Blood Hina (25 page)

She pressed her fingers on her closed eyelids, as if to replay the scene in her mind. “He turned back for a second, a split second, and sees me see him. He doesn’t say a word, but his eyes—I’d recognize those eyes anywhere, even with those silly glasses.

“I didn’t sleep one bit that night. I didn’t know what to think. Dee gets up and then starts screaming about the missing dolls. What can I tell her, that her dead father went off with them? I know that I can’t get married that day. Either I’m hallucinating or my husband is still alive.

“So I call off the wedding, hoping that I’d figure it out in a couple of days. But then Dee starts making a bigger fuss about the dolls, even calling the police. I had to go along with it, at least for a little while.

“Then a couple of days later, he shows up. Ike. I’m alone in the house and he’s on my front doorstep. I practically faint, right then and there. He wants to know if I’d done anything with the dolls. Nothing, nothing. I spent three thousand on them because they were a symbol of what we once were. But I don’t really care about the dolls. I want to know why my
husband is alive twenty years after he was supposed to have burned in a car accident.

“He says that he will tell me everything after he finds those dolls, his dolls. He goes to the Hina House, but they don’t seem to know anything. I mean, why should they lie? So he figures it’s the government or other authorities who have taken the tape. Either way, he wants to get Estacio Pena. Kill him. Extinguish his life. So even if he doesn’t have the tape, he pretends that he does. He calls him anonymously. Threatens him that he has evidence that will shame his father. Destroy his political reputation and his relationship with the U.S. government.”

Mas could not understand the passion of this man, his commitment to do someone in after so many years. Perhaps it was because Ike had achieved the American dream, held it in his hands, seen it secured by friends even when the government was after him. It must have been a bitter blow to have this dream crumble—not from the outside, but from the inside, from his precious youngest daughter.

“Ike blamed himself. He really did. He worked so hard but at the expense of the girls, especially Dee. She has a different kind of personality than the two older girls. More sensitive. More emotionally needy. Debra and Donna are more like Ike and me. Task oriented. We like to get things done. But Dee, as the youngest, always felt ignored, neglected. We were all so busy with the business; we didn’t really spend time with each other as a family.”

Spoon then told of her counseling sessions with Dee and Ike. “It finally occurred to him that all that work and money were meaningless. All of the achievements didn’t mean
lickety-squat. That was a huge revelation, you know. That what you’ve been striving for all these years wasn’t worth that much.”

It sure seemed that Spoon was giving her husband an easy way out. “He fake datsu heezu dead. Datsu
orai
wiz you?”

“Of course not. All that pain that he caused me and the girls, especially Dee? And not to mention Jorg and Sonya. And Geoff. I can’t bear to even think of them. Why would Jorg be so foolish to take on this horrible responsibility?”

Jorg the Dutchman. Where was he, anyway? Ike had not mentioned his friend’s current whereabouts. And the way Spoon was talking about him, Mas figured that he was dead.

“He adored Ike. Saw him like the brother he never had. It probably hurt him to see Ike in so much anguish. I’m sure he wasn’t thinking when he went on those first drug runs with Ike. And then it was too late.

“Did you know that Estacio threatened Jorg? Said that his men would kill Sonya and Geoff if anything happened to him? At that point, Ike and Jorg thought for the sake of us, their families, they needed to disappear, die.

“That’s why, Mas, you cannot say anything to Dee or the other two girls. Or to Sonya. They made this sacrifice so that we’d be safe. And we have to accept it or else all of this was for naught.”

Spoon then explained that Casey even had a role in the deception. “Do you know that he thought Ike was really a drug runner? He even attempted to blackmail Geoff after his father died. That didn’t work, so he tried to take over the route in Hanley himself. It didn’t take, I guess. But Geoff
never forgot and never forgave.”

Mas wondered if Spoon had shared this with the dead man. Being locked up in the same house for a few days was the perfect environment to unload a lifetime of secrets.

“You need to forget everything that happened today.” Spoon began rocking back and forth in the passenger seat. “And I’m not doing this just to protect Ike. Far from it. This Ike isn’t the same man I married. In fact, we were having a lot of marital problems back then.”

Mas remembered Sonya’s stories of Ike moving in with them during some rough patches in the Hayakawa union.

“He was always so restless. He wanted new challenges to conquer. He wanted to sell the business and start another one, run off to Hawaii or some other exotic place. ‘What about the children?’ I asked. ‘They’re all grown up,’ he said. And then Dee got into trouble, a reminder that what he started was unfinished, maybe even not done right.”

Spoon finally stopped moving in her seat. “These past few days when I was sequestered in the house with Ike, do you know what I was thinking of?”

Mas shook his head.

“That I missed Haruo.” Her sad eyes met Mas’s. “I felt so guilty because Dee was accusing him of stealing the dolls. And I said nothing, except for reporting that I paid only a few hundred dollars for them. Just a minor theft, nothing big.” She then covered her face again. “I know that’s a poor excuse. I have to tell him that I’m sorry. You have to find him.”

What do you think I’ve been doing these past five days?
Mas thought. In the beginning, he’d been the only one to be
sounding the alarm. Now that the mystery of dolls had been solved, people were finally moving onto the true innocent, Haruo.

“Whaddabout your husband?” Mas didn’t want to be
hinnikui
, twisting the truth into her gut, but this new discovery could not be ignored.

“That man is not my husband,” Spoon said. “My husband has been dead for twenty years.”

When Mas got home, he called G.I. and Juanita and filled them in.

“Unbelievable,” Juanita said.

“Yeah, sounds like you were in some kind of assassin movie,” G.I. said from the second line. “Pretty soon they’ll be calling you ‘Mas the Badass’.”

Juanita started laughing, and for a second, Mas contemplated hanging up the phone. He’d gone through too much that day to suffer through any ridicule. Juanita regained her composure. “Get off the phone, G.I. I have to talk to Mas about business,” she said.

“No offense, Mas. I’ll be talking to you.”

The click of the second line and then Juanita reported what she had discovered about the postcard from Phoenix. “That particular postcard is provided to certain resorts and hotels, more on the high-end side. My girlfriend knows someone at the company that distributes them, and when I mentioned the strange message, the sales rep got a bit cagey.

“In other words, she knew exactly what I was talking
about. Turns out she’d had Homeland Security calling her because someone was sending these postcards with strange messages to all these government offices. Not necessarily threatening messages, but accusing the CIA of wrongdoing. Finally, she told me which one of her customers it was—a retirement resort in Phoenix.

“I called the activities director, and after I told her the postcard story, she says, ‘Oh, that’s Richard Mars.’ He was apparently suffering from Alzheimer’s, and it got really got bad last year. The activities director scanned his ID photo and e-mailed it to me. He was of Dutch descent, she explained, loved all the Dutch pastries, so they were monitoring his diet.

“I remembered what you told me about Ike Hayakawa’s good friend, Jorg de Groot. That his heritage was from Holland. Found an old photo on a news story about the accident. It was the same guy, Mas. Only twenty years older. This Richard Mars is definitely Jorg de Groot.”

“So Jorg de Groot alive?”

“Well, actually he died last year. Natural causes in the retirement home. And unfortunately alone.”

After hearing about Jorg de Groot, Mas couldn’t fall asleep for a while. What had he been doing for the past twenty years? He’d gone incognito, underground for the sake of his friend. Mas wasn’t sure he would do that for anyone, even Haruo, but somehow he knew that Haruo would do it for him.

Mas finally willed himself to sleep and when he did, he became Urashima Taro in his dreams. There, he saved a turtle from some bullying boys and then was invited to spend time in the Turtle World. They were under the sea, prancing and dancing, feeling the security of warm water protecting them from the harshness of dry land life. But then Mas was washed ashore, and as he walked barefoot through downtown Los Angeles and finally Altadena, nothing looked familiar. The grand old buildings in Pasadena had been replaced by high-rises, and his wood-framed house was gone; in fact, his own street had been plowed over. The houses had been replaced by piles of rocks, smooth and flat like the ones in Genessee Howard’s backyard.

At around five o’clock, his phone rang. Maybe three hours of sleep at best?

“Mas.” It was Taxie’s voice, which had recently taken on a hard, clipped tone, reminding Mas of stale rice crackers. “They are requesting that you come into the market for a special meeting. Noon.”

Mas agreed. After Taxie clicked off, Mas realized that he hadn’t asked, “Who’s ‘they’?” or “What kind of special meeting?”

The rest of the morning consisted of Yuban coffee and a couple of games of solitaire. Mas finally picked up the phone and pressed a long string of numbers. A very familiar answering machine. He was going to hang up, but he forced himself to stay on and leave a message.

“Hallo,” he said. “Itsu Dad.”

As Mas approached the market, he saw a familiar figure on the southwest corner of Wall and Seventh: the giant black man with the bean sprout–shaped head and body. Mas pulled over to the red-painted curb and, turning off the engine, slid over to the passenger side of the banana-yellow seat and rolled the window halfway down, because that was as far as it would go.

“Hey, I see you talkin’ to Roberto yesterday,” Mas said.

The man frowned. “Roberto. I know probably ten Robertos.”

“Dis one from the flower market.”

“The only person that I really knew at the market was Casey. The nicest guy. Dropped off old bread from the flower market bakery once a week to us in Skid Row. And took us to the racetrack all the time.”