Mas had been truly afraid only three times. The first time was, of course, when he stood in the black rain of the Bomb; the second, watching Chizuko being eaten by the cancer; and the third, when the Bomb returned from its hiding place in his memory. In those instances, fear slapped him square in the face and kept his legs from moving. The tangle of Kazzy’s murder was different. Here now fear slowly seeped in, causing him to run faster and faster. Hayaku, hayaku, just like the pace of the city.
He was now in Fort Lee on the thoroughfare by the bus stop in the plaza, passing familiar cafés with lit candles on the tables.
Anna Grady said that she wanted to talk to Mari, face-to-face, but there was no way Mari could risk bail by leaving New York City. Lloyd was ready to go. News of Seiko Sumi’s death had altered his thinking. Lloyd had said he thought that the run-in with the Impala in Seabrook was more a case of road rage than anything else. Apparently Mari had gotten in her share of shouting matches and short-term chases when she was behind the wheel of a vehicle. But now, with another dead Nisei, you couldn’t help but make certain connections.
But Mas told Lloyd to stay home. If Anna had taken a fancy to Kazzy, a half-Japanese man, maybe she would open up to Mas.
It was no problem locating the exact high-rise building. Three police cars, lights flashing, were parked at the loading zone, radios squawking out numbers and addresses over the crackle of static. In spite of the late hour-nine, ten?-there was a small crowd of men and women surrounding the parking lot, cordoned off by familiar yellow police tape. Huge lights had been propped up, as if it were a location for a movie shoot. Mas knew about these things because he had driven past his share of production sites in L.A.; hell, one director had paid him one hundred dollars to park his Ford gardening truck in the background of a scene.
The figure of a body was outlined on the concrete ground. The coroner’s department must have carted away the body, but had left behind a puddle of blood. Under the bright lights, the blood glistened, still wet with floating chunks of body parts-was that part of a brain? Mas felt his dinner come to his throat, but he pushed it down.
He couldn’t believe that only this remained of the chawan -haired woman so prim and precise.
The same security guard was outside with the crowd, so in spite of the high-rise being the scene of a bloody death, Mas found it easier to get to the elevator, and then to Anna Grady’s floor. The apartment door was open, more radio voices. A long, colorful ribbon decorated the knocker. Mas hadn’t noticed that before.
Police officers, men in suits and ties, and women in sweaters and slacks walked into and out of rooms, talking among themselves and taking notes. Again, no one seemed to pay attention to Mas.
The sliding-glass door was ajar, letting a cool breeze in. Mas could smell the sourness of an overworked river. A wind chime shaped like a Buddhist bell tinkled from the top of the balcony. Most of the plants had been overturned, soil dumped out, roots exposed.
“Mr. Arai, you came.”
Mas turned. Anna Grady was wearing a tight black dress with part of her chichi s showing. At her age, her breasts should have drooped down to her heso, belly button, so either she had on one amazing piece of underwear or else her body was still in tip-top shape. “Please, over here-” She gestured to a small dining room table in the corner.
Mas sat with Anna in silence for a few minutes. The display case was busted open, glass shards everywhere, and the journal and clothing were gone. They watched as police officers went from place to place-door, light switch, telephone-collecting evidence.
“That’s all they took,” Anna finally said, gesturing to the display case. “Seiko’s mother’s things. They left my jewelry. Seiko’s money-she had at least a thousand dollars in cash in her closet. All of that, untouched.”
“Book.” Mas kept staring at the destroyed display case.
“Yes, the journal’s gone. Do you think that’s what they were after?”
Mas recalled the detailed questioning by the bail bondsman. “What happen, exactly?”
Anna crossed her legs. “I was out with a friend. We went out to a concert in the city. When I came back, the police were already here, and Seiko’s body-” Anna covered her face with her hands. Her fingernails were filed and painted a funny tan shade the color of garden snails.
“Sorry, so sorry.” Mas wished that he could leave. He could barely stand it when any woman cried. He didn’t know what was worse-when it was a stranger or your wife.
“They say that she was thrown off the balcony. Why would anyone do that to Seiko?” She dabbed the corner of her eyes with her fingers and took a deep breath, making the top of her dress move up and down. “I asked for you and your daughter to come, because she had asked me about the note I sent Kazzy.”
She then leaned over to Mas, so close that he could feel the softness of her chichi s. “I’ll tell you what happened as long as you tell no one,” she whispered. “Especially Becca.”
Becca? What did she have to do with Anna Grady?
She placed a folded-up note in Mas’s hand. “Read this later,” she whispered. “Kazzy wrote me back. He messengered it to me the same day. Thursday. The day he died.”
Mas stuffed the note in his jacket pocket.
“With Kazzy dead and now Seiko, what am I going to do?” She leaned her head against Mas’s arm, and Mas could feel her soft hair on his chin.
“Mr. Arai, what the hell are you doing here?” Mas pulled away from Anna to see Detective Ghigo standing in the middle of the noisy living room.
Mas felt the blood drain from his face. Was Ghigo, the crow, ever present?
“We can ask you the same question, Detective,” Anna said. Kazzy’s ex-girlfriend knew Ghigo? “Aren’t you out of your jurisdiction?”
“Like I told you before, Mrs. Grady, the New Jersey police is working with us on the murder investigation of Kazzy Ouchi. Since we were just here interviewing you, we were called in. Just to see if there’s some kind of connection.”
“Well, there’s no connection; I can tell you that.”
“We’ll see.” Ghigo turned his attention back to Mas. “So how do you know Mr. Arai?”
“He’s a friend. Old friend.” Anna put her hand on Mas’s shoulder, snail-colored fingernails in full view.
“That’s interesting,” said Ghigo, “especially since he just arrived in New York last week.”
Before the detective could say more, his bald-headed partner called him over to the balcony. “Don’t go anywhere, Mrs. Grady,” he said.
While Ghigo’s back was turned to them, Mas rose. “I betta go.”
Anna followed Mas to the hallway, picking up her cat, Tama, on the way. “Oh, Tama- san,” she cooed in the cat’s ear. “You must be so afraid.”
“Tama, thatsu Japanese,” said Mas, who was feeling a pang of jealousy. Baka, he told himself, who would be jealous of a cat?
“Yes, I like the Japanese people. They were my first friends in this country. I trust the Japanese.”
“You ’Stonian?” Mas asked without thinking.
“Yes, I’m from Estonia. My family moved to New Jersey after World War Two. Why do you ask?”
Estonia had been taken over by a couple countries, by one twice over, isn’t that what Tug had said at the Seabrook museum? Anyone who had gone through that would be suspicious of people in power, especially those in uniform. It would make sense that Anna Grady would feel more comfortable with the people who had befriended her first. There were plenty of untrustworthy Japanese people, Mas knew that firsthand, but Anna didn’t need to know that right now.
Mas remembered the question that had brought him and Mari to Anna Grady’s apartment in the first place. “So whyzu you send him a gardenia dat night?”
“He had been coming over here regularly, wanting to talk with Seiko. She just didn’t like him at first. She said he was-what was the word she had used?-too high-tone. But we ended up getting to know each other better each time he came around. And then one day in January, it was snowing so hard, he just appeared at the apartment, his felt hat in his hands. I told him that Seiko was gone to see a friend, but he told me that he was actually here to see me.
“Then he brought out this gardenia. It was so beautiful-huge, with a wonderful smell. I told him that it looked like hope in the middle of winter. That was our first night together.”
Mas averted his eyes, as if he was watching an intimacy that he had no part of.
“I even saved the gardenia,” said Anna. “All brown and shriveled up, but I don’t care.” She went on to describe how wonderful Kazzy had been on all their dates. Mas didn’t have the stomach for such nonsense, but he knew that he had to hang in there like a dentist wiggling a rotten tooth. “We had gotten so close in a short amount of time. Kazzy even talked about marriage.”
Mas didn’t doubt it. If Kazzy had married three times, what was one more?
“But then that terrible daughter of his-”
Mas became more alert. What was that? She was talking about Becca.
“She was the one who poisoned Kazzy’s mind. She was so jealous; she couldn’t stand for another woman to be involved in her father’s life.”
Becca had just seemed like a silly female to Mas, not someone capable of any kind of poisoning, whether physical or emotional.
“You don’t believe me, do you? Well, she threatened me. Yes, she did. She even hired a private investigator to look into my past. Not only in New Jersey, but even in Estonia.”
Mas waited to see if Anna would divulge the private investigator’s findings.
“I told her that I didn’t care what she found, I wouldn’t break it off. But then Kazzy calls me. Tells me that he cares about me, but he has to end it.” Her mouth had become small and puckered. “So I sent him a gardenia last Thursday. I wanted him to remember the sweetness of our first time. But now I’m thinking that he probably used me.”
Mas pulled at one of his earlobes.
“He just wanted to see that damn journal so much.” Anna’s voice was powerful, an uppercut punch. “If he couldn’t get it through Seiko, he was going to get it through me. I was the one who Xeroxed it for him, a few pages at a time. I had to go behind Seiko’s back to do it. I felt awful, but she had already sent off a whole copy to the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles. But if they could see it, why couldn’t Kazzy? I didn’t understand.”
“You knowsu whatsu in it?”
Anna shook her head. “That journal’s cursed. You don’t want to know what’s in it.”
When Mas got home, Lloyd was still awake, his stocking feet on the coffee table. He had the television on, but he wasn’t watching it. He had been doing some heavy thinking, and wanted to hear what Mas had learned in Fort Lee.
Mas told him the whole story and then pulled out the note, folded into a small square. Lloyd unfolded the paper and read the typed message aloud:
DEAR ANNA,
UNFORTUNATELY I CANNOT MEET YOU TONIGHT.
I THINK IT’S BEST IF WE DO NOT KEEP IN TOUCH.
K-SAN
“So businesslike,” commented Lloyd. “I mean, that’s the way Kazzy was, but even this seems too cold for him.”
“Maybe because Kazzy knowsu already he gonna die.”
“That’s true,” Lloyd said. “But why didn’t Anna just hand this over to the police?”
Mas couldn’t answer that for Lloyd. He wouldn’t understand. He probably grew up learning to trust the people in power. Anna Grady and Mas knew different. That sometimes people in uniform were to be feared.
Mas silently read the note again. One thing had been nagging at him on the bus ride back to New York City. “K- san, that was on the suicide note, too. Kazzy’s MIS buddy, dis Jinx Watanabe, he tellsu us Kazzy was chanto man.”
“ Chanto, that means proper, right? Yeah, that was Kazzy, all right,” Lloyd said.
“But no chanto Japanese put ‘ san ’ on his own name.” That was an honorific reserved for other people or, in the case of Anna Grady, for cats.
Lloyd waited a beat. “That’s true. I never thought of it. Wait a minute, I have some notes from Kazzy.” Lloyd shuffled through papers on his overburdened desk and found at least six old memos. Every single one of them was typed in capital letters; every single one of them ended with one letter, a single K. No san added.
“If Kazzy so chanto, he chanto till the end,” said Mas.
“You think someone else wrote this note to Anna Grady?”
“And jisatsu note.”
“Suicide letter,” Lloyd repeated in English.
Phillip was the first person who came to Mas’s mind. And then the teenager behind the red door. Mas shared his thoughts with Lloyd.
“You think this Riley may have been the one who followed you and Mari in Seabrook?”
Mas nodded. The physical description fit, and based on the gun he’d shoved in Mas’s face, he had the temperament.
“Tomorrow,” said Lloyd, “we’ll go pay this Riley a little visit. You and I, Mr. Arai.”
The next morning, even before Takeo had a chance to cry from behind the bedroom door, Mas called Haruo.
“Mas, I just getsu home. Whatsu goin’ on with the dead man?”
“Two dead people now. Ouchi- san and a woman.”
“Woman? Toshiyori or a young one?”
“ Toshiyori. Nisei. Sheezu about our age.”
“Thatsu nasakenai. How she die?”
“Thrown over her balcony. Seventeen stories high.”
“Catch the guy?”
“ Mada. But soon.” Mas could at least hope. “Anyhowsu, I needsu your help, Haruo.”
“Anytin’, Mas, anytin’.”
One thing about Haruo, he knew a lot of people. To describe someone like him, the Japanese said Kao ga hiroi, “Your face is wide,” and Haruo’s face was one of the widest among Mas’s friends. “You gotsu any contact wiz museum?”
“Which museum, the one in Little Tokyo?”
“Yah.”
“Come to think of it, my counselor, her sista work ova at the museum. Why, Mas?”
“There’s sumptin’ I wantchu to take a look at.”
Mas was eating breakfast when the rest of the family came out of the bear’s lair and settled in the living room.
“You’ll need to stay home with Takeo today,” Lloyd told Mari, who was giving the baby his morning bottle.
“Was planning on it anyway. And I’m expecting that call back from Dr. Bhalla. What’s up?”
“Your father and I have some things to do. Then I’m going to go to the Ouchi Foundation board meeting.”
“They’re not going to let you in.”
“They’ll have to. I’m now officially on the board. That’s why Becca had to legally inform me of the meeting.”
“But they think we killed Kazzy.”
“Charged, but not convicted. Anyhow, that’s you, not me.”
Mari gave her husband a shocked look as if she were a trout pulled straight out of the water.
“That didn’t come out quite right,” Lloyd corrected himself. “You know what I mean.”
“Why does my dad have to come with you?”
Mas looked up from his bowl of dry shredded wheat, curious about how Lloyd would answer.
“I need him,” Lloyd said, “for moral support.”
M ore than a physical place, New York City was a feeling. Mas was learning that to get around in the city, he couldn’t get too stuck on maps and street names. The best way for him was to depend on his intuition.
In L.A., this approach would never work, namely because you could start driving in one direction on a hunch and suddenly be in either Nevada or Mexico. If you took a wrong turn in New York City, you eventually hit the water, so you then just backtracked in the opposite direction. Mas relied on his inner compass to get to the red door. They got out at Times Square Station and then walked west. Mas knew that they were going in the right direction when the buildings became grimier.
“This area’s called Hell’s Kitchen,” said Lloyd after they had traveled for several blocks.
“Get hot ova here?”
“It’s not that. Actually, I’m not sure why it got its name. It used to be a real rough area, but now they are cleaning it up. Making restaurants and nightspots out of the old factory buildings.”
When Mas described the drugs that he had seen in the back room behind the red door, Lloyd nodded his head. “Your boys were probably selling Ecstasy. That’s the popular drug in these clubs down here.”
Ecstasy, hiropon, didn’t make much difference to Mas. Names and chemicals could be changed, but drugs had the same general effect. To give temporary sweetness to a life that was bitter and hard to take. In Mas’s case, he was lucky that he preferred the bitter to the fake sweet.
It was early morning, and that wasn’t doing Hell’s Kitchen any favors. It was like shining light in a drunk’s face: the area, rather than menacing, seemed pitiful. Pedestrians moved in slow motion, as if walking too fast would cause their heads to roll off.
They passed a couple of brick factory buildings, syringes and torn condom packages scattered on the sidewalk. Mas then pointed down an alley, toward a faded red door. “Thatsu it,” he said.
Just as Mas had, Lloyd moved the trash can next to the door and climbed on top so that he could see through the window above the door. Mas sidled up to the trash can, waiting for Lloyd’s scouting report.
“I just see a man sleeping on the couch.”
“Whatsu he look like?”
“Actually, he looks kind of familiar. Brown hair, pork-chop sideburns-you know, like Elvis.” Lloyd told Mas to knock and call the teenager over to the door. Mas didn’t know if this was a good idea, but he complied.
Mas hammered the door with his fist.
There were noises of someone moving around in the room and then a shuffling of feet.
“What?” A voice slightly muffled by sleep, yet still undeniably male and young. “Who the hell is it?!”
Mas placed his mouth near the crack in between the door frame and the door. “Mas Arai. Itsu Mas Arai.”
“Who?”
“I was here dat day. Wiz Phillip Ouchi.”
Mas grimaced as he saw Lloyd reach for the metal light fixture above the door. Who did he think he was? Yojimbo? Some lone-gun bodyguard?
Mas could hear the locks being loosened.
The door opened a crack, just enough for Mas to see Riley’s bloodshot eye, and then BOOM! Lloyd’s long legs smashed open the unlocked door, knocking Riley down onto the floor of the back room.
Lloyd had landed on Riley’s legs, and now his long fingers were around Riley’s thick neck. Mas looked around the room, and he grabbed the first weapon he could find, a state-of-the-art hedge clipper, and pressed down on the handle so the clipper’s metal jaw opened.
Riley was gagging as Lloyd pressed down on his Adam’s apple. “I want you to stay away from my wife. And the rest of my family.” Riley pulled at Lloyd’s arms-the teenager had more muscle, but Lloyd had more heart. Lloyd’s hands remained in their position underneath Riley’s chin.
Riley coughed and strained for air. He desperately exchanged glances with Mas, who knew that this hanatare, a runny-nose punk, wasn’t worth killing. In fact, the boy was literally a hanatare, because two lines of snot were streaming out of his nostrils.
“I thinksu you betta let him say sumptin’,” Mas told Lloyd.
As soon as Lloyd let go, Riley dropped his head, gulping down big breaths. He coughed, letting strings of mucus fall to the floor. “This is screwed, man. I didn’t mess with your wife.”
“You know who I am.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen you at the garden.” He bent down again, and then made a sudden move for the cushions on the couch. Lloyd beat him to it, and a gun clattered onto the ground. Mas scooped it up, and before he knew it, he was pointing it at Riley. Mas had held guns before in his life. One was a distant relative’s shotgun in Watsonville. When they weren’t harvesting lettuce or picking strawberries, Mas went with a second cousin to shoot at geese, ducks, and pheasant at a nearby farmer’s ranch.
And later, in Texas, as Mas traveled to different labor camps during tomato season, he had an opportunity to handle a coworker’s pistol, which they took turns aiming at empty beer cans. That was a wild gun, whose force bruised Mas’s hand in spite of the thick calluses that padded his palms like gloves.
But this gun’s handle was as smooth as polished stone. It was compact and neat, a streamlined weapon that any man would be proud to own. Lloyd must have felt Mas’s excitement, because he gently took the gun from his father-in-law’s shaky hands and held it in his own.
Riley knew he was really beat this time, and leaned back against the wall.
By now, Lloyd had noticed the expensive garden equipment lined up on the other side of the wall. “You ripped us off. That equipment is from the Waxley House.” Lloyd held the gun tighter and aimed it toward Riley’s head. “You’re the one who killed Kazzy.”
“Listen, listen.” Riley raised his hands. “I explained that all to Phillip. I found the guy there. He was already dead, okay? I saw the gun and I was going to keep it, but when I heard the cop cars, I threw it in the trash can down the block. I wasn’t paid to deal with that.”
“Why were you in the garden in the first place?”
“Phillip paid me to vandalize the garden, that’s all. I don’t know what the hell why. Maybe he was getting back at his dad, okay? I used to have an internship at his company. Phillip would come in, thinking he was all that, and then the old man would overturn his decisions. Maybe he was sick of it, I don’t know. Anyway, I got in a little trouble-borrowing too many office supplies-and I got fired. Then, out of the blue, Phillip calls me. Says that he has a little job for me to do. It was easy. Just go to the Waxley House late at night a few times and make a mess. Dump trash. Tear down the branches. I was doing that kind of stuff in junior high.
“But killing Kazzy-that’s not anything that Phillip proposed. And I wouldn’t have done it if he had. I have a good thing going here. I don’t need to kill people to make money. I just have the gun for protection.”
“How about the equipment?”
Riley’s face looked sheepish and, for once, more his age.
“For my girlfriend’s dad. She wanted it as a birthday present. I guess he likes to garden.”
Lloyd lowered the gun. “Well, I guess we’ll hang on to this right now. You return the equipment back to the garden, and we won’t tell anyone that you stole it.”
“So when can I have the gun back?”
“We’ll see,” said Lloyd. “We’ll just see.”
Mas didn’t think that it was a good idea for Lloyd to go into the Ouchi Foundation board meeting with a gun in his pants pocket, but there was no stopping him now. Lloyd was pretty quiet and reserved for a hakujin, but now an aggressive part of him-maybe a past generation of hunters who wore coonskin caps-was coming out. Men like Tug and Lloyd, with their sedate, decent exteriors, had pushed down their dark sides for so long that their primitiveness was more concentrated and pure and, as a result, more dangerous. When their anger was unleashed, you had to take a step back and stay out of their way.
As they approached the Waxley House, Mas was shocked to see the state of the sycamore. Someone had taken what looked like a chain saw to the poor tree. Stripped of branches on the right side, it seemed as though it could topple over at any time. Perhaps that was the state of the Waxley House as well.
Mas followed Lloyd into the house and then into the dining room. The fry-pan-faced attorney sat at the head of table. Becca was at his right and Phillip across from her. Miss Waxley’s back was toward them, and to her right was Penn Anderson, his orange hair uncharacteristically drooping down like a wilting plant. To her left was Larry Pauley, who looked like something wild had been unleashed inside of him. He wore a wrinkled long-sleeved dress shirt over a pair of jeans ripped at the seams.
Phillip was the first to say something. “It’s not right for him to be here.” There was an annoying thin shrill to Phillip’s voice. “His wife has been charged in my father’s murder. There’s a huge conflict here.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room,” Lloyd said. “I have every right to be here, according to Kazzy’s will.”
“Kazzy’s not around now. We’re the board, and we should decide,” Phillip pushed back.
“Did they decide that the garden should be destroyed?”
Becca, who had been nervously fingering one of the three earrings dangling from her earlobe, became alert. “What?”
Lloyd laid his cards on the table. “You paid a teenager to vandalize the garden.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Phillip stood as straight as one of the shovels in the toolshed.
“Some kid named Riley.”
“Riley?” Becca asked. “Didn’t K- san fire him for stealing from the company?”
“Listen!” Phillip exploded, the volcano finally erupting. “Our father was pouring millions into this place. It didn’t make any good fiscal sense. Ouchi Silk is on the brink of bankruptcy. Who wears silk anymore in America?”
“So you hire a criminal to deface our garden.” The siblings were going at it-two crocodiles facing off, their tails whipping back and forth.
“There was no stopping Kazzy, Becca. He was like a man possessed. He had to restore this whole place like he remembered it, sixty years ago. Why? Mr. Waxley is the one who kicked him out of here in the first place.”
Miss Waxley then reared her head and joined the fight. “I won’t allow you to talk that way. Our family is the one who gave Kazzy his start. Our foundation, don’t you forget, has also poured good money into the garden. My father was just trying to get Kazzy on his own two feet. And look what happened! Perhaps Kazzy owed his success to my father.”
Before the two families clawed each other further, Lloyd stepped in. “I didn’t come here for this. All I want are the financials.”
The group stared at Lloyd, trying to comprehend what he had just announced. Penn looked like he was going to dissolve into his chair, whereas Larry seemed to rise up, an obake coming back from the dead.
“If I’m officially on the board, I want to see the financial statements,” Lloyd repeated.
“What?” Penn followed Larry’s lead and stood up as if he were a marionette whose strings were being lifted by his puppeteer.
“The quarterly statement since the foundation was created. Tax filings, et cetera.”
“That’s not going to happen. You have no right to any of those documents,” Larry said, pointing an overstuffed sausage-shaped finger at Lloyd.
“That will take some time to photocopy,” said Becca.
“Well, then let’s start off with the past quarter.”
Becca glanced at the attorney, and he nodded his head. She disappeared, and Mas could hear her shoes clomp up the wooden staircase. The phone rang, and then, a few moments later, Becca came down. “It’s Mari,” she told Lloyd. “She says it’s an emergency.”
Lloyd left the room, and Mas felt desperately uncomfortable. Becca, Phillip, Miss Waxley, and Penn had all positioned themselves in different corners, like the same poles of magnets repelling each other. Larry, on the other hand, planted himself right in front of Mas. “You two aren’t going to get away with this,” he said. Larry’s breath was warm and kusai, like Mari’s old dog Brownie when he was sick with distemper.
It was just business records; why was Larry so concerned? Mas didn’t back down, and stared back at Larry’s face. The vein underneath the scar on his forehead pulsed, making his flesh look like a crawling spider.
Lloyd reappeared and asked Mas to meet him outside. His eyes were moist, and in the hazy sun, his pupils resembled the broken patterns within a kaleidoscope. “Takeo needs a blood transfusion. I need to go to the hospital now. Can you wait to get the financial statements? We’ll call you at the apartment and tell you what’s happening.”
Mas nodded.
“And put this”-Lloyd slipped something heavy into Mas’s coat pocket-“in a safe place. But no target practice, okay?”
“ Orai. ”
“I’ll tell them what’s going on.”
“I wait here,” Mas said. Lloyd went back into the house and then reemerged, gripping Mas’s shoulder briefly before he headed for the sidewalk.
A few minutes later, Larry stormed out, almost knocking Mas down from the porch-a giant bowling ball crashing into a lone pin. He uttered no threats or apologies. He moved quickly and forcefully down the walkway and up the sidewalk. If Larry was indeed a gambling man, he would seek relief at the tables or racetrack, Mas figured. The problem was that Larry was already acting like a gambler on the losing end of a bet. That kind of transparency would lead to further losses.
Becca came out with a stack of papers in a manila file. Mas took them without saying thank you or good-bye. He wanted to get away from the Waxley House as soon as he could.
Back at the underground apartment, Mas had to find a hiding place for the gun. It was so beautiful, Mas wanted to keep stroking it, but he didn’t have time to be an aho. He first put it in the bottom desk drawer. But wasn’t that obvious? Next was a drawer in the bedroom underneath Lloyd’s boxers. Another stupid idea. Finally, Mas decided on the okome canister on a shelf in the kitchen. There wasn’t that much rice left, but enough to cover the gun. Mas pushed down on the tin cover, hoping that out of sight meant out of mind.
Next Mas had to contend with the papers, an inch thick. He arranged the financials in piles. This was a familiar task, as he met with his tax man, a former gardener, once a year before April fifteenth. Before their meeting, Mas would sort out receipts, check stubs, and invoices, attach related pages with paper clips, and calculate the totals with an adding machine Chizuko had bought from a now defunct discount chain called Fedco.
Mas chewed on some peanuts left over from his plane ride and surveyed his work. He had placed income all together in one pile; he wasn’t concerned about incoming funds. But expenditures, that was another story. Becca, whether intentionally or not, had gone beyond just providing financial summaries. Instead, Mas had copies of receipts and checks, all signed by Larry Pauley and Penn Anderson.
Sitting at Lloyd’s desk, Mas paid special attention to the bills for gardening supplies and services. He used to help his ex-friend, Wishbone Tanaka, with his lawn mower shop on rainy days in Los Angeles. He was familiar with various gardening and pesticide companies, their prices and policies. Adjusting his reading glasses, Mas blinked hard and tried to focus. The rows of numbers seemed to merge into one another. Mas felt his eyelids drooping. He rested his head on the stack of papers. Just for a minute, he told himself.
The phone rang, jerking Mas awake. He was still at Lloyd’s desk, and he could tell it was morning, because light was coming through the edges of the curtains. He must have slept a good six hours. The financials that had served as his pillow were wet with Mas’s drool. His reading glasses had dug into his face and left impressions on his cheeks. Wiping the drool off the side of his face, he answered the phone on the fifth ring.
“Dad,” said Mari, “we need you now.”