Kazzy was wearing a fancy gray suit, and even with bits of trash stuck to it, Mas could tell the suit was at least five cuts above the black polyester funeral version hanging in the back of his closet in Altadena. As the body lay on the gurney, Mas noticed that Kazzy had been tall for a Nisei, probably around five feet eight or so. Workers wearing jackets that said CORONER on the back covered the body in cloth and then lifted the gurney, causing something white, as large as Mas’s fist, to flutter down to the ground. Mas was ready to say something, but then thought better of it. It was probably nothing, another balled-up Kleenex. No sense in calling attention to himself now.
After the people from the coroner’s office left the garden, Mas knelt down to get a better look at the white object. Wasn’t discarded tissue paper but a flower. A huge gardenia, whose edges were still white. Mas took out an old pen from his jeans pocket and poked the back of the pen gently into the center of the flower. The petals were stiff, not from the cold but from wax coating. There was a dark hair in the middle, much longer than an eyelash, but shorter than a regular strand of hair. “ Okashii, ” Mas muttered to himself. Strange.
“Hey, you, get the hell away from there!” It was a tall man with a heavy moustache and full head of hair. Some kind of shiny badge dangled from his black jacket.
Mas backed away from the gardenia. He looked both ways for a place to escape back into anonymity, but it was too late. This man wasn’t going to forget about him. A couple of the uniformed officers were stretching yellow tape across the now empty pond. Even the trash had been bagged and taken away.
“Come over here, sir. We need to have a conversation,” the man said.
Mas felt his hands grow sweaty. I didn’t do nothing, he told himself.
“I’m Detective Ghigo.” Strange name, thought Mas, accepting the detective’s business card. The card said Ghigo worked for the Seventy-seventh Precinct-wherever that was. “I understand you were the one to discover the body.”
Mas nodded.
“You can speak English, right, sir?”
Mas cursed in two languages in his mind. He wanted to sneer, but instead bit down on his dentures. He nodded his head again.
“What’s your name?”
“Mas.”
“Mas? M-A-S? That’s Spanish, right?”
“Japanese,” Mas spouted out. “Izu Japanese.”
“Your full name?”
“Masao Arai.”
“Arai? So how do you spell that?”
“A-R-A-I.”
“Okay, so what do you have to do with this garden? Is this your place of work?”
Mas paused. Was it or was it not? “First day.”
“Well, what a way to start your first day of work, huh? Address?”
“Izu live in California.”
“ California -that’s a long commute, Mr. Arai.”
Mas shook his head and took out his wallet. “Izu livin’ here now.” He took out a scrap of paper with Lloyd and Mari’s name, address, and phone number.
“Lloyd and Mari Jensen; I’m looking for them. What is your connection to them, Mr. Arai?”
“Daughter and son-in-law.”
“Well, where might they be? They were expected here this morning. In fact, about an hour ago.”
Mas hesitated. He knew by the tone of the detective’s voice that both Lloyd and Mari were under suspicion.
“They comin’, they comin’. Problems with their kid. Their son, Takeo.”
“Well, I called their house, and no answer. Cell phone, same thing.”
Mas licked his lips. It was so damn cold in this Brooklyn place.
“I don’t want you going anywhere, Mr. Arai. You just stay put here for a while.”
Mas had to warm up his joints, so he went into the house through the back door. There was a small room with a photocopy machine and shelves holding office supplies, most likely once a bedroom for the servants. Then a large tiled kitchen and, beyond that, an open living room with bright-colored paintings on the wall. At a long table sat Becca, who had been crying so hard that half circles of black makeup shadowed her eyes. A man in his mid-thirties was pacing the hardwood floors. “I told him that this project would only mean trouble. I told him, I told him. Now he’s fallen off the bridge and killed himself.”
“We don’t know that, Phillip. He was covered in trash. Somebody buried him. Probably the same people who were vandalizing the garden.”
Phillip’s face turned a chalky white. He suddenly noticed that Mas was in the room. “Who’s this guy?”
“Phillip, this is Mr. Arai, Mari’s father. Mr. Arai, this is my brother, Phillip.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“He’s come to help on the garden. To make sure that it’s ready by May.”
“Well, there won’t be any opening.” Phillip finally looked straight at Mas, who made note of the familiar steel gray eyes. “So we won’t be needing your services, Mr. Arai, or Lloyd’s.”
“You don’t know that, Phillip. The garden is part of the foundation, and it’s the foundation’s decision to make.”
“Well, we’re two of the five board members, not to mention Dad, and he’s not around to say one way or the other.”
“And I’m not for canceling anything. This was K- san ’s dream. And I’m not going to let him down, especially now.” Becca began to cry again, and Mas was amazed that more tears could come out of her swollen eyes.
Phillip gripped Becca’s shoulder and glared at Mas. “Can you please give us some privacy?”
Before Mas could explain that he had been ordered by Detective Ghigo to stay put, Phillip practically pushed him out of the living room and then the kitchen and laundry room. Before Mas knew it, he was outside behind the closed back door.
Mas sat on the cement steps and sucked on another cigarette. The coldness from the stairs soaked through his jeans into his oshiri, but he didn’t care. He blew out smoke and was grateful for the quiet, aside from the steady hum of cars on the street. Detective Ghigo was back inside the house, questioning Kazzy’s two children. Where the hell were Mari and Lloyd? This didn’t look good, them disappearing and a dead man in Lloyd’s place of work. Mas didn’t know what kind of relationship Kazzy had with Lloyd and Mari, but knowing how his daughter felt about authority figures, it couldn’t have been too good. And where was the wife? Becca and Phillip acted like a pair of siblings who seemed unanchored to each other. Mas had a hunch that their mother was already dead-without the mother, the family was never the same.
Before Mas could start on his third cigarette, a young hakujin man came through the back gate. He was dressed in a black suit and black tie, but he was no businessman. First of all, he wore tennis shoes-the modern kind, with bright-red wafflelike soles and silly white swoops sewn into the leather. To top it off, his hair was whipped into tiny cones that dangled like baby sea eels stuck in a piece of coral.
“Hey,” the man said to him.
Mas just grunted back. He wasn’t going to waste any extra energy to say “hallo” to someone who was going to “hey” him.
“Got an extra smoke?”
Mas studied the man. He wasn’t homeless; some kind of working stiff. Mas held out his Marlboro package.
“Thanks.” The man slipped a cigarette into his mouth and returned the package to Mas. He flipped open a shiny metal lighter and leaned the cigarette into the flame. After a few puffs, the man attempted to make some conversation. “I’ve never seen you before.”
Well, never seen you before either, Mas thought. He had little patience for small talk, but here he had little choice. “Help wiz garden.”