Stalking the Angel

by Robert Crais

  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 maître 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 four 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.”

  “You, maybe. I look like Don Johnson. You look like Fred Flintstone.”

  Sixteen hours with nothing to eat and the Sapporo was working wonders. Pike flagged a waitress and we ordered sashimi, sushi, white rice, miso soup, and more Sapporo. Sapporo is great when your back is stiff from an all-night stakeout.

  Several young women who looked like models came in. They were tall and thin and wore their hair in flashes and swirls and bobs that looked okay in a magazine but looked silly in real life. They spent a lot of time touching themselves.

  Pike said, “Maybe we should interrogate them.”

  The food came. We’d ordered toro and yellowtail and octopus and freshwater eel and sea urchin. The urchin and eel and octopus were prepared as sushi, each slice draped over a molded bullet of rice and held there by a band of seaweed. Sashimi is sliced fish without the rice. The waitress brought two little trays of a dark brown dipping sauce with a sprinkling of chopped green onion in it for the sashimi. In an empty tray I mixed soy sauce and hot green mustard for the sushi. I dipped a piece of the octopus sushi in the sauce, let the rice absorb the sauce, then took a bite. Delicious. Pike was looking in his miso soup. “There’s something in here.”

  “Black pasta,” I said. “Nouveau cuisine.”

  Pike pushed the soup aside.

  By one o’clock the place was packed. It was SRO up by the maître d’ and the crowd noise was threatening to drown out the music. Just after one a second bartender came on duty. He was younger than the Butterfly Lady, with short spiky hair and very smooth skin and a little-boy face. Someone’s grad student nephew, given a part-time job to make a few extra bucks during the summer. The Butterfly Lady said something and the new kid looked our way. Worried. I smiled at Pike. “Well, well. I think we’re making progress.”

  I got up and went over to the new kid’s end of the bar. “You guys have Falstaff?”

  The grad student shook his head. The Butterfly Lady came over, gave me a look, said something in Japanese to the kid, then went back to her end of the bar. The grad student began building a margarita. I said, “How about Corona?”

  “Just Japanese.”

  I nodded. “Sapporo in a short bottle. Two.”

  He poured the margarita mixture into three round glasses. The Butterfly Lady came back, got them, went away. I smiled at the kid. Mr. Friendly. “Get many thugs in here?”

  He said, “What?”

  I winked at him, and took the two Sapporos back to the table. Our dishes had been cleared. Pike said, “Look.”

  Across the room, at a little corner table by some leafy plants, three men were being seated. An older Japanese man, a much younger Japanese man with heavy shoulders, and a tall, thin black man. The black man looked like Lou Gossett except for the scar that started at the crown of his head and ran down across his temple and curved back to lop off the top of his left ear. The two Asian men were smiling broadly and laughing with a slight man in a dark suit whose long hair was pulled back in a punk version of the traditional Japanese topknot. Manager. “Something tells me we are no longer the only thugs in the place,” I said.

  “Know the black guy from when I was a cop,” Pike said. “Richards Sangoise. Dope dealer from Crenshaw.”

  “You see,” I said. “Gangsters.”

  “Could just be coincidence they’re here.”

  “Could be.”

  “But maybe not.”

  “Maybe those two Asian gentlemen are yakuza executives in search of an expanding business opportunity.”

  Pike nodded.

  I went back to the grad student and gave him the same Mr. Friendly. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you see the three gentlemen seated there?”

  “Uh-huh.” Uneasy.

  “I have reason to believe that those men are criminals, and that they may be engaged in the criminal act of conspiracy, and I felt obligated to tell someone. You might want to call the police.”

  The kid gave me Ping-Pong ball eyes. I walked back and sat down with Pike. “Just a little push,” I said.

  We watched the bar. The grad student said something to the Butterfly Lady. She snagged a waiter, said something, and the waiter went down onto the main floor to the manager. The manager came back into the bar and went over to the Butterfly Lady. They looked our way, then the manager left the bar and went back toward the kitchen. A little while later he reappeared and came over to our table. “Excuse me, gentlem
en.” Mr. Cordiality. “We’re terribly busy, as you can see. Since you’ve finished your meal, would it be too much of an imposition for me to ask that you make room for others?”

  “Yes,” Pike said, “it would.”

  I said, “My friend Nobu told me that if I came here I would be treated better than this.”

  The manager looked past me for a moment. “You’re a friend of Mr. Ishida?”

  I said, “Mr. Ishida is dead. Murdered. I want to know who he was with the last time he was in here.”

  The manager shook his head and gave me a smile that wobbled. “You should leave now.”

  “We like it here,” Pike said. “We might stay forever.”

  The manager worked his mouth, then went back down to the dining room and into the kitchen. Pike said, “I think we’re becoming a problem.”

  I nodded. “Fun, isn’t it?”

  Pike went down into the dining area and over to the table with the two Japanese men and the black man. He stood very close to the table, so that the men had to lean back to look up at him. He said something to Richards Sangoise. Sangoise’s eyes widened. Pike leaned over, put a hand on Sangoise’s shoulder, and said something else. Sangoise looked at me. I made a gun with my hand, pointed it at him, and pulled the trigger. Sangoise shoved his chair back and left. The younger Japanese man jumped to his feet. The older man looked from Pike to me and back to Pike. Angry. They hurried out after Sangoise. The manager came running out of the back in time to see the end of it. He looked angry, too. The grad student looked even more worried and said something to the Butterfly Lady. She said something sharp and walked away from him. Pike came back to the table and sat down.

  “Nice,” I said.

  Pike nodded.

  When the grad student came out from behind the bar and went back toward the kitchen, I followed him.

  The kitchen was all steel and white with a high industrial ceiling. It was hot, even with the kitchen’s blowers going at top speed. There was a narrow hall at the right rear of the kitchen with a door that said OFFICE. On the left, there was another little hall with a pay phone and a sign that said RESTROOMS. I passed a woman carrying a tray of pot sticker dumplings and went into the men’s room.

  It was small and white, with one stall for the toilet and one urinal and one sink and one of those blowers that never get your hands dry and a smudged sign above the sink that said that employees MUST wash with soap. The grad student was standing at a urinal. He looked over and saw it was me and you would’ve thought I’d kicked him in the groin. I gave him the smile, then I threw the little bolt that locked the door. He said, “You’d better not touch me.”

  I said, “Is this place owned by the yakuza?”

  Scared. Very scared. “Open the door. Come on.”

  “I’ll open the door after we talk.”

  He zipped up and moved away from the urinal. His mouth was working like maybe he’d cry, like he’d spent a lot of time thinking that something like this would happen one day and now it was. Malcolm Denning. I said, “The shit is about to hit the fan, boy. Do you know what the yakuza is?”

  He shook his head.

  I said, “Did you know a man named Nobu Ishida?”

  He shook his head again and I slapped him in the center of the chest with an open right hand. It made a deep hollow thump and knocked him back and frightened him more than hurt him. I said, “Do not bullshit me. Nobu Ishida was in here three times a week for three months. He spent big and he tipped big and you know him.”

  Someone tried the door, then knocked. I opened my jacket to show the Dan Wesson to the kid and said, “Occupied. Out in a minute.” The kids eyes were big, and his mouth opened and closed like a fish. Koi. He said, “I didn’t know him. He was a customer.”

  “But you know the name.”

  “Yes, sir.” Yes, sir.

  I said, “Nobu Ishida was a member of the yakuza. Every two weeks he was here with other people and those people were probably in the yakuza, too. A girl named Mimi Warren has been kidnapped, maybe by the yakuza, and maybe by someone who knew Ishida. I want their names.”

  The kid looked up from the place under my jacket where the Dan Wesson lived. “Mimi was kidnapped?”

  I looked at him. “You know Mimi Warren?”

  He nodded. “She comes here sometimes.”

  “Here?”

  “With her friends.”

  “Friends?” Witness interrogation had always been a strong point.

  “A girl named Carol. Another girl named Kerri. I really didn’t know them. They’re around, you see them, you say hi. They’d come and dance and hang out. We get pretty good bands.” He was looking past me at the door. Like maybe somebody was going to kick it in. “I don’t know anything about a kidnapping. I swear I don’t. They’re going to miss me and come looking. I’ll get in trouble.”

  “Tell me about Ishida.”

  The kid spread his hands. Helpless. “There were always three other men. The only one I know was Mr. Torobuni. He owns the place. Please.” Terry Ito had said that Yuki Torobuni runs the L.A. yakuza.

  I opened the door and let the kid out. A pink-faced guy in a nice Ross Hobbs suit gave me a helluva look when I walked out after the kid.

  Mimi Warren? Here?

  When I got back to the bar, three men were waiting at the table with Joe Pike. There was an older guy with a lot of loose skin and a cheap sharkskin coat over an orange shirt, and a very short guy with two fingers off his left hand and the sort of baleful stare you get when life’s a mystery. There was also a tall kid with too many muscles in a three-quarter-sleeve pullover. Eddie Tang. He grinned at me. “What do ya know. It’s Mickey Spillane.”

  Pike’s mouth twitched. “You missed all the fun,” he said. “While you were out, somebody phoned for reinforcements.”

  17

  The older man in the cheap sharkskin looked at Eddie. “You know this one?” No accent.

  Eddie nodded. “He came into Ishida s.”

  I said, “Wow, Eddie. Last week you’re working for Nobu Ishida, then Ishida gets osterized, and now you’re working for Yuki Torobuni. You’re really on the rise.”

  Yuki Torobuni said, “How do you know who I am?”

  “You’re either Torobuni or Fu Manchu.”

  Torobuni dipped his chin at Eddie. “Let’s go in the back.”

  Torobuni moved past me and went down the steps toward the kitchen. The midget swaggered after him the way midgets will. Pike and I went next, and Eddie trailed behind. The Butterfly Lady watched us go, lean hips moving to The Smiths, little butterfly dancing. Nice moves.

  Eddie said, “You like that, huh?”

  Some guys.

  When we got into the kitchen, Yuki Torobuni leaned against a steel table and said, “Eddie.” Everything was Eddie. Maybe the midget was a moron.

  Eddie moved to pat Pike down. Pike pushed Eddie’s hand away from his body. “No.”

  The midget took out a Browning .45 automatic about eighteen sizes too big for him. The smell of sesame oil and tahini and mint was strong and the kitchen help was careful not to look our way.

  Eddie and Pike were just about the same height but Eddie was heavier and his shoulders sloped more because of the insanely developed trapezius muscles. Eddie sneered at Pike’s red arrows. “Those are shit tattoos.”

  Torobuni made a little forget-it gesture with his left hand. “Let’s not waste our time.” He looked at me. “What do you want?”

  “I want a sixteen-year-old girl named Mimi Warren.”

  Eddie Tang laughed. Torobuni smiled at Eddie, then shook his head and gave me bored. “So what?”

  “Maybe you have her.”

  Torobuni said, “Boy, I never heard of this girl. What is she, a princess, some kind of movie star?” Eddie thought that was a riot.

  I said, “Something called the Hagakure was stolen from her parents, and whoever got it kidnapped the girl to stop the search. It’s a good bet that whoever wanted the Hagakure is also in th
e yakuza. Maybe that’s you.”

  Torobuni’s face darkened. He barked out a couple of words of Japanese and Eddie stopped laughing. “Whoever stole the Hagakure kidnaps the girl to stop you looking for it?”

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  “Not too bright.”

  “Geniuses rarely go into crime.”

  Torobuni stared at me a moment, then walked over to a giant U.S. range where a woman was taking a fresh load of tempura shrimp from the deep fat. He mumbled something and she plucked out a shrimp on a little metal skewer and handed it to him. He took a small bite. He said, “Two years ago I had a man’s face put in here.” He gestured at the grease vat. “You ever see a fried face?”

  “No. How’d it taste?”

  Torobuni finished the shrimp and wiped his hands on a cloth that was lying on the steel table. He shook his head. “You’re out of your mind to come here like this. You know my name, but do you have any idea who I am?”

  “Who killed Nobu Ishida?”

  He leaned against the table again and looked at me. Eddie shifted closer, his eyes on Pike. The midget with the .45 beamed. Torobuni folded the towel neatly and put it down. “Maybe you killed him.”

  “Sure.”

  Behind us cooking fat bubbled and cleavers bit into hardwood cutting boards and damp heat billowed out of steamers. Torobuni stared at me for another couple of centuries, then spoke again in Japanese. The midget put away the gun. Torobuni came very close to me, so close the cheap sharkskin brushed my chest. He looked first in my right eye, then in my left. He said, “Yakuza is a terrible monster to arouse. If you come down here again, yakuza will eat you.” His voice was like late-night music.

  “I’m going to find the girl.”

  Torobuni smiled a smile to match the voice. “Good luck.”