by Barry Lancet
Getting nowhere with that line of speculation, I rang Renna, who had left a message to call anytime before one.
“I found it,” my SFPD friend said.
“Found what?”
“Mikey’s secret. You’re not going to believe it. I’m holding it in my hand and I still don’t. Officially sealed records.”
That didn’t sound good. “Sealed why?”
“Mikey’s got a sheet.”
“Our modest, mild-mannered, shier-than-shy, salt-of-the-earth friend? I’m not buying it.”
“Yeah, well, he was underage, but technically he does.”
Turned out, back in high school, Mikey and his friend Billy Cantor had caught a ride home with a guy called Jared Trooger. Trooger looked older than his eighteen years and always bragged about scoring some cold ones whenever he wanted, even though the drinking age in California was twenty-one. Did they want in? They were fifteen and said sure, why not? It was Friday afternoon.
Trooger drove to a 7-Eleven over on Clement Street. They waited in the car a half a block away while Trooger went for the suds. The clerk carded him, so Trooger shot the guy and grabbed the beer, two bags of Lay’s potato chips, and a handful of bills from the register. All of which was caught on camera.
The police nailed Trooger the following day, and Mikey and Billy the day after. The high schoolers had no idea Trooger had killed the clerk and robbed the place, but he fingered them as accomplices. He was tried as an adult and received fifteen years. The two kids spent five months in juvie and were on juvie parole until their eighteenth birthdays.
I was incredulous. “You went to school with Mikey and his brother and never heard about this?”
“The department was pretty careful about minors even in those days, and there was no gossip at school. But I remember both brothers going away to the East Coast for a semester and staying with relatives.”
“That would be it,” I said.
Mari tapped on my door, stuck her head in, and signaled that Noda, the head detective, was on another line. I held up a pair of fingers. There in two.
Renna said, “I talked to a couple of old-timers and they told me the assistant DA saw an easy way to boost his win count.”
“I don’t even know where to start with that. ‘Despicable’ would be too polite. Did you know Billy Cantor?”
“Yeah. He went off the rails. Spent a lot of time on the couches of a lot of different shrinks. Mikey just got quieter.”
I hated to hear this sort of stuff. Their lives were upended due to the raw stupidity of the likes of Jared Trooger.
Through gritted teeth, I said, “Was Trooger still locked up when Mikey was shot?”
“Released six months ago on good behavior.”
“Whoa. That’s a coincidence I don’t like.”
“I’m already on it.”
“Better you than me. I get my hands on the guy, he won’t be standing for long.”
* * *
Once I hung up, Mari patched through Noda.
As I reached for the phone, my eyes fell on a portrait of my daughter. Luminous liquid-brown eyes beamed at the camera with uninhibited trust and love. Mikey and Billy Cantor would have had exhibited some of the same trust and naiveté as they waited for the walking, talking disaster-waiting-to-happen that was Trooger to come back with a six-pack.
Into the phone I said, “Thanks for checking in. Going to see you this afternoon?”
The bulldog detective was my go-to guy for any complex case. He was also less talkative than a tree stump.
“Not till the funeral.”
“So you have something?”
Noda never made social calls. He kept to himself and barely managed polite, Japanese though he was. Prying loose more than a truncated version of any event from the head detective was always trying. To normal Japanese, he was an impertinent mutt. But he was loyal and got the job done.
“Bad news. Old PSIA friend called.”
An unseen hand wrapped itself around my heart and squeezed. Spooksville again. PSIA stood for the Public Security Intelligence Agency. It handled counterespionage activities on Japanese soil and any threats against the country’s security. A sort of hybrid of the FBI and CIA with inward-looking tendencies, it has ties to major intelligence agencies around the world.
“Your friend offering to help?”
“Told me to back off.”
“The Kennedy Center case?”
“Yeah.”
“You happen to mention that I knew both victims personally?”
“He already knew. Made it worse.”
I bit my lip. “Because?”
“Because you’re the only one who knew both victims.”
Homeland, Zhou, and now the PSIA. “They were my friends.”
Noda snorted. “He didn’t see it that way.”
“How did he see it?”
“One coincidence too many.”
“Where’d they get their intel?”
“Homeland.”
I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it. I knew hopeless when I heard it. But far worse was the bald truth behind Noda’s words: the PSIA and Swelley had opened a line of communication.
How long would it be before one or both of them came for me?
CHAPTER 27
I RODE the elevator down from Brodie Security’s fifth-floor office to street level. During my last visit to Tokyo, I’d bedded down in a local hotel. Tonight’s lodging would be different. It had once been my childhood home.
Where I’d spent the first seventeen years of my life.
Where I’d also left every weekday morning for the local Japanese school my parents insisted I attend. Where I’d been the only Caucasian. Where I’d learned to appreciate Japan. It had all just clicked with me.
Despite living in the middle of the Japanese capital, my parents had found a balance between East and West. Tucked away in the warm confines of our small Tokyo home, I was in America. We spoke English. We watched satellite TV. My mother served American-style food.
I glanced around for a taxi, a cool May breeze brushing my face, balmy and carrying the promise of an early summer. Tokyo has more cabs than the central fish market has shellfish, but none trolled the backstreets tonight or cruised the main avenue, so I decided to hoof it, an excursion I once made four or five times a week.
From the age of thirteen, after school let out, I would head down the main avenue to Brodie Security, where I’d hang out. My father put me to work, sorting through office minutiae. But the real training came from being a teenage fly on the wall, soaking up the detectives’ discussions about their cases, which ran from blackmail, corporate malfeasance, and kidnapping to con games and murder.
The conversations were gritty and complex and pockmarked by life. I mingled freely with the detectives, who, with my father’s blessing, took me under their collective wing and out on cases.
And all of that clicked for me too.
Then one day my mother invited me into the bowels of the Tokyo National Museum, where she was consulting on an upcoming exhibition. She showed me centuries-old screens with glittering gold-leaf backgrounds. She showed me Zen ink paintings by famous Buddhist monks, then swords and ceramics and the robes of princes and shoguns of old that echoed the dramatic flourishes of the Kabuki robes the Freer Gallery in Washington sought. A third click.
Which is how it happens for all of us, I don’t care who you are. A farmer or a factory worker or a tech junkie or a dentist. In our lives, we find one or more things that click for us. And when they do, we should pay attention.
Which is what I did instinctively back then.
As easily as I devoured the rough-and-scrabble work of my father’s world, I took in the muted elegance of my mother’s. I was young and fascinated and I absorbed it all like a sponge.
Then upheaval shook my world.
My parent’s marriage crumbled and divorce followed. My mother and I landed in an affordable but dicey area on the edge of South Central Lo
s Angeles; we both worked to make ends meet; I learned to hold my own on the street; my mother struggled to find a curator’s job while holding down a minimum-wage position as a drugstore cashier; I graduated high school, then enrolled in college; a couple of years later my mother died suddenly of intestinal cancer; I deserted Los Angeles for San Francisco, a city that had always beckoned.
Then, for a short spell, the roller-coaster ride ran straight and even.
At twenty-one, I rented a walk-up in the Mission, yet another dubious neighborhood. I found a job at a local garage as a grease monkey, since, for some reason, tinkering under the hood of a car came naturally. One day, looking for something to hang on my wall, I wandered into an antiques shop and sifted through a stack of neglected Japanese woodblock prints tossed on top of a dusty nineteenth-century American dresser.
I carried my choice up to the front to pay. Instead of taking my money, the owner grilled me about my upbringing. When I started to protest, he offered to give me the woodblock print—if I’d answer a few questions. I agreed. He soon nosed out my exposure to art in Tokyo under my mother’s tutelage. Next he pointed to a trio of European vases across the room and asked me to pick out the best piece. Without hesitation, I chose the one that danced before my eyes. On the spot, he offered me a job as his apprentice. Why? Because aside from selecting the correct vase, I’d brought him the best Japanese print from the stack.
I embraced the chance to get the grease out from under my fingernails. I also enrolled at SF State, where I polished my art chops and met Mikey. By then I was twenty-two, three years older than him—and became his big brother away from home.
Later, Mieko, a Japanese woman whom I’d helped out in Los Angeles several years earlier, tracked me down in San Francisco to express her condolences over my mother. We got to talking, dating, and soon after I turned twenty-five we were married. Jenny was born some fifteen months later, and I opened my own antiques shop out on the long stretch of Lombard in the Marina District.
A few more good years followed, then the roller coaster plunged down again. I became a widower, with a child, after Mieko died in a midnight fire in her parents’ home. Three years later, my father was killed in a car accident in Tokyo and I came into half of Brodie Security—and what my mother labeled “the other life; the dangerous one.”
I’d never expected to set foot in Brodie Security again, but when I did I found that some of the people of my teen years still worked there. I bowed to their request to continue as the American head to what they called “my father’s legacy.”
The legacy ran on a shoestring. Once expenses and salaries were met, what remained gave me little more than a stipend most times, but combined with the up-and-down income from my art endeavors, I paid the rent on my apartment and shop in San Francisco, put food on the table, and during a good month stashed away a few bucks in Jenny’s college fund.
Adding a further twist, my father had attached the deed to our old family home to Brodie Security, so in theory I’d inherited half of it with my half of the company.
My father had prepared well.
But, at times, preparation alone is insufficient. I had the uneasy premonition that Mikey’s and Sharon’s deaths would be one of those times. Especially with Homeland Security, a Chinese spy, and the PSIA lurking at the edges.
And as if in confirmation, I unlocked the door to my old family home—and sensed in the next instant that I was not alone.
CHAPTER 28
I SLIPPED inside, ignoring the light switch.
Another pace and I stepped out of my shoes and up onto the raised floor, also disregarding a set of indoor slippers. As with every house in the land, street grime intruded no farther than the entryway. None of the dust or soil on the roadways would be tracked over carpet, wooden floors, or linoleum. As long as it didn’t cost me, I did not have to bypass the finer points. Without a sound, I unburdened myself of my duffel bag. I was doubtful I’d entered without alerting the intruder. I had only a single advantage. He was unaware I knew of his presence.
I turned left into the main body of the house, which was dark and still.
Too still.
My body tensed.
Nerve endings buzzed.
My South Central warning system kicked up a notch. I could feel the intruder’s presence. As I often did when a hostile third party was in the vicinity. Six years in dangerous neighborhoods gave you skills.
The shadows near the kitchen doorway shifted. My night vision was good but the interior darkness was complete, ambient light nonexistent. Still, the vague outline of a human form took shape before me. The intruder was short. Clothes tight against the body. The left hand rose. Empty. Without weapon. But rising. I was on the point of launching an attack when the uninvited intruder spoke.
“Trick or treat.”
A woman’s voice. Soft, gentle, bemused. And one I recognized.
A light flickered on.
Rie Hoshino stood before me in her Tokyo Metropolitan Police uniform. Navy-blue jacket and pants, sky-blue blouse, thin navy tie. Each item was crisp and creased and as fresh as the first time I’d laid eyes on her in the outfit. The brass buttons running down the middle of the jacket picked up the soft light.
“It’s May,” I said.
Without a word, she raised an eyebrow over mesmerizing cocoa-brown eyes, spread her arms, and twirled around once in a complete three-sixty. Her pinkish beige skin glowed.
“Treat,” I said. “Definitely treat.”
Smiling, she stepped forward to meet me. “Wise choice.”
“Maybe we should make preemptive celebrations a habit.” I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her close. “How’d you find me? More to the point, how’d you get in here?”
“Do I need to remind you yet again that I am a third-generation cop?”
“I’ve heard rumors the talent runs in the family, but proof has been lacking.”
“I just put you off your question with a question.”
“Touché.”
She pressed in closer, raised her head, and our lips touched. Beneath the uniform her body was warm and pliant. The kiss was long and lingering, then passionate and heated.
It was our first kiss in three months and worth the wait.
Our embrace soon escalated to a higher plane. Wrinkles were introduced into Rie’s perfectly pressed uniform, but she voiced no complaints.
* * *
Later, in an upstairs bedroom, we sat back against the headboard.
From the first floor, Rie had brought a bottle of champagne and two tall crystal glasses. We now sipped the sparkling beverage with considerable contentment. The bedsheet was pulled over her breasts and tucked in at the sides. A faint smile played on her lips.
“What are we celebrating besides the early arrival of Halloween?” I asked, wondering if I’d missed a key date. A three-month marker? A six-month one?
We had met less than a year ago, but—as in most relationships where the parties lived in distant places—the timeline was convoluted. Three months separated our first date in the quaint Japanese beachside town of Kamakura from our next, at an upscale Tokyo izakaya, a kind of Japanese gastro pub. The second get-together ended abruptly when I was forced to rush off to Kyoto after a client’s son went AWOL. We almost did not survive the third date at a fugu restaurant, the poisonous blowfish being only one of several hazards that night.
Interruptions were the norm for us, so anniversary calculations were subjective at best. Serious computations would be speculative, algebraic, complex. For the romantically inclined, possibilities existed, I supposed. On the other hand, I was dating a soft-on-the-outside, tough-on-the-inside Japanese policewoman. Or was that the other way around?
“Just us,” Rie said. “It is a miracle we have made it this far.”
An unexpected answer. And touching. “I could drink to that.”
“You had better.”
Maybe tough all around.
We drank. Twice. Which led to
an encore engagement. After which Rie refilled our glasses, saying, “I know you would much rather have a beer, whisky, or saké than anything bubbly.”
“True.”
“But I think it is sweet you are willing to suffer for me.”
“I’ve been through worse,” I said, and when she smiled added, “but not by much.”
The remark earned me a poke in the ribs before she took another sip from her fluted glass.
We were in the master bedroom. Mercifully, the staff at Brodie Security had hauled away the old furniture and changed the color scheme. Over fading beige tones, they lathered on a fresh coat of mint-green paint, unfurled a pearl-white carpet, and installed a new dark-wood bedroom set in a masculine mode. Any lingering ghosts floated off to more familiar quarters.
Even with the face-lift, the place still felt like my old home. Upstairs, the two bedrooms, storage area, and half bath received touch-ups or complete makeovers. Downstairs, the two-story Tokyo cottage retained its original charm. The old refrigerator and other dated appliances were swapped out for newer models, but the sitting room, my father’s fully stocked wet bar, and the traditional Japanese woven-tatami-mat room remained untouched.
Although Jenny’s “other stuff” had slipped in ahead of schedule, I did my duty and reported on my daughter’s martial arts accomplishments. Rie was delighted, and gave me a special message to pass on. Then she turned serious.
“How’s the case coming?”
“It isn’t,” I said, “aside from an unsettling sit-down with Zhou.”
She didn’t know any more than she’d read in the papers, so I filled her in, after which she said, “You chased him through the church?”
“Yes.”
Her brown eyes grew still. “And the threat to cripple your friend, do you think he was serious?”
“Without a doubt.”
She shuddered. “Homeland Security and a Chinese spy. This is a horrible case.”
I added Noda’s warning about the PSIA.
Rie closed her eyes and a darkness crept into her manner. “Brodie, this is bad. Hand the job over to someone else in your office, please. Someone who has experience dealing with those kinds of people.”
