Blood Hina (10 page)

Mas was back on the freeway, this time to the home of his Alhambra customer. Dr. Svelick had been Mas’s customer for the past seven years. Mas had watched him grow from a young resident, stopping by the house at odd times in green scrubs, to a full-fledged private practitioner who wore a tie five days a week. Mas knew that one day the doctor, who was starting to go
ohage
around the back of his head like an old-fashioned Catholic priest, would someday move to a more upscale neighborhood like San Marino. But for now Mas had him, and he would relish the working relationship. The
doctor never complained and mailed in his monthly check like clockwork. No
monku
and money you can count on. What else could a gardener past his prime ask for?

The traffic on the 10 was still moving at a crawl, and Mas couldn’t help but think of the two dead men who had been buddy-buddy. What would possess seemingly straight-arrow guys like Jorg de Groot and Ike Hayakawa to do something illegal? The two men, with their sturdy middle-class ranch homes in the suburbs, obviously seemed to be able to support their families with legitimate work. Why did Casey want to tarnish their reputations by spreading rumors after both were long gone?

Mas finally reached the offramp for Dr. Svelick’s house and went north on Fremont. Construction delayed him further, so by the time he turned onto the doctor’s street, he was ready to hop out of the truck and get to work. Except that another gardener’s truck was parked in front of Dr. Svelick’s. It was a white Toyota, probably about twenty years old but maintained as if it were a newborn. The original hubcaps had been replaced with shiny racing ones, and the back of the bed, which once simply sported the brand name TOYOTA, now read just “YO.”

Mas frowned and parked behind the revamped truck. His stomach felt queasy. He had a bad feeling about this.

As he approached the doctor’s home, the side back door swung open, and Mas heard the banter of Spanish and saw a couple of men carrying a gardener’s catcher full of freshly mowed grass. The smell of the grass was powerful, pungent—no matter how many lawns Mas had cut, that scent gave him a high no drug could. The second man, donning a
worn wide-brimmed straw hat shaped like an upside-down Chinese teacup, abruptly stopped in his tracks upon noticing Mas. He was tall and brown and somehow looked familiar. He was young, with a strong profile, a narrow face, and a high-ridged nose.

“Hello, Mister.” The boy took off his straw hat and smiled widely. “Remember me?”

It was the sardonic grin that helped place the face. Mas’s former helper Eduardo’s nephew. This was the same boy who refused to get into Mas’s truck because it was too old. How long had it been? At least six, seven years.

“Dr. Svelick give this to you.” The boy handed Mas a neat white envelope.

Mas didn’t have to open it to know what it was. Sometimes the message came via the telephone, sometimes in a thin envelope like this one, mailed to the house. Either way, the communication was short and to the point: “We won’t be needing your services anymore.”

To have the message delivered by his replacement was especially cruel and humiliating. And this one—a boy probably barely in his twenties! A youngster who had disparaged Mas’s beloved Ford.

Mas edged closer to Eduardo’s nephew, and the young man must have detected Mas’s foul mood because he took a few steps back. “Whatchu name?” Mas asked.

“Raul Jesus,” the boy replied, pronouncing his second name the traditional Spanish way of hey-sus.

Jesus. That just plain figured. Thanks or perhaps no thanks to Tug, Mas was starting to open his heart to God, and this is what He gives him? That’s why
bachi
, what goes
around comes around, had once seemed to make more sense to Mas. Either God didn’t exist or He had a very mean streak in Him.

Mas was going to tear up the envelope and throw it at Raul Jesus like confetti, but then he thought better of it. There was probably a final check in there, and in these lean economic times, Mas had to put his emotion aside, at least for this week. There was no telling how long Haruo would be staying at the house, for example, and Mas might need that money to set his friend up with a deposit on a new apartment.

“Raul Gee-sus, good luck to youzu,” Mas growled and turned on the heels of his scuffed work boots and marched back to the Ford. He was so mad that he even entertained the thought of dragging his key along the span of the perfectly hospital-white side panel of the Toyota. Only for a second, however. No decent man would ever deface another man’s automobile. Some things were sacred; that line should not be crossed.

Once Mas hopped into the Ford, he squeezed the steering wheel so tight that his joints hurt. How in the world could this Raul Jesus have stolen Dr. Svelick from him? And then he remembered. When he was laid up around Christmas with shingles, he’d called Eduardo to cover for him. He must have brought along his nephew, this Jesus. It was then that the takeover plan had been set in motion. There was no doubt that the boy must be charging at least twenty percent less than Mas’s rate.
Inu!
Traitors, all of them.

It was only when he was stopped at an intersection a good three blocks away that he had the nerve to open the envelope. The note was written in Dr. Svelick’s lopsided
scrawl. Mas couldn’t make out all of the words, but the last paragraph was fairly readable: “I’ve appreciated your hard work for me over the years. Just think it’s best—for both you and me—that we make this change. You really deserve to take it easy. Enjoy your life!”

                  
Odairisama to ohinasama

                  
Futari narande sumashikao

                  
Oyome ni irashita neesamani

                  
Yokunita kanjo no shiroikao

                  
Emperor and empress

                  
Side by side, grave expressions

                  
At the wedding are maidens

                  
Their white faces all alike

                  
— “Hina Matsuri Song,” second stanza

CHAPTER SIX

E
njoy my life!” Mas muttered as he drove to Juanita Gushiken’s family’s Japanese-Peruvian restaurant on Virgil in Los Angeles. He couldn’t get Dr. Svelick’s breezy directive out of his head. The mantra had played in his head all afternoon.
Enjoymylife!
Driving home to his sidewalk-less neighborhood in Altadena.
Enjoymylife!
Splashing water on his face and combing his hair back with Three Flowers oil.
Enjoymylife!
Fooling with the lock of the Ford because the screwdriver technique wasn’t working effectively.

If he was to enjoy his life, he might as well do it at the Peruvian Palace. Unlike its royal name, the eatery, located
a couple of doors down from a laundromat, was no frills. No frills meant no carpet and no tablecloths, just scuffed-up linoleum and paper napkins from a metal dispenser. But the food was tasty. Mas’s favorite was the fresh mound of seafood ceviche—baby octopus legs tangled through circles of squid and topped with orange-striped unshelled shrimp.

Mas opened the tinted glass door and spied G.I. Hasuike, Juanita’s boyfriend, seated in their usual spot, a corner booth.

“Eh, Mas, long time,” said G.I., finishing off a sip of Inca Kola.

It had been a long time. Long enough for G.I. to have chopped off his salt-and-pepper waist-long horsetail. In fact, the fiftysomething man had taken a razor to his head and now resembled a crazed skinny monk who’d stayed in the monastery too long. Mas met G.I. through Wishbone when a young Japanese acquaintance was knee-deep in legal problems. Ever since then, G.I. was usually the first person Mas called when he needed help from a Sansei, third-generation Japanese American, with a JD degree.

Juanita, wearing an apron, waved from the other side of the room. A Japanese Peruvian with roots in Okinawa, she was a PI by day and a dutiful daughter by night. When G.I.’s friend was found stabbed to death in a Hawaiian restaurant, Mas and Juanita joined forces to discover the truth behind a clue remaining at the crime scene, an Okinawan stringed instrument called a snakeskin shamisen.

“Haruo called. He’s running a little late but says to start,” Juanita announced, placing plates of soft rolls and green sauce in the middle of their table. Mas knew enough not to soak the roll in the sauce, which was like wasabi—a few
drops gave starch some needed kick, but any more sent you to guzzle down a gallon of water and maybe to the bathroom as well.

He ordered a beer, and Juanita left to get a bottle from a refrigerator near the counter.

“So, too bad about Haruo, huh?” G.I. said.

“Heezu comin’ tonight.”

G.I. nodded. “How is he?”

Mas shrugged his shoulders. “Stayin’ at my place.”

G.I. began to cough, almost choking on his roll. Then his whole body shook with laughter. After taking a last drink of his Inca Kola, he asked, “And how’s that working out for you, Mas?”

After delivering Mas’s beer, Juanita sat with the two men in the booth. Although she was lean and muscular, she was all female inside. She wanted to know all the details of what Spoon had said to Haruo (Mas didn’t know), how Haruo was taking it (pretty good), and how much money was lost in canceling the wedding (Mas had no idea). Once the fortysomething woman had pumped as much information about Haruo and Spoon’s relationship as she could—only extracting about a cupful of useful gossip—she put on her private investigator cap and began asking about the theft of the dolls. G.I., whose eyes were starting to glaze over, looked reinvigorated. A lawyer who lived on the fumes of conflict, G.I. was always attracted to anything related to crime.

“You know much about Mexican gangsters?” Mas
abruptly asked.

Juanita glanced at G.I. “Well, there’s the Eighteenth Street gang, which started back in L.A. in the sixties. You’re not getting involved with them, are you? They are very dangerous, Mas.”

“Howsu about cocaine? Whatchu knowsu about cocaine?”

“Cocaine, Mas? What’s this all about?”

Mas shared what he’d learned from Casey, not revealing his name, of course. Casey talked in the heat of anger to protect his reputation, and it wasn’t fair to hold that against him.

“Well, cocaine was big in the eighties. Very big. That time it was the powdered kind that rich people used,” G.I. said. “And what followed that was crack cocaine. You know, you smoke it in a pipe.” G.I. seemed to know his share about
maiyaku
, and Mas guessed that some of that knowledge was first-hand experience. Turned out his hunch was right.

“A lot of us got involved in drugs in the seventies and eighties, Mas. It’s just that some of us couldn’t leave it.”

Juanita nodded. She was a decade younger than G.I., but apparently old enough to have lived through that time herself.

“Asian-American groups like the Yellow Brotherhood came in to help addicts. We were losing too many people to cocaine.” From this effort came drug-abuse recovery centers, which were in existence even today, said G.I.

“Datsu what happen to Spoon’s daughter.” Rehab, isn’t that what Haruo called it?

“What’s her name?” asked G.I.

“Dee Hayakawa.”

“Sounds familiar. She from the Eastside?”

“Montebello.”

“Well, generally speaking, I didn’t really hang out with any girls from Montebello. Those were the rich girls.”