by Robert Crais
I drank some of the beer and thought about Bradley and Sheila and Jillian Becker and Malcolm Denning. Bradley would be sitting comfortably in first class, dictating important business notes to Jillian Becker, who would be writing them down and nodding. Sheila would be out on her tennis court, bending over to show Hatcher her rear end, and squealing, Ooo, these darn laces! Malcolm Denning would be staring at the pictures of his wife and his boys and his Little League team and wondering when it would all go to hell.
“You ever notice,” I said to the cat, “that sometimes the bad guys are better people than the good guys?”
The cat crept out from beneath the Weber, walked over, and sniffed at my beer. I poured a little out onto the deck for him and touched his back as he drank. It was soft.
Sometimes he bites, but not always.
4
The next morning it was warm and bright in my loft, with the summer sun slanting in through the big glass A that is the back of my house. The cat was curled on the bed next to me, bits of leaf and dust in his fur, smelling of eucalyptus.
I rolled out of bed and pulled on some shorts and went downstairs. I opened the glass sliding doors for the breeze, then went back into the living room and turned on the TV. News. I changed channels. Rocky and Bullwinkle. There was a thump upstairs and then the cat came down. Bullwinkle said, “Nothing up my sleeve!” and ripped off his sleeve to prove it. Rocky said, “Oh, no, not again!” and flew around in a circle. The cat hopped up on the couch and stared at them. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle is his favorite show.
I went back out onto the deck and did twelve sun salutes to stretch out the kinks. I did neck rolls and shoulder rolls and the spine rock and the cobra and the locust, and I began to sweat. Inside, Mr. Peabody and Sherman were setting the Way Back Machine for the Early Mesopotamian Age. I put myself into the peacock posture with my legs straight out behind me and I held it like that until my back screamed and the sweat left dark splatters on the deck, and then I went into the Dragon kata from the tae kwon do, and then the Crane kata, driving myself until the sweat ran in my eyes and my muscles failed and my nerves refused to carry another signal and I sat on the deck and felt like a million bucks. Endorphin heaven. So clients weren’t perfect. So being a private cop wasn’t perfect. So life wasn’t perfect. I could always get new cards printed up. They would say: Elvis Cole, Perfect Detective.
Forty minutes later I was on the Hollywood Freeway heading southeast toward downtown Los Angeles and Little Tokyo and feeling pretty good about myself. Ah, perfection. It lends comfort in troubled times.
I stayed with the Hollywood past the Pasadena interchange, then took the Broadway exit into downtown L.A. Downtown Los Angeles features dirty inner-city streets, close-packed inner-city skyscrapers, and aromatic inner-city street life. The men who work there wear suits and the women wear heels and you see people carrying umbrellas as if it might rain. Downtown Los Angeles does not feel like Los Angeles. It is Boston or Chicago or Detroit or Manhattan. It feels like someplace else that had come out to visit and decided to stay. Maybe one day they’ll put a dome over it and charge admission. They could call it Banal-land.
I took Broadway down to First Street, hung a left, and two blocks later I was in Little Tokyo.
The buildings were old, mostly brick or stone facade, but they had been kept up and the streets were clean. Paper lanterns hung in front of some of the shops, and red and green and yellow and blue wind socks in front of others, and all the signs were in Japanese. The sidewalks were crowded. Summer is tourist season, and most of the white faces and many of the yellow ones had Nikons or Pentaxes slung under them. A knot of sailors in Italian navy uniforms stood at a street corner, grinning at a couple of girls in a Camaro who grinned back at them. One of the sailors carried a Disneyland bag with Mickey Mouse on the side. Souvenirs from distant lands.
Nobu Ishida’s import business was exactly where Malcolm Denning said it would be, in an older building on Ki Street between a fish market and a Japanese-language bookstore, with a yakitori grill across the street.
I rolled past Ishida’s place, found a parking spot in front of one of the souvenir shops they have for people from Cleveland, and walked back. There was a little bell on the door that rang as I went in and three men sitting around two tables at the rear of the place. It looked more like a warehouse than a retail outlet, with boxes stacked floor to ceiling and lots of freestanding metal shelves. A few things were on display, mostly garish lacquered boxes and miniature pagodas and dragons that looked like Barkley from Sesame Street. I smiled at the three men. “Nice stuff.”
One of them said, “What do you want?” He was a lot younger than the other two, maybe in his early twenties. No accent. Born and raised in Southern California with a surfer’s tan to prove it. He was big for someone of Japanese extraction, just over six feet, with muscular arms and lean jaws and the sort of wildly overdeveloped trapezius muscles you get when you spend a lot of time with the weights. He wore a tight knit shirt with a crew neck and three-quarter sleeves even though it was ninety degrees outside. The other two guys were both in their thirties. One of them had a bad left eye as if he had taken a hard one there and it had never healed, and the other had the pinkie missing from his right hand. I made the young one for Ishida’s advertising manager and the other two for buyers from Neiman-Marcus.
“My name’s Elvis Cole,” I said. “Are you Nobu Ishida?” I put one of my cards on the second table.
The one with the missing finger grinned at the big kid and said, “Hey, Eddie, are you Nobu Ishida?”
Eddie said, “You have business with Mr. Ishida?”
“Well, it’s what we might call personal.”
The one with the bad eye said something in Japanese.
“Sorry,” I said. “Japanese is one of the four known languages I don’t speak.”
Eddie said, “Maybe you’ll understand this, dude. Fuck off.”
They probably weren’t from Neiman-Marcus. I said, “You’d better ask Mr. Ishida. Tell him it’s about eighteenth-century Japan.”
Eddie thought about it for a while, then picked up my card, and said, “Wait here.” He disappeared behind stacks of what looked like sushi trays and bamboo steamers.
The guy with the bad eye and the guy with no finger stared at me. I said, “I guess Mr. Ishida keeps you guys around to take inventory.”
The guy with no finger smiled, but I don’t think he was being friendly.
A little bit later Eddie came back without the card and said, “Time for you to go.”
I said, “Ask him again. I won’t take much of his time.”
“You’re leaving.”
I looked from Eddie to the other two and back to Eddie. “Nope. I’m going to stay and I’m going to talk to Ishida or I’m going to tip the cops that you guys deal stolen goods.” Mr. Threat.
The guy with the bad eye mumbled something else and they all laughed. Eddie pulled his sleeves up to his elbows and flexed his arms. Big, all right. Elaborate, multicolored tattoos started about an inch below his elbows and continued up beneath the sleeves. They looked like fish scales. His hands were square and blocky and his knuckles were thick. He said something in Japanese and the guy with the missing finger came around the tables like he was going to show me the door. When he reached to take my arm I pushed his hand away. He stopped smiling and threw a pretty fast backfist. I pushed the fist past me and hit him in the neck with my left hand. He made the sound a drunk in a cheap restaurant makes with a piece of meat caught in his throat and went down. The guy with the bad eye was coming around the tables when an older man came out from behind the bamboo steamers and spoke sharply and the guy with the bad eye stopped.
Nobu Ishida was in his early fifties with short gray hair and hard black eyes and a paunch for a belly. Even with the paunch, the other guys seemed to straighten up and pay attention. Those who could stand.
He looked at me the way you look at a disappearing menu, then shook his head. The
guy on the floor was making small coughing noises but Nobu Ishida didn’t look at him and neither did anyone else. Ishida was carrying my card. “What are you, crazy? You know I could have you arrested for this?” Nobu Ishida didn’t have an accent, either.
I gave him a little shrug. “Go ahead.”
He said, “What do you want?”
I told him about the Hagakure.
Nobu Ishida listened without moving and then he tried to give me good-natured confusion. “I don’t get it. Why come to me?”
The guy with the missing finger stopped making noises and pushed himself up to his knees. He was holding his throat. I said, “You’re interested in samurai artifacts. The Hagakure was stolen. You’ve purchased stolen artworks in the past. You see how this works?”
The good-natured confusion went away. Ishida’s mouth tightened and something dark washed his face. Telltale signs of guilt. “Who says I’ve bought stolen art?”
“Akira Kurosawa gave me a call.”
Ishida stared at me a very long time. “Oh, we’ve got a funny one here, Eddie.”
Eddie said, “I don’t like him.” Eddie.
I said, “I think you might have the Hagakure. If you don’t, I think you might know the people who stole it or who have it.”
Ishida gave me the stare a little more, thinking, and then the tension went out of his face and his shoulders relaxed and he smiled. This time the smile was real, as if in all the thinking he had seen something and what he had seen had been funny as hell. He glanced at Eddie and then at the other two guys and then back at me. “You got no idea how stupid you are,” he said.
“People hint.”
He laughed and Eddie laughed, too. Eddie crossed his arms and made the huge trapezius muscles swell like a couple of demented air bladders. You could see that the tattoos climbed over his elbows and up his biceps. Pretty soon, everybody was laughing but me and the guy on the floor.
Ishida held up my card and looked at it, then crumpled it up and tossed it toward an open crate of little plastic pagodas. He said, “Your problem is, you don’t look like a private detective.”
“What’s a private detective look like?”
“Like Mickey Spillane. You see those Lite beer commercials? Mickey Spillane looks tough.”
I hooked a glance at the guy with the crushed neck. “Ask him.”
Nobu Ishida nodded, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The smile went away and the serious eyes came back. Hard. “Don’t come down here anymore, boy. You don’t know what you’re messing with down here.”
I said, “What about the Hagakure?”
Nobu Ishida gave me what I guess was supposed to be an enigmatic look, then he turned and melted away behind the bamboo steamers.
I looked at Eddie. “Is the interview over?”
Eddie made the tattoos disappear, then sat down behind the tables again and stared at me. The guy with the bad eye sat down beside him, put his feet up, and laced his hands behind his head. The guy with the missing finger pulled one foot beneath himself, then the other, then shoved himself up into sort of a hunched crouch. If I stood around much longer, they’d probably send me out for Chinese.
“Some days are the pits,” I said. “Drive all the way down here and don’t get so much as one clue.”
The guy with the bad eye nodded, agreeing.
Eddie nodded, too. “Watch those Lite beer commercials,” he said. “If you looked more like a detective, people might be more cooperative.”
5
I walked back along Ki to the first cross street, turned north, then turned again into an alley that ran along behind Ishida’s shop. There were delivery vans and trash cans and dumpsters and lots of very old, very small people who did not look at me. An ice truck was parked behind the fish market. At the back of Ishida’s place there was a metal loading dock for deliveries and another door about six feet to the right for people and a small, dirty window with a steel grid over it between the doors. An anonymous tan delivery van was parked by the people door. Nobu Ishida probably did not use the van as his personal car. He probably drove a Lincoln or a Mercedes into the parking garage down the block, then walked back to the office. It was either that or matter transference.
I continued along the alley to the next street, then went south back to Ki and into the yakitori grill across the street.
I sat at the counter near the front so I could keep an eye on Ishida’s and ordered two skewers of chicken and two of giant clam and a pot of green tea. The cook was an x-ray thin guy in his fifties who wore a pristine white apron and a little white cap and had gold worked into his front teeth like Mike Tyson. He said, “You want spicy?”
I said sure.
He said, “It hot.”
I said I was tough.
He brought over the tea in a little metal pot with a heavy white teacup and set a fork and a spoon and a paper napkin in front of me. No-frills service. He opened the little metal refrigerator and took out two strips of chicken breast and a fresh geoduck clam that looked like a bull’s penis. He forced each strip of chicken lengthways onto a long wooden skewer, then skinned the geoduck and sliced two strips of the long muscle with a cleaver that could take a man’s arm. When the geoduck was skewered he looked doubtfully back at me. “Spicy very hot,” he said. He pronounced the r fine.
“Double spicy,” I said.
The gold in his teeth flashed and he took a blue bowl off a shelf and poured a thick powder of crushed chili peppers onto his work surface. He pressed each skewer of meat down into the powder, first one side, then the other, then arranged all four skewers on the grill. Other side of the counter, I could still feel the heat. “We see,” he said. Then he went into the back.
I sipped tea and watched Ishida’s. After a few minutes, Eddie and the guy with no finger came out, got in a dark green Alfa Romeo parked at the curb, and drove away. Eddie didn’t look happy. I sipped more tea and did more watching, but nobody went in, and nobody else came out. Real going concern, that place.
The cook came back and flipped the skewers. He put a little white saucer of red chili paste in front of me. It was the real stuff, the kind they make in Asia, not the junk you buy at the supermarket. Real chili paste will eat through porcelain. He gave me a big smile. “In case not hot enough.” Don’t you love a wiseass?
When the edges of the chicken and clam were blackened, he took the skewers off the grill. He dipped them in a pan of yakitori sauce, put them in a paper-lined plastic basket, put the basket beside the chili paste, then leaned back against his grill and watched me.
I took a mouthful of the chicken, chewed, swallowed. Not bad. I dipped some of the chicken in the chili paste, took another bite. “Could be hotter,” I said.
He looked disappointed and went into the back.
I sipped more tea, finished the first chicken, then started on the first geoduck. The clam was tough and hard and chewy, but I like that. The tea was good. While I was chewing, a Japanese guy wearing a Grateful Dead tee shirt came in and went up to the counter. He looked at the chalkboard where the daily menu was written, then looked at what was left of the geoduck lying beside the grill and made a face. He turned away and walked back to a pay phone they had in the rear. Some guys you can never please.
Twenty minutes later I was on my second pot of tea when Nobu Ishida came out and started up the street toward the parking garage. I paid, left a nice tip, then went out onto the sidewalk. When Ishida disappeared into the garage, I trotted back down to my car, got in, and waited. Maybe Ishida had a secret vault dug into the core of a mountain where he kept stolen treasure. Maybe he called this secret place The Fortress of Solitude. Maybe he was going there now and I could follow him and find the Hagakure and solve several heretofore unsolved art thefts. Then again, maybe not. I was three cars behind him when he pulled out in a black Cadillac Eldorado and turned right toward downtown.
We left Little Tokyo and went past Union Station and Olvera Street with its gaudy Mexican colors and food booth
s and souvenir shops. There were about nine million tourists, all desperately snapping pictures of how “the Mexicans” lived, and buying sombreros and ponchos and stuffed iguanas that would start to ripen about a week after they got home. We swung around the Civic Center and were sitting in traffic at Pershing Square, me now four cars behind and counting the homeless bag ladies around the Square, when I spotted the guy in the Grateful Dead tee shirt from the yakitori grill. He was sitting behind the wheel of a maroon Ford Taurus two cars in back of me and one lane over. There was another Asian guy with him. Hmmmm. When the light changed and Ishida went straight, I hung a left onto Sixth. Two cars later, the Taurus followed. I stayed on Sixth to San Pedro and went south. The Taurus came south, too. I took the Dan Wesson out of the glove box and put it between my legs. Freud would’ve loved that.
At a spotlight on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Commerce, the Taurus pulled up on my left. I looked over. The guy in the Grateful Dead shirt and the other guy were staring at me and they were not smiling. I gripped the Dan Wesson in my right hand and said, “Sony makes a fine TV.”
The guy on the passenger side said something to the driver, then turned back to me and flipped open a small black leather case with a silver and gold L.A.P.D. badge in it. “Put it over to the curb, asshole.”
“Moi?”
The Taurus bucked out ahead under the red light and jerked to the right, blocking me. They were out and coming before the Taurus stopped rocking. I put both hands on the top of the steering wheel and left them there.
The guy who had shown me the badge came directly at me. The other guy walked the long way around the car and came up from behind. The car behind us blew its horn. I said, “I swear to God, Officer. I came to a full stop.”