Stalking the Angel (4 page)

“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 Cañon 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.

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 facade,
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?”