Summer of the Big Bachi (25 page)

 

 

Mas waited a moment until he understood. “Oh, that Kimura boy,” he said finally. “Could’ve. I dunno. Dunno either way.”

 

 

“But why? What would he have to do with that woman?”

 

 

“Well, women, you knowsu how that goes,” Mas said, who then quickly realized that Tug had little idea. “Money. Maybe money.”

 

 

“Money?”

 

 

“Tug, itsu always about money,” said Mas, before reopening the Frigidaire to make sure he had a second six-pack.

 

 

“But this isn’t a rich woman. She lives by herself in a one-bedroom apartment. They even aren’t too sure what she does for a living.”

 

 

“But maybe she knowsu sumptin’ thatsu worth a lot of money.”

 

 

“Like?”

 

 

“What did that boy tell you? Whyzu he here, anyhowsu, and don’t tell me itsu because of a stupid magazine article.”

 

 

Tug sat quietly on the Coleman cooler.

 

 

“Heezu gotsu an angle, Tug. We all gotsu one.”

 

 

“I know all about angles. I worked for the government for fifty years. I know more than you think.” Tug frowned. While most Japanese would be flushed red from the alcohol, Tug’s face was stone white. “I’ve had people offer me kickbacks. Lakers tickets, even cash.”

 

 

Mas’s hand grew slippery around his beer can.

 

 

“Every time, I told them ‘No, no.’ ”

 

 

Well, of course, thought Mas. You’re that kind of sonafugun.

 

 

“Except once.” Tug sighed. “Once, I didn’t say no. They were Dodgers tickets. The pennant race in seventy-eight. Seats right behind home plate.”

 

 

“Oh—” Mas pushed out a breath. He knew how much Tug loved the Dodgers.

 

 

“I tried to fool myself, Mas. Told myself they weren’t a bribe. That it was a gift, between friends. But I had known that restaurant owner for only six months, and he wasn’t a friend. I didn’t even like him.” Tug took another sip of his beer. “So I went. Even took Joe. The thing was, the seats were so good that we landed up on TV. Every time someone went up to bat, you could see me and Joe there, eating peanuts and drinking Coke. The next day at work, people told me that they saw me and my son. Didn’t say much of anything else. But I know what they were thinking. That I was just like them.

 

 

“I felt sick to my stomach, Mas. I wanted to take those tickets back. But I couldn’t. Then I went back to that restaurant. Rat droppings everywhere. I told the owner that I would have to close them down.”

 

 

“Howsu he take it?”

 

 

“Not good. He said we had an agreement. I told him I’d pay for the tickets. He said that wasn’t good enough. He was going to go to my boss and report me.”

 

 

“Whatcha do?”

 

 

“The only thing I could do. I beat him to it. I confessed everything.”

 

 

Mas blinked hard. He could only imagine how difficult that had been for Tug.

 

 

“I was ready to be fired. Even warned Lil. She was plenty furious. Even said I had tainted Joe by taking him to the game.

 

 

“So anyhows, I revealed everything. Afterward, my boss looks at me. ‘I’m going to forget everything you just told me,’ he said. He fixed it all. Gave the restaurant a temporary reprieve. Was assigned to another inspector. I got a second chance, Mas. And I never blew it again.”

 

 

“Lucky, Tug,” Mas said.

 

 

“Lucky nothing,” said Tug, ash white. “It was a curse. He held that over my head my whole career.”

 

 

 

They had not yet completed the second six-pack when Mas sent Tug home. There was no use getting Lil even madder than she had been that day at the hospital. Before Tug left, Mas made him suck down two cups of freeze-dried instant coffee and even stuffed some old coffee candies in his pocket for the five-minute drive home.

 

 

From what Mas could figure out from the last hour with Tug, the boy was still in trouble. The police had wanted him around for questioning. “Don’t leave L.A.,” they told him. Mas knew what that meant. They were waiting for the mistress to die. Once the death certificate was issued, they would work like hell to send the boy away.

 

 

Tug was convinced of the boy’s innocence. Mas wasn’t as sure. But he was Joji’s flesh and blood, after all. His grandnephew. His only heir. At times at the track, Mas made a bet on a long-shot horse. Yuki Kimura was no horse, but he might as well be one since he was alone in America with only a faint promise of a three-million-dollar prize.

 

 

Mas returned to bed for a while, but sleep would not come. Tug had said that the police weren’t sure what the mistress did for a living. And then there was the apartment manager, making comments about the men coming by. And Shuji Nakane. Where the hell was he now?

 

 

Mas tried to slow his thoughts down. He remembered that when he mislaid something, Chizuko had always told him to travel backward. In his mind he went back, step-by-step, until he landed up in that apartment in North Hollywood for the first time. He pictured the bonsai trees lined up all perfect on those boards, the box of aluminum paper on the counter. The Casio watch. The photos pasted on the wall. One in somewhere like Hawaii, Junko with another girl, wearing leis around their necks. There had been that one with all the girls and men in suits, holding beers and smiling like at a New Year’s party. The girls had been all made-up, lipstick and eyelashes. The photo of Riki and the mistress in Vegas.

 

 

Mas then tried to remember the mistress. Was there anything about her that could tell him who she was? The Shuji Nakane business card. Hardly any papers. And the envelope with money.

 

 

Something then snapped on in Mas’s mind. The map in the envelope that had led him to the poker game. It had been written on some kind of blank receipt form. Probably nothing, he thought. But he got up and pulled at the pockets of his discarded clothing again. Sure enough, there it was. The map had been written on back of a receipt for some kind of business named “Chochin’s.” There was an address in Los Angeles with a zip code and phone number. One look and Mas knew where it was. West L.A. Sawtelle.

 

 

* * *

 

Mas used to get together with a Sawtelle gardener who was crazy about the game go. Mas could play go well enough; he even had a set of flat, polished stones stored in covered bowls— one black, the other white. A wooden board, which folded in half with a hinge, completed the set. The board was lined with a grid, hundreds of perfect squares, hundreds of potential moves.

 

 

Kids like Mari thought that the winner of go was the one who got five in a row first. It actually had nothing to do with that. Go was all about territory, about closing a solid line around the other guy’s markers. The key was to set traps in unexpected places. Then, when the other guy was barely looking, you started on your plan.

 

 

Mas drove out west on the Santa Monica Freeway, then down on the dreaded 405. He hated that side of town. Cars were almost piled upon one another. Some were going to the airport; others, who knew where. Traveling on the 405 from the Santa Monica was like risking a bad sunburn. You didn’t want to stay out there too long.

 

 

Mas got off the short stretch of the 90, went on the Marina Freeway, and then finally drove into the Sawtelle District. It had changed a lot. Instead of sleepy storefronts, there were new mini-malls full of fancy cars. Bookstores and video rental places with neon Japanese signs. Sawtelle had moved up in the world.

 

 

Chochin’s was on the edge of the business district, between the new and the old. The building itself looked kept up, but it seemed like it was one foot away from tumbling into nothingness. For one thing, there was no sign. Not anywhere. Second of all, there were no windows.

 

 

The parking lot was virtually empty, aside from a beat-up Chevrolet with a tarnished hardtop, and a white Acura. Mas opted to park across the street, near a new mini-mall. He cautiously approached the nondescript building, glancing through the glass door. Dark. All he could make out was a stand with a display of fake flowers.

 

 

He had heard about these hostess bars but had never gone inside one. They were reserved for big shots from Japan, or the
sukebe
rich ones over here who liked to have a pretty woman with their beer and sake.

 

 

Women had never been Mas’s weakness, even during his younger years when his hair was black and full. Mas liked a different kind of excitement, which involved dice, money, and cards. Gambling, that’s what pulsed through his veins more than any other kind of lust. He couldn’t imagine paying money for young girls to sit down and talk to him. A waste of time and a waste of money.

 

 

But he knew plenty of other men with different tastes and passions. Riki Kimura, for example, who probably chased everything that he couldn’t have. It didn’t surprise Mas that Chochin’s would be one of his L.A. hangouts.

 

 

A mailman, wearing a light-blue shirt and gray shorts, approached the nondescript building. “It’s closed until five, I think,” he said, pushing some letters through a slot in the door.

 

 

Mas grunted and shoved his hands in his pockets. Last thing he wanted to do was make small talk in front of a place like Chochin’s.

 

 

The mailman was tall, with gray hair everywhere, from the top of his head to his arms and knobby legs. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know what kind of establishment this is, would you? Recently got this route, and I tell you, I sometimes see some pretty women coming out of this place.”

 

 

This mailman had too much time on his hands, Mas figured. Living off the energy of other people’s lives, instead of finding it in his own. “Dunno,” Mas said, and left for Haruo’s Honda. As he passed the parking lot, two girls came out of the back door of the building. One was so thin that she barely filled out one-half of her leather miniskirt. Mas couldn’t make out the other girl, only that she kept her head down like a sick animal. As they proceeded to a red Corolla next to the sidewalk, the thin girl stroked the other one’s back. It was obvious that the one hunched over was upset, even crying.

 

 

Mas slowed his gait and snuck a look, a long one this time. He had seen the sobbing girl before. Her skin was white and smooth as a newborn’s, except for two red marks on her cheeks. His mind flipped back in time. Keiko’s ramen house, he remembered. It was the girl with the tadpole eyes, except now they were almost swollen shut from despair.

 

 

 

Mas got back into the Honda and then traveled east along the Santa Monica Freeway. The downtown skyscrapers were barely visible in the late-afternoon smog, and Mas knew he had one more stop to make. The Empress Hotel, in Little Tokyo.

 

 

There was nothing imperial about the Empress Hotel. In fact, they should have called it Hole Hotel or Dirty Inn. Even Mas himself felt apprehensive about entering a place that rented rooms by the week. He had a friend who had once lived in such a place, years ago. One of the hotels was being closed down, and Haruo and Mas had gone down to help him. He had had a stroke, and couldn’t walk so good, and the manager had just left him out there on the sidewalk. All the electricity had been turned off, and the remaining residents, all
kuru-kuru-pa,
wandered around the hallways like ghosts. They had little grip on reality, but enough so that they could at least cash their social security checks and buy food in the grocery store. Within weeks they, too, would be loaded into trucks and deposited into the heart of skid row.

 

 

He parked the Honda at the meter in front of the boarded-up chop suey restaurant. How many times had he, Chizuko, and Mari eaten off their thick ceramic plates? The entrance to the Empress Hotel was on the side, up a narrow flight of stairs. When Mas got to the top, he saw two men, a black man and what looked like a Chinese, sitting on the second flight of stairs.