Dead Midnight

by Marcia Muller

  “Have you heard of karoshi?”

  I shook my head.

  “The word is Japanese. Literally it means to die of overwork. A common phenomenon in that country—responsible, they estimate, for between one thousand and ten thousand deaths per year.”

  “What kind of deaths? Heart attacks? Strokes? Pure exhaustion?”

  “All of those, and more. Until recently the majority of such deaths seldom resulted in litigation, but last year the family of one victim successfully sued a large Tokyo advertising agency. My clients, who are of Japanese descent, knew of the case and decided to see if the same could be accomplished in the U.S. courts.”

  “And you need my agency to document that the employer was liable for your godson’s death.”

  “Yes. And I want you, Sharon, not one of your operatives.”

  “Of course.” The concept was intriguing. Why had Glenn felt he needed to ply me with expensive food and wine in order to interest me? I pulled my mini-cassette recorder from my bag and said, “I’ll need some particulars now, so I can open a file. And I’ll need copies of your files on the case as well. What’s the family’s name?”

  “Nagasawa.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  “You’ve probably seen the name in the paper. They’re patrons of the arts and supporters of a number of local charities. I went to college with Daniel Nagasawa. He’s an eye surgeon and owns one of those clinics that do corrective laser treatment. His wife, Margaret, has a small press that publishes quality children’s books. They have—had—three sons. Harry, the oldest, is twenty-nine and a resident in cardiac surgery at U.C. Medical Center. Roger, my godson, was twenty-six when he died, the middle child. Eddie’s twenty and still down at Stanford, studying a combination of physics and computer science, top of his class.”

  “From their given names, I judge the family has been in this country awhile.”

  “Four generations. Daniel’s grandfather came over from Osaka to work on a truck farm in the Central Valley, and ended up owning his own farm near Fresno. He left his son a going concern that earned enough to put Daniel through college and medical school. The Nagasawas are worth many millions now.”

  “Okay, what about Roger? What was he like?”

  Glenn’s face grew more melancholy. “An underachiever in a family of overachievers. Had a degree in journalism from the University of Michigan—the only one of the boys who ever lived far from home. Personally, I think he chose Michigan in order to escape the family pressures. After graduation, he drifted from one reporting job to another, moving west with each change. A year and a half ago he returned to San Francisco, and a friend recommended him for a staff position at InSite. Roger saw it as an opportunity to excel, eventually exercise promised stock options, and measure up to the rest of the family.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes. We were close. But apparently not as close as I thought.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Glenn ignored the question. “The atmosphere at InSite was brutal. Sixteen, twenty-hour days, seven days a week, and no comp time. Low pay, and their promises of stock options went unfulfilled. The editor and publisher, Max Engstrom, is an egomaniac who delights in abusing and humiliating his subordinates. Stupid stuff, reminiscent of hazing in college fraternities, but it cuts to the core when a person’s sleep-deprived and unsure as to whether he’ll have a job the next day. And particularly hard to take for a sensitive young man who’s desperate to win his family’s love and approval.”

  “So what happened? Did Roger die because the hazing went too far?”

  Glenn’s mouth twitched and his eyes grew liquid. “You could say that. Two months ago, on Valentine’s Day, Roger committed suicide. Stopped his car on the Bay Bridge, climbed over the railing, and jumped. Beforehand he mailed a letter to his parents in which he apologized for being a failure.”

  I’m sorry.

  Joey’s note. God, the parallels were so obvious! A man who drifted from job to job. An underachiever in a family of overachievers.

  A man who killed himself.

  Suddenly I felt lightheaded. I touched my fingers to my forehead. It was damp, and the too-heavy lunch I’d eaten now lay like a brick in my stomach.

  “Sharon?” Glenn said.

  I pressed the stop button on my recorder. “I’m okay,” I said after a moment. “But I can’t take this case. There’s no way I can take it.”

  And there was no way I was going to discuss Joey’s suicide with Glenn. Too much of my private life had been the subject of conversations over the past six months. Bad enough that I was repeatedly forced to explain—as I just had at lunch—that when the man whom I’d thought to be my father died in September, I’d discovered that I had a birth father living on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. That while I had a family in California, I also had a birth mother, a half sister, and a half brother in Boise, Idaho.

  No, I couldn’t take this case, but I’d find some way of explaining why that didn’t involve Joey. Or so I told myself until Glenn spoke again.

  “I know about your brother,” he said. “Hank told me.” Hank Zahn, my closest male friend since college, had betrayed a confidence.

  “The subject came up because of Roger,” Glenn added.

  “And you, like a typical lawyer, saw a way to capitalize on it.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “No, what’s not fair is you asking me to do this. Why would you want me to take on a case that would continually remind me—”

  “Perhaps you need to be reminded, and to deal with it.”

  “What’re you saying? That you’re offering me the job for its therapeutic value?”

  Glenn stood, put both hands on my shoulders, and looked into my eyes. “Yes, for its therapeutic value—for you, me, and the Nagasawas.”

  “Sorry, the answer is no.”

  He studied me for a moment longer, then straightened, smiling faintly. “I’ll have copies of my files messengered over to you by close of business.”

  “So that’s how it is. You understand why I’ve got to tell Glenn I can’t take the case.”

  Curled up on my sofa, a cat draped across the back with its paws dangling onto my head, another purring on my feet, I was sipping a glass of wine and talking on the phone with my birth father, Elwood Farmer. Elwood was one of the few people I knew whom I could find wide awake and eager for conversation at eleven-thirty P.M.—the hour I’d finished reading Glenn’s files on Roger Nagasawa’s death.

  “I understand why you think you can’t take it,” he said.

  I could picture him seated in his padded rocker in front of the woodstove in his small log house in Montana. He’d be wearing a plaid wool shirt and jeans, his gray hair unkempt and touching his shoulders, a cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth, its smoke making him squint. We’d taken to talking every couple of weeks, feeling our way toward a comfortable father-daughter relationship. Unfortunately, the conversations were not always amicable, because I harbored a resentment toward him for having suspected my existence my whole life but making no effort to find me, and he was plainly bewildered at how to be a parent to a forty-one-year-old stranger.

  “What?” I said. “You think I should accept a job that’s going to make me dwell on Joey’s suicide?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, do you?”

  “What I think isn’t important.”

  “Come on, Elwood. Be a father for once. Give me some advice.”

  “I’m only learning to be a father. And I don’t believe in imposing my opinion upon another person.”

  “I just want to know what you think.”

  “… I think the answer is already within you.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! If you’re going to get mystical, or whatever you call this, I’m going to hang up.”

  “Good. Hang up and call me back when you’ve assembled your thoughts.”

  Assemble my thoughts, my ass! He
pulled that crap on me when we first met, but it isn’t going to work this time.

  Who is this man to me, anyway? Somebody who donated his sperm to my birth mother, that’s all. End of his connection to both Saskia and me. Later, when she was in worse trouble than the pregnancy, he didn’t return her phone call because he was preoccupied with the woman he eventually married.

  Why should I care what he thinks?

  Assemble my thoughts. Hah!

  “I’m sorry I hung up on you.”

  “I know you are.”

  “I’ve assembled my thoughts.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I know what you mean by the answer already being within me. I can’t refuse this case, because I’m a truth-seeker. If working on this Nagasawa investigation can help me to understand why Joey killed himself … Well, it’s something I have to do.”

  “Not so difficult to figure out, was it?”

  Tuesday

  APRIL 17

  Roger Nagasawa’s flat was in a narrow building on Brannan Street not far from South Park: five stories of gray cinder block over an original wood facade, each with a single casement window facing the street. Its concrete front steps ended in a porch large enough for a pair of wrought-iron chairs and a small glass-topped table; all three were secured by chains to rings that had been attached to the building’s wall. To the right stood a former warehouse that now housed a health club; the building to the left was a live-work loft conversion, now stalled by the city’s six-month moratorium on such projects while a study on growth and development was conducted.

  I took out the keys Glenn Solomon had given me, got the front door open. The lobby was small, perhaps ten feet square, and carpeted in threadbare brown that bunched up in the center, as if stretched out of shape by too many vigorous cleanings. An elevator with an accordion grille that screened a door with a porthole window was opposite the entrance, its cage waiting. I stepped inside, punched the button for the top floor, and it began a groaning ascent.

  When I’d appeared at Glenn’s office in Four Embarcadero that morning, he’d betrayed no surprise that I’d decided to take the Nagasawa case. We agreed on business matters, signed a contract, and he promised to let the family know I’d be contacting them. Then he turned over the keys to Roger’s flat, which he had owned and his parents had left untouched since his suicide. I’d come directly here to commune with the dead.

  The elevator jerked to a stop. I waited till it stopped bouncing, then stepped out into a tiny space where the sun glared down through a skylight. A fly buzzed fitfully against its glass, and dust motes danced on the warm air. A door was set into the wall to my left, an impressive collection of locks and numerous coats of paint—the latest being white—spoiling what must once have been a handsome piece of woodwork. I started keying locks from the top down.

  The room beyond was white walled, with bleached pine floors and a long sofa of unnaturally dyed turquoise leather perched on a clear acrylic base. Cubes of the same acrylic were positioned to either side, their tops empty of anything but dust. I shut the door and walked to the center of the room, my footfalls loud on the bare boards. A state-of-theart entertainment center stood opposite the sofa, housed in more cubes.

  Through wide archways I could see two other rooms: a bedroom at the front, with a door to a bathroom opening off it, and a dining-and-kitchen area. More skylights and windows at either end admitted light made harsh by the unadorned walls. I moved toward the dining area, where an oval glass table rested on a crimson lacquered base shaped like a piece of driftwood. The straight-backed chairs positioned around it were a matching crimson and looked uncomfortable. A galley kitchen with brushed chrome appliances ran along the wall to my left, separated from the main room by a white marble-topped bar.

  I skirted the table and looked out the rear window. Five stories below in a small backyard someone had planted a garden with neatly spaced rows. An optimist, I thought. How could anything grow with the grimy walls of buildings towering over it on four sides and blocking out the sun?

  There was a seat under the window. I perched on it, taking in the entire elongated space. Stark white walls. Minimal furnishings. Nothing on the table, nothing on the bar but a single crimson pottery bowl. Similarly bare counters behind it. Platform bed in the far room, covered in a violently yellow comforter. Three splashes of bright color, like paint splattered on a blank canvas. And where were the personal touches? Where were the objects that would tell me what kind of man Roger Nagasawa had been?

  I went looking for them.

  An hour later the picture I’d formed of Roger was still hazy, but fascinating. There were two sides of his personality represented in the flat—sides that most certainly had been at war with each other.

  On the surface he’d been compulsively neat: Nothing was without its place, to the extent that he’d labeled where various plates and glasses went on his open-fronted shelves. The DVD and audio discs in the entertainment center were alphabetized, as were the books on the shelves in his bedroom. The computer workstation contained no discs whatsoever, and there was only a jumble of pens and pencils and a phone book in its drawer.

  The machine was a Mac, like mine. I turned it on, clicked to his Internet server, found he’d stored his password. When the connection was made, I found he had no new e-mail— which was to be expected—and no old or sent mail either. I signed off and clicked on the icon for the hard drive; there were no files stored there. Most likely he’d deleted them before killing himself.

  On the shelves in the small bathroom, personal-care items were neatly lined up by type. The cord to his blow-dryer was wound tightly around its handle, the way a maid in a hotel will leave it. The towels—yellow, to match the comforter—showed signs of use, but were folded and aligned on their bars so the edges met perfectly.

  But then there was the other side of Roger: Anything that wasn’t in plain view was in a state of total disorder. A knee-high heap of dirty clothing in the bedroom closet, most other garments crooked on their hangers. Coats and hats and umbrellas dumped on top of a pile of papers and books in a closet off the living room. Utensils jumbled in the kitchen drawers. For a moment I wondered if someone hadn’t trashed the flat while looking for something, but there was no feel of such violation here. Roger, I decided, had simply been a clandestine slob.

  A pantry off the kitchen was the absolute worst. Its small floorspace was covered with bundles of recyclables, gallon cans of dried and cracking white paint, dirty rags, flowerpots containing dead plants, and an oily pool of a substance that I didn’t care to get close enough to identify. Bags of pasta and rice were spilled on the shelves, a bottle of pancake syrup had tipped over and bonded to a can of tomato juice, a cereal box had been gnawed by mice, whose droppings lay everywhere. The top shelf was given over to paper products, which Roger apparently had bought in bulk. Sandwiched incongruously between the toilet tissue and paper towels was a leather binder.

  I pulled the binder from the shelf and took it to the dining area, where I sat down in a chair that was as fully uncomfortable as it looked. The binder was tan, with the initials RJN stamped on it in gold—the sort of gift most men receive at some time or another but seldom use. I opened it randomly to a vellum page covered with a backhanded script.

  May 28

  I’m not as depressed since I moved into the flat. Sunny here South of Market, and there’s so much light in the space. Am painting the walls white and will use bright accent colors to keep the good moods coming. And when the bad moods set in there’s always a walk along the waterfront or bench-sitting in South Park. My fears about returning to the city were groundless.

  I flipped ahead a number of pages, looking for evidence of a deteriorating emotional condition.

  August 13

  Dinner with the folks. Harry mercifully absent. But, God, that’s a depressing house! Full of all that clutter. Japanese crap, as if they’re trying to prove they haven’t lost touch with their roots. Why didn’t I notice it bef
ore? How did I breathe while I was living there? When I came home tonight I boxed up the few knicknacks I’d set out. None of that clutter for me.

  September 15

  I met a woman tonight. Lady in distress. She’s hip and beautiful. As we shared a glass of wine and conversation, I felt my reserve crumbling, that old magic returning. I’d better watch myself—it’s bound to turn out as badly as it always has.

  October 17

  I can’t believe the shit that’s going on at work. You have to be there awhile before you fully tap into it, but I’m tapped now. For a while I was stunned, then I got angry. There’s got to be a way to make those people act like human beings, but—

  A knock at the door. I set the binder down and went to see who was there.

  The woman who stood in the hallway was probably in her midtwenties: small, with closely cropped brown hair, large, thickly lashed hazel eyes, and multiple earrings in each lobe. Her stance was aggressive, one booted foot thrust forward, hands in the pockets of her black leather pants, but it didn’t mask her nervousness. She blinked when she saw me.

  “Who’re you?” she asked in a voice not much louder than a whisper.

  “A representative of the Nagasawa family’s attorney. And you are … ?”

  Some of the tension left her features; she unpocketed her hands and crossed her arms over her loosely woven sweater. “Jody Houston. I live downstairs. What’re you doing here? Is the family getting ready to sell the flat?”

  “Eventually.” I moved back and motioned her inside. She hesitated, looking around furtively, before stepping over the threshold. “Were you a friend of Roger’s?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I was. Look, if they’re not planning to sell yet, what’re you doing here?”

  I told her my name and occupation. “I’m trying to establish a profile of Roger, find out about his last days. The family would feel better if they knew why he killed himself.”

  “He’s been dead for two months. Why the sudden interest now?”

  Glenn had cautioned me against mentioning a potential suit against InSite to anyone. “I don’t know what prompted it. I haven’t talked with them yet.”