They were in the detective bullpen on the second floor of police headquarters, in the municipal building. It was Saturday morning, the day after the burning of Zozobra.
“Not a lot I can tell you,” the homicide commander said. “We don’t have much more than we had last night. It was a big crowd, it was dark, everybody was watching the show, and none of them saw the shooting.”
“Anything we can do to help,” Montoya said.
“I appreciate that,” Norris told him.
“You identify the victim?” Benny asked.
“His family did. Takeshi Minamoto, age seventy-three. Guy was a peach farmer, on the Embudo, your neck of the woods.”
“What was he doing down in Santa Fe?”
Norris shrugged. “Looking for the party,” he said.
“Was he by himself?” Benny asked.
“Far as we know. His daughter tells us he got in his truck yesterday afternoon and drove off.”
“Okay,” Benny said. “Keep us posted. We turn anything up, we’ll let you know.”
“Good enough,” the homicide dick said. He didn’t want to give Rio Arriba or the states a marker, but it had gone unspoken that a murder is solved in the first seventy-two hours, or the trail goes cold. If the sheriff came up with anything workable, it was all to the good.
Benny and Johnny Lee went down to the street.
“Something on your mind?” Johnny Lee asked.
“The cop upstairs thinks we’re looking for credit on his arrest, if he makes one,” Benny said. “You looking for points?”
“I’m not as hungry as I used to be.”
“I don’t fault him for ambition,” Benny said. “If the guy wants to get ahead, more power to him.”
“You just don’t want it to get in the way.”
Benny nodded. “We’ll take what comes,” he said.
“What else?” Johnny Lee asked him.
“Japanese are generally close, in terms of family.”
“Just like Norteños,” Johnny Lee said.
“The old guy gets in his truck and drives away, and doesn’t tell his daughter anything. That’s uncharacteristic.”
“Unless he’s keeping something from her.”
“What’s the big thing about Fiesta?” “Tradition,” Johnny Lee said.
Benny shook his head. “Crowds,” he said.
“I see where you’re going. If the old man wants to meet somebody, and he wants to keep it a secret, he comes to Fiesta. Who notices, all the people in the streets?”
“Question is, who did he want to meet with?” Benny asked.
Twenty miles upriver from Española there was a cluster of small towns, Velarde, Dixon, Peñasco, along the banks of the Embudo, a tributary of the Rio Grande. It was orchard country, and an acequia system kept the farmland well watered. Peaches, apples, pears, and apricots, grapevines and lavender, piñon and pecans.
First cultivated by the Pueblo, then settled by the Spanish; the Minamoto family were relative latecomers.
Three generations, Emily Minamoto told Benny. They were walking under the peach trees, heavy with fruit, ready for their second harvest of the season.
Benny was only a kitchen gardener, himself, but he could appreciate Emily’s connection to the earth. There was something gravitational about it.
“Did your father emigrate from Japan?” Benny asked.
“No, he was born here.”
Nisei, she meant, second-generation. Emily herself was Sansei, or third-generation, pretty much assimilated, which her English name suggested.
“It didn’t keep us out of internment,” she said.
Benny had known this was coming from the beginning. Out of courtesy, he’d waited for her to bring it up.
“I was in eighth grade,” Emily said.
Fourteen, he thought. Angelina’s age.
“They let us bring one suitcase apiece.”
American citizens, behind barbed wire, armed guards on the perimeter.
“My father still practiced Shinto,” she said, smiling. “I was educated by the nuns, so I was a Catholic.”
The camp had been located at the western edge of the Santa Fe city limits, on a hillside overlooking what later became a national cemetery, where many veterans of the Pacific war were buried, some of them survivors of the Bataan Death March. Benny was aware of the ironies.
“It wasn’t easy, but it was livable,” Emily said. “My brother told me they got to play softball, listen to the World Series on the radio. Then he enlisted in the Nisei brigade. He was killed at Monte Cassino.”
It was the most decorated unit in U.S. military history.
They’d been awarded more Purple Hearts than any other outfit in Europe. The 442nd had fought in Italy, and into France. They had something to prove, so the conventional wisdom went.
“You know what’s hard,” she said. “It’s hard to come back and pick up the pieces. My father was Japanese, culturally, but I thought of myself as an American.”
“I can’t repair the damage,” Benny said.
“I’m not asking you to,” Emily said. “I’m wondering why we went through all of this, and then my father gets shot.”
“I’m wondering the same thing,” Benny said.
“Is it racial bias?”
“Possibly.”
“In other words, you don’t know.”
“What was he doing in Santa Fe?” Benny asked.
“He didn’t tell me,” Emily said.
“That makes two of us,” Benny said.
Benny hadn’t gone to war, but the war had come to New Mexico.
The secret city up at Los Alamos, the Japanese relocation camps, the Navajo Code Talkers. Much of it under wraps, still.
“We’re boxing with shadows,” he said to Johnny Lee Montoya.
“The War Department won’t give anything up.”
“When did they ever? I thought you had an in with Groves.” He meant the guy who’d spearheaded the Manhattan Project.
“Groves is a lieutenant general these days. He walks with the gods. Mere mortals are beneath his notice.”
“So we’ve got no chips we can call in?”
Benny mulled it over. “What about the FBI?” he asked.
Johnny Lee had had a prickly relationship with the Bureau during the war. They were security-conscious, jealous of their prerogatives, and dismissive of local “hick” law.
“I was thinking maybe Gideon Horace,” Benny said.
Johnny Lee sucked on his teeth. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said. “But worth a shot, anyway.” Horace had been with the Albuquerque office. Not the senior man, the AIC, but not the lowest-ranking guy either. Montoya thought he was even halfway human, an exception to the culture of mental constipation that generally characterized the Feds. “I heard he’s been reassigned to the Big Rez, up in Farmington.”
“Give him a call?”
“Sure,” Johnny Lee said. “What are you going to be doing?”
“I’ll try the back door,” Benny said.
The so-called relocation camps had been run by INS, with staff recruited locally. Benny thought it would be easy enough to track down some guys who’d worked the guard duty at the Santa Fe camp. He went over to the VFW on Montezuma.
“Yeah, my brother Oscar, matter of fact,” Fidelio Ramirez told him. Fidelio was working the stick, and offered Benny a beer. Benny hesitated, and then said yes. Fidelio drew him a long frosty. “He was kind of, what’s the word? Chagrined, when the Army turned him down in ’forty-two. Couldn’t pass the eye exam.”