Since they were all props and stage furniture, most of the drawers were empty. The one exception was the top drawer of the desk, where I kept my notes about the mystery weekend, along with short biographies I had written for each of the characters in the mystery. These were scattered on the top of the desk. Someone had apparently read them and I wondered what they made of them.
The phone started ringing and I was at a loss to find it for a few seconds. I finally went to where the cord was plugged into the wall and followed the cord until I found the phone sitting under a file drawer. I sat on the floor and answered it.
“Hello?”
“Mr.Tanaka?”
“Yes.”
“This is Rita Newly. I’ve been calling for two days now to make arrangements to pick up my property.” Her tone was brittle and sharp.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been in the office. A good part of the time I was with the police.”
“The police?” Her tone was now more wary than surprised.
“Yes. Mr. Matsuda was murdered soon after I picked up the package for you.”
“That has nothing to do with me,” she said hastily. “The package is my property, and part of a normal business transaction.”
“Pornography and blackmail are normal business transactions? That’s a peculiar view of what you’ve told me.”
“Look, I really need that package. What will it take to get you to give it to me?”
“How about starting with some information? For instance, who were those two Asians you were running away from yesterday morning?”
“What Asians?”
“Oh, come on, Ms. Newly. I was in front of the office when you pulled your cool maneuver with the Mercedes. It seemed precipitated by your seeing two Asian gentlemen standing in front of the office.”
“I don’t know who they were.”
I sighed, exasperated. “If you didn’t know them, why did you take off? They certainly seemed to know you because they took off after you. Now I come into the office and find everything turned upside down. . ”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean someone ransacked my office yesterday afternoon or last night. Everything is torn apart.”
“Did they get the package?”
“The famous package! No, they didn’t get the package. It’s being held at a safe place not five minutes from the office. But you’re not going to get it until you start telling me the truth about what this is all about.”
There was a long silence. “Hello?” I finally said, thinking she might have hung up.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Tanaka,” she was all sweetness and light again. “Those men were Yakuza, Japanese gangsters. I recognized one from Tokyo. They scared me when I saw them in front of your office, and I just panicked and ran.”
“Gangsters?”
“That’s right.”
I digested that statement. Lacking anything more insightful, I asked, “So, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. My package has nothing to do with the murder of Mr. Matsuda. That shocked me when I heard about it on the news. But I’m sure my business with him has no connection with this crime.”
So she already knew about Matsuda’s murder. I wondered if she knew from the news or some other means. “So, what is your involvement in this?”
Another pause. “I’m not sure I can trust you,” she said. “Can you let me think about it for a while and get back to you?”
“Why don’t you give me a number where I can get in touch with you,” I suggested.
“No, I’ll call you,” she said. She hung up.
“Damn!” I said as I slammed down the phone. I sat for a few minutes, but finally decided that the most positive way I could vent my frustration was to put the office back into order.
As I worked I came across the telephone books that I got when I installed the phone. I put them aside and finished putting the office together. When I was done I picked up the yellow pages and started flipping through them. Finding the woman in Matsuda’s room was important. She could confirm my story about just being in the room a few minutes and leaving. She could also supply the cops with information on what happened after I left. The question was, how to find her?
Of course, Sherlock Holmes would have known her family history, her place of employment, her residence, and her social security number after a ten-second meeting, but unfortunately I wasn’t The Great Detective. In fact, I wasn’t even a great detective. Thinking about it, I wasn’t even a detective. Great.
But I did have clues. She said she was a dancer, and she said she needed only half an hour to get dressed and on stage after her proposed “party.” That meant she had to get someplace close to the hotel. Even at 10:30 at night, you can’t drive too far in downtown L.A. in that time. She also said something about a G-string. In an age where some grandmas wear thong bikini panties, sexy underwear is not a big deal, but I imagine something like a G-string is still primarily worn by strippers. That meant a club or something similar. So I should have been able to narrow things down to a strip joint within a short driving distance from the hotel. So far, so good.
But how to pinpoint what strip joints were within a short distance of the hotel became a problem. I looked up strippers in the yellow pages and only found stripping telegram services. I looked up strip clubs and found nothing. Nightclubs got me a lot of listings, but no real indication about which ones had strippers. It looked as if I might be condemned to driving around the hotel in ever-widening circles, keeping my eyes peeled for someplace where the woman might be dancing. That seemed like a long and tedious task, but one that couldn’t be avoided without some kind of listing of strip joints in downtown L.A.
The phone rang. It was Mariko.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“Uh, fine, I guess.”
“Something’s wrong.”
“Somebody ransacked the office here.”
“A thief?”
“Maybe, but they didn’t seem to take anything.”
“The package. They were looking for the package.”
“Maybe. I can’t be sure. It might be coincidence.”
“Are you going to report it to the police?”
“I’m not sure about that, either. They didn’t take anything, and I really hate that cop assigned to this case. He’s an ass. Have you called your cousin Michael yet?”
“He’s in court this morning. His secretary said he’d call back this afternoon. I said it was important.”
I sighed.
“So what are you going to do?” Mariko asked.
“I’m trying to find the woman who was in Matsuda’s room. She can verify my story.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Ah, research,” I said lamely. I was embarrassed to tell Mariko of my fruitless investigation into strip joints.
“What kind of research? Are you going to cruise for hookers?”
That was a development I hadn’t contemplated. In downtown L.A. that could be a formidable task. “If you must know, I was trying to figure out how to find the addresses of all the strip joints in downtown L.A. I want to plot them on a map and see which ones are close to the hotel. I haven’t had much success, though, because strip joints aren’t listed in the yellow pages.”
“Oh, if that’s what you want you should pick up a copy of the L.A. Sizzle newspaper. They sell them in front of liquor stores. It will have a complete listing of strip joints and bars with strippers.”
“How do you know that?”
“I have my sources.”
“Seriously, how would you know that?”
“Hey, the guys in AA have sworn off liquor, not vice. Most of those nude places can’t serve hard liquor, so the guys claim it’s a good place to hang out. Of course, something like the public library doesn’t serve liquor, so I don’t think not serving liquor is the real reason the guys go to the clubs.”
I stammered my thanks to Mariko for the tip, then went a block to a liquor store that, sure enough, had a news rack with the L.A. Sizzle newspaper in front of it. On the way back to the office I looped past my car and got my Thomas Brothers map guide.