Woman with a Blue Pencil

by Gordon McAlpine

  Well, I don’t presume to know what your father would tell you about whatever reservations persist for you. But, as your editor, I must remind you that the integrity of your character, Jimmy Park, is seriously threatened whenever you put your own words into his mouth at the expense of his own words and thoughts. That’s right, his own. After all, as you’ve speculated in a previous note, properly conceived characters achieve a kind of independent Life, which the author must honor rather than merely presume to create. So, in this light, are you allowing Jimmy his life?

  Additionally, and somewhat less esoterically, your professionalism should insure that you provide pace sufficient to your “spy novel” that readers will want to keep turning the pages. This is a basic requirement. If, instead, you allow self-doubt and moral confusion (despite my numerous assurances to you about the inherently good-hearted nature of our project) to interfere with the basic requirements of good storytelling—coherent character and compellingly paced plot—then you are failing as a writer and that leaves you . . . where? Nowhere, Takumi.

  Now, I’m not suggesting that Jimmy need be callous about things. Perhaps you can condense the two chapters you’ve currently set in Glendale into one conversation with Mr. Barratt in the car while traveling toward the amusement park? I’m not asking that Jimmy be cardboard. Sure, give him feelings. Just be quite certain that they’re his and not yours.

  Forgive my vehemence on this, please. It’s just that your project and your well-being in general have come to mean so much to me these past months. How could they not? In our personal lives we’ve each suffered incalculable losses (yes, my husband remains MIA). But you and I are bound together as comrades by a game fellow named Jimmy Park. You created him. Now, he’s his own man. So grab some of his reckless enthusiasm when you need it. And share it with me, please.

  Cut the stuff in Glendale. Let’s get to the shoot ’em up.

  Affectionately,

  Maxine

  THE REVISED—CHAPTER SEVEN

  And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

  The instruments of darkness tell us truths . . .

  —William Shakespeare

  It was just past eight when Sumida entered the lobby of the Barclay Hotel on Fourth and Main. In the initial hours after his inquiries at the dentist’s office and with the soothsayer in Little Tokyo, he’d wandered the downtown, considering what to do when he met Czernicek. His various plans all ended the same—his gaining satisfaction. But he needed proof. He needed a confession. He settled on a plan. Nonetheless, in the early evening, with time left to kill, other questions persisted. So he had returned to the library, this time to the metaphysics section, 110 by Dewey Decimal reckoning, which seemed one place he might find an explanation for the strange dislocation of the past day. The soothsayer had told him seeking such answers was strictly for fools. Well, he was a fool.

  How else could he have arrived in these circumstances?

  Besides, haunting the library shelves was better than wandering the street. It felt familiar. He was an academic, after all. And he needed something to take his mind off the coming confrontation with Czernicek. (If he was a drinker this would have involved a bar, if he was a womanizer a brothel, but he was neither.)

  Unfortunately, his library research turned up only the concept of the doppelganger, a German word for an apparition who is an exact double of a living person. There were reputed examples from history. The poet Shelley claimed that on an Italian shore he had once met his doppelganger, who silently pointed toward the Mediterranean. Not long after, Shelley drowned in the same sea. The French author de Maupassant claimed to have been aided by his doppelganger, who came to him late in his life to dictate a story. Shortly before her death, Queen Elizabeth I of England saw her doppelganger lying portentously on the royal bed. The poet John Donne met his wife’s doppelganger while he was in Paris and she was giving birth in England. Being of a bookish sensibility, Sumida absorbed the superstitious accounts with interest, attempting to connect the phenomenon with his own experience. Might he be a doppelganger? No, his friend Tony Fortuna would have recognized him, as being recognizable was the defining characteristic of a doppelganger. Besides, if Sumida were a doppelganger then it should have been his “authentic” self, rather than a stranger, who lived in his Echo Park bungalow. It all came to nothing.

  He was no more a doppelganger than he was a ghost or an urban sprite.

  Sumida left the library with no more understanding than he’d had when he entered it. His research skills were worthless to him now. He didn’t know what he was, except flesh and blood.

  The soothsayer was right.

  But he would be a fool no longer. Instead, he would do what he was called upon to do by his own small, still voice, leaving the desire for understanding to the babbling, drunken prophets who lived in their own filth on Fifth Street, the infamous Nickel. Still, he couldn’t help considering how dire a man’s situation was when he discovered himself disappointed to realize that he was not an apparition but that he and the world he inhabited were both real, if unfathomable.

  The walk from the library to the Barclay Hotel was short.

  By the time he passed through the revolving door, he’d moved on from Shelley, de Maupassant, Queen Elizabeth I, and John Donne. Instead, he considered Hamlet, who, like Sumida, suffered from sometimes wanting to know too much. Now Sumida thought that “To be or not to be” mightn’t be the essential question. There need be no questions at all. Instead, the Dane may have gotten it right simply with this: Oh, from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.

  He approached the front desk clerk, a bespectacled man who stood at least six and a half feet tall but couldn’t have weighed much more than Sumida himself. “I have an appointment with one of your guests, Henry Czernicek,” Sumida said.

  The clerk glanced down at the guest register, then back at the wall of keys.

  “Mr. Czernicek is out.”

  Sumida nodded. “I’ll wait.” He started toward the modest but comfortably furnished lobby.

  “Not here you won’t,” the night clerk said.

  Sumida stopped and turned. “What?”

  “No Japs hanging around the lobby.”

  Sumida knew he could reach over the counter and pull the string bean over it, then break him in two over his knee. But what was the percentage in that? “Look, he’ll be here any minute.”

  “Then you won’t have to wait outside too long.”

  Sumida didn’t have to wait outside at all, as Czernicek just then entered the lobby, his coat fluttering about him as if he were Doug Fairbanks. In his hand, he carried a file. “We need to go up to my room,” he said, approaching Sumida but not offering his hand.

  Sumida wouldn’t have shaken it anyway.

  “We’ve got things to discuss,” Czernicek continued.

  “Yes we do,” Sumida affirmed.

  Czernicek strode to the front desk. “512,” he said to the string bean clerk, who handed over the key.

  “You going to take that Jap up to your room?” the clerk asked.

  “He’s a Chink,” Czernicek answered. “Don’t sweat it.”

  The desk clerk didn’t like it. But he turned back to a novel he had open behind the counter.

  Sumida and Czernicek were silent in the open grill elevator.

  “You can take a seat over there, near the window,” Czernicek said, after he opened his room door and flipped on the light.

  Sumida entered.

  Czernicek closed the door after himself and casually set the file on top of a weathered dresser. “I’ve got to take a piss,” he said, walking into the bathroom. He didn’t bother closing the door.

  Sumida did not sit but stood, waiting, listening to the heavy stream from the john. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves and checked the pistol in the back waistband of his trousers—the .38 Special he had taken the night before from Tony Fortuna, who’d previously taken it from the unconscious hulk on the sofa.

&n
bsp; The toilet flushed.

  Czernicek emerged into the hotel room, still zipping his trousers. “Better now.”

  Sumida wasn’t going to waste any time. He stepped toward Czernicek, extending the business card he had taken from Dr. Shinoda’s dental office with the appointment scribbled on the back. “I just found this lying here beside the bed,” he lied. “It must have fallen out of your jacket.”

  Czernicek took the card and looked at it. Then he slipped it casually into his trousers pocket.

  “He’s your dentist,” Sumida said, allowing for no denial.

  Czernicek’s eyes narrowed. His thought registered on his movie-star face: had he allowed a moment’s lapse, carelessness, exposure? His expression turned to one of aggression. “I didn’t say anything about him being my dentist.”

  “But you took the card without a second thought.”

  “Look, what kind of game are you playing at, Sumida?”

  “Earlier, you mentioned using ‘cut-rate’ Japanese dentistry,” Sumida calmly explained.

  “Lots of people go to this Shinoda,” Czernicek said.

  “We’re not talking about Dr. Shinoda.”

  Czernicek waited.

  “That office is where Kyoko used to work,” Sumida continued. “But you already knew that, Czernicek. Everybody knew. It was at the public inquest. What wasn’t public, however, was that you’d been a patient of Dr. Shinoda and that you met my wife there.”

  Czernicek sighed as if bored.

  Sumida continued. “I don’t know how you charmed her. The usual ways, I’d guess. Good looks. Cop. But you ought to know that she was already unhappy at home. With me. I’ll admit that. So don’t pat yourself too much on the back for having taken her away.”

  “I didn’t take nobody.”

  “She was a beautiful woman,” Sumida said. “I commend your taste.”

  “She was a beautiful woman,” Czernicek snapped, his patience exhausted. “Too damn good for you. Too damn good for any of you. I wonder, how is it that Jap women are so much better looking than their men? I don’t understand how there’re even any purebred Jap babies, considering the sorry ass Jap men your women have to fuck. But your wife didn’t mean anything to me. Understand? I got chippies on every block of this city. You met one today at lunch. The truth is, I can’t even keep them straight. And why would I bother?”

  “So she didn’t mean more to you than any of the others?”

  “That’s right. She was just another piece of ass. An exotic one, at least.”

  “So why did you kill her?”

  “Kill her?” Czernicek laughed and sat down on the bed. “You’ve completely gone around the bend.”

  Sumida knew Czernicek was armed and dangerous. Now, having broached the subject of Kyoko’s murder, this was no longer a time for subtlety. Reaching into his back waistband, Sumida withdrew the .38, pointing it at Czernicek’s head. “Don’t move,” he said. He was glad that his voice betrayed little of the anxiety he felt. Glad too that his hand was steady. Until now, he hadn’t been sure either would be the case. He sorted through the books and movies he’d studied for what to say next. Spade, the Continental Op, even Nick Charles . . . “With two fingers gently remove your weapon from its holster and drop it on the carpet, kicking it toward me.”

  Czernicek grinned. “Which is it, Sumida? ‘Don’t move?’ Or ‘remove my weapon?’ See, your orders kind of contradict each other.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Czernicek.”

  “Hey, you’re the professor,” Czernicek said. “The smart one. I’m the good looking one.”

  Sumida motioned with the .38. “Remove your goddamn gun. Drop it on the carpet and kick it toward me. And if you try anything funny you should be assured that even an amateur couldn’t miss your pretty face from this range.” Sumida felt a surge of confidence. “And I’m not as much an amateur as you may think.”

  Sighing, Czernicek did as Sumida asked.

  Without looking down, Sumida kicked Czernicek’s handgun further out of reach, under the bed.

  “Kyoko was something special to you, whatever you claim,” Sumida said, his hand hot on the big gun. “Otherwise she would still be alive. Just like your string of waitresses are alive. But Kyoko wasn’t like them.”

  Czernicek shook his head. “I don’t like to disappoint you, but she was nothing to me.”

  Sumida waited. He held the gun.

  “The truth is,” Czernicek said after a moment, “I hadn’t thought of her since we put her file in the cold cases a few weeks after the crime. It was only seeing you that brought her to mind at all.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  Czernicek looked away, as if frustrated. “I slept with your wife,” he said. “Sorry. But even you admit I didn’t break up your already failing marriage.” His manner turned more reasonable. “So why don’t you put down the gun. I’ll stand up right here and let you take your best shot at me, right in the kisser. Knock me out cold if you can. I deserve it. Man to man. Then we can get past this woman thing and back to the pressing matter, which is that you and I don’t seem to exist in this place, which I used to think was just Los Angeles.”

  Sumida wouldn’t allow himself to be distracted, even by the existential confusion that had characterized his last hours. “You lie about my wife.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Because when I walked into the periodicals room this morning at the library I was told that you’d already checked out the newspaper for January 12, 1941, the day the story broke about Kyoko’s murder.”

  That seemed to take Czernicek aback.

  “Oh, it didn’t strike me as suspicious at first,” Sumida continued. “It should have, but everything seemed so disorienting then. My mind’s cleared now, even if I still don’t understand how things work with you and me and the rest of the world.” He shook his head. “That world stuff’s a real pisser, huh? It’s like we two were excised from the universe and now we’ve been dropped back into some variation of it in where we never existed. I don’t understand why. I don’t have to. I don’t care. Because I’m standing here now just thinking about that newspaper. And I can’t imagine why you’d request that particular day’s edition if you’d ‘forgotten’ all about Kyoko’s existence until you saw me, as you claim?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Sure, you were confused back in the periodicals room. You wanted to know if the murder you’d committed had followed you, now that everything else had seemed to fall away. And you were probably relieved to learn that it hadn’t. But there I was. You should have killed me the minute you saw me. Before I got clear in my mind. But now it’s too late. Now, I know you killed her.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “No. It makes sense. The white man who nobody at the hotels recognized . . . It was you. And this is LA. So who’s going to testify against a police detective, especially when he’s the one asking the questions, heading up the ‘investigation’? Who’s dumb enough to think anything but an early grave would await such testimony? So you got a free pass. Except from me.”

  “So what if you’re right?” Czernicek asked calmly. “What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

  Sumida nodded, equally calm.

  “That would be a mistake.”

  “Why?”

  Czernicek laughed. He gestured with his chin toward the dresser, where he’d dropped the file that he’d carried into the hotel. “Because it’s possible you’re right and wrong at the same time.”

  Sumida waited.

  Czernicek shrugged. “I killed her down on the docks. You’re right about her being kind of special. But she’d had her fill of me. For all I know, the little Geisha wanted to go back to you. And I didn’t like that. I didn’t have to tolerate that. So I shot her in the head. Quick, painless.”

  It took all the will Sumida possessed not to pull the trigger right then.

  “Just a splash off the dock and she was gone for somebody else to fish out,” Czernicek continued. “Nothing
new down at the harbor. The thing barely even makes news when it’s somebody with brown skin or black skin or yellow skin. So you’d be right to shoot me dead now, except for one thing.”

  Sumida waited. He’d be damned if he’d ask.

  Czernicek broke first. “This evening I got into my old office at the station, flashing my badge and claiming to be new, since nobody recognized me. But my key still worked. It’ll come as no surprise that the office wasn’t mine anymore. I searched it anyway. Turns out the place belongs to the head of some special anti-Jap task force working with the Feds. Spy stuff. National security. I used another of my keys on the filing cabinet.” Again, Czernicek gestured with his chin toward the file. “I borrowed that file because you’d be interested, buddy.”

  “I thought you were going to tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you dead right now.”

  “Because your wife is alive,” Czernicek said.

  Sumida froze. He wouldn’t be taken in.

  “Just look at the file,” Czernicek said.

  Sumida approached the detective, keeping the .38 pointed at the big man’s head. He wasn’t going to get so close that Czernicek might take a swing at him; rather, he drew just close enough to kick Czernicek on the point of his chin, sending him sprawling backward over the length of the bed and hard against the wall, unconscious. Sumida dragged the man to the radiator. There, he removed Czernicek’s keys and handcuffs and bound him to the metal piping. Last, he stuffed the bastard’s mouth with a hand towel in case he woke and tried to call for help.

  Sumida still planned to kill him.

  But first the file . . .

  He opened it. On top was a photo.

  It was Kyoko, dressed in a luxurious gown that Sumida could never imagine being able to buy for her. And her hair was done up in an uncharacteristically extravagant, traditional fashion. But there was no mistaking her face. She was as beautiful as he remembered—her skin silk, her cheek bones and chin somehow imperially strong without diminishing her soft femininity, her hair streaked with the line of white that she’d had since early childhood. True, in this photograph her expression was one Sam had not seen before—determined, heedless. But the face was unmistakable. Written in grease pencil across the front of the 8X10 were the words: “The Orchid.” He didn’t understand the reference.