I went downstairs and sat at one of the two tables in the deepening darkness until Lou Poitras pulled up out front in a light green Dodge. A black-and-white pulled up behind him and the plain white van the crime scene guys use pulled up behind the van. Cops on parade.
I went to the front door and opened it. Across the street, the ATF cops were on their feet in the big window, ZZ Top screaming into the phone, the other one pulling on a jacket. I gave them a little wave.
Poitras said, "Knock off that shit and come in here."
If Lou Poitras wasn't a cop he could rent himself out as Mighty Joe Young. He spends about an hour and a half every morning six days a week pumping iron in a little weight room in his back yard in Northridge, trying to see how big he can get. He's good at it. I'd once seen him punch through a Cadillac's windshield and pull a big man out over the steering wheel.
He shouldered past me. "Where?"
"In the back. Up the stairs."
One of the uniforms was a black guy with a bullet head and a thick neck and hands four sizes too big for him. His name tag read LEONARD. His partner was a blond kid with a skimpy Larry Bird mustache and hard eyes. Leonard mumbled something and the blond kid took the crime scene guys into the back after Poitras.
"You don't want to see?" I said.
Leonard said, "I seen enough."
I went back to the two tables and sat. Leonard found the lights, turned them on, then went back up front. He leaned against a floor-to-ceiling case of toy robots with his arms crossed, and stared out into the street. You do this job long enough, you know what's going to be back there even without going back there.
The little door chime rang and the two ATF cops from the insurance office came in. They showed their badges to Leonard and then they went into the rear. When they passed me, the one in the ZZ Top tee shirt said, "You're in deep shit, asshole."
Lou Poitras came back around the bamboo steamers and said, "Jesus Christ." He looked pale.
I nodded.
The blond kid came out like it was nothing. He went back to Leonard and said, "You should see that, Lenny." His voice was loud.
In fifteen minutes the place was swarming with cops like flies on a nervous dog. Someone had found a Dunkin' Donuts and brought back two boxes of crullers and about twenty little Styrofoam cups of coffee. Crime scene specialists from the Hollenbeck Division were dusting everything and snapping pictures and asking me every two minutes if I had moved anything before they got there, and every time they asked I said no.
Two guys came in from the L.A. County Medical Examiner's Office, but neither of them looked like Jack Klugman. One of them had a twitch. More than one cop came out of the back and sat down with his face in his hands, and everybody pretended not to notice when they did.
I was working on my second cup of coffee when the bell tinkled and the ATF cop with the bantamweight's face came in. He was wearing tan chinos and a pale lavender rugby shirt and a light khaki windbreaker and Topsiders with no socks. Like he'd been at home about to sit down to dinner with his family. Poitras went over and talked with him and then they went into the back. When they came back, ZZ Top was with them. Poitras and the bantamweight came over to me. ZZ Top pushed aside the cruller box, sat on the table, crossed his arms, and glared at me. Cops are tough when they've got you outnumbered.
Poitras said, "This is Terry Ito. He works out of the Asian Task Force, Japanese sub-unit."
I put out my hand. Ito didn't take it. He said, "What were you doing with Nobu Ishida?"
"Taking chopsticks lessons." The muscles in the tops of my shoulders and down through my mid-back were tight and aching.
Ito looked at Poitras. Poitras shrugged. "He's like that."
Ito looked back at me. "I think maybe you got shit for brains. You think that's possible?"
I looked from Ito to the cop at the cruller table and back to Ito. I could still smell what I'd smelled in Ishida's office. I said, "I think somebody dropped the ball. I think someone walked in here under ZZ Top's nose and did this and walked out again and nobody said dick."
The cop on the cruller table uncrossed his arms and stood up and said, "Fuck you, asshole."
"Good line," I said. "Schwarzenegger, right? The Terminator."
Poitras said, "Cut the bullshit."
Ito said, "Jimmy."
A tall black uniform came out of the back, took off his hat, and said, "Who'd do something like that?" Then he went outside. I was breathing hard and Jimmy was breathing hard but everybody else looked bored. Jimmy sat down again but didn't cross his arms.
Ito turned away from Jimmy and looked at me. "How long were you outside, hotshot?"
"Maybe six hours."
"You see anybody?"
I sipped some coffee.
Ito nodded. "Yeah, that's what I thought." He went over to the cruller table, picked up a cup of the coffee, peeled off its top, and took a long sip. Steam was rising off the cup but the heat didn't seem to bother him. He said, "Who's your client?"
"A guy named Bradley Warren. The Pacific Men's Club is naming him Man of the Month tomorrow."
"Man of the Month."
"Yeah. You should get in on that."
Jimmy said, "Shit."
I told them who Warren was and that he had hired me to find the Hagakure and that I had turned up Nobu Ishida's name as a place to start. Terry Ito listened and sipped the hot coffee and stared at me without blinking. Detectives and crime scene guys and uniforms moved around us. The two guys from the ME's office went out to their van and came back with a gurney. Ito called to them.
"When did it happen?"
The shorter of the two said, "Maybe eight hours."
Ito looked at me and nodded. I shrugged. Ito looked at Jimmy, but Jimmy was staring at the floor and flexing his jaws.
I drank coffee and told them about my first visit to Ishida's shop and about the three guys sitting at the tables and about Ishida. I said, "The stiff upstairs with the missing finger was one of them. There was another guy with a bad left eye, and a big kid, young, named Eddie."
Ito looked at Jimmy again. Jimmy looked up and said, "Eddie have tattoos? Here?" He touched his arms just below the elbows.
"Yeah."
Jimmy looked at Ito and nodded. "Eddie Tang."
I said, "About three hours after I left Ishida's, the client's wife got a phone call saying they'd burn the house down if the Warrens didn't call off the cops. I wanted to work Ishida some more, maybe take a look around his house, that kind of thing, so I came back here today."
Jimmy said, "That's horseshit. You don't threaten somebody to make the cops back off."
I said, "Yeah. You cops are tough, all right."
Ito said, "You're some smart for a guy standing where you're standing."
"It's not hard in this company."
Jimmy didn't say anything.
I could feel the pulse in my temples and a sharp pain behind my right eye. It made me blink. Ito stared at me a long time, then gave a little nod. "Yeah, you're smart. Maybe if you're smart enough you can get what's in that room back there out of your head. Maybe if you're tough enough, what you saw back there won't bother you." His voice was softer than you would've expected.
I took a deep breath and let it out. I rolled my shoulders to try to work out some of the tension. Poitras was leaning against a shelf of tea trays and little lacquer cups with his arms crossed. Crossed like that, they looked swollen even more than normal. Ito was good, all right.
He said, "Thing is, what's back there ain't so special around here. This is Little Tokyo, Chinatown. You oughta see what the Mung have going down in Little Saigon."
Jimmy said, "How about those pricks in Koreatown?"
Ito nodded at him, then looked back at me. Thinking about those pricks in Koreatown made him smile. "This ain't America, white boy. This is Little Asia, and it's ten thousand years old. We've got stuff down here like nothing you've ever seen."
I said, "Yeah." Mr. Tough.
He said, "If Nobu Ishida wanted you out of the picture, he wouldn't do it by calling up some broad and making a threat." He swiveled around and looked at Jimmy. "Call Hollenbeck Robbery and see who has this book thing. Find out what they know."
"Sure, Terry." Jimmy didn't move.
I said, "What's the big deal with Nobu Ishida?"
Ito looked back at me and thought about it for a while. Like maybe he would tell me and maybe he wouldn't. "You know what the yakuza is?"
"Japanese mafia."
Jimmy smiled, wide and mindless, the way a pit bull smiles before he bites you. He said, "How about that, Terry. You think we got something as pussy as the mafia down here?"
Ito said, "Call Hollenbeck."
I said, "Ishida was in the yakuza?"
Jimmy smiled some more, then pushed off the cruller table and walked out. Ito turned back to me. "The yakuza is big in white slavery and dope and loan-sharking like the mafia, but that's where it stops. The stiff in back with the missing finger, he's what you would think of as a mafia soldier. But the mafia doesn't have any soldiers like him. These guys, they've got a little code they live by. Somewhere along the line this guy screwed up and the code required him to chop off his own finger to make up for it. I've seen guys with three, four fingers missing from one hand."
I drank more coffee.
Ito said, "The real headcases get their entire body tattooed from just below the elbows to just above the knees. Those guys are yakuza assassins." He touched his forehead. "Bug fuck."
"Eddie," I said.
Ito nodded. "Yeah. Eddie's a real up-and-comer. Local kid. Arrest record could fill a book. We got him made for half a dozen killings but we can't prove it. That's the bitch with the yakuza. You can't prove it. People down here, something happens, they don't see it and they don't talk about it. So you've got to put a guy like Ishida's business under surveillance for eight months and pray some hotshot private license doesn't come along and tip him that he's being watched and blow the whole thing. You don't want that to happen because Ishida is overseeing a major operation to import brown heroin from China and Thailand for a guy named Yuki Torobuni who runs the yakuza here in L.A. and if you get Ishida maybe you get Torobuni and shut the whole fucking thing down." Behind us, the two guys from the coroner's office wheeled out the gurney. There was a dark gray body bag sitting on it. Whatever was in the bag looked rumpled.
I said, "If they're moving dope in, the guys down in Watts and East L.A. aren't going to like it. Maybe what happened in back is an effort to eliminate competition."
Ito looked at Poitras. "You were right, Poitras. This boy is bright."
"He has his days."
"Unless," I said, "it has something to do with the Hagakure."
Terry Ito smiled at me, then walked over to the cruller box and selected one with green icing. He said, "You're smart, all right, but not smart enough. This isn't your world, white boy. People disappear. Entire families vanish in the most outrageous manner. And there's never a witness, never a clue." Ito gave me a little more of the smile. "Have you read a translation of the Hagakure?"
"No."
The smile went nasty. "There's a little thing in there called Bushido. Bushido says that the way of the warrior is death." Ito stopped smiling. "Whoever took your little book, pray it's not the yakuza." He stared at me for a little while longer, then he took his cruller and went into the back.
Poitras uncrossed the huge arms and shook his head. "Sometimes, Hound Dog, you are a real asshole."
"Et tu, Brutè?"
He walked away.
They kept me around until a dick from Hollenbeck got there and took my statement. It was 3:14 in the morning when they finished with me, and Poitras had long since gone. I went out into the cool night air onto streets that were empty of round-eyed faces. I thought about the yakuza and people disappearing and I tried to imagine things like nothing I'd ever seen. I tried, but all I kept seeing was what someone had done to Nobu Ishida.
The walk to the car was long and through dark streets, but only once did I look behind me.