Death in Little Tokyo

10

The phone rang. I picked it up and recognized Mariko’s voice. It was unusual for her to call me early in the morning.

“There’s a big write-up about your murder in the L.A. Times,” she said.

“My murder? If it’s about my murder, then like Mark Twain said, my death has been greatly exaggerated!”

“Gee, the wonders of a sixth-grade education.”

“Never mind the sarcasm. What are you talking about?”

“There’s a big write-up in the Times about Matsuda’s murder,” Mariko said. “It talks about Matsuda and then discusses how other Japanese businessmen have been victimized by crime in Little Tokyo. You know, muggings and things like that.”

“Why don’t you read it to me?”

“Read it to you? It’s about half a page long. It wouldn’t kill you to go out and get a paper.”

“Ever helpful.”

“Well, I’m trying to be,” Mariko answered. “I thought you might be interested in it. Besides, you’re mentioned in the article.”

“I am?”

“Sure, I’ll read you that part, at least. ‘The police say they are following up on various clues and checking out the stories of suspects.’ I figure that’s you,” Mariko announced.

“You’re not going to think it’s so funny if it turns out to be true, and you end up bringing me gift baskets at some maximum security prison. Remember ‘Bubba’?”

Mariko’s voice was much less animated. “Do you think that will actually happen?”

“Well, I hope not. But it has happened in the past, and I certainly don’t want to put it to the test in this case. You know the cops can start feeling the heat just like anybody else. And if there’s a lot of pressure being put on Hansen to make an arrest, there’s no telling what he might do.”

“I was kidding.”

“I hope you’re kidding, too. I just want you to know you shouldn’t go around joking about me being a suspect because it’s probably true.”

“Now you’ve got me worried sick,” Mariko said.

“About me?”

“Of course.”

“I thought you were worried that I might say that you were the mastermind behind the whole thing.”

“Don’t tease about this, Ken.”

“I’m like you. I sort of vacillate between macabre humor and outright hysteria. I’ll go down and read what the Times has to say about the case, then I’ll call you back later this afternoon. Will you call your lawyer cousin and set up a time for me to see him? I want to get rid of the package as soon as possible.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, Mariko?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“Finally some sense comes out of your mouth.” She hung up.

I went down to the corner doughnut shop and got a Times. Back in my apartment I read the story about the murder. It had a short interview with Nachiko Izumi, the maid who found the body, but the actual details of the murder were pretty sketchy. I did learn that the police confirmed the weapon was probably a sword, based on the wounds inflicted on the body. And I was fascinated to read a little bit about Matsuda’s background.

Matsuda had been raised in the United States, but he went to Japan right after World War II and renounced his U.S. citizenship. Since that time, he had been in the United States frequently, acting as a sales agent for a variety of companies.

The article went on to talk about other crimes in Little Tokyo, with visiting Japanese businessmen as their victims. The crime rate in the United States is much higher than in Japan, and despite a lot of publicity in Japan about it, many of the visitors simply weren’t trained to cope with the Los Angeles urban jungle.

A favorite technique seemed to be going from room to room in hotels that catered to the Japanese businesspeople, knocking on doors and mugging or robbing the residents when they opened the door to see who was there. Welcome to America.

After reading the paper and having some breakfast (this time, cornflakes, not sushi), I decided to call Ezekiel Stein, the president of the L.A. Mystery Club. Ezekiel was a manager in the Water Quality Division of the L.A. Department of Water and Power (DWP). He was a thin man in his fifties, with a small beard and thick, black-rimmed glasses.

Ezekiel actually got me involved in the L.A. Mystery Club, and I met him in kind of a funny way. The Los Angeles DWP has this mania for covering open reservoirs. They like to take restful blue water and spread a plastic cover over it in the name of water improvement. In fact, the way to improve water is to filter it, not just cover it, but covering is cheap and the City of L.A. likes cheap.

Residents and environmentalists opposed the covering of the reservoirs, arguing that if the DWP really wanted to improve water quality they should take steps that will achieve that aim, instead of taking a halfway measure that destroyed the open reservoirs without making any substantive improvement in water quality. The Silver Lake district of L.A. got its name from the open reservoirs that form its geographic and emotional center. Like most people in Silver Lake, I joined the effort to stop the covering.

I met Ezekiel at a community meeting to discuss ways to keep the reservoirs uncovered. I noticed that Ezekiel had placed some flyers on a table when he entered the meeting, and I strolled over to see what they were. They advertised an upcoming L.A. Mystery Club weekend event, and I talked briefly with Ezekiel about the event and what was involved. I was surprised when later I saw Ezekiel sitting as part of a panel representing the DWP. When you view people as part of the opposition on an issue, you don’t often view them as having aspects to their lives that you might share an interest in.

I decided to give the mystery weekends a try and found them fun. As I got more involved with the club, I got to know Ezekiel better. I still thought his views about covering the reservoirs were a sacrilege, but I also learned that it shouldn’t prevent me from working with him on things of interest to both of us.

Ezekiel was an engineer, which explained some, but not all, of his eccentricities.

For instance, for fun he would calculate the center of gravity for all sorts of things, such as automobiles or oranges. As near as I could tell, knowing the center of gravity is only useful for things like airplanes or sailboats, but Ezekiel calculated it for just about anything that struck his fancy: chairs, tables, phone booths, and myriad other objects. He once proudly showed me a database he kept on a laptop computer that had all his center of gravity computations, along with a scanned photo or sketch of the object. He had literally thousands of entries, and he told me he had been doing this since college.

Ezekiel would also get involved in long tiffs with bureaucracies (and L.A. has many, what with all the city, county, and state agencies, not to mention agencies with adjacent cities). If some bureaucratic rule seemed illogical to him, he would sometimes spend months trying to get it changed, even when the change he wanted seemed to have no practical effect. Working for the world’s largest municipally owned utility, he should have known the difficulties in getting any bureaucracy to change, but he always had a half dozen little skirmishes going on.

His trait of most interest to me was his voracious reading about crime.

His phone rang and I heard the familiar voice answer, “Hello.”

“Ezekiel. Ken Tanaka here. What do you know about recruiting American women to entertain in Japan?” With Ezekiel it was unnecessary to go through the normal social amenities. In fact, it was often counterproductive to do something like ask him how he felt. Ezekiel would tell you, in excruciating detail, including (I once learned to my sorrow) a report on his latest schedule of bowel movements and stool condition.

“There’s been sporadic complaints about it. Often the Japanese don’t comply with the terms of the contracts they sign with the women, which causes problems.”

“Have you ever heard of a woman being blackmailed once she returned to the States?”

“Blackmail?” A pause. I could just see the gears turning in his mind while he thought about that one. “No, I’ve never heard of a case of blackmail once the woman returned to the United States. Why do you ask.”

“I think I might be involved with one.”

“You mean a real one?”

“Yes. And that’s not the half of it. I’m also involved with that Japanese businessman that was killed at the Golden Cherry Blossom last night.”

“The one reported in the Times?”

“Yes.” I gave Ezekiel a brief rundown on my meeting with Rita and Matsuda. I left out the part about still having the package. When I was done, I asked, “Any ideas?”

“Obviously the woman didn’t want to pick up the package herself because she was trying to put something over on Matsuda. For five hundred bucks she bought herself a sacrificial goat.”

“So who killed Matsuda?”

“Not enough information,” Ezekiel said. “Can’t figure things like this out without information.”

“Yeah, I’m finding that out,” I said. “Say, do you know a good criminal lawyer?”

“I know of several lawyers who are criminals.”

I gritted my teeth and rephrased my question. Ezekiel was not trying to be funny. When people laughed at things he said, he’d sometimes get puzzled and hurt. It was just the way his brain worked. “Do you know of any lawyers who are good at representing criminals?”

“Just what I read in the paper. Do you need one?”

“I might. Mariko has suggested her cousin Michael, but I don’t know him and I want to make sure I talk to someone who knows what he’s doing.”

“You need Mary Maloney. That woman can find out anything. She’ll know how to find out what you want to know about Mariko’s cousin. Anything else?”

“No, not now.”

“Okay, but talk to me more about this when you have the time.”

The phone was dead. It was typical of Ezekiel to hang up without saying good-bye, and I wasn’t offended by it. I replaced the receiver and decided to drive down to the detective office before I called Mary.

I parked my car in the lot I normally used and walked to the office. I noticed the posters advertising Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week festival on the telephone poles. A Nisei is a second generation Japanese in the U.S. I was a third generation, which made me a Sansei.

Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week celebration was started in 1934 by a bunch of enterprising Nisei looking for a way to drum up jobs. It usually coincided with the Japanese O-bon, which is held in late summer. Before coming to L.A., I had never heard of Nisei Week, but O-bon was something we used to celebrate in Hawaii. In the way we Americans have of homogenizing ethnic events until they lose their toothiness, the L.A. version of O-bon consists of a parade with street dancing, plus the usual kitsch things like a beauty pageant and plenty of chicken lunches for businessmen. I don’t think most people know that the festival has its roots in a Buddhist religious festival.

I walked into the office building and summoned the slow elevator. The building where I rented the office had one supreme virtue: the rents were dirt cheap. Otherwise, it was a pit. Like most old office buildings, it had a smell of age clinging to it, like the stale ghost of the past. When the building was new and bustling with commerce it was home to dentists and lawyers and several small accounting firms. Now it housed small-time import/export businesses and nondescript enterprises with names like “John Smith, Inc.”

My office was on the second floor, and in the few days I had occupied the office I rarely saw anyone else walking the halls of this floor. I put the key in the door and turned the lock.

The scene that greeted me was chaos. Every file cabinet drawer had been opened, removed from the cabinet, and dumped on the floor. The desk drawers had been treated in a similar fashion. Even the four pictures I had hung on the wall had been taken down and dumped facedown on the desk. It took me a few moments to realize that someone was looking at the backs of the pictures, to make sure nothing had been taped to them. So much for my idea to do precisely that with the package.

Since they were all props and stage furniture, most of the drawers were empty. The one exception was the top drawer of the desk, where I kept my notes about the mystery weekend, along with short biographies I had written for each of the characters in the mystery. These were scattered on the top of the desk. Someone had apparently read them and I wondered what they made of them.

The phone started ringing and I was at a loss to find it for a few seconds. I finally went to where the cord was plugged into the wall and followed the cord until I found the phone sitting under a file drawer. I sat on the floor and answered it.

“Hello?”

“Mr.Tanaka?”

“Yes.”

“This is Rita Newly. I’ve been calling for two days now to make arrangements to pick up my property.” Her tone was brittle and sharp.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been in the office. A good part of the time I was with the police.”

“The police?” Her tone was now more wary than surprised.

“Yes. Mr. Matsuda was murdered soon after I picked up the package for you.”

“That has nothing to do with me,” she said hastily. “The package is my property, and part of a normal business transaction.”

“Pornography and blackmail are normal business transactions? That’s a peculiar view of what you’ve told me.”

“Look, I really need that package. What will it take to get you to give it to me?”

“How about starting with some information? For instance, who were those two Asians you were running away from yesterday morning?”

“What Asians?”

“Oh, come on, Ms. Newly. I was in front of the office when you pulled your cool maneuver with the Mercedes. It seemed precipitated by your seeing two Asian gentlemen standing in front of the office.”

“I don’t know who they were.”

I sighed, exasperated. “If you didn’t know them, why did you take off? They certainly seemed to know you because they took off after you. Now I come into the office and find everything turned upside down. . ”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean someone ransacked my office yesterday afternoon or last night. Everything is torn apart.”

“Did they get the package?”

“The famous package! No, they didn’t get the package. It’s being held at a safe place not five minutes from the office. But you’re not going to get it until you start telling me the truth about what this is all about.”

There was a long silence. “Hello?” I finally said, thinking she might have hung up.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Tanaka,” she was all sweetness and light again. “Those men were Yakuza, Japanese gangsters. I recognized one from Tokyo. They scared me when I saw them in front of your office, and I just panicked and ran.”

“Gangsters?”

“That’s right.”

I digested that statement. Lacking anything more insightful, I asked, “So, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. My package has nothing to do with the murder of Mr. Matsuda. That shocked me when I heard about it on the news. But I’m sure my business with him has no connection with this crime.”

So she already knew about Matsuda’s murder. I wondered if she knew from the news or some other means. “So, what is your involvement in this?”

Another pause. “I’m not sure I can trust you,” she said. “Can you let me think about it for a while and get back to you?”

“Why don’t you give me a number where I can get in touch with you,” I suggested.

“No, I’ll call you,” she said. She hung up.

“Damn!” I said as I slammed down the phone. I sat for a few minutes, but finally decided that the most positive way I could vent my frustration was to put the office back into order.

As I worked I came across the telephone books that I got when I installed the phone. I put them aside and finished putting the office together. When I was done I picked up the yellow pages and started flipping through them. Finding the woman in Matsuda’s room was important. She could confirm my story about just being in the room a few minutes and leaving. She could also supply the cops with information on what happened after I left. The question was, how to find her?

Of course, Sherlock Holmes would have known her family history, her place of employment, her residence, and her social security number after a ten-second meeting, but unfortunately I wasn’t The Great Detective. In fact, I wasn’t even a great detective. Thinking about it, I wasn’t even a detective. Great.

But I did have clues. She said she was a dancer, and she said she needed only half an hour to get dressed and on stage after her proposed “party.” That meant she had to get someplace close to the hotel. Even at 10:30 at night, you can’t drive too far in downtown L.A. in that time. She also said something about a G-string. In an age where some grandmas wear thong bikini panties, sexy underwear is not a big deal, but I imagine something like a G-string is still primarily worn by strippers. That meant a club or something similar. So I should have been able to narrow things down to a strip joint within a short driving distance from the hotel. So far, so good.

But how to pinpoint what strip joints were within a short distance of the hotel became a problem. I looked up strippers in the yellow pages and only found stripping telegram services. I looked up strip clubs and found nothing. Nightclubs got me a lot of listings, but no real indication about which ones had strippers. It looked as if I might be condemned to driving around the hotel in ever-widening circles, keeping my eyes peeled for someplace where the woman might be dancing. That seemed like a long and tedious task, but one that couldn’t be avoided without some kind of listing of strip joints in downtown L.A.

The phone rang. It was Mariko.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Uh, fine, I guess.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“Somebody ransacked the office here.”

“A thief?”

“Maybe, but they didn’t seem to take anything.”

“The package. They were looking for the package.”

“Maybe. I can’t be sure. It might be coincidence.”

“Are you going to report it to the police?”

“I’m not sure about that, either. They didn’t take anything, and I really hate that cop assigned to this case. He’s an ass. Have you called your cousin Michael yet?”

“He’s in court this morning. His secretary said he’d call back this afternoon. I said it was important.”

I sighed.

“So what are you going to do?” Mariko asked.

“I’m trying to find the woman who was in Matsuda’s room. She can verify my story.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“Ah, research,” I said lamely. I was embarrassed to tell Mariko of my fruitless investigation into strip joints.

“What kind of research? Are you going to cruise for hookers?”

That was a development I hadn’t contemplated. In downtown L.A. that could be a formidable task. “If you must know, I was trying to figure out how to find the addresses of all the strip joints in downtown L.A. I want to plot them on a map and see which ones are close to the hotel. I haven’t had much success, though, because strip joints aren’t listed in the yellow pages.”

“Oh, if that’s what you want you should pick up a copy of the L.A. Sizzle newspaper. They sell them in front of liquor stores. It will have a complete listing of strip joints and bars with strippers.”

“How do you know that?”

“I have my sources.”

“Seriously, how would you know that?”

“Hey, the guys in AA have sworn off liquor, not vice. Most of those nude places can’t serve hard liquor, so the guys claim it’s a good place to hang out. Of course, something like the public library doesn’t serve liquor, so I don’t think not serving liquor is the real reason the guys go to the clubs.”

I stammered my thanks to Mariko for the tip, then went a block to a liquor store that, sure enough, had a news rack with the L.A. Sizzle newspaper in front of it. On the way back to the office I looped past my car and got my Thomas Brothers map guide.

The newspaper had the ads for nude bars neatly organized by the section of the city, and it only took me a few minutes to locate two clubs close to the hotel, along with a theater called the Paradise Vineyard that promised “Old Time Burlesque” in its ad. I marked their locations on my map of downtown.

Since they were all close, I decided to drive by them to see what there was to see, but first, on impulse, I picked up the phone and called Mary Maloney.

When she found out who it was, Mary’s voice warmed up. “Ken! How’s the mystery coming? We’re all looking forward to participating in it.”

“It’s coming along fine, but I have something more serious to ask you.”

“Oh, what is it?” Mary was a large woman, who enjoyed mothering people. Maybe that’s why she has contacts everywhere who were willing to help her whenever she wanted. Mary was still something of a puzzle to me. For all her openness and friendly demeanor, she really didn’t talk much about herself. She didn’t seem to work, and although she seemed to have a modest lifestyle, she also had a penchant for taking off to Europe or Asia for weeks at a time, seemingly on a whim. That implied some source of income, but she never talked about it. She also had a mania for knitted dresses, sweaters, and pants suits. In fact, I couldn’t recall seeing her in anything that wasn’t knitted. I don’t know if she made these clothes herself or bought them, but Mariko once remarked that Mary’s clothes were custom-made, and not off the rack.

“I’m afraid I’m involved with that murder at the Golden Cherry Blossom Hotel, and I need to get some legal advice about how to gracefully get out of a situation I’ve put myself in. Mariko has suggested that I talk to her cousin Michael, but frankly I don’t know if he’s any good. As you know I’m unemployed, so maybe he’ll give me a discount, but I don’t want a price break if it’s going to land me in jail with bad advice.”

“What’s his full name.”

“Michael Kosaka.”

“And he practices here in L.A.?”

“Yes.”

“Give me some time. I’ll call you back with some information.”

“I was just about to leave the office.”

“It will only take me a minute. Just wait.”

I gave Mary the office number and rang off. I had time to put my notes on the club mystery back in order when the phone rang. It was Mary.

“Michael Kosaka is an excellent attorney,” Mary reported. “My sources say you should get good advice from him.”

“Thanks, Mary, I appreciate it.”

“So you’re not going to explain what’s going on?”

“Not right now. I’ll tell you as soon as I can.”

“Rats!”

“See you soon.” Mary was an information junky, but things were happening so fast I didn’t know what information to give her right now. One thing I wasn’t going to give her was the fact that I was going to spend my morning checking out strip joints. Look, I’m not lily pure and pristine. I’m not even prudish. But I was embarrassed.

I drove to the first club and, of course, it was closed. In front of the club was a couple of display cases with pictures of the girls, and I stopped to look. They all seemed to have names like Ginger and Kiki and Brandy. I didn’t recognize any of them. As I stood in front of the club looking at the pictures, I had the thought that someone like Mrs. Kawashiri would probably drive by and see me, and it made me uncomfortable. Still, this was business of sorts, and I pressed on to the second club.

It had the same setup, with pictures in front, along with its own collection of Brandys (this time spelled Brandee) and Gingers, but I didn’t see the woman I was looking for, so I went to the theater.

The Paradise Vineyard is an old converted movie theater on the western edge of downtown Los Angeles. The facade of the theater is weathered, and the once-bright gold, red, and yellow designs on the theater’s front are now muted and worn.

The marquee on the front of the theater promises “Girls! Girls! Gi ls!” The missing “R” looked as though it had been gone for a long time. Underneath the triple proclamation of what could be found within was a yellow and black banner with the words “Old Time Burlesque!”

I parked my car and walked to the front of the theater, where I was disappointed to see that there were no pictures of the dancers, just a poster informing me that “Cutie Valentine” and “Yolanda LaHuge” were the featured acts. At least they were plumb out of Gingers and Brandies, even though I had a good idea about what it was about Yolanda that was so huge. Still, without photos, it was impossible to tell if the woman I met was dancing there.

“You know someone here?”

I knew that voice, and it was the worst person I could think of to catch me in front of the theater.

“Hello, Officer Hansen. I don’t know anyone here.”

“That’s Detective Hansen,” he said. His eyes were already narrowed in suspicion. “If you don’t know anyone here, why are you standing in front of the theater?”

“I was hoping to find some picture in front so I could see if the woman I met in Matsuda’s room was a dancer here.”

“How did you know to come here?”

“I got a list of strip clubs in downtown L.A. and marked the ones near the hotel on a map. Do you want me to show it to you?”

“Yes.”

We walked to my car with my face burning red. “I imagine you’re doing something similar,” I said, as I showed him my Thomas Brothers map with the clubs marked on them.

“I’m interested in why you’re doing this,” Hansen said.

“I thought it would be helpful if I found the woman. She could back up my story.”

“Or deny it.”

I bit my tongue and forced myself to smile at the bastard. “It costs nothing to be polite” was one of my father’s favorite sayings. He was wrong, of course. Sometimes it costs a great deal of self-control. “That’s always a possibility,” I answered, “but if she tells the truth, her story should corroborate mine.”

“Mr. Tanaka, I’m going to ask you once to stop getting involved in police affairs,” Hansen said. “If we need your help, we will ask for it. You don’t have to do things on your own that involve this murder.”

“All right,” I said as I walked around to get into my car. I was going to tell him that he didn’t have to bother checking out the two clubs I had already stopped at, but I decided to let him carry out his own investigation. Yes, I know it’s petulant and petty, but I think he would have gone to the other clubs anyway.

I drove back to Little Tokyo and went to the Kawashiri Boutique to talk to Mariko.

“I saw that police detective this afternoon. He caught me standing in front of a strip joint looking for that woman, and I’m sure I’m his number one suspect by now. I want to talk to your cousin Michael as soon as possible.”

“Oh, great. My boyfriend the criminal. Did you read the story in the Times?” Mariko asked.

“Yeah. It was really interesting. Especially the part about Matsuda originally being a U.S. citizen. The Times seemed to know about Matsuda awfully fast. I wonder what else they know? I’d love to get more information.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Mariko said. “Mrs. Kawashiri has a customer, a Mrs. Okada, who’s always talking about her grandson who’s a reporter for the L.A. Times. He wasn’t the person who wrote today’s story, but maybe he can give you more information.”

“How would I meet him?”

“By asking Mrs. Kawashiri, of course. You know how this works with Japanese, with all the reciprocal favors. All that ongiri stuff. Mrs. Okada owes Mrs. Kawashiri. For some reason Mrs. Kawashiri sees more in you than I do, and I’m sure she’d be glad to help you.”

Ongiri is how Japanese keep things in social balance. On is a debt of gratitude. Giri is a sense of duty. You do me a favor or give me a gift, and I’m now obligated to eventually do you a favor or give a gift of equal value. In fact, if I do too big a favor or buy too big a gift in return, it’s a kind of a put-down. The exchange of gifts and favors don’t balance themselves out.

In most of Japanese or Japanese-American society you don’t write things down about who owes whom favors, but in some rural villages in Japan they actually write down all the help and favors one village member gives to another, and they keep these records for generations. A village member might be expected to help another build a barn because that person’s great grandfather got help from the barn-raiser’s great grandfather a century before, and that social debt has not been balanced out yet! It can get tedious keeping track of things, even without formal mercantile bookkeeping.

Mariko thought that Mrs. Okada owed Mrs. Kawashiri for past favors, and Mrs. Kawashiri would be willing to help me by calling in some of her chips with Mrs. Okada on my behalf. I, of course, would then be obligated to Mrs. Kawashiri.

“Okay, I’ll ask Mrs. Kawashiri if she can set something up,” I said. “Are you sure Michael will get back to me?”

“Michael’s very good about getting back to people. I’m sure as soon as he has a break he’ll call me.”

Frustrated, but not seeing much I could do about things on the lawyer front, I went into the shop and asked Mrs. Kawashiri if she could ask Mrs. Okada to set up a meeting with her grandson who worked at the Times. Mrs. Kawashiri showed genuine pleasure at the prospect of helping me, and said she’d set something up.

I went into the back room where Mariko was waiting and decided to try something else. “Where’s the hatbox with the mysterious package.”

“On the shelf behind you. Why?”

“Because I’m going to open it.”

Mariko reached behind me and took down a hatbox. “No you’re not,” she announced. “I’m going to open it!”

She took the package out of the box and set to work. Her small fingers busily worked at tearing away the string and tape that held the package together. I cautioned her, because I wanted to be able to put the package back together more-or-less like I found it. She moderated her enthusiasm, but within a few seconds the package was open and lying in her lap was a stack of pale yellow sheets.

“What are they?” I asked.

Mariko picked one up and looked at it. She frowned. “This one seems to be a warranty claim for a TV.”

11

One hundred twenty-three thousand, seven hundred three dollars, and sixty-two cents. Did you double-check the total?”

Mariko shook her credit card calculator at me. “Are you saying my machine can’t add?”

“I’m saying you might have pressed the wrong key.”

“I double-checked it.”

“That’s an awful lot of money for warranty claims.”

“It’s weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“Why all this fuss over a bunch of claim forms?”

Mrs. Kawashiri came into the back room and asked, “Ken-san, can you meet Mrs. Okada right after lunch today? She lives in Culver City and says her grandson can stop by at that time.”

“Sure. Can you get me the address?”

Mrs. Kawashiri handed me a piece of paper with Mrs. Okada’s address written on it. She looked at the claim forms and said, “What are those?”

I sighed. “That’s a good question.” I picked up one of the claim forms and looked at it. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “There is one thing unusual about them, though.”

“What’s that?” Mariko asked.

“Even though there’s a dealer number filled in on the form, the name and address of the business that did the repairs has been left blank.”

“Everything else seems to be filled in,” Mariko said, looking at one of the forms.

Mrs. Kawashiri picked a form up and looked at it. “Mine’s got a little sticker on it,” she said, pointing to a white label a quarter-inch high and about two inches long. “There’s a bar code or something on it. Do all of them have that?”

Mariko flipped through the pile of claims. “Yeah. They all seem to have a sticker. They’re all claims against Mihara Electric Company, too. Right?”

I shuffled through the forms. “That’s right, but they’re for different things: TVs, VCRs, microwave ovens. A lot of them are bulk claims for fixing five or six TVs or VCRs.”

The bell that announced a customer entering the boutique went off. Mariko rose to greet the customer, but Mrs. Kawashiri motioned her down and went back into the shop herself.

“What’s the biggest claim?” I asked Mariko.

“About thirteen thousand dollars, I guess. Most of them seem to be between four and ten thousand, but there are a couple in here for just a few hundred dollars. Those are the ones that just have one repair listed on the claim.”

“Do the bulk claims all list serial numbers?”

“Sure. Here’s one. See? Three TVs and here are the serial numbers, two VCRs and here are the serial numbers, four microwave ovens, a TV satellite dish, and a projection TV. Total parts and labor is seventy-eight hundred bucks.”

“Do you think this could be evidence of some kind of fraud?” Mariko said.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe these things show that somebody was cheating Mihara Electric on its U.S. warranty claims, and Newly is trying to get back the evidence or something.”

“I don’t see how they could show that, because they don’t even have a company name. Although … I see they all have the same dealer number.”

“Maybe you can trace back from that who originally filled out the claim form, but I don’t see how they can be evidence of anything.” Mariko put down the claim form she had in her hand. “It’s beyond me.”

The phone rang, saving me from having to admit bafflement, too. It was Mariko’s lawyer cousin Michael. After briefly explaining the situation to him, we made an appointment to meet at three-thirty.

“Give me a couple of the claim forms to take with me, and wrap up the rest.” I said as I got off the phone.

“Excuse me, do I look like your personal assistant?”

“No, but you look like someone who will assist me if I bribe her with a large bowl of udon noodles for lunch.”

“With shrimp tempura on top?”

“Yes, with shrimp tempura on top.”

“Your packages, Mr. Tanaka, will be rewrapped in approximately two minutes.”

After lunch I dropped Mariko off and drove over to the Culver City address for Mrs. Okada given to me by Mrs. Kawashiri.

Naomi Okada was a small woman. I judged that she couldn’t be more than 4’9” tall, but osteoporosis had curved her spine till she seemed even tinier. She met me at the door of her modest Culver City home wearing a dark purple dress with thin black stripes. Her face was remarkably free of lines for her age, which I judged to be at least in the late sixties. Her gray hair was neatly pulled back into a bun, and her deep brown eyes had a bright sparkle of intelligence.

“Mrs. Okada?”

“Yes.”

“My name’s Ken Tanaka. Mrs. Kawashiri said she talked to you about me.”

“Oh, Mr. Tanaka. Please come in. My grandson’s not here yet.”

She stood aside and let me enter the small, neat living room of her house. A comfortable looking flower print couch, a matching chair, and a maple coffee table made it look like a showroom at an Ethan Allen furniture store. On the coffee table was a book and an arrangement of irises. In one corner of the room was a lacquered wood glass doll case, with a Japanese doll in it. Japanese style, the case stood on the floor, instead of up on a table. The doll was dressed in a miniature print kimono. Its painted face looked up at me with solemn dignity.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said.

“Oh, it’s no bother. I’m happy to introduce you to my grandson, Evan.”

“Well, I know it’s a big inconvenience.”

“It’s no inconvenience. Please sit down.” She indicated the couch. “Would you like some green tea?”

“No, I don’t want to bother you or put you out.”

“It’s absolutely no bother. Why don’t you have some tea?”

“Well, if you’re sure it’s not a bother, I would like some. Thank you.”

“Good.”

The complicated dance of apology and refusal, offer and denial was carried out in traditional Japanese fashion, and I could see that Mrs. Okada was pleased that I knew my proper role in the elaborate social interplay. It showed I was “raised right.”

Mrs. Okada had the tea things ready in the kitchen, and she returned with them on a tray almost immediately. Of course I was expected to accept the tea, despite all the protestations, so she already had it prepared. If I had either accepted too readily or refused she would have been hurt and put out by my lack of manners. On the tray was a spectacular satsuma platter with characteristic gold and colored enamel designs. It held Japanese arare rice crackers, and it seemed a shame to use such a lovely piece for such plebeian purposes.

“This platter is beautiful,” I said, touching the edge of the dish.

“It’s a very poor thing,” Mrs. Okada said, even though obviously it wasn’t.

When all the social preliminaries had been dispensed with, we sat back in our seats. Mrs. Okada sort of perched on her chair with her legs barely touching the ground. Her curved spine forced her to look up to see me, but her face had an expression of expectation.

“My grandson should be here soon,” she said.

“Okay. Do you know what he covers for the Times?”

“I’m not totally sure. My eyes are bad so I don’t read much anymore. I used to love to read, but now I have a hard time. My daughter sometimes reads stories to me that my grandson wrote. They all seem to do with Asian business.”

“You must be proud of him.”

She waved that thought away with her hand, but I could see she was pleased. Floundering to make polite small talk until her grandson appeared, I noticed that the book on her coffee table bore the picture of a dark mountain jutting out of a high desert landscape. The book was titled Heart Mountain. I pointed to the book.

“Is that book about the Heart Mountain Relocation camp?”

“Concentration camp,” she corrected. “Relocation camp is what they call it now to make themselves feel better. The book is about it. I was in that camp during the war.”

“Oh. It must have been pretty bad.”

“It was bad. The only nice part was you could see Heart Mountain. It was beautiful. Sometimes when I look at the cover of this book and I see the picture of Heart Mountain in Wyoming, it makes me think of Mount Fuji in Japan.”

“Were you born in Japan?”

“Heavens, no. I was born in Seattle. My father owned a hardware store before the war. I didn’t even visit Japan until the 1960s. I always wanted to see Japan, and I realize now I went at the perfect time, before the dollar became worthless!”

“What was Heart Mountain like?”

“It was just a collection of barracks at the foot of a mountain in Wyoming. The summers were unbearably hot, with all kinds of bugs biting at you. The winters were incredibly cold, with icy air coming out of Canada. I was a teenager then, but I still suffered from the cold during the winter. The old people really suffered. We used to joke that the average yearly temperature at Heart Mountain was great. It was the individual daily temperature that was lousy.” She poured the tea as she talked. “It seems like a lot of the camps were put in locations where there were extremes in temperature.

“The barracks at Heart Mountain were just little tar paper and rough board things, so they did nothing to stop the cold and they seemed to increase the heat. The lids from tin cans were in great demand because they could be used to patch knotholes. We were in room F of our barracks, which meant we had a little bigger room. Each barrack had six rooms, of three different sizes. The rooms got smaller in size as you approached the middle.”

“How big were the barracks?” I asked, interested.

“About sixty feet in total.”

“And your entire family lived in just one room in the barracks?”

“Yes. We had these rusty old army cots from the First World War and we strung blankets across on string to give some privacy. Something like a shelf to hold your possessions was actually a luxury. That’s because wood was so scarce. Every winter we would scrounge around for wood to burn to keep us warm. But even if you were lucky enough to find enough wood, the little potbelly stoves in the barracks would hardly take the frost out of the air on some cold mornings.

“The first men into the camps actually built most of it. My father was in that bunch, because they figured that if he owned a hardware store he must know all about construction. He told us the first group of men were convinced they were being taken into the wilderness to be shot. The guards on the train were real mean and they made the men sit in the same position for days. Sitting still for days doesn’t sound like much punishment, but after a while it can get to be agony if you’re not allowed to even stand up and stretch. They could only get up one at a time to go to the bathroom twice a day, on a regular schedule. If you didn’t have to go when it was your time, well, too bad. If you had to go at any other time, well, you just had to hold it.

“When they finally got to Heart Mountain, they found a bunch of tar paper and lumber dumped off by the side of the train tracks and they were forced to build the camp. My father said the materials they provided were junk, and a lot of the men didn’t know what they were doing. There was hardly a right angle in any barracks in that camp. He said he thought someone was selling the good lumber and such on the black market. I know the chefs at the camp were selling sugar and milk on the black market. It got so bad that the children didn’t have milk to drink and there was almost a riot over that.”

“I remember they gave us boiled squid and rice for weeks on end. I know squid is supposed to be a delicacy, but to this day I still can’t eat it.” She picked up her cup of tea, “You remarked on my satsuma platter. At the camp we had these cups and plates that were enormously thick and large. They all had ‘U.S.Q.M.C.’ on the back, and I can remember wondering what kind of company would make porcelain so thick and clumsy. I eventually found out that ‘U.S.Q.M.C.’ stood for ‘U.S. Quartermaster Corps.’ The plates were old army plates from World War One.” She laughed. It was a light, friendly laugh.

“From the time I was a little girl I loved porcelain. It came from my mother. When they gave us orders to go to camp we could only take what we could carry. Before we left I remember my mother packing her beloved porcelain away in a barrel for storage. A white man was going door-to-door in our neighborhood buying things from Japanese at just pennies on the dollar. When he got to our house he told my mother everything in storage would be confiscated anyway, and that he’d buy the plates for a penny apiece. I can remember my mother walking to the front door of the house with a handful of plates and throwing them on the sidewalk. They hit and shattered into a thousand pieces. She preferred breaking them over selling them to a profiteer. It turned out our things in storage weren’t confiscated, but some were stolen. This satsuma platter is one thing that survived.” She lightly touched the edge of the platter.

“It sounds like a terrible time.”

“We actually tried to have what we thought was a normal American life in camp. We had schools and clubs and even a boy scout troop. But it was a hollow kind of life. In the camps the whole family structure disintegrated. That’s what I think was sad. The men felt low and helpless. Kids were uprooted and put in a strange environment. The women put up with things they never had to put up with in civilian life.”

“Such as?”

“Well, for instance, the toilets had no doors on them. They were just open-faced stalls, with one side open up for everyone to see. The government wouldn’t provide materials for doors. It was humiliating. We had pieces of cardboard we would hold in front of us while we did our business. It was things like that. Little indignities that chipped away at the kind of family we had before the war.

“With the adults adrift, the kids ran loose. It was hard to have a normal life. Everything we had been taught about America and justice and democracy all seemed to have no meaning. Most of us were raised to believe in America, and we felt we were Americans. We couldn’t understand why we were shipped off to these camps just because Japan, a foreign country, had attacked us. Eventually, family discipline broke down so much that some of the kids formed gangs. Even some of the men got together in gangs. And the prison guards were no better. Some were okay,” she corrected, “but like I said, a lot of them stole rations and sold them on the black market. Besides the squid, for awhile we just had rice and peaches to eat, because the meat they provided was rotten. They were selling all the good meat on the black market. The peaches actually turned out to be a bad thing, even though we kids liked them, because some of the men made stills and fermented alcohol from the peaches.”

Mrs. Okada looked at me and laughed. “I’m just running on about bad times! Until recently I wouldn’t talk about the camps at all and now I can’t seem to shut up!”

“Why didn’t you talk about the camps?” I asked, puzzled. The reticence to talk about the camp experience was something I had always noticed in Japanese-Americans who were in them. My family was from Hawaii. Although my grandfather lost his fishing boat because they thought all Japanese with boats must be spies, we were relatively untouched. My mother was at Pearl Harbor during the attack, and during the war she worked as a Red Cross volunteer. The experience of the mainland Japanese-Americans was different from Hawaiian Japanese-Americans, and I was frankly curious.

“We were embarrassed and ashamed. It was like being in prison, even though we had done nothing. But you younger people seem more open about it, and it’s made it easier to talk about the experience. The apology and redress for the camps from the U.S. government was also something that helped. I recently went to the Japanese American National Museum and looked up my camp records on their computer system. I even sent away to the National Archives and got a copy of my camp file. They had report cards and school records and even some drawings I did in school. It’s both sad and interesting that they keep everybody’s files after half a century.”

The doorbell rang, and I was so interested that I was actually sorry that Mrs. Okada’s grandson finally showed up.

When she opened the door I was surprised to see that Mrs. Okada’s grandson was well over six feet tall. He was in his late twenties, with spiky black hair atop a face with the same cheekbones as Mrs. Okada. He was dressed in blue jeans and a Levi’s work shirt. Despite the way he towered over the diminutive woman, I learned who the boss was inside of two seconds. “You’re late,” she scolded. “I’ve been boring Mr. Tanaka with my ramblings while we’ve waited for you.”

“I’m sorry, Grandma,” he said, a faint flush of color coming to his cheeks. She grabbed his arm and guided him inside. An elf leading a giant. She brought him over to me and said, “This is my worthless grandson.”

He flushed again, but because of the business with the tea, Mrs. Okada knew that I wouldn’t believe she was in earnest. Some Japanese downplay the virtues of their children and spouses and are surprised that others take them seriously. Mrs. Okada knew I wouldn’t make that mistake.

“Hi, I’m Ken Tanaka,” I said, offering my hand.

“I’m Evan Okada,” he said as he shook my hand. We each sat at an end of the couch as Mrs. Okada resumed her perch on the chair.

“I understand that you work as a reporter for the L.A. Times,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” he said with what I thought was a bit of wariness.

“Did you work on the story about the Japanese national who was killed at the Golden Cherry Blossom Hotel?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I was probably one of the last people to see him alive.”

Evan’s interest picked up. “Did you know him?” he asked.

“Not really. The night he was killed was the only time I met him.”

“Do you work at the hotel?”

“No. I had business with him.”

“What kind of business?”

“I was just picking up a package from him.”

“And when did you see him?”

I laughed. “I guess it’s in a reporter’s nature to ask questions, but I was really hoping that you could provide me with information, not vice versa. You haven’t even answered my original question about if you worked on the story.”

“Why are you interested in finding out more information?”

“Because I saw him that night, I think I may be a suspect. Frankly, I want to protect myself by learning about the case. I was surprised about how much information the Times story had about Matsuda’s background, and I wanted to know how you got the information so fast.”

“Actually, it’s against our policy to discuss sources for stories.”

The frustration must have shown on my face because Mrs. Okada interjected. “Now you answer his questions! Mrs. Kawashiri asked me to see if I could help Ken-san. She said it would be a great kindness to her if I did so. She’s been very good to me over the years, and I want you to stop being a bad grandson and help him.” She shook a small finger at him as she lectured.

In some Japanese families being a “bad” son or grandson is the ultimate chastisement. A reporter’s wariness and the policies of the Los Angeles Times were no match for Japanese Grandma Power. Evan crumbled.

“I’m sorry I haven’t answered your questions,” he said. “It’s just that a lot of the information was contained in a dossier I obtained from a confidential source. I didn’t write the story, but I did contribute some research. My normal beat is Pacific Rim business stuff, so I’m interested in the business activities of the Yakuza and have contacts with law enforcement who share that interest.”

“Matsuda was a member of the Yakuza?”

“Actually, I don’t know. He was certainly connected with Yakuza companies that are associated with the Sekiguchi-Gummi crime family, but he didn’t appear to be an actual member of the Sekiguchi-Gummi. Maybe his background made him a bit of an outcast. In any case, he seemed to operate as a ‘fixer,’ someone who acts as a go-between on deals, instead of an actual member of the Yakuza.”

“I’m a little confused. I thought the Yakuza was Japanese organized crime. He was acting as some kind of business agent for them?”

“The Yakuza is involved in legitimate businesses like pachinko parlors and bars. Like U.S. organized crime, they also get involved in show business. They also have clearly illegal enterprises, too, like drugs or gun smuggling. It’s really complicated. A big Yakuza family like the Sekiguchi-Gummi will have company picnics and operate more-or-less openly. It’s sort of like some sections of New York where everybody knows who the wise guys are and who the Don is. Knowing those things and proving criminal activity are two different things.”

“Do you think Matsuda was killed by the Yakuza?”

Evan paused for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “What makes me think he might have been is the fact that he was apparently killed by a sword. A sword is a Yakuza weapon.”

“How do you mean?”

“Japan has strict gun control laws. Guns are very difficult to get. They’re becoming more common now, but until recently crimes involving guns were very rare, so the Yakuza would use swords and knives for hits. They cut up that movie director, Jizo Itami, because they didn’t like a movie he made about them. I’ve even seen TV news videotape of a Yakuza hit man crawling into the window of a house where an informer was hiding. He took a sword in with him and murdered the informer. Then he bragged on camera afterward, holding the bloody sword.”

“Was he crazy?”

“No. Just proud of his work and not too concerned about his personal well-being. There’s no death penalty in Japan, and if he had any family he knew they’d be well taken care of by his Yakuza bosses. It’s all that Japanese nonsense about loyalty to the group taken to its ultimate, perverse conclusion.”

I sat back, soaking in what Evan had told me. During the lull in the conversation, Mrs. Okada leaned forward and patted him on the arm, saying, “I’m pleased that you’re helping. Do you want some arare crackers?”