Woman with a Blue Pencil
Page 4
He took a deep breath.
This night had been confusing, disheartening, soaking wet. But it was just one night. His mind was playing tricks. A good sleep would change everything. He reminded himself that he had no pressing problems save one: finding Kyoko’s killer. Nothing else mattered.
He started forward, then stopped.
Somehow, the house didn’t feel the same.
Of course, the place had become something different eleven months before. His aunt and uncle had suggested he sell, that sleeping in the room he had shared with Kyoko couldn’t be healthy. Sugitaru wa nao oyobazaru ga gotoshi. “Let what is past flow away downstream,” his aunt said, being aggravatingly fond of maxims. But he didn’t want to let go, to move forward. The only movement he wanted was backward, and that was impossible. So he hadn’t sold the place, even when his aunt further pressed him, reminding him of Kyoko’s unfaithfulness: Akusai wa hyaku-non no fusaku. “A bad wife spells a hundred years of bad harvest.” But Sam didn’t see Kyoko that way, whatever turn their marriage had taken. He stayed in the house. Nonetheless, it had recently begun to feel like “his” instead of “theirs”—perhaps an inevitable consequence of time.
Now, irrationally, it didn’t even feel like his anymore either.
Regaining his sense of the present, he noticed a 1939 Chrysler Royal parked in the driveway.
Whose car?
At the front door, he reached into his pocket for his keys. But he’d left them with the parking attendant downtown at some point in the past. So he knelt and reached beside the garden hose for the rock beneath which hid his spare house key. Nothing there. “Shit,” he muttered.
He tried the door.
Fortunately, and unexpectedly, it was unlocked.
When he walked into his house, the first thing he noticed was a tall, white man in slacks, blue dress shirt, and suspenders, lying sprawled face up, snoring, on the sofa, an empty bottle of rye on the floor beside him.
“Hey, what are you doing in my house?” Sumida asked, kicking at the white man sleeping on the sofa.
The big man didn’t budge, but merely snored more loudly.
Sumida turned.
That’s when he noticed that the Diego Rivera print had been replaced on the wall by a quartet of framed, hand-embroidered samplers, all bearing clichéd sayings like, “Home Sweet Home” and “God Bless America.” Who’d moved the picture? Then he noticed something even more disturbing. Where were his wedding photos? And, on the mantelpiece, where were the half-dozen antique Japanese wood and ivory carvings, netsuke, which had been Kyoko’s sole inheritance when her parents were killed in an automobile accident? The furniture and curtains were different too, ugly and obviously chosen without a woman’s eye, without Kyoko’s eye. Propped informally against the radio was a snapshot of an unfamiliar, romantically entwined Asian couple. He picked it up. In ink, the woman had inscribed, “To Jimmy, with much love, Sun.” Who? Cigar butts crowded ash trays. When had Sumida’s home become a bachelor pad? It made no sense.
Sam moved through the house.
To his shock and dismay, he found no sign of his living here—nor of Kyoko. But there was plenty of evidence of some other man. In a framed photograph on the dresser in the master bedroom stood an unfamiliar Asian man dressed in a t-shirt and chino pants in front of this house, Sam’s house, removing a “For Sale” sign with a wide grin on his face and a ’37 Dodge Coupe in the background.
That’s when he heard the toilet flush in the bathroom.
He turned.
The door opened and Tony Fortuna emerged, his face red from drinking.
“Tony!” Sam said, pleased to see his friend’s familiar mug.
Tony narrowed his eyes. “Who are you?”
“It’s me, Sam.”
“Who? I don’t know no Sam.”
“Come on, Tony. It’s me, Sam Sumida.”
“You called me a couple hours back?”
“I can see you’ve been drinking, Tony.”
Tony shrugged. “Maybe I’ve had a few, but not so many as to be confused about Japs.” Showing surprising dexterity for a drunk, he slipped past Sam and into the living room. “Hey, Joe, wake up!” he called.
Sam followed him.
Tony knelt beside the big man and was now shaking him by the lapels. “Wake up!”
The man on the couch opened his eyes momentarily. His pupils were rolled halfway back into his head.
“Look, what’s going on?” Sam pressed. “Who’s this big guy? In my house.”
Tony turned. “Your house?”
Sam nodded.
“Look, what do you want, Sumida?” Tony asked, as if addressing a threatening stranger. “Did you come here looking for Jimmy? Or is he looking for you? I know he’s been doing some kind of ‘special’ work. Whose side are you on?”
“Who’s Jimmy?”
Tony fumbled inside the unconscious man’s jacket, his jittery hand emerging with a .38 Special, which he turned on Sumida.
“Look, Tony . . .”
“Shut up.” Tony stood. “If I pull this trigger it’ll blow your brains clean out the back of your head. So put your hands up.”
Sumida raised his hands. “You’ve been drinking, Tony. So maybe you don’t recognize me.”
“I’m not as drunk as all that. Now, sit down in that chair and keep your hands where I can see them.”
Hadn’t Sam just seen Humphrey Bogart knock the gun from the hand of Peter Lorre? But Tony was too far to reach. Besides, real life felt different than movies, even if Tony swayed where he stood, more drunk than he was willing to admit.
“I said, sit,” Tony repeated, as if talking to a dog.
Had there been some object Sumida could grab he’d have hurled it at him and then taken away the gun. But there was nothing within reach. So he’d have to bide his time, wait for his moment. Good PIs did that too, sometimes.
He sat.
Tony took a deep breath, uncertain what to do next, and then belched.
“This is my home,” Sumida said, confused. “But someone’s changed everything. Who let you in?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” Tony snapped.
Then the moment Sam had been awaiting arrived.
The phone rang.
Tony turned.
Sumida leaped toward him, acting on instincts developed in his youth at a karate dojo in the Bixby Knolls section of Long Beach. He didn’t know that Tony wouldn’t just turn and shoot him dead. But he didn’t consider outcomes. He just acted.
He kicked the gun from Tony’s hand.
With the handgun now on the floor across the room, roughly equidistant between the two men, Tony took an old-fashioned boxing stance, like John L. Sullivan. He snarled and motioned for his Japanese opponent to approach. Sumida obliged, moving in, his hands and feet flashing in coordinated arcs that leveled his opponent. A final kick to the sinking man rendered him unconscious. He fell hard, his head cracking audibly against the stone fireplace hearth.
The telephone stopped ringing.
Sam didn’t understand what was happening. But he knew this wasn’t his house. Not anymore. Just as Tony was no longer his friend, or even acquaintance, apparently.
Sumida knew he needed help.
Picking up the telephone, he dialed the number of his aunt and uncle, who cared for his ailing mother and had been like another set of parents to him.
But the phone didn’t even ring. Instead, an operator informed him that no such number was in service.
“That’s impossible,” he said, hanging up.
He dialed again, making certain he got it right this time.
Different operator, same message . . .
He’d drive to his aunt and uncle’s house in South Gate, fifteen miles away. He had to see someone who recognized him.
He knelt and took the car keys from the pocket of the man still unconscious on the couch.
Next, he picked up the handgun that had skittered across the living room floor.
Inside the glove compartment was a leather ID wallet that contained a badge.
Lucas was LAPD.
“Shit,” Sumida murmured.
Excerpt from chapter four of The Orchid and the Secret Agent, a novel by William Thorne
Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1945
The first thing Jimmy Park noticed as he pulled up to his house was that Joe’s car was no longer parked in the driveway and that all the lights were on inside. He sighed. When drunk, his friend couldn’t be trusted with even the simplest things. He doubted Joe had locked up after himself. But at least Joe had managed to leave the house. Once a week, Joe passed out on the sofa, awakening with hangovers that would have killed a lesser man. Jimmy wondered how Joe’s wife put up with it. He could barely tolerate it himself.
But, friendship was friendship.
And, after what Jimmy had seen in the past few hours in the manager’s office at the movie theatre and then in the bloody alley off Seventh Street, he thought it might not have been the worst thing in the world to have had a buddy in the house tonight. Even a rye-soaked, unconscious one, which was, despite the absent Chrysler Royal, precisely what he found when he walked in the front door.
Joe sprawled, snoring, on his belly on the sofa, one arm hanging over the edge, his hand resting like a porcelain sculpture on the carpet beside the empty bottle. But that wasn’t what Jimmy focused on when he first walked into the room. Nor did he wonder where Joe’s car was.
That was child’s play.
This was not . . .
Written in blood on the wall behind the sofa, a mere three feet over Joe’s head, were more Japanese characters. The calligraphy was the same as at the movie house. Translated, it read, “Accept your friend’s life as a personal gift.”
“Joe!” Jimmy called. “Wake up.”
Joe kept on snoring.
Jimmy removed the .45 from the pocket of his raincoat and turned in a slow circle in the room.
The assassin could still be here.
Cautiously, Jimmy inspected the living room, kitchenette, dining room, master bedroom, bathroom, guest bedroom. He went to the back door and ran the flashlight over the backyard. Aside from an opossum scurrying away from the light, he spied nothing unusual.
Still, his senses remained sharp.
There were shadows everywhere.
He went back inside, locking the back door behind him, and returned to the living room, shaking his friend by the shoulder and emphatically calling his name, “Joe, Joe, Joe.”
At last the big man opened his eyes, though he didn’t seem capable of moving another muscle. “Jimmy?”
“Yeah, what happened here, Joe?”
Joe managed to brush the empty bottle of rye with his hand, rolling it toward Jimmy. “The usual, I guess. Sorry.”
That wasn’t what Jimmy was asking. But it was evidence enough that Joe wasn’t aware anything unusual had happened. He’d slept through it. He’d be no help.
Jimmy glanced up to the blood-scrawled message on the wall.
Joe closed his eyes again, snoring.
How easy it would have been for the assassin to cut his friend’s throat.
But this personal gift business . . .
Jimmy owed the Jap assassin nothing but a bullet between the eyes. That would be his personal gift.
Then he noticed something unusual about the calligraphy.
He hadn’t caught the subtlety of style back at the movie house or in the alley, though he knew the writing was the same. Perhaps he’d been too distracted by the waves of police and technicians who descended upon the places. Or maybe he just needed to see the calligraphy a third time to realize it had been written by a woman.
He couldn’t say for sure how he knew.
But he was certain.
He recalled that the teenagers who worked in the movie-house lobby described the “man” who went into the manager’s office as being thin and wearing a cloak.
They hadn’t seen his face. Or her face.
And then Jimmy had a terrible thought.
The assassin had used the blood of his victims to write the messages back at the movie house and in the alley.
Where had this blood come from?
Jimmy didn’t have to look long to discover the answer.
A puddle was forming at the edges of the sofa.
“Joe!” he called again, rolling his friend onto the ground and kneeling to run his hands over his body, frantically looking for a wound.
Joe opened one eye. “Hey, you trying to take advantage of me, buddy?” he kidded, unaware of all that was going on. “You think I’m some kind of cheap date or something?”
Ignoring Joe’s joking, Jimmy sighed in relief when he found no wounds.
But then he noticed the sofa.
After Joe had rolled off it, the cushions rose up a few inches, as if something had been stuffed inside, held down until now by Joe’s dead weight.
Jimmy got to his feet and removed one cushion, which was enough.
Stuffed inside the sofa was his neighbor from across the street, Tony Fortuna, who sometimes came over with a bottle of amaretto when he noticed Joe’s big car parked outside. The two liked to talk about Minor League baseball.
Tony’s throat had been cut.
It was his blood on the walls. Used by a female hand for a perfect and terrible message in calligraphy.
This spy ring Jimmy had been alerted to . . .
They were onto him. They meant business.
He was glad his girlfriend Sun wasn’t over tonight. What horrors might they have done to her?
Locking the side and then front doors, he went for the phone.
Excerpt from a letter dated April 12, 1942:
. . . I am saddened to hear that you and your parents will be forced to leave your home in the next few days. Naturally, you were the first person I thought of when I heard about the President’s executive order on the radio. Somehow, I didn’t anticipate the relocations taking place so quickly. I understand too that you’re disappointed at having to discontinue your art history studies at UCLA. (Though, frankly, this may be a blessing in disguise, as your natural instincts as a novelist are such that I do not believe art history is the right field for you or, for that matter, that a college education is necessary to your success as a writer—look at Hemingway, no college at all! Academia can be a trap, dear boy.) Now, you will have all the time that your writing requires.
Still, these are difficult times (so sad that you have to leave your dog behind), and your resilience will likely be further tested. But try to remain positive. Perhaps getting away from familiar places (some of them clearly dangerous these days, a case in point being your father’s violent experience with the marauding anti-Japanese bullies in LA, whom I read in TIME Magazine are becoming only more prevalent) will stimulate your work rather than restrict it. After all, I have, to date, been impressed by the versatility of your vision and feel confident that in no time you’ll be re-settled and back to the daily rhythms that have produced such excellent first chapters.
Bear up, Takumi Sato, and keep up the good work. Ah to have the energy of a twenty-two year-old and talent! I believe you can really make something of this novel.
Sincerely,
Maxine Wakefield
Maxine Wakefield,
Associate Editor,<
br />
Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc.
THE REVISED—CHAPTER THREE
And if, through the act of a powerful magician or perverse, authorial god, your world came to belong to another man, rendering you unrecognizable even to friends and family, would you still bear the strength to be . . . you?
—James Matsumoto, chaplain at
Manzanar Relocation Camp
Leaving Echo Park, Sam Sumida drove south for ten or twelve miles, past dark, open lots and auto repair shops and junkyards that were shuttered for the night, likely guarded by heavily muscled dogs. Very few cars passed in either direction. Turning onto Florence, the businesses tended now more toward retail stores, radio repair shops, and a few gasoline stations that were open even at this hour. Occasional lights still glowed in houses interspersed among the local businesses.
It was just past midnight when Sam Sumida shut off the Chrysler in South Gate.
Of course, it was far too late for an ordinary visit, but this was no time to stand on ceremony.
Uncle Yamato and Aunt Misaki had taken in Sumida’s ailing mother, Sakura, a few months earlier, when it became clear that the poor woman’s mental state would no longer allow her to live on her own. Sam would have taken her in himself had it not been for the pressing matter of finding his wife’s killer, which took all of his time. He was grateful his mother and her younger sister Misaki had always been so close. And Uncle Yamato was a generous man who had been like a second father to Sam, particularly after Sam’s actual father had been killed in an accident at sea.
Sumida’s family was small but close.
He got out of the unfamiliar car and made his way to the neatly kept, Spanish-style bungalow. He pressed the doorbell.
After a moment, a middle-aged Asian man, unfamiliar to Sumida, opened the door. He wore a dressing gown, and his hair was disheveled. He frowned at Sam. “What do you want?” he asked, holding firm to the door. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Who are you?” Sumida inquired, surprised.