The woman snorted. It was a sound that eloquently expressed her contempt for the knife-waving neighbor.
I put the sword back into the scabbard, and I noted with interest that my hands weren’t shaking. If asked, I’d have predicted an incident like this would have left me shaking like a leaf. Instead I seemed unusually lucid and alive.
I helped the woman put the dropped merchandise back on the table, keeping a wary eye on the apartment door. When I was done I decided that my first stakeout had certainly been eventful but not successful. But I did confirm that Angela wasn’t at her apartment, which made me think she might be the woman I saw in Matsuda’s room. Now the question was why she wasn’t in her apartment. Was she scared or involved with Matsuda’s murder or was it coincidental because she just wanted to dump her repulsive boyfriend/pimp/lover? I could add those questions to all the others I had. In fact, I even thought of another. I wondered if the police could be wrong about the murder weapon and if a large knife, like the one just waved under my nose, could have caused the wounds to Matsuda’s body, instead of a sword.
While on the subject of swords, I looked at the samurai sword that had so recently come to my rescue.
“How much did you say you wanted for that sword?”
“A hundred dollars.”
“Will you take a check?”
16
I play an ancient Japanese board game called Go. It uses round black and white stones to capture territory on a wooden board. Like chess, it requires a lot of study to get really good, and part of this study involves solving problems, usually printed in little books. Like chess problems, Go problems have a huge advantage over a real game. With a Go problem you always know there’s a solution. They present the problem to you just so you can figure out the solution. In a regular game, however, you’re presented with situations and you don’t know if there’s a solution for them or not. The problems presented by the L.A. Mystery Club were like chess or Go problems. You knew there was a solution and that all the pieces you needed to discover the solution were available to you. What I was facing now didn’t have a guaranteed solution.
I felt frustrated. I was stuck. Well and truly stuck. Even asking myself the critical question (“What would Sam Spade do now?”) didn’t bring about a brainstorm.
Of course, the sensible thing would be to step back and let the cops do their thing, but by now you know I’m not all that sensible. My own resources had sputtered out, so I decided to ask the help of people who might apply more resources and intellectual firepower to the problem. I thought of Ezekiel Stein and Mary Maloney. I figured that the L.A. Mystery Club had sort of gotten me involved in this mess and maybe they had some ideas that could get me out.
I went to the office to check to make sure it wasn’t ransacked again. Then I made a couple of phone calls to set up meetings with Ezekiel and Mary.
Ezekiel worked at the downtown DWP building. It was within walking distance of the office, but I knew that Ezekiel would validate my parking at the DWP parking lot, so like a typical Angeleno I drove.
The DWP building is a hulking monolith surrounded, appropriately enough, by a watery moat. The story of Los Angeles is really the story of water. Local supplies of water will only support 300,000 to 400,000 people, so for Los Angeles to exist it must import water from hundreds of miles away. William Mulholland built the L.A. Aqueduct around the turn of the century, and despite the fact that the city is built essentially on a coastal desert, L.A.'s growth has been fueled by cheap and plentiful water. Remember the movie Chinatown? That was a fictionalized account of what cheap water did for L.A.
In the last part of this century environmental and other interests have put a squeeze on L.A.'s profligate ways with water, but the city government and its water department still hasn’t faced the reality of what that means yet. To me, the moat of water around the building is an apt symbol of the isolation from reality the city suffers from.
The Water Quality Division literally occupies the bowels of the building, stuck in the basement where there are no windows to let in the sunshine and light. I know I’m prone to finding symbols in things around me, but to me this was also apt. The people charged with preserving natural freshness and purity in the water were literally buried under the monolithic bureaucracy that reaches fourteen stories above them.
Ezekiel’s office was tucked into a corner of the Water Quality Division. It was one of those semicubicles, with flimsy walls made of painted panels and glass. It was stuffed with papers, books, and blueprints. He waved me into the office and, without a word of greeting, waited for me to explain the situation.
It took me a while to explain everything that had happened. For most of my explanation he sat silently, playing with a pencil. When I got to the part about Rita Newly and the two Asians in front of the office, however, he got animated.
“What did they look like?”
“Both Asians. One smaller than me, dressed in an expensive suit. The other one was twice my size, and dressed in a cheap suit. The big guy looked like a gorilla.”
“Did they have all their fingers?” Ezekiel asked.
“That’s a strange question.” I thought for a moment. “You know, the big guy was missing the tip of a little finger on one of his hands. How did you know?”
“Yakuza,” Ezekiel said. “Genuine Japanese Mafia, down to the missing the tip of his little finger. I bet if you peeled the shirts off them you’d find that one or both were tattooed.”
“I don’t think I want to know either one that intimately. You didn’t let me finish, but I talked to someone from the L.A. Times, and he told me that Matsuda was associated somehow with Yakuza front companies.”
“That’s not a good sign. The Yakuza can be very, very dangerous.”
“Don’t they operate more or less openly in Japanese society?” I asked. “I mean, I was told they’re involved in legitimate as well as illegal businesses.”
“They do operate more or less openly. Some even have business cards identifying their gang and lapel pins with little logos. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be dangerous. That’s how your friend, the big guy, lost his finger. When a Yakuza does something to offend his boss, his oyabun, he must make amends for it. Perhaps he botched a deal or failed on an assignment. But the way to traditionally make amends is to amputate a finger. It’s called yubitsume.”
“You know more Japanese than me,” I said.
“Only crime words. I couldn’t order a meal or ask where the bathroom is. But crime stuff I know.”
“I suppose they call a particularly inept Yakuza stubby.”
Ezekiel gave a half-smile, but then shook his head. “It’s really not funny if you think about the discipline involved. They have to amputate their own finger. To show their sincerity to their boss, they’ll stick their own finger on a chopping block and take a cleaver to it.”
“Ugh.”
“Ugh, exactly,” Ezekiel answered. “If they’ll do that to themselves, you can imagine what they will do to others. These are not people you want to mess around with.”
“What are they doing in Los Angeles?”
“They’re all over the Pacific. They’re in Taiwan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. They’re very active in Hawaii and they’ve started showing up here on the West Coast.”
“What do they deal in?”
“Amphetamines, guns, prostitution. . virtually anything they can make a buck at. Maybe it’s amphetamines. That’s the drug of choice in Japan and fairly easy to obtain in the U.S.”
“The package I got for Rita Newly doesn’t contain amphetamines. It contains this.” I handed the sample warranty claims I had kept over to Ezekiel.
He studied them carefully and finally returned them to me shaking his head. “I’m a walking encyclopedia on crime, but the meaning of these claims has me stumped. It could be some kind of Yakuza scam, and it also could be that Rita is a victim of the Yakuza. Regardless, these invoices prove that story she told you about the pictures isn’t true.”