Kage: The Shadow

by John Donohue

  Actually, they had someone else in mind as well, but my brother refused to go.

  Micky had snickered when he showed me the invitation. “Hey, check this out. You know that guy from the News who wrote the book about that Ronin guy?” I nodded. A columnist from the Daily News had churned out a breathless true-crime paperback about a case we had been involved in. It had all the elements of a best seller: a tale of revenge featuring serial murders and the exotic world of the martial arts. And, as far as I was concerned, the ending was great because Micky, Yamashita, and I got to walk away from the scene of the crime. Actually, they took me away in an ambulance, but that’s beside the point. The guy from the News did a halfway decent job, but for some reason the book never did catch on—that season the reading public was interested in other things. But the author did his best to plug the book whenever possible, and was asking my brother to join him on a panel in an upcoming mystery writer’s conference.

  I had handed the letter back to my brother. “Why not?” I asked. “You were the cop who was featured in his book. You could tell those people stories that would curl their hair.”

  Micky had been a policeman for twenty years. He and his partner Art had just retired and started their own security consulting firm. They had spent the last decade as homicide detectives in New York City. That and a recent brush with Philippine terrorists had provided them with a wealth of contacts and tremendous street cred. As a result, business was booming. But although my brother no longer carried his gold detective’s shield, not much else had changed. Growing up, Micky was always a handful. As he’s aged (I’m not sure whether matured is the right term) he’s gotten quieter. But it’s not a comforting type of quiet.

  We’ve got a big family and we get together often: a dense crowd of Burkes washing across various rooms and backyards. My brothers and sisters follow the old ways. As a result, there is a small army of Burke children that regularly alights on my mother’s house like a swarm of Mayo locust. The adults settle on chairs and sofas or cluster in the kitchen to rib each other with the ease of long familiarity. The kids pound up and down stairs, on fire to eavesdrop on the adults, yet torn by the equally powerful desire to consume the salty snacks strategically placed like lures in the family room and basement, far away from their parents.

  It’s a benevolent type of chaos, a restless celebration of connection. But in the midst of it all, you’ll often spot Micky sidling off to a window or the backyard and staring into the distance.

  They say that cops either care too much and burn out, or grow callous out of self-preservation. Micky’s opted for a third way. My brother seems to have mastered the art of keeping his inner filament intact, of stoking a fire that burns but doesn’t consume him. It makes him a great cop, but it also creates an outlook that’s pretty cut and dried: just the facts, ma’am.

  “Connor,” my brother had told me, as I emerged from my reverie, “the world is full of bullshit. Why should I contribute to it?” I nodded in silent agreement. Micky eyed me slyly and pointed at the invitation. “You, however, would be natural for this sort of thing.”

  Which is how I ended up in Arizona, in a room full of writers, annoying the Walrus Man. The conference people had offered to pay my expenses, and Sarah had a consulting job lined up in Phoenix that she’d been putting off, so we flew in together. I dropped her off in Scottsdale and headed south toward Tucson. We planned to meet up in a few days and drive north. The Grand Canyon. Cliff dwellings. The wide-open spaces. It was going to be great if I could just avoid being assaulted by the people at this writer’s conference.

  The audience was still waiting for something from me. A retraction? I wasn’t sure. During my brief speech, I had gotten up to talk and had moved away from the table where three other speakers sat. Now I looked over to my fellow panelists in a mute appeal for help. They were silent for an awkward moment. I got the feeling they were happy just to be out of the blast zone. Then one cleared his throat and stood up.

  He was a lean, youngish guy with a full head of dark hair, wearing jeans, a dark turtleneck shirt, and a sport jacket. He looked every inch the best selling writer that he was. He had a self-confident, easy manner that probably came with being on the “A” list. All day people had been nodding and smiling at him, pointing him out surreptitiously and gazing in rapt admiration. So far no one had fallen to their knees and tried to touch the hem of his garment, but the day was young.

  “What Dr. Burke has done for us,” he said smoothly, “is to remind us of the real challenge of the writer’s craft.” He smiled at me and I smiled back. I couldn’t help it. The guy was good. And besides, the crowd seemed to buy it. I slipped into my chair and listened while he distracted the mob.

  “What we do as writers,” he continued, “is combine the world in our imagination with just enough reality to engage people’s attention; to gain their trust. And then we spin a web with language that makes them suspend something of their critical faculties.” He paused and the crowd seemed to hold its breath. “Then,” he concluded, “we pull them into our world.” His fellow panelists nodded in agreement and there was a general bobbing of heads all over the room.

  No one asked me questions after that. I had, I suppose, been officially noted as someone who would never enter their world. Fair enough. The session broke up and people milled around chatting and hoping for a private audience with the other luminaries on the panel. I was left pretty much to my own devices. I cut across the room and started to move down a side aisle, putting the rows of metal banquet chairs between me and the writers lingering for a last word. Some of them still looked annoyed with me. A vigilant defense is a successful defense.

  I escaped without incident into the foyer, which was located at the center of a series of conference rooms. People milled about display tables with colorful flyers and paperback books on racks, or sat along the walls at small café tables, chatting and drinking coffee. Everyone in this section of the hotel had to have little plastic ID cards around their necks to show that they were bona fide conference participants. Presenters like me had a little red star on their card. After my performance I was wondering whether they’d yank the star off.

  I glanced at my watch. It was too early to call Sarah. I figured I’d get changed and visit the health center at the hotel. Traveling always makes my leg and back muscles tight and, after all this time, you get addicted to the regularity of some sort of training.

  I noticed some people moving down the hallway. They didn’t look like conference members. For one thing, they were missing their little plastic ID cards. And they were better dressed. The man was young and professional looking and was wearing a blue blazer with the hotel crest on it.

  The woman with him was a little older, but still on the young side of middle age. Frosted blonde hair. Blue eyes. She wore some sort of linen suit that fell around her in a way that made you think it was expensive. The guy with the blazer was gesturing toward me. Uh-oh. There goes my star.

  The woman walked right up to me and extended a hand. She moved with a smooth, controlled quality that betrayed toned muscle. She was good-looking, and you got the impression that she knew it and had practiced moving so that you would know it, too. It was a little too studied for my taste, but it didn’t make her any less attractive.

  “Dr. Burke?” It was a rhetorical question and she didn’t even wait for a reply. “I’m Lori Westmann, the general manager.”

  I shook her hand and smiled. She didn’t even bother to introduce the guy in the hotel blazer. His nametag identified him as “Roy.” As far as Westmann was concerned, Roy was invisible. Being in charge means you get to pretty much treat people any way you want. Or at least that’s what I hear. Roy didn’t seem offended by the omission and just stood respectfully at a slight distance from us, ready to serve.

  Lori Westmann smiled back at me with even white teeth. It was a practiced smile that didn’t really communicate much—just a standard visual cue in the conversational sequence.

 
; “What can I do for you?” I said.

  She glanced about her at the guests. “I have a business proposition for you. Perhaps you’d care to join me for an early lunch?” She leaned in slightly toward me, cocking her head as if listening for my silent agreement. Then she moved off without waiting to see whether I was following or not.

  We were seated with a bit of understated hysteria by the restaurant staff. It was clear that they were all pretty intimidated by their hotel manager. It suggested to me that her looks were probably deceiving. The blue-eyed blond with the long legs who was sitting across from me was easy on the eye in the same way a statue was: hard and cold.

  The restaurant was hacienda themed; fake adobe partitions with rounded timbers jutting from little tile roof sections that were meant to create a pattern of cozy little nooks for customers. The focus of the place was inward, to the table and the meal, but you could look out through the tinted windows that ran across one end of the restaurant. Inside it was cool and dim, but out there you could see the hard light pounding down on the sere landscape in the distance.

  The restaurant manager materialized to take our drink orders. He was almost quivering with attention. Lori Westmann ordered a chardonnay. I quickly perused the beer list and ordered a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. I’m on a personal mission to try every beer ever made. Some varieties merit multiple tastings.

  The drinks arrived. “Are you enjoying the conference?’ she asked. “The accommodations appropriate?” She was running down a mental checklist. Ms. Westmann didn’t look like someone deeply concerned about other people’s enjoyment. She did seem focused on efficiency, however.

  “It’s fine,” I assured her.

  She smiled. A flash of white teeth and a tight motion of the lips. Then back to business.

  “I was surprised to see someone like you at this type of conference, Dr. Burke.”

  I wondered whether this woman would ever get to the point and why she was so obviously engaging in small talk. She didn’t seem the type. But I was in no rush. I shrugged at her statement and took a sip of the Sierra Nevada. Looked out the window into the shimmering hills and wondered idly how hot it was out there. “The accommodations are nice. The beer is even better,” I said.

  She frowned slightly at that—a small crease at the bridge of her nose. Lori Westmann probably was not exposed to a great deal of levity from underlings. She gave her head a little shake as if dislodging a troublesome fly. “I would expect someone like you at a conference of academics, not mystery writers.”

  She was overestimating my place in the scholarly community, but I let it go, and explained how I got here.

  “And how are you enjoying this group?” she asked when I had finished.

  “Not a question of how I’m enjoying them,” I replied. “Mostly, I don’t think I’m what they expected.”

  She eyed me over the rim of her wine glass. “How so?”

  I thought for a minute. “I’m too… reality based.”

  She sat up a little straighter. “Excellent. So am I.” The waiter came and we contemplated lunch. Westmann didn’t even look at the menu when she ordered. I had a chicken sandwich. Burke, culinary adventurer. When the help had gone, Westmann got back to business.

  “I’m looking for someone with your research expertise to assist me,” she began. I raised my eyebrows questioningly to encourage her to continue. Lori Westmann took a deep breath as if preparing herself for something unpleasant. “A month ago, my father was found dead at home.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She waved the sympathy away as irrelevant. “The cause of death was listed as an accidental fall. I disagree.”

  I thought I saw where this was going. “Ms. Westmann, I’m sorry for your loss,” I started, “but this is probably something you need to take to the police. I’m not a trained investigator.” This point was, in fact, a huge understatement. I’ve blundered around a few crime scenes to help my brother Micky, but, as he reminds me, my major talent is that I know obscure things that most people don’t care about. I also have a knack for getting in way over my head and clawing my way back out again.

  “I’m well aware of your background and qualifications,” Westmann commented. “I have a number of people working on this from the forensic angle.”

  “And?”

  “You know as well as I do that if a murder isn’t solved within forty-eight hours it’s probably not going to happen.” She waved a hand. “The police are overworked. They feel the evidence for a crime is shaky at best and that I’m a typical grieving child incapable of accepting the sudden death of a parent.”

  She didn’t look all that broken up to me, but she did seem like someone who didn’t take no for an answer. Our lunches came and I ordered another beer. Lori Westmann had been sipping at her wine since it arrived, but the glass seemed as full as ever.

  “And are the cops right?” I asked. “About you, I mean.”

  She looked at me directly. I didn’t think the cops were right. Her eyes had a hard glint to them. “I have very good reasons to think that my father’s death was not accidental, Dr. Burke.”

  “Such as?”

  I had picked up my glass to take a drink. Lori Westmann leaned across the table toward me. “Dr Burke,” she said intensely, “my father was Eliot Westmann.”

  I put down my beer.

  Eliot Westmann was a lunatic of the first order. He was notorious in Asian Studies circles for writing a series of books about his alleged adventures studying with a mysterious sect in Hokkaido, far to the north in Japan. Westmann and his publisher maintained that the books were true accounts; most scholars considered them a blend of personal fantasy and faulty scholarship.

  Westmann had been awarded a doctoral degree by an obscure little Midwestern university. As an undergraduate he had a double major in marketing and theater. Everyone should have seen it coming. His book, Inari-sama: Tales of a Warrior Mystic, hit the stands in the late sixties and made him a cult favorite. I had looked at it years ago. It seemed a weird first-person journey through a confusing mix of Tantric Buddhism, recycled Asian stereotypes, and fragments of martial arts stories about ninja and samurai masters. He eventually published another five or so books on the same subject. Specialists scoffed and the public devoured them.

  Westmann had always maintained that by writing about the secret community of Inari-sama, the Fox Lord, he had put his life at risk. He claimed that the members of the sect vowed a horrible revenge on anyone who revealed their secrets. Special assassins, marked with a mystic diamond tattoo at the base of the neck, would be dispatched from the cold mountains of Japan’s remote north country to hunt him down.

  The only people who hunted him down, it turned out, were fans. Nothing annoys scholars like popularity, but, Westmann, true to his theatrical penchant, reveled in the spotlight. He eventually dropped any pretense of connection to the academic establishment. He and his considerable royalty payments simply moved on. The last I had heard, he was dabbling in Native American mysticism, ostensibly still vigilant against assassins, still reclusive and as controversial as ever.

  Westmann’s daughter Lori watched me as I reacted to the mention of her father.

  “So,” I finally said trying to tone down my disbelief, “you think Inari-sama’s people got him?”

  Her mouth tightened with displeasure. “It’s not a joke, Dr. Burke. We’re talking about a man’s life here.”

  I took a breath. She had a point. “OK. What do you want from me?”

  “I never knew my father as a child. My late mother was his first wife. In the last five years we had reconnected and he told me about his experiences in Japan.” She saw my skeptical look. “Never at any time did I get the sense that he was being anything but truthful.” She tapped the table for emphasis. Her nails were short but manicured, professional. “I’m in a business where I have to read people constantly, Dr. Burke. My father was not lying.”

  “OK,” I said. I wasn’t going to argue. “How do I fi
t in?”

  “My father was killed. I’m sure of it. I’ve got investigators looking into the crime. What I need is someone to do an objective assessment of his works.” Her words came more quickly, fueled by an unexpected emotion. “Someone,” she continued, “with a background as a scholar who can vouch for his integrity and rehabilitate his reputation after all these years…”

  Oh boy. “And,” I concluded, “someone to provide a motive for his killing.”

  Lori Westmann sat back in her chair, eyes bright. “Exactly.”

  I took a sip of beer. “Ms. Westmann, I’ve got to be honest with you. I read some of your father’s stuff years ago. I thought it was entertaining, but I never took it seriously. All I could provide you would be an honest assessment of your father’s work from a scholarly perspective…”

  “That’s exactly what I want.”

  “You’ll want it unless it comes back with an unfavorable conclusion,” I pointed out.

  “I’m convinced an objective evaluation will clear his reputation and lead the authorities to his killer. And you’re just the type of well-credentialed skeptic I need,” she concluded briskly. She looked at me with a firm, almost clenched-jaw expression: woman of action brooking no resistance. Then she looked around into the dim recesses of the restaurant and made a motion with her hand. Roy appeared almost magically and placed a leather portfolio on the table. She opened it and pulled out a slim golden Montblanc. “I’m proposing that you spend approximately a month going through my father’s notes and manuscripts, evaluating his work, and providing me with a confidential written report. Shall we talk about compensation?”

  I have an obscure research specialty and a genius for alienating potential academic employers. I spend most of my time and energy training with Yamashita. As a result, I cobble a living together in the most unlikely of ways. I looked at the lady across the table and gave a mental shrug. I’ve had worse jobs.

  Lori Westmann was waiting, tapping her elegant executive pen on an open page of checks. I thought about what I would make in a month in a typical year. Then I doubled it. I told her that was my fee and she didn’t bat an eye. She started to write in the checkbook.