Death in Little Tokyo (Ken Tanaka Mysteries Book 1) Page 5

  “Mr. . . . excuse me,” Hansen reached into his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper, “Mr. Susumu Matsuda of Tokyo, Japan.”

  “I met Mr. Matsuda last night, but I can’t say that I really know him.”

  Hansen pulled out two folded sheets of paper from his jacket pocket, and handed them over to me. I unfolded them and looked at the sheets. They were photocopies of my detective business card, both the front and the back.

  “Is that your business card?” Hansen asked.

  “It’s one I had made up for the mystery puzzle. It goes along with the office.”

  “Is that your handwriting on the receipt on the back of the business card?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Can you tell me what kind of package you received?”

  “I don’t honestly know. I picked up the package for a client and that was my only contact with Mr. Matsuda. I couldn’t have spent three minutes in his room.”

  “A client?”

  I sighed. I was beginning to feel very flustered. “A woman stopped by yesterday and apparently made the same mistake you did. She thought I was a real detective. She asked me to go to Matsuda’s room and pick up a package for her.”

  “His room?”

  “I visited him at the Golden Cherry Blossom Hotel. He’s a guest there.”

  “When was this visit?”

  “Last night.”

  “What time last night?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose a little bit after eight.”

  “And you only stayed there a few minutes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was Mr. Matsuda alone?”

  “As a matter of fact, he wasn’t. There was a woman in the room with him.”

  “A woman?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you happen to learn her name?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Was she there to pick something up, too?”

  I shrugged. “I’d say she was there on quite different business, if you understand what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  “I believe she was a prostitute.”

  “What would make you suspect that she was a prostitute?”

  “Some of the statements she made and the way she acted and looked.”

  “And you claim that this was the first time you met Mr. Matsuda?”

  “That’s right.”

  I knew what Hansen was doing. It was a cat and mouse game that I had played on more than one occasion myself in solving mystery weekend puzzles. Except in those circumstances I was usually the cat, and the person I was talking to was the mouse.

  What made me the cat was knowledge—knowledge about the crime. When I did it, what I was trying to do in my questioning of the mouse was to draw some additional piece of knowledge or some statement that would connect the mouse to the crime.

  It’s amazing how strong the need to confess is in people. Sometimes, but not always, the cat and mouse game would lead the mouse to blurt out some confession. The confession might be only a half-truth, without the mouse actually saying he or she was guilty. But it was from those half-truths that a bridge could be built, piece by piece, between the crime and the person suspected of committing the crime.

  I wondered what the crime was that Hansen was investigating, and although I thought it might be better to show patience until Hansen finally told me, I couldn’t help myself and asked, “Can you tell me what this is about?”

  “Earlier this morning Mr. Matsuda was found dead in his room.”

  There was a long silence. I was flabbergasted and for a confused moment I wished this was actually still part of some elaborate hoax arranged by some other member of the L.A. Mystery Club. Finally, Hansen said, “You don’t seem very surprised.”

  “Actually, I’m stunned.” Maybe I was hypersensitive, but I felt Hansen was doing the “inscrutable Asian” bit with his remark. It riled me. Now it was my chance to let the silence linger.

  Hansen finally broke the silence by saying, “Did someone see you enter or leave Mr. Matsuda’s room?”

  “I asked the desk clerk about a house phone when I entered the hotel. The woman with Mr. Matsuda saw me leave. I don’t know if any of the other hotel personnel saw me leave the hotel.”

  “How did you spend the evening after you saw Mr. Matsuda?”

  “Went home, took a bath, read, and went to sleep.”

  “Any witnesses to that? You didn’t see anybody or meet anybody later that evening?”

  “No. I was alone.”

  “Where do you live, Mr. Tanaka?”

  “Silver Lake, near Dodger stadium.”

  “Do you have a car?” In Los Angeles, this was almost a given. Hansen was making a statement more than asking a question.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Can you tell me where it is?”

  “In the lot that’s about a block and a half from here.”

  “Do you mind if we look it over?”

  “For what?”

  “We’d just like to look it over.”

  To see if they can find any clues, I thought.

  “And my apartment?”

  “Yes. That would be nice if we could get your address and permission to look it over.”

  I got scared. And with fear came anger. “You can look over anything you can get a warrant for.”

  “That’s not being very cooperative.”

  “I don’t have to be cooperative. It might not be in my best interest to be cooperative.”

  “Something to hide?”

  “I believe you’re the one who’s been hiding things, or at least not telling me exactly what happened to Matsuda. So far you’ve told me he’s dead. You’ve been interested in my whereabouts later last evening, even though I’ve admitted that I saw him. And you want to check out my car and maybe my apartment. What happened up there?”

  “Mr. Matsuda was murdered. Very brutally murdered. In fact, he was more than murdered, he was totally dismembered; hacked to pieces. Our preliminary estimation is that it occurred at about one or two A.M., and it was such a brutal murder that whoever did it must have been covered with blood when he left the hotel. That’s why I think it might be advisable to look over your car and possibly your apartment. In fact, since you’re the first person we’ve come across who saw him last night, I think I’d like to ask you to come down to the station to make a statement.”

  8

  Hansen sat in a small room directly opposite me. Between us was a metal table covered with linoleum. At one corner of the table there was the microphone of a tape recorder, positioned unobtrusively. On Hansen’s side of the table was a large manila envelope. It had been a long afternoon.

  “All right,” Hansen said. “Let’s go through your story one more time.”

  He had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. The bright light from the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling framed his head and highlighted the fact that he was starting to go bald. The closely cropped hair had a definite shiny spot at the back of his head. Hansen had combed his remaining hair forward and to one side to help camouflage the receding hairline at the temples. His face was broad, with a wide chin. The scars of an adolescent problem with acne still pitted his cheeks.

  I had already come to dislike Mr. Hansen intensely. He had a condescending manner that just made me bristle. I was raised to respect authority and to view good cops as heroes. Hansen may have been a good cop, but in my opinion he was a lousy human being. In life you come across all sorts of people. Some you like, some you don’t like, and most you don’t have strong feelings about one way or another. It’s terrible when you come across someone you instantly don’t like who has some power over your life. Hansen fit this description perfectly.

  “You say you met Matsuda around eight?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that he was not alone.”

  “No. He had a woman in the room with him.”

  “And that you too
k the woman to be a prostitute?”

  “She acted like a prostitute. At least some of the things she said certainly suggested it. She said something about being a dancer, and even did a little pirouette.”

  “Like a ballet dancer?”

  “Yes, but she didn’t look like that kind of dancer. I told you she said something about waving a G-string, and the last time I looked ballet dancers don’t wear G-strings.” Hansen didn’t like my sarcasm, and I told myself that I shouldn’t let my dislike for him push me into acting like a smartass. “She had dyed red hair, was short, and a little plump. I’ve gone through this story twice before and told you exactly what she said.”

  “You didn’t tell me about the little pirouette before. Just cooperate with us, Mr. Tanaka.”

  “I’m sorry.” I shrugged. “I know you’re going over and over my story to see if it’s too pat, and therefore memorized, or too full of holes, and therefore inconsistent. But I’ve told you the truth and no matter how many times we go over the story it will come out more or less the same way each time.”

  Hansen tapped the table with his fingers in irritation. He absently reached to his shirt pocket where he had a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He caught himself and actually scowled. Early in the interview he had asked me if I minded if he smoked. In the cooped-up little room I most certainly did mind, and Hansen had now gone a couple of hours without a smoke. “Let’s try a different topic for a while then. Why don’t you tell me more about this club that you belong to?”

  “The L.A. Mystery Club is a group of mystery enthusiasts who get together monthly to solve crimes.”

  “Crimes?” Hansen’s eyebrows angled quizzically.

  “Not real crimes,” I added. “Some members of the club create the crime that’s going to be solved. The other members come on a Saturday and follow a trail of clues to see if they can solve the crime. Afterward there’s a dinner where the winners are announced and the solution is revealed.”

  “So it’s sort of like kids playing Let’s Pretend,” Hansen said.

  “No. It’s adults solving intellectual puzzles. Sometimes quite complicated intellectual puzzles. But to solve these puzzles you pretend to be something that you’re not. To solve the puzzles some members play roles like in a play. Sometimes we even hire professional actors. They act the parts of various characters in the mystery. The other members sometimes act out the parts of various favorite detectives.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple, characters from detective literature. People like that.”

  “It all sounds kind of silly to me,” Hansen said.

  “Most recreation is. With you, solving crimes is a profession. With us, it’s a hobby. There’s a difference in your outlook when you’re doing something just for the fun of it.”

  “It seems like there’s a more important difference,” Hansen said. “All these club crimes are just foolishness. What I’ve got on my hands is a real murder.”

  I felt my face burn red. I hated Hansen’s attitude, and his remarks about the childishness of the L.A. Mystery Club were all the more infuriating because they had a germ of truth to them. Despite this truth, I felt my anger toward Hansen growing. In the back of my mind I wondered if this was a technique Hansen was using in an effort to make me lose my temper and perhaps say something that I normally wouldn’t.

  “So because of this club activity, you rented the office and had business cards made up,” Hansen continued.

  “Yes.” My voice now had a brittleness caused by anger.

  “And you claim that this woman, Rita Newly, showed up at your office by mistake.”

  “I assume it was a mistake. Initially I thought it might be another member of the L.A. Mystery Club playing a trick on me.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “Obviously not.”

  “So she hired you to go get the package from Matsuda?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you decided to play detective and do it.”

  Once again I felt my face turning red with embarrassment and anger. My jaw clenched and I spat out, “Yes.”

  “So apparently you weren’t able to differentiate between your little playacting and reality?”

  “Apparently.”

  “You didn’t get Newly’s address or telephone number?”

  “No.”

  Hansen sighed and sat back in his chair. “Not much of a detective, are you?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “By the way, what did you do with the package?” Hansen asked.

  “I gave it to her,” I lied.

  “Rita Newly?”

  “The woman who called herself Rita Newly.” My anger made me lie about the disposition of the package, and I knew it was a mistake to make such a foolish statement as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I was about to retract the lie when I saw Hansen shaking his head with a patronizing smirk.

  “So essentially you were a delivery boy and not a detective.”

  “Yes, and please don’t call me a boy. I’m a full-grown man.” I stared at the black tube of the microphone sitting on the desk and wanted desperately to retract my lie, but I realized the entire interview was being recorded, and I didn’t know how to extricate myself gracefully from the situation I had just put myself in without giving Hansen a chance for more snotty comments.

  Hansen lifted up the manila envelope. “I want to show you something.” He opened up the envelope and took out several large photographs. “These are pictures of the body and the room. Could you identify Matsuda if I showed them to you?”

  “I only met him once. Aren’t you sure he was the one who was killed?”

  “The fingerprints and photo matched his passport, so we’re sure who the victim was,” Hansen said. “But I want you to look at the pictures to make sure the man in the room you met was actually Matsuda.”

  Hansen hesitated a second, then added, “It may be difficult to identify Matsuda’s face. The body was pretty well cut up. The doctors say a lot of it was done after he was already dead. It was a pretty violent murder.”

  Hansen handed the photos to me. I looked at the first photo. My stomach gave an immediate lurch at the sight. It was in color; an eight-by-ten blowup.

  Lying on the floor in a corner of the room, dressed in the same suit that I had seen him in, was the body of Matsuda, or what was left of it. Long red slices crisscrossed the head and shoulders, and flaps of skin, matted with blood and hair, hung loosely, exposing the white skull beneath. It was hard to identify the face with the multitude of slashes, but I could see a part of the birthmark on a patch of skin that still clung to the skull. Blood was splashed everywhere.

  In my short time in Vietnam I can’t say that I know for sure that I ever killed someone. I shot at people but I never actually saw anyone get hit. I did see several people killed, however, including someone blown to pieces by a land mine. It was his second day in Vietnam, and he was just unlucky. The horror of that ripped-apart body in Vietnam was no worse than the slashed body before me in the pictures. But for some reason the situation with Matsuda struck me as somehow more terrible. The body in Vietnam was mutilated by the effects of mindless energy during a time of war; an explosion set off because a foot was placed on the wrong patch of earth. The body in the picture was ripped to pieces because someone had stood before it and slashed at it over and over again.

  In the picture, one of Matsuda’s arms was twisted to one side, and the other arm was just a stump. A ring of blood soaked the end of the cut-off jacket sleeve where the rest of Matsuda’s arm should have been.

  I shuffled the pictures. The second picture explained the mystery of the missing arm. Lying on the green rug of the hotel room was the severed arm, with the hand mutilated and missing some fingers. It seemed to be resting just inside the doorway, where someone entering the room would see it first. Next to the arm was a little slip of paper with a number written on it. It was some kind of identification numbe
r used by the photographer.

  I turned to another picture to see one of the severed fingers lying on the carpet in a closeup shot. The curly nap of the green carpet was clearly visible, with the brown severed finger lying incongruously on it like some red and tan slug crawling across a curly green sea bottom. Another identification number flanked the finger.

  The last picture was a closeup of the face. The flesh was sliced by dozens of blows that exposed bloody muscle and bone. I glanced at it without focusing on what I was seeing. I handed the pictures back to Hansen.

  “It’s unbelievable,” I said, shaken.

  “It’s not unbelievable because it happened. That’s the difference between your recreation and my job. The blows on the hands and wrists are characteristic of defense wounds; someone placing their hands and arms over their head to protect themselves. That’s how the fingers got sliced off and how the arm was hacked off, too. You can see the defense mechanism didn’t do much good, because even after Matsuda was dead someone continued to hack away at his head. The forensics boys say it was probably done with a long, sharp instrument. Maybe a sword.”

  “A sword? It must be a maniac.”

  Hansen shrugged. “Who knows. Some people do worse things for just a few bucks. But this was pretty bad. Whoever did this was not someone with just a casual grudge against Matsuda.”

  “I can’t identify the face with all the head wounds, but it’s the same suit that Matsuda was wearing when I saw him earlier that evening, and I saw part of a birthmark on Matsuda’s cheek. Or at least that part of the cheek that is still attached to the skull.”

  “And after seeing these,” Hansen said, touching the photographs, “do you have anything else you want to say to us about what happened?”

  I shook my head, too upset to even remember my lie.

  When I finally got out of Parker Center, the main police headquarters in L.A., I wanted to pick up Mariko, tell her what had happened, and ask her for advice.

  9

  I don’t think Americans are an especially honest people. Cheating on taxes is endemic, and everyone speeds over sixty-five miles per hour. I admit to the latter, but I’m too scared to do the former. I used to have a friend call me every April to boast how little he was paying in taxes. He accomplished this through outrageous cheating, and he was proud of it. He stopped calling the year I told him that because of cheating bastards like him, stupid bastards like me were paying more taxes.