Stalking the Angel (14 page)

When we were as clean as about a million paper towels and soap that smelled like Pledge could make us, we walked the three blocks down to Mr. Moto’s. It was ten minutes before noon when we went in the front door and the slim Japanese maître d’ said, “Two for lunch?” The hair on the right side of his head was shaved down to a quarter-inch buzz cut, the hair on the left was long and frizzed. New wave, all right.

I said, “We’ll sit at the bar for a while.”

It was a nice-looking place, even with the neon. The front was all aqua plastic tables and peach wrought iron chairs and a tile floor the color of steel. There was a sushi bar on the right, with maybe twenty stools and four sushi chefs wearing white and red headbands and yelling anytime somebody walked into the place. About halfway back, the room cut in half. Tables continued along the wall on the right all the way to the kitchen in the back. On the left, you could step up underlit tile steps to a full bar and a little drinking area they had there with more tables and plants and neon triangles. A modern steel rail ran around the edge of the drinking platform to keep drunks from falling into someone’s California roll. There were three women together at one of the little tables up in the bar area, and four couples in the dining room. Business people on their lunch hour. Pike and I went back through the dining area and up the little steps to the bar, one of the three women staring at Pike’s tattoos.

The bartender was a Japanese woman in her late twenties. Hard face and too much green eye shadow and a rich ocher tan. She was wearing black, sprayed-on pants and a blue and black
hapi
coat with red trim that
had been tied off just below the breasts so her midriff was bare. A tattoo of a butterfly floated two inches to the right of her navel. She said, “What’ll it be, guys?”

I said, “Not too busy.”

“It picks up about twelve-thirty.”

We ordered a couple of Sapporo in the short bottles, and Pike asked for the men’s room. The bartender told him, and Pike went back through the kitchen. I said, “First time here. A friend of mine raves about the place, though. You might know him. A regular.”

She reached under the bar and music started to play. A Joan Jett rip-off. “Who’s that?”

“Nobu Ishida.”

The bartender shrugged. “So many faces,” she said.

A man and a woman took two stools at the end of the bar. The bartender went down to them. I leaned over the bar to watch her. Nice legs.

The three women at the table took their drinks and went down to the dining area. I brought my beer and Pike’s and took their table. Pike came out of the back a couple of minutes later. He said, “Restroom in the back with a pay phone. L-shaped kitchen running the width of the building and a cold room. Door out the back. Office off the kitchen. Five men and four women working the place.”

We sipped our beer. Mr. Moto’s filled with lots of men in Giorgio Armani suits and women in black biking tights and female lawyers. You could tell the lawyers because they drank too much and looked nervous. There was a smattering of Asians in the place, but most everybody else was white or black. “You’ll notice,” Pike said, “that the only people in here who look like thugs are me and you.”

“You, maybe. I look like Don Johnson. You look like Fred Flintstone.”

Sixteen hours with nothing to eat and the Sapporo was working wonders. Pike flagged a waitress and we ordered sashimi, sushi, white rice, miso soup, and more Sapporo. Sapporo is great when your back is stiff from an all-night stakeout.

Several young women who looked like models came in. They were tall and thin and wore their hair in flashes and swirls and bobs that looked okay in a magazine but looked silly in real life. They spent a lot of time touching themselves.

Pike said, “Maybe we should interrogate them.”

The food came. We’d ordered toro and yellowtail and octopus and freshwater eel and sea urchin. The urchin and eel and octopus were prepared as sushi, each slice draped over a molded bullet of rice and held there by a band of seaweed. Sashimi is sliced fish without the rice. The waitress brought two little trays of a dark brown dipping sauce with a sprinkling of chopped green onion in it for the sashimi. In an empty tray I mixed soy sauce and hot green mustard for the sushi. I dipped a piece of the octopus sushi in the sauce, let the rice absorb the sauce, then took a bite. Delicious. Pike was looking in his miso soup. “There’s something in here.”

“Black pasta,” I said. “
Nouveau
cuisine.”

Pike pushed the soup aside.

By one o’clock the place was packed. It was SRO up by the maître d’ and the crowd noise was threatening to drown out the music. Just after one a second bartender came on duty. He was younger than the Butterfly Lady, with short spiky hair and very smooth skin and a little-boy face. Someone’s grad student
nephew, given a part-time job to make a few extra bucks during the summer. The Butterfly Lady said something and the new kid looked our way. Worried. I smiled at Pike. “Well, well. I think we’re making progress.”

I got up and went over to the new kid’s end of the bar. “You guys have Falstaff?”

The grad student shook his head. The Butterfly Lady came over, gave me a look, said something in Japanese to the kid, then went back to her end of the bar. The grad student began building a margarita. I said, “How about Corona?”

“Just Japanese.”

I nodded. “Sapporo in a short bottle. Two.”

He poured the margarita mixture into three round glasses. The Butterfly Lady came back, got them, went away. I smiled at the kid. Mr. Friendly. “Get many thugs in here?”

He said, “What?”

I winked at him, and took the two Sapporos back to the table. Our dishes had been cleared. Pike said, “Look.”

Across the room, at a little corner table by some leafy plants, three men were being seated. An older Japanese man, a much younger Japanese man with heavy shoulders, and a tall, thin black man. The black man looked like Lou Gossett except for the scar that started at the crown of his head and ran down across his temple and curved back to lop off the top of his left ear. The two Asian men were smiling broadly and laughing with a slight man in a dark suit whose long hair was pulled back in a punk version of the traditional Japanese topknot. Manager. “Something tells me we are no longer the only thugs in the place,” I said.

“Know the black guy from when I was a cop,” Pike said. “Richards Sangoise. Dope dealer from Crenshaw.”

“You see,” I said. “Gangsters.”

“Could just be coincidence they’re here.”

“Could be.”

“But maybe not.”

“Maybe those two Asian gentlemen are yakuza executives in search of an expanding business opportunity.”

Pike nodded.

I went back to the grad student and gave him the same Mr. Friendly. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you see the three gentlemen seated there?”

“Uh-huh.” Uneasy.

“I have reason to believe that those men are criminals, and that they may be engaged in the criminal act of conspiracy, and I felt obligated to tell someone. You might want to call the police.”

The kid gave me Ping-Pong ball eyes. I walked back and sat down with Pike. “Just a little push,” I said.

We watched the bar. The grad student said something to the Butterfly Lady. She snagged a waiter, said something, and the waiter went down onto the main floor to the manager. The manager came back into the bar and went over to the Butterfly Lady. They looked our way, then the manager left the bar and went back toward the kitchen. A little while later he reappeared and came over to our table. “Excuse me, gentlemen.” Mr. Cordiality. “We’re terribly busy, as you can see. Since you’ve finished your meal, would it be too much of an imposition for me to ask that you make room for others?”

“Yes,” Pike said, “it would.”

I said, “My friend Nobu told me that if I came here I would be treated better than this.”

The manager looked past me for a moment. “You’re a friend of Mr. Ishida?”

I said, “Mr. Ishida is dead. Murdered. I want to know who he was with the last time he was in here.”

The manager shook his head and gave me a smile that wobbled. “You should leave now.”

“We like it here,” Pike said. “We might stay forever.”

The manager worked his mouth, then went back down to the dining room and into the kitchen. Pike said, “I think we’re becoming a problem.”

I nodded. “Fun, isn’t it?”

Pike went down into the dining area and over to the table with the two Japanese men and the black man. He stood very close to the table, so that the men had to lean back to look up at him. He said something to Richards Sangoise. Sangoise’s eyes widened. Pike leaned over, put a hand on Sangoise’s shoulder, and said something else. Sangoise looked at me. I made a gun with my hand, pointed it at him, and pulled the trigger. Sangoise shoved his chair back and left. The younger Japanese man jumped to his feet. The older man looked from Pike to me and back to Pike. Angry. They hurried out after Sangoise. The manager came running out of the back in time to see the end of it. He looked angry, too. The grad student looked even more worried and said something to the Butterfly Lady. She said something sharp and walked away from him. Pike came back to the table and sat down.

“Nice,” I said.

Pike nodded.

When the grad student came out from behind the bar and went back toward the kitchen, I followed him.

The kitchen was all steel and white with a high
industrial ceiling. It was hot, even with the kitchen’s blowers going at top speed. There was a narrow hall at the right rear of the kitchen with a door that said
OFFICE
. On the left, there was another little hall with a pay phone and a sign that said
RESTROOMS
. I passed a woman carrying a tray of pot sticker dumplings and went into the men’s room.

It was small and white, with one stall for the toilet and one urinal and one sink and one of those blowers that never get your hands dry and a smudged sign above the sink that said that employees MUST wash with soap. The grad student was standing at a urinal. He looked over and saw it was me and you would’ve thought I’d kicked him in the groin. I gave him the smile, then I threw the little bolt that locked the door. He said, “You’d better not touch me.”

I said, “Is this place owned by the yakuza?”

Scared. Very scared. “Open the door. Come on.”

“I’ll open the door after we talk.”

He zipped up and moved away from the urinal. His mouth was working like maybe he’d cry, like he’d spent a lot of time thinking that something like this would happen one day and now it was. Malcolm Denning. I said, “The shit is about to hit the fan, boy. Do you know what the yakuza is?”

He shook his head.

I said, “Did you know a man named Nobu Ishida?”

He shook his head again and I slapped him in the center of the chest with an open right hand. It made a deep hollow thump and knocked him back and frightened him more than hurt him. I said, “Do not bullshit me. Nobu Ishida was in here three times a week for three months. He spent big and he tipped big and you know him.”

Someone tried the door, then knocked. I opened my jacket to show the Dan Wesson to the kid and said, “Occupied. Out in a minute.” The kids eyes were big, and his mouth opened and closed like a fish. Koi. He said, “I didn’t know him. He was a customer.”

“But you know the name.”

“Yes, sir.” Yes, sir.

I said, “Nobu Ishida was a member of the yakuza. Every two weeks he was here with other people and those people were probably in the yakuza, too. A girl named Mimi Warren has been kidnapped, maybe by the yakuza, and maybe by someone who knew Ishida. I want their names.”

The kid looked up from the place under my jacket where the Dan Wesson lived. “Mimi was kidnapped?”

I looked at him. “You know Mimi Warren?”

He nodded. “She comes here sometimes.”

“Here?”

“With her friends.”

“Friends?” Witness interrogation had always been a strong point.

“A girl named Carol. Another girl named Kerri. I really didn’t know them. They’re around, you see them, you say hi. They’d come and dance and hang out. We get pretty good bands.” He was looking past me at the door. Like maybe somebody was going to kick it in. “I don’t know anything about a kidnapping. I swear I don’t. They’re going to miss me and come looking. I’ll get in trouble.”

“Tell me about Ishida.”

The kid spread his hands. Helpless. “There were always three other men. The only one I know was Mr. Torobuni. He owns the place.
Please
.” Terry Ito had said that Yuki Torobuni runs the L.A. yakuza.

I opened the door and let the kid out. A pink-faced guy in a nice Ross Hobbs suit gave me a helluva look when I walked out after the kid.

Mimi Warren?
Here?

When I got back to the bar, three men were waiting at the table with Joe Pike. There was an older guy with a lot of loose skin and a cheap sharkskin coat over an orange shirt, and a very short guy with two fingers off his left hand and the sort of baleful stare you get when life’s a mystery. There was also a tall kid with too many muscles in a three-quarter-sleeve pullover. Eddie Tang. He grinned at me. “What do ya know. It’s Mickey Spillane.”

Pike’s mouth twitched. “You missed all the fun,” he said. “While you were out, somebody phoned for reinforcements.”