by Robert Crais
I ran my tongue across the backs of my teeth and thought about Mimi Warren and couldn’t shake the cold feeling. “Did she do things like that often?”
Traci Louise Fishman began to sob, great heaving sobs that shook her and made her gag. The secret had been held a long time, and it had been scary. Perhaps even incomprehensible. When the sobs died, she said, “You’ll find her? You’ll find her and bring her back?”
“Yes.”
“I told her I was real. I told her I had purpose.”
I nodded.
“She’s my friend,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and bubbly.
I nodded. “I know, babe.”
The sobs erupted once more and took a long time to die. I gave her my handkerchief. With the pale skin and the out-from-under eyes and the heavy little-girl face, there was a quality of loneliness to her that comes when your only friend walks away and you don’t know why and there’s no one else and never will be. A left-behind look.
We sat like that for another few minutes, Traci rubbing at her flat nose and me breathing deeply and thinking about Mimi and Eddie Tang and what that might mean. Most of the cars had long since gone, but the red 944 still sat in its spot, music playing, girls within pretending not to stare toward Traci Louise Fishman’s white Volkswagen Rabbit. After a while I said, “They’re still watching us.”
Traci nodded. The eyes weren’t watering anymore and the nose was dry and she gave back my handkerchief. “They can’t believe a good-looking guy like you is sitting here with me.”
“Maybe,” I said, “they can’t believe a good-looking girl like you is letting me.”
She smiled and looked down at her steering wheel again, and again picked at the plastic. She said, “Please bring her back.”
I looked at the Porsche. The girl in the back seat was staring our way. I said, “Traci?”
She looked up at me.
I leaned across and kissed her on the lips. She didn’t move, and when I pulled back she was a vivid red. I said, “Thanks for the help.”
Her chin went down into her neck and she swallowed hard and looked mortified. She touched her lips and looked over at the girls in the Porsche. They were gaping at us. Traci Louise Fishman blinked at them, and looked back at me. Then she squared her shoulders, touched her lips again, and folded both hands very neatly in her lap.
I got out of the Rabbit, went back to the Corvette, and drove to my office.
22
I parked in the bottom of my building, went into the deli, bought a pastrami sandwich with Chinese hot mustard, then used the stairs to go up to the office. Walking the stairs made it easier not to think about Mimi Warren holding a lit cigarette to her skin. Maybe Traci Louise Fishman had made up that part. Maybe she’d made up all of it. Maybe if I didn’t think about Mimi Warren or Traci Louise Fishman or Eddie Tang they would all disappear and living would be easy. Elvis Cole, Existential Detective. I liked that. Not thinking, properly done, creates a pleasant numbed sensation in the brain that I like a lot. There are women who will tell you that not thinking is one of my best things.
I let myself into the office, got a Falstaff out of the little fridge, put the sandwich on a paper plate, and called Lou Poitras.
Lou said, “Don’t tell me. You’ve cracked the case.”
I said, “The girl knew Eddie Tang.”
He told me to hang on and then he put me on hold. When he put me on hold, the phone started playing music. Michael Jackson singing about how bad he was. Our tax dollars at work.
Lou came back and said, “Go on.”
“She used to sneak out of the house and go to clubs. She hung out and met people and one of the people she met was Tang. She might’ve mentioned the book to him. She told people that Eddie Tang was her boyfriend.”
“She know Tang was yakuza?”
“I don’t know.”
“Eddie hears about the book, he maybe figures it’s a good thing to steal.”
“Uh-huh.”
Lou Poitras didn’t say anything for a while. He’s got three kids. Two of them are daughters. “Thanks for the tip, Hound Dog. I’ll look into it.”
“Always happy to cooperate with the police.”
“Right.”
We hung up. I watched Pinocchio’s eyes slide from side to side and ate the sandwich. Terry Ito had said Eddie Tang was on his way up. Maybe Eddie figured taking advantage of Mimi Warren and stealing the Hagakure were the keys to ascendancy. Hmmm. I finished the sandwich, then called the phone company. I asked if they had a street address for a guy named Eddie or Edward Tang. They did. Forty minutes later, I was there.
Eddie Tang lived in an apartment building in the flat part of L.A. just south of Century City off Pico Boulevard. It’s older in there, and used to be middle class, but now there’re lots of trendy restaurants and singles places and New Age health clubs. Eddie’s complex had been redone about five years ago with mauve stucco and redwood inlays and black slate steps that twisted up from the walk in a slow curve to a glass security door. To the right of the entry a driveway angled down beneath the building and was blocked by a wrought iron gate. To either side of the garage, bougainvillea had been planted but not long enough ago to flourish. It was a good-looking building. Proof positive that crime pays.
I parked fifty yards down the block in the shade from a gum tree and waited. Maybe Eddie was home and maybe he had Mimi bound and gagged and hidden away in a closet, but maybe not. Boxes buried a couple of feet under the desert up in Sun Valley were more along the lines reserved for kidnap victims than upscale apartment houses in West Los Angeles.
At four-ten a brown unmarked copmobile pulled to a stop by the fire hydrant in front of Eddie’s building. You know it’s a copmobile because nobody in L.A. would buy anything as boring as a stripped-down four-door Dodge sedan except the cops. A bald-headed dick with freckles and a younger dick with a deep tan and heavy lines around his eyes climbed out and went up to the glass security door. The bald-headed guy was in a suit that looked like it hadn’t been pressed in two months. The younger guy was in a dark blue Calvin Klein cord jacket and charcoal slacks with creases so sharp they could have been registered as deadly weapons. Poitras had made some phone calls and this was the follow-up.
They stood at the glass door and pretty soon a young woman in jeans and no shoes and a Sports Connection T-shirt came and opened the door. Manager. The younger cop showed her his badge and they all went inside and about fifteen minutes later they all came back out again. Eddie wasn’t home, and Mimi hadn’t been in a closet. The bald-headed cop went out to the car. The younger cop stood at the security door and talked to the woman for a while, both of them smiling a lot. When the woman went back inside, the younger cop watched her closely. Probably alert for suspicious moves. The cops left.
Just before five, Eddie Tang came down the street in a dark green Alfa Romeo Spider. There might’ve been blood stains on Eddie’s shirt, but if there were, I couldn’t see them. The garage gate lifted and Eddie Tang disappeared beneath his building and the gate closed and I waited.
At a quarter after six, the garage gate lifted again and Eddie and the Alfa turned north past me, heading toward Olympic. I followed him. We turned west on Olympic, then south to Washington, and stayed on Washington until we came to a clapboard warehouse in Culver City three blocks from MGM. Eddie pulled into the warehouse, then almost lost me when he pulled out again while I was looking for a place to park. We went west into Marina del Rey. Eddie drove slowly, as if he wasn’t sure where he was going, and that made it tough. I had to keep cars between us and I had to drop further and further back to do it. In the Marina, we turned off Washington onto Via Dolce Drive and passed tall, cubist houses on little tiny lots that sold for over a million bucks each. Eddie parked at the curb of a brick and wood monstrosity with a sea horse in the window and got out of the Alfa carrying a red nylon gym bag. A slender man with a beard and thick glasses opened the door, took the gym bag without a word, then closed the door. Crimi
nals rarely observe the social graces. We went back out to Washington and drove east. After a while Eddie stopped at a Texaco station and used the pay phone, then drove south to pick up the 1-10 freeway. In Hollywood, a heavily muscled black guy in a tank top climbed into Eddie’s car and the two of them talked, the black guy getting agitated and waving his arms. Eddie threw a snapping backfist, and after that the arm-waving stopped. The black guy put a handkerchief to his mouth for the bleeding. There was more driving and more stops and more phone calls and not once did I see anyone dressed like a ninja or carrying a sword.
At eight-twenty that evening, Eddie Tang turned west onto Sunset from Fairfax, drove two blocks, and pulled to the curb at a new wave dance place called the Pago Pago Club. We were right in the heart of the Sunset Strip. There were two men and three women waiting for him. One of the women was Mimi Warren.
Kidnapped, all right.
23
Mimi Warren wasn’t tied up and no one was holding a gun on her. She was wearing tight white pants and a green sequined halter top and spike-heeled silver sandals. Her hair stuck out at odd angles and her nails were bright blue and she wore too much makeup the way teenage girls do when they think it’s sexy. She still wasn’t very pretty, Eddie pulled to the curb and gave her a big smile.
I drove past the club, turned around at Tower Records, and crept back. The Strip was bright with flashing neon signs and the sidewalks were jammed with overage hipsters trying to look like Phil Collins or Sheena Easton. There were two baby-blue spotlights on the back of a flatbed trailer parked in front of a shoe store. The lights arced in counter-rotating circles, the light shafts crisscrossing again and again like matched sabers.
When I got back, Mimi and the white-haired girl Traci Louise Fishman had identified as Kerri were climbing into the Alfa. Eddie gave Mimi a kiss. There was a lot of laughing and a lot of waving and then they drove away, heading west on Sunset across Beverly Hills. I thought about shooting out the tires, but that would have been showing off.
Eddie turned north, following Rexford as it turned into Coldwater Canyon, and climbed into the Santa Monica mountains. He wasn’t bringing her home and he wasn’t bringing her back to his place. Maybe he was bringing her to a party. There’s always a party in Hollywood.
At the top of the mountain, Eddie turned west on Mulholland Drive. Mulholland runs along the top of the mountains like some great black python. There were no streetlights and no other cars. The only light came from the waxing moon high overhead and from the San Fernando Valley, spreading out on the right like gold and yellow and red glitter. I turned off my headlamps and dropped back and hoped nothing was lying in the road.
Just before Benedict Canyon, the Alfa’s brake lights flared and it pulled into a drive cut into the hillside. The drive was private and well lit and there was a modern metal gate growing out of the rock and one of those little voice boxes so you can announce yourself. The gate rolled out of the way and the Alfa went in. Then the gate closed.
I stopped about a hundred yards short of where the Alfa disappeared, backed into another drive, and killed the engine. The air was chill and clean and there was a breeze coming up the canyons. If you listened hard, you could hear the faraway hiss of the Ventura Freeway riding the breeze. I sat for twenty minutes and then the gate opened again and the Alfa came out. Eddie was still driving, but if Mimi and Kerri were with him, they were in the trunk.
Hmmm.
I got out of the Corvette, walked up to the gate, and took a look. The drive followed the curve of the hillside for about sixty yards to where the mountain had been cut away for a large neat lawn and a large, well-lit Bauhaus house. There were garages on the right of the property with what looked like a tennis court peeking out from behind, and a guy and a girl standing just outside the entry to the house. They were both wearing pale gray pants and pale gray Nehru jackets with black leather belts. That good old Red Army look. Mimi and Kerri were framed in a large picture window to the left of the entry, talking with another boy and girl. The boy was Asian, but the girl wasn’t. The girl wore the same pale gray uniform. The boy wore baggy white pants and a too-big tee shirt. The four of them stood in the window for a while, then walked out of my line of sight. There came no cries for help, no sharp crack of gunfire, no blood-curdling screams.
I went back to the Corvette, got in, and stared at the gate. Mimi was in the house, and it appeared that she planned to stay there. It also appeared that she was safe. The smart thing would be to find a phone and call the cops. It was also the obvious thing. I sat there and stared, and after a while I started up and drove west.
Just off Beverly Glen at Mulholland I found a Stop & Go convenience store and used their pay phone. I called the phone company again, gave them my name and the number off my license, then told them the Mulholland address, and asked who lived there. The phone company voice said that there were four numbers installed at that address, all unlisted, two being billed to something called Gray Shield Enterprises and two being billed to a Mr. Kira Asano, all billings being sent care of an accountancy firm with a Wilshire address. I said, “Kira Asano, the artist?”
The voice said, “Pardon me, sir?”
I hung up.
I went into the Stop & Go, got more change, then called the Herald Examiner and asked if Eddie Ditko was on the night desk. He was.
Eddie came on with a phlegmy cough and said, “Elvis Cole, shit. I heard you got shot to death down in San Diego. What in hell you want?” Eddie loves me like a son.
“Know anything about a guy named Eddie Tang?”
“What, I’m supposed to know about some guy just because we got the same goddamn first name?” You see? Always the kind word.
“Try out Yuki Torobuni.”
Eddie made a gargling sound, then spit.
“How about a guy named Kira Asano?”
“Asano’s the gook artist, right?”
“That’s what I like about you, Eddie. Sensitive.”
“Shit. You want Asano or you want sensitive?”
“Asano.”
“Okay. Made Time back in the sixties. Back then, he was some kinda hot shit artist from Japan, mostly because of a lot of minimalist landscape work showing empty beaches and crap. He stopped painting and came here, saying America was gonna be the new Japan, and he was gonna instill the samurai spirit in American youth. Some shit, huh?”
“The Hagakure,” I said.
“Huh?”
“What else?”
Eddie made the gargling sound again, then said, “Jesus. You wouldn’t believe what I got coming out of me.” That Eddie. “Asano founded something called the Gray Army and got a couple hundred kids to join. That was a long time ago, though. Old news. I ain’t heard about him in years.”
I said, “Is he dangerous?”
“Hell, I’m dangerous. Asano’s just crazy.”
I hung up and got back in the Corvette but didn’t start it. Sonofagun. Maybe Kira Asano was behind the theft of the Hagakure. Mimi would have gotten involved with his organization because she didn’t have anything else in her life, and Asano would’ve pointed out what a grand fine place the Hagakure would have in the movement. Only now Eddie knew about the Hagakure, and wanted it, and was playing on Mimi to get to it. You and me, babe. My, my.
A fat man in baggy shorts came out of the Stop & Go with a brown paper bag. Inside, the Persian clerk stared at a miniature TV. The fat man looked at me, nodded, then got into a black Jaguar and drove away. When the Jaguar was gone, the little parking lot was quiet except for the insectile buzz of the street lamps. Here in the mountains, the Stop & Go was an island of light.
I had come to rescue Mimi, and that would be easy enough. I could call the cops, and let them do it, or I could return to Asano’s, crash through the gate, and drag Mimi back to the safe tranquility of Holmby Hills and her mother and father. Only she probably wouldn’t stay. Something had driven her away. Something had turned her into a kid who burned herself with cigarettes and adopted a
different personality for everyone in her life and had made her want to get away from home so badly and hurt her parents so much that she had gone to incredible lengths to do it. Something wasn’t right.
I sat and I stared into the warm light of the Stop & Go and I thought about all the different Mimis. The Mimi that I’d met and the Mimi that Bradley and Sheila knew and Traci Louise Fishman’s Mimi and the Mimi who thought the kids in the gray uniforms had “purpose.” I’m with people who love me now. Maybe there would even be a different Mimi tomorrow. Maybe I needed to know which Mimi was the real Mimi before I’d know what to do.
At eighteen minutes after ten I started my car, pulled out onto Mulholland Drive, and went home.
24
At nine-forty the next morning I drove back along Mulholland, pulled up at Asano’s gate, and pressed a blue metal button on the call box. A female voice said, “May I help you?”
I said, “Yes, you may. My name is Elvis Cole, and I’d like to speak with Mimi Warren.”
Nothing happened.
I pressed the call button again and said, “Knock, knock, knock! Chicken Delight!”
The female voice said, “There is no Mimi Warren here.”
“How about I come in and talk with Kira Asano.”
“Do you have an appointment, sir?”
“Yes. Under the name George Bush.”
A male voice came on. “Sir, if you’d like to make an appointment with Mr. Asano, we should be able to fit you in sometime toward the end of next week. If you do not wish an appointment, please clear the driveway.”
