Gasa-Gasa Girl (7 page)

Mas nodded. That definitely was true.

“I took the gun to work just as a precaution. It wasn’t loaded, of course. I just kept it in a drawer in case I needed to scare off any vandals late at night.”

“You never registered it?”

“I wasn’t going to use it. Did you do a search of the edit suite inside of the house? It’s on the second floor.”

“No gun in there.” Ghigo tapped his pen on his thigh. “Do you know what kind of gun it was?”

Mari’s voice sounded as small as a mouse’s squeak. “Nine millimeter, I think.”

Mas spit out his gum into a flattened Juicy Fruit wrapper.

“So who else knew about the gun?”

“Well, just me, for a while. Lloyd found it about a week ago. Told me to get rid of it. But I was too busy.”

“I’d like for us to go over to the precinct. To sort everything out.” Ghigo stood up.

“My son,” Mari said.

Ghigo studied Mari’s face for a moment. “Oh, yes. How is he doing?”

Lloyd stood up, and Mas wasn’t sure if he was going to challenge the detective to a fight. “Not sure yet.”

“Listen, you can make it easier on both of us if you just come with me. Wouldn’t want to cause a scene, you know.”

An older couple sitting on a couch at the other side of the waiting room looked over. Mas didn’t relish his daughter and son-in-law being taken away in handcuffs. When a family member was sick, the hospital became your new world. It would be hard enough for Mari to return to this world without everyone knowing that they were suspects in a murder investigation.

“I’ll go, Mari. We have nothing to hide.” Lloyd put on his jacket. “Just call me as soon as you hear something from the doctor.”

Mari nodded.

“And you’d better find us a lawyer.”

While Lloyd and Mari discussed more details about doctors, Mas went over to Ghigo.

“You hang on to that gardenia?”

Ghigo, a bit puzzled, peered down at Mas. “Oh, you mean that white flower. Yep, we bagged it. But then there were a lot of flowers in that garden.”

“That flower not from the garden,” Mas told him. “Take a look—some kind of hair in the middle.”

Ghigo stared at Mas for a moment as if he didn’t know what to make of the old Japanese man. “I’ll have the lab check it out,” he said.

Mas nodded. Somehow he felt that the gardenia was important, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.

After Lloyd gave Mari an awkward kiss on the lips, he and Detective Ghigo headed down the hallway toward the elevators. Both Mari and Mas stood and watched until the two men disappeared into the elevator going down.

“He wants me to get an attorney. How am I going to find a criminal attorney?” Mari began pushing buttons on her cell phone when a nurse passing by stopped her, pointing to a large sign showing a picture of a phone with a red diagonal line through it.

“Dammit, dammit. Nothing’s going right today, Dad.” Mari buried her forehead in her hands.

“No worry, Mari.” Mas meant to take the phone from her, but instead felt his daughter’s fingers, ice-cold and trembling. “I may knowsu someone who can help.”

chapter four

G.I. Hasuike was an attorney in Los Angeles with long black and gray hair that reached down to his waist. His hair was usually tied back in a rubber band; that’s why Mas hadn’t noticed its length the first time he had met him.

Since that time, they had shared enough beers and sake for Mas to learn that G.I. was short for George Iwao. He was a Sansei, a third-generation Japanese American, who ran around with a pack of friends from Boyle Heights, next door to East L.A. G.I. had fought in the Vietnam War, not because of any sense of duty, but because his friends had run out of soy sauce the night before their Army physical. They had a square gallon container of Kikkoman
shoyu
, which they took turns gulping (in between swigs of rum and whiskey and puffs of who-knows-what). G.I. unfortunately had too much rum and whiskey and not enough salt from the
shoyu
, so his blood pressure test came out free and clear to go shoot some other yellow men an ocean away.

G.I. specialized in spill-and-fall cases, but he was no stranger to criminal cases, either. He told Mas that he had witnessed dozens of men killed in the jungle, so what was dealing with a few murders in the streets of L.A.?

“Where are you calling from, Mas?”

Mas, clutching Mari’s cell phone, stood underneath a pine tree on the corner outside the hospital. A few pine needles fell on his shoulder as a lost bird moved on to a warmer location. “New York,” he said.

“New York? Damn, Mas. You sure get around these days. What’s goin’ on?”

Mas tried to explain the whole scenario, from the discovery of the body to Detective Ghigo’s questioning of Mari and Lloyd. “You knowzu any lawyers in New York?”

“Do they have any money? Criminal defense lawyers like to have their fee up front.”

Mas blinked. He pictured the underground apartment and pitiful television set. “No, no money.”

“May be hard,” said G.I. “But I do have a friend connected with the Asian Legal Defense Alliance. Her name’s Jeannie Yee. She’s young, but can kick anybody’s butt.”

Mas took down the name and phone number on the visitor’s sticker the hospital had given him.

After he got off the phone with G.I., Mas realized that he had forgotten to tell the lawyer that Lloyd was
hakujin
, not Asian. Either way, he still needed defense. And besides, wasn’t he a member of the family?

W
hen Mas returned to the waiting room, Mari was talking to a young dark-skinned woman in a white lab coat. She resembled Mr. Patel, one of Mas’s customers in Arcadia who owned a small chain of teriyaki fast-food stands. “Thank you, Doctor, thank you,” Mari said as the physician headed for a door to the hidden heart of the hospital. Mas pulled out his visitor’s name tag, which had hairs of his wool sweater on the once-sticky side and the lawyer’s name and phone number on the other. “Youzu call dis Jeannie girl,” he told Mari. “She supposed to help you out. At least thatsu what my friend G. I. Hasuike says.”

Mari accepted the name tag and her cell phone. “Takeo’s fever has gone down. He’s going to stay overnight for some more tests, and they’re going to let me be with him.” She then shifted her weight from one leg to the other. “I know Ghigo told you that you can’t leave New York, and you know what, I think that it’s good that you’ll be around. I’ve been fighting off this postpartum depression, you know, feeling bad after having a baby. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m saying or feeling anymore.”

Mas couldn’t remember if Chizuko had suffered from this postpartum sickness—it had been more than thirty years ago. But Mas was so relieved that his grandson was doing better that he began babbling promises, promises that later he wasn’t sure he could keep.

The first promise was that he would check on Lloyd. But it was now getting dark, and he had no idea how to get to this Seventy-seventh Precinct. Just the number—seventy-seven—scared him, because it meant there were at least seventy-six other precincts and who knows how many dozens more. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and thought about his alternatives. He could try one of those underground trains; he saw the stations here and there marked with red and green signs. But everyone was
gasa-gasa;
they probably wouldn’t have the time to hear the troubles of an old Kibei man. He thought about the neighbor, the middle-aged
hakujin
woman with the flowing sweater, but they had not formally met. And then there was the Korean shopkeeper, but Mas had already shared too much about himself in a short time. He couldn’t impose more, or his debt would be too great. Japanese straight from Japan always said, “
Osewa ni natta
”—“I have been in your debt”—but that usually applied to little things like being bought a meal or borrowing a cordless power drill, not going to a police station to rescue a son-in-law. In cases like this, it was best to lean on someone familiar, and tonight that person had to be Tug Yamada.

Mas first went back to the underground apartment to make good on his second promise to Mari—that he get something to eat. He was practically running on empty, fueled only by bread and Nescafé. He must have looked as tired as he felt, because Mari had commented that his face seemed pale and dragged down. Mas replied that it was the weather: how could a California man survive in thirty-degree temperatures? At least Mas was hot-blooded, and not a
samugari
like Chizuko, who had always complained when the house dipped below fifty-nine degrees.

The apartment smelled of the richness of Thai food and steamed rice, which seemed to almost lift the rooms above their subterranean level. Mas first called Tug at his daughter Joy’s house. No answer, but an answering machine with strange music and a female voice mewing like cat. Mas couldn’t believe that Joy would have such a message (what happened to a plain “Hello and leave your name and number”?), so he hung up and called a second time. What the hell—he left a message and hoped that somehow the human cat would deliver the message to his friend.

In the meantime, Mas began his mission of getting food into his stomach. He was grateful for Mari’s making of the rice. Their rice cooker wasn’t one of those high-tech, streamlined kind decorated with pink flowers or tiny elephants. Instead, it was the standard of the sixties and seventies, a white one with black handles that stuck out like ears. Mas put two scoops of rice on a plate and then foraged through the paper bags of take-out food. A strange stew of vegetables covered in a sweet-smelling sauce that was the color of yellow chalk. Chicken on skewers that reminded Mas of
yakitori
barbecued on hibachis at Japanese bars. And finally, thick rice noodles that were folded like pillows in brown gravy. Mas had never had Thai food before, but tonight he ate as if there were no other.

As he was chewing on the last chicken skewer, the phone rang. It was Tug, apologizing and telling him that he was without his rental car. Mas told him everything that had transpired: from Kazzy’s death to Takeo’s medical setback to the appearance of Detective Ghigo at the hospital. “Needsu to get to Seventy-seven police station; check on Lloyd,” Mas told Tug. They made plans to meet at the Atlantic Avenue subway station ticket booth in the northeast corner. Mas had no idea how he was going to get to the Atlantic Avenue station, much less any specific corner of it, at eight o’clock at night, no less. At this point, he would just have to go out there and try. “Snooze, you lose,” his former friend Wishbone Tanaka once told him regarding an opportunity to buy a nursery. At that time, Mas lost a business deal; but this time, he could lose much more.

M
as had put his old long underwear from his fishing and camping days on underneath his wool sweater and nylon jacket, but the blast of cold air still seemed to soak through the layers of clothing into his bones. He adjusted his Dodgers cap, but that was hardly any help in retaining warmth. At least it would disguise his age; he figured looking seventy years old would attract lazy thieves seeking an easy target.

On his subway map he had already traced the route of the green line with the edge of his dirty index finger. Unfortunately, the Atlantic Avenue stop was a good seven blocks away from the underground apartment. Seven blocks during a winter day in L.A. would be nothing, but this was New York City at night. Luckily the path was a straight one along Flatbush Avenue, so Mas figured that at least there was no danger of getting lost if he went in the right direction.

He traveled alongside the moving wall of cars until he came to a gated area next to a sporting goods store. The gate was open, and an overhead light from the side of the building shone on a man digging around a small pond. The Teddy Bear Garden that Tug had talked about, Mas remembered. Mas couldn’t help but walk a few steps into the dirt.

“Well, hello—” A balding
hakujin
man turned from his shoveling job. Mas noticed a flat of daffodils in square plastic planters. The man didn’t seem afraid that a stranger had invaded his space, and Mas wondered if the night gardener might be a little
kuru-kuru-pa
. “Got kind of behind from the rain last weekend,” the man said. “Wanted to at least get the daffodils going.”

From what Mas could tell, the garden would look pretty good in late spring. But right now, the bare trees and planted seedlings only held a promise of what could be.

“Are you interested in gardening?” the man asked.

Mas didn’t know how to answer. He had been doing it for more than forty years, but he honestly didn’t know how interested he was in it. “Izu a gardener,” he chose to respond. “In California.”

“Wonderful, that’s just wonderful.” The man went to a folding chair and pulled a piece of paper from a stack that was held in place by a round polished rock. “We’re having a barbecue here in a couple of weeks for anyone who wants to join us. We would love to have you.”

“Izu be out of here by then.” Mas glanced at the colored flyer, which was printed in English on one side and Spanish on the other.

The bald man looked sincerely disappointed. “That’s too bad,” he said. “But if you’re around, please come.”

As Mas left the gated garden, he just had to shake his head. He had had contact with plenty of strange
hakujin
in California, but the ones in Park Slope might even top them. He almost stopped by a wire garbage can to toss the flyer, but had second thoughts and stuffed it in his jeans pocket instead.