Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631)

by Jance, Judith A.

  Their insistent belief led me to agree with them.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE DEEP-THROATED HONK OF A SEMI’S horn sounded three short bursts out in front of the house. Kimi glanced at her watch then jumped up and started out of the garden. “The movers,” she explained. “I’ll go tell them what’s happened, that they’ll have to come back later.”

  “No,” Machiko said. She didn’t say much, but what she did say was definitive.

  Frowning, Kimi stopped and turned to her mother. “What do you mean, no?”

  “Your father say today. He give his word. We go today.”

  “But—”

  Machiko held out her hand, a gesture which both stifled protest and asked for help. Kimi pulled Machiko to her feet. “You stay,” the older woman ordered. “I go.”

  It was more a command than a request, and Kimiko unwillingly assented to it. She stood watching with furrowed brows as her mother, leaning on the gnarled cane, hobbled slowly across the bridge and out of sight around the house while the truck’s horn honked impatiently once more.

  This time when Kimiko turned back to us, tears were streaming down her face. She made no effort to wipe them away. “How could he do this to her?”

  “Do what?”

  “Bail out. Leave her like this with next to nothing. Worse than nothing. The house is gone, along with everything else.”

  “But your mother seems to think he was murd—”

  Kimi interrupted with an angry snort. “She’d defend him no matter what, right or wrong. It’s always been that way.”

  She paused long enough to blow her nose. Kimiko Kurobashi’s bitterly hostile words didn’t sound like those of someone grieving for a dead father, at least not yet. It was still too soon. She was still too angry with him for dying. It’s a common enough reaction, and I didn’t fault her for it.

  The time had come to begin the inevitable questioning process. Big Al picked up the ball and ran with it, speaking directly to Kimiko for the first time. “You said you talked to your father last night at his office?”

  Kimi nodded.

  “What time was that?”

  “About eight-thirty, I guess. He called around eleven yesterday morning while I was working. It took me several hours to get squared away at work, to make arrangements to have someone fill in for me both at school and on the farm.”

  “The farm?” I asked, suddenly remembering the words printed on the side of the horse trailer. “Would that be Honeydale Farm?”

  People don’t expect you to pay attention to the little telltale clues they leave scattered around them. If you ask someone wearing a Yellowstone T-shirt how they liked Old Faithful, they’ll be mystified as to how you knew. They react as though you have some secret, black magic way of knowing things about them when it’s actually nothing more than using basic powers of observation. Kimi Kurobashi was no exception. She had long since stopped seeing the Honeydale Farm lettering on the horse trailer.

  “I live there,” she said, giving me an uncertain look. “I help out around the place for board and room both for me and Sadie.”

  “Who’s Sadie?”

  “My horse. Teaching assistants don’t earn enough to support horses.”

  “Your parents haven’t been helping you then?”

  “Are you kidding? My father threw me out when I was nineteen years old. I’ve earned my own way ever since, every penny of it. When he called me yesterday, it was the first time I had spoken to him in almost nine years.”

  “That’s a long time,” I said.

  “He was a stubborn man,” she said, adding thoughtfully after a moment, “I must take after him.”

  “Getting back to yesterday,” I prompted.

  “As I said, it took me a while to get things lined up. It was after one before I was able to get away. It takes a full five hours to get across the mountain pass, a little longer pulling the trailer, especially in weekend traffic, and it was windy coming across the Columbia. I didn’t get here until almost six-thirty.

  “Mother must have spent weeks packing. She had been here working by herself all day long and was so tired she could barely stand. There wasn’t a crumb of food left in the house—everything was packed. I took her into Kirkland to have something to eat. She doesn’t drive. I dropped her off after dinner, and then I went to see my father.”

  “At his office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there anybody else there?”

  “One person that I saw. A young guy who was moving files.”

  “Moving them where?”

  “I don’t know. I met him coming out of my father’s office carrying a full file drawer. He brought the empty drawer back later and got another full one. I assumed he must be packing them into boxes somewhere.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as an odd way to move files?”

  “Odd? Maybe, especially on a Sunday night, but I didn’t question it, if that’s what you mean. I still don’t think you understand about my father, Detective…”

  “Beaumont,” I supplied.

  “Detective Beaumont. His word was law both at work and at home. Questioning wasn’t allowed. Period.”

  “So what happened when you got to his office?”

  “As I said, in the doorway I met this young man in overalls who was carrying the file drawer. I waited long enough for him to come out and then I went in.”

  “And your father was there?”

  She nodded. “Sitting at his desk, polishing that damn sword.”

  “Had you ever seen it before?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Do you have any idea where it came from?”

  “No.”

  “And what did he say to you?”

  For the first time in her narration, Kimiko faltered, pausing to swallow before she answered. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you for what?”

  “He said thank you for coming home to take care of Mother.”

  “And you took that to mean?”

  “That he was going to kill himself,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  “Why?”

  “I’m a Japanese-American, Detective Beaumont. I grew up on samurai stories, cut my teeth on them while my friends at school were reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. It looked like a samurai short sword to me. I know all about seppuku, about choosing death over disgrace. It’s a time-honored Japanese custom.”

  “But he didn’t say outright that he was going to do it, did he?”

  “No. In fact, when I asked him, he denied it. I told him he had no right to leave my mother. She’s always been totally dependent on him. Far too dependent. He kept her here in this house, waiting on him hand and foot, but she never said a word against him, never objected to the way he treated her.”

  “And how was that?”

  “Like he was lord and master and she was his servant. His slave. Around the house things were done his way and that was it.”

  “What about you?” I asked quietly. “Did you always do things his way?”

  “Up to a point.” She gave me a shrewd, appraising glance. “You’re a smart man, aren’t you?”

  “I try.”

  “Things were fine when I was younger. Kids think that whatever they’re used to at home, that however they live, is the way life is supposed to be. They don’t question it. He treated me like the son he never had, took me places, taught me things.”

  “Is that why you’re studying engineering?”

  She shrugged. “Probably,” she said. “I’m good at it, but he made sure I was exposed to engineering at a very early age.”

  Lost in thought, she stopped and seemed to drift away. “Go on,” I said.

  “Back then I didn’t worry about my mother, didn’t even think about her very much. She was always there but almost invisible, always hovering in the background, always doing things, never complaining. But eventually I grew up and went away to school. I got my consciousness raised in a Women’s Studies prog
ram over at Central. When I came home from Ellensburg, I tried to talk to my father about it, tried to get him to see that what he was doing to her was wrong, how he’d made her too helpless, too dependent on him, kept her isolated and cut off from everyone but us. We had a major battle over it, and he threw me out.”

  “What did your mother say?”

  “What do you think? She sided with him, as always. She said that I was wrong, that I was too young to understand. That’s the last time I spoke to my father until he called me on the phone yesterday morning.”

  “But you stayed in touch with your mother.”

  “Yes. Other than him, I was all she had. My father had his work, his company. Without me, she had nothing.”

  “So what happened last night in your father’s office?”

  “We quarreled again. Except for that pitiful little stack of household goods out in the trailer, all my mother’s things were packed up, ready to go to the auction to satisfy his debts, and there he sat holding that damn sword. I don’t know where he got it or how long he’s had it, but I told him that if she had to give up all her things, so did he. He told me about it then, bragged that it was made by a student of Masamune. He claimed that it had been in the family for hundreds of years, that it was priceless.”

  “But you had never seen it before?” That seemed strange to me. Priceless family heirlooms aren’t usually hidden under bushels. People talk about them, brag about them, show them off.

  “No. I had no idea he owned such a thing.”

  “Can you spell that?” Big Al was still glumly taking notes.

  “What?”

  “The name. It started with an M.”

  “M-A-S-A-M-U-N-E.” Kimi spelled it out slowly before she continued. “He’s the Leonardo of Japanese sword makers. Swords done by him or by one of his students are considered national treasures in Japan. I’m sure it can’t be genuine. How could it? How would he have gotten it?”

  If Kimiko Kurobashi didn’t have an answer to that question, I certainly didn’t.

  “Did he say anything else about the sword?”

  “Only that he had finally thought of a way of putting it to use, that it would fix everything but that it would take time. In the meantime he wanted my mother out of harm’s way.”

  “That’s what he said?”

  “Not exactly. He implied that all the disruption of selling the house and everything in it was upsetting to her and that he wouldn’t be able to do whatever it was with the sword in time to stop the foreclosure or the auction, but he insisted that there would be plenty of money later.”

  Big Al’s scratching pencil was suddenly quiet. Raising one eyebrow, he glanced meaningfully in my direction. “Insurance?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Maybe. If the policy has been in effect long enough, suicide is usually covered.”

  “I thought about insurance, too,” Kimiko said. “And when he told me about the money, I asked him again.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He laughed.” She stopped abruptly. I could tell from her expression that Kimiko was reliving that painful scene, that she was still hurt and puzzled by his reaction. Considering subsequent events, her question didn’t seem the least bit out of order. Laughter did.

  “What about the office when you got there?” Big Al put in. “Was there anything unusual that you noticed? Anything out of place? For instance, what did you see on his desk?”

  “Not much. His computer, the ashtray, a wooden box. I guess it’s the box he kept the sword in. There was a piece of cloth, black silk maybe, that he was using for polishing. And then…” She stopped, unable to continue.

  “And what else?”

  “My trophy,” she whispered.

  “The rodeo trophy?”

  “Yes. And a picture of me, too. An old one, hanging on the wall behind his desk. He was so angry with me that I was surprised to see those things there, surprised that he bothered to keep reminders of me anywhere in his life.”

  “Did you see any kind of a bill?”

  “A bill?”

  “An invoice.”

  “No. There were no papers of any kind.”

  I had to doff my hat to Al Lindstrom. He was asking good questions. If Kimiko Kurobashi was telling the truth, and we had no reason to think otherwise, then she may not have been the last person to see her father alive. The fellow in the overalls, presumably the guy from DataDump, had been.

  “What about the door to the safe? Was it opened or closed?”

  “What safe? I don’t remember seeing a safe anywhere in the room.”

  “And where was the picture?”

  “On the wall, right behind his desk.”

  That struck me as an important piece of information and another bingo for Detective Allen Lindstrom. The door to the safe had been closed and concealed behind the picture when Kimiko was in her father’s office, when she last saw him alive, but it had been found open that morning, open and empty both, when our investigators had arrived at the crime scene.

  “Do you have any idea what might have been important enough for him to keep in the safe?”

  “I didn’t even know he had a safe. How would I possibly know what he kept in it?”

  “What about the computer?”

  “What about it?”

  “Was it on or off?”

  “Off,” she answered decisively, without the slightest hesitation. “Most definitely off. I already told you, he wasn’t working. He was sitting there rubbing the sword with that piece of silk like he didn’t have a care in the world while my mother was home working like a dog to get packed and out of there.”

  “What did you know about your father’s business?” I asked.

  “Not much. Only what everyone else knows, what I read in the papers. Until it was settled, the patent infringement lawsuit between MicroBridge and RFLink, Ltd., was hot news in newspaper business sections for months.”

  “What was it all about?”

  “My father used to work for a man named Blakeslee. His job, as engineering manager, was to develop a system of local area networks. There were evidently hard feelings when he left, and Blakeslee claimed that when my father started MicroBridge a few months later, that he did it using technology and patents that rightfully belonged to Blakeslee’s company. Blakeslee took him to court and won. Blakeslee was in the process of putting my father out of business.”

  “So you knew that your father was in some financial difficulty?”

  She shrugged. “Vaguely, but I didn’t have any idea how bad it was. And even if I had known, I wouldn’t have been able to help. From what I’ve gleaned from my mother, he must have personally guaranteed a line of credit and put second and third mortgages on the house in order to meet payroll and keep the company afloat during the lawsuit. When he lost the case in court, the bank pulled the note.”

  She paused and shook her head. “My father and I didn’t get along, but I always thought he was brilliant. I believed he was brilliant. I still don’t understand how he could do such a stupid thing.”

  “What did he do that was so stupid?”

  “He bet everything on winning that case—this house, their personal possessions, their chance of a comfortable retirement—everything. And he lost it all.”

  “He must have thought he was betting on a sure thing,” I suggested.

  “He was a fool!” Kimiko Kurobashi’s dark eyes flashed with anger as she spoke. Her contempt for her father was absolutely unforgiving. Despite the years of hostility, the child in her was now being stripped of all lingering illusions. She was getting an adult look at her father’s feet of clay, and she didn’t like what she was seeing. Kimiko regarded her father’s failure as a personal betrayal of her mother’s simple trust, and seeing it for what it was tore her to pieces.

  “Nobody but a fool bets on a sure thing!”

  Machiko appeared at the corner of the house, limping slowly around the Suburban and the horse trailer.

  “You know,
she packed the entire house by herself,” Kimi said, watching her mother’s slow progress toward us. “Every bit of it. The boxes are there in all the rooms, carefully labeled in her own handwriting, waiting for the movers. It’s like he forced her to dismantle her own life, piece by piece.”

  “Are they labeled in English or Japanese?” I asked.

  “Japanese. I’ve spent all morning relabeling them. That’s another thing. How is she going to get along? She never learned to speak English very well, and she doesn’t write it at all.”

  Kimi didn’t add, “My father wouldn’t let her.” She didn’t have to. From the way she said it and from the look of disgust on her face, I knew this was yet another unpardonable sin laid at her father’s door without Tadeo Kurobashi having a chance to defend himself.

  Just as I suspected, the warfare between them was continuing unabated. If the message on Tadeo’s computer screen was truly intended for his daughter, if Kimi was supposed to be the child that still offered hope, then Tadeo had screwed up again. Royally. He had bet big on yet another losing horse.

  Falling silent as her mother approached within earshot, Kimi hurried forward to help Machiko cross over the bridge, where she sank gratefully onto a bench.

  “Two hours,” she said. “Done in two hours.”

  Kimi shook her head. “Two hours to move a lifetime.”

  Machiko looked at her daughter. “Things are nothing. When they finish, we go.”

  “Go?” Kimi echoed in surprise. “Go where?”

  “Home with you. Like your father say.”

  Kimiko Kurobashi looked shocked, dumbfounded. “But we can’t,” she objected. “There’ll be all kinds of arrangements to make—the funeral, the auction.”

  Machiko was adamant. “No. We go today. Soon. In two hours.”

  While she had been off supervising the movers, Machiko Kurobashi had uncovered a daunting reserve of inner strength.

  Kimi turned to me, pleading for help. “We can’t leave, can we, Detective Beaumont? Shouldn’t we stay here or in Seattle in a motel for a day or two until things get settled?”

  “It would probably be better…” I began.