Woman with a Blue Pencil (19 page)

The clerk glanced down at the guest register, then back at the wall of keys.

“Mr. Czernicek is out.”

Sumida nodded. “I'll wait.” He started toward the modest but comfortably furnished lobby.

“Not here you won't,” the night clerk said.

Sumida stopped and turned. “What?”

“No Japs hanging around the lobby.”

Sumida knew he could reach over the counter and pull the string bean over it, then break him in two over his knee. But what was the percentage in that? “Look, he'll be here any minute.”

“Then you won't have to wait outside too long.”

Sumida didn't have to wait outside at all, as Czernicek just then entered the lobby, his coat fluttering about him as if he were Doug Fairbanks. In his hand, he carried a file. “We need to go up to my room,” he said, approaching Sumida but not offering his hand.

Sumida wouldn't have shaken it anyway.

“We've got things to discuss,” Czernicek continued.

“Yes we do,” Sumida affirmed.

Czernicek strode to the front desk. “512,” he said to the string bean clerk, who handed over the key.

“You going to take that Jap up to your room?” the clerk asked.

“He's a Chink,” Czernicek answered. “Don't sweat it.”

The desk clerk didn't like it. But he turned back to a novel he had open behind the counter.

Sumida and Czernicek were silent in the open grill elevator.

“You can take a seat over there, near the window,” Czernicek said, after he opened his room door and flipped on the light.

Sumida entered.

Czernicek closed the door after himself and casually set the file on top of a weathered dresser. “I've got to take a piss,” he said, walking into the bathroom. He didn't bother closing the door.

Sumida did not sit but stood, waiting, listening to the heavy stream from the john. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves and checked the pistol in the back waistband of his trousers—the .38 Special he had taken the night before from Tony Fortuna, who'd previously taken it from the unconscious hulk on the sofa.

The toilet flushed.

Czernicek emerged into the hotel room, still zipping his trousers. “Better now.”

Sumida wasn't going to waste any time. He stepped toward Czernicek, extending the business card he had taken from Dr. Shinoda's dental office with the appointment scribbled on the back. “I just found this lying here beside the bed,” he lied. “It must have fallen out of your jacket.”

Czernicek took the card and looked at it. Then he slipped it casually into his trousers pocket.

“He's your dentist,” Sumida said, allowing for no denial.

Czernicek's eyes narrowed. His thought registered on his movie-star face: had he allowed a moment's lapse, carelessness, exposure? His expression turned to one of aggression. “I didn't say anything about him being my dentist.”

“But you took the card without a second thought.”

“Look, what kind of game are you playing at, Sumida?”

“Earlier, you mentioned using ‘cut-rate' Japanese dentistry,” Sumida calmly explained.

“Lots of people go to this Shinoda,” Czernicek said.

“We're not talking about Dr. Shinoda.”

Czernicek waited.

“That office is where Kyoko used to work,” Sumida continued. “But you already knew that, Czernicek. Everybody knew. It was at the public inquest. What wasn't public, however, was that you'd been a patient of Dr. Shinoda and that you met my wife there.”

Czernicek sighed as if bored.

Sumida continued. “I don't know how you charmed her. The usual ways, I'd guess. Good looks. Cop. But you ought to know that she was already unhappy at home. With me. I'll admit that. So don't pat yourself too much on the back for having taken her away.”

“I didn't take nobody.”

“She was a beautiful woman,” Sumida said. “I commend your taste.”

“She
was
a beautiful woman,” Czernicek snapped, his patience exhausted. “Too damn good for you. Too damn good for any of you. I wonder, how is it that Jap women are so much better looking than their men? I don't understand how there're even any purebred Jap babies, considering the sorry ass Jap men your women have to fuck. But your wife didn't mean anything to me. Understand? I got chippies on every block of this city. You met one today at lunch. The truth is, I can't even keep them straight. And why would I bother?”

“So she didn't mean more to you than any of the others?”

“That's right. She was just another piece of ass. An exotic one, at least.”

“So why did you kill her?”

“Kill her?” Czernicek laughed and sat down on the bed. “You've completely gone around the bend.”

Sumida knew Czernicek was armed and dangerous. Now, having broached the subject of Kyoko's murder, this was no longer a time for subtlety. Reaching into his back waistband, Sumida withdrew the .38, pointing it at Czernicek's head. “Don't move,” he said. He was glad that his voice betrayed little of the anxiety he felt. Glad too that his hand was steady. Until now, he hadn't been sure either would be the case. He sorted through the books and movies he'd studied for what to say next. Spade, the Continental Op, even Nick Charles . . . “With two fingers gently remove your weapon from its holster and drop it on the carpet, kicking it toward me.”

Czernicek grinned. “Which is it, Sumida? ‘Don't move?' Or ‘remove my weapon?' See, your orders kind of contradict each other.”

“Don't get smart with me, Czernicek.”

“Hey, you're the professor,” Czernicek said. “The smart one. I'm the good looking one.”

Sumida motioned with the .38. “Remove your goddamn gun. Drop it on the carpet and kick it toward me. And if you try anything funny you should be assured that even an amateur couldn't miss your pretty face from this range.” Sumida felt a surge of confidence. “And I'm not as much an amateur as you may think.”

Sighing, Czernicek did as Sumida asked.

Without looking down, Sumida kicked Czernicek's handgun further out of reach, under the bed.

“Kyoko
was
something special to you, whatever you claim,” Sumida said, his hand hot on the big gun. “Otherwise she would still be alive. Just like your string of waitresses are alive. But Kyoko wasn't like them.”

Czernicek shook his head. “I don't like to disappoint you, but she was
nothing
to me.”

Sumida waited. He held the gun.

“The truth is,” Czernicek said after a moment, “I hadn't thought of her since we put her file in the cold cases a few weeks after the crime. It was only seeing you that brought her to mind at all.”

“That's a lie.”

Czernicek looked away, as if frustrated. “I slept with your wife,” he said. “Sorry. But even you admit I didn't break up your already failing marriage.” His manner turned more reasonable. “So why don't you put down the gun. I'll stand up right here and let you take your best shot at me, right in the kisser. Knock me out cold if you can. I deserve it. Man to man. Then we can get past this woman thing and back to the pressing matter, which is that you and I
don't seem to exist
in this place, which I used to think was just Los Angeles.”

Sumida wouldn't allow himself to be distracted, even by the existential confusion that had characterized his last hours. “You lie about my wife.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“Because when I walked into the periodicals room this morning at the library I was told that you'd already checked out the newspaper for January 12, 1941, the day the story broke about Kyoko's murder.”

That seemed to take Czernicek aback.

“Oh, it didn't strike me as suspicious at first,” Sumida continued. “It should have, but everything seemed so disorienting then. My mind's cleared now, even if I still don't understand how things work with you and me and the rest of the world.” He shook his head. “That world stuff's a real pisser, huh? It's like we two were excised from the universe and now we've been dropped back into some variation of it in where we never existed. I don't understand why. I don't have to. I don't care. Because I'm standing here now just thinking about that newspaper. And I can't imagine why you'd request that particular day's edition if you'd ‘forgotten' all about Kyoko's existence until you saw me, as you claim?” He didn't wait for an answer. “Sure, you were confused back in the periodicals room. You wanted to know if the murder you'd committed had followed you, now that everything else had seemed to fall away. And you were probably relieved to learn that it hadn't. But there I was. You should have killed me the minute you saw me. Before I got clear in my mind. But now it's too late. Now, I know you killed her.”

“You're insane.”

“No. It makes sense. The white man who nobody at the hotels recognized . . . It was you. And this is LA. So who's going to testify against a police detective, especially when he's the one asking the questions, heading up the ‘investigation'? Who's dumb enough to think anything but an early grave would await such testimony? So you got a free pass. Except from me.”

“So what if you're right?” Czernicek asked calmly. “What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

Sumida nodded, equally calm.

“That would be a mistake.”

“Why?”

Czernicek laughed. He gestured with his chin toward the dresser, where he'd dropped the file that he'd carried into the hotel. “Because it's possible you're right and wrong at the same time.”

Sumida waited.

Czernicek shrugged. “I killed her down on the docks. You're right about her being kind of special. But she'd had her fill of me. For all I know, the little Geisha wanted to go back to you. And I didn't like that. I didn't have to tolerate that. So I shot her in the head. Quick, painless.”

It took all the will Sumida possessed not to pull the trigger right then.

“Just a splash off the dock and she was gone for somebody else to fish out,” Czernicek continued. “Nothing new down at the harbor. The thing barely even makes news when it's somebody with brown skin or black skin or yellow skin. So you'd be right to shoot me dead now, except for one thing.”

Sumida waited. He'd be damned if he'd ask.

Czernicek broke first. “This evening I got into my old office at the station, flashing my badge and claiming to be new, since nobody recognized me. But my key still worked. It'll come as no surprise that the office wasn't mine anymore. I searched it anyway. Turns out the place belongs to the head of some special anti-Jap task force working with the Feds. Spy stuff. National security. I used another of my keys on the filing cabinet.” Again, Czernicek gestured with his chin toward the file. “I borrowed that file because you'd be interested, buddy.”

“I thought you were going to tell me why I shouldn't shoot you dead right now.”

“Because your wife is alive,” Czernicek said.

Sumida froze. He wouldn't be taken in.

“Just look at the file,” Czernicek said.

Sumida approached the detective, keeping the .38 pointed at the big man's head. He wasn't going to get so close that Czernicek might take a swing at him; rather, he drew just close enough to kick Czernicek on the point of his chin, sending him sprawling backward over the length of the bed and hard against the wall, unconscious. Sumida dragged the man to the radiator. There, he removed Czernicek's keys and handcuffs and bound him to the metal piping. Last, he stuffed the bastard's mouth with a hand towel in case he woke and tried to call for help.

Sumida still planned to kill him.

But first the file . . .

He opened it. On top was a photo.

It was Kyoko, dressed in a luxurious gown that Sumida could never imagine being able to buy for her. And her hair was done up in an uncharacteristically extravagant, traditional fashion. But there was no mistaking her face. She was as beautiful as he remembered—her skin silk, her cheek bones and chin somehow imperially strong without diminishing her soft femininity, her hair streaked with the line of white that she'd had since early childhood. True, in this photograph her expression was one Sam had not seen before—determined, heedless. But the face was unmistakable. Written in grease pencil across the front of the 8X10 were the words: “The Orchid.” He didn't understand the reference.

The photo was dated: 1/19/42. Just a few days ago . . .

Typed papers clipped to the photo suggested the Feds believed she was an enemy to America.

That was impossible.

Kyoko was no traitor, whatever melodramatic name they'd assigned to her. And there was worse—the documents outlined a plan for her assassination, scheduled for this night at the Pike in Long Beach.

Czernicek's killing would keep.

Sumida grabbed the detective's wallet—he'd need money for a cab and might be able to put the police ID to some use. Then he raced from the room, locking the door behind him, and descended the five flights down the stairway. He lowered his hat over his eyes, knowing the eight o'clock curfew complicated his movements. But he wasn't going to let that stop him. When he got to the lobby, he slipped unseen past the clerk and into the blacked-out LA streets. In such darkness, who'd even be able to pick him out as Japanese?

He wondered: what would a working amusement park be like with most of its lights dimmed or shut off altogether? All shadows and noise. It would provide just the cover he needed, he thought.