai, so youzu save the day. Good for you. Haruo not here, go talksu to him tomorrow at market.”
“I will. But I want to see him sooner. I think my mother may be having a nervous breakdown.”
Mas bit down on his lip. Spoon was on his black list, but not enough for him to wish her an emotional meltdown.
“She won’t leave the bedroom and won’t let anyone in. Doesn’t want to see any of us girls. She even threw me out of the house.”
Mas raised his eyebrow. So-ka, he thought. Seems like every homeless person ends up in my house. Good thing he’d stopped by the market for a baker’s dozen of ramen packages.
“She won’t see a therapist. I thought maybe Haruo could talk to her. She still cares about him, you know.”
You wouldn’t know that judging from her recent actions, Mas thought.
“My mother is hiding something. I think it has to do with those dolls. I know, I thought Haruo had stolen them. But now I don’t know.”
Dee’s doubts did little to cool Mas’s anger. She was the one who had sent the law after Haruo in the first place. He marched out of the kitchen and returned to the front door. He checked the screen. It wasn’t just open, someone had given it a big tug so it was almost unhinged from the frame. The screen had been broken before, but Mas had made the time to repair it last year. Outside on the concrete porch he saw skid marks from the heels of someone’s shoes.
“Youzu do dis to my house?”
Dee shook her head. “I just went straight in. I didn’t even touch the screen door.”
Mas traced physical clues: a spray of gravel, a trail of open cement where a blanket of dried sycamore leaves had been. He took a big sniff. A familiar, delectable smell, one that made his mouth water. On the side of the cracked driveway, by some pigweed threatening to overtake the neighbor’s lawn, lay a spoon covered in fresh curry. And tangled in the leaves of a knee-high weed he saw long, greasy black-and-white hairs pulled out from their roots, their ends stained in blood.
Mas knew what the theories at Eaton’s Nursery would be—that Haruo had perhaps faked his disappearance because he had actually stolen the dolls to pay off bookies and loan sharks. But they hadn’t seen the masked men at Sonya de Groot’s house. Or listened to the talk about cocaine at the market.
“Haruo’s in trouble,” Mas murmured to himself, repeating it more loudly for his one witness’s benefit. “Big trouble.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Making other people believe that Haruo was in big trouble was a larger challenge than Mas bargained for. The Buckwheat Beauty wouldn’t leave his house, but he wasn’t going to let her stop what had to be done. First was a call to G.I. Hasuike and Juanita Gushiken, the closest thing to a crime-fighting duo that he knew of. But G.I. and Juanita, both busy with their respective lawyering and private investigating, were unmoved.
“Why would anyone want to kidnap Haruo?” asked G.I. over the phone.
A very good question, Mas thought, a good question that he didn’t have an answer for. Haruo had no money, no house, and no working car. His children, both teachers, weren’t rich. His ex-wife had indeed remarried, but to a television repairman who’d retired his shingle as soon as people started paying companies to take old broken TV sets off their hands.
“And those men who were at Spoon’s neighbor’s house—are you sure they weren’t just kids causing trouble?” asked Juanita on the other line.
No, no, no, Mas tried to tell them. In spite of the ski masks, he knew the difference between a wild gangly teenager’s build and a grown man’s. Plus they had threatened Sonya, not only in person but in telephone calls—but he had promised the old lady that he wouldn’t breathe a word about that.
“Well, you can file a report with the sheriff’s department. When they find out about Haruo’s background—I just don’t know, Mas. If that neighbor woman goes to the police about her intruders, it might be a different story.”
Next on Mas’s list was Kiyomi, Haruo’s daughter, who also didn’t seem to understand the gravity of what was being told to her. “Missing?”
“Ka-re burnin’ right on the stove.”
“Oh.”
Why, just oh, thought Mas, his temper rising.
“Did he ever tell you how he left the house while he was filling up the bathtub when we were children? Our hardwood floors got all warped.”
This has nothing to do with an overflowing bathtub, Mas wanted to yell. He saw a chunk of Haruo’s hair in the driveway. What else was being done to him right this moment?
The daughter was so passive that Mas had to move on to the son. He knew from the get-go that Clement would not be happy to hear from Mas, much less about his estranged father.
“Are you sure he’s not back at it?”
Mas gritted down on his dentures. It had been indeed a mistake to call the son, but he didn’t know what else to do.
“You know what I’m talking about. Did you check the card clubs in Gardena, the Indian casinos in Temecula? Las Vegas, even?”
Mas had no answer.
Apparently the son distinctly remembered pulling his father back from those tables, time after time. “When you search all those places and you still can’t find him, I’ll know something’s wrong. But until then, don’t bother calling back.”
“No luck?” said Dee, bringing Mas a freshly brewed cup of Yuban coffee to the kitchen table. Mas was going to refuse it, but what was the use? The Buckwheat Beauty was not stupid. Even overhearing Mas’s clipped side of the conversations, she knew that no one was taking his concerns seriously. Mas understood the bitterness of children. He himself had been an absent father and had experienced the fallout from that neglect. He was trying to mend fences now, two thousand miles away, and it was like tending a sick orchid—no flowers, but the bare stem of hope was still standing.
Mas took a sip of the coffee, so
hot that it burned his tongue. He didn’t mind because the pain jump-started his brain. It was already close to eleven and no Haruo. Wishbone and Stinky hadn’t seen him. Neither had his boss, Taxie. Other than receiving a phone call about the wedding cancellation, Tug hadn’t even spoken to Haruo in a few weeks.
“I think we’d better call the sheriff.”
Mas looked up surprised. Not because the Buckwheat Beauty was suggesting that they contact the authorities, but because she had said “we.”
The first thing Mas did when the sheriff’s deputies stepped into the house was hand over the plastic baggy with the bloody strands of hair. Mas had seen enough television crime dramas to know that hair could unravel secrets of the most pernicious and hidden crimes. The Altadena sheriffs, however, seemed skeptical. Dressed in brown uniforms, they were congenial enough, patiently spelling out Haruo’s first name a couple of times before they got it right.
“Now, would there be any reason why Mr. Mukai would want to run away from his life?” one of the deputies asked.
Mas mumbled unintelligibly, and the Buckwheat Beauty looked down at her high-top tennis shoes.
“You know, woman problems, maybe any trouble with the police?”
Yes and yes would have been the correct answers, but Mas and Dee shook their heads.
“Do you have a photo?” they asked.
Mas sat frozen in his living room chair, thinking desperately of where he might have an image of Haruo other than the one in his head.
“I do,” said the Buckwheat Beauty, surprisingly. She brought out keys to the delivery truck, which was attached to a wallet. Inside the wallet were a few plastic compartments for photos. One was of Dee, Dee’s sisters, and their parents when Ike was alive. The other was a more recent group shot of the family, including Haruo in the back.
One of the sheriff deputies brought the photo close to his face. “You weren’t exaggerating about the scar,” he said to Mas. “It is pretty severe. How did he get it?”
Mas knew that Haruo had many different versions about the birth of his scar. House fire. Spousal abuse. Anything except the truth—the Bomb—because it just caused too much discomfort for the inquirer. It turned out that Mas didn’t have to manufacture anything, because the Buckwheat Beauty beat him to it.
“Kitchen fire, when he was a kid in Japan,” said Dee. Her answer surprised Mas, not because it was a lie, but because she said it so easily, flippantly, as if she really believed it. Mas crossed his arms, jamming his fists into his armpits. Wait a minute. She did really believe it. Why hadn’t Haruo told her the truth?
There were doubles of the same photo in the sleeve of the wallet, so Dee gave the less worn one to the deputies.
“We’ll send out his name with the photo. If anyone finds a person matching his description they’ll let us know.”
Mas felt his dentures click together. He knew what the deputy was saying. If they found an unidentified dead body in a hospital or in a ditch, Haruo Mukai would be on the list of possible John Does. What good was that, identifying Haruo when he was dead, when they needed to find him while he was alive.
Still, Mas got up from his easy chair and bowed his head in thanks.
“Maybe he’ll show up at work,” Dee said, a little too brightly, after the deputies had left the house. They’d told them not to worry, to rest, but that’s the last thing Mas could do.
He wondered if Dee was going to tell her mother what was going on. If Spoon was indeed having a nervous breakdown, news of Haruo’s disappearance might be too much. Either way, he’d let the daughter take care of dispatching the news to the Hayakawa side. He’d already been a target of Spoon’s volatile mood swings and wanted to stand clear of any more.
He went into the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee. It was lukewarm by now, but Mas didn’t care.
The two of them sat at the kitchen table and stayed quiet for a while. In fact, the whole house was so still that Mas could hear the ticking from his bowling trophy clock in his bedroom.
“You know, we used to have a kitchen set like this.” Dee spread her arms over the table surface, which was tattooed with soy sauce stains and cigarette butt marks. “Formica, right, that’s what they call it?”
Formica, whatever, what did that have to do with anything? Mas wondered.
Dee tipped her head back and again for a flash, Mas could see a glimpse of her former beauty. “I was sitting with my dad like this on the morning he died. He was up at three, like always, and I hadn’t even slept yet. I watched him do his little routine, you know, boil an egg for six minutes, let it cool, and then crack it open about fifteen minutes later. Then he’d spread a thick layer of Best Food mayonnaise over the top and sprinkle some black pepper over that. He did that every morning. Mom said she’d boil the eggs for him beforehand, but he said he didn’t like how the yolk would get dark on the outside. Dad was kind of like that egg. All perfect. No marks. When I started getting into trouble, I
thought for sure he’d lose it. Yell, hit me. In rehab, you know, my parents had to come in for our family sessions. I had to get into it. Everything I did. Where I bought drugs. When I was arrested. The whole time my mom would be holding her purse, ready to make her getaway at any minute, while Dad had his head down, like what I did was his fault.
“Anyway that day he got killed, he must have known that something bad was going to happen. Because after he ate his egg, he looked at me. Right at me. ‘Take care of your mother,’ he said. ‘Whatever you do, take care of her.’
“I knew I needed to stop him, tell him not to go to Hanley. But I didn’t follow through. And that’s something I’ve regretted every day since. So if you think Haruo’s in trouble, you can’t just give up and let the police handle it. Because they don’t know Haruo like you do.”
Mas looked at his Casio watch. Haruo was missing now for seven hours. A lot could happen in seven hours. In fact, in a few seconds the day could become night and the skies could bleed black. Both Mas and Haruo had witnessed it for themselves. The Buckwheat Beauty was right: Time was not often on Mas’s side, and for that matter, not on Haruo’s, either.
Mas fell asleep right at the kitchen table and woke when he heard the thump-thump of newspapers being delivered to some of his neighbors’ homes. Dee was gone, probably off to work at the market. Before Mas could figure out what to do next, the phone rang.
He picked up the receiver on the second ring. “Hallo,” he said, louder than any man should at five o’clock in the morning.
“Mas, it’s Taxie. Sorry to call so early, but you told me to call you to tell you if Haruo showed up, right?”
Mas swallowed. His throat felt scratchy and parched.
“Yeah, well, he didn’t come in. I’m kind of worried because he hasn’t missed a day of work since he started.” Taxie must have been on a cell phone, because the reception was poor, causing crackling and popping in between every word.
“And well, I hate to tell you this, Mas, but I thought you should know—he’s been going to the track a couple times a week for the past three months. Sometimes with Casey. Casey didn’t want anyone to know, but the parking attendant noticed them leaving together and Haruo let it slip one day that they were going to Santa Anita. I just found out myself this morning.”
Mas’s stomach fell. Haruo was back gambling? In a way, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Mas had heard Americans saying that someone’s eyes were too big for their stomach. Well, Haruo’s eyes were much too big for his wallet. Being the optimist that he was, he always thought the pot of gold or happy ending awaited him if. If he stayed at the poker table for one more round. If he tossed the dice one more time. That kind of hope could only lead to one thing—death. Either a physical death at the hands of a loan shark’s dispatcher or a death of a spiritual kind. Haruo had been saved from the latter, but Mas doubted that his friend or even he could survive another incident.
While speaking to Taxie, Mas silently cursed Haruo, Casey, and the gambling sickness.
“Youzu see Casey at the market?”
More crackling.
“You know, I actually haven’t seen him this morning. But then he doesn’t come in every day.”
“Where he live?”
“He’s between places. I think he’s living in an apartment next to the Japanese Episcopal Church right now. The one in Koreatown.”
Mas could hear potential flower customers in the background inquiring about the cost of different blooms, so he let Taxie return to business.
If Casey had been the one to lead Haruo astray, church or no church, there would be hell to pay.
The Japanese Episcopal Church in Los Angeles was smack dab in the middle of Koreatown. The area was called Uptown before the war, and Japanese immigrants, mostly gardeners, once lived in bungalows north and south of there.
Mas knew where the church was but had never gone inside. Mari had gone—or rather, was sent to—Japanese school every Saturday morning a few blocks away. Mas and Chizuko didn’t know how many times she’d actually graced the doors of her classroom, because they’d heard and even seen her loitering outside with another girl smoking cigarettes. It seemed that the more Chizuko pushed Mari to be Japanese, the more she declared herself to be American. Mas was sympathetic, because he often felt the same way, but since he couldn’t properly speak either Japanese or English, he was not only without a language but also a country.
The church had once been flanked by a Korean-owned golf driving range, with green netting as tall as the neighboring mini-high-rises. Now the driving range had been replaced by a new elementary school with an impressive multicolored pagoda on one side. The voices of children playing during recess lifted Mas’s spirits.
He parked on the street, and as he neared the modest chapel he spied a couple of neon-yellow golf balls in the driveway. He picked them up—he didn’t know why, but they seemed to be crying out to be claimed.
The apartment, the orange color of Ritz crackers, stood above a vegetable garden surrounded by a locked gate. Judging from the look of the soil and its maintenance, the garden was relatively new. He saw beds of carrots, melons, beets, and radishes. In between potted lemon trees, another golf ball, looking like a recently laid white egg, had fallen.
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