Death in Little Tokyo

13

Hansen pulled around the side of the Paradise Vineyard Theater and stopped his car in an alleyway in a no parking zone. He got out of the car and I followed him up to a metal-clad door with a faded NO ADMITTANCE stenciled on it.

Without bothering to knock, Hansen turned the door handle and entered the theater with me in tow. I’m not used to being backstage in theaters, and I was surprised at how tall the ceiling was. It went up into a seemingly endless darkness, and high in the rafters I could see catwalks, backdrops, and a spider’s skein of ropes. The air in the theater had a musty, stale odor that left a metallic taste in my mouth.

Near the door a laconic, fat stagehand was sitting on a chair and smoking a cigarette. The stagehand wore a short, blue T-shirt that didn’t hide the rolling flesh of his belly. Between the bottom of the T-shirt and the top of his blue jeans was a round tube of pale flesh that sprouted curly brown hairs. On the front of the T-shirt was the message “Stud for Hire” in white letters. I believe in the power of advertising, but I don’t believe this guy got any business from the shirt.

“Where’s the manager?” Hansen demanded.

The stagehand watched us with his small dark eyes, then he pointed to the back edges of the stage with a hand that held the half-smoked cigarette.

Hansen marched off in the general direction indicated, and I scurried after him. Behind the backdrop of the curtain was an open area that seemed set aside for practice.

Sitting on a chair in this practice area was a small Asian man. His hair was a streaked salt and pepper, combed straight back. Around his neck was a pale blue silk scarf that tucked into a finely cut dark blue shirt. He wore dark blue slacks and white shoes. Resting across his lap was a black cane with a silver handle, and draped over the back of the seat was a large black overcoat, two very unusual accessories for Los Angeles.

The man was talking softly to a woman dressed in gray leotards and leg warmers. He was giving direction in a calm, authoritative voice, with the woman listening intently and nodding her head on occasion. The woman appeared to be in her late twenties, and I thought that she was surprisingly attractive.

“Yoshida?” Hansen called as he walked across the practice area toward the man in the chair.

He turned his head and fixed Hansen with his gaze. Dark, bushy eyebrows capped the man’s intense eyes. By his face, I judged the man to be in his sixties, but he could have been older. He was in good shape, so it was hard to tell. Deep lines etched his face, and his jaw tightened as he recognized Hansen. I knew the feeling.

He turned and said a few words to the woman, who gave Hansen and me a sour look as she walked out of the practice area and back toward the darkness of the theater.

“Officer Hansen,” the man said. His tone was flat and emotionless.

“Mr. Yoshida, this is Mr. Tanaka.” Hansen pointed at me. “As I told you on the phone, I brought him along to see if he can identify the lady who was with Matsuda.”

Yoshida’s eyes slipped past Hansen and locked onto me. I felt myself dissected by the two hard orbs. My clothes, my looks, and perhaps even my history were being absorbed, categorized, and filed by the hard eyes of Yoshida. He gave no word of greeting; instead he nodded. “I’ll go and get the girls,” he said.

As he got out of the chair, I noted that he leaned heavily on the cane, and I watched with fascination as the small Japanese limped to the back of the theater using the cane to carry part of his weight on every step.

“Who’s Yoshida?” I asked.

“He’s the stage manager at the theater,” Hansen responded. “He sort of runs things backstage, and he also coaches the girls in their routines. The guys at the station tell me he’s been doing it for years.”

Yoshida hobbled back into the practice area with two women following him. One was a Latina with a tall pile of red hair. The crimson of her lipstick made a large slash across her mouth which was picked up by the red dress she was wearing. The second woman had pale white skin and short red hair. She had a short, white terry cloth robe on and her hands were thrust in the robe’s pockets.

“This is Miss Rosie Martinez,” Yoshida said, “who dances under the name of the Mexican Firecracker, and this is Mrs. Valerie Welsh, who is known as Cutie Valentine.” He looked at me, as if expecting me to acknowledge acquaintance with one of the two women.

“Neither one of these ladies is the one I saw with Matsuda,” I said.

“Where’s the third woman?” Hansen asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“When I was here before there were three redheads. Now there are only two. What happened to the third one?”

“Ah. That’s Miss Sanchez. I’m afraid she left and hasn’t returned yet. She said she was ill.”

“When will she be back?”

Yoshida shrugged. “Who knows. The girls can sometimes be very unreliable. She didn’t call to tell me if she’ll be here for tonight’s show. I have no idea when she’ll be in.”

“I took her phone number and address,” Hansen said. “Can I borrow your phone? I’d like to call her and see if she’s home.”

Without answering, Yoshida hobbled off the stage and Hansen trailed after him. The two women started to leave.

“Excuse me a second,” I said.

The women looked at me quizzically.

“Could you answer a few questions for me?”

A look of suspicion flashed across Welsh’s face, and Martinez crossed her arms and shifted her weight onto one foot. Talk about body language.

“I’m not a cop,” I added. “So you really don’t have to answer any questions if you don’t want. I’m just a guy that’s caught up in this, and maybe the other lady is, too. Her name’s Sanchez?”

“Angela. Angela Sanchez,” Martinez said.

I focused my attention on her. “Is she really sick?”

She shrugged.

“I’m just asking because she might be in something that she really doesn’t want to be involved in. I know that’s my feeling. I saw the murdered guy on business the other night and now I’m traipsing around with this cop. I’d much rather be doing something else. Like I said, maybe Angela’s involved the same way.”

Martinez shrugged again.

“Can I ask you if she was with the Japanese gentleman who was murdered?”

Martinez looked at me, sizing me up. “You can ask,” she said.

“I’m leaving,” the pale girl announced, and turned around and walked out of the area. As Martinez also turned to leave, I touched her on the arm and said, “Please don’t go. I really need your help.”

“Ask Fred. I don’t know nothing,” the girl said.

“Who’s Fred?”

“Yoshida.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

Hansen came back with Yoshida a few minutes later.

“Nobody’s home,” Hansen remarked.

“Maybe she’s on the way,” Yoshida said. “She tends to keep her own hours, anyway. I have no idea when she’ll be back”

“Yeah. Right.”

I suppressed a giggle. It occurred to me that Detective Hansen sometimes talked like Jack Webb on the old Dragnet TV series. Maybe there was a course on talking like that at the L.A. Police Academy.

Hansen took me back to the office, and I went to pick Mariko up so we could have a quick dinner and drive out to the valley for her AA meeting.

I’ve never seen Mariko drunk. And sometimes I don’t understand why she has to go to AA meetings three or four times a week. Based on Mariko’s urging, I had educated myself a little bit about alcoholism. Contrary to what I used to think, most alcoholics aren’t sleeping in gutters. Since alcoholism is a progressive disease, they might end up that way, but for the most part alcoholics are able to hold down jobs and can even have successful careers. Mariko was able to keep a good job with a bank, but she couldn’t control her drinking, especially on weekends. For a good part of her life, she didn’t want to control her drinking.

Now a good part of her life was dominated by her desire to not drink. And tonight I was sitting on a folding chair in an effort to support her.

“This is hard,” she said. Mariko stood in front of fifty people at the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the San Fernando Valley. It was her first time as a speaker and it was at a meeting that wasn’t one of the ones she normally attended. Since it was an open meeting that anyone could attend, she asked me to go along for support. Even though we had both been puzzled by the stack of invoices in the package, and equally surprised at the disappearance of Angela Sanchez, the details of life continue. Mariko’s first time speaking at an AA meeting was important, and I wanted to be there.

“My name is Mariko and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Mariko,” the crowd said in unison, in AA fashion.

“This is my first time as a speaker and I thought it might be easier at a meeting I don’t normally attend. But as I look out at you I’m frankly glad to see at least one face I know.” She smiled at me.

“What’s strange about me being intimidated by a new group of people is that I want to be an actress and I’ve never in my life had stage fright. Yet, as I stand here, I have all the classic symptoms. I have sweating palms, a churning stomach, vertigo, and the fear that I’ll just clam up and not produce more than a croak, instead of words. I’ve been told that’s what stage fright is. Of course, maybe I just ate a bad burrito for dinner.”

The crowd laughed, which seemed to give Mariko confidence.

“When I’m on stage I’m usually playing someone else. It’s easy to play someone else, but I think everyone in AA has learned that it’s hard to play yourself. Scratch that, it’s hard to be yourself.

“I think that’s one reason I started drinking. When I was drunk it was easy to be someone else and not face my own feelings and problems. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and my father was a professor at Ohio State. If you look at my face, it’s easy to see that I don’t fit the mold of what you’d call your typical midwestern farm girl. I’m Japanese and for awhile I thought I was the only Japanese in Ohio. I wish I had a dollar for everyone who told me how good my English was when I was growing up, but I don’t speak Japanese, or any other foreign language, for that matter. It was just hard to be so different.

“That raised a lot of issues that I’m still working out, but I found that in the small world of a college town it was easier to be accepted if you drank like a fish. I guess it’s the same thing these days, and many of you in this room probably had your drinking problem start in high school or college, when drinking was cool and something everyone did.

“Maybe it was something everyone did, but when I did it I was different. I was an alcoholic, and no matter how many times I convinced myself that I could stop anytime I wanted, I found that I couldn’t, at least not without the help of AA.

“I got married right out of college. Naturally, to another alcoholic. At the time I didn’t know he was an alcoholic. I just thought he was a fun guy.

“Did I mention that my husband was a Caucasian? No? Well, most Japanese-Americans actually marry outside their race, so either we’re totally assimilated and not racially sensitive, or there’s something about other races that attracts us. Either way, in a few generations there may no longer be any pure Japanese-Americans, except for the new Japanese who come from Japan as immigrants.

“Well, I realize now that the fact that my ex-husband was Caucasian had a lot to do with me marrying him. The only Japanese boys I knew were nerdy foreign exchange students, so my image of Japanese men wasn’t good. I was so insecure in my own racial and personal identity that having a Caucasian husband was important to me. I just didn’t realize it at the time. I know I say that a lot, but it’s funny how much you do start to realize when you join AA and follow the program. It’s like you spend a good part of your life in a fog, and the discipline of the program forces you to penetrate the fog in an effort to see clearly.

“My husband was a lot of fun when I first met him. He got drunk. I got drunk. We got drunk together. When I was still at the stage where getting drunk was fun, it seemed like a great idea to marry Kurt. When I got to the point where the alcohol was starting to kill me, the getting drunk together ceased to be fun. When I tried to stop, it just added to the misery. He got defensive and abusive, and I got a little crazy. He started turning mean when he was drunk. I was going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to work on my drinking and also going to Al-Anon meetings because my spouse was a drunk. In the vernacular of AA that made me a double winner. Kurt hadn’t hit bottom, and I had. I knew that if I didn’t get my drinking under control I’d never get a chance to try acting. I had to get out.

“Now I’ve been sober for almost four years. When I was a drunk I had a job I hated, but which paid well. Now I’m a starving actress. When I was a drunk I had a marriage that I found meaningless, but it provided a comfortable and mindless kind of security. Now I have an unemployed boyfriend who I sometimes think is crazy, even though I’m madly in love with him. When I was a drunk it was important to me to have a husband who was a Caucasian. Now it’s almost an accident that my boyfriend is Japanese, and I frankly wouldn’t care what race he was. When I was a drunk I had a lot of unresolved issues about being Japanese in a white society, and although I at least now realize I have all these issues, they’re still not resolved. I mention all this to illustrate that when you get sober, your life doesn’t immediately become peaches and cream. And if it does, you may not like peaches and cream.”

She checked her watch. “Well, once I got started I ran way over the five minutes they wanted me to speak. Since this was my first time up here, they were trying to be easy on me and not give me too much time to fill. I guess they didn’t really know me. There’s a lot more I could say about myself and what AA has done for me, but I guess the one thing I want to leave you with is the message that a sober life is not always a life without struggle and problems, but it is a life worth living because you will find the courage to be yourself, instead of an alcohol-induced stranger. Thanks.”

Mariko walked through the audience and sat next to me. The crowd gave her enthusiastic applause, and I was surprised to feel that she was actually trembling when she sat down. I gave her a hug, and we settled in to listen to the next speaker.

On the way to my apartment after the meeting, we stopped and bought some ice cream as a kind of celebration. We ate banana splits and I told her about the meeting at the Paradise Vineyard that afternoon. Then I said, “Do you know you’re one of my heroes?”

Mariko seemed flustered. “What do you mean?”

“I admire the way you’ve reinvented yourself.”

“I’m sick. I have no choice if I want to live.”

“You have choices. You could stay the way you were. Most people do. Changing yourself is the hardest thing in the world. It takes courage. I wish I had the same courage.”

“You’ve never had a drinking problem.”

“Yeah, but I have life problems. Or maybe midlife problems. I haven’t been very active looking for a new programming job. I used to enjoy the work, but now I feel like I’m drifting. I wish I had the courage to just strike out and do what I want to.”

Mariko sighed. “I’m torn between encouraging you to get a programming job that will pay you a salary that will allow you to entertain me in a style better than Baskin-Robbins, or encouraging you to follow your dream. What is it you want to do?”

“That’s just the problem. I don’t know. That’s why I feel like I’m past forty and drifting.”

She put her hand on mine. It was slightly sticky from the ice cream. She smiled. “Well, we can drift along together. Remember, one day at a time.”

I checked my watch and said, “We can’t drift along too much tonight. We better finish up. I want to do some more work.”

“What?” Mariko said. “It’s almost midnight. What kind of work could you possibly be doing this late?”

“I’m going to go back and glean the field, to see if there’s something I’ve missed. I’m returning to the Paradise Vineyard and see if I can find the girl who was in Matsuda’s room.”

“Why do you want to see a bunch of floozies?”

“I don’t want to see the strippers,” I answered. “I want to see the stage manager.”