Becca had just seemed like a silly female to Mas, not someone capable of any kind of poisoning, whether physical or emotional.
“You don’t believe me, do you? Well, she threatened me. Yes, she did. She even hired a private investigator to look into my past. Not only in New Jersey, but even in Estonia.”
Mas waited to see if Anna would divulge the private investigator’s findings.
“I told her that I didn’t care what she found, I wouldn’t break it off. But then Kazzy calls me. Tells me that he cares about me, but he has to end it.” Her mouth had become small and puckered. “So I sent him a gardenia last Thursday. I wanted him to remember the sweetness of our first time. But now I’m thinking that he probably used me.”
Mas pulled at one of his earlobes.
“He just wanted to see that damn journal so much.” Anna’s voice was powerful, an uppercut punch. “If he couldn’t get it through Seiko, he was going to get it through me. I was the one who Xeroxed it for him, a few pages at a time. I had to go behind Seiko’s back to do it. I felt awful, but she had already sent off a whole copy to the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles. But if they could see it, why couldn’t Kazzy? I didn’t understand.”
“You knowsu whatsu in it?”
Anna shook her head. “That journal’s cursed. You don’t want to know what’s in it.”
When Mas got home, Lloyd was still awake, his stocking feet on the coffee table. He had the television on, but he wasn’t watching it. He had been doing some heavy thinking, and wanted to hear what Mas had learned in Fort Lee.
Mas told him the whole story and then pulled out the note, folded into a small square. Lloyd unfolded the paper and read the typed message aloud:
DEAR ANNA,
UNFORTUNATELY I CANNOT MEET YOU TONIGHT.
I THINK IT’S BEST IF WE DO NOT KEEP IN TOUCH.
K-SAN
“So businesslike,” commented Lloyd. “I mean, that’s the way Kazzy was, but even this seems too cold for him.”
“Maybe because Kazzy knowsu already he gonna die.”
“That’s true,” Lloyd said. “But why didn’t Anna just hand this over to the police?”
Mas couldn’t answer that for Lloyd. He wouldn’t understand. He probably grew up learning to trust the people in power. Anna Grady and Mas knew different. That sometimes people in uniform were to be feared.
Mas silently read the note again. One thing had been nagging at him on the bus ride back to New York City. “K- san, that was on the suicide note, too. Kazzy’s MIS buddy, dis Jinx Watanabe, he tellsu us Kazzy was chanto man.”
“ Chanto, that means proper, right? Yeah, that was Kazzy, all right,” Lloyd said.
“But no chanto Japanese put ‘ san ’ on his own name.” That was an honorific reserved for other people or, in the case of Anna Grady, for cats.
Lloyd waited a beat. “That’s true. I never thought of it. Wait a minute, I have some notes from Kazzy.” Lloyd shuffled through papers on his overburdened desk and found at least six old memos. Every single one of them was typed in capital letters; every single one of them ended with one letter, a single K. No san added.
“If Kazzy so chanto, he chanto till the end,” said Mas.
“You think someone else wrote this note to Anna Grady?”
“And jisatsu note.”
“Suicide letter,” Lloyd repeated in English.
Phillip was the first person who came to Mas’s mind. And then the teenager behind the red door. Mas shared his thoughts with Lloyd.
“You think this Riley may have been the one who followed you and Mari in Seabrook?”
Mas nodded. The physical description fit, and based on the gun he’d shoved in Mas’s face, he had the temperament.
“Tomorrow,” said Lloyd, “we’ll go pay this Riley a little visit. You and I, Mr. Arai.”
The next morning, even before Takeo had a chance to cry from behind the bedroom door, Mas called Haruo.
“Mas, I just getsu home. Whatsu goin’ on with the dead man?”
“Two dead people now. Ouchi- san and a woman.”
“Woman? Toshiyori or a young one?”
“ Toshiyori. Nisei. Sheezu about our age.”
“Thatsu nasakenai. How she die?”
“Thrown over her balcony. Seventeen stories high.”
“Catch the guy?”
“ Mada. But soon.” Mas could at least hope. “Anyhowsu, I needsu your help, Haruo.”
“Anytin’, Mas, anytin’.”
One thing about Haruo, he knew a lot of people. To describe someone like him, the Japanese said Kao ga hiroi, “Your face is wide,” and Haruo’s face was one of the widest among Mas’s friends. “You gotsu any contact wiz museum?”
“Which museum, the one in Little Tokyo?”
“Yah.”
“Come to think of it, my counselor, her sista work ova at the museum. Why, Mas?”
“There’s sumptin’ I wantchu to take a look at.”
Mas was eating breakfast when the rest of the family came out of the bear’s lair and settled in the living room.
“You’ll need to stay home with Takeo today,” Lloyd told Mari, who was giving the baby his morning bottle.
“Was planning on it anyway. And I’m expecting that call back from Dr. Bhalla. What’s up?”
“Your father and I have some things to do. Then I’m going to go to the Ouchi Foundation board meeting.”
“They’re not going to let you in.”
“They’ll have to. I’m now officially on the board. That’s why Becca had to legally inform me of the meeting.”
“But they think we killed Kazzy.”
“Charged, but not convicted. Anyhow, that’s you, not me.”
Mari gave her husband a shocked look as if she were a trout pulled straight out of the water.
“That didn’t come out quite right,” Lloyd corrected himself. “You know what I mean.”
“Why does my dad have to come with you?”
Mas looked up from his bowl of dry shredded wheat, curious about how Lloyd would answer.
“I need him,” Lloyd said, “for moral support.”
M ore than a physical place, New York City was a feeling. Mas was learning that to get around in the city, he couldn’t get too stuck on maps and street names. The best way for him was to depend on his intuition.
In L.A., this approach would never work, namely because you could start driving in one direction on a hunch and suddenly be in either Nevada or Mexico. If you took a wrong turn in New York City, you eventually hit the water, so you then just backtracked in the opposite direction. Mas relied on his inner compass to get to the red door. They got out at Times Square Station and then walked west. Mas knew that they were going in the right direction when the buildings became grimier.
“This area’s called Hell’s Kitchen,” said Lloyd after they had traveled for several blocks.
“Get hot ova here?”
“It’s not that. Actually, I’m not sure why it got its name. It used to be a real rough area, but now they are cleaning it up. Making restaurants and nightspots out of the old factory buildings.”
When Mas described the drugs that he had seen in the back room behind the red door, Lloyd nodded his head. “Your boys were probably selling Ecstasy. That’s the popular drug in these clubs down here.”
Ecstasy, hiropon, didn’t make much difference to Mas. Names and chemicals could be changed, but drugs had the same general effect. To give temporary sweetness to a life that was bitter and hard to take. In Mas’s case, he was lucky that he preferred the bitter to the fake sweet.
It was early morning, and that wasn’t doing Hell’s Kitchen any favors. It was like shining light in a drunk’s face: the area, rather than menacing, seemed pitiful. Pedestrians moved in slow motion, as if walking too fast would cause their heads to roll off.