Ezekiel actually got me involved in the L.A. Mystery Club, and I met him in kind of a funny way. The Los Angeles DWP has this mania for covering open reservoirs. They like to take restful blue water and spread a plastic cover over it in the name of water improvement. In fact, the way to improve water is to filter it, not just cover it, but covering is cheap and the City of L.A. likes cheap.
Residents and environmentalists opposed the covering of the reservoirs, arguing that if the DWP really wanted to improve water quality they should take steps that will achieve that aim, instead of taking a halfway measure that destroyed the open reservoirs without making any substantive improvement in water quality. The Silver Lake district of L.A. got its name from the open reservoirs that form its geographic and emotional center. Like most people in Silver Lake, I joined the effort to stop the covering.
I met Ezekiel at a community meeting to discuss ways to keep the reservoirs uncovered. I noticed that Ezekiel had placed some flyers on a table when he entered the meeting, and I strolled over to see what they were. They advertised an upcoming L.A. Mystery Club weekend event, and I talked briefly with Ezekiel about the event and what was involved. I was surprised when later I saw Ezekiel sitting as part of a panel representing the DWP. When you view people as part of the opposition on an issue, you don’t often view them as having aspects to their lives that you might share an interest in.
I decided to give the mystery weekends a try and found them fun. As I got more involved with the club, I got to know Ezekiel better. I still thought his views about covering the reservoirs were a sacrilege, but I also learned that it shouldn’t prevent me from working with him on things of interest to both of us.
Ezekiel was an engineer, which explained some, but not all, of his eccentricities.
For instance, for fun he would calculate the center of gravity for all sorts of things, such as automobiles or oranges. As near as I could tell, knowing the center of gravity is only useful for things like airplanes or sailboats, but Ezekiel calculated it for just about anything that struck his fancy: chairs, tables, phone booths, and myriad other objects. He once proudly showed me a database he kept on a laptop computer that had all his center of gravity computations, along with a scanned photo or sketch of the object. He had literally thousands of entries, and he told me he had been doing this since college.
Ezekiel would also get involved in long tiffs with bureaucracies (and L.A. has many, what with all the city, county, and state agencies, not to mention agencies with adjacent cities). If some bureaucratic rule seemed illogical to him, he would sometimes spend months trying to get it changed, even when the change he wanted seemed to have no practical effect. Working for the world’s largest municipally owned utility, he should have known the difficulties in getting any bureaucracy to change, but he always had a half dozen little skirmishes going on.
His trait of most interest to me was his voracious reading about crime.
His phone rang and I heard the familiar voice answer, “Hello.”
“Ezekiel. Ken Tanaka here. What do you know about recruiting American women to entertain in Japan?” With Ezekiel it was unnecessary to go through the normal social amenities. In fact, it was often counterproductive to do something like ask him how he felt. Ezekiel would tell you, in excruciating detail, including (I once learned to my sorrow) a report on his latest schedule of bowel movements and stool condition.
“There’s been sporadic complaints about it. Often the Japanese don’t comply with the terms of the contracts they sign with the women, which causes problems.”
“Have you ever heard of a woman being blackmailed once she returned to the States?”
“Blackmail?” A pause. I could just see the gears turning in his mind while he thought about that one. “No, I’ve never heard of a case of blackmail once the woman returned to the United States. Why do you ask.”
“I think I might be involved with one.”
“You mean a real one?”
“Yes. And that’s not the half of it. I’m also involved with that Japanese businessman that was killed at the Golden Cherry Blossom last night.”
“The one reported in the Times?”
“Yes.” I gave Ezekiel a brief rundown on my meeting with Rita and Matsuda. I left out the part about still having the package. When I was done, I asked, “Any ideas?”
“Obviously the woman didn’t want to pick up the package herself because she was trying to put something over on Matsuda. For five hundred bucks she bought herself a sacrificial goat.”
“So who killed Matsuda?”
“Not enough information,” Ezekiel said. “Can’t figure things like this out without information.”
“Yeah, I’m finding that out,” I said. “Say, do you know a good criminal lawyer?”
“I know of several lawyers who are criminals.”
I gritted my teeth and rephrased my question. Ezekiel was not trying to be funny. When people laughed at things he said, he’d sometimes get puzzled and hurt. It was just the way his brain worked. “Do you know of any lawyers who are good at representing criminals?”
“Just what I read in the paper. Do you need one?”
“I might. Mariko has suggested her cousin Michael, but I don’t know him and I want to make sure I talk to someone who knows what he’s doing.”
“You need Mary Maloney. That woman can find out anything. She’ll know how to find out what you want to know about Mariko’s cousin. Anything else?”
“No, not now.”
“Okay, but talk to me more about this when you have the time.”
The phone was dead. It was typical of Ezekiel to hang up without saying good-bye, and I wasn’t offended by it. I replaced the receiver and decided to drive down to the detective office before I called Mary.
I parked my car in the lot I normally used and walked to the office. I noticed the posters advertising Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week festival on the telephone poles. A Nisei is a second generation Japanese in the U.S. I was a third generation, which made me a Sansei.
Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week celebration was started in 1934 by a bunch of enterprising Nisei looking for a way to drum up jobs. It usually coincided with the Japanese O-bon, which is held in late summer. Before coming to L.A., I had never heard of Nisei Week, but O-bon was something we used to celebrate in Hawaii. In the way we Americans have of homogenizing ethnic events until they lose their toothiness, the L.A. version of O-bon consists of a parade with street dancing, plus the usual kitsch things like a beauty pageant and plenty of chicken lunches for businessmen. I don’t think most people know that the festival has its roots in a Buddhist religious festival.
I walked into the office building and summoned the slow elevator. The building where I rented the office had one supreme virtue: the rents were dirt cheap. Otherwise, it was a pit. Like most old office buildings, it had a smell of age clinging to it, like the stale ghost of the past. When the building was new and bustling with commerce it was home to dentists and lawyers and several small accounting firms. Now it housed small-time import/export businesses and nondescript enterprises with names like “John Smith, Inc.”
My office was on the second floor, and in the few days I had occupied the office I rarely saw anyone else walking the halls of this floor. I put the key in the door and turned the lock.
The scene that greeted me was chaos. Every file cabinet drawer had been opened, removed from the cabinet, and dumped on the floor. The desk drawers had been treated in a similar fashion. Even the four pictures I had hung on the wall had been taken down and dumped facedown on the desk. It took me a few moments to realize that someone was looking at the backs of the pictures, to make sure nothing had been taped to them. So much for my idea to do precisely that with the package.