Blood Hina (15 page)

“I think we’d better call the sheriff.”

Mas looked up surprised. Not because the Buckwheat Beauty was suggesting that they contact the authorities, but because she had said “we.”

The first thing Mas did when the sheriff’s deputies stepped into the house was hand over the plastic baggy with the bloody strands of hair. Mas had seen enough television crime dramas to know that hair could unravel secrets of the most pernicious and hidden crimes. The Altadena sheriffs, however, seemed skeptical. Dressed in brown uniforms, they were congenial enough, patiently spelling out Haruo’s first name a couple of times before they got it right.

“Now, would there be any reason why Mr. Mukai would want to run away from his life?” one of the deputies asked.

Mas mumbled unintelligibly, and the Buckwheat Beauty looked down at her high-top tennis shoes.

“You know, woman problems, maybe any trouble with the police?”

Yes and yes would have been the correct answers, but Mas and Dee shook their heads.

“Do you have a photo?” they asked.

Mas sat frozen in his living room chair, thinking desperately of where he might have an image of Haruo other than the one in his head.

“I do,” said the Buckwheat Beauty, surprisingly. She brought out keys to the delivery truck, which was attached to a wallet. Inside the wallet were a few plastic compartments for photos. One was of Dee, Dee’s sisters, and their parents when Ike was alive. The other was a more recent group shot of the family, including Haruo in the back.

One of the sheriff deputies brought the photo close to his face. “You weren’t exaggerating about the scar,” he said to
Mas. “It is pretty severe. How did he get it?”

Mas knew that Haruo had many different versions about the birth of his scar. House fire. Spousal abuse. Anything except the truth—the Bomb—because it just caused too much discomfort for the inquirer. It turned out that Mas didn’t have to manufacture anything, because the Buckwheat Beauty beat him to it.

“Kitchen fire, when he was a kid in Japan,” said Dee. Her answer surprised Mas, not because it was a lie, but because she said it so easily, flippantly, as if she really believed it. Mas crossed his arms, jamming his fists into his armpits. Wait a minute. She did really believe it. Why hadn’t Haruo told her the truth?

There were doubles of the same photo in the sleeve of the wallet, so Dee gave the less worn one to the deputies.

“We’ll send out his name with the photo. If anyone finds a person matching his description they’ll let us know.”

Mas felt his dentures click together. He knew what the deputy was saying. If they found an unidentified dead body in a hospital or in a ditch, Haruo Mukai would be on the list of possible John Does. What good was that, identifying Haruo when he was dead, when they needed to find him while he was alive.

Still, Mas got up from his easy chair and bowed his head in thanks.

“Maybe he’ll show up at work,” Dee said, a little too brightly, after the deputies had left the house. They’d told them not to worry, to rest, but that’s the last thing Mas could do.

He wondered if Dee was going to tell her mother
what was going on. If Spoon was indeed having a nervous breakdown, news of Haruo’s disappearance might be too much. Either way, he’d let the daughter take care of dispatching the news to the Hayakawa side. He’d already been a target of Spoon’s volatile mood swings and wanted to stand clear of any more.

He went into the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee. It was lukewarm by now, but Mas didn’t care.

The two of them sat at the kitchen table and stayed quiet for a while. In fact, the whole house was so still that Mas could hear the ticking from his bowling trophy clock in his bedroom.

“You know, we used to have a kitchen set like this.” Dee spread her arms over the table surface, which was tattooed with soy sauce stains and cigarette butt marks. “Formica, right, that’s what they call it?”

Formica, whatever, what did that have to do with anything? Mas wondered.

Dee tipped her head back and again for a flash, Mas could see a glimpse of her former beauty. “I was sitting with my dad like this on the morning he died. He was up at three, like always, and I hadn’t even slept yet. I watched him do his little routine, you know, boil an egg for six minutes, let it cool, and then crack it open about fifteen minutes later. Then he’d spread a thick layer of Best Food mayonnaise over the top and sprinkle some black pepper over that. He did that every morning. Mom said she’d boil the eggs for him beforehand, but he said he didn’t like how the yolk would get dark on the outside. Dad was kind of like that egg. All perfect. No marks. When I started getting into trouble, I

thought for sure he’d lose it. Yell, hit me. In rehab, you know, my parents had to come in for our family sessions. I had to get into it. Everything I did. Where I bought drugs. When I was arrested. The whole time my mom would be holding her purse, ready to make her getaway at any minute, while Dad had his head down, like what I did was his fault.

“Anyway that day he got killed, he must have known that something bad was going to happen. Because after he ate his egg, he looked at me. Right at me. ‘Take care of your mother,’ he said. ‘Whatever you do, take care of her.’

“I knew I needed to stop him, tell him not to go to Hanley. But I didn’t follow through. And that’s something I’ve regretted every day since. So if you think Haruo’s in trouble, you can’t just give up and let the police handle it. Because they don’t know Haruo like you do.”

Mas looked at his Casio watch. Haruo was missing now for seven hours. A lot could happen in seven hours. In fact, in a few seconds the day could become night and the skies could bleed black. Both Mas and Haruo had witnessed it for themselves. The Buckwheat Beauty was right: Time was not often on Mas’s side, and for that matter, not on Haruo’s, either.

Mas fell asleep right at the kitchen table and woke when he heard the thump-thump of newspapers being delivered to some of his neighbors’ homes. Dee was gone, probably off to work at the market. Before Mas could figure out what to do next, the phone rang.

He picked up the receiver on the second ring. “Hallo,” he said, louder than any man should at five o’clock in the morning.

“Mas, it’s Taxie. Sorry to call so early, but you told me to call you to tell you if Haruo showed up, right?”

Mas swallowed. His throat felt scratchy and parched.

“Yeah, well, he didn’t come in. I’m kind of worried because he hasn’t missed a day of work since he started.” Taxie must have been on a cell phone, because the reception was poor, causing crackling and popping in between every word.

“And well, I hate to tell you this, Mas, but I thought you should know—he’s been going to the track a couple times a week for the past three months. Sometimes with Casey. Casey didn’t want anyone to know, but the parking attendant noticed them leaving together and Haruo let it slip one day that they were going to Santa Anita. I just found out myself this morning.”

Mas’s stomach fell. Haruo was back gambling? In a way, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Mas had heard Americans saying that someone’s eyes were too big for their stomach. Well, Haruo’s eyes were much too big for his wallet. Being the optimist that he was, he always thought the pot of gold or happy ending awaited him
if
. If he stayed at the poker table for one more round. If he tossed the dice one more time. That kind of hope could only lead to one thing—death. Either a physical death at the hands of a loan shark’s dispatcher or a death of a spiritual kind. Haruo had been saved from the latter, but Mas doubted that his friend or even he could survive another incident.

While speaking to Taxie, Mas silently cursed Haruo, Casey, and the gambling sickness. “Youzu see Casey at the market?”

More crackling.

“You know, I actually haven’t seen him this morning. But then he doesn’t come in every day.”

“Where he live?”

“He’s between places. I think he’s living in an apartment next to the Japanese Episcopal Church right now. The one in Koreatown.”

Mas could hear potential flower customers in the background inquiring about the cost of different blooms, so he let Taxie return to business.

If Casey had been the one to lead Haruo astray, church or no church, there would be hell to pay.

The Japanese Episcopal Church in Los Angeles was smack dab in the middle of Koreatown. The area was called Uptown before the war, and Japanese immigrants, mostly gardeners, once lived in bungalows north and south of there.

Mas knew where the church was but had never gone inside. Mari had gone—or rather, was sent to—Japanese school every Saturday morning a few blocks away. Mas and Chizuko didn’t know how many times she’d actually graced the doors of her classroom, because they’d heard and even seen her loitering outside with another girl smoking cigarettes. It seemed that the more Chizuko pushed Mari to be Japanese, the more she declared herself to be American.
Mas was sympathetic, because he often felt the same way, but since he couldn’t properly speak either Japanese or English, he was not only without a language but also a country.

The church had once been flanked by a Korean-owned golf driving range, with green netting as tall as the neighboring mini-high-rises. Now the driving range had been replaced by a new elementary school with an impressive multicolored pagoda on one side. The voices of children playing during recess lifted Mas’s spirits.

He parked on the street, and as he neared the modest chapel he spied a couple of neon-yellow golf balls in the driveway. He picked them up—he didn’t know why, but they seemed to be crying out to be claimed.

The apartment, the orange color of Ritz crackers, stood above a vegetable garden surrounded by a locked gate. Judging from the look of the soil and its maintenance, the garden was relatively new. He saw beds of carrots, melons, beets, and radishes. In between potted lemon trees, another golf ball, looking like a recently laid white egg, had fallen.

Mas walked around the imprisoned garden to gain access to the apartment building. A row of battered metal mailboxes in front of a staircase held few clues. There were numbers but no names. Would Mas have to knock on each door to find where Casey lived?

As he mulled over his options, a mustached man carrying a golf club appeared from the staircase. “You have my balls.”

“Excuse?”

“Golf balls.” The man gestured toward the neon-yellow dimpled balls in Mas’s right hand.

“Oh yah.” Somewhat embarrassed, he forfeited the balls.
He was just trying to be a good Samaritan, not a bloody
dorobo
.