Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 6. Whole No. 856, December 2012

Old Man Gloom by David Edgerley Gates

David Edgerley Gates belongs to a rare breed: He’s a short-fiction specialist, and has received two nominations for the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award and one for the Shamus Award for his stories. His tales are often of novella length and always involve a vivid depiction of his chosen setting, which is usually the American Southwest. This month he brings back the character featured in his last story for EQMM (see “The Lion of the Chama” 12/03), retired lawman Benny Salvador.

That year Aurora was one of the little Glooms who gather at Zozobra’s skirts. She was thirteen. Her sister Angelina, at fourteen, liked to pretend she was too grown up for such things, but she fussed over Aurora’s costume all the same, and when Fiesta came, she was as excited as any other child, anticipating the fireworks blooming in the night sky.

They got there early, Benny and Teresa and the girls. Aurora had been to rehearsals, but she wanted to be sure she was well ahead of time.

Teresa let her skitter away.

“She’ll be fine,” Benny said. He knew his wife was afraid she’d lose Aurora in the crowd. He had to admit that he was too, but God had given them wings to fly. You had to put your fears aside. You bent the bow, children were arrows. Anything that might have happened to them before was history.

“What if she has to pee?” Angelina asked him.

“You’re asking me?” He had to take a leak himself.

It was the weekend after Labor Day. The war had been over for two years. Benny Salvador was still sheriff in Rio Arriba. Connie Navarro, the girls’ mom, was working down south in Albuquerque, and visited every weekend. Their father, Victor, was up in Hanford. He tried to get back every few weeks, but to all intents and purposes, Benny and Teresa were their parents.

Teresa had delivered two babies, stillborn, so the Navarro girls were her lifeline. His, as well. You played the cards you’d been dealt, in life or at the table, and occasionally you drew a good hand. Benny felt the deck had been kind to him, so far.

Zozobra was a marionette, thirty feet tall. He had a papier-mâché head and sticks for arms, draped in a tall white gown. People wrote their grievances on little slips of paper, and they were stuffed inside the puppet, so when the puppet burned, your grief went up in smoke, it was hoped. A new tradition, not as old as Fiesta itself, which dated back to De Vargas and the eighteenth century. Zozobra had been invented by a Santa Fe artist named Will Shuster, based on a Yaqui tribal ritual, an effigy of Judas, paraded through the village and then destroyed, with his sins. It had a primitive appeal, cathartic and celebratory, and Benny found it somehow reassuring. He’d long since lost his faith in the Catholic church, and avoided Mass. Aurora’s First Communion was next on the immediate horizon. Benny knew he’d be bullied into submitting to it by the women in his life.

At dusk, bonfires were lit around the stage. The little Glooms danced at Zozobra’s feet. The monster puppet dipped his head and groaned, flailing his arms. Then it was full dark, and Old Man Gloom himself fell to the torch.

Zozobra burned, his groans louder and more anguished. The pyrotechnics inside him began to explode, so not only did he burn, he sent off pinwheels of sparks. Then the skyrockets and Roman candles lit up. The audience laughed and applauded.

Off to his left, Benny heard three sharp reports. Even with the fireworks onstage, he knew gunshots. He told Teresa to stay with the girls and worked his way through the press.

Santa Fe PD had a presence, for security and crowd control, and they’d responded first. Benny was glad to see Johnny Lee Montoya there too. Johnny was a captain with the state police, and he and Benny went back.

The cops had established a perimeter. Benny and Johnny Lee showed them their shields, and were allowed in.

“What happened?” Benny asked the senior sergeant.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” the Santa Fe cop said. He knew Benny Salvador by reputation.

“You have a shooter?” Johnny Lee asked.

“No, sir.” The sergeant knew Montoya for another hard-ass.

He’d let the chain of command bump heads.

“What are you doing here?” Benny asked Johnny Lee.

“Same as you, celebrating Fiesta with my kids,” Johnny told him. He smiled. “Aurora was terrific.”

Benny nodded. He looked at the sergeant. “Anything?”

“We’re trying to canvass witnesses, and we’re looking for a throw-down,” the sergeant said. He meant a discarded weapon.

“It’s not our jurisdiction, Benny,” Johnny Lee said to him.

“Anywhere my girls are at risk is my jurisdiction,” Benny said. He looked at the sergeant again. “All due respect, but I could use a word with the investigating officers.”

“No problem, Sheriff,” the sergeant said, only too happy to hand this one off. “Homicide dicks are on the way.”

“ID on the victim?” Benny asked.

The sergeant shook his head.

Benny knelt down. The dead man was an elderly Japanese.

Three in the chest, DOA when he hit the ground. He was wearing an old suit, much repaired. His hat was a few feet away. Benny stood up. “Your crime scene,” he said to the Santa Fe cop.

As if he were doing the guy a favor. No such luck.

Dean Norris didn’t like Benny Salvador stepping on his toes. And he didn’t much care for the state police presence either. Johnny Lee Montoya had pull with the governor’s office. But it was a Santa Fe PD homicide case, and Benny was Rio Arriba, out in the sticks. He could show an interest, but he had no real reason to be involved. Neither did Montoya. Lieutenant Norris made every effort to make this clear, short of telling them they could butt out.

They were in the detective bullpen on the second floor of police headquarters, in the municipal building. It was Saturday morning, the day after the burning of Zozobra.

“Not a lot I can tell you,” the homicide commander said. “We don’t have much more than we had last night. It was a big crowd, it was dark, everybody was watching the show, and none of them saw the shooting.”

“Anything we can do to help,” Montoya said.

“I appreciate that,” Norris told him.

“You identify the victim?” Benny asked.

“His family did. Takeshi Minamoto, age seventy-three. Guy was a peach farmer, on the Embudo, your neck of the woods.”

“What was he doing down in Santa Fe?”

Norris shrugged. “Looking for the party,” he said.

“Was he by himself?” Benny asked.

“Far as we know. His daughter tells us he got in his truck yesterday afternoon and drove off.”

“Okay,” Benny said. “Keep us posted. We turn anything up, we’ll let you know.”

“Good enough,” the homicide dick said. He didn’t want to give Rio Arriba or the states a marker, but it had gone unspoken that a murder is solved in the first seventy-two hours, or the trail goes cold. If the sheriff came up with anything workable, it was all to the good.

Benny and Johnny Lee went down to the street.

“Something on your mind?” Johnny Lee asked.

“The cop upstairs thinks we’re looking for credit on his arrest, if he makes one,” Benny said. “You looking for points?”

“I’m not as hungry as I used to be.”

“I don’t fault him for ambition,” Benny said. “If the guy wants to get ahead, more power to him.”

“You just don’t want it to get in the way.”

Benny nodded. “We’ll take what comes,” he said.

“What else?” Johnny Lee asked him.

“Japanese are generally close, in terms of family.”

“Just like Norteños,” Johnny Lee said.

“The old guy gets in his truck and drives away, and doesn’t tell his daughter anything. That’s uncharacteristic.”

“Unless he’s keeping something from her.”

“What’s the big thing about Fiesta?” “Tradition,” Johnny Lee said.

Benny shook his head. “Crowds,” he said.

“I see where you’re going. If the old man wants to meet somebody, and he wants to keep it a secret, he comes to Fiesta. Who notices, all the people in the streets?”

“Question is, who did he want to meet with?” Benny asked.

Twenty miles upriver from Española there was a cluster of small towns, Velarde, Dixon, Peñasco, along the banks of the Embudo, a tributary of the Rio Grande. It was orchard country, and an acequia system kept the farmland well watered. Peaches, apples, pears, and apricots, grapevines and lavender, piñon and pecans.

First cultivated by the Pueblo, then settled by the Spanish; the Minamoto family were relative latecomers.

Three generations, Emily Minamoto told Benny. They were walking under the peach trees, heavy with fruit, ready for their second harvest of the season.

Benny was only a kitchen gardener, himself, but he could appreciate Emily’s connection to the earth. There was something gravitational about it.

“Did your father emigrate from Japan?” Benny asked.

“No, he was born here.”

Nisei, she meant, second-generation. Emily herself was Sansei, or third-generation, pretty much assimilated, which her English name suggested.

“It didn’t keep us out of internment,” she said.

Benny had known this was coming from the beginning. Out of courtesy, he’d waited for her to bring it up.

“I was in eighth grade,” Emily said.

Fourteen, he thought. Angelina’s age.

“They let us bring one suitcase apiece.”

American citizens, behind barbed wire, armed guards on the perimeter.

“My father still practiced Shinto,” she said, smiling. “I was educated by the nuns, so I was a Catholic.”

The camp had been located at the western edge of the Santa Fe city limits, on a hillside overlooking what later became a national cemetery, where many veterans of the Pacific war were buried, some of them survivors of the Bataan Death March. Benny was aware of the ironies.

“It wasn’t easy, but it was livable,” Emily said. “My brother told me they got to play softball, listen to the World Series on the radio. Then he enlisted in the Nisei brigade. He was killed at Monte Cassino.”

It was the most decorated unit in U.S. military history.

They’d been awarded more Purple Hearts than any other outfit in Europe. The 442nd had fought in Italy, and into France. They had something to prove, so the conventional wisdom went.

“You know what’s hard,” she said. “It’s hard to come back and pick up the pieces. My father was Japanese, culturally, but I thought of myself as an American.”

“I can’t repair the damage,” Benny said.

“I’m not asking you to,” Emily said. “I’m wondering why we went through all of this, and then my father gets shot.”

“I’m wondering the same thing,” Benny said.

“Is it racial bias?”

“Possibly.”

“In other words, you don’t know.”

“What was he doing in Santa Fe?” Benny asked.

“He didn’t tell me,” Emily said.

“That makes two of us,” Benny said.

Benny hadn’t gone to war, but the war had come to New Mexico.

The secret city up at Los Alamos, the Japanese relocation camps, the Navajo Code Talkers. Much of it under wraps, still.

“We’re boxing with shadows,” he said to Johnny Lee Montoya.

“The War Department won’t give anything up.”

“When did they ever? I thought you had an in with Groves.” He meant the guy who’d spearheaded the Manhattan Project.

“Groves is a lieutenant general these days. He walks with the gods. Mere mortals are beneath his notice.”

“So we’ve got no chips we can call in?”

Benny mulled it over. “What about the FBI?” he asked.

Johnny Lee had had a prickly relationship with the Bureau during the war. They were security-conscious, jealous of their prerogatives, and dismissive of local “hick” law.

“I was thinking maybe Gideon Horace,” Benny said.

Johnny Lee sucked on his teeth. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said. “But worth a shot, anyway.” Horace had been with the Albuquerque office. Not the senior man, the AIC, but not the lowest-ranking guy either. Montoya thought he was even halfway human, an exception to the culture of mental constipation that generally characterized the Feds. “I heard he’s been reassigned to the Big Rez, up in Farmington.”

“Give him a call?”

“Sure,” Johnny Lee said. “What are you going to be doing?”

“I’ll try the back door,” Benny said.

The so-called relocation camps had been run by INS, with staff recruited locally. Benny thought it would be easy enough to track down some guys who’d worked the guard duty at the Santa Fe camp. He went over to the VFW on Montezuma.

“Yeah, my brother Oscar, matter of fact,” Fidelio Ramirez told him. Fidelio was working the stick, and offered Benny a beer. Benny hesitated, and then said yes. Fidelio drew him a long frosty. “He was kind of, what’s the word? Chagrined, when the Army turned him down in ’forty-two. Couldn’t pass the eye exam.”

“You active duty, yourself?” Benny asked.

“National Guard, the Philippines,” Fidelio said. “You know what I’m saying?”

Benny nodded. Fidelio had survived the Death March.

“We were stationed at Clark Field. Anti-aircraft was outgunned by the Zeroes. They hit the B-17’s right on the deck. We faded into the jungle, and MacArthur, that windbag, got on a PT boat and beat it for Australia.” Fidelio shook his head. “We held out until April. Dysentery, malaria. The drizzly shits and no quinine. The worst with the watery bowels, see, it ain’t the squirts so much, it’s how it makes your skin raw, the inside of your legs. Then you try walking seventy-five miles.”

Five thousand men died because they couldn’t keep up, shot or bayoneted, disemboweled, beaten to death.

“I was at a hundred and seventy-two pounds when I enlisted. I weighed ninety pounds when I was liberated,” Fidelio said.

How much had he aged? Benny wondered. Three years as a POW translated in physical terms to ten or twelve, he’d heard. So if Fidelio were thirty, he actually looked forty. He’d given up ten years of his life in the Philippines.

“We figured we were dead meat. After we surrendered, the Japanese thought we’d dishonored ourselves. They didn’t respect us as soldiers.”

“How’d you feel about them?” Benny asked him.

“How do you think I felt? I hated their guts.”

“What about the Japanese who were interned stateside?”

“Apples and oranges,” Fidelio said. “Those people weren’t Japs, they were Americans. Not to mention that a bunch of their kids died fighting for this country.”

Benny didn’t know if everybody was as forgiving as Fidelio.

“Your brother Oscar think the same?”

Fidelio shrugged. “Ask him,” he said.

“All right,” Benny said.

“See, the news stories about Bataan didn’t start coming out until later, because of wartime censorship, but I see where you’re going with this. You want to know if there were any hard feelings. Were people in the camps mistreated?”

If their treatment wasn’t inhumane, it was still demeaning. They lost their possessions, they were separated from their families, they were herded together into tarpaper shacks. Maybe he was fishing in the wrong pond, but Benny was still fishing.

“Thing is, there were casualties after the fact too,” Fidelio told him. “Three-and-a-half years on rice and rat meat, it takes a toll. Some guys got home, they died the first year back. They never recovered. And their families see what it did to them? Yeah. somebody might hold a grudge.”

Or want to make it look that way, Benny thought.

New Mexico boys had taken a disproportionately high hit. There were a lot of names on war memorials, some commissioned by the state, others put up with private contributions in smaller towns like Truchas and Alcalde.

Oscar Ramirez lived in Truchas, between Española and Taos, but he worked at Los Alamos, the Hilltop, local people called it, or simpler still, the Labs. The place had outgrown itself twice over from its early start in ’43, when it was known as Site Y, and security had been so tight it didn’t exist on paper.

These days, instead of Quonset huts and barbed wire, it was closer to becoming an actual town, with public schools and paved roads and open access. Many areas were still, of course, highly restricted, and the military presence was significant, but Benny met Oscar in an ordinary coffee shop.

“What do you do here?” Benny asked him.

“Maintenance,” Oscar said.

Well, that covered a multitude of sins. Benny knew better than to inquire further. Even a janitor had a clearance, on the Hilltop. You mopped up secrets.

“I talked to your brother Fidelio, down in Santa Fe,” Benny said. “He bought me a beer at the VFW.”

Oscar nodded. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and a wary look.

“You were a guard at the internment camp during the war.”

Oscar nodded again, but was obviously puzzled.

“I wanted to get a handle on what it was like, the internal dynamic,” Benny said.

“The who?” Oscar asked.

“How it was, who did what, the general climate. Was there any prejudice, was there any sympathy? What was the demeanor of the Japanese? Were they resentful?”

“They played a lot of softball,” Oscar Ramirez told him.

Which is what Emily Minamoto had said. “They any good?” he asked.

“Yeah, they were real good. They could hit it over the fence. We’d go pick up the ball and toss it back to them. They only had the use of one.”

“So your relationship was friendly, more or less?”

“Why not? They were mostly teenagers, and old farts.”

“What about their families?”

“What families?” Oscar shook his head. “The camp in Santa Fe was segregated. Men only.”

“What happened to the women and kids?”

“No idea,” Oscar said.

Benny digested this. Emily hadn’t told him she’d been sent somewhere else. “Tell me about the Nisei brigade,” he said.

“Army recruiters came in. Anybody who was draft age jumped at the chance, same as I would have.”

“Bother you?”

“Bother me, why?”

“You were Four-F, poor eyesight. They fought in your place, a bunch of Japs.”

“You trying to piss me off?”

“I appreciate what happened to your brother.”

“You don’t have a clue,” Oscar said. He stood up.

“You know a guy named Takeshi Minamoto?” Benny asked.

“Tashi? Sure,” Oscar said. “He’s a fruit farmer. Me and some of the other kids, we used to help him with the peach harvest, we were fifteen, sixteen years old. Hard money, but we worked for it.”

“He was in the camp.”

“What are you getting at? They said he was an enemy alien, which is baloney. He broke his ass, dawn to dusk.”

“He got shot dead in Santa Fe the night before last.”

“What?”

“I want to find out if it’s racially motivated.”

“And you’re coming to me?”

Benny was beyond embarrassment. “Give me something, Oscar. So far, I’ve got nothing.”

“I told you, there’s nothing to get.”

“I don’t buy it,” Benny said. “If you and your brother harbor no ill will toward the Japanese, you must be the only two guys this side of Tokyo.”

“Get lost,” Oscar said, and walked away.

The MPs stopped him on his way out of town and escorted him to the provost marshal’s office.

“What’s your business here, Sheriff?” the major asked him.

“It’s not Army business,” Benny said. “All due respect.”

“With all due respect, that’s my decision,” the major said. “I’m responsible for security on this installation.”

Benny thought about whether to play it hard or easy. “Take me into custody, you feel you’ve got the authority,” he said.

“Let’s not be hasty,” another voice drawled.

The soldiers jumped to attention, and Benny turned. It was Groves, in the flesh, in uniform, all three stars.

“You’re like the clap, Benny, you’re hard to get rid of, but I’m in your debt,” the general said. “Care to tell me how I can help?”

“It’s not a security question,” Benny said.

“Even better,” Groves said.

They stepped outside, onto the porch. The afternoon was clear and hot, the sky cloudless, the air still and dry. Benny rolled a smoke. The post CQ was just across the street from Fuller Lodge and what had once been known as Bathtub Row, where the senior Manhattan Project scientists and their families, like Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, had been quartered.

“Have you thought about the consequences?” Benny asked.

“You mean bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” Groves shook his head. “It ended the war. You know what kind of casualties we would have taken if we’d had to invade the Home Islands? The Japanese would have fought to the last man, woman, and child.”

The estimate, Benny had heard, was that the U.S. would have suffered a million dead.

“You know, the object was to beat Hitler to the bomb,” the general told him. “More than a few of the men who worked here were German refugee Jews. They understood it was a real danger. But after Germany surrendered, the air went out of their tires, and some of them, Oppenheimer included, didn’t think there was a practical use for the weapon.”

“Obviously, you disagreed.”

Groves gave him a level look. “I hope you’re not going all gooey on me, Sheriff,” he said.

“No, the Japanese had to be beaten, one way or another.”

“What are you doing here, Benny?” Groves asked.

Benny told him about the murder victim, Tashi Minamoto, and the Ramirez brothers.

“You think it goes back to the Jap relocation camps?”

“My guess. Bad blood.”

“They got a raw deal.”

“Why weren’t Germans and Italians interned?”

“You’re being naive,” Groves said.

“Okay, it was about the Yellow Peril,” Benny said.

“There was a war on,” Groves reminded him.

“The war’s over.”

“Maybe not for everybody,” Groves said.

“That’s my point,” Benny said.

“I understood you the first time.”

“What are you doing here, General?” Benny asked.

“Taking a victory lap,” Groves said.

“You deserve it.”

“I do,” Groves said, with a wry smile. “But the plain fact is, I’ve made a lot of enemies. I’m resigning from the Army.”

“A man can be judged on the strength of his enemies,” Benny said. “You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Didn’t say I did.”

Benny stubbed out his cigarette, and they shook hands.

“Good luck, Sheriff,” Groves said.

“Good luck to you, General.”

“I’ve been twice blessed,” Groves said. “I got to build the Pentagon, and I built Los Alamos. You don’t get lucky three times. It tempts the gods.”

Groves and Oppenheimer had tempted the gods, and beaten them. “What was it Oppenheimer said, after the first successful bomb test?” Benny asked, although he already knew the answer.

Oppenheimer had said, I am become death.

“You should be wary of too much philosophy,” Groves said.

“Only if it conceals a falsehood,” Benny said.

But what was the lie? Nobody had told him a deliberate untruth, or nothing he could put his finger on.

“Why don’t you believe the Ramirez brothers?” Teresa asked.

“Their story doesn’t ring true.”

“You’re suspicious by nature. Simplest is best.”

Simplest was always best. He knew that from forty years of law-enforcement experience.

“Oscar told you he picked fruit on the Minamotos’ farm when he was a teenager,” she said. “So he knew Emily’s father.”

“He knew him at the camp in Santa Fe too,” Benny said.

“Then it’s more likely he did him favors than bullied him,” Teresa said.

“Smuggled his letters past the censors? Or made sure he had warm clothing in the winter, something extra to eat?” Benny nodded. “That’s if you take Oscar at face value.”

“Why would Oscar wait two years?”

“Good point. Then again, why would anybody? There must have been any number of opportunities to stick it to an internee back during the war, when they were locked up.”

“But you do think that’s what this is about?”

“It makes the most sense.”

“You know better than to construct a theory and then make the evidence fit after the fact,” she reminded him. “You’ve got too many loose ends.”

“Not every story we wish to be true is false,” Benny said.

“Well, where to start?” Gideon Horace asked them. It was a rhetorical question. The FBI agent had agreed to meet Benny and Johnny Lee in Tierra Amarilla, the Rio Arriba county seat, halfway between Farmington and Española, far enough off the beaten path they wouldn’t attract attention. Horace, of course, was required to report any official contact with local law.

This was off the record. Background only.

“The women probably got sent to Manzanar, in the Sierra Nevada,” he said. “Not exactly a garden spot, but the camps in general were located away from population centers.” He looked at Benny. “I’m not saying right or wrong, it’s how it was. The War Department made the call.”

“How did they decide who went where?” Benny asked him.

“It was pretty arbitrary,” Horace said. “Japanese from Hawaii, say, were sent to the mainland. More of a risk of fifth column, is my guess. Pacific fleet had been decimated at Pearl Harbor. In any event, internees were categorized according to perceived risk. Were they loyal to the Empire of Japan, or were they loyal to the United States?”

“Why was there a question?”

“Japanese were thought to have a racial bias.”

“You believed that?”

“Better safe than sorry.”

Benny nodded. “What were the categories?” he asked.

“There were the die-hard imperialists, Bushido, the Rising Sun, all that eyewash. They wound up in Army custody, POWs, in effect. Then there were people who got classified as possible security risks because they wouldn’t renounce their Japanese citizenship, first-generation, for the most part. And of course there were kids who got released when they agreed to serve in the U.S. military. But there was a lot of mix and match, and a certain amount of tension. Most people went along with the program, and some of them got beaten up because they were seen as collaborators, or the rumor went around they were getting preferential treatment. It depended on who did what, or who got did to.”

“How did a fruit farmer from Embudo find himself shut up in a camp as an enemy alien?” Benny asked.

“He had the bad luck to be Japanese,” the FBI agent said.

“How much trouble got stirred up?” Johnny Lee asked him.

“Internally? We had an ugly incident in Santa Fe. A bunch of bad apples got transferred in from Tule Lake. They had shaved heads, they did regimented calisthenics, they behaved like they were in the Nip army. In fact, most of them chose to be repatriated to Japan after the war. They were hoodlums. They thought the rest of the internees had shamed themselves by giving in to relocation.”

“What happened?” Benny asked.

“They started a ruckus. Had to be broken up with tear gas and night sticks. Heads got cracked. Thankfully, nobody got dead, either side. You have to understand that the older guys, guys who’d been in the camp three or four years, they were terrified of these fanatics. Hell, they had a Suicide Squad. You crossed them, it was banzai. You wound up getting your ass handed to you, and if you were lucky, it was still in two pieces instead of six or eight.”

“What happened afterwards?” Johnny Lee asked.

“Ringleaders got shipped out to the Fort Stanton stockade.”

“Things settle down after that?”

“Pretty much.”

Johnny Lee looked at Benny. “Goes against the conventional wisdom,” he said. “That the Japanese were passive.”

“They don’t sound very passive,” Benny said.

“They’re not a passive race,” Horace said.

“We back to that?” Benny asked.

“That’s not what I meant,” Horace said. “I meant that, as a culture, they don’t like to suffer embarrassment. They have a pride in themselves.”

“Don’t we all,” Benny said.

“What are you looking for, Sheriff?” Horace asked.

“An answer I can understand.”

“Easy answers are hard to come by.”

“I didn’t imagine it would be easy,” Benny said.

“You think we’re barking up the wrong tree?” Johnny Lee asked.

“I think you can’t catch smoke in a bag,” Benny said.

“What do you want to do?”

“Go back to Santa Fe PD. See if they’ve turned anything up on the crime scene.”

“Homicide squad won’t be glad to see us.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Johnny Lee smiled and shook his head. “You ever get tired of being a pain in the ass?” he asked.

“Not a bit of it,” Benny said to him.

“Me either,” Johnny Lee said. “Let us go amongst them.”

“Eight millimeter shell casings.”

“Which suggests what?”

“Jap gun,” the detective said. “Probably a Nambu, souvenir pistol somebody brought back from the Pacific.”

“Interesting,” Benny said.

“Yeah,” Norris said. “Not that it gets us any further.”

“Still no witnesses?” Johnny Lee asked.

The cop shook his head. “Everybody was watching Zozobra burn,” he said. “The killing took place behind their backs. It might as well have happened in a vacuum.”

Benny nodded. “Crowds,” he said to Johnny Lee.

“You got something going?” Norris asked him.

“The old guy arranged to meet somebody, is what I think,” Benny said. “They did it at Zozobra because nobody would notice them, with all the people.”

“Why keep it a secret?”

“Guilt, maybe.”

“What was Minamoto guilty of?”

“He was Japanese.”

“You think it was a race crime?”

“I meant the Japanese take personal shame very seriously,” Benny said. “Minamoto was old-school. He may have been looking to atone for something.”

“You didn’t tell me your family was separated,” Benny said.

“It didn’t occur to me,” Emily said.

He was familiar with this habit of mind. If it was a thing everybody had common knowledge of, that made it unremarkable.

“Tommy joined the Army, and my mother and I were released.”

“When was that?”

“Nineteen forty-three. We still had to report to INS once a month.”

They were standing by the cenotaph at the edge of the national cemetery. Emily put her hand on the warm stone. Her brother’s name was engraved there, along with many others. They were buried overseas, but their names were here.

“A lifetime ago,” she said, sadly.

For these guys, Benny thought. “When you were released, why wasn’t your father released as well?” he asked. “He didn’t present a danger.”

“He felt he had an obligation.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The camp in Santa Fe was self-governed, to a degree.”

“How much of a degree?”

“More than you might think,” Emily said. “Because of its size, and the number of internees, there were frictions, and they turned to some of the older men, like my father, who formed grievance committees, to see that people were treated fairly.”

“So your father worked with the camp administration.”

“Both sides respected him.”

“Did they offer to let him out?”

“Early in ’forty-four.”

“Why didn’t he take the deal?”

“Because of the hard-liners,” Emily said. Kibei, she explained, American-born Japanese who’d gone back to Japan for their education, and then returned to the U.S. As a group, they tended to resist assimilation.

“I heard that after some of them got transferred in from Tule Lake, there was trouble,” Benny said. “Your father wind up in the middle of it?”

Emily nodded. “They called him a traitor to the Emperor.”

“Your father was an American citizen.”

She smiled, without humor. “So he was.”

Benny shook his head. “What a can of worms,” he said.

“It was a difficult time.”

“Everybody fought their own war,” Benny said.

“We did,” Emily said. She glanced at the memorial.

“Who took care of the farm while your family was interned?” he asked her.

“Our neighbors,” she said. “We’ve always helped each other out, then and now.”

“And they wanted nothing in return, when you came back?”

“We share the land, we share the water rights, we share the labor,” she said. “Come harvest time, everybody pitches in.”

Even a kid with Coke-bottle glasses? he thought to himself. “You remember a guy named Oscar Ramirez?” he asked.

“Sure,” Emily said. This time her smile was unrehearsed.

“What?” Benny asked.

The smile stayed in her eyes. “Oscar had a terrible crush on me, I’m afraid,” she said. “He never spoke up, of course. I knew how he felt, it just wasn’t in the cards.”

“Cultural differences?”

Emily shot him a sharp look. “No,” she said.

“Excuse me,” Benny said. The question still hovered.

Emily cleared her throat. “Oscar’s a sweet person,” she said. “He’s sincere, he’s honest, he’s a good catch. The plain truth is, I’m not attracted to him, or not that way.”

“Which isn’t what he wants to hear.”

“Who does?”

“He was a guard at the Santa Fe camp,” Benny said.

Emily kept her gaze level, face front. “I wasn’t about to break Oscar’s heart to get my father preferential treatment,” she said. “People do a lot of things, out of necessity. We all disappoint ourselves.”

“Which wasn’t a compromise you were willing to make.”

“For my own sake, I might have, but Oscar deserved better.”

“What if he’s still in love with you?” Benny asked.

“I wouldn’t betray that,” she said.

“You think it’s all he has left?”

“Oscar’s entitled to his feelings,” Emily said.

About those feelings, Benny realized Oscar probably wouldn’t be forthcoming, especially since Benny had already rubbed him the wrong way, but there was no helping that. Benny could only hope a second interview might go better than the first.

In the event, he got lucky, because Oscar’s brother Fidelio called him.

The three of them met at the VFW. This time it was Benny’s turn to buy the first round.

Oscar, it turned out, was embarrassed. “My brother figures I owe you an apology,” he said to Benny.

“No need,” Benny told him.

“Caught me off-guard, you telling me Tashi Minamoto was dead. It hit a little close to home. And the way you asked the questions, you got my back up.”

“Man’s only doing his job,” Fidelio said.

“You find out who killed him?” Oscar asked Benny.

Benny shook his head. “Not yet,” he said.

“You include us out?” Fidelio asked.

Is that what this was about? Benny wondered. “I don’t have a reason to include you in,” he said.

“Well, there’s Bataan,” Fidelio said.

Benny looked at Oscar. “Tell me about the riot,” he said.

Oscar pulled a face. “Those guys were trouble from the get-go,” he said. “They were a gang. They intimidated the old guys. The young guys had all joined up, like Tommy Minamoto, so there was nobody left to stand up to the muscle-heads.”

“Tommy’s father,” Benny said.

Oscar nodded. “Tashi had brass balls. He wasn’t afraid of making enemies. He knew who his friends were.”

“Friends come and go,” Benny said. “Enemies accumulate.”

He’d meant to ask Oscar about Emily, but in the end he thought better of it. There was no purpose in rubbing salt into old wounds.

“You had a major running security at Los Alamos,” Benny said.

“Peer de Silva,” Groves said. “He made lieutenant colonel, before the war ended.”

Groves was back in Washington. Benny was both surprised and pleased he’d taken his call. “Is de Silva still in military intelligence?” he asked.

There was a pause. Benny could sense Groves smiling. “You must be cashing in that favor, Sheriff,” he said.

“In late ’forty-three or early ’forty-four, two or three dozen Japanese nationalists were released from Army custody at Tule Lake, and reassigned to the internment camp at Santa Fe, where they caused some fair amount of grief.”

“I’ve heard the story,” Groves said.

“They were returned to Army custody for the duration. What happened to them after V-J Day?”

“They were sent back to Japan.”

“All of them?”

“What’s your question, Benny?”

“I want a list of their names, and the disposition of their cases.”

“That would take months.”

“I don’t have months,” Benny said. “Colonel de Silva has access to the classified records, and you’ve got a few chips you can call in.”

He could tell the general was making careful notes of their conversation. “Anything else?” Groves asked.

“Current location,” Benny said.

“Needles in a haystack.”

“I mean whether any of them are stateside,” Benny said.

“What’s this about?”

“It’s about a murder in wartime.”

“The war’s over.”

“Not for everybody,” Benny said.

“Okay,” Groves said.

They’d had the same conversation before.

“I started out thinking it was payback,” Benny told Teresa. “A revenge killing, an American GI who was mistreated when he was a POW, say, or a family member, somebody with an axe to grind.”

“Like one of the Ramirez boys.”

“Except they don’t fit the picture. I could cast a wider net, maybe, but I just don’t get the impression there was bad blood between the Minamoto family and anybody else up in the Embudo valley. They worked hard, they got along with everybody, their neighbors took care of things when they were interned.”

“You don’t think there was prejudice?”

“There had to be some,” Benny said. “These people were unfairly singled out because they were of Japanese descent, and then they all got lumped together, so it could be that easy, the only good Jap is a dead Jap.”

Teresa knew he was thinking out loud.

“Thing is, that of course they weren’t all the same,” he said. “Yeah, some of them still had family ties to Japan, some of them were active enemy sympathizers. But look at Tommy Minamoto. Purple Heart, posthumous Silver Star, fighting in Italy. He died for his country, and that country was the United States, not Imperial Japan.”

“So which side was his father really on?”

“Our side,” Benny said. “I think that was the problem, the tensions between the interned Japanese in the camps.”

“He tried to be a peacemaker.”

“And got labeled a collaborator.”

“Where’s this leading, Benny?” she asked.

“Your question, remember, was why anybody would wait two years,” he said. “A survivor of the Bataan Death March, or some kid who was Four-F because he’s almost legally blind?”

She smiled. “And who’s still carrying a torch for Emily?”

“So maybe the guy’s been out of action the last two years,” he said. “Two years to brood about the injustice, the shame.”

“You think he’s been in prison?”

“I’m guessing he’s been in Japan,” Benny said.

“Colonel de Silva’s list,” Johnny Lee said. He was calling from Albuquerque, an hour and a half south of Santa Fe.

Of the thirty-five men, only three had been issued visas with recent U.S. entry dates. The FBI had tracked one guy down in Los Angeles, where he was visiting family. The second guy was reportedly in the Baltimore area. The third guy was dead in an Albuquerque motel room, of self-inflicted wounds.

“I’ll drive down,” Benny said.

“You’re not going to see anything I haven’t,” Montoya said. “And you won’t want to see what I saw.”

After three days, the people in the adjoining rooms had complained about the smell. Even in September, the weather in Albuquerque could be hot. When the cops broke the door down, the first of the responding officers who went into the room fell to his knees, his stomach heaving.

Nobody made fun of him later. None of them had ever seen a Japanese ritual suicide.

Kneeling on a bamboo mat, the dead man, later identified as Iyeshi Saito, had placed the katana, the sword of a samurai, to his left. He’d used the wakizashi, the short sword, to open his bowels into his lap. Just out of reach, to his right, was an 8mm pistol, a Japanese officer’s Nambu model. There had been no friend present to administer the killing blow, and the pistol was Saito’s last resort, but it had apparently slipped away from his bloody hands, and he’d thrashed to death.

“Three days,” Benny said.

“The timing’s right,” Johnny Lee said. “He shoots Minamoto and then kills himself. We’ll run ballistics on the gun.”

“This stinks,” Benny said.

Johnny Lee had been in the motel room with the dead body, and he could vividly remember the smell, but he understood Benny meant it metaphorically.

“What do I tell Minamoto’s daughter?” Benny asked. “We owe her an explanation.”

“Saito left a note,” Johnny told him.

It was in Japanese calligraphy, done with careful brush strokes.

There was arterial blood spray on the wrinkled rice paper. Benny was cautious not to tear it. “What does it say?” he asked the college professor, spreading it out on his desk.

“It’s haiku,” the Japanese scholar told him.

“Bear with me,” Benny said.

“It’s a poem, very formally structured.”

“Can you translate it?”

“It’s not an exact science.”

“Approximately, then,” Benny said.

Snow alights gently

On the shoulders of a lark

Grief burns, fire takes wing

“Meaning?” Benny asked.

“Exile, perhaps, and rebirth, or renewal.”

“The cops tell you they found this next to a suicide?”

The professor nodded.

“An educated guess, then.”

“It might mean he redeemed himself, in death.”

Benny decided he wouldn’t show anybody else the poem.

He took Aurora and Angelina up to Emily Minamoto’s farm to pick peaches. As he expected, it was hard work, but satisfying. The girls, of course, complained to him about it.

Benny had little sympathy.

Peaches, he explained patiently, are easily bruised.

Copyright © 2012 by David Edgerley Gates