by Robert Crais
After a while I opened the bag and took out the container of squid and the larger container of rice and the little plastic cup of bright red chili paste and the napkins and the chopsticks. I had to move the little figures of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse to make room for the food. What was it Jiminy Cricket said? Little man, you’ve had a busy night. I put some of the chili paste on the squid and some on the rice and mixed it and ate and drank the beer. I’m a big brown mouse, I go marching through the house, and I’m noooot afraid of anything!
The sun was low above Catalina, pushing bright yellow rectangles up my eastern wall when the door opened and Joe Pike walked in. I tipped what was maybe the second or third Modelo bottle at him. “Life in the fast lane,” I said. Maybe it was the fourth.
“Uh-huh.”
He came over to the desk, looked in what was left of the carton of squid, then the carton of rice. “Any meat in this?”
I shook my head. Pike had turned vegetarian about four months ago.
He dumped what was left of the squid into the rice, took a set of chopsticks, sat in one of the director’s chairs, and ate. Southeast Asians almost never use chopsticks. If you go to Vietnam or Thailand or Cambodia, you never see a chopstick. Even in the boonies. They use forks and large spoons but when they come here and open a little restaurant they put out chopsticks because that’s what Americans expect. Ain’t life a bitch?
I said, “There’s chili paste.”
Pike shook what was left of the chili paste into the rice, stirred it, continued to eat.
“There’s another Modelo in the box.”
He shook his head.
“How long since you’ve come to the office?”
Shrug.
“Must be four, five months.” There was a door to an adjoining office that belonged to Pike. He never used it and didn’t bother to glance at it now. He shoveled in rice and broccoli and peas, chewed, swallowed.
I sipped the last of the Modelo, then dropped the empty into the waste basket. “I was just kidding,” I said. “That’s really pork-fried rice.”
Pike said, “I don’t like losing the girl.”
I took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair. The office was quiet and still. Only the eyes in the Pinocchio clock moved. “Maybe, whatever reason, Warren wanted the Hagakure stolen and wants people to know and also wants them to know that he’s had a child kidnapped because of his efforts to recover it. Maybe he’s looking for a certain image here, figuring he can make a big deal out of recovering the book and his daughter. That sound like Bradley to you?”
Pike got up, went to the little refrigerator, and took out a can of tomato juice. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it’s the other way. Maybe somebody wants Warren to look bad and they don’t give a damn about the book just so they stir up as much publicity as they can. Maybe what they want is to make the big Japanese connections lose interest. Or maybe they just want to hurt him. Maybe he owes money.”
“A lot of maybes,” I said.
Pike nodded. “Maybe is a weak word.”
I said, “Maybe it’s the yakuza.”
Pike shook the little can of tomato juice and peeled off the foil sealer tab and drank. A tiny drop ran down from the corner of his mouth. It looked like blood. He wiped it away with a napkin. “We could sit here maybe all night and the girl’s still gone.”
I got up and went to the glass doors and opened them. Traffic noise was loud but the evening air was beginning to cool. “I don’t like losing her either. I don’t like getting fired and told to forget it. I don’t like it that she’s out there and in trouble and we’re not in it anymore.”
Mirrored lenses caught the setting sun. The sun made the lenses glow.
“I think we should stay in,” I said.
Pike tossed the little can on top of the empty Modelo bottles.
“We stay with the yakuza because they’re what we have,” I said. “Forget the other stuff. We push until someone pushes back and then we see where we are.”
“All we have to do is find the yakuza.”
“Right. All we have to do is find the yakuza.”
Pike’s mouth twitched. “We can do that.”
15
Nobu Ishida had lived in an older split-level house on a Leave-It-to-Beaver street in Cheviot Hills, a couple of miles south of the Twentieth Century-Fox lot. It was dark, just after nine when we rolled past his home, rounded the block, and parked at the curb fifty yards up the street. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked.
The house was brick and board and painted a light, bright color you couldn’t make out at night. Ishida’s Eldorado was in the drive, with a tiny, two-tone Merkur behind it. There was an enormous plate glass picture window to the left of the front door, ideal for revealing the house’s brightly lit interior. A woman in her fifties passed by the window talking to a young man in his twenties. Both the woman and the man looked sad. Mrs. Ishida and a son. With Dad not yet cold in the grave, there was plenty to be sad about.
Pike said, “Me or you?”
“Me.”
I got out of the car as if I were out for an evening stroll. A block and a half down, I turned, came back, slipped off the walk into the shadows, and went to the west side of the Ishida house. There were two frame windows off what looked like a bedroom. The bedroom was dark. Past the windows, there was a redwood gate with a neatly painted sign that said BEWARE OF DOG. I whistled softly through my teeth, then broke off a hedge branch and brushed it against the inside of the gate. No dog. I slipped back to the street, then followed a hedgerow to the east side of the house. The garage was on that side, locked tight and windowless, with a narrow chain link gate leading to the back yard. I eased open the gate and walked along the side of the house to a little window about midway down. A young woman in a print dress sat at the dining room table, holding a baby. She touched her nose to the baby’s and smiled. The baby smiled back. Not exactly a yakuza stronghold.
I went back to the car. Pike said, “Just family, right?”
“Or clever impersonators.”
Forty minutes later the front door opened and the young man and the woman with the baby came out. The young man had a pink carry-bag with teddy bears on the side, probably stuffed with Pampers and baby bottles and teething rattles and Bert and Ernie dolls. Mrs. Ishida kissed everyone good-bye and watched them walk out to the little Merkur and waved as they drove away. “You see that?” I said.
Pike nodded.
“Classic yakuza misdirection.”
Pike said, “You’re a pip on stakeout.”
Just before midnight, an L.A.P.D. prowl car turned the corner and cruised the block, arcing its big spot over the houses to scare away burglars and peepers. At one-twenty, two men jogged down the middle of the street, one white, one black, breathing in unison, matching strides. By three, I was stiff and hungry. Pike had not moved. Maybe he was dead. “You awake?”
“If you’re tired, go to sleep.”
Some partner.
At twenty-five minutes after five, an Alta-Dena milk truck rolled down the street and made four stops. By six-oh-five, the sky in the east was starting to pinken, and lights were on in two houses down the block. At fourteen minutes after eight o’clock, after jobs had been gone to and children had been brought to school and lives had been put under way, Nobu Ishida’s widow came out of her house carrying a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag and wearing a black suit. She locked the door, walked to the Eldorado, got in, and drove away.
I said, “Let’s do it.”
We climbed out of the Corvette, went through the little chain link gate next to the garage, then around to the back. There was a standard frame door off the kitchen, and French doors opening off the family room to a small, kidney-shaped swimming pool. We went in through the French doors.
Pike said, “I’ll take the back of the house.”
“Okay.”
He disappeared down the hall without making a sound.
The family room was a nice-sized space with
Early American furniture and pictures of the kids and a Zenith console color TV and absolutely nothing to indicate that Nobu Ishida had an interest in feudal Japanese artifacts. People magazine sat on the hearth and a box of Ritz crackers was on the coffee table and someone was reading the latest Jackie Collins. Imagine that. Portrait of the criminal as a Middle-Class American.
There was a yellow dial phone on a little table beside a Barcalounger chair across from the Zenith. Beneath the phone was an address book with listings for things like paramedics, doctor, fire, police, Ed and Diane Waters, and Bobby’s school. Probably code names for yakuza thugs. I put the address book down and went into the kitchen. There were messages held to the refrigerator by little plastic magnets that looked like Snoopy and Charlie Brown and baskets of flowers. A picture of Ishida’s wife sat on the counter in a frame that said KISS THE COOK. She looked like a nice woman and a good mom. Did she know what her husband had done for a living? When they were young and courting, had he said, “Stick with me, babe, I’m gonna be the biggest thug in Little Tokyo,” or had he simply found himself there while she found herself with children and PTA and a loving husband who kept business to himself and made a comfortable life? Maybe I should introduce her to Malcolm Denning’s wife. Maybe they would have a lot to talk about.
Pike materialized in the doorway. “Back here,” he said.
We went back through the family room and down a short hall to what had probably once been a child’s bedroom. Now, it wasn’t.
“Well, well, well,” I said. “Welcome to Nippon.”
We were in a small room with a lot of furniture and all the furniture was lacquered rosewood. There was a low table in the center of the room with a pillow for a chair and one of those lacquered boxes with a phone inside. A matching file cabinet stood in the corner, and a low table ran along two walls. On the table were four little stands, each stand holding a pair of horizontal samurai swords, a longer one on the bottom, a shorter one above it. The swords were inlaid with pearls and gems and had silk ribbons wound about the handles. Separating the stands were very old samurai battle helmets shaped like the helmets the Federation Storm Troopers had worn in Star Wars. A beautiful silk robe was framed on the wall above the helmets. It looked like a giant butterfly. There were wood-block prints on the opposite walls and a silk-screened watercolor under glass that looked so delicate that a ripple of air might fray it, and two tiny bonsai trees growing in glass globes. On the outside wall, shoji screens softened and filtered the early morning sunlight. It was a beautiful room.
Pike went to the low table and said, “Look.”
Three books were stacked on the edge of the table. The top book was an excerpted English translation of the Hagakure. The second book was a different translation. The third was titled Bushido: The Warrior’s Soul. Pike thumbed through the top Hagakure translation. “They’ve been read a lot.”
“If Ishida had the real thing, maybe someone found out and wanted it bad enough to try to make him turn it over to them.”
“Uh-huh.” Pike found something he liked and stopped to read.
“Perhaps we can find a clue as to whom.”
Pike kept reading.
“As soon as we finish reading.”
Joe read a moment longer, then put the book back on the table. “I’ll go up front and keep watch.”
When he was gone, I looked around. There was nothing on the low desk but the books and the phone, and nothing on the wall tables but the swords and the helmets. Not even dust. The file cabinet was absolutely clean, too, but at least there were the drawers to look into. The top drawer had neatly labeled files devoted to home and family: the kids’ schools, medical payments, insurance policies. The bottom drawer held art catalogs, vacation brochures, and supply catalogs from Ishida’s import business. There were no financial records from his business. Those were probably with his accountant. Filed under C for Crime.
In the third folder from the back of the drawer I found Ishida’s personal credit card records. The charges were substantial.
Nobu Ishida had two Visa cards and two Master-Cards and American Express Platinum and Optima and Diners Club. Most of the charges were at restaurants or hotels or various boutiques and department stores. The Ishidas had gone out a lot, and spent a lot more than people living in this house in this neighborhood might spend. I was looking for patterns, but there didn’t seem to be any. All the hotels were one-shots and so were most of the restaurants. Go someplace for a bite, maybe not go back for another couple of months, if you went back at all. There were a few repeats, but those mostly to places I recognized. Ma Maison is not a yakuza hangout.
I had gone through the old stuff and was working on the recent when I noticed that two or three times a week, every week for the past three months, Ishida had gone to a place called Mr. Moto’s. There were mostly small charges, as if he had gone by himself to have a couple of drinks, but once every two weeks, usually on a Thursday, there was a single large charge of between four and five hundred dollars. Hmmmm.
I put the credit card receipts back in their file and the file back in its folder and left the cabinet as I had found it and went back to the low table. I used the phone and called information.
A woman’s voice said, “What city?”
“Los Angeles. I need a number and address for a restaurant or bar named Mr. Moto’s.”
If all you want is a number, they put on the computer. If you want the address, a person has to tell you. The person gave me the number and the address and told me to have a good day. Something the computer never does. I hung up and wiped the beautiful lacquered box free of unsightly fingerprints, then went out to Joe Pike.
He nodded when he saw me. “Didn’t take long.”
“The best clues never do.”
We let ourselves out, walked back along the side of the house, got into the Corvette, and drove to Mr. Moto’s.
16
Mr. Moto’s was a storefront dance club just off Sixth downtown. Hi-tech deco. Whitewashed front with porthole windows outlined in aqua and peach, and Mr. Moto’s spelled out in neon triangles. Japanese and Chinese cuisine. Very nouveau. There would be buffalo mozzarella spring rolls and black pasta miso and waiters with new wave football player haircuts and more neon triangles on the inside. A sign on the door said CLOSED. Another sign said LUNCH-DINNER-COCKTAILS-OPEN 11:30 A.M. It was twenty minutes after ten.
We drove another three blocks and stopped at a Bob’s Big Boy to clean up in their restroom. There was an older guy with a copy of the Jewish Daily News standing at one of the lavatories combing his hair when we walked in. Pike went to the lavatory next to him, pulled off his sweatshirt, then unhooked his hip holster and put his gun on top of the soap dispenser. The old man looked at the gun, then at Pike, then left. He forgot his newspaper.
When we were as clean as about a million paper towels and soap that smelled like Pledge could make us, we walked the three blocks down to Mr. Moto’s. It was ten minutes before noon when we went in the front door and the slim Japanese maitre d’ said, “Two for lunch?” The hair on the right side of his head was shaved down to a quarter-inch buzz cut, the hair on the left was long and frizzed. New wave, all right.
I said, “We’ll sit at the bar for a while.”
It was a nice-looking place, even with the neon. The front was all aqua plastic tables and peach wrought iron chairs and a tile floor the color of steel. There was a sushi bar on the right, with maybe twenty stools and four sushi chefs wearing white and red headbands and yelling anytime somebody walked into the place. About halfway back, the room cut in half. Tables continued along the wall on the right all the way to the kitchen in the back. On the left, you could step up underlit tile steps to a full bar and a little drinking area they had there with more tables and plants and neon triangles. A modern steel rail ran around the edge of the drinking platform to keep drunks from falling into someone’s California roll. There were three women together at one of the little tables up in the bar area, and fo
ur couples in the dining room. Business people on their lunch hour. Pike and I went back through the dining area and up the little steps to the bar, one of the three women staring at Pike’s tattoos.
The bartender was a Japanese woman in her late twenties. Hard face and too much green eye shadow and a rich ocher tan. She was wearing black, sprayed-on pants and a blue and black hapi coat with red trim that had been tied off just below the breasts so her midriff was bare. A tattoo of a butterfly floated two inches to the right of her navel. She said, “What’ll it be, guys?”
I said, “Not too busy.”
“It picks up about twelve-thirty.”
We ordered a couple of Sapporo in the short bottles, and Pike asked for the men’s room. The bartender told him, and Pike went back through the kitchen. I said, “First time here. A friend of mine raves about the place, though. You might know him. A regular.”
She reached under the bar and music started to play. A Joan Jett rip-off. “Who’s that?”
“Nobu Ishida.”
The bartender shrugged. “So many faces,” she said.
A man and a woman took two stools at the end of the bar. The bartender went down to them. I leaned over the bar to watch her. Nice legs.
The three women at the table took their drinks and went down to the dining area. I brought my beer and Pike’s and took their table. Pike came out of the back a couple of minutes later. He said, “Restroom in the back with a pay phone. L-shaped kitchen running the width of the building and a cold room. Door out the back. Office off the kitchen. Five men and four women working the place.”
We sipped our beer. Mr. Moto’s filled with lots of men in Giorgio Armani suits and women in black biking tights and female lawyers. You could tell the lawyers because they drank too much and looked nervous. There was a smattering of Asians in the place, but most everybody else was white or black. “You’ll notice,” Pike said, “that the only people in here who look like thugs are me and you.”