Woman with a Blue Pencil (8 page)

An announcer said it was Friday, January 23, 1942.

“Rise and shine, Los Angeles,” my ass
, Sumida thought.

It
should
have been Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. It
should
have been a peaceful, quiet morning spent with the
LA Times
and a glass of juice squeezed from oranges grown on a tree in the backyard of his own house. But whatever nightmare had commenced the night before continued.

And then it got worse.

The newsman said something about a war in the Pacific.

Sumida sat up on the front seat, listening:

Thousands of civilians had been killed in Singapore by merciless Japanese bombings.

American forces had engaged Japanese combatants in the Bataan Peninsula.

American forces against Japanese?

The radio news continued:

Unconfirmed reports suggested that Japanese forces had massacred
thousands
at Changjiao in China.

Locally, two sports fishermen reported a Japanese submarine off the coast of Santa Barbara.

And, at a press conference yesterday, LA's chief of police warned that with the increasing possibility of an imminent Japanese military invasion of the mainland, vigilant residents of Southern California needed to report not only unusual activities sighted along the coastline but
any
suspicious behavior among their Japanese-American neighbors, even those of long standing. The chief revealed that Army Intelligence warned there was little doubt that some percentage of local Japanese-American farmers, fishermen, small business owners, and service workers were, in fact, deceitful Fifth Columnists.

The racial epithets from the night before made sense. American-born or not, Sumida was now the enemy.

Finally, the newsman reported that sometime after ten p.m. a local man had died of a skull fracture sustained in a fall at the home of a neighbor on the eight hundred block of Laveta Terrace in the Echo Park neighborhood. Currently, police were not treating the death as a homicide, but as a likely “domestic accident.” Unconfirmed reports suggested alcohol was likely a factor. Authorities had not yet released the name of the unfortunate Angeleno.

Sumida knew the name—Tony Fortuna.

And while there had been drinking, he also knew it was not alcohol that had cracked Tony's skull.

He gathered himself.

Sumida's country was at war and he'd inadvertently killed his neighbor (who somehow hadn't recognized him). Sumida needed to do something. Ought he to turn himself in? But what would that accomplish? Particularly as he no longer understood
how the world worked
.

What had become of the last six weeks?

How had so much changed?

He'd heard of blackouts—periods when individuals seemed to “lose time,” learning upon reawakening that they'd moved unconsciously about their worlds in uncharacteristic ways. The Jekyll and Hyde business, which might explain the lost time (a period of evident catastrophe in world affairs) but little else of his interactions with the seemingly altered world. No, his dislocation extended beyond a mere temporary blackout. But what did that leave?

Perhaps he'd have been better off not waking at all, either from his night's brief sleep or the two-month blackout that preceded it. But he
had
awakened. And his instinct for survival, for which he'd carried shame since the murder of his wife, remained too.

So now he considered immediate precautions.

With dawn just minutes away, he slipped out of the car, closing the door softly behind him to shut off the dome light. He looked around to insure no one could see him. Wedged between the tractor-trailers, he couldn't see far. He looked straight up. Judging from the visible stars, the new day would be mercifully absent of rain. But mud was still everywhere. He bent and grabbed a handful, moving around to the back of the car and crouching to the level of the California license place, which read:

“82B3874.”

Applying the mud carefully, like a painter working in unusual materials, he managed to change the yellow letters on the black plate, until it read:

“32P3371”

He'd seen the trick in one or another movie. Or he'd read it in a book. He didn't remember. And though he knew it wouldn't fool the cops for long, it'd buy him a little time on the roads without his Chrysler being spotted as a stolen vehicle (so long as the mud dried dark enough and held fast). Later, he'd have to stop at a five-and-dime and buy a small can of black paint. For now, he made his way to the front bumper and repeated the mud application to the front license plate.

Cautiously, he walked around the back of one tractor-trailer to get a wider view.

The first glow of morning was visible over the mountains in the east. The subtle colors and shadings of gold reminded him of the Edo-period paintings of Kanō Sanraku—more than three hundred years and a world away . . . a useless thought now.

The diner across the lot was open, and a few truck drivers had already settled at the counter inside. Sumida would not be joining them. Instead, he returned to his car, turned the key, and pulled out of the lot.

The streets were quiet, lampposts still aglow.

He drove cautiously. The last thing he could afford would be to get pulled over for a speeding ticket.

There was only one place to go now. The Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights. He needed to talk to Kyoko.

Of course, she wouldn't talk back to him. He knew that much, even in this fragmented frame of mind. But at least he could put his hand on her name, where it was carved in stone—where it said, “BELOVED WIFE” (even if, during those last months, she had not actually loved him so much but had been deceived and seduced by some unknown, dishonorable, and possibly murderous suitor).

Boyle Heights lay a few miles east of downtown. The Evergreen Cemetery, largest and oldest in LA, did not open its gates until seven, so Sumida parked near a closed taco stand to wait the last few minutes. He watched the neighborhood awaken. Mexicans and whites made their ways out of their wooden frame houses, heading toward one or another of the streetcar or bus lines that would take them to work in the foundries of Gardena or the houses of the wealthy in Beverly Hills. At seven, a man in a dark suit with aviator sunglasses unlocked and opened the metal gates to the cemetery.

Sumida waited for the man to disappear inside the cemetery before driving straight to the spot he had frequented so often these past months . . .

But there, after getting out of his car, Sumida's heart sank.

In the place on the marble wall where Kyoko's marker belonged there now hung a different marker, “Miko Kamikubo, 1901–1939.”

He'd never heard of Miko Kamikubo.

And he hadn't made a mistake in searching out Kyoko's marker. He'd been here a hundred times since her passing. His heart pounded so hard that for a moment he could hardly breathe. Where was Kyoko? He ran down one long row of marble memorials and then another and another.

Why would they have moved her resting place?

Finally, he'd covered the whole Japanese section. She was gone.

He got back in the big Chrysler and drove to the cemetery office, which didn't open until 9 a.m.

Outside the cemetery office was a phone booth. He had plenty of dimes. And no more foolish pride.

However, the phone numbers he'd written on a scrap of paper kept in his wallet—one for a former teaching colleague, one for the home of the art history department chair at Marymount, numbers for his two cousins in Long Beach, the work number for a childhood friend now employed at a bakery in West LA, the office numbers of the trio of PI's he'd sequentially hired after Kyoko's murder—all had been blurred to inky gibberish by the soaking he'd gotten in the rain the night before.

And when he dialed 1-1-3 for information he was told there were no such listings.

He drove his car to the far end of the cemetery and parked it beneath a willow that hung over the narrow road.

All he knew was that nothing made sense.

So he had to make sense of that . . .

He had observed his mother lose her mind over the past few years. Though still only in her sixties, she had developed early senility that began with her forgetting details dating back a few weeks or months. Next, the memory loss encroached on her recent days, then her hours, then her minutes. Now, she couldn't say what she'd had for lunch, ten minutes after finishing. Nonetheless, she still recalled her distant past. Sumida as a child. . . . The death at age three of Sumida's sister, Yukiko, his only sibling, from Rheumatic Fever. . . . Her husband, Sam's father, as a young man (she thought he was still alive, not remembering he'd drowned off Dana Point). . . . Her girlhood in Japan. . . .

It was a plague of forgetfulness, leaving her only with the present moment and the distant past. No in-between.

And it was more than that.

At times, he'd observed his mother filling-in the blank spaces with delusions. For example, sometimes she believed she was being held captive, rather than being cared for, by her sister and brother-in-law—lashing out at them with profanity she had never used before. Sometimes she turned upon them with physical violence, clawing and scratching at their faces or throwing objects about the house. Other times she believed she was staying at a lodge in Yosemite and couldn't understand why she wasn't allowed to go outside alone to enjoy the pine trees and majestic views. Her sister would tell her it was because of an infestation of bears and that all the “guests” were required to stay inside for their own safety. Lies like that helped.

Sumida didn't like seeing such things. She was his mother, after all.

But he couldn't help being fascinated by the force of the delusions. More powerful than dreams, from which one can usually awaken oneself if the dream becomes too harrowing, these were alternative worlds from which she could not awake. Doctors referred to it as a form of senile psychosis.

It worried Sumida that his closest living relative suffered from such a thing. Particularly as he knew his paternal grandfather had suffered a similar psychological decline in Japan before his death in the 1890s. So now he couldn't help wondering . . .

Was it possible to skip the memory-loss portion of the illness and go straight to the psychosis?

Or would one even remember the memory-loss portion?

What other than madness made sense of all this? Sure, the driver's license in his wallet attested to his name and address. But the world objected. Still, this
had
to be different than his mother's affliction.

Everything depended on that being so.

Then he wondered: If Kyoko Sumida was not buried here, might that mean she was alive?

Was he still even investigating a murder?

He turned his car around and drove out of the cemetery, passing through the broken-down parts of Boyle Heights, where he'd have been beaten senseless even before America went to war with Japan, and back toward downtown.

The Hall of Records.

The newspaper files at the LA public library.

He was investigating a crime, for God's sake. His job was to get to the bottom of things.

Excerpt from a letter dated August 1, 1942:

. . . Your reluctance is surely understandable, considering how recent events have affected you and your family. You have my sympathies. Indeed, if you were not off to such a good start with your Jimmy Park character, if I did not think you were truly onto something successful and new here, I'd agree that perhaps a more conventional approach to writing a mystery (i.e. a Caucasian protagonist working to solve an ordinary murder case)
would
be the way to go. But remember, it was the exciting prospect of doing a mystery novel from the point-of-view of an Oriental detective that initially drew me to your manuscript, distinguishing your work from other submissions on the “slush pile.” Your concept of a Japanese protagonist grabbed me. And, while geopolitical circumstances have changed dramatically since that first submission, I do not believe we betray our original intention to create something NEW by having made the changes we have made to this point.

Naturally, I do not want you to go forward with something that makes you uncomfortable. But these are complex times. And you are a young man, just starting out.

The truth is, there may be no better way to introduce an Oriental as protagonist in a popular spy story than the one afforded us now: by making Park's enemy Japanese you win over a mass audience's sympathies in a way that your original plan to have your Nisei detective solve the murder of his wife by tracking down a Caucasian police detective would never have accomplished. The specter of “the Yellow Peril,” like it or not, might have doomed our project even
before
Pearl Harbor. In fact, it now seems reckless, almost mad, to have entertained the notion that we could pull that off. So, mightn't the current revisions be a blessing in disguise?