Blood Hina

by Naomi Hirahara

  And then there were the dead bodies that had been found at the Hanley car crash. Blanco had said that they’d most likely been doused with gasoline and set on fire. Mas knew enough about burned remains—you always went for the teeth. The teeth left a trail leading to their owner.

  That’s why before the Buckwheat Beauty got out of his truck at the residential facility, he’d asked: “Youzu papa gotsu dentures?”

  “Yes,” she said, “he got them all extracted when he was still in his fifties. Too much candy, I guess. That’s why he always told Uncle Jorg to go to the dentist, but Uncle Jorg didn’t listen to him. Funny, such a big man afraid of the dentist.”

  So no teeth trail—Mas filed that information away. He then felt confident to charge into Lopez, Sing, and Iwasaki Mortuary and demand some answers.

  Itchy instantly became jittery, his left thumb dancing against the papers on top of his desk.

  “Okay, Ike came to me,” Itchy finally admitted. “Said that he need two corpses. One about his size and one about six feet tall. I told him that he was crazy—I couldn’t just hand over two of our clients’ bodies. That would be against the law.

  “But I had my connection with the coroner’s office, and they have a backlog of indigents, unclaimed bodies—whaddaya call it, potter’s field. They are cremated, filed, and later buried in a lot over there on the side of Evergreen Cemetery.

  “So I told them that we were willing to take on the cremations as a service, even look after some of the burials. They were more than willing to work with us.

  “Out of all those bodies, I found the two that fit the profiles Ike gave me. I didn’t know what he wanted with them. He said that he wouldn’t be hurting people, that actually he’d be saving lives. He told me to extract all the teeth from the shorter man before I prepared the bodies for him.

  “They came here to pick up the bodies in huge athletic duffel bags. I didn’t know what they were going to do with them. But those were dead bodies already. I didn’t kill anyone and neither did they. Later, when I heard about Ike and Jorg dying, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t want to get the business in trouble, so I kept quiet.”

  And kept the money Ike gave you, thought Mas. This Ike Hayakawa was a detail person. The type who made plans and actually followed them. He was a headman, a smart man who could move in different circles deftly and elegantly like a ballroom dancer. He wasn’t like Mas, who didn’t know how to water down or sweeten an insult or alter the way he spoke or walked into a room.

  Mas stared directly at Spoon. “I know heezu alive,” he said. She immediately lowered her eyes, which meant she knew it, too.

  The back bedroom door then flew open and Mas literally leaped out of his seat.

  The figure in the doorway walked closer to the light. The same thick hair in the photographs, only now it was all silver gray. He’d replaced the aviator glasses with rectangular plastic-framed tinted ones that artists and actors wear. Instead of a short-sleeved button-down shirt, he had on a baby blue velour sweatsuit, the uniform of suburban wannabe rappers.

  Mas had only one question for the dead man, Ike Hayakawa. “Whatchu do wiz Haruo?”

  The dead man wanted to start from the beginning, so Mas let him. Minutes and hours were ticking away, but Ike claimed that he knew nothing about Haruo Mukai, other than that he was going to marry his wife. He sat on the couch next to Spoon, nursing a fizzy drink and a lit cigarette.

  “Occupational hazard,” he explained. “I had quit a while back and now everyone around me is smoking.”

  Mas surprisingly didn’t crave the tobacco smell at that moment. His stomach was completely kara, empty, and the only way it could be sated was with explanations. He couldn’t help noticing how comfortable Ike was in his former home. How long had he been there? Ever since Spoon had kicked out Dee, Mas imagined.

  “My family started off growing pompons in Montebello. You know what they are?”

  Mas nodded. He was familiar with the fat chrysanthemums that the Japanese used to grow. They were sometimes as large as cabbages, their stems bent from all the weight they carried.

  “My family was one of the early ones who came before the alien land laws. We were able to actually buy land. Can you believe it? We built a greenhouse, a real one with pane glass, not those temporary fixtures with cheesecloth muslin.”

  The Hayakawas were among the elite, that’s for sure. They didn’t have to wander throughout the desolate desert every season, following around truck farmers. They didn’t have to sleep in shacks and carry blankets on which they could rest their heads.

  The Hayakawas owned land, so they could stay put, build a house, go to the same school for several years, be smart.

  “My father was the one who was close to Mr. de Groot. The de Groots first belonged to the other side of the market, the European side. But we both farmed in Montebello, and Jorg and me, we grew up together. A group of these Nisei boys were giving Jorg a hard time, him being so big, you know, and quiet. So I spoke out. My mother told me that my words could cut like a knife. Didn’t have to beat on anyone, make physical threats.

  “My dad died right before World War Two, so I guess that I was the man in charge. The de Groots offered to take care of the farm, didn’t know what we would do if it hadn’t been for them. We got married in camp—” Ike paused and grinned at Spoon, who had been tearing at her dead cuticles the whole time of his monologue. “And then just when the conflict overseas was ending I got drafted, can you believe it? Was part of the Counter Intelligence Corps and spent some time in Japan. We helped interrogate prisoners of war, were a watchdog for communism.”

  “Spy,” Mas couldn’t help but to murmur and Ike nodded.

  “I guess we were. Counter intelligence officer sounds a lot better.”

  “Hina. Those hina dolls come from Japan. Spy dolls.”

  Ike nodded again. “It was a pet project of one of the other officers. He didn’t want to bring it back to the States so I asked him if I could. We just used them as regular Girls’ Days dolls and you know what, I completely forgot about them having a recording device. That is, until Dee started getting into trouble.” Ike’s voice became thin and fragile—quite a contrast to the relaxed, friendly way he’d started the conversation. The ice cubes in his drink had melted and his cigarette had long been extinguished.

  “Whatsu on tape?” Mas brought the conversation back to what was in his pocket.

  Ike looked up sharply and Mas immediately realized that he’d shown his hand too early. “You know where it is? Who has it?”

  “Dat doll man in San Diego.”

  “I knew he was hiding something. He switched the dolls, didn’t he?” Ike got up quickly before Mas stopped him. The tape felt like it was on fire in his pocket, and his hand instinctively went to his thigh to protect it.

  Ike remained as still as a hstatue, and as he slowly bent down onto the couch, his knees cracked. His pupils seemed to expand like a rabid dog’s.

  “I need that tape,” he plainly said.

  “I wanna know whatsu on it. You know dat Chuck Blanco’s dead.”

  Ike didn’t seem surprised. “You don’t need to know anything. It’ll be safer for you and safer for Spoon.”

  “Give him the tape, Mas,” Spoon said softly. She wasn’t pleading or begging. More like a warning.

  Mas balled up his fists, grimacing as pain surged from his cut hand. He stood up. “No, you tell me first—whatsu on dat tape? My friend’s gone and I needsu to know.”

  “It’s Estacio Pena’s confession.”

  Mas frowned. Confession about what? That he was selling drugs out in Imperial Valley? Mas didn’t know much about American drug laws, but that had taken place close to twenty years ago. Hadn’t too much time elapsed to get him now?

  “Confession that he was never going to get prosecuted for his crimes. The DEA was out to get him. Well, more than him, his father. His father ran a drug cartel that bled into California and Arizona. The weak link: Estacio Pena, t
he bastard son. So when Dee was arrested, the DEA approached me. They needed my help, some way to convince Dee to give Estacio up. But she told everyone that she knew nothing. She was telling the truth, but that wasn’t going to help her case. So I told the DEA that I’d help them. That I’d contact Estacio Pena and tell him that I’d be willing to smuggle in some drugs—as long as he left Dee alone.

  “So I tracked him down. He came to the house and the dolls were ready for him—just my own security plan, you have to understand. Jorg helped me through the whole thing. But as we were talking, Estacio kept bragging that he was protected. That his father had the government in his back pocket. He kept mentioning the CIA. That the CIA was looking out for his father because he was one of the rebel leaders who were going to take the Nicaraguan government down.

  “I thought Estacio was bluffing, just tooting his horn as usual. But the deeper and deeper Jorg and I got into it, nothing was happening to Estacio. We didn’t make one drug run—we made seven. We gave all the information to the DEA, but somehow Estacio was always elusive. He was one step ahead of the authorities, always.

  “It was the Hanley police. Practically all of them were on the take. Everyone except for Chuck Blanco. He was the only honest cop on the force. Too bad he wasn’t that smart. I’m sorry to see him dead.

  “We told the DEA that we wanted out of this undercover business, but they wouldn’t let us. Said that they had enough on us to prosecute us—but for what? It was their deal, after all. They weren’t going to help us, so Jorg and I decided that we needed to take drastic steps.”

  “You fake the car accident.”

  Ike nodded. “We didn’t know what else to do. Estacio’s men kept warning us that if anything happened to Pena’s son, our families would be killed. For me, it made sense to sacrifice my identity—Dee was my daughter. But Jorg—” Ike’s voice cracked. “He didn’t have to do any of it. He just did it because he was my friend.”

  What happened to them afterward, Mas wondered. How could one live a life incognito after having a wife and raising a family?

  “Now, I’ll need that tape.” Ike tugged at the waistline of his sweatpants and brought out a gun. It was black and had a long attachment on its barrel.

  Mas did have a little experience with guns, enough experience to know that Ike wasn’t playing around.

  “Put that away,” admonished Spoon. “That’s not necessary. Mas will give up that tape without any rough stuff.”

  Mas removed the reel from his pocket. The ends of the brown audio tape were thin and tangled, but the meat of the recording was still intact.

  Ike grabbed hold of the tape. This was the prize he had been searching for during the past week. For what? Blackmail? To ruin Estacio’s father’s political career? Or perhaps as a carrot to snag a very big and bad rabbit?

  The doorbell rang.

  The three of them stayed frozen in between the couch and the love seat. Who could that be?

  “Spoon, see who it is.”

  Spoon pulled out a plastic footstool underneath a table and looked through the peephole.

  “It’s Dee.”

  Mas got on his knees and angled his head so he could spy through a decorative side window covered with an opaque curtain. “Matte!” He whispered for them to wait before taking action. “Someone wiz her.”

  Ike hunched over next to Mas. “Estacio.” The old man then moved toward the hallway as gracefully as a cat. “I’ll be back here. Let them in.”

  Keeping the door chained, Spoon slowly turned the knob. Seizing his opportunity, Estacio pressed Dee’s face into the crack of the open door, revealing the presence of a gun. “Let us in, Mrs. Hayakawa,” he hissed, “or I’ll shoot your daughter right on this welcome mat.”

  Spoon’s hands shook as she struggled to undo the chain. As soon as the door was freed, Estacio pushed Dee into the house and slammed the door shut behind them.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” Dee fell into her mother’s arms while Estacio aimed his gun at Mas’s head.

  “So where is it?”

  Mas felt like he was in a movie. Surely this could not be happening to him, the Buckwheat Beauty, and Haruo’s fiancée right here in the middle of Montebello.

  “I know you have it, old man. Klinger told my man—at least while he was alive.”

  “Dunno whatchu talkin’ about.”

  Estacio grabbed Dee by the elbow and pushed her down to her knees, aiming the gun at her head.

  “Old lady, come here,” he barked at Spoon. She knelt down next to her daughter and reached out for her hand.

  “Both of you, put your hands on your head.” Their backs toward Mas, the mother and daughter unclasped hands and complied.

  “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry for everything.”

  “Shut up, Dee,” Estacio ordered, aiming the gun barrel at Spoon’s head. “So, old man, it’s all up to you. The longer you wait before telling me the truth, the sooner I kill one of them. First the the old lady. And then Dee.”

  Mas bit down on his lip. Wasn’t the dead man supposed to intervene at some point?

  “So what’s it going to be?”

  Estacio turned toward Mas in frustration, and his eyes widened as if he’d seen a ghost. “Shit,” he murmured, and then they heard the whoosh-clack sound of a noise resembling the release of a staple gun, followed by the smell of smoke. Estacio’s head slammed against the china cabinet, spraying a red halo of blood on the mint-green wall, before he slumped to the carpeted floor.

  Dee screamed and covered her face. Seeking to console her daughter, Spoon wrapped her in her oversized sweater. Mas looked back at the hallway and could see right into the back bedroom. The window over the bed had been slid wide open, its screen thrown onto the floor. The curtains blew in from a spring breeze, a perfect scene of domesticity, belying the violence that had just occurred a room away.

  Officers Chang and Gallegos arrived on the scene within a matter of minutes. They had received an anonymous call about trouble brewing inside the Hayakawa house. Ike had definitely come through on that.

  They came in with their guns cocked and ready, stepping around the pool of blood underneath Estacio’s body, the hole in his head releasing a busted persimmon of brains.

  “Who shot this man?” Officer Gallegos asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dee spoke first, and then her mother said the same thing.

  Mas shook his head, too. He didn’t feel that any of them were lying. Spoon perhaps had known him at one time. Maybe Dee did as well. But the dead man who had returned home was indeed a stranger. His world had changed, and so had he.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The police officers must have thought it best to get to the truth by dividing and conquering. They split up Mas, Spoon, and the Buckwheat Beauty in separate rooms and even the backyard to question them. Officer Chang picked Mas.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  Mas had forgotten all about the incident at Hina House. Was the doll man dead, as Estacio had boasted? “Tree-cuttin’ accident,” he said.

  They sat in the bedroom that the Buckwheat Beauty was using. It had a futon on the hardwood floor and a guitar in the corner. Mas remembered that Dee said she was into music—in fact, that was how Estacio “Steve” Pena came into her life.

  “Tell me what happened, Mr. Arai.”

  Mas wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but he knew there was to be no mentioning the dead man. Other than that fact, he basically reported the truth: He had come to talk to Spoon about her missing fiancé, his best friend. And Dee had come to the door with a gun pointed at her head.

  “Did you know the assailant?”

  Mas shook his head vigorously. No, he did not.

  “Who else was in the house with you?”

  “Spoon.”

  “Mrs. Hayakawa?”

  Mas nodded.

  “And who else?”

  “Dee.”

  “And?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Then w
ho shot Mr. Pena?”

  Mas shrugged his shoulders. “I hear gun, look back, and bedroom room and window wide open.”

  “Seems like you would have heard someone go through the bedroom window while you were in the house.”

  “My hearing, not so good, yo,” Mas said. “I ole man, you knowsu.”

  Officer Chang tried to suppress a smile, but the corners of her mouth tugged up, in spite of herself. She composed herself to look more serious and suspicious. “We’re having that entire room dusted for prints, so I hope for all of your sakes that we have evidence that indeed another person was in that room.”

  After the interrogation by the uniformed officers, Mas, Spoon, and Dee were all told that they would have to go to the police station later to speak to detectives. And that they would all have to spend the night somewhere else, as the house would be need to be further examined for evidence. Already yellow tape was stretched across the living room, and Mas held back an inclination to gag as he saw the bloodstains splattered on a bookcase and parts of the mint-green walls.

  Spoon’s eldest daughter, Debra, had arrived to take the two women to her house, but Spoon waved her off. “You take Dee. I need to talk to Mas alone, so I’ll have him drive me.”

  The Buckwheat Beauty gave Mas a quick hug before getting into her sister’s mini-van. “I didn’t say a word,” she whispered in his ear. “And I won’t say anything, either.”

  Mas backed away from the girl. What was she saying? That Mas had been the gunman? That didn’t make any sense. Because first of all, if Mas had a real gun in his hands, he would have ended up shooting holes in the ceiling and the wall, rather than getting the side of Estacio’s head in one try. And second, where was the murder weapon? That kept the authorities scratching heads. Because if it indeed had been Mas, Spoon, or Dee, then where was the gun?