Woman with a Blue Pencil (6 page)

“This is my home,” Sumida said, confused. “But someone's changed everything. Who let you in?”

“I'll ask the questions,” Tony snapped.

Then the moment Sam had been awaiting arrived.

The phone rang.

Tony turned.

Sumida leaped toward him, acting on instincts developed in his youth at a karate dojo in the Bixby Knolls section of Long Beach. He didn't know that Tony wouldn't just turn and shoot him dead. But he didn't consider outcomes. He just acted.

He kicked the gun from Tony's hand.

With the handgun now on the floor across the room, roughly equidistant between the two men, Tony took an old-fashioned boxing stance, like John L. Sullivan. He snarled and motioned for his Japanese opponent to approach. Sumida obliged, moving in, his hands and feet flashing in coordinated arcs that leveled his opponent. A final kick to the sinking man rendered him unconscious. He fell hard, his head cracking audibly against the stone fireplace hearth.

The telephone stopped ringing.

Sam didn't understand what was happening. But he knew this wasn't his house. Not anymore. Just as Tony was no longer his friend, or even acquaintance, apparently.

Sumida knew he needed help.

Picking up the telephone, he dialed the number of his aunt and uncle, who cared for his ailing mother and had been like another set of parents to him.

But the phone didn't even ring. Instead, an operator informed him that no such number was in service.

“That's impossible,” he said, hanging up.

He dialed again, making certain he got it right this time.

Different operator, same message . . .

He'd drive to his aunt and uncle's house in South Gate, fifteen miles away. He had to see someone who recognized him.

He knelt and took the car keys from the pocket of the man still unconscious on the couch.

Next, he picked up the handgun that had skittered across the living room floor.

Outside, he started the big man's '39 Chrysler. As he backed out of the driveway, he noticed in the rearview mirror a shadowed figure standing across the street; the figure was further obscured by what appeared to be a hooded rain cloak. Small and lean, almost feline. He was reminded of the entering movie-house patron with whom he'd collided on his way out of the lobby. It couldn't be the same person. In any case, it was a witness . . . But he didn't stop, as he hadn't an explanation for any of it. So he gunned the car down the street. At a traffic light a few miles east on Temple, he checked the car's registration on the steering column. The owner was named Joe Lucas.

Inside the glove compartment was a leather ID wallet that contained a badge.

Lucas was LAPD.

“Shit,” Sumida murmured.

Excerpt from chapter four of
The Orchid and the Secret Agent
, a novel by William Thorne

Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1945

The first thing Jimmy Park noticed as he pulled up to his house was that Joe's car was no longer parked in the driveway and that all the lights were on inside. He sighed. When drunk, his friend couldn't be trusted with even the simplest things. He doubted Joe had locked up after himself. But at least Joe had managed to leave the house. Once a week, Joe passed out on the sofa, awakening with hangovers that would have killed a lesser man. Jimmy wondered how Joe's wife put up with it. He could barely tolerate it himself.

But, friendship was friendship.

And, after what Jimmy had seen in the past few hours in the manager's office at the movie theatre and then in the bloody alley off Seventh Street, he thought it might not have been the worst thing in the world to have had a buddy in the house tonight. Even a rye-soaked, unconscious one, which was, despite the absent Chrysler Royal, precisely what he found when he walked in the front door.

Joe sprawled, snoring, on his belly on the sofa, one arm hanging over the edge, his hand resting like a porcelain sculpture on the carpet beside the empty bottle. But that wasn't what Jimmy focused on when he first walked into the room. Nor did he wonder where Joe's car was.

That was child's play.

This was not . . .

Written in blood on the wall behind the sofa, a mere three feet over Joe's head, were more Japanese characters. The calligraphy was the same as at the movie house. Translated, it read, “Accept your friend's life as a personal gift.”

“Joe!” Jimmy called. “Wake up.”

Joe kept on snoring.

Jimmy removed the .45 from the pocket of his raincoat and turned in a slow circle in the room.

The assassin could still be here.

Cautiously, Jimmy inspected the living room, kitchenette, dining room, master bedroom, bathroom, guest bedroom. He went to the back door and ran the flashlight over the backyard. Aside from an opossum scurrying away from the light, he spied nothing unusual.

Still, his senses remained sharp.

There were shadows everywhere.

He went back inside, locking the back door behind him, and returned to the living room, shaking his friend by the shoulder and emphatically calling his name, “Joe, Joe, Joe.”

At last the big man opened his eyes, though he didn't seem capable of moving another muscle. “Jimmy?”

“Yeah, what happened here, Joe?”

Joe managed to brush the empty bottle of rye with his hand, rolling it toward Jimmy. “The usual, I guess. Sorry.”

That wasn't what Jimmy was asking. But it was evidence enough that Joe wasn't aware
anything
unusual had happened. He'd slept through it. He'd be no help.

Jimmy glanced up to the blood-scrawled message on the wall.

Joe closed his eyes again, snoring.

How easy it would have been for the assassin to cut his friend's throat.

But this
personal gift
business . . .

Jimmy owed the Jap assassin nothing but a bullet between the eyes. That would be
his
personal gift.

Then he noticed something unusual about the calligraphy.

He hadn't caught the subtlety of style back at the movie house or in the alley, though he knew the writing was the same. Perhaps he'd been too distracted by the waves of police and technicians who descended upon the places. Or maybe he just needed to see the calligraphy a third time to realize it had been written by a woman.

He couldn't say for sure how he knew.

But he was certain.

He recalled that the teenagers who worked in the movie-house lobby described the “man” who went into the manager's office as being thin and wearing a cloak.

They hadn't seen his face. Or
her
face.

And then Jimmy had a terrible thought.

The assassin had used the blood of his victims to write the messages back at the movie house and in the alley.

Where had
this
blood come from?

Jimmy didn't have to look long to discover the answer.

A puddle was forming at the edges of the sofa.

“Joe!” he called again, rolling his friend onto the ground and kneeling to run his hands over his body, frantically looking for a wound.

Joe opened one eye. “Hey, you trying to take advantage of me, buddy?” he kidded, unaware of all that was going on. “You think I'm some kind of cheap date or something?”

Ignoring Joe's joking, Jimmy sighed in relief when he found no wounds.

But then he noticed the sofa.

After Joe had rolled off it, the cushions rose up a few inches, as if something had been stuffed inside, held down until now by Joe's dead weight.

Jimmy got to his feet and removed one cushion, which was enough.

Stuffed inside the sofa was his neighbor from across the street, Tony Fortuna, who sometimes came over with a bottle of amaretto when he noticed Joe's big car parked outside. The two liked to talk about Minor League baseball.

Tony's throat had been cut.

It was his blood on the walls. Used by a female hand for a perfect and terrible message in calligraphy.

This spy ring Jimmy had been alerted to . . .

They were onto him. They meant business.

He was glad his girlfriend Sun wasn't over tonight. What horrors might they have done to her?

Locking the side and then front doors, he went for the phone.

Excerpt from a letter dated April 12, 1942:

. . . I am saddened to hear that you and your parents will be forced to leave your home in the next few days. Naturally, you were the first person I thought of when I heard about the President's executive order on the radio. Somehow, I didn't anticipate the relocations taking place so quickly. I understand too that you're disappointed at having to discontinue your art history studies at UCLA. (Though, frankly, this may be a blessing in disguise, as your natural instincts as a novelist are such that I do not believe art history is the right field for you or, for that matter, that a college education is necessary to your success as a writer—look at Hemingway, no college at all! Academia can be a trap, dear boy.) Now, you will have all the time that your writing requires.

Still, these
are
difficult times (so sad that you have to leave your dog behind), and your resilience will likely be further tested. But try to remain positive. Perhaps getting away from familiar places (some of them clearly dangerous these days, a case in point being your father's violent experience with the marauding anti-Japanese bullies in LA, whom I read in TIME Magazine are becoming only more prevalent) will stimulate your work rather than restrict it. After all, I have, to date, been impressed by the versatility of your vision and feel confident that in no time you'll be re-settled and back to the daily rhythms that have produced such excellent first chapters.

Bear up, Takumi Sato, and keep up the good work. Ah to have the energy of a twenty-two year-old
and
talent! I believe you can really make something of this novel.

Sincerely,

Maxine Wakefield

Maxine Wakefield,

Associate Editor,
Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc.

THE REVISED—CHAPTER THREE

And if, through the act of a powerful magician or perverse, authorial god, your world came to belong to another man, rendering you unrecognizable even to friends and family, would you still bear the strength to be . . . you?

—James Matsumoto, chaplain at
Manzanar Relocation Camp

Leaving Echo Park, Sam Sumida drove south for ten or twelve miles, past dark, open lots and auto repair shops and junkyards that were shuttered for the night, likely guarded by heavily muscled dogs. Very few cars passed in either direction. Turning onto Florence, the businesses tended now more toward retail stores, radio repair shops, and a few gasoline stations that were open even at this hour. Occasional lights still glowed in houses interspersed among the local businesses.

It was just past midnight when Sam Sumida shut off the Chrysler in South Gate.

Of course, it was far too late for an ordinary visit, but this was no time to stand on ceremony.

Uncle Yamato and Aunt Misaki had taken in Sumida's ailing mother, Sakura, a few months earlier, when it became clear that the poor woman's mental state would no longer allow her to live on her own. Sam would have taken her in himself had it not been for the pressing matter of finding his wife's killer, which took all of his time. He was grateful his mother and her younger sister Misaki had always been so close. And Uncle Yamato was a generous man who had been like a second father to Sam, particularly after Sam's actual father had been killed in an accident at sea.

Sumida's family was small but close.

He got out of the unfamiliar car and made his way to the neatly kept, Spanish-style bungalow. He pressed the doorbell.

After a moment, a middle-aged Asian man, unfamiliar to Sumida, opened the door. He wore a dressing gown, and his hair was disheveled. He frowned at Sam. “What do you want?” he asked, holding firm to the door. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Who are you?” Sumida inquired, surprised.