Death in Little Tokyo

14

After dropping Mariko off at her apartment I drove downtown and pulled up to the back of the Paradise Vineyard. I didn’t have the gall to park in the no parking zone in the alley like Hansen, so I parked about half a block away. I checked my watch before leaving the car. It was twenty after twelve.

I went to the stage door entrance of the theater and walked in. As before, the door was unlocked and no one challenged me as I entered the theater. From the stage loud music was being projected to the audience, but backstage it had an oddly hollow sound to it.

I saw Yoshida standing in the wings, talking to a woman wearing a flowing white blouse and a short black skirt. Incongruously, the woman was holding an electric fan in one hand.

The music ended to a scattering of applause and a few whistles. The applause continued for a few minutes and died, then a bare-breasted woman wearing a G-string came off stage. In her hand she was clutching some blue satin cloth. The woman was Martinez, but if she recognized me she didn’t give any indication of it as she passed. In fact, she gave no indication that I was alive at all. I could have been a stage prop. So much for my animal magnetism.

Slow, languid music started up from the speakers, and the woman with the fan walked onto the stage amidst applause and a few hoots from the audience.

Martinez headed backstage to where the dressing rooms were.

She seemed totally at ease and not the least bit caring that she was almost completely nude.

I walked up to Yoshida, who was leaning heavily on his cane. On stage, I could see the woman had plugged the fan into a socket inset in the floor of the stage. Now she was standing before the fan, letting the breeze catch her hair, whipping it back, as she stroked her neck and slowly moved her hips in rhythm with the music.

“Mr. Yoshida?”

Yoshida glanced at me. “The cop,” he said. “Angela Sanchez never showed up. I already told your buddy that when he called earlier tonight.”

“I’m not a policeman,” I corrected.

Yoshida absorbed that information and said, “What do you want?”

“I’d like to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“I think you can help me.”

“Help you with what?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Look,” I said. “Is there any place we can talk, where it’s not so loud?”

The booming music from speakers echoed over our heads, radiating out to the audience. I looked past the stage at the audience. There were twenty-five or thirty patrons in the theater, all men. Most seemed to be older, although there did seem to be a couple of younger ones in the audience. Several were surprisingly well-groomed.

On stage, the girl had untucked the blouse from her skirt and was letting it billow in the breeze of the electric fan.

“She’s the last act,” Yoshida said. “If you’ll buy me a beer, I’ll talk to you. But after the act I have to come back and lock up.”

“Okay,” I readily agreed.

Yoshida nodded and started hobbling off toward the stage door, leaning heavily on the silver-handled cane. By the stage door, Yoshida stopped and pulled on a black overcoat hanging on a hook by the door. He knotted the coat’s belt around his waist. With the cane, he actually looked quite dapper.

“Okay,” Yoshida said. “There’s a bar just down the block. We can talk there.”

I followed Yoshida out through the stage door and down the alley to the bar. The bar had a well-worn feeling to it, and it might have passed as a neighborhood joint if it wasn’t for the hookers and drug dealers standing in front of it. Of course, in downtown L.A. maybe that’s what constituted a neighborhood bar.

At the bar Yoshida eased himself into a booth. He placed the cane across his knees and studied me with interest. “You’re Japanese, too,” he said, as if it was some kind of discovery.

“Yes. My name’s Tanaka, Ken Tanaka.”

“I remember. What is it you want me to help you with?”

“I’m interested in finding Angela Sanchez. I think she’s probably the woman who was with the guy killed at the Golden Cherry Blossom Hotel.”

Yoshida shrugged. “I don’t know where she is.”

“You must have some idea,” I said. “You have her home address.”

“I already gave that to the police.”

“I’m not the police. And I got the impression that the dancers trusted and respected you.”

I could see that Yoshida was pleased by this, in spite of himself.

“I help them with their routines, their dancing skills, and polish up their acts,” Yoshida said.

It had never occurred to me that strippers needed dancing skills or a polished act, and the expression on my face must have mirrored my thoughts.

“I know it’s a dirty job, but it’s all I can get,” Yoshida said. “In Japan my ancestors were farmers. They made a living pushing dirt and hauling around human crap to fertilize it. That wasn’t a pleasant job, either, but they seemed to do it with dignity and some measure of pride. I’ve got a job where I push around the dirt of humanity, too, and I still try to do it with some measure of pride and dignity. Did you ever go to a topless bar? The kind where they have dancers?”

“Once, when I was in the army,” I said. “I don’t like being exploited, and I figured that the whole game was exploitation of one sort or another, so I never went back.”

“Did you see the dancers there?”

I nodded.

“What did you think?”

“Some were pretty, most were sad.”

Yoshida snorted in exasperation. “No, I mean what did you think of the dancing?”

“It was just dancing. I remember the music was too loud and hurt your ears, but that’s about it.”

“That’s what I mean,” Yoshida said, “nothing there was memorable. Some naked amateur gets up wiggles her rear. That’s supposed to be exciting? It’s supposed to be sensuous? Unless you’ve got the mind of a smutty fourteen-year-old, it’s not even interesting. Now, with my girls down at the Paradise Vineyard, it’s different. There’s always a reason for them to do what they’re doing. Let’s say it’s hot. A girl comes on stage with an electric fan. She’s dressed in a flowing blouse and a skirt. She puts the fan on the floor and stands in front of it. The skirt is whipped up, showing her legs. She uses her hands to cup the breeze and divert it to her face.

“Already you’re kind of interested, intrigued to see what’s going to go on next. The skirt whipping up reminds you of Marilyn Monroe standing on that grating in The Seven Year Itch, and the flash of skin teases you about what’s to come. The music starts to play softly, and because it’s so hot, the girl starts to remove her blouse, swaying gently to the music. As she removes each garment, the breeze from the fan catches the cloth, alternately hiding and exposing the girl’s body to the audience. She drops each garment to the ground, and the whole audience is mesmerized, waiting to see what she’s going to do next.” Yoshida sat back and slowly twirled his glass of beer between his fingers.

“That’s the kind of thing I do,” he said. “I provide the brain power to make the bodies on stage interesting. It’s not doing a big-time musical, but it is making use of some of my talents in a back water of show business.”

“Have you ever tried getting work elsewhere?” I asked.

“A couple of times. It’s hard for a crippled choreographer to get work. And I had another problem. You see this face?” Yoshida pointed to himself. “An Asian face is what you find on most of the people in the world. Here, it’s a handicap. Even before my accident, it was a problem getting work as a dancer. When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be the next Fred Astaire. I had the moves, I had the style, I had the dance steps, and I even had a better singing voice than Astaire. . ‘I’m putting on my top hat. .’”

Yoshida sang the first line of the Astaire classic in a surprisingly clear tenor voice.

“I used to bug my mother to spend the money she earned selling produce from her vegetable garden on dancing lessons for me. I used to work on learning dance steps until I was close to collapse. Then I’d catch my breath, get up, and start working some more. I was a fanatic at it because I thought I’d become the greatest song and dance man in the world. It took some hard knocks in life to convince me otherwise.”

As I sat nursing my beer, I was struck by how dapper Yoshida was. It wasn’t so much that his clothes were fastidious or that his hair was meticulously in place, but how he sat and moved. He had stage presence. At one time it was obvious that he had been trained to cultivate that presence and to project it to the audience, even if it was only an audience of one.

“It’s a shame you weren’t allowed a chance to try your skills as a singer and dancer,” I said.

Yoshida looked at me and tilted his head slightly, acknowledging the sympathy. “I say the fact that I was Japanese was a barrier because it was,” Yoshida said. “But actually what killed all hope was this.” He slapped his left leg.

“What happened?” I asked, and almost immediately regretted asking, because I was sure that Yoshida had been asked that question a million times before.

“World War Two.”

“Oh?”

“That’s right, but perhaps not what you think. Like most of the rest of the West Coast Japanese, I was sent to a camp. Man, it was cold there.”

I remembered what Mrs. Okada said and asked, “Were you at Heart Mountain?”

Yoshida looked startled and said “No. Manzanar. Why do you ask?”

“I just talked to someone who was at Heart Mountain today and she remarked about how cold it was there. That’s why I thought you might have been at Heart Mountain. Wasn’t Manzanar in the desert?”

“Yes, but during the winter it could get awfully cold, too. That’s why when the opportunity came for me to volunteer to go into the army, leaving the camp didn’t sound so bad.”

“Were you in the 442nd?” I asked, referring to the famous all-Japanese combat team, the most decorated in the U.S. Army.

“I was supposed to be in the 442nd, but I never made it. I never made it past two weeks in boot camp. They were supposed to be teaching us to throw hand grenades, but some of our guys really weren’t very coordinated. We were throwing them from these bunkers, really just a pile of sandbags in a U-shape. One of the guys pulled the pin on a grenade and threw it, but it didn’t go very far. It just sort of hit the ground and sat there. We were all ducked down behind, but nothing happened, so we decided the grenade was a dud.

“The guy who was training us, a staff sergeant, really wasn’t very smart. He was a big Southern boy and I figured he was given us bunch of Japanese to train as some kind of punishment. I don’t think he was malicious, but like I said, I don’t think he was very smart. Instead of evacuating all of us straight back from behind the bunker, after about ten minutes he told us to go over to the next bunker.

“I had just left the safety of the sandbags when the grenade went off. The guy who tossed it barely tossed it out onto the range. It was a pathetic throw really. It was more dangerous to us than it would have been to any enemy.

“Anyway, it went off and I caught a bunch of shrapnel in my leg and hip. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but it cut a bunch of tendons instead of just embedding itself in the fleshy part of the leg.

“If the guy who threw the grenade had just been a little bit more coordinated, it wouldn’t have been close enough to do me any damage. Or if the sergeant in charge of our group had shown a little bit more patience, or had been a little bit smarter in the way he evacuated us, I wouldn’t have been hit, either. In fact, I’ve often thought that just a few seconds delay in leaving the shelter of the sandbags would have saved me.”

He smiled and said, “Well, it can’t be helped. That’s what killed my dancing and my military career. I never got overseas. I never got to try professional dancing, although I think now maybe that would have been butting my head against a wall. Being a Japanese song and dance man right after World War Two wouldn’t have been easy.”

“We sort of have something in common. I was in Vietnam only three weeks when I got a back injury. Did they send you back to the camp after you recovered?”

“Oh, yes. Manzanar was my home for the duration.”

“Look, Mr. Yoshida, maybe you can help me find Angela.”

“What’s your interest in her?”

“She can help me establish the time when I visited Matsuda.”

“Are you a suspect?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think so,” I said. “At least not yet. But I did see Matsuda that night and the only one who can really establish when I saw him is Angela Sanchez. I’ve developed a real interest in this case for other reasons, and I want to speak to her.”

Yoshida looked at me for a few long moments. I could see the aloofness, which had started to flee while Yoshida told his story of the hand grenade, returning. “I can give you her home address and telephone number when we get back to the theater, but I really can’t do much else.”

After getting the information I drove back to my apartment in Silver Lake. I was surprised to see Mariko curled up on my couch with a blanket pulled over her. She knew where I hid my extra key, and she had driven over from her own apartment and let herself in. I walked over to the edge of the couch, put my hand on her shoulder, and leaned forward and kissed her.

“How were the strippers?” she said. Her eyes were closed, but her voice was wide awake.

“I told you I went there for business,” I protested.

“Monkey business,” she said, her eyes popping open. Her face was serious, but I could see a playful gleam in her eyes.

“Well, I really went there to talk to the stage manager and choreographer, a guy called Yoshida.”

“Aha. And you didn’t see any naked girls?”

“Well, one,” I admitted, “but only because she strutted past me going offstage.”

“And I suppose you modestly closed your eyes when she did so?”

“Well, it was really hard to close them. They were bulging out.”

Mariko twisted around and playfully started to punch me. I grabbed her arms and soon we were involved in an impromptu wrestling match. Within minutes the wrestling match turned into something quite different.

Mariko fell asleep after our lovemaking, but as I got under the covers and snuggled up to her, I kept thinking about what Yoshida had told me. I also thought about Mariko and her struggles as an actress and an alcoholic. I thought about her standing up in front of a group of strangers to share part of her story in an effort to make it easier for others who were taking the same journey she was. I buried my face into the fragrance of Mariko’s hair and felt very protective toward her.