Mas had a last question for Dee before she left for group. It was a strange one, he knew, but she seemed unfazed that he was inquiring about her father’s dental care.
After answering, she hopped out of the car and headed for the two-story building. Before she opened the door, she abruptly turned around to make sure that Mas was still there, watching. In her oversized clothing but more so with her facial expression, she transformed into that young girl, needing her father to prod her on, assure her that she would be okay on her own.
The Ford’s motor was still running, so Mas quickly made a U-turn to head out. He was relieved that the Buckwheat Beauty was getting help, but he also realized that he was no closer to finding Haruo. Clement was now in charge of the search party, but Mas couldn’t just sit back and drink Budweisers and play solitaire. Too bad he had so few customers. In the past, work had been a great diversion from pain and worry.
Mas then realized that he was only about a few miles away from Genessee Howard’s house in Mid-City. He was without any rocks but still had some ideas for the rock garden in his head. Suddenly he wanted nothing more than to sit down in Genessee’s warm kitchen with a cup of coffee in a handmade mug.
Once he arrived at Genessee’s street, he knew he had made a mistake. Just like the incident at Dr. Svelick’s, there was a huge warning sign in front of the house—only this wasn’t a white Toyota truck, but a brown Chevy van. On the porch bench sat Genessee, and right next to her was the older black gardener Mas had seen the last time on the street.
Before Mas could speed away, Genessee waved to him and got to her feet.
Sonafagun, thought Mas. It was too late for him to make his getaway. Mas parked in front of the van and, straightening his Dodger cap, he got out of the Ford.
“Mas, what a wonderful surprise,” she called out.
The gardener beside her also rose. He was wearing a jumpsuit that read HENRY’S GARDEN over his left chest. In his hands was a mug, the same handmade rustic one Mas had drunk from before. Together they looked like a perfectly matched couple. Mas wished he could disappear.
“This is Henry, my regular gardener. Henry, this is Mas Arai, the one who suggested the rock garden.”
“Pleased to meet you.” Henry held out a calloused hand, and Mas gripped it with his. Normally Mas would be embarrassed at how torn-up his palms and fingernails usually were, but today he wore his blisters as a badge of honor. Only problem was that Henry’s hands seemed even more calloused from work.
“Perfect timing, Mas, because Henry just delivered an unbelievable gift.” She pulled at the cuff of Mas’s sleeve and he resisted the impulse to clasp her free hand. She led him into the backyard, where a mound of smooth stones had been dumped into the former dirt bike course.
Anyone who didn’t know about rocks wouldn’t think much of a pile of them. But looking at Henry’s gift, Mas saw dollar signs. Each stone must be worth a dollar, and there must have been five hundred in Genessee’s backyard.
“One of my other clients was getting rid of her Japanese garden to grow vegetables,” explained Henry. “She said that I could get all the rocks free as long as I took care of carting them away.”
“Yah, yah, very good,” Mas said, jealousy burning his neck. He was the one who came up with the rock garden idea. He was supposed to bring Zen to Genessee Howard’s life, only to find that he’d been bested by a gardener named Henry.
“Well, I betta go.”
“Already, Mas? No, stay for some coffee. I can make a fresh pot.”
Mas, who had taken off his Dodger cap to fully absorb the treasure of the rocks, put it back on his head.
Genessee followed Mas down her cement pathway while Henry the gardener remained on the porch. “Are you all right, Mas? You haven’t told me why you stopped by.”
Mas merely shook his head as if to say goodbye and then jogged across the street, his elbows pointed out like chicken wings. Back in the truck and driving, he cursed himself. Bakatare, bakatare. At each stop, the Ford sighed, so Mas cursed it, too. They were two fools on the road in L.A. How could Mas even imagine that he was more than he was—a has-been, good-for-nothing gardener who was just counting days before Lopez, Sing, and Iwasaki Mortuary would be making arrangements to lower his ashes into the ground.
His thoughts returned to the Buckwheat Beauty, in her oversized T-shirt and her high-top tennis shoes. What was she doing now in her group? Sniveling and crying, no doubt, telling how she had been that close to snorting, swallowing, smoking, whatever they did with hiropon these days. How wonderful it would be to escape and forget with either drugs or with a group. Then Mas could be freed from all worry, all shinpai, about Haruo.
Why was Haruo taken from Mas’s house, anyway? One theory was that he could have been followed—it was also common knowledge at the market that he was staying at Mas’s house. Or else it could be that Haruo had not been the intended target at all. In spite of Haruo’s scar, Mas could pass for Haruo at a distance. Instead of snatching Haruo, did the kidnappers hope to get Mas?
But who would want to kidnap me? Mas thought to himself. That idea was as preposterous as trying to figure out who was behind Haruo’s disappearance. Who even knew Mas or even cared enough to take him? It wasn’t like those masked men at Sonya de Groot’s house knew who he was. But then he had given out his Oriental Gardening business card with his home address to somebody recently, hadn’t he? His business card, in fact, was one of the few places that advertised his full name (over the past five years, he might have given out three cards). Mas then remembered—the Hina House doll dealer down in San Diego. That fellow, Les Klinger, had indeed seemed like a henna otoko, strange man who lived in his own world. Was it possible that he had passed along Mas’s information to someone like Estacio Pena? Or perhaps Haruo had gone to Hina House directly to resell the stolen hina dolls back to them?
Mas sped down the 5 like his truck was on fire. It was almost as if a supernatural force was protecting him as he passed Highway Patrol car after Highway Patrol car apprehending speeders. The Ford in their eyes was perhaps not worth ticketing. Anonymity was all that Mas and the Ford had going for them and they would embrace it for all that it was worth.
Once he reached the Hina House, Mas attempted to find the screwdriver on the floor of the passenger side, only to feel the sharp edges of keys and then the rough vinyl of a wallet. The Buckwheat Beauty had forgotten her valuables, but then there probably was no need for them in group. Mas stuck the keys and wallet in his front left pocket and his screwdriver in his right.
He pushed down on the doorbell, forgetting that it would unleash the “Sakura” cherry blossom song. Ding-ding-DONG-ding-ding-DONG, it rang like the bells of a Buddhist priest during a memorial service. Mas put his ear to the door. Was that the soft crunch of footsteps and then pressure against the other side of the door as if someone was peering through the peephole?
Mas poked the doorbell again—ding-ding-DONG-ding-ding-DONG—and again and again. He swore that he would not move in spite of how anxious the noisy doorbell was making him feel. He would keep ringing until he busted the bell and after that he planned to move on to banging the door.
Finally the doorknob turned and Les Klinger appeared, his arm in a sling. “I took a fall recently,” he explained. “It takes me a while to get around now.”
Mas charged past the doll man and the eerie blowup dolls floating in the swimming pool and entered the darkened showroom. The hairs on his arm prickled–did he hear soft murmuring from the dolls in the different corners of the room? Was it the wooden kokeshi, straight-as-a-nail erect backs and rice-bowl haircuts, clattering by the floor? The melodious chanting of the hina dolls cascading down the wall, the drums gently beating? Or perhaps the Friendship Doll, Miss Tsuneo, crying in her glass prison?
Was there a secret door somewhere? Was Haruo locked up in a spare bedroom?
“Wherezu Haruo? Wherezu my friend?” Mas whipped around and the display lights seemed to swirl in circles like cosmic
stars. “Was my friend here?”
“I don’t know what or who you are talking about.” Klinger, cradling his wrist, looked confused. His mukuchi wife, the woman without a mouth, stood beside him.
Mas was tired of all the lies and deception. The problem had started here. The hina dolls. Everyone wanted them and someone had them and yet was not satisfied. The Hina House knew their secrets.
“Who you tell dat I come here last week?” Mas yelled. His voice was as rough as frayed rope and its harshness even surprised him.
Klinger adjusted his glasses with his good hand. His wife’s eyes were as big as billiard balls. “Nobody,” he murmured.
“Whatsu special about those dolls?” What was their power, their black magic? Surely they were not as common as the doll man had described them. Because if they were, why were so many wanting them?
The doll man and his wife stood stunned, frozen. Mas needed answers and he didn’t care who he hurt at this point. Haruo’s life was in danger; he could feel it in his bones. Maybe he was just a nobody gardener like Mas, but the Bomb had spared them both. Mas used to think that it had been a cruel joke, but in recent years, there seemed to be an additional purpose to their lives. That Haruo might be sacrificed for two dolls was no way to end his life.
Mas took another spin around the room, and his eyes followed the main spotlight on the queen of the castle, the Friendship Doll. As he made his way to Miss Tsuneo, Noriko, the wife, literally cringed behind her husband. Mas gripped the screwdriver like an ice pick and turning his head away, he stabbed into the glass case. The protective box shattered into giant pieces, a broken shard slicing into the side of Mas’s hand. He winced in pain but had to keep going. As loose broken pieces fell, tinkling against each other like wind chimes, he pulled out Miss Tsuneo and, using a professional wrestler’s move, squeezed her head in the crook of his arm as blood dripped down his hand and into his sleeve.
“Be careful!” Les called out, and then his wife squeaked as if to add an extra exclamation mark.
“Izu want the truth,” Mas said, swinging the doll back and forth. The doll was actually the size of a small child and Mas could not believe what he was doing.
“Watch the blood!” Klinger screamed.
Noriko’s mouth was now wide open, revealing her square white teeth, shaped like a Christmas nutcracker’s.
Mas felt like he was going to be sick. This couple actually thought of the doll as their child.
“You give my address to somebody.”
“No, no, I said nothing about you.” Sweat streamed down Klinger’s forehead. “In fact, I almost forgot about you until today.”
Again, Mas could have been offended, but this was no time for hokori, pride. “But you hidin’ sumptin about those hina dolls.”
Noriko squeaked again and Mas knew that he was on the right track.
“Yes, yes, I did a swap. An exchange.”
Mas wiped some of the excess blood onto his afternoon shadow. He could only imagine what a madman he must resemble.
“I knew that there was something different about these sets of dolls because of the interest we were receiving. The dolls historically were not that unusual—in fact, we had an exact set in storage.”
“So I took the dolls apart, starting with the heads, and what do I find but a wire connected to some kind of audio-recording device set in the platform base. The recorder was old, a Minifon from the forties. The battery was dead, and even when I replaced it, the recorder didn’t work. But sure enough, there were two tiny reels and skinny audio tape. I knew what I had was some kind of spy device from around World War Two.”
“Whatsu on the tape?”
The doll man’s upper lip trembled. “I’m not sure. My plan was to listen to the tape before handing it over to the authorities. A Japanese man, an old man, came by a couple of days ago. He almost insinuated that I had made the swap of the dolls. How would he know? He hadn’t even purchased the dolls.”
Mas demanded the tape and the recorder, but the two remained unmoved. After shaking Miss Tsuneo a few times, Mas finally got the attention of the doll man.
“It’s in the back bedroom.” He stepped forward, but Mas gestured toward the wife instead.
“She,” Mas said.
“Noriko, ikkinasai,” Klinger directed his wife.
“No police,” warned Mas.
“No police,” Klinger repeated.
Noriko bowed slightly before disappearing into the hallway. She emerged in a few minutes, the tape and recorder held in outstretched hands. The whole recorder was no bigger than a half a sandwich, the reel the size of a silver dollar. Could this be why Chuck Blanco was killed and Haruo kidnapped?
“Can I have her back now?” Klinger asked, his arms outstretched toward the doll, anticipating a big dakko, parent-child embrace.
“One more thing.” While still clutching Miss Tsuneo’s head, Mas pulled out Spoon’s wallet from his left pocket and shoved a photo in front of Klinger’s face. “Dat Japanese man who came ova, itsu him?”
Klinger lifted up his glasses, narrowed his eyes, and nodded. “Yes, that’s him.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Once they were buried or burned, dead people, Mas imagined, didn’t have any sort of ethnic identity. They didn’t know that they were Mexican, Chinese, or Japanese, but the relatives they left behind did. That’s why a place like Lopez, Sing, and Iwasaki Mortuary was born in the heart of L.A.’s Lincoln Heights, just across from Plaza de la Raza, where young Latinos cut out skeletal images from bright colored tissue paper at Day of the Dead workshops every October.
Although he had experienced some rough patches in the 1980s, Itchy Iwasaki was making a tidy sum in his mortuary partnership, especially because he was in charge of the Japanese bereavements. Funerals were big deals in this ethnic community—you could just see from the paid obituaries in the Los Angeles Times. At least one and sometimes even up to three—what a bonanza!—of the approximately twenty obits was topped with a Japanese name. And more often than not, if it was a man’s name, an image of an American flag accompanied it, a testament to those who had fought in either World War Two, Korea, or Vietnam.
Of course, it didn’t mean one out of twenty people in Southern California was Japanese. The reality was much, much less. But if you judged from the hoopla in the obituary section, you would come to a very different conclusion.
Mas had initially thought that Itchy, who joined the mortuary in the eighties, had been related to Spoon, but now he was convinced that the connection was on Ike’s side. It had been hard for Itchy to establish himself in the field, with so many competing mortuaries southwest of Lincoln Heights in Little Tokyo. It had required Itchy to take some desperate measures—maybe not so harmful, but perhaps not so ethical, either.
So Mas pounded up the stairs to Itchy’s office, in search of two dead men. Once he received his answer, he knew what he would say to the widow in her home in Montebello.
Like the doll man, Spoon did not come to her door no matter how many times the doorbell rang. There was nothing musical about Spoon’s bell—it seemed to administer an electric shock to the comatose house. Except for Sonya sneaking looks through her drapes, there was literally no one in their homes on the cul-de-sac during the day, so Mas could be as urusai, noisy, as a bloodthirsty watchdog. He altered his tactics and began pounding the door with his good left fist. He had ripped the middle of his T-shirt and wrapped it around the cut on his right hand to stop the bleeding. The dried blood was brick red, already crusted like old paint over rags.
Finally the doorknob began to turn, and it was Spoon, in her trademark off-white sweater. Keeping the chain on the door, she cringed to see the blood on the side of Mas’s face and glanced beyond his silhouette, as if she were worried that someone else was on the porch. She then closed the door, removed the chain lock, and reopened the door.
“Come in,” she whispered.
After Mas entered, Spoon resecured the door and the chain lock. She off
ered no explanations and excuses for why she’d first ignored Mas’s ringing of the bell. And why she was being so cautious now. Didn’t Haruo say that sometimes Spoon forgot to lock the front door at night?
“What happened to you?” she asked meekly. When Itchy had asked the same question, Mas lied and said it had been a tree-cutting accident.
This time he offered no explanation, only that he’d just come from Itchy’s mortuary in Lincoln Heights.
Spoon nodded. “He called me.” She sank down on one end of the couch and hugged an embroidered pillow to her chest as if to cushion a blow. Mas noticed that the Girls’ Day platform of stacked shoe boxes was gone. Spoon gestured for Mas to sit across from her on a love seat.
What had Itchy told her? When Mas had arrived at his office, the mortuary man seemed congenial at first, pulling at his sunburned earlobes as usual when he said hello. But when Mas mentioned Ike Hayakawa’s name, it was harder for Itchy to keep up the sides of his smile.
“Itchy wanted to know how you found out,” reported Spoon.
It had been a weird hunch. Maybe all this time Mas wondered about Itchy’s good luck and his sudden cash infusion in the eighties. When you yourself didn’t have much good fortune, you were brutally aware of another man’s jackpot.
“You know what he did?”
Spoon shook her head. “Not until recently.” Her face was the color of rice paste—she really looked unwell but not shocked. If Mas had recently discovered that a stranger’s dead body had been substituted for his spouse’s, he would not be so calm.
It hadn’t only been a nagging suspicion about Itchy’s launching of the mortuary partnership back in the eighties. That was tangential, actually, the piece that was helpful in tying up the loose ends. What was much more curious was that both Ike and Jorg had indicated to their children that they were expecting to die on the same day. They were just driving to Hanley, not flying to the Middle East on a combat mission. And then, what a coincidence, each had taken out a million-dollar life-insurance policy. Quite convenient to guarantee a strong future for both their respective families.
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