“Don’t we all,” Benny said.
“What are you looking for, Sheriff?” Horace asked.
“An answer I can understand.”
“Easy answers are hard to come by.”
“I didn’t imagine it would be easy,” Benny said.
“You think we’re barking up the wrong tree?” Johnny Lee asked.
“I think you can’t catch smoke in a bag,” Benny said.
“What do you want to do?”
“Go back to Santa Fe PD. See if they’ve turned anything up on the crime scene.”
“Homicide squad won’t be glad to see us.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Johnny Lee smiled and shook his head. “You ever get tired of being a pain in the ass?” he asked.
“Not a bit of it,” Benny said to him.
“Me either,” Johnny Lee said. “Let us go amongst them.”
“Eight millimeter shell casings.”
“Which suggests what?”
“Jap gun,” the detective said. “Probably a Nambu, souvenir pistol somebody brought back from the Pacific.”
“Interesting,” Benny said.
“Yeah,” Norris said. “Not that it gets us any further.”
“Still no witnesses?” Johnny Lee asked.
The cop shook his head. “Everybody was watching Zozobra burn,” he said. “The killing took place behind their backs. It might as well have happened in a vacuum.”
Benny nodded. “Crowds,” he said to Johnny Lee.
“You got something going?” Norris asked him.
“The old guy arranged to meet somebody, is what I think,” Benny said. “They did it at Zozobra because nobody would notice them, with all the people.”
“Why keep it a secret?”
“Guilt, maybe.”
“What was Minamoto guilty of?”
“He was Japanese.”
“You think it was a race crime?”
“I meant the Japanese take personal shame very seriously,” Benny said. “Minamoto was old-school. He may have been looking to atone for something.”
“You didn’t tell me your family was separated,” Benny said.
“It didn’t occur to me,” Emily said.
He was familiar with this habit of mind. If it was a thing everybody had common knowledge of, that made it unremarkable.
“Tommy joined the Army, and my mother and I were released.”
“When was that?”
“Nineteen forty-three. We still had to report to INS once a month.”
They were standing by the cenotaph at the edge of the national cemetery. Emily put her hand on the warm stone. Her brother’s name was engraved there, along with many others. They were buried overseas, but their names were here.
“A lifetime ago,” she said, sadly.
For these guys, Benny thought. “When you were released, why wasn’t your father released as well?” he asked. “He didn’t present a danger.”
“He felt he had an obligation.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The camp in Santa Fe was self-governed, to a degree.”
“How much of a degree?”
“More than you might think,” Emily said. “Because of its size, and the number of internees, there were frictions, and they turned to some of the older men, like my father, who formed grievance committees, to see that people were treated fairly.”
“So your father worked with the camp administration.”
“Both sides respected him.”
“Did they offer to let him out?”
“Early in ’forty-four.”
“Why didn’t he take the deal?”
“Because of the hard-liners,” Emily said. Kibei, she explained, American-born Japanese who’d gone back to Japan for their education, and then returned to the U.S. As a group, they tended to resist assimilation.
“I heard that after some of them got transferred in from Tule Lake, there was trouble,” Benny said. “Your father wind up in the middle of it?”
Emily nodded. “They called him a traitor to the Emperor.”
“Your father was an American citizen.”
She smiled, without humor. “So he was.”
Benny shook his head. “What a can of worms,” he said.
“It was a difficult time.”
“Everybody fought their own war,” Benny said.
“We did,” Emily said. She glanced at the memorial.
“Who took care of the farm while your family was interned?” he asked her.
“Our neighbors,” she said. “We’ve always helped each other out, then and now.”
“And they wanted nothing in return, when you came back?”
“We share the land, we share the water rights, we share the labor,” she said. “Come harvest time, everybody pitches in.”
Even a kid with Coke-bottle glasses? he thought to himself. “You remember a guy named Oscar Ramirez?” he asked.
“Sure,” Emily said. This time her smile was unrehearsed.
“What?” Benny asked.
The smile stayed in her eyes. “Oscar had a terrible crush on me, I’m afraid,” she said. “He never spoke up, of course. I knew how he felt, it just wasn’t in the cards.”
“Cultural differences?”
Emily shot him a sharp look. “No,” she said.
“Excuse me,” Benny said. The question still hovered.
Emily cleared her throat. “Oscar’s a sweet person,” she said. “He’s sincere, he’s honest, he’s a good catch. The plain truth is, I’m not attracted to him, or not that way.”
“Which isn’t what he wants to hear.”
“Who does?”
“He was a guard at the Santa Fe camp,” Benny said.
Emily kept her gaze level, face front. “I wasn’t about to break Oscar’s heart to get my father preferential treatment,” she said. “People do a lot of things, out of necessity. We all disappoint ourselves.”
“Which wasn’t a compromise you were willing to make.”
“For my own sake, I might have, but Oscar deserved better.”
“What if he’s still in love with you?” Benny asked.
“I wouldn’t betray that,” she said.
“You think it’s all he has left?”
“Oscar’s entitled to his feelings,” Emily said.
About those feelings, Benny realized Oscar probably wouldn’t be forthcoming, especially since Benny had already rubbed him the wrong way, but there was no helping that. Benny could only hope a second interview might go better than the first.
In the event, he got lucky, because Oscar’s brother Fidelio called him.
The three of them met at the VFW. This time it was Benny’s turn to buy the first round.
Oscar, it turned out, was embarrassed. “My brother figures I owe you an apology,” he said to Benny.
“No need,” Benny told him.
“Caught me off-guard, you telling me Tashi Minamoto was dead. It hit a little close to home. And the way you asked the questions, you got my back up.”
“Man’s only doing his job,” Fidelio said.
“You find out who killed him?” Oscar asked Benny.
Benny shook his head. “Not yet,” he said.
“You include us out?” Fidelio asked.
Is that what this was about? Benny wondered. “I don’t have a reason to include you in,” he said.
“Well, there’s Bataan,” Fidelio said.
Benny looked at Oscar. “Tell me about the riot,” he said.
Oscar pulled a face. “Those guys were trouble from the get-go,” he said. “They were a gang. They intimidated the old guys. The young guys had all joined up, like Tommy Minamoto, so there was nobody left to stand up to the muscle-heads.”
“Tommy’s father,” Benny said.
Oscar nodded. “Tashi had brass balls. He wasn’t afraid of making enemies. He knew who his friends were.”