by Barry Lancet
“No, lean laundry load.”
He nodded. “The single-parent thing. My apologies for dragging you away from your daughter.”
I said, “I’m guessing you have a good reason.”
His brow crumpled. “Unfortunately, I do.”
CHAPTER 7
MOTIONING me to follow, the inspector retraced his steps. I ducked under the crime scene tape, inched past the second car, and nearly stumbled over the reason for his midnight summons.
On the cobblestone lay a pulped bag of bones that had once been human.
The victim’s head was pummeled beyond recognition—cheekbones smashed; nose pounded flat; eyes swollen shut. Both lips were split open like overripe fruit, and the front incisors had been knocked out. What wasn’t battered and bruised was slathered with a crust of purple-brown blood.
The body belonged to a Japanese male.
It wore a suit.
Beyond that, nothing you could classify as human remained. His own mother wouldn’t recognize him.
I inhaled sharply. “You don’t see this too often.”
“They were thorough,” the inspector agreed.
The beating had been relentless, but it hadn’t stopped there. Both legs had been broken, as well as the left arm.
The right arm was missing altogether.
I shot a questioning look at Kato for a clue as to why he’d dragged me out here in the middle of the night, but the inspector had grown as still as a stone Buddha.
I cast about for the missing arm. I looked up the alley toward where the MPD had set up a barricade to keep the curious at bay, then down the alley along the other side of the second car and into the shadows and crevices. Nothing.
I moved forward to get a better look, and when I turned back to the body I noticed a strip of duct tape hanging from the underside of the face, a blood-soaked sock clinging to the adhesive. A white sports sock. No brand. No stripes. No design. Generic. A down-and-dirty gag. Simple and unbeatable. Whoever had done this knew a thing or two.
The pair of patrol cars discouraged prying eyes from the back end of the crime scene, but at the front, where the alley spilled into a wider thoroughfare, neither a clutch of patrol boys nor their barrier of cones and yellow tape across the alley mouth could protect the poor soul before me from public humiliation.
Inebriated gawkers feasted. Another moment’s entertainment.
The Brodie Security gig took me to some strange places. Places I didn’t always want to go. Places an antiques dealer never went. Having spent five years on the edge of South Central Los Angeles and two more in a hazardous section of San Francisco until I could afford better, I was no stranger to violence. But that didn’t mean I had to like it. What brought me out here tonight were obligations. They ran deep in Japan. I owed Inspector Kato big-time. And as if that weren’t enough, he’d known my father, too.
“Where’d it happen?” I asked.
A beating like this took time, and the alley was too exposed. Add the relatively small blood pool around the corpse and you had a second location.
“Over there,” Kato said, nodding to a shaded recess. “It goes in about ten feet. Back end of a liquor store that closed hours ago.”
“Do you mind?” I asked.
The detective shook his head. In three steps I was staring down a dirty alcove leading to a rear door. More blood but no arm, no teeth. A pair of battered trashcans tucked up against a wall were all the view had to offer.
I returned to the corpse. “Once they gagged him, they had all the time in the world.”
The inspector ran his fingers through his hair but said nothing.
“Find the arm?” I asked.
Kato shook his head.
“Teeth?”
Another shake.
Kato had gone quiet. His gaze was steady. His protégée stood a discreet distance behind him, watching me as intently as her boss did, eyes diving to the pavement when I flicked a look her way.
Something was off.
I said, “So how can I help?”
Kato’s attention redoubled. It was open and probing. “One of those minor details we run across from time to time.”
“What would that be?”
“We found your meishi in the dead man’s wallet.”
My body went cold. “My business card? Must be a mistake. I don’t know this guy.”
“You sure?”
Actually, that was a good question. If his own mother couldn’t identify him, maybe I couldn’t either. And, as far as I knew, my meishi were not passed around like trading cards—much to the detriment of my bank account and what passed for Jenny’s college fund. I took a closer look. No spark of recognition had hit me on arrival, and no memory flared now.
“Well?” Kato asked.
“Don’t think so,” I said.
“We need more than think.”
I squatted down for a closer inspection. The corpse reeked of fecal matter and decay. Breathing through my mouth, I peered beneath the gore. And came up with more nothing. The face was too damaged.
As I stared, I caught movement in my peripheral vision. A figure separated itself from the cops at the front of the scene and strolled our way. Plainclothes like Kato, but better dressed. By several ranks. Wearing the wide-collared tan Burberry trench coat favored by older Japanese. It was open and showing a prominent paunch.
“The gaijin give you a confirmation yet?” Burberry asked. He had a self-satisfied air and a large square head.
The foreigner bit again. The “outside person.” “Gaijin” is a contraction of gaikokujin, which translates literally as “outside-country person.” The term is observational and a lot less offensive than, say, “alien.” However, the shorter form sounds faintly prejudiced, and some long-term foreign residents bristle when they hear it, even though its creation was a simple linguistic shortcut. The Japanese do not consider it offensive and I no longer took offense. I’d moved on. But it could be used in a derogatory manner if given a certain turn. And that is what I heard in Burberry’s voice. He would know my name but chose “gaijin,” with a disdainful spin, as if I were some lower life-form.
“You got the wallet, right?” I asked Kato.
“Better if you could ID him without it.”
A night breeze lifted a fresh wave of foulness to my nostrils. I straightened, exhaling strongly to clear my lungs.
“Be better if you’d invited me for a beer instead of this,” I said.
Kato shrugged. “Miura. Yoji Miura.”
I felt my heart clutch in my chest. Was this some kind of joke? I scanned Kato’s face. Then the new guy’s. Did they know Yoji’s father had just signed on with Brodie Security? That I’d seen father and son only this afternoon?
Kato’s jaw was set. I looked down at the remains. They looked nothing like the man I’d met for the first time earlier today.
And then I saw him.
Yoji Miura jumped out at me. Clarified in an instant like one of those optical illusions you couldn’t see a moment before. The body size, the line of the jaw, the slant of his brow. The white shirt, the red silk tie—they were all there. My face collapsed.
Could it really be him?
I extracted a credit card from my wallet, bent down, and with the corner of the plastic pushed back the sleeve of the jacket.
And there it was—one of those goddamn platinum cuff links no one wears anymore.
* * *
An ageless sorrow pressed in on me. How had this happened? How had I let it happen?
Kato watched me with a Zen-like calm.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, a hint of sympathy riding the soft hump of his voice.
I nodded once. “Met him for the first time this afternoon. Well, yesterday now. His father hired me.”
“Impressive,” Burberry said. “Twelve hours after he engages your services he’s fly food. You must be very good at what you do.”
I felt rage swelling up inside me. There was no reason to take that
from a stranger. Especially an overdressed one. If the police weren’t out in force, I’d flatten the guy’s nose in a second. Might still.
I rose to my full height. At six-one and a hundred ninety pounds, I towered over most Japanese, and I towered over this smug bastard. With menace.
Burberry stiffened. “Cage your pet, Kato-kun.” He glared at the inspector, then stalked off.
“Who the hell was that?”
“Would have been his case if it hadn’t been dumped in my lap along with the two home invasions.”
“So he’s gloating?”
Kato nodded, adding in a low voice, “And putting in an appearance for show. What did Miura come see you about?”
I glanced around. At Burberry, at Officer Hoshino, at the half dozen other cops within earshot. There were too many ears.
Kato read my hesitation. “The short version now, the longer later.”
I frowned.
“I need it, Brodie.”
My gut churned. Why hadn’t we put some men on Yoji Miura? His father hadn’t hinted at any danger to his son, and no one at Brodie Security had considered the possibility.
Now Yoji was dead and shouldn’t be.
On my watch.
“His father hired Brodie Security to look into a personal matter,” I said, an undercurrent of self-condemnation tingeing my reply.
“What kind of personal matter?”
A public hearing wouldn’t do. I settled for vague. “Untoward things were happening to his old army buddies.”
Kato said, “Untoward how?”
I stared dejectedly at the mangled remains of my client’s son.
“Like this,” I said. “And equally permanent.”
And suddenly I felt impelled to reach for my mobile. I needed to find out if they’d gotten to my client, too.
CHAPTER 8
BUT Inspector Kato grabbed me before I could make the call. Seated in Hoshino’s squad car, I gave him the connection between my client and the home invasions, along with the rest of it.
Staring out the windshield at the milling crowd, he considered my story. “Took their payback out on the son.”
“Looks that way.”
“Imagine you need to make some calls.”
“Do.”
He thanked me for coming, and I headed toward a main thoroughfare in search of a taxi, digging out my cell phone as I went.
With the first call I put the men guarding Akira Miura on high alert. With the second I doubled the guard, ordering the next shift in immediately. I told them all why but asked that they let me break the news to Miura Senior. They seemed relieved. The third call set in motion a telephone chain through Brodie Security personnel that would have all the principals and support staff on the case who were not watching Miura in the office by 8 a.m. With my last call I checked on my daughter. She had not stirred.
Small blessings in a storm.
Then I rang back the guard on Miura.
“Get him up and give him some coffee,” I said. “I’m coming over.”
I wanted a crack at my client before the police.
* * *
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
I had never imagined myself manning a desk at Brodie Security. The firm was my father’s baby. He had built it from scratch four decades ago, after heading up the MP units policing American military bases around Tokyo.
Once he mustered out, he joined the LAPD, balked at the pecking order, and left to set up on his own, first in Los Angeles—until his shop collapsed due to a lack of connections—then in Tokyo, where the network from his years of service kept him afloat.
At the time, my future mother, an art curator by trade, was working for the American Red Cross in the Japanese capital, a volunteer transplant also from LA. They met, they married, I was born, and I spent seventeen years of my life in Tokyo, the only Caucasian attending the local Japanese public school, where I learned the language, the culture, and so much more.
By the age of twelve, afternoons at Brodie Security were slotted into my routine, as were four weekly sessions with two of the best martial arts masters in Tokyo, courtesy of my father’s ever-expanding list of contacts.
For five years I listened to his operatives dissect cases. The conversations were raw and gritty and endlessly fascinating—yakuza blackmailers, philandering millionaires, swift-thinking cat burglars who emptied bank accounts by stealing hanko—the carved seals the Japanese used in place of signatures. And on and on.
At the dojos I developed a wicked karate kick and a powerful judo throw. What adolescent boy could ask for more? Then one day my mother took me into the bowels of the Tokyo National Museum, where I caught my first glimpse of Japan’s glittering heirlooms, from sixteenth-century samurai armor to profound yet frisky zenga, aka Zen paintings, artworks composed of brisk black strokes of ink on a white ground done by enlightened Buddhist monks like Sengai.
What I saw that day woke something inside me attuned to the serene.
Which is when the roller coaster started.
My parents’ marriage blew up within the month. My mother and I were hurled back to her native LA. We landed in an edgy neighborhood bordering South Central, where three times in two days, quick-thinking strikes to my opponent’s vulnerable spots stifled the aggressive probing of local gangbangers, who thereafter gave me a wide berth. Some eventually became friends.
Over the next ten years, I enrolled in the local college; refined my martial arts training; watched my mother die of intestinal cancer; moved to San Francisco; worked as a grease monkey under the hoods of other people’s cars; stumbled into an apprenticeship with a local art dealer; met and married Mieko Brodie née Kuroda of Tokyo; fathered a beautiful baby girl; opened an antiques shop on my own; and woke up to the news that my new wife had died in a midnight fire while visiting her parents. Jenny was two. Then four years later—last year—my father passed on, punting half of Brodie Security in my direction, though we’d been estranged since the divorce.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
When the roller coaster slowed, I was a man split between two occupations. Make that three—I was also a single parent. In San Francisco, I bounced between my young daughter and my struggling Japanese antiques dealership on Lombard Street. In Tokyo, I juggled trips to find inspired Japanese art for the shop with my default position as a second-generation PI.
So, at thirty-two, I led a mongrel lifestyle. In the back of my mind, art and detecting had begun to merge. With the first, I introduced works that elevated lives with the same sense of serenity I’d discovered many years before when my mother led me into the dark vaults of that vast Tokyo museum; the second allowed me to help people whose hold on life had dipped downward into disruption or devastation. Both parents were gone, but their ghosts hovered nearby, pulling me in opposite directions.
With a notable difference.
Only one of the pursuits could get me killed.
CHAPTER 9
2:10 A.M.
I GRABBED a cab to Miura’s house in Koenji, a youth magnet four stops west of Shinjuku on Japan Rail’s Chuo Line. The area around the station belonged to college students, artists, and musicians. Farther afield, old family homes peppered residential neighborhoods, many of the plots purchased long before the war.
I knocked lightly on Miura’s door. The wiry Brodie Security operative in charge of the night watch greeted me.
“Did the son’s wife call to give her in-laws the news?” I asked.
“No.”
“Really? So he knows nothing?”
“No, but he’s wondering.”
I stepped over the threshold and exchanged my shoes for indoor footwear. Miura welcomed me into his home, worry at the edge of his smile. His place was a standard middle-class Japanese abode with white walls and chunky, building-block rooms.
Once he and his wife were comfortably seated on a brown couch with a coarse wool weave, I broke the news as gently as I could. Miura’s eyes went wide
with shock. Old soldier that he was, he fought valiantly, muttering “Yoji . . .Yoji” and shaking his head over and over again. His wife rose and alternately hovered over her husband in concern or darted quick glances about the room as if expecting her son to appear at any moment. She was a good fifteen years younger than her spouse, a not-uncommon arrangement in Japan, and while less frail she was far from sturdy.
About the time I thought Miura had his emotions in check, he cradled his face in his hands and fell into a silent, body-racking sob. His wife mumbled something about bringing refreshments and wandered away.
The kitchen was the other way.
I headed to the cooking quarters and opened cabinets until I found their stash. I poured a double shot of Nikka Miyagikyo fifteen-year-old single malt into a coffee mug, trooped back into the den where Miura sat, and coaxed him to drink.
He raised his head from behind moist palms, then reached for the clay vessel and sipped absentmindedly. Tears spilled down his cheeks unchecked.
“Drink it all now,” I said. “No sipping.”
Miura drained the mug. I splashed more in and he swallowed the second round without prodding. He sputtered, caught his breath, and fell back in his chair, exhausted. Tears still tracked down his face.
Rage tamped any sorrow I was feeling. I’d walked away from Kabukicho fuming. Yoji’s death was disturbing on so many levels I didn’t know where to begin. My anger had receded during the ride over, but watching my client crumble before my eyes fanned my fury all over again.
I was mad.
Mad at the police for their cavalier dismissal of Miura’s claims at the outset. Mad at the fumbling and apologetic Yoji for getting himself killed. But most of all, I was mad at myself for letting someone get to my client’s son.
I would find whoever did this.
* * *
While I waited for Miura Senior to regain control, I considered the disturbing state of his son’s body.
