Strawberry Yellow (22 page)

Minnie’s hands shook and the gun with it. Ats’s face turned to Jimi and for a moment, Jimi recognized an old familiar light in her eyes.

“Mmminnie,” she mouthed. Jimi felt a streak of electricity go up his spine.

No, no, no
, Jimi thought.
This will ruin everything.
He needed to think fast and think ugly. Say something that would keep Minnie’s anger simmering and finally boil over enough for her to pull the trigger two times. “Shug used me, he used everyone around him,” he said, meaning every word. “He used you, too. I’m sure I did you a favor.”

She raised and pointed the gun right at him, and he could breathe again.

But he’d underestimated Minnie. “What are you trying to do?” she said. “Do you want me to kill you? Do you want me to destroy your life like you have destroyed mine?”

Too late, our lives are already destroyed
, thought Jimi. He wondered how it would feel to enter the other world.

“Mmminnie.” It was Ats again.

“Ats, shh.” Jimi tried to control his voice. He didn’t want his last words to his wife to be harsh.

“Is this why you killed him? Because you felt that we’d abandoned Ats?” Minnie’s voice cracked as she spoke.

But you had
, Jimi thought.
When she was young and active, you always had time for her, for us.
Coming around for free pies and cakes. Asking for donations, flats of strawberries, for the next temple fundraiser. The doorbell was always ringing for Ats. And she always answered, ready to fulfill any request. But apparently she wasn’t needed anymore. And the quiet was slowly killing her.

“Ats, oh, Ats. What has become of us?” Minnie then slumped down to the floor, dropping the gun. Leaning against the wall, she covered her eyes. She started to make a strange noise, like a cat spitting out a hairball. Jimi finally realized that she was crying.

Ats pulled herself up with the bed railing and stared at Minnie.

“Goddammit,” Jimi cursed. And then he cursed some more. Minnie kept crying and Ats kept watching. “You know, you Arais, you have it all. Money, everyone knows you and respects you. Trips around the world. The Stem House.”

More crying and hiccupping. Tears were also running down Ats’s face. Did she understand what was happening?

Minnie wiped her nose on the cuff of the jacket, which obviously was too large for her. “What are you talking about? We don’t have the Stem House anymore.”

“That’s your son’s stupidity. Finally caught up with him.”

Minnie’s mouth took on an ugly shape. “Shug took all
the money. All our retirement money. I have nothing. I may even lose the house we are living in.”

“But how can that be?”

“He put it all into the new strawberry. Every single penny. I curse that new berry.”

Jimi sunk back onto the wall.
What?
His mind whirled, trying to make sense of Minnie’s revelation.

The screen door screeched open and shut, and a new person entered Ats’s small room. Mas must have been running, because his chest was heaving up and down. Seeing Minnie on the floor next to the gun, he took a fighting stance. “Whatchu do?” he demanded of Jimi.

“You need to take her home.”

“Sonofabitch.” Mas raised his fist to strike the old man.

Minnie stopped him. “No, Mas, no. It wasn’t him. It was me. I was going to kill Ats. Like he killed Shug.”

Mas felt like a top that was losing steam. Outside, the sirens of the police cars sounded louder and louder until their wailing finally ceased a few yards away.

Mas feared that the police would cart away Minnie. If so, it would all be his fault. Because he, after all, was behind the call to the police. It had been the patriarch of the Duran House, the housebound Miguel, who had insisted on informing the police before he’d give up the keys to the Impala.

It looked mighty suspicious, the gun in the middle of the room next to Minnie. They were frozen in place from either fear or shock, all of them except for Ats. She had jumped
over her bed rail and scooped up the weapon, slipping it underneath her mattress. Then magically she was back in bed, wrapped back in her sheets, mummified.

The officer who Mas had met at his motel room break-in was first on the scene. “We got a report that there might be possible shooting at this address,” he said, a gun in his hands.

“I did it,” Jimi bleated, shocking both Mas and Minnie. “I’m the one who killed her husband.”

As soon as he said those words, Jimi felt he had found his solution.
I killed Shug Arai
. Four simple words. The police asked him the same questions forty different ways. The same answer:
I killed Shug Arai.
They wanted details—how he had done it, when he had started to plan to kill him—but all Jimi could give them was,
I killed Shug Arai
. They brought in a Japanese interpreter, obviously hoping that a different language would stir a different, more detailed response. But it was the same,
I killed Shug Arai
. On a yellow lined pad of paper, Jimi carefully held the pen and wrote over and over again,
I killed Shug Arai
.

He felt the authorities growing frustrated. Some of the experts even raised their voices and threatened him, his family. But Jimi felt like he was floating over the police station, the chimneys, the city, the farmlands. He was up in the night clouds, feeling moisture soak into the wrinkles of his face, caressing his dry, gray hair and the stubble on his chin and underneath his nose. His best defense was the truth, a truth that they could not prove. He was untouchable.

I
don’t understand,” Minnie told the assistant district attorney, a harmless-looking man who apparently had just gotten promoted. “He’s confessed. How can he already be released? Why hasn’t he been charged with my husband’s murder?”

The attorney had a nervous habit of brushing down an imaginary moustache underneath his nose. Mas moved his weight from one side of his body to the other. He and Minnie sat in the attorney’s crammed office, files stacked on all sides of the desk, threatening to topple over them both.

“His attorney said that he confessed under duress. He’s eighty years old and is the main caregiver for his terminally ill wife. He’s a sympathetic figure, that’s for sure.”

“But this toxicology report. . . .” Minnie waved an envelope in front of the attorney’s nose. She’d been waving it in front of everyone since she received it in the mail that morning. “It says right here that there was a high level, a dangerously high level, of oxalic acid in my husband’s body. Rhubarb leaves have oxalic acid.”

“Yes, but so does black tea. Also certain bacteria can produce it as well.” He turned to Mas. “I was a chemistry major in college.” Mas was unimpressed. The attorney cleared his throat. “The thing is, it’s not illegal for someone to be growing rhubarb. I mean, if we were talking about a poisoning with an illicit drug, it would be a different story.”

“How about Linus? He’s said that Shug ate a pie the day before he died. A pie made by Jimi Jabami. And that he wasn’t feeling well afterward.”

“I know, that’s something, for sure. But it still doesn’t prove that Mr. Jabami killed your husband.”

“What do we need? What do we need to prosecute him?”

“Well, if he told someone his plan. Or if he gives the sheriff a proper confession, with specific details on how and why he poisoned your husband.”

“And without that?” Minnie asked.

“I’m sorry,” the attorney said. “There’s not much I can do.”

“I can’t believe it,” Minnie said after she and Mas had given their lunch orders to the waitress at the coffee shop down the street from the courthouse. Sitting across from her, Mas noticed how exhausted Minnie looked. Her face, devoid of any makeup, was the color of dirty dishwater.

“I still can’t believe it,” she repeated. “Jimi will be out there, free as a bird, after what he’s done. If I hadn’t left Shug alone, this never would have happened. He didn’t want me to go to Santa Maria and leave him behind. Shug may have seemed so independent, but he relied on me.” Minnie started sniffling, enough to warrant taking a tissue from her purse.

Mas felt that he had failed Minnie and Shug. Yes, he’d helped find Shug’s killer, but what did it matter if Jimi wasn’t going to pay for his crime? All that was left was a pang of emptiness. The waitress, too friendly for their mood,
delivered their overflowing plates and refreshed their coffee cups. They picked at their food and spoke about nothing significant for a while.

Finally, Mas had to deliver the news. “I’zu gotta get back to Rosu Angelesu.”

Minnie nodded. “I know. You’ve done so much for us already. Even if Jimi’s out there free, at least I know, and he knows that I know. Even that much is a great relief to me.”

Minnie excused herself to go to the bathroom, leaving Mas with his half-eaten tuna melt and cold French fries. As he reached for his coffee, he heard hard soles approaching. Someone moved into the seat across from him. Instead of Minnie in a fleece jacket, it was a uniformed sergeant, the very same Arturo Salgado from Laila’s murder scene, with a radio wrapped around his shoulder like a snake.

Before Mas could react, Sergeant Salgado began talking. “I have some more questions for you.”

Mas glanced at the tops of graying heads in the coffee shop.
Where was Minnie?

Salgado must have read his mind. “She’s still talking to a friend by the women’s bathroom. She probably won’t be back for a while,” he said. “I just wanted to give you a chance to speak the truth.”

Mas tightened his grip on his fork.

“I can wait until Billy’s mother returns to the booth.”

Minnie had been through so much over the past forty-eight hours. She didn’t need this so-called detective further ruining her lunch.

Mas sighed and nodded. He was ready to face anything the sergeant was going to shovel his way.

“We haven’t found the murder weapon yet. Nothing in the greenhouse matched Laila’s injury. It was quite a blow to the head. Splinters of wood. Maybe by a wooden pole. A bat.”

As soon as he heard “bat,” Mas felt like he might shrink in his shoes, right then and there. He thought, of course, about the bat carved by Wataru Arai. Conveniently placed in the casket and now buried in a cemetery plot in Watsonville. Who had the opportunity to put the bat in the casket? Billy was first on the list. Then, of course, Minnie, her daughters, and Billy’s children. Who knows—maybe Oily and Evelyn had the opportunity, too. Regardless, it would have to be someone who knew that the bat had a special significance to the Arai family’s legacy. Chances were, too, that it was someone that Mas knew.