Strawberry Yellow (4 page)

Mas hoped it would be the Arai in the uniform who would return to his side, but it was Salgado instead.

“I have some questions for you.” The sergeant removed a thin notebook from his breast pocket. “What time did you come here?”

That Mas did know. Midnight.

“Midnight? That’s mighty late to be traipsing around here.”

“My relative’s funeral. Couldn’t sleep,” Mas lied. He had been sleeping like a baby until Billy had come around.

“You were with Billy last night.”

Mas just grunted.

“How did he seem?”

Kuru-kuru-pa
. Head turned around. Also, not to mention, stinking drunk. “Fine.”

“Why did you come here to the Stem House? It’s not the Arai family’s any more.”

“Ole times’ sake.” That much was true.

“So it was your idea.”

Mas moistened his lips.

“Maybe,” was the best he could offer.

Salgado walked over to the crumbling stairs of the Stem House, and Mas followed. The fog had burnt off a little, and the sunlight accentuated the decrepit state of the building. If the house could talk, it would be moaning in pain and moaning loud.

“We could charge you with breaking and entering,” Salgado said, gesturing toward the pile of torn four-by-fours, the rusty nails bent but still in the wood.

Salgado ducked to avoid a spider’s web hanging from the porch eaves and the two men looked inside the open doorway. From the foot of the stairs, Mas could see the edge of the
staircase banister, the end of it shaped like an eagle’s talon. How many times had he, Shug, and Oily slid down that banister? Shug’s parents never scolded them or told them not to. Boys will be boys must have been their motto, even though they were on the cusp of being young men. The Arais in Watsonville had taken Mas in without requiring anything from him. If they hadn’t vouched for him, there was no way he could have returned to his birthplace, America, so early in his life.

“Were you with Billy the whole night?”

Ah, the million-dollar question
.

“Mr. Arai, you may want to protect Billy, but he’s not protecting you. You could be an accessory to murder. If you’re innocent, I would speak up.”

“Ah, Billy go home,” Mas said. That he spoke the half-truth shocked even himself. He knew, however, that once he dove into these waters, there was no going back.

“Do you remember what time?”

“
Sugu
. Right away.”

“So you saw Billy Arai leave the premises. Didn’t hang around outside.”

Mas shook his head, using all his might to steady his shaking legs and arms.

“So you are the one who drank all these beers?”

There were at least three empty beer cans littering the hallway.

Mas nodded. Maybe being drunk could be his excuse for telling lies to the police. Only he was quite sober at this particular time.

“Well, we’ll confirm these details with Billy,” said
Salgado, scribbling Mas’s motel room number in his notebook. “The Forever Inn, right? Okay, you’re free to go, for now. But I wouldn’t leave town if I were you.”

I won’t, Mas thought. At least not for the rest of the day.

After going back to the motel and showering, Mas dressed in the only suit he had, his funeral suit. Arriving at the temple, he sat in his usual place, the back row. Lieutenant Robin Arai obviously didn’t have time to change out of her uniform and was already sitting in the second row. Mas couldn’t see if Billy was in the customary place of the grieving son in the front.

Wreaths were everywhere. Mostly red and white, as if they all were celebrating the winning horse in the Kentucky Derby. One covered in red roses in the front had a white sash with the name “Sugarberry” glittering in silver. Right beside it, as if it were in a competition, was a more unusual arrangement, almost Japanese-looking, with irises, pine branches, and bamboo leaves. That one had a large sign, “Everbears.”

The lesser wreaths spilled out into the aisles. There was a sad pot of Easter lilies that was in danger of being squashed by passersby. On a stake in the pot was a three-by-five card with a logo for the University of California Agriculture Department.

The only bad thing about sitting in the back was that sometimes you ended up in the front of the incense line. When it was time, Mas was directed by a mortuary worker in white gloves to line up in the center aisle. A thin
hakujin
man in a simple long-sleeved t-shirt stood in front of him. Mas thought that the man—or was he just a teenager?—might have wandered into the wrong funeral, but he obviously
understood the drill.

Bow, pinch the powdered incense and sprinkle it into another larger pot, and bow again. Bow in front of the golden altar. Then bow in front of Shug’s open casket and take a quick look. Finally, a bow toward the family.

As he waited for his turn, Mas tried to keep his eyes right in front of him, but they wandered to the front row where the family sat.

He saw the widow, Minnie, first. Instead of her once trademark cat glasses, she was wearing rimless ones. She was one of these women who strangely looked more youthful as she aged. Sitting next to her was Billy, who made a point of looking away when Mas passed by. His two weeping sisters, each of them with a child, managed polite smiles. In the second row, Mas recognized Billy’s wife—what was her name again?—from some old photo Christmas cards. Next to the wife were Billy’s children, a girl and boy, all grown up.

After pinching incense and bowing a number of times, Mas was finally face-to-face with his old friend again. Shug, of course, was in the same position, but now there were other things surrounding him—teddy bears, children’s drawings, Buddhist rosaries, and a baseball bat that Mas recognized as the one Shug’s father, Wataru, had carved in Poston camp.

As soon as Mas returned to his seat, his legs still shaking, he heard, “Mas. Mas Arai, is that you?” A woman with shoe-polish black hair was stuffing an apron into her purse. She slid in an empty seat on his right side.

“Evelyn,” Mas said weakly.

Her face was powdered white and her lipstick was too bright of a red—for both her age and the circumstances.
After unnecessarily explaining that she had been working in the kitchen—like Mas even needed an explanation—she began whispering the latest gossip about the Arai clan.

“I heard that Billy’s drunk.” Evelyn’s breath was warm and stank of cheap coffee. “He stumbled in here, in just a t-shirt and jeans, around ten o’clock in the morning. The minister didn’t know what to do. The minister’s wife gave him three cups of coffee. That’s not even his suit—it’s one that the church was going to donate to Goodwill.”

Mas bent down and patted down his hair.

“Hope that he doesn’t get back in trouble again. It was an accident, it’s all behind him, but some folks always bring up the past.”

Like you doing now
, Mas thought, although he wasn’t sure what Evelyn was talking about.

“I mean, I told everyone, what did they expect? First his father dies and now his girlfriend?”

Mas sat up. “Girlu friend?” Billy was married. And his wife was right there in the Buddhist temple.

“You mean you didn’t hear? He left his wife for this
hakujin
girl, Laila Smith. They’ve been living together for a couple of months now. She was found dead in the Stem greenhouse this morning.”

The rest of the funeral was a complete blur. Evelyn tried to coax Mas into the gym for the potluck, but Mas had to insist—no, in fact almost fight his way back to the motel. He left Evelyn and headed out to the parking lot.

“Mas, Mas.”

Now what? He turned.

“You’re not leaving, are you, Mas?”

Mas was surprised that the newly minted widow, Minnie, even had time to bother with him, not with the crowd who wanted her attention.

“I needsu to go back home. Mari and my grandson livin’ with me now. Gotsu to help them out,” he flat-out lied.

Minnie laughed. “You haven’t changed. You never cared for crowds. But, please, come to my house after the luncheon. Please. I have something to discuss with you.”

Minnie was the one who helped Mas learn some English, as limited as it was back then. And also a few Spanish words—she said that sometimes Spanish, more than English, was more useful in what would become Mas’s working world.

“Shug told me that if I could trust anyone, it would be you.”

Mas grunted and looked down at the graveled ground. Minnie knew how to effectively throw punches, and now she had aimed one right at his heart. So in this round, she was the winner. He promised to stop by in the evening after dinner, releasing the widow back to the mourners, who were busy eating marinated chicken wings in the gym.

Minnie didn’t mince words when Mas came by her house later on. “I think somebody killed Shug.”

“I thought it was heart attack,” he said.

“They say heart attack after a bout of stomach flu, but
I don’t believe it. He was as strong as a horse.” Minnie explained how she’d been in Santa Barbara for a week to babysit her daughters’ children. Shug hadn’t shown up for his weekly Monday lunch at the local Japanese restaurant, so Oily, worried, had called Billy. “Billy was the one who found him.” A cry crept up Minnie’s throat. “He’d been dead for maybe nine hours.”

Mas could only imagine how gruesome the discovery had been. No wonder Billy seemed so tortured.

“I ordered an autopsy, but they didn’t find anything unusual. No trauma. No broken bones. But the toxicology report will take a few weeks. There will be something there, you mark my words. That’s why I’m not cremating him—just in case.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “There is something else, too.” She got up and gestured for Mas to follow her into a smaller room off the hallway.

The white room had a large desk in the middle. Shug’s study, Mas figured. Minnie slid open one of the desk drawers and pointed down. Mas had to step closer to look down at its contents. A gun—not the old hunting gun he and Shug once used to shoot old strawberry baskets for target practice. No, a new, sleek, black gun that was reserved for human targets.

“Shug never had a gun like this before.”

“You’zu neva see it?”

Minnie shook her hand. “No, this is new. New, as in right before he died.” She quickly closed the drawer as if hiding it would deny its existence. “And this computer—” Minnie knocked on the outside of a silver laptop with a bent index finger. “This computer is not the same one that he had
when I left. I don’t know what’s happened to the old one.” They returned back to the living room couch.

“Shug was semi-retired, but you can’t keep a breeder from his work,” Minnie said. “He wouldn’t discuss it with me. He’d go to his test plots by the greenhouse and I don’t know where else. He was keeping whatever he was doing hush-hush. Something is fishy, Mas, and I need you to find out what it is.”

“Oily talkin’ about unfinished bizness.”

“I don’t know what that’s all about. I mean, I know his father and Jimi Jabami’s father had been experimenting with something way back in the twenties. Not sure if it was a new strawberry variety or maybe a secret pesticide. Don’t know if that was what Shug was working on.”

The front door then opened and a giant Everbears wreath appeared, followed by two other displays of flowers.

“My grandson, Zac, and granddaughter, Alyssa,” Minnie introduced with pride. The two college-age young people stepped out from behind the wreaths and took turns shaking Mas’s hand. The boy was thin, tall, and too hunched over for his age, while the girl had dark circles underneath her eyes, but otherwise looked surprisingly fresh-faced after hours of being bathed in incense.