I sat down with what I hoped was a suitably modest expression on my face and Mary concluded the meeting. Several members of the panel came over to congratulate me on my win as Mary left the room to inform Duncan that he came in second.
After thanking the panel members I left and saw Mariko waiting in the meat plant’s lobby, sitting on a folding chair. When she saw me she raised an eyebrow and I gave her a thumb’s up.
“So you did it,” she said.
“Yep, they’ll announce it at the banquet tonight. They had to have a tie-breaking session because Duncan Hathaway turned in his written solution within fifteen minutes of me, but I found more of the clues than him and they gave me the grand prize.”
“Isn’t Duncan the weird guy who runs around in the Sherlock Holmes outfit?”
I laughed. “There’re actually a couple of members who dress up like their favorite fictional detectives. But yes, Duncan is one who dresses up for the mysteries.”
Mariko shook her head. “You guys take this mystery stuff too seriously.”
“It’s just good fun. Besides, you must take it pretty seriously yourself, because you’re going to help me with next month’s mystery.”
“Hey, I’ve got to support you in your endeavors no matter how nutty they get.”
I’ve never thought of the activities of the Los Angeles Mystery Club as exactly nutty, but maybe that was because I was caught up in the nuttiness. Every month the club members pool their money and talents and create a type of living theater: a murder mystery acted out during the course of a Saturday. The club members either try to solve the mystery or play parts in the drama. The idea is to figure out ‘who dunnit’ before the awards banquet that night. Everyone writes down their theory of the crime and the name of the murderer, and the first one with the correct answer gets a trophy. Everyone who solves the mystery, no matter if they were first or not, also gets a certificate. It’s a silly pastime for adults, but fun.
I actually met Mariko through the club. As an aspiring actress, she had been hired to play an exotic femme fatale for one of the mysteries. I found her both femme enough and fatale enough to do something completely uncharacteristic for me: I pursued her. To my surprise, we hit it off and we had been an item for about six months, long enough for us to drop most of our pretenses and to start acting like ourselves. That’s when things get both serious and dangerous.
But at this moment I wasn’t thinking serious or dangerous thoughts. I was trying to decide where I was going to display my Silver Dagger trophy in my apartment.
2
A couple of weeks later I was involved in another murder. Well, I guess to be accurate, I should say I was planning a murder.
“Lissen, sweetheart,” I said in a passable Bogart imitation. “If you want anything, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your two lips together and blow.” Wait a minute. That was Lauren Bacall’s line.
I sighed because I couldn’t recall what Bogart’s line was. It didn’t matter anyway. Let’s face it, physically I couldn’t muster the mass to imitate Bogart’s tough presence. I preferred Alan Ladd when playing a detective. The compact Ladd was much more my size.
I looked at myself in the large mirror I had propped up against the wall and decided I still cut a pretty dashing figure. I figured I looked like a worthy recipient of the Silver Dagger trophy for unraveling the L.A. Mystery Club’s phony murder.
I was dressed in a tan trench coat and a gray hat. The props helped to compensate for my small frame and delicate features. . two curses for someone who secretly aspired to be a 1930s hardboiled detective. Of course, my being a Japanese-American from Hawaii is also an impediment to this aspiration. The only Asian detectives I remember from old movies were Warner Olan doing his Charlie Chan bit or Peter Lorre doing an incredibly campy Mister Moto. At least Charlie Chan was from Honolulu, although no body I’ve ever met from Hawaii actually looked and talked like Warner Olan did.
My face is round with a slightly squared jaw. My eyes are more deeply set than the Asian stereotype, but many Asians, particularly in Japan or Southeast Asia, have deep set eyes. I have the epicanthic fold that characterizes Asians everywhere, and of course my eye color is deep brown and I have black hair.
The tan Burberry trench coat was a good fit, but somehow the felt fedora just didn’t look right. I pulled it low over my eyes, but that just blocked my vision. I pulled it off and tried placing it on my head at a rakish angle, but a shock of black hair peeked out and the effect was just goofy. I put it squarely on my head and tried bending down the brim a little. Then I sighed. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best of all the variations I had tried. I guess I just wasn’t used to seeing myself in a hat.
I walked over and took off the trench coat. It was a hot August in Los Angeles, and hats and trench coats were definitely not the attire that suited the weather, especially in an old office building with marginal air-conditioning. I hung the trench coat on the old clothes rack that stood in the corner of the office and surveyed my temporary kingdom.
A large wooden desk with many dings and dents dominated the room. Old oak file cabinets stood against the wall next to the propped-up mirror. Four pictures were hung on the walls: photos of Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Cagney, plus a poster for The Maltese Falcon. The next wall had two windows that looked down on Second Street. In reverse order, I could see the back of gilt letters that said KENDO DETECTIVE AGENCY-KEN TANAKA, DET. On both windows. The letters were the most expensive things in the room.
The furniture was all borrowed or rented. My girlfriend Mariko Kosaka had supplied most of it through one of the little theater groups she belonged to. Theater props were most appropriate because I was setting up a murder as theater.
I’d gone all out for the mystery I was creating. Besides renting a cheap office in Little Tokyo, I had business cards printed up, installed a phone, and had the proper signs put up in the lobby and on the windows.
My plan was to have the members of the mystery club come to the office to kick off the mystery. The office would act as sort of a hub to the action, and members of the club would have to go to various parts of Little Tokyo to unearth clues.
I had bought several props with a Japanese motif, and was in the midst of evolving a complicated mystery involving a stolen jade statue of supposedly priceless value (the Jade Penguin), a variety of cryptic clues scattered around Little Tokyo, and (of course) a couple of murders. Some members of the club would play the parts of villains or stooges, and the other members of the club would be expected to follow the trail of clues to unravel the puzzle and solve the “crime.”
Usually these things were put together by a committee, but except for Mariko’s help I had put this one together pretty much on my own. I’d noticed that the mysteries put together by committees were prone to leaks as members of the committee couldn’t resist dropping cryptic hints to friends. It was as bad as Congress or some other notorious gathering of blabbermouths.
Doing things on my own precluded the chance for leaks, but it meant endless hours putting things together for the mystery to come off right. That meant either a compulsive personality or a lot of time on my hands. I confess to being doubly guilty.
Like many in America, I found myself starting over while on the other side of forty. A failed marriage, a frustrating job and a pink slip as part of the process euphemistically known as “corporate downsizing” had all added up to plenty of time to plan fake murder mysteries. Mariko had given me as much help as possible, but between work, little theater, and AA meetings, she really didn’t have much time to put into the effort.