The police came within fifteen minutes-stocky men stuffed in blue uniforms and windbreakers. They spent most of their time speaking to Becca, whose nose and eyes had become red and swollen from her crying. They barely acknowledged Mas, who was used to and even happy being overlooked.
The policemen took Becca into the house. Mas stayed outside in a corner of the garden and watched as more men and women, their hands gloved and mouths covered with cloth masks, came in to retrieve the body. They walked into the concrete pool, and as they lifted Kazzy’s shoulders, Mas noticed that a piece of the back of his head was missing. A woman wearing rubber boots waded into the trash, picked up something the size of a smashed peach and stained with the color of chocolate syrup-no doubt blood-and placed it into a plastic bag.
Mas felt woozy, his mouth raw as if his teeth had been extracted again with a double dose of novocaine. He welcomed the numbness, postponing the time when memories of dead bodies, both past and present, would haunt his mind.
Kazzy was wearing a fancy gray suit, and even with bits of trash stuck to it, Mas could tell the suit was at least five cuts above the black polyester funeral version hanging in the back of his closet in Altadena. As the body lay on the gurney, Mas noticed that Kazzy had been tall for a Nisei, probably around five feet eight or so. Workers wearing jackets that said CORONER on the back covered the body in cloth and then lifted the gurney, causing something white, as large as Mas’s fist, to flutter down to the ground. Mas was ready to say something, but then thought better of it. It was probably nothing, another balled-up Kleenex. No sense in calling attention to himself now.
After the people from the coroner’s office left the garden, Mas knelt down to get a better look at the white object. Wasn’t discarded tissue paper but a flower. A huge gardenia, whose edges were still white. Mas took out an old pen from his jeans pocket and poked the back of the pen gently into the center of the flower. The petals were stiff, not from the cold but from wax coating. There was a dark hair in the middle, much longer than an eyelash, but shorter than a regular strand of hair. “ Okashii, ” Mas muttered to himself. Strange.
“Hey, you, get the hell away from there!” It was a tall man with a heavy moustache and full head of hair. Some kind of shiny badge dangled from his black jacket.
Mas backed away from the gardenia. He looked both ways for a place to escape back into anonymity, but it was too late. This man wasn’t going to forget about him. A couple of the uniformed officers were stretching yellow tape across the now empty pond. Even the trash had been bagged and taken away.
“Come over here, sir. We need to have a conversation,” the man said.
Mas felt his hands grow sweaty. I didn’t do nothing, he told himself.
“I’m Detective Ghigo.” Strange name, thought Mas, accepting the detective’s business card. The card said Ghigo worked for the Seventy-seventh Precinct-wherever that was. “I understand you were the one to discover the body.”
Mas nodded.
“You can speak English, right, sir?”
Mas cursed in two languages in his mind. He wanted to sneer, but instead bit down on his dentures. He nodded his head again.
“What’s your name?”
“Mas.”
“Mas? M-A-S? That’s Spanish, right?”
“Japanese,” Mas spouted out. “Izu Japanese.”
“Your full name?”
“Masao Arai.”
“Arai? So how do you spell that?”
“A-R-A-I.”
“Okay, so what do you have to do with this garden? Is this your place of work?”
Mas paused. Was it or was it not? “First day.”
“Well, what a way to start your first day of work, huh? Address?”
“Izu live in California.”
“ California -that’s a long commute, Mr. Arai.”
Mas shook his head and took out his wallet. “Izu livin’ here now.” He took out a scrap of paper with Lloyd and Mari’s name, address, and phone number.
“Lloyd and Mari Jensen; I’m looking for them. What is your connection to them, Mr. Arai?”
“Daughter and son-in-law.”
“Well, where might they be? They were expected here this morning. In fact, about an hour ago.”
Mas hesitated. He knew by the tone of the detective’s voice that both Lloyd and Mari were under suspicion.
“They comin’, they comin’. Problems with their kid. Their son, Takeo.”
“Well, I called their house, and no answer. Cell phone, same thing.”
Mas licked his lips. It was so damn cold in this Brooklyn place.
“I don’t want you going anywhere, Mr. Arai. You just stay put here for a while.”
Mas had to warm up his joints, so he went into the house through the back door. There was a small room with a photocopy machine and shelves holding office supplies, most likely once a bedroom for the servants. Then a large tiled kitchen and, beyond that, an open living room with bright-colored paintings on the wall. At a long table sat Becca, who had been crying so hard that half circles of black makeup shadowed her eyes. A man in his mid-thirties was pacing the hardwood floors. “I told him that this project would only mean trouble. I told him, I told him. Now he’s fallen off the bridge and killed himself.”
“We don’t know that, Phillip. He was covered in trash. Somebody buried him. Probably the same people who were vandalizing the garden.”
Phillip’s face turned a chalky white. He suddenly noticed that Mas was in the room. “Who’s this guy?”
“Phillip, this is Mr. Arai, Mari’s father. Mr. Arai, this is my brother, Phillip.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“He’s come to help on the garden. To make sure that it’s ready by May.”
“Well, there won’t be any opening.” Phillip finally looked straight at Mas, who made note of the familiar steel gray eyes. “So we won’t be needing your services, Mr. Arai, or Lloyd’s.”
“You don’t know that, Phillip. The garden is part of the foundation, and it’s the foundation’s decision to make.”
“Well, we’re two of the five board members, not to mention Dad, and he’s not around to say one way or the other.”
“And I’m not for canceling anything. This was K- san ’s dream. And I’m not going to let him down, especially now.” Becca began to cry again, and Mas was amazed that more tears could come out of her swollen eyes.
Phillip gripped Becca’s shoulder and glared at Mas. “Can you please give us some privacy?”
Before Mas could explain that he had been ordered by Detective Ghigo to stay put, Phillip practically pushed him out of the living room and then the kitchen and laundry room. Before Mas knew it, he was outside behind the closed back door.
Mas sat on the cement steps and sucked on another cigarette. The coldness from the stairs soaked through his jeans into his oshiri, but he didn’t care. He blew out smoke and was grateful for the quiet, aside from the steady hum of cars on the street. Detective Ghigo was back inside the house, questioning Kazzy’s two children. Where the hell were Mari and Lloyd? This didn’t look good, them disappearing and a dead man in Lloyd’s place of work. Mas didn’t know what kind of relationship Kazzy had with Lloyd and Mari, but knowing how his daughter felt about authority figures, it couldn’t have been too good. And where was the wife? Becca and Phillip acted like a pair of siblings who seemed unanchored to each other. Mas had a hunch that their mother was already dead-without the mother, the family was never the same.
Before Mas could start on his third cigarette, a young hakujin man came through the back gate. He was dressed in a black suit and black tie, but he was no businessman. First of all, he wore tennis shoes-the modern kind, with bright-red wafflelike soles and silly white swoops sewn into the leather. To top it off, his hair was whipped into tiny cones that dangled like baby sea eels stuck in a piece of coral.
“Hey,” the man said to him.
Mas just grunted back. He wasn’t going to waste any extra energy to say “hallo” to someone who was going to “hey” him.
“Got an extra smoke?”
Mas studied the man. He wasn’t homeless; some kind of working stiff. Mas held out his Marlboro package.
“Thanks.” The man slipped a cigarette into his mouth and returned the package to Mas. He flipped open a shiny metal lighter and leaned the cigarette into the flame. After a few puffs, the man attempted to make some conversation. “I’ve never seen you before.”
Well, never seen you before either, Mas thought. He had little patience for small talk, but here he had little choice. “Help wiz garden.”
“Oh, yeah? Were you here when they found-”
Mas nodded his head.
“No kiddin’. Right over there?” The man pointed his cigarette to the empty pond, the yellow police ribbon stretched across from the bamboo to a broken-down cherry blossom tree.
Mas nodded.
“Shit, gives me the creeps. I guess the police want you to hang around.”
Mas exhaled smoke from his nostrils. “You knowsu him- Kazzy?”
“Yeah, real nice guy. He lives in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, but he seemed to hang out here the most. Anytime I gave him a ride, he always gave me a good tip. Twenty dollars, even, for taking him a couple of blocks.” The man extended his hand. He wore ragged knit gloves with the tips of the fingers cut off. “I’m J-E. Miss Waxley’s driver.”
“Jay,” Mas repeated, not bothering to shake the man’s gloved hand or introduce himself.
“No, no. Jay-Ee. The letter J, hyphen, then E. J-E.”
Mas paid little attention to the driver’s detailed instructions on how to spell his name. What did he care? “Your boss live ova here?” Mas gestured toward the Waxley House.
J-E shook his head, causing his twisted tufts of hair to tremble. “Nobody lives there now. Just offices. Used to be Miss Waxley’s father’s place way back when, though. Miss Waxley’s here because she’s a member of the foundation board. By the way, how’s Becca taking it?”
Mas shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know the daughter that well, but from the looks of it, her response was not good.
“I call her ‘sweet,’ her brother ‘sour.’ Have you met the brother?”
Mas nodded.
“He thinks that he’s all that, you know. Conceited bastard. He thinks that he’s the only one who knows what’s going on. Becca and the rest of us are fools, he thinks.”
Mas didn’t care to listen to family gossip. He brought the conversation back to the garden. “Somebody must be out to get dis Kazzy. Or at least his garden.”
“Well, he’s a rich guy. Must have had his share of enemies. But the garden, what would anyone have against that? Doesn’t hurt anyone, you know?”
The back gate to the garden swung open and slammed shut. A bald hakujin man in an oversized sweater walked over to the stairs, his legs spread wide and his elbows out, as if he were challenging them to a gunfight at high noon. “Is that your damn Cadillac parked outside my house again?”
“Hey, it’s a free country. The street is public property,” said J-E.
“I’m expecting a special delivery today. I need the street clear today for my delivery guys.”
“Well, that’s not my problem. You don’t own the street.”
The bald man’s face flushed red, his head now a distressed lightbulb. “You move your damn car, or else I’ll be telling Miss Waxley to do it.”
J-E rose, dropped his still-smoking cigarette on a step, and swore under his breath. “Asshole. Makin’ trouble all the time. Wouldn’t surprise me if he offed Kazzy himself.”
Crushing the cigarette with his waffle sole, he looked apologetically at Mas. “I’ll catch you later, man.”
Mas nodded back. He knew the sting of urusai neighbors complaining about the volume of a gas blower or lawn mower. The thing was, they had a job to do, and nothing was going to happen in America without some kind of inconvenience to somebody.
The driver never returned, but two other people came through the back gate a few minutes later. Hakujin men, again in fancy suits. One was short, almost Mas’s height, in a brown suit and an orange tie the color of a sea urchin’s guts. Even the front of the man’s reddish brown hair was splayed out like the spikes of a sea urchin. The other man was taller, with a solid body like a mini sumo wrestler’s. His gray pin-striped suit seemed a little tight on him, as if he had recently gained weight or muscle.
“Oh my God, look at that.” The sea urchin pointed to the yellow police tape fluttering in the breeze across the pond.
“The last resting place of Kazzy Ouchi.” The sumo wrestler spit on the concrete. It was so cold out that Mas noticed the man’s spit came out slow and even seemed to harden right there on the cement walkway. “Good riddance.”
“This isn’t going to mean the end of the garden, right?” The sea urchin’s voice went up an octave higher.
“No. Don’t worry about it, Penn. ”
The men noticed Mas for the first time. Examining Mas’s brown, leathery face and worn jeans, they must have figured that he was no threat to them. “Are Becca and Phillip inside?”
Mas nodded. “Wiz police.”
The men exchanged glances. They didn’t seem too eager to enter, but with Mas sitting out on the stairs as a witness, they didn’t have much choice.
Finally, after about forty-five minutes, the back door opened again. It was Detective Ghigo, his tie loosened and eyes bloodshot. “Okay, Mr. Arai, we’re ready for you.”
Mas followed Ghigo through the dining room into the living room. A gloomy gray light from the large picture window in the front cast a pall over the surroundings. On the large couch sat the son-in-law, wearing the same work clothes as yesterday, and Mari, carrying the baby. They must have come through the front door, thought Mas, grateful that everyone was back together, safe and sound. Another older woman, a hakujin with silver hair piled on top of her head, sat in a high-backed armchair. Miss Waxley, the driver’s boss, Mas figured. Both the sea urchin and sumo wrestler were standing awkwardly next to the picture window.
“This is your father, is that correct?” Ghigo asked, pulling at Mas’s coat as if he were a piece of old furniture found in the trash.
Mari glanced down at the Oriental rug in the middle of the room and then lifted her head toward Mas. She had gotten much thinner; her face was now angular, much like during her teenage years. But she had also aged-her eyes had lost all their sharpness, and her skin was as sallow as raw fish that had been left out too long. Her hair had been clipped short like a boy’s, and poking out from the top of her head were quite a number of gray strands.
Mari licked her lips. “Yes, he’s my father,” she said.
“Well, your father verified your story. That you were at home taking care of the baby this morning.”
Takeo was sleeping in Mari’s arms. His face was no longer so red as in his earlier photograph, and even with his eyes closed, he somehow looked more Asian.
“So we can go?” asked Lloyd.
“Yes.” Detective Ghigo nodded. “You all can go. But don’t be planning any trips to California.”
As Lloyd went to retrieve a baby stroller left in the hallway, Mas patted down his coat pockets. Empty. “Gloves, forgot my gloves,” he told the son-in-law. Mas went through the back door, and sure enough, he found the gloves on the stairs. What a sonafugun mess, thought Mas, taking one last survey of the garden. He expected to see the pure whiteness of the gardenia left in the middle of the dirt path. But the path was completely empty, as if it had been swept clean.
“I think they are going to close down the whole project, the garden and the museum,” Lloyd said. Mari pushed the stroller, one of these elaborate kinds with patterned cushions and even a holder for drinks.
“What do you expect? Kazzy’s dead.” Mari bent down to adjust the blanket over Takeo. He was starting to fuss, making hiccupping noises. Mari then noticed Mas at her side. “It’s a real screwed-up situation,” she said to no one in particular, followed by a couple of double-dose bad words.
Mas hated to hear his daughter curse, much less in front of the baby (who knew what he could absorb?), but it wasn’t anything new to him. Ever since she had moved to New York for school, it seemed that the East Coast had coarsened her, stripped her of any good manners learned from their detached single house in Altadena.
A large truck was parked outside the neighbor’s home, a two-story white building with columns. The back of the truck was open, revealing some fancy wooden furniture. The man with the lightbulb-shaped head was now shouting instructions to some deliverymen who were raising a load ramp from the back of the truck.
When the neighbor spied Lloyd and Mari, he switched his focus to them. “I can’t have all these cars here,” he told them. “Miss Waxley’s Cadillac was parked outside my place again.”
“Dammit, Howard,” Lloyd said. “Kazzy’s dead.”
The neighbor didn’t register any emotion. “I know, I know. I’ve already spoken to the police. I’m the one who called them when I heard a gun go off at nine last night. They couldn’t find a thing wrong; they didn’t take my call seriously, I guess. But all this ruckus proves what I’ve been saying: that garden and museum thing has no place in this neighborhood. Take it over to downtown Brooklyn, or Manhattan. But not here.”
Mari looked like she was going to verbally slash the neighbor, but Lloyd pushed her forward. “C’mon, Mari. We’ve had enough excitement over the past twenty-four hours. Just let it go.”
They made it a few doors down until Mari apparently couldn’t hold it in any longer. “He’s a damn racist,” she muttered, tightening her grip around the stroller’s handlebar.
“He’s not against other races; he’s just against everyone. A nondiscriminatory hater.” Lloyd was trying to tell a joke, Mas figured, but it wasn’t registering with either Mas or Mari.
They turned the corner and walked down Flatbush Avenue, past coffee shops smelling of bacon grease and syrup, laundries with stacks of thin brown-paper packages in the window, and bakeries offering pastry cones filled with light-pink cream. Mas could feel Mari’s anger now redirecting from the neighbor to her father, and could almost hear his daughter’s thoughts. Why did I ask him to come? I didn’t want him over here in the first place, and now see what has happened.
Once they were back in the underground apartment, Mari and Lloyd took Takeo into the bedroom and closed the door behind them. Mas, meanwhile, folded up the futon and blanket and placed them in a wicker chair by the fireplace in the living room. As he fumbled to take his cigarettes out of his pocket, Mas noticed that his hands were shaking. Even though Kazzy had been a stranger, it had been a shock to see the dead man’s face. That was the strange thing: both Mari and Lloyd had known the man well, and they didn’t seem that sad at all.
Mari was hard to predict when it came to emotions. During Chizuko’s funeral at a mortuary in Little Tokyo, Mari wore sunglasses that would occasionally slip down her small nose. At first Mas thought that her pride was taking hold, her reluctance to let people see her weak and vulnerable. But as mourners passed by Chizuko’s casket, Mas got a good sideways glance at his daughter’s profile. Her eyes were clear and dry, not a speck of any kind of weepiness. Mas realized then that the dark glasses were to hide her lack of emotion, not her excess of it.
Mas had wanted the funeral banquet to be at Far East Café, only about six blocks away from the mortuary, but Mari opted for the chop suey house in Monterey Park, a suburb east of downtown Los Angeles. “More people live out there,” she announced. “And there’s plenty of parking.” End of discussion.
Mas and his daughter had been seated at one of the round tables next to each other, but most of the time Mari was out of her chair. During one particularly long absence, Mas got up to look for her and thought he saw her by the cash register, arguing with one of the waiters. He was then waylaid by some family friends who spent a full useless fifteen minutes telling him what a saint Chizuko had been, how strong she was during her radiation and chemotherapy treatments.
Mas finally found Mari outside in the parking lot, where she was leaning against the yellow brick wall, an unfiltered cigarette in her hands. Her dark glasses were off her face, and tears watered down her cheeks.
“What happen?”
“They ran out of the damn pakkai.”
“Itsu orai.” Who cared about missing out on a serving of sweet and sour pork after seven other courses?
“It was Mom’s favorite,” she said.
But Mom not here, Mas was about to say, then stopped himself.
“It was mine, too.” Mari pushed up her dark glasses and went back into the restaurant.
Mas hadn’t seen Mari many times since then. He had given her all of Chizuko’s jewelry-the wedding ring, the string of pearls from Hiroshima, and even the cheap stuff she had received from customers when she began cleaning houses after Mari started school. Mari had taken all of that, as well as some old black-and-white photographs and Chizuko’s Japanese hymnal from her days as a schoolgirl in Hiroshima. Mas didn’t understand why she wanted the black hymnal, since Mari couldn’t really read Japanese well and, as far as he knew, had quit going to church. But that was all part of the mystery called Mari Arai. Now Mari Jensen.
Lloyd came out of the bedroom first. “I’m going to get some Thai food,” he announced, grabbing his keys from the kitchen table. His voice sounded funny, and Mas knew that both he and Mari had been talking about him.
“I go wiz you.”
“No, it’s okay, Mr. Arai. Really. I think Mari wants to talk to you.” The son-in-law looked dog-tired. His hair was tied back in a ponytail, and both the sides of his face and chin showed a healthy crop of golden beard stubble.
“I pay, at least.” Mas reached down for his wallet. Again, Lloyd shook his head.
“No, Mr. Arai, it’s fine.” He went to the door and stopped as if he wanted to say something more. But he pushed forward, locking the gate behind him. Through the small barred window, Mas watched Lloyd’s work boots reach ground level and then disappear toward the street.
The living room became progressively darker, but instead of turning on the lamps, Mas folded his hands together and sat back on the couch. He left the cigarettes on the coffee table. No sense smoking in a sick baby’s house.
After some time, fluorescent light washed over the room. Mari had opened the bedroom door. “He’s finally asleep,” she said. Mas was surprised that Takeo could rest with so much light. She closed the door softly and turned on the kitchen light. She brought down an old aluminum cookie tin from one of the shelves, and after she pried it open with her fingernails, Mas realized that it was an okome canister, which held their daily supply of rice. As Mari began measuring cupfuls of rice into a rice cooker, Mas finally said, “I dunno your baby’s sick.”
“Yeah, I should have told you. But it was too hard to explain over the phone.” Mari closed the tin and returned it to a shelf.
Mas wondered where his daughter had wandered to last night. He knew that she had inherited his personality: flashes of explosive anger and fear, a need to escape for miles and miles. In Mas’s case, he would drive away in his Ford pickup. Mari, on the other hand, had to rely on her legs and public transportation.
She took a deep breath, as if she were getting ready to go underwater. “I thought about all the things I would tell you when you got here. What’s been going on with me over the past few years. How I’ve been working on myself. Trying to be happier, becoming less angry. But on the day you arrived, I realized that this whole thing was a mistake. Seeing you was too soon. I shouldn’t have called you, asked you to come all the way over here from L.A. ”
There was a hush over the apartment. There would be no turning back from whatever would come next.
“I can’t tell you how wonderful it’s been since Takeo was born. It’s like the whole world’s a little bit brighter, better. I never knew what my girlfriends with kids were talking about. All I saw were the inconveniences, the messes. Runny noses, crying, wet pants. No vacations, no career, no money. But the sacrifices have been worth it. Really.”
Baby changes everything, Mas wanted to say, but thought better of it.
“I’ve been rethinking everything. You, Mom. What it took to raise me. I understand how hard it is.”
Mas blinked hard. What was his daughter trying to tell him?
Mari turned on the faucet to wash the rice. “Sometimes I feel like walking away. I do. From Lloyd and the garden. From New York. And sometimes even Takeo.”
She swished the grains of rice in the pot. “I even blamed myself for overworking while I was pregnant. Maybe that’s why he has so many health problems.”
Or maybe it’s me, thought Mas. The legacy of the Bomb pumping through his body, to Mari’s, and now the grandson’s.
“I don’t want to pass on my problems to Takeo. Keep him from knowing you because I don’t. But now with all of us together, I realize that it’s too much.”
Mas’s heart began to drop, from the base of his throat down to his stomach.
“I thought that I could handle it. But I don’t think I can, Dad.” Mari placed the pot in the rice cooker.
“I go.” Mas had heard enough.
“Maybe it’s because too much is going on. And now with Kazzy-”
“I go,” Mas repeated. He didn’t want to hear her excuses.
Mari nodded. “I thought that you’d understand,” she said. She put the lid on the pot, pressed a button on the rice cooker, and then disappeared back into the lighted bedroom.
It wasn’t hard to pack his things. He hadn’t changed his clothes or even bothered to take a shower during his first twenty-four hours in New York. His yellow Samsonite, in fact, was in the same spot where he had left it. Mas couldn’t stand being in that underground apartment for another minute, and went to take a walk around the neighborhood.
He went back to the first stranger he had spoken to in New York. The operator of the small grocery store across the street.
Ever since Mas had gotten all his rotted teeth pulled out to make room for his ill-fitting dentures, he never could properly get the hang of chewing gum again. Tonight he didn’t care. He placed a large package of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum on the counter. He figured that he could at least suck the sugar out of three sticks at one time.
“Marlboro?” This time it was just the old man.
Mas shook his head. “Nah, just dis. Izu go back to Los Angeles.” He didn’t know why he was offering any personal information, but there was no one else-not Tug, not Haruo-to talk to.
“Short trip,” the shopkeeper said. “ Mijikai sugiru. ”
Mas widened his eyes. He shouldn’t have been surprised. The man was most likely Korean and old enough to have been there when the Japanese had forced their language on those they conquered.
“Yah, too short, but whatcha gonna do?” Mas shrugged his shoulders. In these situations, Mas felt awkward speaking Japanese and opted to use English instead. Here the Japanese language seemed bitter and sad, remnants of a weapon that had been once used to wipe out a people’s identity.
The shopkeeper laughed. “Yah, what you gonna do?”
The minute Mas reentered the apartment, he knew something was wrong. Takeo was wailing, and the door to the bedroom was wide open.
“They said they’ll be here in five minutes,” said Lloyd, placing the telephone back on its cradle on the kitchen wall. Two large bags, bursting with the smell of strong spices, had been left on the counter. Instead of whetting his appetite, they made Mas feel like throwing up.
Lloyd grabbed his leather jacket from a hook on the wall. “We’re going to take Takeo to the hospital,” he explained to Mas.
Mari brought out the baby from the bedroom. He was wearing a knit cap and blue jacket, and who knows how many layers of clothing underneath that. Takeo’s jacket arms were so stuffed that they poked out from his body like the plastic legs of an overturned toy animal.
Lloyd noticed, too. “He’s already burning up, Mari. Don’t you think he’s wearing too much?”
“It’s cold out there. I don’t want him to get worse.”
They hurried back and forth, packing blankets, diapers, and bottles into nylon bags, when a car honked out front.
“The cab’s here.” Lloyd, who stayed back to lock the door and the gate, seemed surprised to see Mas follow Mari outside.
At the top of the stairs to the adjoining apartment stood a middle-aged hakujin woman wearing a long sweater decorated with leaping deer. “Is the baby all right?”
“He has a high fever; we’re taking him to the hospital.” Mari bounced Takeo in her arms.
“Call me if you need anything.”
“You’ll be the first one we call, Mrs. Knudsen.”
The cabdriver jumped out of the taxi to open the door for Mari and the baby. Mas was also ready to get inside, but as he leaned into the car, he met Mari’s icy stare.
“Let him come, Mari,” Lloyd said.
She said nothing, and then moved far enough down the backseat to allow a place for Mas.
The hospital was all brick and about eight stories tall. It reminded Mas of an old-fashioned hotel, like the Biltmore back in downtown Los Angeles, more than any kind of medical facility. Even the admitting area resembled a hotel lobby, with shiny tile floors, an expansive counter, and a couple of plastic plants on both sides. The emergency room, however, was nothing unusual, aside from the fact that they had a special section for children. The nurses admitted Takeo in no time flat, but told Mari that she would have to go to the waiting room with Lloyd and Mas on the third floor.
In the elevator, Mari flinched when Lloyd tried to put his arm on her shoulder. Her bony arms were folded tightly across her chest-the upper half of her body looked like a human clothes hanger, ready to poke anyone, perhaps Mas especially, in the eye at any minute. Mas couldn’t blame her. It had taken the nurse a few tries to pry Takeo away from her arms.
The third-floor waiting room also resembled a fancy hotel. Fake plants were everywhere, as if the real kind would cause deadly allergies and rashes. Mas understood the hospital’s need for artificial plants. Real plants needed gardeners to take care of them, and here the priority was to make sure people, rather than ivy or ficus trees, stayed alive.
They made themselves comfortable on couches and easy chairs arranged in a square. Mas opted for one of the chairs, while Mari and Lloyd sat on different couches facing each other. Mas was grateful for his Juicy Fruit chewing gum. After offering some to Mari and Lloyd, he stuffed five pieces in his mouth at one time. In spite of the sugar intake, he dozed off for a few minutes before hearing Mari ask in a sharp tone, “What are you doing here?”
It was that detective again, Ghigo, wearing the same black jacket and badge. Pretty low class to come at a time like this, thought Mas.
“Your neighbor, Mrs. Knudsen, told me you’d be here.” He took a seat on a couch next to Lloyd.
“Can’t this wait, Detective? Our son’s not doing so well.” The more time Mas spent with the son-in-law, the more he had to admit he liked him. Lloyd was quiet for a hakujin, but he also knew when to speak up.
“No, Mr. Jensen, this can’t wait. You see, we checked your credit card activity, and the records show that a hotel stay was charged to your card, Mrs. Jensen. A hotel in Midtown, checkout at eight this morning. Curious that you could be in Midtown Manhattan when you told us that you all were in Park Slope.”
“We had a family situation.” Mari’s arms remained crossed.
“Would you like to elaborate?”
“Not really. It’s a private matter.”
Mas sucked on his wad of gum, which now felt like a wet rag in his mouth.
“Well, I have to disagree, Mrs. Jensen. It’s now a police matter.”
Mari jutted out her chin. Mas knew that she was close to attack mode.
Ghigo turned his attention to Lloyd on the couch. “Hadn’t you had an argument with the deceased just two days ago?”
Mari’s eyebrows pinched together as she stared at Lloyd. “Who told you that?” she demanded of Ghigo.
“Never mind who told us. Is it true?”
“It was nothing out of the usual. I was just telling him that we needed to alter our business practices,” said Lloyd. “We’re changing into a nonprofit, and we can’t operate like a private enterprise. I was just telling him we should diversify our vendors; look for different suppliers of plants, equipment, fertilizer.”
“Did he want to end the project?”
“He was always saying that. But he really didn’t mean it. He just needed me to reassure him that everything was going to turn out all right.”
“You really had a stake in this working out,” said Ghigo.
“What the hell are you trying to say?” Mari interrupted.
“A garden that was paying for your family’s health expenses.”
The power of the detective’s words seemed to catch Mari off guard. Her eyes misted over, and then Ghigo softened his approach.
“Listen, I got two kids myself. I know how all this can add up, a doctor’s visit here, a procedure there. A person may feel like he doesn’t have many choices.”
“We didn’t hurt Kazzy. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to him,” Lloyd said.
Mari took a less calm approach. “What are you suggesting? That we threw Kazzy into the pond ourselves?”
“Do you own a gun, Mrs. Jensen?”
Mari’s face grew very still, and Mas knew that something was wrong.
Lloyd hesitated for a minute. “No, of course we don’t own a gun.” He stumbled over his words like he was walking in unknown territory when it was pitch dark.
“Well, that’s good to know, because we found a gun in a trash can down the street. A nine millimeter. It’s only a matter of time before ballistics matches that gun with the bullet in the victim’s skull.”
“Bullet? I thought that Kazzy was pushed into the pond by vandals,” said Lloyd.
The missing part of his head, thought Mas.
Lloyd and Mari exchanged looks. Finally Mari swallowed and spoke. “Well, there is this one gun. It’s just a prop from one of the silly slasher films I worked on as an assistant cinematographer. The propman wasn’t too professional and never kept track of it.
“I just kept it as a joke. I knew that I needed to get rid of it eventually, but I stuck it in a shoe box and forgot about it. Until all this stuff was going on at the garden. I was working there, sometimes alone, at all hours. I needed to use the foundation’s digital equipment, you see. We don’t even have a decent television set at home.”
Mas nodded. That definitely was true.
“I took the gun to work just as a precaution. It wasn’t loaded, of course. I just kept it in a drawer in case I needed to scare off any vandals late at night.”
“You never registered it?”
“I wasn’t going to use it. Did you do a search of the edit suite inside of the house? It’s on the second floor.”
“No gun in there.” Ghigo tapped his pen on his thigh. “Do you know what kind of gun it was?”
Mari’s voice sounded as small as a mouse’s squeak. “Nine millimeter, I think.”
Mas spit out his gum into a flattened Juicy Fruit wrapper.
“So who else knew about the gun?”
“Well, just me, for a while. Lloyd found it about a week ago. Told me to get rid of it. But I was too busy.”
“I’d like for us to go over to the precinct. To sort everything out.” Ghigo stood up.
“My son,” Mari said.
Ghigo studied Mari’s face for a moment. “Oh, yes. How is he doing?”
Lloyd stood up, and Mas wasn’t sure if he was going to challenge the detective to a fight. “Not sure yet.”
“Listen, you can make it easier on both of us if you just come with me. Wouldn’t want to cause a scene, you know.”
An older couple sitting on a couch at the other side of the waiting room looked over. Mas didn’t relish his daughter and son-in-law being taken away in handcuffs. When a family member was sick, the hospital became your new world. It would be hard enough for Mari to return to this world without everyone knowing that they were suspects in a murder investigation.
“I’ll go, Mari. We have nothing to hide.” Lloyd put on his jacket. “Just call me as soon as you hear something from the doctor.”
Mari nodded.
“And you’d better find us a lawyer.”
While Lloyd and Mari discussed more details about doctors, Mas went over to Ghigo.
“You hang on to that gardenia?”
Ghigo, a bit puzzled, peered down at Mas. “Oh, you mean that white flower. Yep, we bagged it. But then there were a lot of flowers in that garden.”
“That flower not from the garden,” Mas told him. “Take a look-some kind of hair in the middle.”
Ghigo stared at Mas for a moment as if he didn’t know what to make of the old Japanese man. “I’ll have the lab check it out,” he said.
Mas nodded. Somehow he felt that the gardenia was important, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.
After Lloyd gave Mari an awkward kiss on the lips, he and Detective Ghigo headed down the hallway toward the elevators. Both Mari and Mas stood and watched until the two men disappeared into the elevator going down.
“He wants me to get an attorney. How am I going to find a criminal attorney?” Mari began pushing buttons on her cell phone when a nurse passing by stopped her, pointing to a large sign showing a picture of a phone with a red diagonal line through it.
“Dammit, dammit. Nothing’s going right today, Dad.” Mari buried her forehead in her hands.
“No worry, Mari.” Mas meant to take the phone from her, but instead felt his daughter’s fingers, ice-cold and trembling. “I may knowsu someone who can help.”