Sins As Scarlet

by Nicolas Obregon

  One week later Anthony took Anya away for the weekend to San Diego. He kept his cap on during the day, feeling more relaxed after sunset. At the hotel, he liked that she would take hours perfecting her make-up and evening dress – as though her entire life had been leading up to this long weekend. They ate prawns grilled by barefoot men in white jackets, wooden torches illuminating the private beach. In that light, he thought Anya could pass for a tanned Jane Russell.

  On their last day they went for a stroll through Balboa Park. At the outdoor theatre her delighted squeal when he revealed tickets for King Lear scared the birds from the trees. During the performance Anya whispered along with Cordelia and Anthony tried to hide his irritation.

  The sunset was perfect against the flowering jacaranda trees, the girl next to him was beautiful, his life was inarguably a good one. Yet he could almost taste his dissatisfaction. Everything was annoying to him now. He regretted coming to San Diego. The risk of running into an acquaintance was foolish and, on reflection, four days with the girl had been way too long. Once he had come her repertoire of charms greatly diminished, while his list of irritations had grown to a point where none of it made sense anymore.

  As Edmund plotted to depose his brother, Anthony decided he had to get rid of her. Soon as I’m back, I’ll talk to her. She’ll understand. How could she not understand? I’ll cut her loose and then it’ll be as if nothing ever happened. Kate won’t know a thing and I’ll work hard to make her happy. Happiest she’s been. This was all just a freak-out before fatherhood.

  Anthony looked up and a deafening rumble grew closer.

  On stage, the actors froze.

  Amiable laughter rippled through the amphitheatre as the passenger jet passed overhead, making its final descent to nearby Lindbergh Field. When the sound had passed, the actors sprang back into life as if un-Paused.

  ‘ “The art of our necessities is strange.” ’ The king shook his head gently. ‘ “That can make vile things precious.” ’

  Anthony distantly registered a flash somewhere behind him. He turned to search the audience but recognized no one. Even so, he pulled the brim of his cap lower.

  ‘You okay?’ Anya whispered, her smile glittering in the dusky shadow.

  ‘Sure. Why?’

  ‘You just seem, like, kinda far away.’

  He slipped his hand around the nape of her neck and grinned. ‘I’m right here.’

  ‘Good.’ She rested her head on his outstretched arm and kissed it.

  A dozen rows behind, up in the balcony, Kosuke Iwata unscrewed his telescopic lens. He put the camera back in its case, as if placing the murder weapon in an evidence bag. Packing up the rest of his equipment, he put on his tea-shade sunglasses and quietly left the theatre.

  In the end, it had taken Iwata just a few days to catch his mark. The Floccari house was in Pacific Palisades, on a pretty cul-de-sac with a handsome ocean view. Hopping out of the Bronco, Iwata drank in the beauty of Coperto Drive – single-storey houses, cached in ceanothus lilac, bougainvillea and flowering palms. Clients came in all shapes and sizes but just as often than not they led enviable lives, full of wealth and pleasure. Yet these were lives they risked throwing away, seemingly as extreme sport. Iwata didn’t judge; there were always reasons and he had been there himself.

  Iwata let himself in using the spare keys Kate had given him. First, he checked the browsing history on Floccari’s computer then combed his study for the better part of an hour, but he found nothing relevant. He searched the house for a hidden phone: no dice. He riffled through clothes, shoes and gym gear. The laundry told him nothing either. Outside, he upended the garbage and there, in amongst the scraps, Iwata found a piece of paper ripped into six pieces. They formed a jigsaw of hasty blue letters:

  S DIEGO HOTEL. CHECK IN AFTER 12.

  PROMO CODE: THURS25.

  Iwata googled ‘THURS25 San Diego hotel’ and struck gold. Taking out his phone, he dialled.

  ‘Hotel del Coronado, how may I help you?’

  ‘Hi there, my name is Anthony Floccari and I checked in a few days ago. I just wanted to see if there were any messages left for me? F-L-O-C-C-A-R-I.’

  ‘Absolutely, sir. Let me just check that real quick … No, doesn’t seem to be anything for you Mr Floccari. Is there anything else I can help you with –’

  Iwata hung up.

  The drive from Pacific Palisades to San Diego had taken just over three hours. With his brightest smile, Iwata approached the hotel reception and asked after his dear colleague, Tony Floccari. The receptionist, clearly new to the job, cheerily confirmed the reservation.

  ‘Is he in now? I’d love to surprise him.’

  ‘He left a little while ago with his partner.’

  ‘Shoot.’ Iwata snapped his fingers ruefully. ‘Any idea where they went?’

  ‘Matter of fact, I do, sir,’ she beamed. ‘King Lear. Sold him the tickets myself.’

  *

  In the consultation room of Iwata’s rented unit, Iwata Investigations LLC, Kate Floccari held a glossy photograph with quivering hands. The lighting in the image was unintentionally gorgeous, the golden hour catching the girl’s beauty with devastating clarity. She was closing her eyes in pleasure as Floccari held the nape of her neck. They looked stock-photo happy.

  Iwata supposed Kate recognized the gesture. In his experience people were capable of inhabiting various sexual personas, depending on what they were hiding, or what they were trying to be. But when it came to intimacy, people only ever knew one way of loving, a solitary assemblage of gestures and murmurings.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Kate.’

  No speeches were needed. The wounded were barely listening anyhow. They were living in a new reality.

  ‘You were fast.’ She spoke without looking up. ‘Thank you for being fast.’

  ‘Do you have any questions?’

  ‘She’s young. A student?’

  ‘Yes. I have her name. If you wanted to know. Other details …’

  Kate shook her head. ‘They look good together.’

  ‘Do you want some water? Or maybe …’

  She broke down. Iwata stayed in his seat. It wasn’t that he felt nothing and it wasn’t that he had no wish to comfort her. He just knew that sitting in silence was the best response. The only response. All else was useless.

  As Kate sobbed, she held her stomach. She was already showing.

  Iwata looked out of the window. Wilshire Boulevard was clogged with afternoon traffic. Roadworks had dragged on for weeks and the heat shimmered between stationary cars. A homeless man in flip-flops pushed his cart of blackened teddy bears and knick-knacks slowly along the sidewalk, stopping to address injustice wherever he saw it. Iwata saw him most days. He would rail against the system or, if he was in a good mood, he would revert to his catchphrase. The best of luck. The BEST of luck! A grubby American flag fluttered in his cart.

  Kate stood up and placed the photograph face down on the desk. She never needed to see it again. Her eyes were red and her lips trembling but her expression was resolute.

  ‘Thank you, Kosuke. I mean it. I’m in your debt.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You’ll have payment by tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Please, none necessary.’

  ‘You’ll have payment by tomorrow afternoon.’

  She left the room and Iwata waited a few minutes before filing away the photograph. Anthony Floccari disappeared into the folders of the unfaithful, the missing, the liars. They were the unwitting clientele in Iwata’s trade, one half of an equation of human doubt and vulnerability.

  Iwata looked at the framed cityscapes of Downtown LA on the wall. They had been left by the unit’s previous occupants, an accounting venture run by Armenian brothers. The print on the wall behind him showed Angels Flight in black and white, full of passengers, in all its glory. Beneath it, the words of Norman Mailer ran in Didot font:

  LOS ANGELES IS A CONSTELLATION OF PLASTIC

  I
wata closed the blinds and left the consultation room. In the elevator he tapped his foot along with a bossa nova version of ‘Hotel California’. Though he usually had no feelings about the cases he took on, he was glad this one was closed.

  Iwata did not particularly enjoy his job, but he did like solving puzzles, even rudimentary ones. His was the business of lives changing, the cataclysm of the truth for money. But it was never personal. Kosuke Iwata didn’t do personal.

  Back on Descanso Drive, Iwata picked up the sweet bay plant and went outside. He sat with his back to the front door, gently inspecting the leaves. They gave off a fragrance only when touched. It was the closest he was ever going to get to having a pet.

  Iwata felt serene, more or less. He scanned the black-orange tinsel of the cityscape and wondered what it meant to him. LA wasn’t home, but it was something. Japan was behind him and there was little that he missed.

  In its place, Iwata had gotten used to the palm trees and the blue skies. He’d gotten used to the February summers and the June gloom. To the swarm of helicopters that criss-crossed the skyline at any one time. The toy-sized subway system and one-minute waits at pedestrian crossings. Mothers walking children to school under parasols and dark Mexican men in high-vis fixing what needed fixing.

  He’d gotten used to crammed freeways named after dead police officers and a half-empty Downtown in the evenings. The lines for sushi in Little Tokyo nearby, its businesses largely operated by Koreans now. The loquacious Hollywood touts that pounced on tourists gazing down at the sidewalk stars. The smell of baking wafting through Little Armenia and the distant barbecue aroma of wildfires devouring cypress, mesquite and pine trees.

  He had gotten used to the officer-involved shootings in Vermont Vista, in Crenshaw. The police car chases every other night. The addiction treatment centres flecked along the Pacific Coast Highway. The near-dead trickle of the Los Angeles River. Little speakeasies in Silver Lake where wannabes tried to flog screenplays to executives only interested in lines young and curved, or white and straight.

  He’d gotten used to the smiling Scientologists south of Los Feliz wearing waistcoats and slacks like an army of flight attendants with nowhere to fly to. The infinite homeless camps over intersections, under bridges, in doorways. The convertibles revving along Rodeo Drive.

  He’d gotten used to the countless glowing yard shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe in East LA. The hopeful singers in Mariachi Plaza and the downhearted drunks that looked on. The million aspiring actresses lining up for work, paid or unpaid. And the men who would make promises to them. The brief celebrity sighting under the hotel portico and the blood drying in the alleyway behind it. The little clouds of jasmine perfume that turned dark street corners into wedding arbours. And the Santa Ana winds, blown in from the Great Basin by the devil himself, leaving fire in their wake.

  Kosuke Iwata had gotten used to the staggered pockets of city that made up Los Angeles.

  He showered, brushed his teeth and got into bed. He figured tomorrow would be just another day, another case.

  3. The Best of Luck

  As usual, Iwata woke at dawn. He opened the bedroom window and breathed in the chilly air as he listened to the groundswell of distant traffic. He dressed in an old T-shirt and went outside to stretch under the bougainvillea. The cityscape was still black, but the sky beyond it was turning musk melon. As Iwata clutched his kneecaps to his stomach he had a vague feeling it was going to be a productive day.

  It took him half an hour, running through the near-empty streets, to reach Downtown. As he ran he thought about his life, though he stayed in the shallows.

  In 2011 Iwata had left Japan blindly, arriving back in California with nothing. A few days later he passed a private investigations agency in Hollywood. There was a sign in the window:

  WE’RE HIRING

  Iwata already had the requisite six thousand hours of paid investigative experience and he figured he was too old to hone another skill-set anyhow. He aced the two-hour multiple-choice exam on laws and regulation, and learned the Private Investigator Act by heart. He paid his $175 to the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services and applied for his licence. $32 went to the Department of Justice for a fingerprint-processing fee and $19 to the FBI for the same. Within a month Iwata was officially a private eye, though he preferred the term ‘professional investigator’.

  Originally assuming it to be a simple pay cheque, Iwata quickly learned what a competitive industry private investigation was. But he had pedigree. Languages. He had cleared major cases. Back in Tokyo, his last homicide investigation had become a national media event.

  Those that knew him wondered openly why he didn’t apply for LAPD, reasoning that he could waltz his way to a detective’s desk in a few years. After all, he’d already graduated from the academy. Peers would laugh at him, seeing a Michelin-star chef working at a Taco Bell. But it didn’t bother Iwata.

  After a year at the Hollywood agency and a quietly solid reputation he took out a loan and set up his own firm. The work poured in and the months floated by. For the first time he could remember Iwata felt a mild contentment with his life. His stint with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and the Shibuya Homicide Division felt like another Iwata – a strange, grey golem of himself.

  Of course, leaving Japan behind had come at a cost. On a superficial level there was the relinquishment of his police career. Iwata had not only brought the killer to justice in the infamous Black Sun Murders, he’d also exposed deeply entrenched corruption in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and beyond. His name had been in all the papers. Now he was riffling through Anthony Floccari’s rubbish.

  But he’d walked away from the TMPD in a heartbeat. Homicide demanded its disciples to live in death and Iwata had lost his stomach for death a long time ago, if he’d ever had one in the first place.

  Leaving Japan also meant abandoning Cleo. Not that she knew much about it; his wife had been in a persistent vegetative state, or unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, or whatever the neurologists were calling it now, for several years. He hated the idea of leaving her at the sanatorium; the guilt of it was all he could taste for months. But he knew he couldn’t stay in Japan any longer.

  Cleo died in her sleep two years later. In a broken relief, he had her ashes split between their daughter’s urn and another one he sent to her family. Even before her death he knew his guilt would never truly leave him. Like the scars on his body, Cleo would always be there inside him.

  But realizing that meant accepting it. He no longer went to bed with vodka on the bedside table. He craved the chalky crunch of sedatives less frequently. No more did he wake up sobbing. Iwata had started a new life and though he didn’t feel he deserved it he had found something approximating peace.

  Stopping behind the opera pavilion, he bought a bag of diced mango, cucumber and jícama. He heaped on the tajín powder and added extra lime juice. The old lady behind the cart, her grey hair up in a bun, her golden crucifix gleaming in the morning sun, told him to go with God.

  Iwata headed for Pershing Square subway station at a stroll. There was plenty of time to get home and shower before work. Downtown rose up all around him, abandoned grandeur slowly being gentrified, the homeless, for so long left in peace, now being moved along, out of the gaze of the open-top tour buses.

  The smell of garbage and exhaust stung Iwata’s throat; the spicy fruit burned his tongue deliciously. The sun refracted through skyscraper glass, overlaying glinting rectilineals and curlicues on the streets below. The homeless sat in clusters, coughing, glad for the warmth.

  Soon they would curse it.

  Patience was the cornerstone of Kosuke Iwata’s job. An impatient private eye was a used-car salesman without the blarney. But patience came easy on billable hours. Not so much on the free consultations, Iwata thought, tapping his foot under the old metal bureau.

  It was a bright, broiling afternoon and the walls of the small unit were too narrow for the huge redheaded man before
him. Ninety thousand people went missing each year in LA County and the man was convinced his wife was one of them.

  Iwata asked if any clothes had been packed, if her job had been vacated, if there had been any problems in the relationship. When the man confirmed all three, Iwata politely turned him away.

  Next up was a college student who suspected her boyfriend of infidelity, though she did not have the means to meet Iwata’s rates for a single day, let alone the several he required as policy. After her, it was the unwanted regular – an elderly man who claimed to know the whereabouts of Osama bin-laden, who, of course, was not really dead. Last week, it had been Jack the Ripper. Iwata told the man, as he told him almost every week, that it probably wasn’t the case for him.

  The sun was setting and Iwata was about to close up for the day when the door opened one last time. A small woman walked in. Iwata was debating whether or not to accept her consultation when he realized he recognized her. He stood on reflex, unable to speak.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she said.

  Iwata nodded at the black-and-white floor tiles as though he were a chess piece with nobody to move him. Heart thudding, he led her into the consultation room. The woman sat on the end of her chair and declined water. Iwata sat across from her, unable to meet her eyes. Instead, he gazed at her wrinkled hands, the veins beneath them sea-green. She was in her early sixties, fair skin, with short blonde-grey hair and dark blue eyes. People might have assumed her to be beautiful in her youth but Iwata had seen old photos of her – she’d always looked severe.

  ‘You can’t look at me, can you?’

  Iwata remembered her voice as accusatory. Now it was just drained.

  ‘No,’ he replied. He was sweating, his voice feeble. ‘You look too alike.’

  Charlotte Nichol was gripping her handbag so tightly her knuckles had blanched. ‘People always told me Cleo was the spit of me.’ She nodded vigorously, as if someone had questioned the point.