Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631)

by Jance, Judith A.

  But all of those are overt reactions—things cops can see for themselves and either accept or avoid by taking some kind of evasive action. For homicide detectives, though, there’s often another dimension, a hidden element of risk.

  Law enforcement statistics show that murder victims are usually killed by someone they know. One way or the other, survivors hold the keys to what went on before the crime. As a consequence, answers to mysteries surrounding murders and often even the killers themselves lurk just below the surface of those initial, painful next-of-kin visits. A detective has to go into those interviews with all his instincts fine-tuned and with his attention to detail honed to a razor-sharp edge.

  And since at that stage of the investigation we didn’t know for sure whether Tadeo Kurobashi had been murdered or if he had died by his own hand, we had to go to his home with our eyes open as well as our minds.

  We followed George Yamamoto off 520 and up the I-405 corridor to the N.E. 70th exit. We headed east for a mile or so and then south on 135th toward Bridle Trails State Park. As the name would imply, it’s a horse-acres neck-of-the-woods, with plots divided into five-acre parcels containing sprawling houses attached to two- or three-car garages. Stables with paddocks and thoroughbred horses take the place of conventional backyards.

  Tadeo Kurobashi’s house, set in a shady stand of towering alders, was at the end of a long cul-de-sac that bordered on the back of the state park. A FOR SALE sign had been pounded into the ground next to the mailbox, and the word SOLD was fastened underneath.

  It could have been any standard American tri-level set in a well-kept but natural setting. The shingles on the roof and the siding of the house had weathered to a matching shade of slate gray. A closer examination of the roof, however, revealed that the ends of the roof peaks had been curved slightly upward, and a length of timber protruded underneath, giving the house’s whole appearance a distinctly Japanese flavor.

  We followed George Yamamoto into the circular front driveway and parked behind his car. Before anyone had a chance to get out, a woman came striding around the side of the house toward us. Her glossy black hair was pulled back and held in a long ponytail. The way she walked made her seem taller than she was, and her clothing—western shirt, faded Levi’s, and worn cowboy boots—gave her an old-time wrangler appearance. At first glance I thought she was much younger than she was, a teenager maybe. Close up, however, I recognized her as a twenty-year-older version of the grinning child from the picture in Tadeo Kurobashi’s office.

  Kimiko Kurobashi wasn’t grinning now. A deep frown furrowed her forehead, her mouth was set in a thin, grim line, and her chin jutted stubbornly. She stopped a few feet from the cars and stood waiting for us, feet spread, hands on her hips.

  Since I was the first one out of the cars, I was the target of her initial blast. “If you’re the new owners, we were told we didn’t have to be out until three P.M. We’re not ready.”

  George Yamamoto exited his car and started toward her. “Kimi—” he called, then stopped, as words stuck in his throat.

  She turned when he spoke to her. Recognition registered on her face, but she made no move toward him. Instead, she stood like a granite statue, waiting for him to come to her. “What are you doing here?”

  George’s professional demeanor had fractured during his long solo ride across the lake. Criminal justice professionals of all kinds learn to detach themselves from death. They have to. They build a wall around their emotions and stay safely inside that protective circle, but if something breaches that wall—the death of one of their own, a family member or another cop, for instance—then they’re in big trouble, just as George Yamamoto was now.

  He stumbled blindly toward Kimiko Kurobashi, his arms outstretched, groping for words. Nothing came out of his mouth but an unintelligible croak. Once he reached her, George gathered Kimiko in his arms and crushed her against him.

  “Kimi, Kimi, Kimi,” he murmured over and over.

  She placed both hands against his chest and pried herself away. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  Shaking his head, George Yamamoto didn’t answer directly. “Where’s your mother?” he asked.

  “She’s out back, but tell me. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s your father, Kimi.”

  “My father! What about him? Is he dead?”

  Her question registered in my consciousness like an arrow zinging straight into the bull’s-eye. Not “Is he hurt?” Not “Has there been an accident?” or “Is he in the hospital?” But right to the heart of the matter: “Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Her wide-set eyes, so brown they were almost black, filled quickly with tears. She stiffened and backed away, brushing the tears away quickly, fiercely. Several feet away from all of us, she stood with her arms crossed, face averted, holding herself aloof from George’s murmured expressions of sympathy. Her reaction appeared to be nine-parts anger and one-part grief.

  “When?” she asked.

  “Last night sometime,” George answered slowly, fighting to control the timbre of his voice, trying to keep it from cracking. “We don’t know exactly.”

  “How?” Single-word questions seemed to be all she could manage.

  “Kimi, I—” Unable to go on, George stopped and shook his head helplessly.

  “Tell me!” Kimiko demanded. She stepped toward him, her voice dropping to a strangled whisper. “Did he do it himself?”

  George shrugged his shoulders. “We don’t know yet.”

  “Yes you do. You must. Tell me the truth! Did he?”

  George was not a tall man, and Kimi Kurobashi was smaller still, but she seemed to grow taller as she stood there staring at him while her whole body vibrated with barely controlled fury. George faltered under the weight of her withering gaze. I would have, too.

  “Maybe,” he answered reluctantly. “Dr. Baker seems to think so, but I don’t.”

  Kimi turned away from him again. She stood hunched over and trembling, her white-knuckled fingers biting deep into the plaid material of the shirt that covered her upper arm.

  “That son of a bitch!” I heard her mutter. “That no good son of a bitch!”

  Shocked, George Yamamoto reacted instantly. “Kimi! He was your father. You mustn’t talk about him that way.”

  “I’ll talk about him any damned way I please,” she blazed back at him. “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t say.”

  “But Kimi—”

  “I asked him straight out,” she continued, “and he lied to me. He lied!”

  While listening to this heated exchange, I was still busily processing her initial reaction. “What did you ask him?” I interjected. “And when?”

  She shuddered and let out a jagged breath. “Last night. I asked him last night, at his office.”

  “You went there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To find out what was going on.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t either. He called me yesterday morning at home. They had to call me in from the barn. He told me to come home right away and get my mother. He said it was urgent.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No. I tried to ask him while we were still on the phone, but he said there wasn’t time, that he wanted her away from here when it happened. He wanted her to go home with me to eastern Washington. He said she was pretty much packed and that she should stay with me until all this blew over.”

  “Until what blew over?

  “I don’t know, not for sure. They were having difficulties evidently. Money difficulties of some kind. He told me that the house had been sold but that he owed more on it than they would get.”

  “Did he tell you he was filing for bankruptcy?”

  Although Kimiko Kurobashi had been answering my questions for several minutes, now she looked at me as if my presence had finally registered. “Who are you?” she asked.

  I fumbled out my ID a
nd showed it to her. “Detective J.P. Beaumont of the Seattle Police Department. This is my partner, Detective Allen Lindstrom. We’re investigating your father’s death.”

  She glanced at George Yamamoto, who nodded a verification.

  “No,” she answered finally. “He didn’t tell me that, but I knew anyway. I figured it out.”

  “How?”

  “He told me my mother had packed up all the things she wanted to keep. That I should take them home with me along with my mother. Everything else is scheduled to be auctioned off next week. A moving van is due here any minute to pick it up.”

  She bent down suddenly, picked up a round river rock from the border of the driveway, and heaved it with surprising strength through the stand of alders until it disappeared into a blackberry thicket in the park behind the house. She made a muted noise, a derisive, angry sound that was neither sob nor laughter.

  “After all those years of lecturing me on my duty, how could he leave her to face this…” She stopped suddenly as if she had just thought of something. She looked from me to George and back to me again. “How?”

  “How what?”

  “How did he do it? With the short sword?”

  There was no sense trying to skirt the issue, especially since she already seemed to know about it. “Yes,” I said.

  She wavered at first when she heard it, but then she straightened up as though hearing it said aloud had somehow refueled her anger and given her newfound resolve. Turning on her heel, she started back around the house the way she had come.

  “Let’s go find my mother,” she said. “She’s out back saying good-bye to the fish.”

  When we walked around the side of the house, we passed a stable with a tall fenced enclosure built around it. No horse was visible at the moment, and from the look of the compound, there had been no four-footed occupant in the place for some time.

  Behind the house, a car and trailer had been backed up to an open door. The faded green-and-white Suburban looked as though it had been picked up at a surplus vehicle auction from either the U.S. Forest Service or Immigration. It was a huge old rig, much the worse for wear. A decaying bumper sticker asked, HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR HORSE TODAY? Hitched to that hulking wreck, however, was one of the classiest horse trailers I’ve ever seen. Impeccable black lettering on the cream-colored metal side announced HONEYDALE APPALOOSA FARM. And on one of the open back doors, in smaller but equally black lettering was the trailer’s own pedigree: PHILLIPS TRAILERS, CHICKASHA, OKLAHOMA.

  The contrast between the battle-worn Suburban and the pristine trailer was so striking that it almost made me laugh. Clearly, the horses’ riding comfort was of more importance than the comfort of any human passengers.

  I sidled around to the opened end of the trailer and glanced inside, half expecting to see the rump of a horse. Instead, the interior of the trailer was stacked high with furniture and boxes. I understood as soon as I looked inside. Considering their financial difficulties, it would be far less expensive for the Kurobashis to move their household goods in a borrowed horse trailer instead of a rented van or U-Haul. Once the trailer had been cleaned out, of course.

  Kimiko stopped in front of me so abruptly that I almost ran her down. George and Big Al blundered to a stop behind me.

  “Wait here,” she ordered. “I’ll go get her.”

  Kimi Kurobashi hurried through a wooden arch into a small, peaceful Japanese garden. She crossed a fountain-fed pond on a miniature arched concrete bridge and paused beside a carved stone bench where a woman sat tossing something to several enormous orange-and-white carp that circled lazily in the sun-dappled water.

  The woman looked up startled and began to rise as Kimi came forward, speaking in rapid-fire Japanese. I couldn’t understand a word that was spoken, but I was sure from Kimi’s tone that she wasn’t pulling any punches. A look of shocked dismay passed over the older woman’s face as she heard the news. Dismay gave way first to denial and then to total anguish as the full meaning of the words finally struck home. Her face crumpled. She faltered backward while Kimi reached out to steady her. Together they sank down onto the bench.

  Even from where we were standing, it was apparent that the daughter was very much a younger, fresher version of her mother. There was the same determined set to the chin, the same delicate molding of eye and cheekbone, although the lines on Machiko Kurobashi’s face were beginning to blur a little with age. Her hair was steel gray and cut short, but I could imagine that it had been long and black, full and lustrous once. In her day, she must have been a striking beauty, just as her daughter was now.

  They sat on the bench for several minutes, while Machiko Kurobashi wept silently. At last the older woman took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. Despite Kimi’s objections, the mother rose and started toward us.

  She was wearing an old-fashioned blue cotton dress with a zipper down the front that reminded me of the everyday dresses my mother used to wear, housedresses she called them, that were good enough for working inside the house but not for going to the grocery store or for entertaining even unexpected guests. Machiko seemed to share my mother’s housedress philosophy. She self-consciously brushed crumbs from her lap and checked the zipper as she walked toward us.

  She was older than I had thought at first, older and frailer. Coming closer, she leaned heavily on her daughter’s arm with one hand and on a twisted wooden cane with the other. When she reached the wooden archway, she stopped and looked questioningly at each of us in turn, her eyes enormous behind the beveled lenses of her gold-framed glasses. When her glance reached George Yamamoto, it stopped, freezing into a hard glitter.

  Machiko Kurobashi’s transformation was sudden and complete. She seemed to grow younger, stiffer, and inches taller all at the same time. Letting go of her daughter’s arm, she raised one trembling hand and pointed an accusing finger at the head of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab.

  “You,” she hissed. “Out!”

  A dark flush swept out from under George Yamamoto’s collar and up his neck, leaving his ears a vivid shade of crimson. “I’m so sorry, Machiko…” he began.

  She shook her head stubbornly, cutting him off. “Out,” she repeated, glaring at him. “Go!”

  He started to object and then thought better of it. He went, retreating dispiritedly past the trailer and Suburban until he disappeared around the corner of the house while Machiko Kurobashi stared after him as if concerned that he might change his mind and come back.

  Surprised, I looked down at the bird-boned old woman who had ordered George Yamamoto away, who had managed to treat a more than sixty-year-old bureaucrat the same way a hard-nosed teacher might treat a misbehaving kindergartener. Obviously, the rancor between George Yamamoto and Machiko Kurobashi was deep-rooted and inarguably mutual.

  Once George was out of sight, Machiko turned toward me. “I sorry to be rude. That man not welcome here.” Her English was broken and heavily accented, but quite understandable. Once again I fumbled my identification out of my pocket and handed it to her. She didn’t bother to look at it.

  “You are police?”

  I nodded. “I’m Detective Beaumont, and that’s my partner, Detective Lindstrom. We came to tell you about your husband.”

  “Kimi told me,” she said. “Come.”

  Instead of going toward the house, she turned and headed back into the garden. The rest of us followed. She resumed her place on the bench, patting it to indicate that I should sit beside her. Big Al and Kimi sat on another bench a few feet away.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Furniture all gone. Nowhere to sit inside.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “This is very beautiful.”

  “Tadeo make it for me. Like home, so I not be homesick.” The aching hurt in her simple words put a lump in my throat. My heart went out to this fragile old woman who seemed to be losing everything at once—husband, home, security. Somehow she didn’t seem defeated.

  “Homesick for Japan?” I asked, wan
ting to be clear about what she was saying.

  She nodded.

  “Didn’t you ever go back?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not even for a visit?”

  “No.”

  From the look of the surroundings, the kind of home they lived in, the kind of business her husband had run, they surely could have afforded the price of an airplane ticket.

  “My home in Nagasaki,” she said simply.

  Nagasaki. Hiroshima’s sister in devastation, the one you seldom heard about. For the second time that day the specter of World War II rose up before me, its horror and destruction made personal in a way it had never touched me before. Looking at Machiko Kurobashi, I wondered what tricks of fate had placed her home and family in the path of exploding atomic bombs.

  “There’s nothing left?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No one. Nothing. Only this, that Tadeo made for me. Now it gone too.”

  Tears sprang once more to her eyes. For several long seconds no one spoke. The brilliantly colored fish alternately lazed in and darted through the shallow water.

  “Tell me about my husband,” she said.

  And so, as gently as I could, I told her everything, including how George Yamamoto had been called in to help determine whether or not Tadeo’s death had involved the ancient practice of hara-kiri or seppuku. I noted what seemed to be a sharp intake of breath when I mentioned the sword, but she said nothing and I continued. Finished finally, I waited to hear what she would say.

  “No.”

  She spoke the word so softly that I almost missed it. “No what?” I asked.

  When her eyes met mine, they were blazing with a new intensity, a desperate defiance. “My Tadeo not kill himself. This I know.”

  And that was all she said, her only response. They may have disagreed on everything else, but on that score, George Yamamoto and Machiko Kurobashi were in full and total agreement. Neither one of them believed for one moment that Tadeo Kurobashi had committed suicide.