Blood Hina Read online

  Mas walked around the imprisoned garden to gain access to the apartment building. A row of battered metal mailboxes in front of a staircase held few clues. There were numbers but no names. Would Mas have to knock on each door to find where Casey lived?

  As he mulled over his options, a mustached man carrying a golf club appeared from the staircase. “You have my balls.”

  “Excuse?”

  “Golf balls.” The man gestured toward the neon-yellow dimpled balls in Mas’s right hand.

  “Oh yah.” Somewhat embarrassed, he forfeited the balls. He was just trying to be a good Samaritan, not a bloody dorobo.

  “You lookin’ for somebody?” The urban golfer eyed him suspiciously.

  “Casey Nakayama.”

  “Mista Casey?”

  Casey would be the last person Mas thought of a “Mister” with a capital M, but he wasn’t going to publicly dispute it.

  “He outta town, I think. Go ova to church. They may know.”

  It was still early, so Mas didn’t expect to find many people at the church. But he saw a steady flow of mothers walking their knee-high children into one of the buildings.

  “You want to go to the chapel?” a woman who acted like a teacher asked him. She stood in a room surrounded by toys and tables.

  Mas nodded. The woman directed him through the classroom down a hall. The doors of the church were open but the lights were dim. A hakujin woman with frizzy graying hair was stacking some kind of book on the back table.

  “I lookin’ for man in charge,” Mas said.

  “I’m the rector, so I guess it would be me.”

  Mas felt his cheeks flush. He wasn’t a church man, either regular or even sporadic, unless you counted funerals. He didn’t realize that head pastors of a Japanese church could be a hakujin, much less a woman.

  “I lookin’ for Casey Nakayama.”

  “Casey told us yesterday that he was going up north to see his brother for a while. His brother’s been sick with cancer. I don’t think he has much more time. Can I help you with anything?”

  Mas shook his head, and his eyes caught glimpses of color above. He’d seen stained glass windows before, but nothing like these. There were at least a dozen long windows facing each other. Instead of looking reverent and austere, they seemed happy and schizophrenic—privy to private jokes and secrets unknown to the public.

  For instance, there was the mother with her child Jesus, but down below on the same pane was the dog in the Peanuts cartoon—Snoopy, isn’t that what Mari had called her stuffed animal? And then on another pane, all ten detention camps where the Nisei like Tug, Wishbone, Stinky, Spoon, and Ike had been locked up. And on another one, fish and flowers alongside a push mower.

  “I heard about dis,” Mas said.

  “Yes, that one represents all the occupations of our early parishioners. Fishermen, produce workers, flower growers, gardeners. They call them Issei, first-generation Japanese, right?”

  Mas nodded.

  “We just started that garden outside in the memory of our founding minister. Casey helped out from time to time, but mostly people from our Spanish-language congregation are tending it.”

  “Nice, nice,” Mas murmured. He thanked the rector and headed back to the truck. This stop in Koreatown had been a waste. Mas didn’t know if Casey had been feeding the rector a line about being a dutiful brother. He didn’t seem the type to sit attentively beside a dying person, but you never know how people react at times of death. Some people cry with all their might, their heads back like a wolf howling at the moon. Others run around in circles. Quite a few take off as fast as they can, a rocket shooting out from the mess of the earth. Mas had been that way when Chizuko was dying—maybe not physically but emotionally—and his daughter had never fully forgiven him for his escape strategy.

  The Episcopal church held no clues, so now Mas was off to the churches of the faithful gambler. To Santa Anita Racetrack. Hollywood Park. Hustler Casino and Normandie Club in Gardena. Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens. And all the assorted gambling joints in lower Los Angeles.

  By the time he came home, his body felt literally broken. Not in two, but pulverized in fractured pieces. Over the course of the day, he’d seen many men who looked like Haruo—short, shrunken Asian men with oily hair and baseball caps. One even sported a gash on his cheek. But none of them was Haruo.

  Mas spent most of the evening staring at one of the many cobwebs growing in the corners of his house. He remembered how Haruo had been the one who visited Mas every single damn day when Chizuko was hospitalized and then in the months after she died. Haruo would sit on the couch—the same one on which he’d recently slept—and revel in minutia about his day and the day of other friends and even strangers. He’d go on like this for hours. Even when Mas finally dragged himself from his easy chair, turned off the television set, and lay down on his mattress in the bedroom, he could hear Haruo prattle on and on. A part of Mas had wanted to throw Haruo out of the house on his ear, but the truth was, the mindless talking served as Mas’s lullaby, causing him to finally fall asleep.

  At about ten o’clock, later than any human should be calling another, the phone rang. “Mas, I’ve got some bad news.” It was Taxie, and Mas feared the worst. He pictured Haruo’s mangled body, crushed by a car. But instead, Taxie said, “Casey Nakayama. He was found shot dead in an alley outside the market.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  No one knew how long the corpse had been in there, Taxie told Mas on the phone. Casey’s body had been discovered by a homeless man looking for plastic bottles and aluminum cans in the nearby dumpster. “We saw him last on Wednesday,” said Taxie. Wednesday was the same day Haruo went missing.

  “Heezu has a brotha up north,” Mas murmured. Isn’t that what the church lady had told him?

  “Casey? He’s the only boy of all sisters. He doesn’t have any brothers.”

  Early the next morning, Mas went straight to the flower market. Crime-scene tape blocked the alley, and pockets of men stood outside leering, as if Casey’s ghost would suddenly make an appearance. There were even a couple of homeless men, one a seven-foot black man with a large head that drooped down like the shell of a bean sprout.

  Although it was the same windowless concrete building, the lively insides had been sucked dry with news of Casey’s death. Workers and regular customers were in a state of disbelief. “Did you hear about Casey?” “Can you believe what happened to Casey” was the background music for the entire day.

  Mas found Pico sleepwalking through his duties, moving a box of baskets from one side of the storage area to another. He was relieved to see Mas, who understood the inner workings and even secrets of the market, yet was an outsider.

  “He was sitting right here a couple of days ago. I still halfway think this is one of his put-ons, you know. Like any minute, he’ll be walking in the market, saying, ‘Gotcha, gotcha,’ and laughing. But he’s not coming back, is he?” Pico waited to see Mas nod, anything that would make reality stick.

  “Somebody take his money?”

  “The police don’t think it was robbery. He was shot through the head, execution style.” Sounded like a page out of a gangster novel. Casey wasn’t an angel, but he wasn’t completely on the dark side, either.

  “He tellsu some folks dat he goin’ away.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he told me. That he was going up to Laughlin for a few weeks. Struck me as kinda strange, because Casey didn’t really go anywhere far.”

  “So heezu seems just the same, no different?”

  “You know, on Wednesday, while we were playing liar’s poker, he got this phone call. His face just went white, and I don’t mean hakujin white, but ghost white.” It was strange for a hakujin man like Pico to use that term, but Mas figured he’d spent too much time with Japanese. “I don’t know who was on the other line, but Casey wasn’t happy to hear from him. He first says, ‘How’d you get this number?’ And then he listens and says ‘Okay, okay.’ Sounded
to me like he was going to meet up with someone later that day. But he didn’t say anything to us.”

  “Heezu always seems to have sumptin’ up his sleeve.”

  “Well, yeah, he was involved in a couple of schemes. Chump change, if you’d ask me. He was taking a lot of homeless guys to the track. Wasn’t sure what that was all about. And one time this guy in a suit comes in, panting almost like a dog, crying that he got found out by his wife about something he did, so he needs to be extra, extra careful. Sounded like he was having an affair and Casey was somehow involved. Didn’t ask, didn’t want to know.”

  The light in the storage area was so dim that it washed all color from Pico’s face and clothes.

  “Where’su dat Roberto guy, anyhow?”

  “That’s the thing. He calls in his resignation yesterday. Said he had to go to be with his sick mother in El Salvador.”

  Mas grunted. Casey’s supposed cancer-ridden brother in Northern California, Roberto’s mother in Central America—fake and supposedly real relatives in the market seemed to be dropping like flies.

  After visiting the flower market, Mas went up to the maze of Silver Lake to Juanita Gushiken’s small house in back of her parents’ house. She lived part time in G.I.’s house but never gave up her primary residence. “Don’t want to disappear in G.I.’s world,” she’d told Mas, who didn’t quite understand.

  He’d called beforehand, just to make sure she’d be at home. First thing she said when she opened the door was, “Sorry we weren’t able to do much when you called about Haruo being missing.”

  Mas understood. Young people—or even middle-aged people—had their own lives, and it should be that way. He had no expectation that his own daughter Mari should dote on him, although his late wife Chizuko might have.

  “You have that postcard?” Juanita asked, referring to the one with the cryptic “HINA” message that Sonya had received.

  “I gotsu it in the car.”

  Mas retrieved it from the glove compartment—only a few dirt smudges, which he attempted to remove but managed to make worse.

  Juanita examined the photo side, four different views of Phoenix—a large red rock formation, a caveman-like drawing, a totem pole in front of a museum, and a cow town. “Doesn’t look like a regular postcard. It’s like those free corporate kinds from hotel chains. I have a friend who works at a resort in Phoenix; I’ll scan this and e-mail it to her.”

  Mas told the private investigator about Casey’s body in the alley.

  “What the hell? I was just over there a month ago picking up some leis for my girlfriend’s birthday party. It’s a pretty sketchy area, but still, a murder? Do you think this guy’s death has anything to do with Haruo’s disappearance?”

  “I dunno. Three guys gone missing from there in two days.”

  “And you think that it goes back to this postcard and maybe those dolls?”

  Mas couldn’t explain why he thought Haruo’s disappearance had something to do with Spoon and her late husband, only that he smelled a connection. Juanita promised to make the identification of the postcard and its anonymous sender her first priority.

  Once Mas was safely at home, he should have some sense of ochitsuki. Ochitsuki literally meant falling into stickiness, to have presence of mind or be calm. He had done what he could, right? He’d informed the Altadena sheriffs of Haruo’s disappearance, approached the daughter Kiyomi and the son Clement, and elicited Juanita’s help. But his mind wandered to a place where two other men lost their lives twenty years ago. He dug out some old AAA maps for California and found the small town of Hanley, barely a pinprick underneath the larger circle for the city of Brawley. As Chizuko always did, he took out a yellow highlighter (his were all dried out, however) and attempted to draw the route from Pasadena through Palm Springs and then to Imperial Valley.

  He’d tossed most of his dead highlighters and had moved on to a red pen when someone knocked on his door. He wasn’t surprised to see the Buckwheat Beauty on the other side of the busted screen.

  “No word on Haruo?”

  Mas shook his head, the map still bunched up in his fist.

  “Are you planning to go somewhere?” she asked, and her eyes widened when she recognized Mas’s red-pen path to the Imperial Valley. She moved the screen door over so she could enter the house.

  “Why are you going there, of all places?” she asked.

  Mas described his conversation with Sonya de Groot and her suggestion that the former detective Blanco may have some answers. Dee apparently didn’t think the same way.

  “The guy’s an asshole. And he’s a terrible detective. He has all these pet theories that he just makes up in his mind—too much TV, if you ask me. He even tried to say that my father’s accident was my fault, that I had scored some drugs from the wrong people in town. Then it turns out that his boss finds a brick of cocaine in his car. He tries to pin that on me, too. Says it’s my people who did that to him.”

  Mas must have plainly worn his skepticism on his face, because Dee spat out, “Hey, I admit that I’ve made some mistakes. But I didn’t cause my father’s death, all right? I’ve been clean. This time for seven months now.”

  The Buckwheat Beauty said seven months as if it were seven decades. You triple or quadruple that, Mas thought, and then I’ll think it’s a big deal.

  Dee took a couple of short breaths as she listened to Mas explain about the repetitive message on the postcards Sonya had received. “Sounds like they were sent from some kind of wacko. Plus Auntie Sonya says the postcards stopped last year, right? What would that have to do with the dolls?”

  After going back and forth with Mas like in a ping-pong match, Dee finally conceded. “If you insist on going, then I’ll go with you. But you’ll have to drive. I’m not going to waste any gas to go to Hanley.”

  Some people looked for signs to know where they were going, but Mas relied on landmarks. For Dr. Svelick’s, it was the community garden on the corner; for his Wednesday customer, it was the San Gabriel Mission. For Imperial Valley, the landmarks didn’t appear every couple of miles, but every seventy-five. They were notable ones—larger-than-life markers you could see even in the deadness of early dawn. The sloping backs of the dinosaur statues, as big as bank buildings, along the 10 at Cabazon, not far from the shopping outlets. The crop of wind turbines, their blades as ominous as kamikaze plane propellers, outside of Palm Springs. And before Mas knew it, the Ford was firmly in the grip of the desert—not the shiny version with pristine pools populated by skin-damaged hakujin old women in leopard-patterned swimsuits, but the true desert, the brown barrenness that sucked moisture from a man’s lips and cheeks and insides. It was certainly a sign that this place was not for human habitation. Only the ugliest and thorniest plants and creatures seemed naturally up to the task.

  Yet people still persevered. In places like Cathedral City, a retirement town where most of the front yards were multicolored crushed bits of granite. Or Indio, marked by palm trees that were diapered below their feathered fronds to catch ripened dates.

  South of those signs of life came the Salton Sea, invisible from Highway 86. It was just as well, because Mas remembered it as being a leaky sink filled with dirty dishwater. The outline of the television satellite dishes and shoebox-shaped trailers dotting the landscape made Mas feel especially lonely. The Buckwheat Beauty had fallen asleep by now (so much for her offer to drive once they reached Palm Springs), so Mas shivered in the Ford alone.

  Once they passed the southern tip of Salton Sea, Mas shook off the bleakness, and his memory kicked in. He remembered the rows of cantaloupes and honeydew melons swollen in the fields after World War Two. He dealt more with tomatoes and did his share of picking on a Nisei farm on the north side, in a town called Niland. Every time they dug down, they would hit rock, quite literally. When hoes or shovels couldn’t do it, the farmers would have to bring out the big guns—tractors with forklift teeth—to remove the giant stones. Soon, a stacked pile of rocks would
be on the edge of the fields, ready for the taking.

  By the time they were on the outskirts of Brawley, the sun was starting to make an appearance. Dee stirred, squinted, and rubbed her eyes with the tops of her fists like a child.

  “I need coffee,” she said, and Mas agreed. He stopped at a gas station mini-mart.

  “Where the hell are we?” Dee asked. They sat outside, at a plastic table covered in graffiti in some unrecognizable language. All Mas could make out was the number 13 splattered in permanent ink.

  The coffee in their Styrofoam cups looked bad and tasted worse. Mas was just thankful for anything to help recharge his batteries. As always, he drank his coffee black, while Dee opened two packages of sugar and a package of fake powdered cream in a triple tear and dumped it on the surface of the brackish-looking liquid. One stir with her index finger and then she winced after taking a sip.

  “Weezu a coupla miles north of Brawley,” Mas said.

  The Buckwheat Beauty’s face fell, and Mas figured it must still be fatigue. “Need to get something.”

  Mas held onto his cup with both hands and looked out at the skyline. In spite of the hollow outline of the sun, grayness prevailed. Low-lying shrubs pinched at any moisture they could find in the flat brown ground. It was still fairly cool, but Mas could feel an oppressive heat gathering above their heads.

  Dee came out with two red pens with artificial nylon roses sticking out from one end.

  “I gotsu pens,” Mas said, referring to his collection in the old L.A. Clippers mug glued to his dashboard. But the girl ignored him.

  They both tossed their half-drunk coffee in the wire trash can by the mini-mart door and got back into the Ford. They’d traveled only a mile when the Buckwheat Beauty started waving her hands.