Elvis Cole 02 – Stalking the Angel – Crais, Robert

*

Chapter 1

I was standing on my head in the middle of my office when the door opened and the best looking woman I’d seen in three weeks walked in. She stopped in the door to stare, then remembered herself and moved aside for a grim-faced man who frowned when he saw me. A sure sign of disapproval. The woman said, “Mr. Cole, I’m Jillian Becker. This is Bradley Warren. May we speak with you?”Jillian Becker was in her early thirties, slender in gray pants and a white ruffled shirt with a fluffy bow at the neck and a gray jacket. She held a cordovan Gucci briefcase that complemented the gray nicely, and had very blond hair and eyes that I would call amber but she would call green. Good eyes. There was an intelligent humor in them that the Serious Businesswoman look didn’t diminish.

I said, “You should try this. Invigorates the scalp. Retards the aging process. Makes for embarrassing moments when prospective clients walk in.” Upside down, my face was the color of beef liver.

Jillian Becker smiled politely. “Mr. Warren and I don’t have very much time,” she said. “Mr. Warren and I have to catch the noon flight to Kyoto, Japan.” Mr. Warren.

“Of course.”

I dropped down from the headstand, held one of the two director’s chairs opposite my desk for Jillian Becker, shook hands with Mr. Warren, then tucked in my shirt and took a seat at my desk. I had taken off the shoulder holster earlier so it wouldn’t flop into my face when I was upside down. “What can I do for you?” I said. Clever opening lines are my forte.

Bradley Warren looked around the office and frowned again. He was ten years older than Jillian, and had the manicured, no-hair-out-of-place look that serious corporate types go for. There was an $8000 gold Rolex watch on his left wrist and a $3000 Wesley Barron pinstripe suit on the rest of him and he didn’t seem too worried that I’d slug him and steal the Rolex. Probably had another just like it at home. “Are you in business by yourself, Mr. Cole?” He’d have been more comfortable if I’d been in a suit and had a couple of wanted posters lying around.

“I have a partner named Joe Pike. Mr. Pike is not a licensed private investigator. He is a former Los Angeles police officer. I hold the license.” I pointed out the framed pink license that the Bureau of Collections of the State of California had issued to me. “You see. Elvis Cole.” The license hangs beside this animation eel I’ve got of the Blue Fairy and Pinocchio. Pinocchio is as close as I come to a wanted poster.

Bradley Warren stared at the Blue Fairy and looked doubtful. He said, “Something very valuable was stolen from my home four days ago. I need someone to find it.”

“Okay.”

“Do you know anything about the Japanese culture?”

“I read Shogun.”

Warren made a quick hand gesture and said, “Jillian.” His manner was brusque and I didn’t like it much. Jillian Becker didn’t seem to mind, but she was probably used to it.

Jillian said, “The Japanese culture was once predicated on a very specific code of behavior and personal conduct developed by the samurai during Japan’s feudal period.”

Samurai. Better buckle the old seat belt for this one.

“In the eighteenth century, a man named Jocho Yamamoto outlined every aspect of proper behavior for the samurai in manuscript form. It was called ‘Recorded Words of the Hagakure Master,’ or, simply, the Hagakure, and only a few of the original editions survive. Mr. Warren had arranged the loan of one of these from the Tashiro family in Kyoto, with whom his company has extensive business dealings. The manuscript was in his home safe when it was stolen.”

As Jillian spoke, Bradley Warren looked around the office again and did some more frowning. He frowned at the Mickey Mouse phone. He frowned at the little figurines of Jiminy Cricket. He frowned at the Spider-Man mug. I considered taking out my gun and letting him frown at that, too, but thought it might seem peevish. “How much is the Hagakure worth?”

Jillian Becker said, “A little over three million dollars.”

“Insured?”

“Yes. But the policy won’t begin to cover the millions our company will lose in business with the Tashiros unless their manuscript is recovered.”

“The police are pretty good. Why not go to them?”

Bradley Warren sighed loudly, letting us know he was bored, then frowned at the gold Rolex. Time equals money.

Jillian said, “The police are involved, Mr. Cole, but we’d like things to proceed faster than they seem able to manage. That’s why we came to you.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought you came to me so Bradley could practice frowning.”

Bradley looked at me. Pointedly. “I’m the president of Warren Investments Corporation. We form real estate partnerships with Japanese investors.” He leaned forward and raised his eyebrows. “I have a big operation. I’m in Hawaii. I’m in L. A., San Diego, Seattle.” He made an opera out of looking around my office. “Try to imagine the money involved.”

Jillian Becker said, “Mr. Warren’s newest hotel has just opened downtown in Little Tokyo.”

Bradley said, “Thirty-two stories. Eight million square feet.”

I nodded. “Big.”

He nodded back at me.

Jillian said, “We wanted to have the Hagakure on display there next week when the Pacific Men’s Club names Bradley Man of the Month.”

Bradley gave me more of the eyebrows. “I’m the first Caucasian they’ve honored this way. You know why? I’ve pumped three hundred million dollars into the local Asian community in the last thirty-six months. You got any idea how much money that is?”

“Excuse me,” I said. I pushed away from my desk, pitched myself out of my chair onto the floor, then got up, brushed myself off, and sat again. “There. I’m finished being impressed. We can go on.”

Jillian Becker’s face went white. Bradley Warren’s face went dark red. His nostrils flared and his lips tightened and he stood up. It was lovely. He said, “I don’t like your attitude.”

“That’s okay. I’m not selling it.” I opened the drawer in the center of my desk and tossed a cream-colored card toward him. He looked at it. “What’s this?”

“Pinkerton’s. They’re large. They’re good. They’re who you want. But they probably won’t like your attitude any more than I do.” I stood up with him.

Jillian Becker stood up, too, and held out her hand the way you do when you want things to settle down. “Mr. Cole, I think we’ve started on the wrong foot here.”

I leaned forward. “One of us did.”

She turned toward Warren. “It’s a small firm, Bradley, but it’s a quality firm. Two attorneys in the prosecutor’s office recommended him. He’s been an investigator for eight years and the police think highly of him. His references are impeccable.” Impeccable. I liked that.

Bradley Warren held the Pink’s card and flexed it back and forth, breathing hard. He looked the way a man looks when he doesn’t have any other choice and the choice he has is lousy. There’s a Pinocchio clock on the wall beside the door that leads to Joe Pike’s office. It has eyes that move from side to side. You go to the Pinkerton’s, they don’t have a clock like that. Jillian Becker said, “Bradley, he’s who you want to hire.”

After a while the heavy breathing passed and Bradley nodded. “All right, Cole. I’ll go along with Jillian on this and hire you.”

“No,” I said. “You won’t.”

Jillian Becker stiffened. Bradley Warren looked at Jillian Becker, then looked back at me. “What do you mean, I won’t?”

“I don’t want to work for you.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like you.”

Bradley Warren started to say something, then stopped. His mouth opened, then closed. Jillian Becker looked confused. Maybe no one had ever before said no to Bradley Warren. Maybe it was against the law. Maybe Bradley Warren’s personal police were about to crash through the door and arrest me for defying the One True Way. Jillian shook her head. “They said you could be difficult.”

I shrugged. “They should’ve said that when I’m pushed, I push back. They also should’ve said that when I do things, I do them my way.” I looked at Bradley. “The check rents. It does not buy.”

Bradley Warren stared at me as if I had just beamed down from the Enterprise. He stood very still. So did Jillian Becker. They stood like that until a tic started beneath his left eye and he said, “Jillian.”

Jillian Becker said, “Mr. Cole, we need the Hagakure found, and we want you to find it. If we in some way offended you, we apologize.”

We.

“Will you help us?”

Her makeup was understated and appropriate, and there was a tasteful gold chain around her right wrist. She was bright and attractive and I wondered how many times she’d had to apologize for him and how it made her feel.

I gave her the Jack Nicholson smile and made a big deal out of sitting down again. “For you, babe, anything.” Can you stand it?

Bradley Warren’s face was red and purple and splotched, and the tic was a mad flicker. He made the hand gesture as quick as a cracking whip, and said, “Write him a check and leave it blank. I’ll be down in the limo.”

He left without looking at me and without offering his hand and without waiting for Jillian. When he was gone I said, “My, my. Man of the Month.”

Jillian Becker took a deep breath, let it out, then sat in one of the director’s chairs and opened the Gucci briefcase in her lap. She took out a corporate checkbook and spoke while she wrote. “Mr. Cole, please understand that Bradley’s under enormous pressure. We’re on our way to Kyoto to tell the Tashiros what has happened. That will be neither pleasant nor easy.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I should be more sensitive.”

She glanced up from the check with cool eyes. “Maybe you should.”

So much for humor.

After a while, she put the check and a 3 x 5 index card on my desk. I didn’t look at the check. She said, “The card has Bradley’s home and office addresses and phone numbers. It also has mine. You may call me at any time, day or night, for anything that pertains to this case.”

“Okay.”

“Will you need anything else?”

“Access to the house. I want to see where the book was and talk to anyone who knew that the book was there. Also, if there’s a photograph or description of the manuscript, I’ll need it.”

“Bradley’s wife can supply that. At the house.”

“What’s her name?”

“Sheila. Their daughter Mimi lives at the house, also, along with two housekeepers. I’ll call Sheila and tell her to expect you.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

We were getting along just great.

Jillian Becker closed the Gucci briefcase, snapped its latch, stood, and went to the door. Maybe she hadn’t always been this serious. Maybe working for Bradley brought it out in her.

“You do that well,” I said.

She looked back. “What?”

“Walk.”

She gave me the cool eyes again. “This is a business relationship, Mr. Cole. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Sure.”

She opened the door.

“One more thing.”

She turned back to me.

“You always look this good, or is today a special occasion?”

She stood like that for a while, not moving, and then she shook her head. “You really are something, aren’t you?”

I made a gun out of my hand, pointed it at her, and gave her another dose of the Nicholson. “I hope he pays you well.”

She went out and slammed the door.

Chapter 2

When the door closed I looked at the check. Blank. She hadn’t dated it 1889 or April 1. It had been signed by Bradley Warren and, as far as I could tell, in ink that wouldn’t vanish. Maybe a better detective would have known for sure about the ink, but I’d have to risk it. Son of a gun. My big chance. I could nick him for a hundred thousand dollars, but that was probably playing it small. Maybe I should put a one and write zeros until my arm fell off and endorse it. Elvis Cole, Yachtsman. I folded the check in half, put it in my wallet, and took a Dan Wesson .38 in a shoulder rig out of my top right-hand drawer. I pulled a white cotton jacket on to cover the Dan Wesson, then went down to my car. The car is a Jamaica-yellow 1966 Corvette convertible that looks pretty snazzy. Maybe with the white jacket and the convertible and the blank check in my pocket, someone would think I was Donald Trump.

I put the Corvette out onto Santa Monica and cruised west through Beverly Hills and the upper rim of Century City, then north up Beverly Glen past rows of palm trees and stuccoed apartment houses and Persian-owned construction projects. L. A. in late June is bright. With the smog pressed down by an inversion layer, the sky turns white and the sun glares brilliantly from signs and awnings and reflective building glass and deep-waxed fenders and miles and miles of molten chrome bumpers. There were shirtless kids with skateboards on their way into Westwood and older women with big hats coming back from markets and construction workers tearing up the streets and Hispanic women waiting for buses and everybody wore sunglasses. It looked like a Ray Ban commercial.

I stayed with Beverly Glen up past the Los Angeles Country Club golf course until I got to Sunset Boulevard, then hung a right and a quick left into upper Holmby Hills. Holmby is a smaller, more expensive version of the very best part of Beverly Hills to the east. It is old and elegant, and the streets are wide and neat with proper curbs and large homes hidden behind hedgerows and mortar walls and black wrought iron gates. Many of the houses are near the street, but a few are set back and quite a few you can’t see at all.

The Warrens’ home was the one with the guard. He was sitting in a light blue Thunderbird with a sticker on its side that said TITAN SECURITIES. He got out when he saw me slow down and stood with his hands on his hips. Late forties, big across the back, in a brown off-the-rack Sears suit. Wrinkled. He’d taken a couple of hard ones on the bridge of his nose, but that had been a long time ago. I turned into the drive, and showed him the license. “Cole. They’re expecting me.”

He nodded at the license and leaned against the door. “She sent the kid down to tell me you were on the way. I’m Hatcher.” He didn’t offer to shake my hand.

I said, “Anyone try storming the house?”

He looked back at the house, then shook his head. “Shit. I been out here since they got hit and I ain’t seen dick.” He shot me a wink. “Leastways, not what you’re talking about.”

I said, “Are you tipping me off or is something in your eye?”

He smirked. “You been out before?”

“Uh-uh.”

He gave me some more of the smirk, then ambled back to the Thunderbird. “You’ll see.”

Bradley Warren lived in a French Normandy mansion just about the size of Kansas. A large Spanish oak in the center of the motor court put filigreed shadows on the Normandy’s steep roof, and three or four thousand snapdragons spilled out of the beds that bordered the drive and the perimeter of the house. There was a porchlike overhang at the front of the house with the front door recessed in a wide alcove. It was a single door, but it was a good nine feet high and four feet wide. Maybe Bradley Warren had bought the place from the Munsters.

I parked under the big oak, walked over to the door, and rang the bell. Hatcher was twisted around in his T-bird, watching. I rang the bell two more times before the door opened and a woman wearing a white Love tennis outfit and holding a tall glass with something clear in it looked up at me. She said, “Are you the detective?”

“Usually I wear a deerstalker cap,” I said, “but today it’s at the cleaners.”

She laughed too loud and put out her hand. “Sheila Warren,” she said. “You’re a good-looking devil, aren’t you.” Twenty minutes before noon and she was drunk.

I looked back at Hatcher. He was grinning.

Sheila Warren was in her forties, with tanned skin and a sharp nose and bright blue eyes and auburn hair. She had the sort of deep lines you get when you play a lot of tennis or golf or otherwise hang out in the sun. The hair was pulled back in a pony tail and she wore a white headband. She looked good in the tennis outfit, but not athletic. Probably did more hanging out than playing.

She opened the door wider and gestured with the glass for me to come in. Ice tinkled. “I suppose you want to see where he had the damn book.” She said it like we were talking about an eighth-grade history book.

“Sure.”

She gestured with the glass again. “I always like to have something cool when I come in off the court. All that sweat. Can I get you something?”

“Maybe later.”

We walked back through about six thousand miles of entry and a living room they could rent out as an airplane hangar and a dining room with seating for Congress. She stayed a step in front of me and swayed as she walked. I said, “Was anyone home the night it was stolen?”

“We were in Canada. Bradley’s building a hotel in Edmonton so we flew up. Bradley usually flies alone, but the kid and I wanted to go so we went.” The kid.

“How about the help?”

“They’ve all got family living down in Little Tokyo. They beat it down there as soon as we’re out of the house.” She looked back at me. “The police asked all this, you know.”

“I like to check up on them.”

She said, “Oh, you.”

We went down a long hall with a tile floor and into a cavern that turned out to be the master bedroom. At the end of the hall there was an open marble atrium with a lot of green leafy plants in it, and to the left of the atrium there were glass doors looking out to the back lawn and the pool. Where one of the glass doors had been, there was now a 4 X 8 sheet of plywood as if the glass had been broken and the plywood put there until the glass could be replaced. Opposite the atrium, there was a black lacquer platform bed and a lot of black lacquer furniture. We went past the bed and through a doorway into a his dressing room. The hers had a separate entrance.

The his held a full-length three-way dressing mirror and a black granite dressing table and about a mile and a half of coats and slacks and suits and enough shoes to shod a small American city. At the foot of the dressing mirror the carpet had been rolled back and there was a Citabria-Wilcox floor safe large enough for a man to squat in.

Sheila Warren gestured toward it with the glass and made a face. “The big shot’s safe.”

The top was lying open like a manhole cover swung over on a hinge. It was quarter-inch plate steel with two tumblers and three half-inch shear pins. There was black powder on everything from when the crime scene guys dusted for prints. Nothing else seemed disturbed. The ice tinkled behind me. “Was the safe like this when you found it?”

“It was closed. The police left it open.”

“How about the alarm?”

“The police said they must’ve known how to turn it off. Or maybe we forgot to turn it on.” She gave a little shrug when she said it, like it didn’t matter very much in the first place and she was tired of talking about it. She was leaning against the door-jamb with her arms crossed, watching me. Maybe she thought that when detectives flew into action it was something you didn’t want to miss. “You should’ve seen the glass,” she said. “He brings the damn book here and look what happens. I walk barefoot on the carpet and I still pick up slivers. Mr. Big Shot Businessman.” She didn’t say the last part to me.

“Has anyone called, or delivered a ransom note?”

“For what?”

“The book. When something rare and easily identifiable is stolen, it’s usually stolen to sell it back to the owner or his insurance company.”

She made another face. “That’s silly.”

I guess that meant no. I stood up. “Your husband said there were pictures of the book.”

She finished the drink and said, “I wish he’d take care of these things himself.” Then she left. Maybe I could go out and Hatcher could come in and question her for me. Maybe Hatcher already had. Maybe I should call the airport and catch Bradley’s plane and tell him he could keep his check and his job. Nah. What would Donald Trump think?

When Sheila Warren came back, she had gotten rid of the glass and was carrying a color 8 X 10 showing Bradley accepting something that looked like a photo album from a dignified white-haired Japanese gentleman. There were other men around, all Japanese, but not all of them looked dignified. The book was a dark rich brown, probably leather-covered board, and would probably crumble if you sneered at it. Jillian Becker was in the picture.

Sheila Warren said, “I hope this is what you want.” The top three buttons on her tennis outfit had been undone.

“This will be fine,” I said. I folded the picture and put it in my pocket.

She wet her lips. “Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?”

“Positive, thanks.”

She looked down at her shoes, said, “Ooo, these darn laces,” then turned her back and bent over from the hip. The laces hadn’t looked untied to me, but I miss a lot. She played with one lace and then she played with the other, and while she was playing with them I walked out. I wandered back through to the kitchen and from there to the rear yard. There was a dichondra lawn that sloped gently away from the house toward a fifty-foot Greek Revival swimming pool and a small pool house with a sunken conversation pit around a circular grill. I stood at the deep end of the pool and looked around and shook my head. Man. First him. Now her. What a pair.

Whoever had gone into the house had probably known the combination or known where to find it. Combinations are easy to get. One day when no one’s around, a gardener slips in, finds the scrap of paper on which people like Bradley Warren always write their combinations, then sells it to the right guy for the right price. Or maybe one day Sheila flexed a little too much upper-class muscle with the hundred-buck-a-week housekeeper, and the housekeeper says, Okay, bitch, here’s one for you, and feeds the numbers to her out-of-work boyfriend. You could go on.

I walked along the pool deck past the tennis court and along the edge of the property and then back toward the house. There were no guard dogs and no closed-circuit cameras and no fancy surveillance equipment. The wall around the perimeter wasn’t electrified, and if there was a guard tower it was disguised as a palm tree. Half the kids on Hollywood Boulevard could loot the place blind. Maybe I’d go down there and question them. Only take me three or four years.

When I got back to the house, a teenage girl was sitting on one of four couches in the den. She was cross-legged, staring down into the oversized pages of a book that could’ve been titled Andrew Wyeth’s Bleakest Landscapes.

I said, “Hi, my name’s Elvis. Are you Mimi?”

She looked up at me the way you look at someone when you open your front door and see it’s a Jehovah’s Witness. She was maybe sixteen and had close-cropped brown hair that framed her face like a small inner tube. It made her face rounder than it was. I would have suggested something upswept or shag-cut to give her face some length, but she hadn’t asked me. There was no makeup and no nail polish and some would have been in order. She wasn’t pretty. She rubbed at her nose and said, “Are you the detective?”

“Uh-huh. You got any clues about the big theft?”

She rubbed at her nose again.

“Clues,” I said. “Did you see a shadow skulk across the lawn? Did you overhear a snatch of mysterious conversation? That kind of thing.”

Maybe she was looking at me. Maybe she wasn’t. There was sort of a cockeyed grin on her face that made me wonder if she was high.

“Would you like to get back to your book?”

She didn’t nod or blink or run screaming from the room. She just stared.

I went back through the dining room and the entry and out to my Corvette and cranked it up and eased down the drive. When I got to the street, Hatcher grinned over from his T-bird, and said, “How’d you like it?”

“Up yours,” I said.

He laughed and I drove away.

Chapter 3

Three years ago I’d done some work for a man named Berke Feldstein who owns a very nice art gallery in Venice on the beach below Santa Monica. It’s one of those converted industrial spaces where they slap on a coat of stark white paint to maintain the industrial look and all the art is white boxes with colored paper inside. For Christmas that year, Berke had given me a large mug with the words MONSTER FIGHTER emblazoned on its side. I like it a lot. I dropped down out of Holmby Hills into Westwood, parked at a falafel stand, and used their pay phone to call Berke’s gallery. A woman’s voice answered, “ArtWerks Gallery.”

I said, “This is Michael Delacroix’s representative calling. Is Mr. Feldman receiving?” A black kid in a UCLA tee shirt was slumped at one of the picnic tables they have out there, reading a sociology text.

Her voice came back hesitant. “You mean Mr. Feldstein?”

I gave her imperious. “Is that his name?”

She asked me to hold. There were the sounds of something or someone moving around in the background, and then Berke Feldstein said, “Who is this, please?”

“The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

A dry, sardonic laugh. Berke Feldstein does sardonic better than anyone else I know. “Don’t tell me. You’re trying to decide between the Monet and the Degas and you need my advice.”

I said, “Something very rare from eighteenth-century Japan has been stolen. Who might have some ideas about that?” The black kid closed the book and looked at me.

Berke Feldstein put me on hold. After a minute, he was on the line again. His voice was flat and serious. “I won’t be connected with this?”

“Berke.” I gave him miffed.

He said, “There’s a Gallery on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills. The Sun Tree Gallery. It’s owned by a guy named Malcolm Denning. I can’t swear by this, but I’ve heard that Denning’s occasionally a conduit for less than honest transactions.”

“‘Less than honest.’ I like that. Do we mean ‘criminal’?” The black kid got up and walked away.

“Don’t be smug,” Berke said.

“How come you hear about these less than honest transactions, Berke? You got something going on the side?”

He hung up.

There were several ways to locate the Sun Tree Gallery. I could call one of the contacts I maintain in the police department and have them search through their secret files. I could drive about aimlessly, stopping at every gallery I passed until I found someone who knew the location, then force the information from him. Or I could look in the Yellow Pages. I looked in the Yellow Pages.

The Sun Tree Gallery of Beverly Hills rested atop a jewelry store two blocks over from Rodeo Drive amidst some of the world’s most exclusive shopping. There were plenty of boutiques with Arabic or Italian names, and small plaques that said BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. The shoppers were rich, the cars were German, and the doormen were mostly young and handsome and looking to land a lead in an action-adventure series. You could smell the crime in the air.

I passed the gallery twice without finding a parking spot, continued north up Canon above Santa Monica Boulevard to the residential part of the Beverly Hills flats, parked there, and walked back. A heavy glass door was next to the jewelry store with a small, tasteful brass sign that said SUN TREE GALLERY, HOURS 10:00 A. M. UNTIL 5:00 P. M., TUESDAY THROUGH SATURDAY; DARK, SUNDAY AND MONDAY.

I went through the door and climbed a flight of plush stairs that led up to a landing where there was a much heavier door with another brass sign that said RING BELL. Maybe when you rang the bell, a guy in a beret with a long scar beside his nose slithered out and asked if you wanted to buy some stolen art. I rang the bell.

A very attractive brunette in a claret-colored pants suit appeared in the door, buzzed me in, and said brightly, “I hope you’re having a good day.” These criminals will do anything to gain your confidence.

“I could take it or leave it until you said that. Is Mr. Denning in?”

“Yes, but I’m afraid he’s on long distance just now. If you could wait a moment, I’d love to help you.” There was an older, balding man and a silver-haired woman standing at the front of the place by a long glass wall that faced down on the street. The man was looking at a shiny black helmet not unlike that worn by Darth Vader. It was sitting on a sleek red pedestal and was covered by a glass dome.

“Sure,” I said. “Mind if I browse?”

She handed me a price catalog and another big smile. “Not at all.” These crooks.

The gallery was one large room that had been sectioned off by three false walls to form little viewing alcoves. There weren’t many pieces on display, but what was there seemed authentic. Vases and bowls sat on pedestals beneath elegant watercolors done on thin cloth that had been stretched over a bamboo frame. The cloth was yellow with age. There were quite a few wood-block prints that I liked, including a very nice double print that was two separate prints mounted side by side. Each was of the same man in a bamboo house overlooking a river as a storm raged at the horizon and lightning flashed. Each man held a bit of blue cloth that trailed away out of the picture. The pictures were mounted so that the cloth trailed from one picture to the other, connecting the men. It was a lovely piece and would be a fine addition to my home. I looked up the price. $14,000. Maybe I could find something more appropriate to my decor.

At the rear of the gallery there was a sleek Elliot Ryerson desk, three beige corduroy chairs for sitting down and discussing the financing of your purchase, and a good stand of the indoor palms I am always trying to grow in my office but which are always dying. These were thriving. Behind the palms was a door. It opened, and a man in a pink LaCoste shirt and khaki slacks came out and began looking for something on the desk. Mid-forties. Short hair with a sprinkling of gray. The brunette looked over and said, “Mr. Denning, this gentleman would like to see you.”

Malcolm Denning gave me a friendly smile and put out his hand. He had sad eyes. “Can you give me a minute? I’m on the phone with a client in Paris.” Good handshake.

“Sure.”

“Thanks. I won’t be any longer than necessary.” He gave me another smile, found what he was looking for, then disappeared back through the door. Malcolm Denning, Considerate Crook.

The brunette resumed talking to the older couple and I resumed browsing and when everything was back the way it had been, I went through the door. There was a short hall with a bathroom on the left, what looked like a storage and packing area at the rear, and a small office on the right. Malcolm Denning was in the office, seated at a cluttered rolltop desk, speaking French into the phone. He looked up when he saw me, cupped the receiver, and said, “I’m sorry. This will take another minute or so.”

I took out my license and held it for him to see. I could’ve showed him a card, but the license looked more official. “Elvis Cole’s the name, private detecting’s the game.” One of those things you always want to say. “I’ve got a few questions about feudal Japanese art and I’m told you’re the man to ask.”

Without taking his eyes from me, he spoke more French into the phone, nodded at something I couldn’t hear, then hung up. There were four photographs along the top of the desk, one of an overweight woman with a pleasant smile, and another of three teenage boys. One of the pictures was of a Little League team with Malcolm Denning and another man both wearing shirts that said COACH. “May I ask who referred you to me?”

“You can ask, but I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you. Somebody tells me something, I try to protect the source. Especially if what they’ve told me can be incriminating. You see?”

“Incriminating?”

“Especially if it’s incriminating.”

He nodded.

“You know what the Hagakure is, Mr. Denning?”

Nervous. “Well, the Hagakure isn’t really a piece of what we might call art. It’s a book, you know.” He put one hand on his desk and the other in his lap. There was a red mug on the desk that said DAD.

“But it’s fair to say that whoever might have an interest in early Japanese art might also have an interest in the Hagakure, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“One of the original copies of the Hagakure was stolen a few days ago. Would you have heard anything about that?”

“Why on earth would I hear anything about it?”

“Because you’ve been known to broker a rip-off or two.”

He pushed back his chair and stood up. The two of us in the little office was like being in a phone booth. “I think you should leave,” he said.

“Come on, Malcolm. Give us both a break. You don’t want to be hassled and I can hassle you.”

The outer door opened and the pretty brunette came back into the little hall. She saw us standing there, broke into the smile, said, “Oh, I wondered where you’d gone.” Then she saw the look on Denning’s face. “Mr. Denning?”

He looked at me and I looked back. Then he glanced at her. “Yes, Barbara?”

Nervousness is contagious. She looked from Denning to me and back to Denning. She said, “The Kendals want to purchase the Myori.”

I said, “Maybe the Kendals can help me.”

Malcolm Denning stared at me for a long time and then he sat down. He said, “I’ll be right out.”

When she was gone, he said, “I can sue you for this. I can get an injunction to bar you from the premises. I can have you arrested.” His voice was hoarse. An I-always-thought-this-would-happen-and-now- it-has voice.

“Sure,” I said.

He stared at me, breathing hard, thinking it through, wondering how far he’d have to go if he picked up the ball, and how much it would cost him.

I said, “If someone wanted the Hagakure, who might arrange for its theft? If the Hagakure were for sale, who might buy it?”

His eyes flicked over the pictures on the desk. The wife, the sons. The Little League. I watched the sad eyes. He was a nice man. Maybe even a good man. Sometimes, in this job, you wonder how someone managed to take the wrong turn. You wonder where it happened and when and why. But you don’t really want to know. If you knew, it would break your heart.

He said, “There’s a man in Little Tokyo. He has some sort of import business. Nobu Ishida.” He told me where I could find Ishida. He stared at the pictures as he told me.

After a while I went out through the gallery and down the stairs and along Canon to my car. It was past three and traffic was starting to build, so it took the better part of an hour to move back along Sunset and climb the mountain to the little A-frame I have off Woodrow Wilson Drive above Hollywood. When I got inside, I took two cold Falstaff beers out of the fridge, pulled off my shirt, and went out onto my deck.

There was a black cat crouched under a Weber charcoal grill that I keep out there. He’s big and he’s mean and he’s black all over except for the white scars that lace his fur like spider webs. He keeps one ear up and one ear sort of cocked to the side because someone once shot him. Head shot. He hasn’t been right since.

“You want some beer?”

He growled.

“Forget it, then.”

The growling stopped.

I took out the center section of the railing that runs around the deck, sat on the edge, and opened the first Falstaff. From my deck you can see across a long twisting canyon that widens and spreads into Hollywood. I like to sit there with my feet hanging down and drink and think about things. It’s about thirty feet from the deck to the slope below, but that’s okay. I like the height. Sometimes the hawks come and float above the canyon and above the smog. They like the height, too.

I drank some of the beer and thought about Bradley and Sheila and Jillian Becker and Malcolm Denning. Bradley would be sitting comfortably in first class, dictating important business notes to Jillian Becker, who would be writing them down and nodding. Sheila would be out on her tennis court, bending over to show Hatcher her rear end, and squealing, Ooo, these darn laces! Malcolm Denning would be staring at the pictures of his wife and his boys and his Little League team and wondering when it would all go to hell.

“You ever notice,” I said to the cat, “that sometimes the bad guys are better people than the good guys?”

The cat crept out from beneath the Weber, walked over, and sniffed at my beer. I poured a little out onto the deck for him and touched his back as he drank. It was soft.

Sometimes he bites, but not always.

Chapter 4

The next morning it was warm and bright in my loft, with the summer sun slanting in through the big glass A that is the back of my house. The cat was curled on the bed next to me, bits of leaf and dust in his fur, smelling of eucalyptus. I rolled out of bed and pulled on some shorts and went downstairs. I opened the glass sliding doors for the breeze, then went back into the living room and turned on the TV. News. I changed channels. Rocky and Bullwinkle. There was a thump upstairs and then the cat came down. Bullwinkle said, “Nothing up my sleeve!” and ripped off his sleeve to prove it. Rocky said, “Oh, no, not again!” and flew around in a circle. The cat hopped up on the couch and stared at them. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle is his favorite show.

I went back out onto the deck and did twelve sun salutes to stretch out the kinks. I did neck rolls and shoulder rolls and the spine rock and the cobra and the locust, and I began to sweat. Inside, Mr. Peabody and Sherman were setting the Way Back Machine for the Early Mesopotamian Age. I put myself into the peacock posture with my legs straight out behind me and I held it like that until my back screamed and the sweat left dark splatters on the deck, and then I went into the Dragon kata from the tae kwon do, and then the Crane kata, driving myself until the sweat ran in my eyes and my muscles failed and my nerves refused to carry another signal and I sat on the deck and felt like a million bucks. Endorphin heaven. So clients weren’t perfect. So being a private cop wasn’t perfect. So life wasn’t perfect. I could always get new cards printed up. They would say: Elvis Cole, Perfect Detective.

Forty minutes later I was on the Hollywood Freeway heading southeast toward downtown Los Angeles and Little Tokyo and feeling pretty good about myself. Ah, perfection. It lends comfort in troubled times.

I stayed with the Hollywood past the Pasadena interchange, then took the Broadway exit into downtown L. A.. Downtown Los Angeles features dirty inner-city streets, close-packed inner-city skyscrapers, and aromatic inner-city street life. The men who work there wear suits and the women wear heels and you see people carrying umbrellas as if it might rain. Downtown Los Angeles does not feel like Los Angeles. It is Boston or Chicago or Detroit or Manhattan. It feels like someplace else that had come out to visit and decided to stay. Maybe one day they’ll put a dome over it and charge admission. They could call it Banal-land.

I took Broadway down to First Street, hung a left, and two blocks later I was in Little Tokyo.

The buildings were old, mostly brick or stone fa+oade, but they had been kept up and the streets were clean. Paper lanterns hung in front of some of the shops, and red and green and yellow and blue wind socks in front of others, and all the signs were in Japanese. The sidewalks were crowded. Summer is tourist season, and most of the white faces and many of the yellow ones had Nikons or Pentaxes slung under them. A knot of sailors in Italian navy uniforms stood at a street corner, grinning at a couple of girls in a Camaro who grinned back at them. One of the sailors carried a Disneyland bag with Mickey Mouse on the side. Souvenirs from distant lands.

Nobu Ishida’s import business was exactly where Malcolm Denning said it would be, in an older building on Ki Street between a fish market and a Japanese-language bookstore, with a yakitori grill across the street.

I rolled past Ishida’s place, found a parking spot in front of one of the souvenir shops they have for people from Cleveland, and walked back. There was a little bell on the door that rang as I went in and three men sitting around two tables at the rear of the place. It looked more like a warehouse than a retail outlet, with boxes stacked floor to ceiling and lots of freestanding metal shelves. A few things were on display, mostly garish lacquered boxes and miniature pagodas and dragons that looked like Barkley from Sesame Street. I smiled at the three men. “Nice stuff.”

One of them said, “What do you want?” He was a lot younger than the other two, maybe in his early twenties. No accent. Born and raised in Southern California with a surfer’s tan to prove it. He was big for someone of Japanese extraction, just over six feet, with muscular arms and lean jaws and the sort of wildly overdeveloped trapezius muscles you get when you spend a lot of time with the weights. He wore a tight knit shirt with a crew neck and three-quarter sleeves even though it was ninety degrees outside. The other two guys were both in their thirties. One of them had a bad left eye as if he had taken a hard one there and it had never healed, and the other had the pinkie missing from his right hand. I made the young one for Ishida’s advertising manager and the other two for buyers from Neiman-Marcus.

“My name’s Elvis Cole,” I said. “Are you Nobu Ishida?” I put one of my cards on the second table.

The one with the missing finger grinned at the big kid and said, “Hey, Eddie, are you Nobu Ishida?”

Eddie said, “You have business with Mr. Ishida?”

“Well, it’s what we might call personal.”

The one with the bad eye said something in Japanese.

“Sorry,” I said. “Japanese is one of the four known languages I don’t speak.”

Eddie said, “Maybe you’ll understand this, dude. Fuck off.”

They probably weren’t from Neiman-Marcus. I said, “You’d better ask Mr. Ishida. Tell him it’s about eighteenth-century Japan.”

Eddie thought about it for a while, then picked up my card, and said, “Wait here.” He disappeared behind stacks of what looked like sushi trays and bamboo steamers.

The guy with the bad eye and the guy with no finger stared at me. I said, “I guess Mr. Ishida keeps you guys around to take inventory.”

The guy with no finger smiled, but I don’t think he was being friendly.

A little bit later Eddie came back without the card and said, “Time for you to go.”

I said, “Ask him again. I won’t take much of his time.”

“You’re leaving.”

I looked from Eddie to the other two and back to Eddie. “Nope. I’m going to stay and I’m going to talk to Ishida or I’m going to tip the cops that you guys deal stolen goods.” Mr. Threat.

The guy with the bad eye mumbled something else and they all laughed. Eddie pulled his sleeves up to his elbows and flexed his arms. Big, all right. Elaborate, multicolored tattoos started about an inch below his elbows and continued up beneath the sleeves. They looked like fish scales. His hands were square and blocky and his knuckles were thick. He said something in Japanese and the guy with the missing finger came around the tables like he was going to show me the door. When he reached to take my arm I pushed his hand away. He stopped smiling and threw a pretty fast backfist. I pushed the fist past me and hit him in the neck with my left hand. He made the sound a drunk in a cheap restaurant makes with a piece of meat caught in his throat and went down. The guy with the bad eye was coming around the tables when an older man came out from behind the bamboo steamers and spoke sharply and the guy with the bad eye stopped.

Nobu Ishida was in his early fifties with short gray hair and hard black eyes and a paunch for a belly. Even with the paunch, the other guys seemed to straighten up and pay attention. Those who could stand.

He looked at me the way you look at a disappearing menu, then shook his head. The guy on the floor was making small coughing noises but Nobu Ishida didn’t look at him and neither did anyone else. Ishida was carrying my card. “What are you, crazy? You know I could have you arrested for this?” Nobu Ishida didn’t have an accent, either.

I gave him a little shrug. “Go ahead.”

He said, “What do you want?”

I told him about the Hagakure.

Nobu Ishida listened without moving and then he tried to give me good-natured confusion. “I don’t get it. Why come to me?”

The guy with the missing finger stopped making noises and pushed himself up to his knees. He was holding his throat. I said, “You’re interested in samurai artifacts. The Hagakure was stolen. You’ve purchased stolen artworks in the past. You see how this works?”

The good-natured confusion went away. Ishida’s mouth tightened and something dark washed his face. Telltale signs of guilt. “Who says I’ve bought stolen art?”

“Akira Kurosawa gave me a call.”

Ishida stared at me a very long time. “Oh, we’ve got a funny one here, Eddie.”

Eddie said, “I don’t like him.” Eddie.

I said, “I think you might have the Hagakure. If you don’t, I think you might know the people who stole it or who have it.”

Ishida gave me the stare a little more, thinking, and then the tension went out of his face and his shoulders relaxed and he smiled. This time the smile was real, as if in all the thinking he had seen something and what he had seen had been funny as hell. He glanced at Eddie and then at the other two guys and then back at me. “You got no idea how stupid you are,” he said.

“People hint.”

He laughed and Eddie laughed, too. Eddie crossed his arms and made the huge trapezius muscles swell like a couple of demented air bladders. You could see that the tattoos climbed over his elbows and up his biceps. Pretty soon, everybody was laughing but me and the guy on the floor.

Ishida held up my card and looked at it, then crumpled it up and tossed it toward an open crate of little plastic pagodas. He said, “Your problem is, you don’t look like a private detective.”

“What’s a private detective look like?”

“Like Mickey Spillane. You see those Lite beer commercials? Mickey Spillane looks tough.”

I hooked a glance at the guy with the crushed neck. “Ask him.”

Nobu Ishida nodded, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The smile went away and the serious eyes came back. Hard. “Don’t come down here anymore, boy. You don’t know what you’re messing with down here.”

I said, “What about the Hagakure?”

Nobu Ishida gave me what I guess was supposed to be an enigmatic look, then he turned and melted away behind the bamboo steamers.

I looked at Eddie. “Is the interview over?”

Eddie made the tattoos disappear, then sat down behind the tables again and stared at me. The guy with the bad eye sat down beside him, put his feet up, and laced his hands behind his head. The guy with the missing finger pulled one foot beneath himself, then the other, then shoved himself up into sort of a hunched crouch. If I stood around much longer, they’d probably send me out for Chinese.

“Some days are the pits,” I said. “Drive all the way down here and don’t get so much as one clue.”

The guy with the bad eye nodded, agreeing.

Eddie nodded, too. “Watch those Lite beer commercials,” he said. “If you looked more like a detective, people might be more cooperative.”

Chapter 5

I walked back along Ki to the first cross street, turned north, then turned again into an alley that ran along behind Ishida’s shop. There were delivery vans and trash cans and dumpsters and lots of very old, very small people who did not look at me. An ice truck was parked behind the fish market. At the back of Ishida’s place there was a metal loading dock for deliveries and another door about six feet to the right for people and a small, dirty window with a steel grid over it between the doors. An anonymous tan delivery van was parked by the people door. Nobu Ishida probably did not use the van as his personal car. He probably drove a Lincoln or a Mercedes into the parking garage down the block, then walked back to the office. It was either that or matter transference. I continued along the alley to the next street, then went south back to Ki and into the yakitori grill across the street.

I sat at the counter near the front so I could keep an eye on Ishida’s and ordered two skewers of chicken and two of giant clam and a pot of green tea. The cook was an x-ray thin guy in his fifties who wore a pristine white apron and a little white cap and had gold worked into his front teeth like Mike Tyson. He said, “You want spicy?”

I said sure.

He said, “It hot.”

I said I was tough.

He brought over the tea in a little metal pot with a heavy white teacup and set a fork and a spoon and a paper napkin in front of me. No-frills service. He opened the little metal refrigerator and took out two strips of chicken breast and a fresh geoduck clam that looked like a bull’s penis. He forced each strip of chicken lengthways onto a long wooden skewer, then skinned the geoduck and sliced two strips of the long muscle with a cleaver that could take a man’s arm. When the geoduck was skewered he looked doubtfully back at me. “Spicy very hot,” he said. He pronounced the r fine.

“Double spicy,” I said.

The gold in his teeth flashed and he took a blue bowl off a shelf and poured a thick powder of crushed chili peppers onto his work surface. He pressed each skewer of meat down into the powder, first one side, then the other, then arranged all four skewers on the grill. Other side of the counter, I could still feel the heat. “We see,” he said. Then he went into the back.

I sipped tea and watched Ishida’s. After a few minutes, Eddie and the guy with no finger came out, got in a dark green Alfa Romeo parked at the curb, and drove away. Eddie didn’t look happy. I sipped more tea and did more watching, but nobody went in, and nobody else came out. Real going concern, that place.

The cook came back and flipped the skewers. He put a little white saucer of red chili paste in front of me. It was the real stuff, the kind they make in Asia, not the junk you buy at the supermarket. Real chili paste will eat through porcelain. He gave me a big smile. “In case not hot enough.” Don’t you love a wiseass?

When the edges of the chicken and clam were blackened, he took the skewers off the grill. He dipped them in a pan of yakitori sauce, put them in a paper-lined plastic basket, put the basket beside the chili paste, then leaned back against his grill and watched me.

I took a mouthful of the chicken, chewed, swallowed. Not bad. I dipped some of the chicken in the chili paste, took another bite. “Could be hotter,” I said.

He looked disappointed and went into the back.

I sipped more tea, finished the first chicken, then started on the first geoduck. The clam was tough and hard and chewy, but I like that. The tea was good. While I was chewing, a Japanese guy wearing a Grateful Dead tee shirt came in and went up to the counter. He looked at the chalkboard where the daily menu was written, then looked at what was left of the geoduck lying beside the grill and made a face. He turned away and walked back to a pay phone they had in the rear. Some guys you can never please.

Twenty minutes later I was on my second pot of tea when Nobu Ishida came out and started up the street toward the parking garage. I paid, left a nice tip, then went out onto the sidewalk. When Ishida disappeared into the garage, I trotted back down to my car, got in, and waited. Maybe Ishida had a secret vault dug into the core of a mountain where he kept stolen treasure. Maybe he called this secret place The Fortress of Solitude. Maybe he was going there now and I could follow him and find the Hagakure and solve several heretofore unsolved art thefts. Then again, maybe not. I was three cars behind him when he pulled out in a black Cadillac Eldorado and turned right toward downtown.

We left Little Tokyo and went past Union Station and Olvera Street with its gaudy Mexican colors and food booths and souvenir shops. There were about nine million tourists, all desperately snapping pictures of how “the Mexicans” lived, and buying sombreros and ponchos and stuffed iguanas that would start to ripen about a week after they got home. We swung around the Civic Center and were sitting in traffic at Pershing Square, me now four cars behind and counting the homeless bag ladies around the Square, when I spotted the guy in the Grateful Dead tee shirt from the yakitori grill. He was sitting behind the wheel of a maroon Ford Taurus two cars in back of me and one lane over. There was another Asian guy with him. Hmmmm. When the light changed and Ishida went straight, I hung a left onto Sixth. Two cars later, the Taurus followed. I stayed on Sixth to San Pedro and went south. The Taurus came south, too. I took the Dan Wesson out of the glove box and put it between my legs. Freud would’ve loved that.

At a spotlight on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Commerce, the Taurus pulled up on my left. I looked over. The guy in the Grateful Dead shirt and the other guy were staring at me and they were not smiling. I gripped the Dan Wesson in my right hand and said, “Sony makes a fine TV.”

The guy on the passenger side said something to the driver, then turned back to me and flipped open a small black leather case with a silver and gold L. A. P. D. badge in it. “Put it over to the curb, asshole.”

“Moi?”

The Taurus bucked out ahead under the red light and jerked to the right, blocking me. They were out and coming before the Taurus stopped rocking. I put both hands on the top of the steering wheel and left them there.

The guy who had shown me the badge came directly at me. The other guy walked the long way around the car and came up from behind. The car behind us blew its horn. I said, “I swear to God, Officer. I came to a full stop.”

The one with the badge had the sort of face they hand out to bantamweights, all flat planes and busted nose, and a knotty build to go with it. I made him for forty but he could’ve been younger. He said, “Get out of the car.”

I kept my hands on the wheel. “There’s a Dan Wesson .38 sitting here between my legs.”

Grateful Dead had a gun under my ear before I finished the sentence. The other cop brought his gun out, too, and put it in my face and reached through the window and lifted out the Dan Wesson. Grateful Dead pulled me out of the Corvette and shoved me against the fender and frisked me and took my wallet. Other horns were blowing but nobody seemed to give a damn.

I said, “Why are you guys watching Nobu Ishida?”

The bantamweight saw the license and said, “PI.”

Grateful Dead said, “Shit.” He put away his gun.

The boxer tossed my wallet into the Corvette and dropped the Dan Wesson into the roof bay behind the driver’s seat. I said, “How about those search and seizure laws, huh?”

They got back in their Taurus and left, and pretty soon the horns stopped blowing and traffic began to move. Well, well, well.

I drove back to my office and called the cops. A voice said, “North Hollywood detectives.”

“Lou Poitras, please.”

I got put on hold and had to wait and then somebody said, “Poitras.”

“There’s an importer down on Ki Street in Little Tokyo named Nobu Ishida.” I spelled it for him. “I was on him today when two Asian cops come out of my trunk and take me off the board.”

Lou Poitras said, “You got that four bucks you owe me?” These cops.

“Don’t be small, Lou. I call up with a matter of great import and you bring up a paltry four dollars.”

“Great import. Shit.”

“They took me out just long enough to lose Ishida. They don’t say three words. They flash their guns all over Pershing Square and they don’t even rub my nose in it the way you cops like to do. Maybe they’re cops. Maybe they’re just two guys pretending to be cops.”

He thought about that. I could hear him breathe over the phone. “You see a badge?”

“Not long enough to get a number.”

“How about a tag?”

“Maroon Ford Taurus. Three-W-W-L-seven-eight-eight.”

Poitras said, “Stick around. I’ll get back to you,” and hung up.

I got up, opened the glass doors that lead out to the little balcony, went back to my desk, and put my feet up. Stick around.

Half an hour later I got up again and went out onto the balcony. Sometimes, when the smog is gone and the weather is clear, you can stand on the balcony and see all the way down Santa Monica Boulevard to the ocean. Now, the heat was up and the smog was in and I felt lucky to see across the street.

I went back in the office, dug around in the little refrigerator I have there, and found a bottle of Negra Modelo beer. Negra Modelo is a dark Mexican beer and may be the best dark beer brewed anywhere in the world. I sipped some and watched the Pinocchio clock. After a while I turned on the radio and tuned to KLSX. Bananarama singing it was a cruel summer. They’re not George Thorogood, but they’re not bad. I went back onto the balcony and looked out over Los Angeles and thought about what it would be like to marry and have children. I would have two or three daughters and we would watch Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers together and then roll around on the floor like puppies. When they grew up they would like Kenneth Tobey movies. Would they look like me, or their mother? I went back into the office, closed the glass doors, and sat in one of the director’s chairs. You think the damnedest things when you’re waiting for a call.

Maybe Lou Poitras had lost my phone number and was desperately searching the police computers in his attempts to contact me. Maybe he had obtained forbidden information concerning the two cops who’d fronted me and was now lying dead in a pool of blood behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile. Maybe I was bored stiff.

At five minutes after seven I was flat on my back on the floor, staring at the ceiling and wondering if aliens from space had ever visited the earth. At ten minutes after seven, the phone rang. I got up off the floor as if I had not been waiting most of the day, sauntered over, and casually picked up the receiver. “Laid-back Detectives, where your problems are no problem.”

It wasn’t Lou Poitras. It was Sheila Warren. She was crying. She said, “Mr. Cole? Are you there? Who is this?” The words spilled out around coughing sobs. It was tough to understand her. She still sounded drunk.

I said, “Is anyone hurt?”

“They said they would kill me. They said they would kill Bradley and me and that they would burn the house down.”

“Who?”

“The people who stole the book. You’ve got to come over. Please. I’m terrified.” She said something else but she was sobbing again and I couldn’t make it out.

I hung up. One thing about this business, it doesn’t stay boring for long.

Chapter 6

When I got to the Warren home it was still standing. There was no fire, no hazy smoke blotting out a blood-red sun, no siege tower breaching the front wall. It was dark and cool and pleasant, the way it gets at twilight just as the sun settles beneath the horizon. Hatcher sat in the same light blue Titan Securities Thunderbird and watched me pull into the drive and park. He came over. He didn’t look too worried. I said, “Everything all right?”

“She phone you about the call?”

“Seemed pretty upset.”

“Yeah. Well.” He hacked up something thick and phlegmy and spit it at the bushes. Sinus.

I said, “You don’t act like anything out of the ordinary has happened.”

He patted his jacket below his left arm. “Anything out of the ordinary comes around here, I’ll give it some of this.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’m surprised she bothered to call me with you out here.”

Hatcher snorted and went back to the T-bird. “You’ll see. You’re around here enough, you’ll see.”

The voice of experience.

I walked over to the front door, rang the bell twice, and waited. In a little bit, Sheila Warren’s voice came from behind the door. “Who’s there?”

“Elvis Cole.”

The locks were thrown and the door opened. She was wearing a silver satin nightgown that looked like it had been poured over her body and silver high-heeled sandals. Her eyes were pink and puffy and her mascara had run and been wiped away and not fixed. She was holding a handkerchief with dark blue smudges on it. The mascara. She said, “Thank God it’s you. We’ve been terrified.”

I shrugged toward the front gate. “Not much is going to get past Wyatt Earp.”

“He could’ve been clubbed.”

Some things you can’t argue. I went in past her, watched her lock the door, then followed her back through the house. She walked with a slight lean to the right as if the floor wasn’t quite level, and she cut too short through the doorways, brushing her inside shoulder. “Who’s home?” I said.

“Just myself and Mimi. Mimi’s in the back.”

She led me to the den. The bar was in the den.

“Tell me about the call.”

“I thought it was Tammy. Tammy’s my girlfriend. We play tennis, we go to movies, like that. But it was a man.” There was a capless bottle of Bombay gin and a short heavy glass with a couple of melting ice cubes in it sitting on the bar. She picked up the glass and finished what was left, and said, “Would you like something to drink?”

“You got a Falstaff?” I walked over to the big French doors that open out to the rear, and looked behind the drapes. Each door was locked and secure.

“What’s that?” she said.

“This beer they brew in Tumwater, Washington.”

“All we have are Japanese beers.” Her voice took on an edge when she said it.

“That’ll be fine.”

She went behind the bar, put more ice in her glass, and glugged in some of the gin. That brought the Bombay down about to the halfway point. The bottle cap was sitting in an ashtray at the end of the bar. A strip of bright clean Bonded paper was lying beside it. The Bombay had been full when she’d started. She disappeared down behind the bar for a little bit, then stood up with a bottle of Asahi. There was a tight smile on her face and a smear of mascara on her left cheek like a bruise. “Did I tell you that I find you quite attractive?”

“It was the first thing you said to me.”

“Well, I do.”

“Everyone says I look like John Cassavetes.”

“Do they?”

“I think I look like Joe Isuzu.”

She cocked her hips and her head and rested her drink along her jawline, posing. She still hadn’t given me the beer. “I think you look like Joe Theismann,” she said. “Do you know who Joe Theismann is?”

“Sure. Used to quarterback for the Redskins.”

She gave me a giggle. “No, you silly. Joe Theismann is married to Cathy Lee Crosby.”

“Oh. That Joe Theismann.”

She opened the Asahi, put a paper coaster that said New Asia Hotels on the bar, then set the Asahi on the coaster. She took an icy beer mug from somewhere beneath the bar and put it beside the bottle. I ignored the mug. “You were telling me about the call.”

The smile went away. She looked down into her drink and swirled it and her eyes began to redden and puff. “He had an ugly voice. He said he had that goddamned book, and that he knew we had the police involved and that we had hired a private investigator. He said that was a mistake. He said if we didn’t stop looking he was going to do things.” Her voice got higher, probably the way it had been ten years ago. It was nice. “He said they were watching me and could strike at any time. He told me when I left the house this morning and what I was wearing and who I met and when I came back. He knew my perfume. He knew I use Maxipads. He knew Tammy came over at four and that we played tennis and that Tammy was wearing green shorts and a halter top and-” She closed her eyes and took more of the gin and said, “Damn.”

“Did you call the police?”

She shook her head, keeping her eyes closed. “Bradley would shit.”

“Calling the cops is the smart thing.”

“We do things Bradley’s way, mister, or we never hear the end of it.” She shook her head again and had more gin. “God damn him.”

I said, “Did you recognize the voice?”

She took a deep breath, let it out, then came around to my side of the bar and stood next to me. Petulant. The first fright was past and the gin was working. She said, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I needed someone here.” I guess she hadn’t recognized the voice.

“I know. I’ll check the house and make sure it’s tight. You’ll be all right. A guy calls like this, it’s only to scare you. If he was going to do anything, he’d have done it.”

She gave her head a flick to get the hair out of her face. Her hair was lush and rich and if it was dyed it was a helluva good job. She reached out and touched my forearm with her finger. “I’ll walk with you.”

I moved my arm. “You look cold,” I said. “Go put something on.”

She looked down at herself. The silver gown made an upside-down V over each breast with a thin silver cord running from the apex of one V up her chest and around behind her neck and back down to the apex of the other V. Her shoulders were smooth and bare and tanned. She said, “I’m not cold. See?” She picked up my hand in both of hers and brought it to her chest.

I said, “Your daughter’s in the house.”

“I don’t give a good goddamn who’s in the house.”

“I do. And even if she wasn’t, your husband hired me, and he didn’t hire me to lay his wife.”

“Do you have to be hired for that?”

“Go put something on.”

She pressed against me and kissed me. The silver gown felt warm and slick. I eased her back. “Go put something on.”

“Fuck you.” She slid past me and hurried out of the room, bouncing a thigh off the near couch as she left. She hadn’t seen her daughter standing in one of the doorways leading from the rear of the house, as motionless as a reed in still air. Neither had I.

I put the Asahi on the bar. “I’m sorry that happened,” I said. “She’s very scared and she’s had too much to drink.”

Mimi Warren said, “She’s very good in bed. Everyone says so.” Sixteen.

I didn’t say anything to her and she didn’t say anything to me, and then she turned and walked away. I watched little drops of condensation sprout on the Asahi until their weight pulled them down to the bar, then I took a rambling tour of the house, checking each window and door and making sure they were tight and locked and that the alarms were armed. I looked for the girl.

At the back of the house, a little hall branched away from the kitchen with a couple of doors on one side and glass looking out toward the pool on the other. If you looked out the glass you could see down across the lawn to the flat mirrored surface of the pool and the dark silhouette of palm trees behind it. I watched the quarter moon bounce on the pool’s still surface, then tried the first door. It was open and the room was dark. I turned on the light.

Mimi was lying on her back across a single bed, legs straight up against the wall, head hanging down over the bedside, eyes wide and unfocused. I said, “You okay?”

She said nothing.

“You want to talk to your mom, we can do it together. That might be easier.”

She did not move. The room was white on white, as stark and cold as the Wyeth landscapes she had been staring at earlier. There were no posters on the walls or record albums on the floor or clothes spilling out of a hamper or diet soda cans or anything at all that would mark the room as a sixteen-year-old girl’s. On a glass topped white desk at the foot of the bed there were three oversized art books by someone named Kiro Asano and a paperback edition of Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. The Mishima looked as if it had been read a hundred times. There was a small Hitachi color TV on the desk, and a scent in the room that might have been marijuana, but if it was it was not recent.

I said, “You gotta be angry.” Mr. Sensitive.

“To be angry is to waste life,” she said, not moving. “One must have a cruel heart.”

Great.

I finished my circuit of the house and found my way back to the den. Sheila was there, sitting on a bar stool, sipping from the short glass. She was wearing a man’s denim work shirt buttoned over the gown and she’d done something about her makeup. She looked good. I wondered how anyone who drank so much could stay that lean. Maybe when she was on the court she played harder than I had thought.

I said, “The house is tight. All the windows are secure and the doors are locked. The alarm is armed and in order. With Hatcher out front, you’re not going to have a problem.”

“If you say so.”

I said, “Your daughter saw you kiss me. You might want to talk to her.”

“Are you scared Bradley’s going to fire you?”

A pulse began behind my right eye. “No. You might want to talk to her because she saw her mother kiss a strange man and that had to be frightening.”

“She won’t tell. She never says anything. All she does is sit in her room and watch TV.”

“Maybe she should tell. Maybe that’s the point.”

Sheila drained the glass. “Bradley’s not going to fire you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

The pulse began to throb. “I’m not worried about it. I don’t give a damn if Bradley fires me or not.”

Sheila set the glass down hard. Red spots flared on her cheeks. “You must think I have it pretty good, don’t you? Big house, big money. Here’s this woman, plays tennis all day, what does she have to gripe about? Well, I’ve got shit is what I’ve got. What the hell’s a big house if there’s nothing in it?” She turned and stalked out the way she’d seen women do a hundred times on Dallas and Falcon Crest. Drama.

I stood by the bar and breathed hard and waited for something else to happen, but nothing did. Somewhere a door slammed. Somewhere else a TV played. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe I would wake up and find myself in a 7-Eleven parking lot and think, Oh, Elvis, ha-ha, you really dreamed up some zingo clients this time!

I let myself out and got in the Corvette and had to stop at the gate to let a yellow Pantera with two teenagers in it pass. Hatcher was in his T-bird, a smug grin on his face.

I leaned toward him. “If you say anything, Hatcher,” I said, “I’ll shoot you.”

Chapter 7

At nine-forty the next morning my phone rang and Jillian Becker said, “Did I wake you?””Impossible. I never sleep.”

“We’re back from Kyoto. Bradley wants to see you.”

I had fallen asleep on the couch, watching a two A. M. rerun of It Came from Beneath the Sea with Ken Tobey and Faith Domergue. The cat had watched it with me and had fallen asleep on my chest. He was still there. I said, “I went by Bradley’s house last night. Someone called and scared the hell out of Sheila.”

“That’s one of the reasons Bradley wants to see you. We’re at the Century City office. May we expect you in thirty minutes?”

“Better gimme a little longer. I want to think up something real funny to see if I can make you laugh.”

She hung up.

I lifted off the cat, went into the kitchen, filled a large glass with water, drank it, and filled it once more when the phone rang again. Lou Poitras. He said, “I made some calls. Those two guys who sixed you yesterday were Asian Task Force cops.”

“Gee, you mean Nobu Ishida isn’t a simple businessman?”

“If ATF people are in, Hound Dog, it’s gotta be heavy.”

Poitras hung up. Asian Task Force, huh? Maybe I had been right about old Nobu. Maybe he was the mastermind of an international stolen art cartel. Maybe I would crack The Big Case and be hailed as The World’s Greatest Detective. Wow.

I fed myself and the cat, then showered, dressed, and was turning down Century Park East Boulevard forty minutes later. It was clear and sunny and cooler than yesterday, with a lot of women on the sidewalks, all of them wearing lightweight summer outfits with no backs and no sleeves. Century City was once the back lot of Twentieth Century-Fox Studios. Now it is an orchard of high-rise office buildings done in designer shades of bronze and black and metallic blue glass, each carefully spaced for that planned-community look and landscaped with small pods of green lawn and California poplar trees. The streets have names like Constellation Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars and Galaxy Way. We are nothing if not grandiose.

The Century Plaza Towers are a matching set of triangular buildings, thirty-five floors each of agents, lawyers, accountants, lawyers, business managers, lawyers, record executives, lawyers, and Porsche owners. Most of whom are lawyers. The Century Plaza Towers are the biggest buildings in Century City. They have to be to squeeze in the egos. Warren Investments occupied half of the seventeenth floor of the north tower. Rent alone had to exceed the Swedish gross national product.

I stepped off the elevator into an enormous glass and chrome waiting room filled with white leather chairs that were occupied by important-looking men and women holding important-looking briefcases. They looked like they had been waiting a long time. A sleek black woman sat in the center of a U-shaped command post. She wore a wire-thin headphone set that curved around to her mouth with a microphone the size of a pencil lead. “Elvis Cole,” I said. “For Mr. Warren.”

She touched buttons and murmured into the microphone and told me someone would be right out. The important-looking men and women glared enviously. Moments later, an older woman with gray hair in a tight bun and a nice manner led me back along a mile and a half of corridor, through a heavy glass door, and into what could only have been an executive secretary’s office. There was a double door wide enough to drive a street cleaner through at the far end. “Go right in,” she said. I did.

Bradley Warren was sitting on the edge of a black marble desk not quite as long as a bowling alley with his arms crossed and a J. Jonah Jameson smile on his face. He was smiling at five dour-faced Japanese men. Three of the Japanese men were sitting on a white silk couch and were old the way only Asians can be old, with that sort of weathered papery skin and eternal presence. The other two Japanese men stood at either end of the couch, and were much younger and much larger, maybe two inches shorter than me and twenty pounds heavier. They had broad flat faces and eyes that stared at you and didn’t give a damn if you minded or not. The one on the right was wearing a custom-cut Lawrence Marx suit that made him look fat. If you knew what to look for, though, you knew he wasn’t fat. He was all wedges and heavy muscle. The one on the left was in a brown herringbone, and had gone to the same tailor. Odd Job and his clone. Jillian Becker sat primly on the edge of a white silk chair, framed neatly in a full wall of glass that looked north. She looked nice. Yuppie, but nice.

“Where’s Bush?” I said. “Couldn’t he make it?”

Bradley Warren said, “You’re late. We’ve had to wait.” Mr. Personality.

“Why don’t we cancel this meeting and schedule another to begin in ten minutes? Then I can be early.”

Bradley Warren said, “I’m not paying you for jokes.”

“I throw those in for free.”

Today Jillian Becker was wearing a burgundy skirt and jacket with a white shirt and very sheer burgundy hose with tiny leaf designs and broken-leather burgundy pumps. With her legs crossed, her top knee gleamed. I gave her a beaming smile, but she didn’t smile back. Maybe I’d go easy on the jokes for a while.

Bradley Warren slid off his desk and said something in Japanese to the men on the couch. His speech was fluid and natural, as if he had spoken the language as a child. The older man in the center said something back to him, also in Japanese, and everybody laughed. Especially Jillian Becker. Bradley said, “These men are members of the Tashiro family, who own the Hagakure. They’re here to make sure every best effort is made to recover the manuscript.” The guy in the brown herringbone spoke softly in Japanese, translating.

“All right.”

Bradley Warren said, “Have you found it yet?” I had expected him to ask about the threat against his wife first, but there you go.

“No.” More mumbling from the guy in the brown herringbone.

“Are you close?”

“Hot on its trail.”

The guy in the brown herringbone frowned, and translated, and the old guys on the couch frowned, too. Bradley saw all the frowning going on and joined in. So that was where he got it. He said, “I’m disappointed. I expected more.”

“It’s been two days, Bradley. In those two days I have begun identifying people who deal in or collect feudal Japanese artwork. I will do more of that. Eventually, one of the people I contact will know something about the Hagakure, or about someone who does. That’s the way it’s done. Stealing something like this is like stealing the Mona Lisa. There’s only a half dozen people on earth who would do it or be involved in it, and once you know who they are it’s only a matter of time. Collectors make no secret about what they want, and once they have it they like to brag.”

Bradley gave the Japanese men a superior look and said, “Harumph.”

The Japanese man sitting in the center of the couch nodded thoughtfully and said, “I think that he has made a reasonable beginning.”

Bradley said, “Huh?”

The Japanese man said, “Has there been a ransom demand?” He was the oldest of the three seated men, but his eyes were clear and steady and stayed with you. His English was heavily accented.

I shook my head. “None that I’m aware of.”

Bradley looked from the old man to me and back to the old man. “What’s this about a ransom?”

The old man kept his eyes on me. “If a ransom is demanded, we will pay it.”

“Okay.”

“If you must pay for information, price is of no concern.”

“Okay.”

The old man looked at Bradley. “Is this clear?”

Bradley said, “Yes, sir.”

The old man stood, and the large men quickly moved to his side in case he needed their help. He didn’t. He stared at me for a very long time, and then he said, “You must understand this: The Hagakure is Japan. It is the heart and the spirit of the people. It defines how we act and what we believe and what is right and what is wrong and how we live and how we die. It is who we are. If you feel these things, you would know why this book must be found.”

He meant it. He meant it all the way down deep where it is very important to mean what you say. “I’ll do what I can.”

The old man kept the steady eyes on me, then mumbled something in Japanese and the other two old men stood up. No one said I’ll be seeing you or Nice to have met you or See you again some time. Bradley walked the Tashiros to the door, but I don’t think they looked at him. Then they were gone.

When Bradley came back, he said, “I didn’t appreciate all the smart talk in front of the Tashiros. They’re nervous as hell and breathing down my neck. You’d be a lot farther along without the wit.”

“Yeah, but along to where?”

His jaw knotted but he didn’t say anything. He strode over to the glass wall and looked out. Holmby Hills was due north. With a good pair of field glasses he could probably see his house. “Now,” he said. “My wife is frightened because of this threat she received. Do you think there’s any merit to it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not professional. You steal something, you’re looking at ten years. You kill someone, you’re looking at life. Besides that, the cops are already in and these guys know it. If they’re hanging around, that means they want something else. What else do you have that they would want?”

“Nothing.” Offended.

“Has there been any communication between you and them that I have not heard about?”

“Of course not.” Pissed.

“Then I’d treat it seriously until we know more.”

Bradley went back to his desk and began to flip through papers as if he couldn’t wait to get back to work. Maybe he couldn’t. “In that case, we should expand your services. I want you to oversee the security of my family.”

“You’ve got Titan.”

Jillian Becker said, “Sheila was not comfortable with Titan. They’ve been let go.”

I spread my hands. “All right. I can put someone in your house.”

Bradley Warren nodded. “Good. Just be sure that the Hagakure investigation continues to proceed.” First things first.

“Of course.”

“And the Man of the Month banquet is tomorrow,” he said. “We can’t forget that.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t go.”

The frown came back and he shook his head. “Out of the question. The Tashiros will be there.” He tamped some papers together and fingered their edges and looked thoughtful. “Mr. Tashiro liked you. That’s good. That’s very, very good.” You could see the business wheels turning.

I said, “Bradley.”

The frown.

“If someone is genuinely committed to killing you or your family, there isn’t much we can do to stop them.”

The skin beneath his left eye began to tic, just like it had in my office.

“You understand that, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

His phone buzzed and he picked it up. He listened for a few seconds, still staring at me, then broke into a Cheshire cat smile and asked someone on the other end of the line how the Grain Tech takeover had gone. He glanced at Jillian Becker and made a dismissal gesture with his free hand. Jillian stood up and showed me to the door. Bradley laughed very loud at something and put his feet up and said he’d like to get some of those profits into a new hotel he was building on Maui.

When we got to the door, Bradley cupped a hand over the receiver’s mouthpiece, leaned out of his chair, and called, “Cole. Keep me posted, will you?”

I said sure.

Bradley Warren uncupped the receiver, laughed like he’d just heard the best joke he’d heard all year, then swiveled back toward the big glass wall.

I left.

With the security of his family now in my trusted hands, apparently it was safe to resume business.

Chapter 8

Twenty minutes after Bradley and Jillian resumed business, I drove down to a flat, gray building on Venice Boulevard in Culver City, and parked beside a red Jeep Cherokee with a finish like polished glass. It’s industrial down there, so all the buildings are flat and gray, but most of them don’t have the Cherokee or an electronically locked steel door or a sign that says BARTON’S PISTOL RANGE. I had to ring a bell and someone inside had to buzz open the steel door before I could enter. The lobby is big and bright, with high ceilings and Coke machines and posters of Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry and Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. Someone had put up a poster of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, with a little sign on it that said WE ARE THE NRA. These gun nuts. There was a long counter filled with targets and gun cleaning supplies and pistols you could rent, and a couple of couches you could sit on while you were waiting for a shooting stall to open up. Three men in business suits and a woman in a jogging suit and another woman in a dress were waiting to shoot, but they weren’t waiting on the couches. They were at the head of the counter and they didn’t look happy. One of the men was tall and forty pounds too fat and had a red face. He was leaning over the counter at Rick Barton, saying, “I made an appointment, goddamnit. I don’t see why I have to stand around and wait.”

Rick Barton said, calmly, “I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, sir, but we’ve had to momentarily close the range. It will open again in about fifteen minutes.”

“Closed my ass! I hear somebody shooting back there!”

Rick Barton nodded, calmly. “Yes, sir. Another fifteen minutes. Excuse me, please.” Rick came down the long counter and nodded at me. He was short and slight and had put in twelve years in the Marine Corps. Eight of those years he had shot on the Marine Corps pistol team. He said, “Thank Christ you walked in. I hadda ‘sir’ that fat fuck one more time, I’da lubed his gear box for him.”

“Ah, Rick. You always did have a gift for the public.”

Rick said, “You want to pop some caps?”

I shook my head. “The gun shop said Joe was here.”

Rick looked at his watch. “Go on back. Tell him he’s got another ten, then I chuck his ass out.”

He tossed me a set of ear covers, and I went back toward the range. Behind me, the fat guy said, “Hey, how come he gets to go back there?”

You go through the door, then down a long, dim corridor with a lot of signs that say things like EAR AND EYE PROTECTION MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES and NO RAPID FIRING, and then you go through another sound-proofed door and you’re on the firing range. There are twelve side-by-side stalls from which people can shoot at targets that they send down-range using little electric pulleys. Usually, the range is bright, and well lighted, but now the lights had been turned off so that only the targets were lit. A tape player had been hooked up, and Bob Seger was screaming I like that old time rock ‘n roll’a so loud that you could hear him through the ear covers. Anyone else would find his partner on the golf course or the tennis courts.

Joe Pike was shooting at six targets that he had placed as far down-range as possible. He was firing a Colt Python .357 Magnum with a four-inch barrel, moving left-to-right, right-to-left, shooting at the targets in precise time with the music. That kind of music just soothes the soul’a He was wearing faded Levi’s and blue Nike running shoes and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and a big steel Rolex and mirrored pilot’s glasses. The gun and the glasses and the Rolex gleamed in the darkness as if they had been polished to a high luster. Pike moved without hesitation or doubt, as precise and controlled as a well-made machine. Bang bang bang. The Python would move, and flash, and a hole would burst near the center of a target. The dark glasses seemed not to adversely affect his vision. Maybe the sunglasses didn’t matter because Pike had his eyes closed. Maybe somehow Pike and the target were one, and we could write a book titled Zen and the Art of Small Arms Fire and make a fortune. Wow.

He stopped to reload, still facing down-range, and said, “Want to shoot a few?” You see? Cosmic.

I went to the stall where he had set up Rick’s tape player and clicked off the music. “How’d you know I was here?”

Shrug.

“We’ve got a job.”

“Yeah?” Pike loves to talk.

We walked down-range, collected his targets, then examined them. Every shot had been within two inches of center. He was delighted. You could tell because the corner of his mouth twitched. Joe Pike does not smile. Joe Pike never smiles. After a while you get used to it. I said, “Eh. Not bad.”

We gathered his things and walked back along the dim corridor, me telling him about Bradley and Sheila and the stolen Hagakure and the phone call from person or persons unknown that had scared the hell out of Sheila Warren.

He said, “Threat like that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Nope.”

“Maybe there wasn’t a threat. Maybe somebody’s having a little fun.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe the lady made it up.”

“Maybe. But we don’t know that. I figure you can stay with the woman and the kid while I look for the book.”

“Uh-huh.”

Pike was pulling off his sweatshirt when we walked out into the lobby. The fat man said, “Well, it’s about goddamned time,” and then he saw Joe Pike and shut up. Pike is an inch taller than me, and more heavily muscled, and when he was in Vietnam he’d had a bright red arrow tattooed on the outside of each deltoid. The arrows pointed forward. There is an ugly pucker scar high on the left side of his chest from the time a Mexican in a zoot suit shot him with a gold Llama automatic, and two more scars low on his back above his right kidney. After the fat guy looked at the tattoos and the muscles, he looked at the scars and then he looked away. Rick Barton was grinning from ear to ear. Pike said, “Use your shower, Rick?”

“No problem, bo.”

While Pike was in the shower I used a pay phone to call Sheila Warren. “I’m on the way over,” I said. “Bradley hired me to look out for you.”

“Well,” she said, “I should hope so.”

“I’m bringing my partner, Joe Pike. He’ll make sure the house and grounds are secure and be there in case there’s a problem.”

There was a pause. “Who’s Joe Pike?” Maybe I had lapsed into Urdu the first time. “My partner. He owns the agency with me.”

“You won’t be here?”

“Somebody has to look for the book.”

“Maybe this Joe Pike should look for the book.”

“I’m better at finding. He’s better at guarding.” You could hear her breathing into the phone. The breaths were deep and irregular and I thought I could hear ice move in a glass but maybe that was the TV. I said, “You were pretty gone last night. How’s your head?”

“You go to hell.” She hung up. Five minutes later Pike came back with a blue leather gym bag and we drove across town, me leading and Pike following in the Cherokee. When we got to the Warren house, Pike parked in the drive, then got out with the gym bag, walked back, and climbed into my car. Hatcher and his T-bird were gone. I told Pike about Berke Feldstein in the Sun Tree Gallery and Nobu Ishida and the two Asian Task Force cops.

“Asian Task Force are tough dudes,” Pike said. “You think Ishida’s got the book?”

“I think that a couple of hours after I saw him, someone threatened the Warrens. If Ishida doesn’t have it, maybe he’ll want to find out who does. Maybe he’ll ask around.”

Pike nodded. “And maybe you’ll be there when he gets some answers.”

“Uh-huh.”

The twitch. “Nice.”

The front door opened and Sheila Warren stepped out. She was in Jordache jeans over a red Danskin top that showed a fine torso. She put her palms on her hips, fingertips down the way women do, and stared at us.

Pike said, “The lady of the house?”

“Yep.”

Pike opened the gym bag, took out a Walther 9mm automatic in a strap holster, hitched up his right pant, fastened the gun around his ankle, then pulled the pant down over it and got out of the car. Maybe he was saving the .357 for heavy work.

“Be careful,” I said.

Pike nodded without saying anything, then took the gym bag and walked up to the house. He stopped in front of Sheila Warren and put out his hand and she took it. She glanced my way, then back up at Pike and gave him a big smile. Twenty kilowatts. She touched his gym bag and then his forearm and said something and laughed. She slid her hand up his arm to his shoulder and showed him into the house. I think she may have licked her lips. I eased the Corvette into gear and drove away. It’s a good thing Pike’s tough.

Chapter 9

Little Tokyo was jammed with the lunch hour rush. Every restaurant on the block had a line of Caucasian secretaries and their bosses queued up out front, and the smell of hot peanut oil and vinegar sauces made my stomach rumble. A small CLOSED sign was taped in the door at Nobu Ishida’s place. It was one of those cruddy hand-lettered things and not at all what you would expect from a big-time importer and art connoisseur, but there you go. I turned into the alley behind Ishida’s just to check, and, sure enough, it looked closed from back there, too. Probably out for lunch.

I turned back to Ki, then went up Broadway past the Hollywood Freeway into Chinatown. Chinatown is much bigger than Little Tokyo and not as clean, but the best honey-dipped duck and spring rolls in America can be had at a place called Yang Chow’s on Broadway just past Ord. If bad guys can break for lunch, so can good guys.

I parked in front of a live poultry market and walked back to Yang Chow’s and bought half a duck, three spring rolls, fried rice, and two Tsingtao to go. They put extra spice in the spring rolls for me.

Ten minutes later I was back on Ki Street, pulling into a parking lot sandwiched between two restaurants. It was crowded but all of the lots this time of day were crowded. I was a block and a half down from Ishida’s, and if anyone went into his shop through the front or came out through the front or turned over the CLOSED sign, I’d be able to see it. If they came or went through the back I was screwed. You learn to live with failure.

The parking attendant said, “You here to eat?”

“Yeah.”

“Three-fifty.”

I gave him three-fifty.

“Park anywhere. Give me the key.”

I took a spot at the front of the lot, blocking in a white Volvo so that I had an easy eyes-forward view of Ishida’s shop. I got out of the Corvette, pulled the top up to cut the sun, then climbed back in. I opened a Tsingtao, drank some, then went to work on the rice.

“I thought you here to eat.” The parking attendant was standing by my door.

I showed him the rice.

“In there.” He pointed at one of the restaurants.

I shook my head. “Out here.”

“You no eat out here. In there for eating.”

“I’m a health inspector. I go in there I’ll close the place down.”

“You got to give me key.” Maybe he didn’t believe me.

“No key. I keep the key.”

He pointed at the Volvo. “What if owner come out? I got to move.” He rapped knuckles on the Corvette’s door.

“I’m here. I’ll move it.”

“You no insured here.”

“Okay. I’ll get out and let you move it.”

“What if you leave.”

“If I leave, I’ll give you the key.” People like this are put here to test us.

He was going to say more when two Asian women and a black man came out of the restaurant. The black man wore a navy suit and had a small mustache and looked successful. The attendant hustled over to them, got a claim check, then hustled to the back of the lot. One of the Asian women said something to the black man and they all laughed. The attendant drove up in a Mercedes 420 Turbo Diesel. Bronze. He closed the door after each woman, and the black man gave him a tip. Maybe the tip made him feel better about things. He went back to the little attendant’s shack and looked at me but left me alone.

The honey-dipped duck was wonderful.

Four hours and twenty minutes later the Volvo was gone and the first of the early evening dinner crowd were starting to show up. The lot had emptied after lunch and another attendant had come on duty, an older man who looked at me once and didn’t seem to care if I stayed or left or homesteaded. No one had gone into Ishida’s shop or come out or touched the little CLOSED sign. Maybe nobody would, ever again.

At ten minutes after five the cop who had made me in the yakitori grill walked past carrying a large white paper bag and a six-pack of diet Coke. The Grateful Dead tee shirt was gone. Now it was ZZ Top. I got out of the car and watched him saunter down Ki Street and turn into a doorway next to the yakitori grill. I waited to see if he would come out and when he didn’t I did a little sauntering myself and took a look. He and a cop I hadn’t seen before were across from Ishida’s in a State Farm Insurance office above the yakitori grill. Those sneaky devils. Who watches the watchers?

I walked back along Ki, crossed over at the little side street, and turned up the alley behind Ishida’s shop. It looked the way it looked when I drove past six hours earlier. Empty. I went up to the loading dock doors and didn’t like the lock and went over to the people door and took out the wires I keep in my wallet and opened it. If the cops had had the rear of the place staked out there would be trouble, but all the cops were on the street side eating cheeseburgers.

I let myself in, eased the door shut behind me, and waited for my eyes to adjust. I was in a dim, high-ceilinged freight room. Dirty light came through the little window beside the door and a skylight twenty feet up, but that was it. Boxes and crates were stacked ten feet up the wall. Some were wooden but most were cardboard, and most had Styrofoam packaging pellets or shredded Japanese newspapers spilling out. There was a metal stair against one wall that went up to a steel-grate catwalk and loft. There were more boxes and crates up there and a little office. If the Hagakure were here it should only take about six years to find it.

I went through a hall at the head of the freight room and past shelves of bamboo steamers and into the showroom. The two desks were still there but the Hagakure hadn’t been left sitting on them. No one had left a note suggesting a safe place to store the manuscript or a photograph of the new owner with his prize collectible. There were memo pads and paper clips and a little purple stapler and assorted pens and pencils and a Panasonic pencil sharpener and an old issue of Batman with the back cover gone. I was hoping for a clue but I would have settled for Ishida’s home phone and address. Nada.

I went into the brighter light near the front of the shop, put my hands in my pockets, and wondered what to do. From the edge of the shadows you could see into the insurance office above the yakitori grill. The cop I didn’t know was sitting a few feet back from the window with his feet up, drinking a diet Coke out of a can with a straw.

I went back into the freight room. Ishida had come from the back. Maybe the little office on the catwalk was where he worked. Maybe there would be a little desk with pictures of the kids and a note to bring home some sushi and a Rolodex or some personal correspondence that would tell me where he lived.

I climbed the steel stair and went along the narrow catwalk and opened the white door with the pebbled glass panel in it and smelled the blood and the cold meat and the death. It’s the smell that comes only from a great quantity of blood and human waste. It can sting your nose and throat like a bad smog. It’s a smell so strong and so alive that it has a taste and the taste is like when you were a kid and found a nickel in the winter and the metal was cold and you put it in your mouth to see what it would be like and your mother screamed that you would die from the germs and so you spit it out but the cold taste and the fear of the germs stayed.

The little office was heavy with shadow. I took out my handkerchief and found the light switch and snapped it on. The guy with the missing finger who’d been out front my first time around was curled atop a gray metal file cabinet. His head and his right arm were hanging over the edge. His neck was limp, the front and side of it purple as if he had been hit there very hard. Someone had cleared Nobu Ishida’s desk of papers and ledgers and pencil can and phone. They had put all that on his swivel chair along with his clothes and then pushed the chair out of the way and tied Ishida spread-eagled on his desk, naked, arms and legs bound to the desk legs with brown electrical cord. They had used a knife on him. There were cuts on his arms and his legs and his torso and his face and his genitals. Some of the cuts were very deep. His bladder and his bowels had let go. The blood had crusted into delicate red-brown rivers along his arms and legs and had pooled on the desk and then dripped heavily onto the floor to mix with other things. The pool on the floor had spread almost to the door and looked slick and tacky. A gray stuffed Godzilla had been jammed in his mouth to smother the screams.

I stepped around the blood to the chair and looked through the things that had been on the desk. Ishida’s wallet was still in his right back pants pocket. I took it out, opened it, copied down his home address, then put the wallet back the way I’d found it. I used my handkerchief to pick up the phone and called Lou Poitras. He said, “What now?”

“I’m at Ishida’s place of business. He’s dead.”

There was a pause. “Did you kill him?”

“No.” I watched the pool of blood.

“Don’t leave the scene. Don’t touch anything. Don’t let anyone else in. I’m on my way. There’ll be other cops but I’ll get there first.”

He hung up. I put the phone down and stepped around the blood back onto the catwalk and pulled the door closed. I worked up spit and swallowed and took several deep breaths. I expanded my lungs from the diaphragm and expelled the air in stages from the lower lobes to the mid-lobes to the upper lobes. I tried everything I could think of but I couldn’t get rid of the taste or the smell. I never could. Like every encounter with death, it had become a part of me.

Chapter 10

I went downstairs and sat at one of the two tables in the deepening darkness until Lou Poitras pulled up out front in a light green Dodge. A black-and-white pulled up behind him and the plain white van the crime scene guys use pulled up behind the van. Cops on parade. I went to the front door and opened it. Across the street, the ATF cops were on their feet in the big window, ZZ Top screaming into the phone, the other one pulling on a jacket. I gave them a little wave.

Poitras said, “Knock off that shit and come in here.”

If Lou Poitras wasn’t a cop he could rent himself out as Mighty Joe Young. He spends about an hour and a half every morning six days a week pumping iron in a little weight room in his back yard in Northridge, trying to see how big he can get. He’s good at it. I’d once seen him punch through a Cadillac’s windshield and pull a big man out over the steering wheel.

He shouldered past me. “Where?”

“In the back. Up the stairs.”

One of the uniforms was a black guy with a bullet head and a thick neck and hands four sizes too big for him. His name tag read LEONARD. His partner was a blond kid with a skimpy Larry Bird mustache and hard eyes. Leonard mumbled something and the blond kid took the crime scene guys into the back after Poitras.

“You don’t want to see?” I said.

Leonard said, “I seen enough.”

I went back to the two tables and sat. Leonard found the lights, turned them on, then went back up front. He leaned against a floor-to-ceiling case of toy robots with his arms crossed, and stared out into the street. You do this job long enough, you know what’s going to be back there even without going back there.

The little door chime rang and the two ATF cops from the insurance office came in. They showed their badges to Leonard and then they went into the rear. When they passed me, the one in the ZZ Top tee shirt said, “You’re in deep shit, asshole.”

Lou Poitras came back around the bamboo steamers and said, “Jesus Christ.” He looked pale.

I nodded.

The blond kid came out like it was nothing. He went back to Leonard and said, “You should see that, Lenny.” His voice was loud.

In fifteen minutes the place was swarming with cops like flies on a nervous dog. Someone had found a Dunkin’ Donuts and brought back two boxes of crullers and about twenty little Styrofoam cups of coffee. Crime scene specialists from the Hollenbeck Division were dusting everything and snapping pictures and asking me every two minutes if I had moved anything before they got there, and every time they asked I said no.

Two guys came in from the L. A. County Medical Examiner’s Office, but neither of them looked like Jack Klugman. One of them had a twitch. More than one cop came out of the back and sat down with his face in his hands, and everybody pretended not to notice when they did.

I was working on my second cup of coffee when the bell tinkled and the ATF cop with the bantamweight’s face came in. He was wearing tan chinos and a pale lavender rugby shirt and a light khaki windbreaker and Topsiders with no socks. Like he’d been at home about to sit down to dinner with his family. Poitras went over and talked with him and then they went into the back. When they came back, ZZ Top was with them. Poitras and the bantamweight came over to me. ZZ Top pushed aside the cruller box, sat on the table, crossed his arms, and glared at me. Cops are tough when they’ve got you outnumbered.

Poitras said, “This is Terry Ito. He works out of the Asian Task Force, Japanese sub-unit.”

I put out my hand. Ito didn’t take it. He said, “What were you doing with Nobu Ishida?”

“Taking chopsticks lessons.” The muscles in the tops of my shoulders and down through my mid-back were tight and aching.

Ito looked at Poitras. Poitras shrugged. “He’s like that.”

Ito looked back at me. “I think maybe you got shit for brains. You think that’s possible?”

I looked from Ito to the cop at the cruller table and back to Ito. I could still smell what I’d smelled in Ishida’s office. I said, “I think somebody dropped the ball. I think someone walked in here under ZZ Top’s nose and did this and walked out again and nobody said dick.”

The cop on the cruller table uncrossed his arms and stood up and said, “Fuck you, asshole.”

“Good line,” I said. “Schwarzenegger, right? The Terminator.”

Poitras said, “Cut the bullshit.”

Ito said, “Jimmy.”

A tall black uniform came out of the back, took off his hat, and said, “Who’d do something like that?” Then he went outside. I was breathing hard and Jimmy was breathing hard but everybody else looked bored. Jimmy sat down again but didn’t cross his arms.

Ito turned away from Jimmy and looked at me. “How long were you outside, hotshot?”

“Maybe six hours.”

“You see anybody?”

I sipped some coffee.

Ito nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He went over to the cruller table, picked up a cup of the coffee, peeled off its top, and took a long sip. Steam was rising off the cup but the heat didn’t seem to bother him. He said, “Who’s your client?”

“A guy named Bradley Warren. The Pacific Men’s Club is naming him Man of the Month tomorrow.”

“Man of the Month.”

“Yeah. You should get in on that.”

Jimmy said, “Shit.”

I told them who Warren was and that he had hired me to find the Hagakure and that I had turned up Nobu Ishida’s name as a place to start. Terry Ito listened and sipped the hot coffee and stared at me without blinking. Detectives and crime scene guys and uniforms moved around us. The two guys from the ME’s office went out to their van and came back with a gurney. Ito called to them.

“When did it happen?”

The shorter of the two said, “Maybe eight hours.”

Ito looked at me and nodded. I shrugged. Ito looked at Jimmy, but Jimmy was staring at the floor and flexing his jaws.

I drank coffee and told them about my first visit to Ishida’s shop and about the three guys sitting at the tables and about Ishida. I said, “The stiff upstairs with the missing finger was one of them. There was another guy with a bad left eye, and a big kid, young, named Eddie.”

Ito looked at Jimmy again. Jimmy looked up and said, “Eddie have tattoos? Here?” He touched his arms just below the elbows.

“Yeah.”

Jimmy looked at Ito and nodded. “Eddie Tang.”

I said, “About three hours after I left Ishida’s, the client’s wife got a phone call saying they’d burn the house down if the Warrens didn’t call off the cops. I wanted to work Ishida some more, maybe take a look around his house, that kind of thing, so I came back here today.”

Jimmy said, “That’s horseshit. You don’t threaten somebody to make the cops back off.”

I said, “Yeah. You cops are tough, all right.”

Ito said, “You’re some smart for a guy standing where you’re standing.”

“It’s not hard in this company.”

Jimmy didn’t say anything.

I could feel the pulse in my temples and a sharp pain behind my right eye. It made me blink. Ito stared at me a long time, then gave a little nod. “Yeah, you’re smart. Maybe if you’re smart enough you can get what’s in that room back there out of your head. Maybe if you’re tough enough, what you saw back there won’t bother you.” His voice was softer than you would’ve expected.

I took a deep breath and let it out. I rolled my shoulders to try to work out some of the tension. Poitras was leaning against a shelf of tea trays and little lacquer cups with his arms crossed. Crossed like that, they looked swollen even more than normal. Ito was good, all right.

He said, “Thing is, what’s back there ain’t so special around here. This is Little Tokyo, Chinatown. You oughta see what the Mung have going down in Little Saigon.”

Jimmy said, “How about those pricks in Koreatown?”

Ito nodded at him, then looked back at me. Thinking about those pricks in Koreatown made him smile. “This ain’t America, white boy. This is Little Asia, and it’s ten thousand years old. We’ve got stuff down here like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

I said, “Yeah.” Mr. Tough.

He said, “If Nobu Ishida wanted you out of the picture, he wouldn’t do it by calling up some broad and making a threat.” He swiveled around and looked at Jimmy. “Call Hollenbeck Robbery and see who has this book thing. Find out what they know.”

“Sure, Terry.” Jimmy didn’t move.

I said, “What’s the big deal with Nobu Ishida?”

Ito looked back at me and thought about it for a while. Like maybe he would tell me and maybe he wouldn’t. “You know what the yakuza is?”

“Japanese mafia.”

Jimmy smiled, wide and mindless, the way a pit bull smiles before he bites you. He said, “How about that, Terry. You think we got something as pussy as the mafia down here?”

Ito said, “Call Hollenbeck.”

I said, “Ishida was in the yakuza?”

Jimmy smiled some more, then pushed off the cruller table and walked out. Ito turned back to me. “The yakuza is big in white slavery and dope and loan-sharking like the mafia, but that’s where it stops. The stiff in back with the missing finger, he’s what you would think of as a mafia soldier. But the mafia doesn’t have any soldiers like him. These guys, they’ve got a little code they live by. Somewhere along the line this guy screwed up and the code required him to chop off his own finger to make up for it. I’ve seen guys with three, four fingers missing from one hand.”

I drank more coffee.

Ito said, “The real headcases get their entire body tattooed from just below the elbows to just above the knees. Those guys are yakuza assassins.” He touched his forehead. “Bug fuck.”

“Eddie,” I said.

Ito nodded. “Yeah. Eddie’s a real up-and-comer. Local kid. Arrest record could fill a book. We got him made for half a dozen killings but we can’t prove it. That’s the bitch with the yakuza. You can’t prove it. People down here, something happens, they don’t see it and they don’t talk about it. So you’ve got to put a guy like Ishida’s business under surveillance for eight months and pray some hotshot private license doesn’t come along and tip him that he’s being watched and blow the whole thing. You don’t want that to happen because Ishida is overseeing a major operation to import brown heroin from China and Thailand for a guy named Yuki Torobuni who runs the yakuza here in L. A. and if you get Ishida maybe you get Torobuni and shut the whole fucking thing down.” Behind us, the two guys from the coroner’s office wheeled out the gurney. There was a dark gray body bag sitting on it. Whatever was in the bag looked rumpled.

I said, “If they’re moving dope in, the guys down in Watts and East L. A. aren’t going to like it. Maybe what happened in back is an effort to eliminate competition.”

Ito looked at Poitras. “You were right, Poitras. This boy is bright.”

“He has his days.”

“Unless,” I said, “it has something to do with the Hagakure.”

Terry Ito smiled at me, then walked over to the cruller box and selected one with green icing. He said, “You’re smart, all right, but not smart enough. This isn’t your world, white boy. People disappear. Entire families vanish in the most outrageous manner. And there’s never a witness, never a clue.” Ito gave me a little more of the smile. “Have you read a translation of the Hagakure?”

“No.”

The smile went nasty. “There’s a little thing in there called Bushido. Bushido says that the way of the warrior is death.” Ito stopped smiling. “Whoever took your little book, pray it’s not the yakuza.” He stared at me for a little while longer, then he took his cruller and went into the back.

Poitras uncrossed the huge arms and shook his head. “Sometimes, Hound Dog, you are a real asshole.”

“Et tu, Brut+??”

He walked away.

They kept me around until a dick from Hollenbeck got there and took my statement. It was 3:14 in the morning when they finished with me, and Poitras had long since gone. I went out into the cool night air onto streets that were empty of round-eyed faces. I thought about the yakuza and people disappearing and I tried to imagine things like nothing I’d ever seen. I tried, but all I kept seeing was what someone had done to Nobu Ishida.

The walk to the car was long and through dark streets, but only once did I look behind me.

Chapter 11

The next morning Jillian Becker called me at eight-fifteen and asked me if I had yet recovered the Hagakure. I told her no, that in the fourteen hours that had passed since we last spoke, I had not recovered it, but should I stumble upon it as I walked out to retrieve my morning paper, I would call her at once. She then reminded me that today was the Pacific Men’s Club Man of the Month banquet. The banquet was to begin at one, we were expected to arrive at the hotel by noon, and would I please dress appropriate to the occasion? I told her that my formal black suede holster was being cleaned, but that I would do the best I could. She asked me why I always had something flip to say. I said that I didn’t know, but having been blessed with the gift, I felt obliged to use it. At ten minutes after ten I pulled into the Warrens’ drive and parked behind a dark gray presidential stretch limousine. The driver was sitting across the front seat, head down, reading the Times sports section. There was a chocolate-brown 1988 Rolls-Royce Corniche by the four-car garage with a white BMW 633i beside it. I made the BMW for Jillian Becker. Pike’s red Jeep was at the edge of the drive out by the gate. It was as far from the other vehicles as possible. Even Pike’s transportation is anti-social.

When I rang the bell, Jillian Becker answered, her face tight. She said, “They’ve just gotten another call. This time the caller said they’d hurt Mimi.”

She led me back along the entry and into the big den. Sheila Warren was sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs, feet pulled up beneath her, an empty glass on the little table beside the chair. She was wrapped in a white terry bathrobe. Joe Pike was leaning against the far wall, thumbs hooked in his Levi’s, and Mimi Warren was on the big couch across from the bar. Her eyes were large and glassy, and she looked excited. Bradley Warren came in from his library at the back of the den, immaculate in a charcoal three-piece suit, and said, “Sheila. You’re just sitting there. We don’t want to be late.”

I looked back at Jillian Becker. “Tell me about the call.”

She said, “A half hour after you and I spoke the phone rang. Whoever it was started talking to Mimi, then must’ve realized she wasn’t an adult and asked for her father.”

“What’d they say, Bradley?”

Bradley looked annoyed. He adjusted each cuff and examined himself in the mirror behind the bar. Sheila Warren watched him, shook her head, and drained her glass. He said, “They told me that they knew we hadn’t stopped searching for the Hagakure and that they were growing angry. They said they would be at the Man of the Month banquet and that if I knew what was good for me and my family, I’d call it off.”

Sheila Warren said, “Bastards.” Her s’s were a little slurred.

Bradley said, “They told me they knew our every move and we were at their mercy and if I didn’t do what they said they’d kill Mimi.”

I looked at Mimi. She was in a shapeless brown silk dress and flat shoes and her hair was pulled back. There still wasn’t any makeup. I said, “Pretty scary.”

She nodded.

I looked back at Bradley Warren. He was picking at something on his right lapel. “Is that the way they said it, using those words?”

“As near as I can remember. Why?” Not used to being questioned by an employee.

“Because it is so theatrical. ‘If you know what’s good for you.’ ‘Know your every move.’ ‘At their mercy.’ Most of the crooks I know have better imaginations. Also, it’s pretty clear now that we aren’t just talking about robbery. The calls you’re getting seem like harassment calls. Someone wants to hurt your business and embarrass you, and that’s probably why the Hagakure was stolen.”

I went over to the big couch and sat down next to Mimi. She was watching everything the way a goldfish watches the world from its bowl, all big eyes and vulnerability and with an assumption of invisibility. Maybe that was easy to assume when Bradley and Sheila were your parents. I said, “What’d they say to you, babe?”

Mimi giggled.

Sheila said, “For Christ’s sake, Mimi.”

Mimi blinked. Serious. “He told me it wasn’t ours. He told me it is the last legacy of Japan’s lost heart and that it belongs to the spirit of Japan.”

Sheila Warren said, “Spirit my ass.” She got up from the chair and brought her glass over to the bar. She wasn’t wearing anything under the robe. “Well, I guess it’s time to get ready for the Man of the Month’s divine moment.” She said it loudly, then turned away from the bar and leered at Joe Pike. “Want to stand guard while I’m in the bath, tough guy?”

Jillian Becker coughed. Pike stood solemn and catlike, mirrored lenses filled with the empty life of a television after a station sign-off. Bradley Warren found a hair out of place and leaned toward the mirror to adjust it. Mimi’s face grew dark and blotched. At the bar, Sheila shook her head at no one in particular, mumbled something about there being no takers, then left.

Bradley Warren stepped away from the mirror, temporarily satisfied with his appearance, and looked at his daughter. “Finish dressing, Mimi. We’re going to leave soon.”

“I hate to be the wet blanket,” I said, “but maybe we should forego the Man of the Month celebration.”

Bradley frowned. “I told you before. That’s impossible.”

I said, “The banquet will be in a large ballroom at the hotel. There will be a couple of hundred people plus the hotel and kitchen employees. People will want to speak with you before the presentation and after, and with your wife, and your family will be spread all to hell and back. If we assume that there is merit to the threats you’ve received, you’ll be vulnerable. So will your wife and daughter.”

Mimi’s left eye began to twitch in the same way that Bradley’s had. What a trait to inherit. Her face was small and pinched and closed, but her eyes were watchful in spite of the tic, and made me think of a small animal hiding at the edge of a forest.

Bradley said, “Nothing’s going to happen to my best girl.” He went over to her with an Ozzie Nelson smile and put his hands on her shoulders.

Mimi jumped when he touched her as if an electrical current had arced between them. He didn’t notice. He said, “My best girl knows I have to attend. She knows that if we’re not at the banquet, the Tashiros will see me as weak.”

His best girl nodded. Dutifully.

Bradley turned the Ozzie Nelson smile on me. “There. You see?”

“Okay,” I said. “Go without your family. Pike will stay with them, here, and I’ll go with you.”

Ozzie Nelson grew impatient. “You don’t seem to understand,” he said. “What you’re asking would be bad for business.”

“Silly me,” I said. “Of course.”

Jillian Becker stared out the front window toward a grove of bamboo. Joe Pike moved to the bar and crossed his arms the way he does when he’s disgusted. I took a deep breath and told myself to pretend Bradley Warren was a four-year-old. I spoke slowly and wished Mimi wasn’t with us. I said, “A threat was made to your wife, and now a threat has been made to your daughter. A person who may or may not have been connected with the theft of the Hagakure was murdered. Whether the two are linked or not, I don’t know, but the situation is worsening and it would be smart to take these threats seriously.”

Jillian Becker turned from the window. “Bradley, maybe we should call the police. They could help with extra security.”

Bradley made a face like she’d pissed on his leg. He said, “Absolutely not.”

Mimi stood, then, and went over to her father. “I put on this dress especially for the banquet. Isn’t it pretty?”

Bradley Warren looked at her and frowned. “Can’t you do something about your hair?”

Mimi’s left eye fluttered like a moth in a jar. She rubbed at the eye and opened her mouth and closed it, and then she left.

Joe Pike shook his head and he left, too.

Bradley Warren looked at himself in the mirror again. “Maybe I should change shoes,” he said. Then he started out, too.

I said, “Bradley.”

He stopped in the door.

“Your daughter is terrified.”

“Of course she’s frightened,” he said. “Some maniac said he was going to kill her.”

I nodded. Slowly. “The right thing for you to do is to call this off. Stay home. Take care of your family. They’re scared now, and possibly in danger, and they need your help.”

Bradley Warren gave me the famous Bradley Warren frown, then shook his head. “Don’t you see?” he said. “A lot of cops would ruin the banquet.”

I nodded. Of course. I looked at Jillian Becker, but she was busy with her briefcase.

Chapter 12

“Who heads security at Bradley’s hotel?”Jillian Becker said, “A man named Jack Ellis.”

“May I have his phone number?”

Jillian Becker held my gaze for a moment, then turned away and found Jack Ellis’s number in her briefcase. I used the phone behind the bar, called Ellis at the hotel, told him what was going on and that I had been hired by Mr. Warren for Mr. Warren’s personal security. Jillian Becker took the phone and confirmed it. Ellis had a thick, coarse voice that put him in his fifties. He said, “What do the cops think about all this?”

“The cops don’t know. Mr. Warren thinks they’d be bad for business.” When I said it Jillian Becker pursed her lips and went back to shuffling papers within the briefcase. Disapproving my tone of voice, no doubt.

Ellis said, “You like that?”

“I think it’s lousy.” More disapproval. The down-turned mouth. The posture. That kind of thing.

Ellis said, “I’ll bring in my night people. That’ll be enough to cover the Angeles Room, where they’re gonna be, follow him in and out, watch the kitchen and the hallways.” There was a pause. “He didn’t tell the cops, huh?”

“Bad for business. Also, too many unsightly cops might ruin the banquet.” Jillian Becker put the Cross pen down and looked at me with the cool eyes.

“Son of a bitch.”

“That’s right.”

I hung up and looked at Jillian Becker looking at me. I smiled. “Want to hear my Mel Gibson imitation?”

She said, “If you knew more about Bradley, you wouldn’t dislike him the way you do.”

“I don’t know. I sort of like disliking him.”

“That’s obvious. Either way, as long as you’re in his employ, you might be more circumspect in sharing your feelings with fellow employees. It breeds discontent.”

“Discontent. How Upper Management.”

The nostrils tightened.

I said, “I think he’s behaving like a self-absorbed ass, and so do you.”

Her left eyebrow arched. “However he’s behaving, he’s still my employer. I will treat him accordingly. So should you.” My country right or wrong.

Pretty soon Joe Pike came back, scrubbed and fresh and bright-eyed. It’s never easy to tell if someone is bright-eyed when they’re wearing sunglasses, but one makes certain assumptions.

He put his gym bag on the floor, then leaned with his back against the bar and his elbows up on the bar rail and stared out at infinity. “You really know how to pick’m,” he said.

A little bit after that Bradley Warren came back resplendent in different shoes, and Sheila Warren came back smelling fresh and clean, and Mimi Warren came back looking and smelling pretty much the same, and we were all together. One big happy family. We trooped out to the limo, Bradley and Jillian and Sheila and me and Mimi and Pike, all single file. I broke into “Whistle While You Work,” but no one got it. Pike might’ve got it, but he never tells. Bradley and Jillian took the forward-facing seat and Mimi and Sheila and I got the seat facing the rear, Sheila and Mimi on either side of me, Sheila sitting so that her leg was pressed against mine. Sheila said, “Don’t they have a bar in these damn things?” Everyone ignored her. Pike said something to the limo driver, then went over to his Jeep. Sheila Warren said, “He’s not coming with us?”

“Nope.”

“Mother fuck.”

Traffic was light. We went down Beverly Glen to Wilshire, then east. We stayed on Wilshire through Beverly Hills and past the La Brea tar pits with the full-sized models of the mammoths they have there and past MacArthur Park and into downtown L. A. until Wilshire ended at Grand. We went up to Seventh, then over on Broadway, and pulled up under the entrance of the New Nippon Hotel.

One thing you could say about Bradley Warren, he built a helluva hotel. The New Nippon was a thirty-two-story cylindrical column of metallic blue glass and snow-white concrete midway between Little Tokyo, Chinatown, and downtown L. A. There were dozens of limos and taxis and MBs and Jaguars. Suitcases were going in and out and doormen in red uniforms were whistling for the next taxi in line and guys I took to be tourists who looked like they made a lot of money were with tall slender women who looked like they cost a lot of money to keep up. None of them looked like gunsels or thugs or art thief-maniacs, but you can never be sure.

“You got a McDonald’s in there?” I said.

Bradley Warren smiled at me.

Sheila Warren murmured, “Piece of shit.”

We pulled to a stop by a clump of men and women who smiled as they watched the limo drive up. Two doormen trotted over, one with a lot of braid who was probably the boss, and opened the doors. Pike pulled up behind us, gave his keys to a parking attendant, and moved to stand by the lobby entrance twenty feet away.

The group of smiling people gathered around Bradley and congratulated him and said it was long deserved and didn’t Sheila look lovely and wasn’t Mimi getting pretty. Somebody took a photo. Sheila gave everyone an arc-light smile and draped herself on her husband’s arm and looked adoring and proud and was everything he could have wanted her to be. She didn’t look like she hated it or hated him or hated the goddamned building. Nancy Reagan would’ve been proud.

A square-faced guy in gray slacks and a blue blazer and a gold and yellow rep tie moved up to Jillian’s elbow, said something, then the two of them moved over to me. He put out his hand. “Jack Ellis. You Cole?”

“Yeah. Where’d you do your time?” Ellis wore ex-cop like a bad coat.

“You can tell, huh?”

“Sure.”

“Detroit.”

“Rough beat.”

Ellis nodded, pleased. “Murder City, brother. Murder City.” Murder City. These cops.

We moved into the lobby and up an escalator to the mezzanine floor. The lower three floors were boutiques and travel agencies and bookstores and art galleries surrounding a lobby interior big enough to park the Goodyear blimp. There was a sign at the top of the escalator that read PACIFIC MEN’S CLUB LUNCHEON with ANGELES ROOM beneath it and an arrow pointing down a short corridor. People who looked like guests milled around and two overweight guys dressed like Ellis stood off to the side, looking like security. Ellis said, “I’ve got eight people in for this. Two up here on the mezzanine, two more in the Angeles Room, two in the lobby, and two in the kitchen entrance behind the podium.”

Bradley and his knot of admirers continued along the corridor, passing the Angeles Room. I thought about saying something, but after all, it was their hotel. They should know where we were going.

I said, “There any other halls or entrances off the Angeles Room besides the kitchen entrance?”

“The Blue Corridor. I got no people there because that’s where we’ll be. We wait in there and when they’re ready for the show to start we can get into the Angeles Room from a side door.”

I nodded and looked at Jillian Becker. “What’s on the program?”

“It shouldn’t take more than an hour and a half. First, lunch is served, then the president of the association makes a few introductory remarks, and then Bradley speaks for about fifteen minutes and we go home.”

We went through an unmarked door and along a sterile tile corridor and through another unmarked door and then we were in the Blue Corridor and then the Blue Room. Both the corridor and the room were blue. Four successful-looking Asian-American men were there, along with a tall black man and an older white guy with glasses and the mayor of Los Angeles. Everybody smiled and kissed Sheila’s cheek and shook Bradley’s hand. There was back-slapping and more photographs and everybody ignored Mimi. She stood to the side with her head down as if she were looking for lint on her dress.

I leaned close to her and whispered, “How you doin’?”

She looked up at me the way you look at someone when they’ve said something that surprises you. I patted her shoulder and said softly, “Stay close, kid. I’ll take care of you.”

She gave me the serious goldfish face, then went back to staring at her dress.

“Hey, Mimi.”

She looked at me again.

“I think the dress looks great.”

Her mouth tightened and bent. A smile.

Jillian Becker came up behind me and tapped at her wrist. “Ten minutes.”

“Maybe we should synchronize watches.”

She frowned.

“I’m going to take a look outside. I’ll be back in five.” I told Ellis to stay with Bradley and told both Mimi and Sheila to stay put. Mimi made the crooked mouth again. Sheila told me she was horny, and asked wouldn’t I like to do something about it. Nothing like cooperation.

I went along the Blue Corridor and out into what a little sign said was the Angeles Room and thought, nope, maybe the sign was wrong. Maybe this was really the UN. Maybe a king was about to be crowned. Maybe aliens had landed and this was where they were going to make their address. Then I saw Joe Pike. It was the Angeles Room, all right.

Eighty tables, eight people per table. Video cams set up on a little platform at the rear of a place that might be called a grand ballroom if you thought small. Press people. A dais with seating for twenty-four. Pacific Men’s Club Man of the Month. Who would’ve thought it. About sixty percent of the faces were Asian. The rest were black and white and brown and nobody looked too concerned about making the next Mercedes payment. I recognized five city council members and a red-haired television newswoman I’d had a crush on for about three years and the Tashiros. Maybe the Pacific Men’s Club was the hot ticket in town. Maybe Steven Spielberg had tried to get in and been turned away. Maybe I could get the newswoman’s phone number.

Pike drifted up to me. “This sucks.”

That Joe.

“I could off anybody in this place five times over.”

“Could you off someone and get away with you here?”

Head shake. “I’m too good even for me.”

I said, “It starts in ten minutes. Door I came from is off the Blue Corridor. They’re in a room down the corridor. We come out that room, along the corridor, through the door, and up to the dais.” I told him where Ellis had put his men. “You take the right side of the dais. I’ll come out with them and take the left.”

Pike nodded and drifted away, head slowly swiveling as he scanned the crowd from behind the sunglasses.

I went back to the Blue Room. Bradley Warren was seated on a nice leather couch, smiling with four or five new arrivals, probably people who would sit on the dais. The little room was getting crowded and smoky and I didn’t like it. Jack Ellis looked nervous. Bradley laughed at something somebody said, then got up and went to a little table where someone had put out white wine and San Pellegrino water. I edged up to him and said, “Do you know all these people?”

“Of course.”

“Any way to clear them out?”

“Don’t be absurd, Cole. Does everything look all right?”

“You’re asking my opinion, I say blow this off and go home.”

“Don’t be absurd.” I guess he liked the sound of it.

“All right.”

“You’re being paid to protect us. Do that.”

If he kept it up, he was going to have to pay someone to protect him from me.

More people squeezed into the little room. Jack Ellis went out and then came back. There were maybe twenty-five people in the room now, more coming in and some going out, and then Jillian Becker went over to Bradley and said, “It’s time,” loud enough for me to hear. I looked around, figuring to get Sheila and Mimi and Bradley into a group. Sheila was nodding at a very heavy white guy who smiled a great deal. I said, “Where’s Mimi?”

Sheila looked confused. “Mimi?”

I went out into the hall. There were more people coming along the corridor and others going into the Angeles Room but there was no Mimi. Jack Ellis came out and then Jillian Becker. Ellis said, “She asked one of the busboys for the bathroom.”

“Where is it?”

“Just around the corner to the left. I got a man down there.” We were trotting as he said it, picking up speed, Ellis breathing hard after twenty feet. We went around one corner then around another and into a dirty white hall with an exit sign at the far end. There was a men’s room door and a women’s room door halfway down its length. Jack Ellis’s man was lying facedown in front of the women’s room door with one leg crossed over the other and his right hand behind his back. Ellis said, “Christ, Davis,” and puffed forward. Davis groaned and rolled over as he said it.

I pulled my gun and pushed first into the women’s room and then into the men’s. Empty. I ran down to the exit door and kicked through it and ran down two flights of stairs and through another door into the hotel’s laundry. There were huge commercial washers and steam-circulating systems and dryers that could handle a hundred sheets at a crack. But there was no Mimi.

In Vietnam I had learned that the worst parts of life and death are not where you look for them. Like the sniper’s bullet that takes off a buddy’s head as you stand side by side at a latrine griping about foot sores, the worst parts hover softly in the shadows and happen when you are not looking. The worst of life stays hidden until death.

On a heavy gray security door that led onto a service drive beneath the hotel, someone had written WE WARNED YOU in red spray paint. Beneath it they had drawn a rising sun.

Chapter 13

When the first wave of cops and FBI got there, they sealed off the Blue Corridor and herded all the principals into the Blue Room and sealed that off, too. An FBI agent named Reese put the arm on me and Ellis and brought us outside and walked us past the restrooms and down the stairs. Reese was about fifty, with very long arms and pool player’s hands. He was about the color of fine French roast coffee, and he looked like he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in twenty years. He said, “How long this guy Davis been working for you, Ellis?”

“Two years. He’s an ex-cop. All my guys are ex-cops. So am I.” He said it nervous.

Reese nodded. “Davis says he’s standing down the hall back up by the bathrooms grabbing a smoke when the girl comes by, goes into the women’s room. Says the next thing he knows this gook dude is coming out the women’s room and gives him one on the head and that’s it.” Reese squinted at us. Maybe doing his impression of a gook dude. “That sound good to you?”

Jack Ellis chewed the inside of his mouth and said, “Uh-huh.”

In the laundry there were cops and feds taking pictures of the paint job and talking to Chicano guys in green coveralls with NEW NIPPON HOTEL on the back. Reese ignored them. “Didn’t anybody tell the girl not to go off alone?” He squatted down to look at something on the floor as he said it. Maybe a clue.

Ellis looked at me. I said, “She was told.”

Reese got up, maybe saw another clue, squatted again in a different place. “But she went anyway. And when she went, nobody went with her.”

I said, “That’s it.”

He stood up again and looked at us. “Little girl gotta go potty. That’s no big deal. Happens every day. Nothing to worry about, right?” A little smile hit at the corner of his mouth and went away. “Only when you got serious criminals out there, and they’re saying things, maybe going potty, maybe that’s something to think about. Maybe calling the police when the threats are made, maybe that’s something to think about, too.” He looked from Ellis to me and back to Ellis. “Maybe the cops are here, maybe the little girl does her diddle and comes back and this never happens.”

Ellis didn’t say anything.

Reese looked at me. “I talked to a dick named Poitras about you. He said you know the moves. What happened, this one get outta hand?”

Ellis said, “Look, Mr. Warren signs the checks, right? He says jump, I say which side of my ass you want me to land on?”

Reese’s eyes went back to Ellis and flagged to half-mast. I think it was his disdainful look. “How long were you a cop?”

Ellis chewed harder at his mouth.

I said, “You gonna bust our ass about this all day or we gonna try to get something done?”

Reese put the look on me.

I said, “We shoulda brought you guys in. We wanted to bring you guys in. But Ellis is right. It’s Warren’s ticket and he said no. That’s half-assed, but there it is. So this is what we’re left with. We can stand here and you can work out on us or we can move past it.”

Reese’s eyes went to half-mast again, then he turned to look at the door with the paint. He sucked at a tooth while he looked. “Poitras said you got Joe Pike for a partner. That true?”

“Yeah.”

Reese shook his head. “Ain’t that some shit.” He finished sucking on the tooth and turned back to me. “Tell me what you got, from the beginning.”

I gave it to him from the beginning. I had told it so many times to so many cops I thought about making mimeographed copies and handing them out. When I told the part about Nobu Ishida, Jack Ellis said, “Holy shit.”

We went back up the stairs to the Blue Room. There were cops talking to Bradley Warren and Sheila Warren and the hotel manager and the people who organized the Pacific Men’s Club luncheon. Reese stopped in the door and said, “Which one’s Pike?”

Pike was standing in a corner, out of the way. “Him.”

Reese nodded and sucked the tooth again. “Do tell,” he said softly.

“You want to meet him?”

Reese gave me flat eyes, then went over and stood by two dicks who were talking to Bradley Warren. Sheila was sitting on the couch, leaning forward into the detective who was interviewing her, touching his thigh every once in a while for emphasis. Jillian Becker stood by the bar. Her eyes were puffy and her mascara had run.

When Bradley saw me, he glared, and said, “What happened to my daughter?” His face was flushed.

Jillian said, “Brad.”

He snapped his eyes to her. “I asked him an appropriate question. Should I have you research his answer?”

Jillian went very red.

I said, “They knew you were going to be here. They had someone come up through the laundry. Maybe he waited in the restroom or maybe he walked around and was in here with us. We won’t know that until we find him.”

“I don’t like these ‘maybes.’ Maybe is a weak word.”

Reese said, “Maybe somebody shoulda brought the cops in.”

Bradley ignored him. “I paid for security and I got nothing.” He stabbed a finger at Jack Ellis. “You’re fired.”

Ellis really worked at the inside of his mouth. Bradley Warren looked at me. “And you? What did you do?” He looked at Jillian Becker again. “The one you insisted I hire. What did you say about him?”

I said, “Be careful, Bradley.”

Warren pointed at me. “You’re fired, too.” He looked at Pike. “You, too. Get out. Get out. All of you.”

Everyone in the small tight room was staring at us.

Even the cops had stopped doing cop things. Jack Ellis swallowed hard, started to say something, but finally just nodded and walked out. I looked at Sheila Warren. There was something bright and anxious in her eyes. Her hand was on the arm of the big cop, frozen there. Jillian Becker stared at the floor.

Reese said, “Take it easy, Mr. Warren. I got a few questions.”

Bradley Warren sucked in some air, let it out, then glanced at his watch. “I hope it won’t take too long,” he said. “Maybe they can still make the presentation.”

Joe Pike said, “Fuck you.”

We left.

Chapter 14

Pike took me back to the Warren house, dropped me off, and drove away without saying anything. I got into the Corvette, went down Beverly Glen into Westwood, and stopped at a little Vietnamese place I know. Ten tables, most of them doubles, cleanly done in pale pinks and pastel blues and run by a Vietnamese man and his wife and their two daughters. The daughters are in their twenties and quite pretty. At the back of the restaurant, where they have the cash register, there’s a little color snapshot of the man wearing a South Vietnamese Regular Army uniform. Major. He looked a lot younger then. I spent eleven months in Vietnam, but I’ve never told the man. I often eat in his restaurant. The man smiled when he saw me. “The usual?”

I gave him one of my best smiles. “Sure. To go.”

I sat at the little table for two they have in the window of the place and waited and watched the people moving past along Westwood Boulevard and felt hollow. There were college kids and general-issue pedestrians and two cops walking a beat, one of them smiling at a girl in a gauzy cotton halter and white and black tiger-striped aerobic tights. The tights started just above her navel and stopped just below her knees. Her calves were tanned. I wondered if the cop would be smiling as much if he had just gotten fired from a job because a kid he had been hired to protect had gotten snatched anyway. Probably not. I wondered if the girl in the white and black tights would smile back quite so brightly. Probably not.

The oldest daughter brought my food from the kitchen while her father rang up the bill. She put the bag on the table and said, “Squid with garlic and pepper, and a double order of vegetable rice.” I wondered if she could see it on my forehead: Elvis Cole, Failed Protector. She gave me a warm smile and said, “I put a container of chili sauce in the bag, like always.” Nope. Probably couldn’t see it.

I went down to Santa Monica and east to my office. At any number of traffic lights and intersections I waited for people to look my way and point and say nasty things, but no one did. Word was still under wraps.

I put the Corvette in its spot in the parking garage and rode up in the elevator and went into my office and closed the door. There was a message on my answering machine from someone looking for Bob, but that was probably a wrong number. Or maybe it wasn’t a wrong number. Maybe I was in the wrong office. Maybe I was in the wrong life.

I put the food on my desk and took off my jacket and put it on a wooden coat hanger and hung it on the back of the door. I took the Dan Wesson out of its holster and put it in my top right drawer, then slipped out of the rig and tossed it onto one of the director’s chairs across from my desk, then went over to the little refrigerator and got out a bottle of Negra Modelo beer and opened it and went back to my desk and sat and listened to the quiet. It was peaceful in the office. I liked that. No worries. No sense of loss or unfulfilled obligations. No guilt. I thought about a song a little friend of mine sings: I’m a big brown mouse, I go marching through the house, and I’m not afraid of anything! I sang it softly to myself and sipped the Modelo. Modelo is ideal for soothing that hollow feeling. I think that’s why they make it.

After a while I opened the bag and took out the container of squid and the larger container of rice and the little plastic cup of bright red chili paste and the napkins and the chopsticks. I had to move the little figures of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse to make room for the food. What was it Jiminy Cricket said? Little man, you’ve had a busy night. I put some of the chili paste on the squid and some on the rice and mixed it and ate and drank the beer. I’m a big brown mouse, I go marching through the house, and I’m noooot afraid of anything!

The sun was low above Catalina, pushing bright yellow rectangles up my eastern wall when the door opened and Joe Pike walked in. I tipped what was maybe the second or third Modelo bottle at him. “Life in the fast lane,” I said. Maybe it was the fourth.

“Uh-huh.”

He came over to the desk, looked in what was left of the carton of squid, then the carton of rice. “Any meat in this?”

I shook my head. Pike had turned vegetarian about four months ago.

He dumped what was left of the squid into the rice, took a set of chopsticks, sat in one of the director’s chairs, and ate. Southeast Asians almost never use chopsticks. If you go to Vietnam or Thailand or Cambodia, you never see a chopstick. Even in the boonies. They use forks and large spoons but when they come here and open a little restaurant they put out chopsticks because that’s what Americans expect. Ain’t life a bitch?

I said, “There’s chili paste.”

Pike shook what was left of the chili paste into the rice, stirred it, continued to eat.

“There’s another Modelo in the box.”

He shook his head.

“How long since you’ve come to the office?”

Shrug.

“Must be four, five months.” There was a door to an adjoining office that belonged to Pike. He never used it and didn’t bother to glance at it now. He shoveled in rice and broccoli and peas, chewed, swallowed.

I sipped the last of the Modelo, then dropped the empty into the waste basket. “I was just kidding,” I said. “That’s really pork-fried rice.”

Pike said, “I don’t like losing the girl.”

I took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair. The office was quiet and still. Only the eyes in the Pinocchio clock moved. “Maybe, whatever reason, Warren wanted the Hagakure stolen and wants people to know and also wants them to know that he’s had a child kidnapped because of his efforts to recover it. Maybe he’s looking for a certain image here, figuring he can make a big deal out of recovering the book and his daughter. That sound like Bradley to you?”

Pike got up, went to the little refrigerator, and took out a can of tomato juice. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it’s the other way. Maybe somebody wants Warren to look bad and they don’t give a damn about the book just so they stir up as much publicity as they can. Maybe what they want is to make the big Japanese connections lose interest. Or maybe they just want to hurt him. Maybe he owes money.”

“A lot of maybes,” I said.

Pike nodded. “Maybe is a weak word.”

I said, “Maybe it’s the yakuza.”

Pike shook the little can of tomato juice and peeled off the foil sealer tab and drank. A tiny drop ran down from the corner of his mouth. It looked like blood. He wiped it away with a napkin. “We could sit here maybe all night and the girl’s still gone.”

I got up and went to the glass doors and opened them. Traffic noise was loud but the evening air was beginning to cool. “I don’t like losing her either. I don’t like getting fired and told to forget it. I don’t like it that she’s out there and in trouble and we’re not in it anymore.”

Mirrored lenses caught the setting sun. The sun made the lenses glow.

“I think we should stay in,” I said.

Pike tossed the little can on top of the empty Modelo bottles.

“We stay with the yakuza because they’re what we have,” I said. “Forget the other stuff. We push until someone pushes back and then we see where we are.”

“All we have to do is find the yakuza.”

“Right. All we have to do is find the yakuza.”

Pike’s mouth twitched. “We can do that.”

Chapter 15

Nobu Ishida had lived in an older split-level house on a Leave-It-to-Beaver street in Cheviot Hills, a couple of miles south of the Twentieth Century-Fox lot. It was dark, just after nine when we rolled past his home, rounded the block, and parked at the curb fifty yards up the street. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked. The house was brick and board and painted a light, bright color you couldn’t make out at night. Ishida’s Eldorado was in the drive, with a tiny, two-tone Merkur behind it. There was an enormous plate glass picture window to the left of the front door, ideal for revealing the house’s brightly lit interior. A woman in her fifties passed by the window talking to a young man in his twenties. Both the woman and the man looked sad. Mrs. Ishida and a son. With Dad not yet cold in the grave, there was plenty to be sad about.

Pike said, “Me or you?”

“Me.”

I got out of the car as if I were out for an evening stroll. A block and a half down, I turned, came back, slipped off the walk into the shadows, and went to the west side of the Ishida house. There were two frame windows off what looked like a bedroom. The bedroom was dark. Past the windows, there was a redwood gate with a neatly painted sign that said BEWARE OF DOG. I whistled softly through my teeth, then broke off a hedge branch and brushed it against the inside of the gate. No dog. I slipped back to the street, then followed a hedgerow to the east side of the house. The garage was on that side, locked tight and windowless, with a narrow chain link gate leading to the back yard. I eased open the gate and walked along the side of the house to a little window about midway down. A young woman in a print dress sat at the dining room table, holding a baby. She touched her nose to the baby’s and smiled. The baby smiled back. Not exactly a yakuza stronghold.

I went back to the car. Pike sad, “Just family, right?”

“Or clever impersonators.”

Forty minutes later the front door opened and the young man and the woman with the baby came out. The young man had a pink carry-bag with teddy bears on the side, probably stuffed with Pampers and baby bottles and teething rattles and Bert and Ernie dolls. Mrs. Ishida kissed everyone good-bye and watched them walk out to the little Merkur and waved as they drove away. “You see that?” I said.

Pike nodded.

“Classic yakuza misdirection.”

Pike said, “You’re a pip on stakeout.”

Just before midnight, an L. A. P. D. prowl car turned the corner and cruised the block, arcing its big spot over the houses to scare away burglars and peepers. At one-twenty, two men jogged down the middle of the street, one white, one black, breathing in unison, matching strides. By three, I was stiff and hungry. Pike had not moved. Maybe he was dead. “You awake?”

“If you’re tired, go to sleep.”

Some partner.

At twenty-five minutes after five, an Alta-Dena milk truck rolled down the street and made four stops. By six-oh-five, the sky in the east was starting to pinken, and lights were on in two houses down the block. At fourteen minutes after eight o’clock, after jobs had been gone to and children had been brought to school and lives had been put under way, Nobu Ishida’s widow came out of her house carrying a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag and wearing a black suit. She locked the door, walked to the Eldorado, got in, and drove away.

I said, “Let’s do it.”

We climbed out of the Corvette, went through the little chain link gate next to the garage, then around to the back. There was a standard frame door off the kitchen, and French doors opening off the family room to a small, kidney-shaped swimming pool. We went in through the French doors.

Pike said, “I’ll take the back of the house.”

“Okay.”

He disappeared down the hall without making a sound.

The family room was a nice-sized space with Early American furniture and pictures of the kids and a Zenith console color TV and absolutely nothing to indicate that Nobu Ishida had an interest in feudal Japanese artifacts. People magazine sat on the hearth and a box of Ritz crackers was on the coffee table and someone was reading the latest Jackie Collins. Imagine that. Portrait of the criminal as a Middle-Class American.

There was a yellow dial phone on a little table beside a Barcalounger chair across from the Zenith. Beneath the phone was an address book with listings for things like paramedics, doctor, fire, police, Ed and Diane Waters, and Bobby’s school. Probably code names for yakuza thugs. I put the address book down and went into the kitchen. There were messages held to the refrigerator by little plastic magnets that looked like Snoopy and Charlie Brown and baskets of flowers. A picture of Ishida’s wife sat on the counter in a frame that said KISS THE COOK. She looked like a nice woman and a good mom. Did she know what her husband had done for a living? When they were young and courting, had he said, “Stick with me, babe, I’m gonna be the biggest thug in Little Tokyo,” or had he simply found himself there while she found herself with children and PTA and a loving husband who kept business to himself and made a comfortable life? Maybe I should introduce her to Malcolm Denning’s wife. Maybe they would have a lot to talk about.

Pike materialized in the doorway. “Back here,” he said.

We went back through the family room and down a short hall to what had probably once been a child’s bedroom. Now, it wasn’t.

“Well, well, well,” I said. “Welcome to Nippon.”

We were in a small room with a lot of furniture and all the furniture was lacquered rosewood. There was a low table in the center of the room with a pillow for a chair and one of those lacquered boxes with a phone inside. A matching file cabinet stood in the corner, and a low table ran along two walls. On the table were four little stands, each stand holding a pair of horizontal samurai swords, a longer one on the bottom, a shorter one above it. The swords were inlaid with pearls and gems and had silk ribbons wound about the handles. Separating the stands were very old samurai battle helmets shaped like the helmets the Federation Storm Troopers had worn in Star Wars. A beautiful silk robe was framed on the wall above the helmets. It looked like a giant butterfly. There were wood-block prints on the opposite walls and a silk-screened watercolor under glass that looked so delicate that a ripple of air might fray it, and two tiny bonsai trees growing in glass globes. On the outside wall, shoji screens softened and filtered the early morning sunlight. It was a beautiful room.

Pike went to the low table and said, “Look.”

Three books were stacked on the edge of the table. The top book was an excerpted English translation of the Hagakure. The second book was a different translation. The third was titled Bushido: The Warrior’s Soul. Pike thumbed through the top Hagakure translation. “They’ve been read a lot.”

“If Ishida had the real thing, maybe someone found out and wanted it bad enough to try to make him turn it over to them.”

“Uh-huh.” Pike found something he liked and stopped to read.

“Perhaps we can find a clue as to whom.”

Pike kept reading.

“As soon as we finish reading.”

Joe read a moment longer, then put the book back on the table. “I’ll go up front and keep watch.”

When he was gone, I looked around. There was nothing on the low desk but the books and the phone, and nothing on the wall tables but the swords and the helmets. Not even dust. The file cabinet was absolutely clean, too, but at least there were the drawers to look into. The top drawer had neatly labeled files devoted to home and family: the kids’ schools, medical payments, insurance policies. The bottom drawer held art catalogs, vacation brochures, and supply catalogs from Ishida’s import business. There were no financial records from his business. Those were probably with his accountant. Filed under C for Crime.

In the third folder from the back of the drawer I found Ishida’s personal credit card records. The charges were substantial.

Nobu Ishida had two Visa cards and two MasterCards and American Express Platinum and Optima and Diners Club. Most of the charges were at restaurants or hotels or various boutiques and department stores. The Ishidas had gone out a lot, and spent a lot more than people living in this house in this neighborhood might spend. I was looking for patterns, but there didn’t seem to be any. All the hotels were one-shots and so were most of the restaurants. Go someplace for a bite, maybe not go back for another couple of months, if you went back at all. There were a few repeats, but those mostly to places I recognized. Ma Maison is not a yakuza hangout.

I had gone through the old stuff and was working on the recent when I noticed that two or three times a week, every week for the past three months, Ishida had gone to a place called Mr. Moto’s. There were mostly small charges, as if he had gone by himself to have a couple of drinks, but once every two weeks, usually on a Thursday, there was a single large charge of between four and five hundred dollars. Hmmmm.

I put the credit card receipts back in their file and the file back in its folder and left the cabinet as I had found it and went back to the low table. I used the phone and called information.

A woman’s voice said, “What city?”

“Los Angeles. I need a number and address for a restaurant or bar named Mr. Moto’s.”

If all you want is a number, they put on the computer. If you want the address, a person has to tell you. The person gave me the number and the address and told me to have a good day. Something the computer never does. I hung up and wiped the beautiful lacquered box free of unsightly fingerprints, then went out to Joe Pike.

He nodded when he saw me. “Didn’t take long.”

“The best clues never do.”

We let ourselves out, walked back along the side of the house, got into the Corvette, and drove to Mr. Moto’s.

Chapter 16

Mr. Moto’s was a storefront dance club just off Sixth downtown. Hi-tech deco. Whitewashed front with porthole windows outlined in aqua and peach, and Mr. Moto’s spelled out in neon triangles. Japanese and Chinese cuisine. Very nouveau. There would be buffalo mozzarella spring rolls and black pasta miso and waiters with new wave football player haircuts and more neon triangles on the inside. A sign on the door said CLOSED. Another sign said LUNCH – DINNER – COCKTAILS – OPEN 11:30 A. M. It was twenty minutes after ten. We drove another three blocks and stopped at a Bob’s Big Boy to clean up in their restroom. There was an older guy with a copy of the Jewish Daily News standing at one of the lavatories combing his hair when we walked in. Pike went to the lavatory next to him, pulled off his sweatshirt, then unhooked his hip holster and put his gun on top of the soap dispenser. The old man looked at the gun, then at Pike, then left. He forgot his newspaper.

When we were as clean as about a million paper towels and soap that smelled like Pledge could make us, we walked the three blocks down to Mr. Moto’s. It was ten minutes before noon when we went in the front door and the slim Japanese maitre d’ said, “Two for lunch?” The hair on the right side of his head was shaved down to a quarter-inch buzz cut, the hair on the left was long and frizzed. New wave, all right.

I said, “We’ll sit at the bar for a while.”

It was a nice-looking place, even with the neon. The front was all aqua plastic tables and peach wrought iron chairs and a tile floor the color of steel. There was a sushi bar on the right, with maybe twenty stools and four sushi chefs wearing white and red headbands and yelling anytime somebody walked into the place. About halfway back, the room cut in half. Tables continued along the wall on the right all the way to the kitchen in the back. On the left, you could step up underlit tile steps to a full bar and a little drinking area they had there with more tables and plants and neon triangles. A modern steel rail ran around the edge of the drinking platform to keep drunks from falling into someone’s California roll. There were three women together at one of the little tables up in the bar area, and four couples in the dining room. Business people on their lunch hour. Pike and I went back through the dining area and up the little steps to the bar, one of the three women staring at Pike’s tattoos.

The bartender was a Japanese woman in her late twenties. Hard face and too much green eye shadow and a rich ocher tan. She was wearing black, sprayed-on pants and a blue and black hapi coat with red trim that had been tied off just below the breasts so her midriff was bare. A tattoo of a butterfly floated two inches to the right of her navel. She said, “What’ll it be, guys?”

I said, “Not too busy.”

“It picks up about twelve-thirty.”

We ordered a couple of Sapporo in the short bottles, and Pike asked for the men’s room. The bartender told him, and Pike went back through the kitchen. I said, “First time here. A friend of mine raves about the place, though. You might know him. A regular.”

She reached under the bar and music started to play. A Joan Jett rip-off. “Who’s that?”

“Nobu Ishida.”

The bartender shrugged. “So many faces,” she said.

A man and a woman took two stools at the end of the bar. The bartender went down to them. I leaned over the bar to watch her. Nice legs.

The three women at the table took their drinks and went down to the dining area. I brought my beer and Pike’s and took their table. Pike came out of the back a couple of minutes later. He said, “Restroom in the back with a pay phone. L-shaped kitchen running the width of the building and a cold room. Door out the back. Office off the kitchen. Five men and four women working the place.”

We sipped our beer. Mr. Moto’s filled with lots of men in Giorgio Armani suits and women in black biking tights and female lawyers. You could tell the lawyers because they drank too much and looked nervous. There was a smattering of Asians in the place, but most everybody else was white or black. “You’ll notice,” Pike said, “that the only people in here who look like thugs are me and you.”

“You, maybe. I look like Don Johnson. You look like Fred Flintstone.”

Sixteen hours with nothing to eat and the Sapporo was working wonders. Pike flagged a waitress and we ordered sashimi, sushi, white rice, miso soup, and more Sapporo. Sapporo is great when your back is stiff from an all-night stakeout.

Several young women who looked like models came in. They were tall and thin and wore their hair in flashes and swirls and bobs that looked okay in a magazine but looked silly in real life. They spent a lot of time touching themselves.

Pike said, “Maybe we should interrogate them.”

The food came. We’d ordered toro and yellowtail and octopus and freshwater eel and sea urchin. The urchin and eel and octopus were prepared as sushi, each slice draped over a molded bullet of rice and held there by a band of seaweed. Sashimi is sliced fish without the rice. The waitress brought two little trays of a dark brown dipping sauce with a sprinkling of chopped green onion in it for the sashimi. In an empty tray I mixed soy sauce and hot green mustard for the sushi. I dipped a piece of the octopus sushi in the sauce, let the rice absorb the sauce, then took a bite. Delicious. Pike was looking in his miso soup. “There’s something in here.”

“Black pasta,” I said. “Nouveau cuisine.”

Pike pushed the soup aside.

By one o’clock the place was packed. It was SRO up by the maitre d’ and the crowd noise was threatening to drown out the music. Just after one a second bartender came on duty. He was younger than the Butterfly Lady, with short spiky hair and very smooth skin and a little-boy face. Someone’s grad student nephew, given a part-time job to make a few extra bucks during the summer. The Butterfly Lady said something and the new kid looked our way. Worried. I smiled at Pike. “Well, well. I think we’re making progress.”

I got up and went over to the new kid’s end of the bar. “You guys have Falstaff?”

The grad student shook his head. The Butterfly Lady came over, gave me a look, said something in Japanese to the kid, then went back to her end of the bar. The grad student began building a margarita. I said, “How about Corona?”

“Just Japanese.”

I nodded. “Sapporo in a short bottle. Two.”

He poured the margarita mixture into three round glasses. The Butterfly Lady came back, got them, went away. I smiled at the kid. Mr. Friendly. “Get many thugs in here?”

He said, “What?”

I winked at him, and took the two Sapporos back to the table. Our dishes had been cleared. Pike said, “Look.”

Across the room, at a little corner table by some leafy plants, three men were being seated. An older Japanese man, a much younger Japanese man with heavy shoulders, and a tall, thin black man. The black man looked like Lou Gossett except for the scar that started at the crown of his head and ran down across his temple and curved back to lop off the top of his left ear. The two Asian men were smiling broadly and laughing with a slight man in a dark suit whose long hair was pulled back in a punk version of the traditional Japanese topknot. Manager. “Something tells me we are no longer the only thugs in the place,” I said.

“Know the black guy from when I was a cop,” Pike said. “Richards Sangoise. Dope dealer from Crenshaw.”

“You see,” I said. “Gangsters.”

“Could just be coincidence they’re here.”

“Could be.”

“But maybe not.”

“Maybe those two Asian gentlemen are yakuza executives in search of an expanding business opportunity.”

Pike nodded.

I went back to the grad student and gave him the same Mr. Friendly. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you see the three gentlemen seated there?”

“Uh-huh.” Uneasy.

“I have reason to believe that those men are criminals, and that they may be engaged in the criminal act of conspiracy, and I felt obligated to tell someone. You might want to call the police.”

The kid gave me Ping-Pong ball eyes. I walked back and sat down with Pike. “Just a little push,” I said.

We watched the bar. The grad student said something to the Butterfly Lady. She snagged a waiter, said something, and the waiter went down onto the main floor to the manager. The manager came back into the bar and went over to the Butterfly Lady. They looked our way, then the manager left the bar and went back toward the kitchen. A little while later he reappeared and came over to our table. “Excuse me, gentlemen.” Mr. Cordiality. “We’re terribly busy, as you can see. Since you’ve finished your meal, would it be too much of an imposition for me to ask that you make room for others?”

“Yes,” Pike said, “it would.”

I said, “My friend Nobu told me that if I came here I would be treated better than this.”

The manager looked past me for a moment. “You’re a friend of Mr. Ishida?”

I said, “Mr. Ishida is dead. Murdered. I want to know who he was with the last time he was in here.”

The manager shook his head and gave me a smile that wobbled. “You should leave now.”

“We like it here,” Pike said. “We might stay forever.”

The manager worked his mouth, then went back down to the dining room and into the kitchen. Pike said, “I think we’re becoming a problem.”

I nodded. “Fun, isn’t it?”

Pike went down into the dining area and over to the table with the two Japanese men and the black man. He stood very close to the table, so that the men had to lean back to look up at him. He said something to Richards Sangoise. Sangoise’s eyes widened. Pike leaned over, put a hand on Sangoise’s shoulder, and said something else. Sangoise looked at me. I made a gun with my hand, pointed it at him, and pulled the trigger. Sangoise shoved his chair back and left. The younger Japanese man jumped to his feet. The older man looked from Pike to me and back to Pike. Angry. They hurried out after Sangoise. The manager came running out of the back in time to see the end of it. He looked angry, too. The grad student looked even more worried and said something to the Butterfly Lady. She said something sharp and walked away from him. Pike came back to the table and sat down.

“Nice,” I said.

Pike nodded.

When the grad student came out from behind the bar and went back toward the kitchen, I followed him.

The kitchen was all steel and white with a high industrial ceiling. It was hot, even with the kitchen’s blowers going at top speed. There was a narrow hall at the right rear of the kitchen with a door that said OFFICE. On the left, there was another little hall with a pay phone and a sign that said RESTROOMS. I passed a woman carrying a tray of pot sticker dumplings and went into the men’s room.

It was small and white, with one stall for the toilet and one urinal and one sink and one of those blowers that never get your hands dry and a smudged sign above the sink that said that employees MUST wash with soap. The grad student was standing at a urinal. He looked over and saw it was me and you would’ve thought I’d kicked him in the groin. I gave him the smile, then I threw the little bolt that locked the door. He said, “You’d better not touch me.”

I said, “Is this place owned by the yakuza?”

Scared. Very scared. “Open the door. Come on.”

“I’ll open the door after we talk.”

He zipped up and moved away from the urinal. His mouth was working like maybe he’d cry, like he’d spent a lot of time thinking that something like this would happen one day and now it was. Malcolm Denning. I said, “The shit is about to hit the fan, boy. Do you know what the yakuza is?”

He shook his head.

I said, “Did you know a man named Nobu Ishida?”

He shook his head again and I slapped him in the center of the chest with an open right hand. It made a deep hollow thump and knocked him back and frightened him more than hurt him. I said, “Do not bullshit me. Nobu Ishida was in here three times a week for three months. He spent big and he tipped big and you know him.”

Someone tried the door, then knocked. I opened my jacket to show the Dan Wesson to the kid and said, “Occupied. Out in a minute.” The kid’s eyes were big, and his mouth opened and closed like a fish. Koi. He said, “I didn’t know him. He was a customer.”

“But you know the name.”

“Yes, sir.” Yes, sir.

I said, “Nobu Ishida was a member of the yakuza. Every two weeks he was here with other people and those people were probably in the yakuza, too. A girl named Mimi Warren has been kidnapped, maybe by the yakuza, and maybe by someone who knew Ishida. I want their names.”

The kid looked up from the place under my jacket where the Dan Wesson lived. “Mimi was kidnapped?”

I looked at him. “You know Mimi Warren?”

He nodded. “She comes here sometimes.”

“Here?”

“With her friends.”

“Friends?” Witness interrogation had always been a strong point.

“A girl named Carol. Another girl named Kerri. I really didn’t know them. They’re around, you see them, you say hi. They’d come and dance and hang out. We get pretty good bands.” He was looking past me at the door. Like maybe somebody was going to kick it in. “I don’t know anything about a kidnapping. I swear I don’t. They’re going to miss me and come looking. I’ll get in trouble.”

“Tell me about Ishida.”

The kid spread his hands. Helpless. “There were always three other men. The only one I know was Mr. Torobuni. He owns the place. Please.” Terry Ito had said that Yuki Torobuni runs the L. A. yakuza.

I opened the door and let the kid out. A pink-faced guy in a nice Ross Hobbs suit gave me a helluva look when I walked out after the kid.

Mimi Warren? Here?

When I got back to the bar, three men were waiting at the table with Joe Pike. There was an older guy with a lot of loose skin and a cheap sharkskin coat over an orange shirt, and a very short guy with two fingers off his left hand and the sort of baleful stare you get when life’s a mystery. There was also a tall kid with too many muscles in a three-quarter-sleeve pullover. Eddie Tang. He grinned at me. “What do ya know. It’s Mickey Spillane.”

Pike’s mouth twitched. “You missed all the fun,” he said. “While you were out, somebody phoned for reinforcements.”

Chapter 17

The older man in the cheap sharkskin looked at Eddie. “You know this one?” No accent. Eddie nodded. “He came into Ishida’s.”

I said, “Wow, Eddie. Last week you’re working for Nobu Ishida, then Ishida gets osterized, and now you’re working for Yuki Torobuni. You’re really on the rise.”

Yuki Torobuni said, “How do you know who I am?”

“You’re either Torobuni or Fu Manchu.”

Torobuni dipped his chin at Eddie. “Let’s go in the back.”

Torobuni moved past me and went down the steps toward the kitchen. The midget swaggered after him the way midgets will. Pike and I went next, and Eddie trailed behind. The Butterfly Lady watched us go, lean hips moving to The Smiths, little butterfly dancing. Nice moves.

Eddie said, “You like that, huh?”

Some guys.

When we got into the kitchen, Yuki Torobuni leaned against a steel table and said, “Eddie.” Everything was Eddie. Maybe the midget was a moron.

Eddie moved to pat Pike down. Pike pushed Eddie’s hand away from his body. “No.”

The midget took out a Browning .45 automatic about eighteen sizes too big for him. The smell of sesame oil and tahini and mint was strong and the kitchen help was careful not to look our way.

Eddie and Pike were just about the same height but Eddie was heavier and his shoulders sloped more because of the insanely developed trapezius muscles. Eddie sneered at Pike’s red arrows. “Those are shit tattoos.”

Torobuni made a little forget-it gesture with his left hand. “Let’s not waste our time.” He looked at me. “What do you want?”

“I want a sixteen-year-old girl named Mimi Warren.”

Eddie Tang laughed. Torobuni smiled at Eddie, then shook his head and gave me bored. “So what?”

“Maybe you have her.”

Torobuni said, “Boy, I never heard of this girl. What is she, a princess, some kind of movie star?” Eddie thought that was a riot.

I said, “Something called the Hagakure was stolen from her parents, and whoever got it kidnapped the girl to stop the search. It’s a good bet that whoever wanted the Hagakure is also in the yakuza. Maybe that’s you.”

Torobuni’s face darkened. He barked out a couple of words of Japanese and Eddie stopped laughing. “Whoever stole the Hagakure kidnaps the girl to stop you looking for it?”

“That’s the way it looks.”

“Not too bright.”

“Geniuses rarely go into crime.”

Torobuni stared at me a moment, then walked over to a giant U. S. range where a woman was taking a fresh load of tempura shrimp from the deep fat. He mumbled something and she plucked out a shrimp on a little metal skewer and handed it to him. He took a small bite. He said, “Two years ago I had a man’s face put in here.” He gestured at the grease vat. “You ever see a fried face?”

“No. How’d it taste?”

Torobuni finished the shrimp and wiped his hands on a cloth that was lying on the steel table. He shook his head. “You’re out of your mind to come here like this. You know my name, but do you have any idea who I am?”

“Who killed Nobu Ishida?”

He leaned against the table again and looked at me. Eddie shifted closer, his eyes on Pike. The midget with the .45 beamed. Torobuni folded the towel neatly and put it down. “Maybe you killed him.”

“Sure.”

Behind us cooking fat bubbled and cleavers bit into hardwood cutting boards and damp heat billowed out of steamers. Torobuni stared at me for another couple of centuries, then spoke again in Japanese. The midget put away the gun. Torobuni came very close to me, so close the cheap sharkskin brushed my chest. He looked first in my right eye, then in my left. He said, “Yakuza is a terrible monster to arouse. If you come down here again, yakuza will eat you.” His voice was like late-night music.

“I’m going to find the girl.”

Torobuni smiled a smile to match the voice. “Good luck.”

He turned and went out the back of the kitchen, the midget swaggering behind him. Eddie Tang went with them, walking backward and keeping his eyes on Joe Pike. He stopped in the door, gave Pike a nasty grin, then peeled up his sleeves to show the tattoos. He worked his arms to make the tattoos dance, then snarled and flexed the huge traps so they grew out of his back like spiny wings. Then he left.

Pike said, “Wow.”

We went out through the dining room and past the bar. The kid I’d talked to was gone. The Butterfly Lady was busy with customers. People ate. People drank. Life went on.

When we got back to the Big Boy lot, Pike said, “He knows something.”

“You got that feeling, huh?”

Nod.

“Somebody else might know something, too. Mimi Warren used to come here.”

The sunglasses moved. “Mimi?” He was doing it, too.

“She came with friends and she hung out and she probably met a wide variety of sleazy people. Maybe whoever grabbed her was someone she met here and bragged to about what her daddy had sitting in his home safe.”

“And if we can find the friends, they might know who.”

“That’s it.”

The sunglasses moved again. “Uh-huh.”

Forty minutes later I pulled the Corvette into my carport, parked, went in through the kitchen, and phoned Jillian Becker at her office. She said, “Yes?”

“It’s Elvis Cole. I’d like to talk with you about Mimi and her father and all of this.”

“You were fired.”

“That may be, but I’m going to find her. Maybe you can help me do that.”

There was a pause, and sounds in the background. “I can’t talk now.”

“Would you have dinner with me tonight at Musso and Frank?”

Another pause. Thinking about it. “All right.” She didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic. “What time?”

“Eight o’clock. You can meet me there, or I’ll pick you up. Whichever you prefer.”

“I’ll meet you there.” It was clear what she preferred.

Chapter 18

After we hung up I pulled off my clothes, took a shower, then fell into a deep uneasy sleep. I woke just after six feeling drained and stiff, as if sleeping had been hard work. I went downstairs and flipped on the TV news, and after a while there was something about Mimi’s kidnapping.

A blond woman who looked like she played racquet-ball twice a day gave the update standing in front of the New Nippon Hotel, “site of the kidnapping.” She said the police and the FBI still had no information as to Mimi’s whereabouts or condition, but were working diligently to effect a positive resolution. The screen cut to a close-up of a photograph of Mimi with a phone number beneath her chin. After the blond woman asked anyone who might have information to call the number, the news anchor segued nicely into a story about a recruitment drive the L. A. P. D. was launching. There was a number to call for that, too.

Mimi Warren had been given seventeen seconds.

At seven o’clock I went into the kitchen, drank two glasses of water, then went upstairs to shave and shower. I ran the water hot and rubbed the soap in hard and after the shower I felt a little better. Maybe I was getting used to the pain. Or maybe it was just the thought of dinner with an MBA.