Woman with a Blue Pencil (12 page)

It took the waitress a moment to make the connection. “Charlie Chan?” Doubt crossed her face like a shadow.

“And my name's Henry Czernicek, LAPD,” he said.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “You know what you want to order?”

“Two pastrami sandwiches and coffee,” Czernicek answered, putting his ID back in his suit jacket pocket.

She returned her pencil to her hair and put her order pad into the pocket of her uniform.

“Aren't you a doll?” Czernicek said to her as she turned to go.

She turned back, looking over her shoulder, mustering teenaged allure. “Thanks for the compliment, Detective.”

“Detective
what
?” Czernicek quizzed her.

She stopped. “Your name?”

“Yeah, I just told you, little doll.”

She shrugged. “Henry . . . something.”

“Good enough,” Czernicek said.

“Okay,” she said, confused.

“You can put our order in now,” Czernicek instructed.

She sashayed away.

“Charlie Chan?” Sumida asked him.

Czernicek said nothing, but watched the waitress go. Then he reached across the table and, without warning, grabbed Sumida's wrist, twisting it hard until Sumida thought it might break.

“Tell me what the hell is going on,” Czernicek demanded.

“I don't know.”

He twisted harder.

Sumida fixed Czernicek with a glare, even as tears formed unbidden in his eyes.

Czernicek twisted harder still.

Sumida could reach across the table with his free hand and hit the big cop in the head with the metal napkin dispenser, opening a hole in his skull. He knew after what he'd done last night in his own bungalow in Echo Park that he was more capable of inflicting physical damage than he'd believed.

But what would that accomplish now?

So instead he just held Czernicek's glare, daring the big man to twist his wrist clean off.

At last, Czernicek let go.

“Okay, Sumida, so you don't know what's going on either. We're partners then. But if this is some kind of trick . . .”

Sumida dropped his sore wrist onto his lap, cradling it beneath the table. “That's how it works being partners with you, Czernicek?”

“I just needed to know you weren't in on something.”

Sumida laughed. “Me, in on something? I'm on the outside of everything, barely even looking in. You understand? Since last night . . . And, I suspect, since a long time before that. So don't test me again, you son of a bitch.”

Czernicek grinned. “Yeah, this is going to be a real fun partnership.”

With his good hand, Sumida took a drink of water. “Tell me what happened when you went to the precinct.”

Czernicek shrugged. “Everybody there acted like they didn't know me.”

“‘Acted' like they didn't know you or . . . didn't
know
you?”

“Yeah, that's the question, Hamlet,” Czernicek said. “Do I be or don't I be?”

Sumida was surprised that Czernicek was capable of playfully appropriating Shakespeare. And he was disturbed by the appropriation—it was more than merely playful. It was the same question he'd been asking himself.

But didn't their recognizing one another put it to rest?

Why did it feel to Sumida like the answer might still be no?

“Of course, stranger yet was that I didn't recognize any of them,” Czernicek said as he mindlessly picked out sugar cubes, one at a time, from a porcelain container next to the salt and paper shakers, lining the cubes in rows of six, parallel to the edge of the Formica tabletop before him. “Still, I walked across the homicide department toward my office, greeting these imposters as if they were compadres. At first, they ignored me, confused. When I got to my office door I found my name wasn't on it anymore. That's when two of them grabbed me by the arms and threw me out like I was some kind of crazy civilian. I'll get the bastards, in time. You can count on that. But first I got to figure out what's going on.”

Sumida nodded.

“What about you?” Czernicek asked.

Sumida reviewed his own facts from the last eighteen hours, starting with the breaking of the film at the movie house. Of course, he left a few things out of his story. Like his visit to his home in Echo Park, where, according to the morning news on the car radio, Tony Fortuna had been killed. Who was to say that Czernicek wasn't putting all this on just to get him to confess to the crime? And Sumida also left out his visit to the cemetery, as he didn't want to bring up Kyoko's name—not with the man who'd considered her insufficiently important to take finding her killer seriously. Sumida couldn't afford to get tangled up in that resentment again. Not when Czernicek seemed his best hope to figure out what was happening. But he told Czernicek about his parking claim check at the downtown lot being two months old and about his aunt and uncle's house now being occupied by strangers.

“I was sitting in a coffee shop last night reading a book,” Czernicek said. “Hemingway's new one,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. I'd just bought it at Williams' Book Store in San Pedro. Not even ten pages in . . .”

“I wouldn't have pegged you for a reader,” Sumida interrupted.

Czernicek glared at him.

“Being a man of action, I mean,” Sumida added.

“There's plenty of action in Hemingway,” Czernicek observed. Then he returned to lining up the sugar cubes in rows. “Suddenly, the lights in the coffee shop flicker. And then all the electricity goes out. Blackness. Even outside through the big picture windows. No moonlight, starlight, nothing. Just like you describe in the movie house. Only for a second or two. And when the light comes back on I'm still sitting in the booth with the book in my hand, like nothing's changed, except that everybody in the place is different.”

“Different?”

Czernicek began to stack the parallel lines of sugar cubes atop one another, forming a wall three or four inches high in front of him. “I mean a whole set of different people, at the counter and in the booths. And then my regular waitress, who's the reason I put up with the crap food at this place, comes over and asks for my order. As if she
ever
has to ask. Hell, I order the same thing every time I go there: chicken fried steak. Just like I always get the pastrami here. But now it's like she doesn't know that. And it's like she doesn't know
me
, which is exactly what she claims when I press her about it. Good God, I've taken that little girl to my bed a time or two after her shift and now she says she doesn't recognize me? So I lose my temper and make a scene and it's only by flashing my badge that things simmer down and I get out of there all right.”

“But you're telling me things weren't all right, even after you got out of there.”

“Yeah, that's what I'm telling you,” Czernicek said, knocking over the sugar cube wall.

The waitress came with the sandwiches on plates in each hand.

Czernicek scooped up the sugar cubes and returned them to the porcelain bowl.

Sumida made a mental note not to take sugar with his tea if he ever returned to this place.

“Eat up,” Czernicek said, as the waitress put down the food.

She turned and walked away.

“That one,” Czernicek indicated, with a wave of his hand toward the retreating waitress. “She ought to know me too. And she sure as hell should know my last name. She lives at home and likes to fuck in her lacy little girlhood bedroom, not ten feet from her Mom and Dad's room. She likes me to put a pillow over her face when she starts making too much noise. And now, you see, she doesn't even recognize me.”

Sumida shook his head. “You got a thing for waitresses, Czernicek?”

“I got a thing for women,” he answered, biting into his sandwich. “But waitresses . . . Well, women who spend their whole working day on their feet are especially appreciative of a man who puts them flat on their backs.”

Sumida grunted.

“But this isn't about that,” Czernicek said.

“No.”

“What's going on, Sumida? Are we ghosts or something?”

The thought had occurred to Sumida. He'd dismissed it. “I think these people would respond to us differently if that were the case,” he answered.

“Then what's your theory, professor?”

Sumida picked up his sandwich with his good hand. He shrugged,
I don't know
.

“Hell of a lot of good running into you has done me,” Czernicek said.

Sumida put his sandwich down. “Our recognizing each other means everything, however little we may understand what's going on.”

“Oh, why?”

“Because it means we're not insane.”

Czernicek laughed. “Was that worrying you?”

Sumida said nothing.

“Or maybe it's all a dream,” Czernicek said.

Sumida shook his head. “You know that business about pinching yourself to ascertain that you're not dreaming?”

“Sure.”

Sumida brought his sore wrist up from beneath the table, where he'd kept it resting on his lap.

It was already black and blue where Czernicek had twisted it.

“No dream,” Sumida said.

Czernicek ignored his brutal handy work. “So that brings us back to our being ghosts.”

Sumida shook his head. “I've been to the Hall of Records. There's no indication of my ever having existed. No birth certificate, marriage license, real estate or tax records . . . nothing. Ghosts leave behind
some
indication of their having once been alive.”

“So what do you make of it, Sumida?”

Privately, Sumida suspected the two were not ghosts, but phantoms of another, even more disturbing order—beings who seemed never to have lived at all, despite their memories. Impossible, of course. “No clue,” he answered.

“And why just you and me?” Czernicek wondered.

Sumida had already silently inventoried the areas of common ground between them. There was only one . . . Kyoko, who was absent in the public records. “I don't know, Czernicek. Maybe we're just meant for each other.”

“Very funny.”

Sumida wondered if this strange reunion was an opportunity to accomplish what they had not accomplished before?
To solve the crime?
Had the two men been singled out for this sudden, inexplicable isolation—more than that, their excision from the past—for just such a purpose, justice? There was nothing Sumida wanted more than to find his wife's killer; losing his house, his car, and his identity would prove a small price to pay if that was what setting things right required. But there remained the problem of how to begin such an investigation when there was no record of Kyoko's either being born, married,
or
murdered. . . .

Sumida kept all this to himself for now.

He suspected that Czernicek was not the sort of man with whom one could speculate about metaphysics, even in the midst of an inexplicable episode. And uninvited talk of the murder investigation (a contentious subject) would threaten this forced but useful partnership.

“And another thing,” Czernicek continued, his frustration level increasing. “Along with everything else, I'm well aware of the suspicious ‘coincidence' of our meeting this morning in the periodicals room.”

Sumida looked at Czernicek. “I don't think our meeting was such a coincidence. We found ourselves in roughly the same situation, displaced. So it seems to me reasonable that we'd think to go to the same resource for some kind of ‘catching-up.'”

Czernicek turned to Sumida. “Our situation might be similar. But what gives you the idea we think alike?”

Sumida said nothing.

“You're a dirty Jap,” Czernicek whispered.

“I was born in this country, just like you,” Sumida answered.

Czernicek laughed. “I was
born
in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I came here as a kid. But
I'm
an American. A real one. And you're still a Jap.”

“Go to hell, Czernicek.”

Czernicek shook his head, fatalistically. Then, with the tip of his index finger, he poked the side of Sumida's head. “Hasn't it occurred to you that we may already
be
in hell?”

So, metaphysics wasn't beyond Czernicek . . . But Sumida disagreed with his appraisal. “This isn't hell.”

Czernicek raised his chin. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because there're important things for us to do here.”

Czernicek flashed his movie-star smile. “That's why I like you, Sumida,” he said, slapping him on the shoulder. “Even with your squinty eyes and toothy grin and sneaky Oriental mind, you manage to hold out hope when there's none. Like with the murder of your wife . . . No solution. So you became a
private
detective
? Ha! One optimistic Jap is what you are.”

“
Keizoku wa chikara nari
,” Sumida answered, knowing the Japanese would aggravate him. “It means ‘perseverance is power.'”

“Spare me your Mr. Moto wise sayings,” Czernicek chortled bitterly. “And let me amend how I described you a minute ago: you're not just one optimistic Jap, you're a downright gullible one.”

“If you think I'm a joke, then you should go your own way,” Sumida said. Though he knew that teaming with Czernicek was his best chance to figure out what was going on, he wouldn't be continually insulted.

Czernicek shook his head. “I need you like you need me. Christ, do you think I'd even be seen sitting here with you if I didn't?”

Sumida said nothing.

“Did you read about Pearl Harbor in the periodicals room this morning?” Czernicek asked.

Sumida shook his head. “That's not where I started.” He'd started with the
Times
edition from the day after Kyoko's body was found. “But I heard a radio report and picked up the gist . . .”