The Flower Master (Rei Shimura #3) (5 page)

"Sakura," Aunt Norie moaned. "Sakura!"

When the police came, I was stunned to see among the stern-looking blue-suited men, a young Japanese officer with unruly black hair and warm brown eyes, that I knew well. Lieutenant Hata, of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, had helped me through a series of adventures the year before. I shouldn't have been surprised to see him there, since Roppongi was his territory. He raised one eyebrow slightly as a sign of greeting but didn't say anything more, probably due to the presence of an inspector from the National Police Agency. The inspector was a bossy-looking man in his forties who was loudly asking questions of the doorman, the only male Kayama employee in sight.

As this inspector started querying Aunt Norie, she broke down sobbing on the shoulder of Miss Okada. Lieutenant Hata urged her to sit down, and the inspector began grilling me. I was going over the sequence of events as carefully as possible, when the school's elevator announced its arrival with an electronic chirp. As the doors parted I saw Natsumi Kayama's bright yellow and orange dress. She had her back to us and was arguing loudly with somebody in the elevator.

"I cannot stand the way you behave!" she was saying to whoever was with her. As her companion hit the elevator door to keep it from closing and stepped around her, I recognized the cool young man who had been at the previous day's ikebana class. Instead of jeans, he was wearing a loose-fitting linen suit. He looked elegant and intensely annoyed, as he stepped around Natsumi and headed down the hall.

"You can't do it. Don't try!" Natsumi hustled down the hail after him, but at seeing all of us, she stopped and bowed. "Oh, I'm sorry! My brother and I had a slight disagreement. I hope we didn't disturb you."

So the insolent-looking young man who'd been lounging in the back of the class was a Kayama. It made sense. Even though women made up the vast majority of the millions of ikebana practitioners in Japan and throughout the world, men were almost always the school headmasters.

"Why aren't you at the front desk?" Takeo asked Miss Okada. "If the police need help, you should have telephoned Mrs. Koda."

"She's not here! I looked everywhere!" Aunt Norie spoke shrilly, her first real sentence since the police had come.

Lieutenant Hata's attention turned from me to the Kayama heir. As he began introducing himself to Takeo Kayama, the young man cut him off.

"Nice to see you. We already donated money to the neighborhood beautification campaign."

Lieutenant Hata smiled tightly and told Takeo that he was not there to solicit funds. He explained to him that Norie and I had found Sakura Sato upstairs, and that the medics who had tended to her had declared her deceased.

At this retelling of the cold, hard facts, Natsumi gave a small bleat and swayed as if she was going to faint. Takeo caught her by the arm just as the elevator door opened once more, and a half dozen flower-arranging students filed out. The ladies stopped short at the sight of all the men in blue.

"I thought the school was officially closed! How many people are in the building?" The National Police inspector sounded furious.

"I don't know exactly, " Takeo Kayama said. "With staff and other students, perhaps thirty."

"In a ten-story building? That is relatively few."

"Floors six through eight are vacant space," Miss Okada explained. "Ten is the Kayama family penthouse, and as you can see, the iemoto's children are here."

"Seal the exits," the inspector directed two assistants. "Miss Okada, please help them."

"But our families are expecting us to come home to make dinner," Eriko said. She obviously had no idea of what was going on. The other Japanese women began murmuring, and the two foreigners in the group, Lila Braithwaite and Nadine St. Giles, looked toward me for help. Mari Kumamori, the student with a talent for pottery, seemed frozen in place.

"Sakura Sato is dead," I said in English. Lila gasped and Nadine reached toward her, inadvertently knocking against the receptionist's table. The calla lily arrangement fell over, spilling water across the glossy rosewood surface. The spreading water on the red wood reminded me of Sakura's blood, which by this time had probably flowed enough to make a red sea.

The National Police Agency inspector tapped the slate floor impatiently with the tip of an umbrella. "Shimura-san, we need you and your niece to accompany us upstairs and retrace your steps toward the scene of the death."

"I can't. Oh, please." Aunt Norie began sobbing, and Eriko rushed to embrace her friend.

"She is in shock. She must take a rest," Eriko said sternly to Lieutenant Hata.

"Yes, I've been trying to get her to sit down for the last five minutes. Can you help with that? In the meantime, the niece will accompany me upstairs," Lieutenant Hata said. I followed him into the elevator, admiring the way he hit the door-close button so swiftly that the inspector had no chance to follow us. Well, he would probably be busy enough questioning all the ladies.

"The National Police Agency heard what happened over a scanner. Murder is big enough news for them to get involved in Metropolitan Police business. Especially in this neighborhood." He raised his eyebrows at me. "I'm sorry, Shimura-san. How are you?"

"Pretty upset. Do I have to look again?"

"Not so much at the body, but at the scene. I want you to explain again what you noticed before and after you entered the room. I'm hoping that will help you remember more details than you told us downstairs."

I'd thought that I'd done a pretty thorough job of talking. I didn't respond, just stared at the elevator floor. There were a few cherry blossoms in a corner that had probably fallen off the bundle of flowers a student was taking home.

"It will take only a minute, Shimura-san." As we stepped off the elevator, Hata and I took off our shoes, leaving them with a line of footwear that had been taken off by crime personnel already collecting evidence in the room.

I walked forward in my sheer stockings with the worsening run in them and looked at Sakura's body.

To my relief, her blood hadn't formed a lake. It had not dripped much further than her collarbone. A police photographer tiptoed around her taking photographs, while three other officers crawled on the floor collecting pieces of dirt for later analysis.

Sakura looked the same. The scissors were still buried in her neck. But there was something different about the lighting. I said, "The window blinds were open when I walked in and saw my aunt and Sakura. Somebody closed them."

"We did that for lighting. And to keep people outside from looking in," the photographer said.

The Kayama Kaikan was covered in mirrored glass; you could see out but not in during daylight hours. I supposed the photographer hadn't thought of that. In fact, the only reason the blinds were ever used was because the midday sun could be blinding. The day before, Sakura had asked for the blinds to be drawn so that she could see her work better.

"Sir, there is a suspicious package outside the classroom door."

Another officer came in from the hallway to Hata, and we followed him out to Mrs. Morita's furoshiki. I explained the package contained a box of plates that had been consigned to me.

"Just in case, may I check inside?" Hata asked me.

"Sure."

"Dust for prints," Hata said, and the young officer untied the furoshiki and spread powder over the wooden box, quickly tracing the fingerprints I was sure would prove to be Mrs. Morita's and mine.

When the box was carefully opened, the other officer became very excited. "Someone must have stolen one of these antique plates. The box with five spaces has only four filled."

"I was given four," I explained. "That's why I'm trying to sell them."

From the way he and the photographer exchanged glances, they obviously thought it was a lost cause.

Lieutenant Hata rode the elevator down to the second floor with me.

"Do you need assistance getting home?" he asked.

"You mean you'll let me go free?" I was amazed, given my previous experiences with the Japanese police.

"You're not going to flee the country, are you?"

I shook my head. "I'm just going to northeast Tokyo. My new address is on this business card."

"We will keep you and your aunt informed about everything. This was a terrible thing for you to witness, but I know you will have the strength to get through."

Lieutenant Hata let me use his pocket phone to call my cousin Tsutomu 'Tom' Shimura at St. Luke's International Hospital. Aunt Norie was too shaken to travel back to Yokohama alone, but she insisted that I not go out of my way to accompany her home. After I told Tom the facts, he said he would get another doctor to cover his shift and come to the Kayama Kaikan to take his mother home.

True to his word, a half-hour later Tom had arrived, still wearing a white doctor's coat over a nondescript gray suit. A few of the ikebana students looked at him approvingly; he was in his early thirties, handsome, and without a wedding ring, perfect for somebody's daughter.

"How did this happen, Rei?" Tom's face was red, as if he'd run for miles instead of just stepping out of the taxi I saw waiting outside.

"We were in the wrong place at the wrong time," I said to him in English, which he understood well. I was tired of all the ladies listening. At first they had been upset at being detained by the police. Now they were fascinated, taking in every word for gossip broadcasts of the future.

But Tom had turned his attention away from me and was staring hard at Takeo Kayama, who was standing in his glamorous wrinkled linen and talking to the National Police Agency inspector in a voice too low for us to hear. I wanted to ask Tom if he knew Takeo, but there wasn't a chance. He was busy shepherding his mother into the waiting taxi for an insulated, expensive ride home.

The Chiyoda Line was jammed with evening rush-hour commuters. Just twenty minutes, I promised myself. Twenty minutes and I'd be home. The afternoon before, people on the subway had steered clear of me because of my armload of cherry blossoms. Now I had been contaminated by murder, but there was no outward sign. Office ladies and salarymen were molded into my back, while schoolchildren filled the spaces under my arms. Following subway etiquette, we pretended not to be aware of how closely we were touching. Nobody noticed me as I silently began to cry.

Outside Sendagi Station, I wiped my damp eyes with some tissues given to me by a young woman hawker wearing a doctor's coat similar to Tom's, but in the style of a minidress.

"Cherry blossom allergies, neh?" the hawker commented sympathetically. "These tissues are distributed with the compliments of Nezu Natural Medicine Clinic. Please give the clinic a try!"

I sniffled a thank-you and began my walk up Sansaki-zaka into Yanaka, the Edo-period village that had survived World War II bombings with many of its buildings, and almost all of its charm, intact. I adored my neighborhood, where there was a traditional cracker or tofu shop on almost every street, and the residents decorated the narrow pavement with potted plants and unchained bicycles. Yanaka had security and warmth and history like no other place in Tokyo.

Once inside my apartment, I double-chained the steel door and turned two deadbolt locks. Despite the safety of the neighborhood, I couldn't shake patterns that I'd learned growing up in San Francisco. I curled up on my futon couch and gazed around the room, lit only by two paper-shaded lanterns. They filled the room with shadows, a look I used to think romantic. That night it felt spooky.

Even though the police had let us go home, I knew that my aunt's future was not secure. Norie was the one who had bought the ikebana scissors that had been in Sakura's neck. We'd been in the school just fifteen minutes before the pruners had found their way into her throat.

How could my own flesh and blood be a killer? It was unfathomable. Still, I hadn't seen what had happened when Norie first stepped into the classroom and found Sakura. My father had told me that a person suffering a psychotic break could commit acts and not have any recollection of what had happened. When Aunt Norie finally spoke a few words to the police, she'd moaned about not being able to remember everything that had happened inside the classroom. She also had not mentioned her argument with Sakura. I doubted that would stay secret after the other flower arrangers had talked to the police.

I felt too shaken to make dinner, so I drank a cup of green tea and took a few bites out of a sembei. The salty-sweet cracker soothed my stomach and made me crave another. Before long I had finished the five-pack and walked into the closet-like space that qualified as my kitchen to throw away the wrapping. The blinking light on the answering machine stopped me, and I pressed play.

"Rei? This is Lila Braithwaite, from icky-bana." She was mispronouncing the word for flower arranging the way many North Americans did, instead of using the phonetic "ee-kay-bah-nah." I listened as Lila continued in her brisk, happy voice. "I'm glad you called, and I'd love to talk with you about antiques. I'll be at home tomorrow morning until eleven. I live in Roppongi Hills, number seven-oh-two. Call me if you can stop in for a visit."

Obviously she had made the call before Sakura died. I wrote down the apartment number but not the street directions. Roppongi Hills had been my last address. No doubt her apartment was even larger than the comfortable two-bedroom model I'd shared with Hugh. Going back would be horrible. I imagined walking past the concierge, who would remember me, and then having to travel upstairs in the elevator, stopping a few floors short of the place where Hugh and I had lived in unmarried bliss. I couldn't go back.

I dialed Lila, thinking that she probably wouldn't want me to come, not after what had happened at the flower-arranging school.

"Oh, it's you!" Lila sounded out of breath when she answered. "I just got back from the Kayama School. The police talked to all of us. It was absolutely awful. I wish that I could disappear into a hot bath for a few hours, but my little ones need dinner, and I'm going crazy."