Death in Little Tokyo (Ken Tanaka Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  “There’s been sporadic complaints about it. Often the Japanese don’t comply with the terms of the contracts they sign with the women, which causes problems.”

  “Have you ever heard of a woman being blackmailed once she returned to the States?”

  “Blackmail?” A pause. I could just see the gears turning in his mind while he thought about that one. “No, I’ve never heard of a case of blackmail once the woman returned to the United States. Why do you ask.”

  “I think I might be involved with one.”

  “You mean a real one?”

  “Yes. And that’s not the half of it. I’m also involved with that Japanese businessman that was killed at the Golden Cherry Blossom last night.”

  “The one reported in the Times?”

  “Yes.” I gave Ezekiel a brief rundown on my meeting with Rita and Matsuda. I left out the part about still having the package. When I was done, I asked, “Any ideas?”

  “Obviously the woman didn’t want to pick up the package herself because she was trying to put something over on Matsuda. For five hundred bucks she bought herself a sacrificial goat.”

  “So who killed Matsuda?”

  “Not enough information,” Ezekiel said. “Can’t figure things like this out without information.”

  “Yeah, I’m finding that out,” I said. “Say, do you know a good criminal lawyer?”

  “I know of several lawyers who are criminals.”

  I gritted my teeth and rephrased my question. Ezekiel was not trying to be funny. When people laughed at things he said, he’d sometimes get puzzled and hurt. It was just the way his brain worked. “Do you know of any lawyers who are good at representing criminals?”

  “Just what I read in the paper. Do you need one?”

  “I might. Mariko has suggested her cousin Michael, but I don’t know him and I want to make sure I talk to someone who knows what he’s doing.”

  “You need Mary Maloney. That woman can find out anything. She’ll know how to find out what you want to know about Mariko’s cousin. Anything else?”

  “No, not now.”

  “Okay, but talk to me more about this when you have the time.”

  The phone was dead. It was typical of Ezekiel to hang up without saying good-bye, and I wasn’t offended by it. I replaced the receiver and decided to drive down to the detective office before I called Mary.

  I parked my car in the lot I normally used and walked to the office. I noticed the posters advertising Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week festival on the telephone poles. A Nisei is a second generation Japanese in the U.S. I was a third generation, which made me a Sansei.

  Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week celebration was started in 1934 by a bunch of enterprising Nisei looking for a way to drum up jobs. It usually coincided with the Japanese O-bon, which is held in late summer. Before coming to L.A., I had never heard of Nisei Week, but O-bon was something we used to celebrate in Hawaii. In the way we Americans have of homogenizing ethnic events until they lose their toothiness, the L.A. version of O-bon consists of a parade with street dancing, plus the usual kitsch things like a beauty pageant and plenty of chicken lunches for businessmen. I don’t think most people know that the festival has its roots in a Buddhist religious festival.

  I walked into the office building and summoned the slow elevator. The building where I rented the office had one supreme virtue: the rents were dirt cheap. Otherwise, it was a pit. Like most old office buildings, it had a smell of age clinging to it, like the stale ghost of the past. When the building was new and bustling with commerce it was home to dentists and lawyers and several small accounting firms. Now it housed small-time import/export businesses and nondescript enterprises with names like “John Smith, Inc.”

  My office was on the second floor, and in the few days I had occupied the office I rarely saw anyone else walking the halls of this floor. I put the key in the door and turned the lock.

  The scene that greeted me was chaos. Every file cabinet drawer had been opened, removed from the cabinet, and dumped on the floor. The desk drawers had been treated in a similar fashion. Even the four pictures I had hung on the wall had been taken down and dumped facedown on the desk. It took me a few moments to realize that someone was looking at the backs of the pictures, to make sure nothing had been taped to them. So much for my idea to do precisely that with the package.

  Since they were all props and stage furniture, most of the drawers were empty. The one exception was the top drawer of the desk, where I kept my notes about the mystery weekend, along with short biographies I had written for each of the characters in the mystery. These were scattered on the top of the desk. Someone had apparently read them and I wondered what they made of them.

  The phone started ringing and I was at a loss to find it for a few seconds. I finally went to where the cord was plugged into the wall and followed the cord until I found the phone sitting under a file drawer. I sat on the floor and answered it.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr.Tanaka?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Rita Newly. I’ve been calling for two days now to make arrangements to pick up my property.” Her tone was brittle and sharp.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been in the office. A good part of the time I was with the police.”

  “The police?” Her tone was now more wary than surprised.

  “Yes. Mr. Matsuda was murdered soon after I picked up the package for you.”

  “That has nothing to do with me,” she said hastily. “The package is my property, and part of a normal business transaction.”

  “Pornography and blackmail are normal business transactions? That’s a peculiar view of what you’ve told me.”

  “Look, I really need that package. What will it take to get you to give it to me?”

  “How about starting with some information? For instance, who were those two Asians you were running away from yesterday morning?”

  “What Asians?”

  “Oh, come on, Ms. Newly. I was in front of the office when you pulled your cool maneuver with the Mercedes. It seemed precipitated by your seeing two Asian gentlemen standing in front of the office.”

  “I don’t know who they were.”

  I sighed, exasperated. “If you didn’t know them, why did you take off? They certainly seemed to know you because they took off after you. Now I come into the office and find everything turned upside down. . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean someone ransacked my office yesterday afternoon or last night. Everything is torn apart.”

  “Did they get the package?”

  “The famous package! No, they didn’t get the package. It’s being held at a safe place not five minutes from the office. But you’re not going to get it until you start telling me the truth about what this is all about.”

  There was a long silence. “Hello?” I finally said, thinking she might have hung up.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Tanaka,” she was all sweetness and light again. “Those men were Yakuza, Japanese gangsters. I recognized one from Tokyo. They scared me when I saw them in front of your office, and I just panicked and ran.”

  “Gangsters?”

  “That’s right.”

  I digested that statement. Lacking anything more insightful, I asked, “So, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. My package has nothing to do with the murder of Mr. Matsuda. That shocked me when I heard about it on the news. But I’m sure my business with him has no connection with this crime.”

  So she already knew about Matsuda’s murder. I wondered if she knew from the news or some other means. “So, what is your involvement in this?”

  Another pause. “I’m not sure I can trust you,” she said. “Can you let me think about it for a while and get back to you?”

  “Why don’t you give me a number where I can get in touch with you,” I suggested.

  “No, I’ll call you,” she said. She hung up.

  “Damn!” I said
as I slammed down the phone. I sat for a few minutes, but finally decided that the most positive way I could vent my frustration was to put the office back into order.

  As I worked I came across the telephone books that I got when I installed the phone. I put them aside and finished putting the office together. When I was done I picked up the yellow pages and started flipping through them. Finding the woman in Matsuda’s room was important. She could confirm my story about just being in the room a few minutes and leaving. She could also supply the cops with information on what happened after I left. The question was, how to find her?

  Of course, Sherlock Holmes would have known her family history, her place of employment, her residence, and her social security number after a ten-second meeting, but unfortunately I wasn’t The Great Detective. In fact, I wasn’t even a great detective. Thinking about it, I wasn’t even a detective. Great.

  But I did have clues. She said she was a dancer, and she said she needed only half an hour to get dressed and on stage after her proposed “party.” That meant she had to get someplace close to the hotel. Even at 10:30 at night, you can’t drive too far in downtown L.A. in that time. She also said something about a G-string. In an age where some grandmas wear thong bikini panties, sexy underwear is not a big deal, but I imagine something like a G-string is still primarily worn by strippers. That meant a club or something similar. So I should have been able to narrow things down to a strip joint within a short driving distance from the hotel. So far, so good.

  But how to pinpoint what strip joints were within a short distance of the hotel became a problem. I looked up strippers in the yellow pages and only found stripping telegram services. I looked up strip clubs and found nothing. Nightclubs got me a lot of listings, but no real indication about which ones had strippers. It looked as if I might be condemned to driving around the hotel in ever-widening circles, keeping my eyes peeled for someplace where the woman might be dancing. That seemed like a long and tedious task, but one that couldn’t be avoided without some kind of listing of strip joints in downtown L.A.

  The phone rang. It was Mariko.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Uh, fine, I guess.”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “Somebody ransacked the office here.”

  “A thief?”

  “Maybe, but they didn’t seem to take anything.”

  “The package. They were looking for the package.”

  “Maybe. I can’t be sure. It might be coincidence.”

  “Are you going to report it to the police?”

  “I’m not sure about that, either. They didn’t take anything, and I really hate that cop assigned to this case. He’s an ass. Have you called your cousin Michael yet?”

  “He’s in court this morning. His secretary said he’d call back this afternoon. I said it was important.”

  I sighed.

  “So what are you going to do?” Mariko asked.

  “I’m trying to find the woman who was in Matsuda’s room. She can verify my story.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Ah, research,” I said lamely. I was embarrassed to tell Mariko of my fruitless investigation into strip joints.

  “What kind of research? Are you going to cruise for hookers?”

  That was a development I hadn’t contemplated. In downtown L.A. that could be a formidable task. “If you must know, I was trying to figure out how to find the addresses of all the strip joints in downtown L.A. I want to plot them on a map and see which ones are close to the hotel. I haven’t had much success, though, because strip joints aren’t listed in the yellow pages.”

  “Oh, if that’s what you want you should pick up a copy of the L.A. Sizzle newspaper. They sell them in front of liquor stores. It will have a complete listing of strip joints and bars with strippers.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “Seriously, how would you know that?”

  “Hey, the guys in AA have sworn off liquor, not vice. Most of those nude places can’t serve hard liquor, so the guys claim it’s a good place to hang out. Of course, something like the public library doesn’t serve liquor, so I don’t think not serving liquor is the real reason the guys go to the clubs.”

  I stammered my thanks to Mariko for the tip, then went a block to a liquor store that, sure enough, had a news rack with the L.A. Sizzle newspaper in front of it. On the way back to the office I looped past my car and got my Thomas Brothers map guide.

  The newspaper had the ads for nude bars neatly organized by the section of the city, and it only took me a few minutes to locate two clubs close to the hotel, along with a theater called the Paradise Vineyard that promised “Old Time Burlesque” in its ad. I marked their locations on my map of downtown.

  Since they were all close, I decided to drive by them to see what there was to see, but first, on impulse, I picked up the phone and called Mary Maloney.

  When she found out who it was, Mary’s voice warmed up. “Ken! How’s the mystery coming? We’re all looking forward to participating in it.”

  “It’s coming along fine, but I have something more serious to ask you.”

  “Oh, what is it?” Mary was a large woman, who enjoyed mothering people. Maybe that’s why she has contacts everywhere who were willing to help her whenever she wanted. Mary was still something of a puzzle to me. For all her openness and friendly demeanor, she really didn’t talk much about herself. She didn’t seem to work, and although she seemed to have a modest lifestyle, she also had a penchant for taking off to Europe or Asia for weeks at a time, seemingly on a whim. That implied some source of income, but she never talked about it. She also had a mania for knitted dresses, sweaters, and pants suits. In fact, I couldn’t recall seeing her in anything that wasn’t knitted. I don’t know if she made these clothes herself or bought them, but Mariko once remarked that Mary’s clothes were custom-made, and not off the rack.

  “I’m afraid I’m involved with that murder at the Golden Cherry Blossom Hotel, and I need to get some legal advice about how to gracefully get out of a situation I’ve put myself in. Mariko has suggested that I talk to her cousin Michael, but frankly I don’t know if he’s any good. As you know I’m unemployed, so maybe he’ll give me a discount, but I don’t want a price break if it’s going to land me in jail with bad advice.”

  “What’s his full name.”

  “Michael Kosaka.”

  “And he practices here in L.A.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me some time. I’ll call you back with some information.”

  “I was just about to leave the office.”

  “It will only take me a minute. Just wait.”

  I gave Mary the office number and rang off. I had time to put my notes on the club mystery back in order when the phone rang. It was Mary.

  “Michael Kosaka is an excellent attorney,” Mary reported. “My sources say you should get good advice from him.”

  “Thanks, Mary, I appreciate it.”

  “So you’re not going to explain what’s going on?”

  “Not right now. I’ll tell you as soon as I can.”

  “Rats!”

  “See you soon.” Mary was an information junky, but things were happening so fast I didn’t know what information to give her right now. One thing I wasn’t going to give her was the fact that I was going to spend my morning checking out strip joints. Look, I’m not lily pure and pristine. I’m not even prudish. But I was embarrassed.

  I drove to the first club and, of course, it was closed. In front of the club was a couple of display cases with pictures of the girls, and I stopped to look. They all seemed to have names like Ginger and Kiki and Brandy. I didn’t recognize any of them. As I stood in front of the club looking at the pictures, I had the thought that someone like Mrs. Kawashiri would probably drive by and see me, and it made me uncomfortable. Still, this was business of sorts, and I pressed on to the second club
.

  It had the same setup, with pictures in front, along with its own collection of Brandys (this time spelled Brandee) and Gingers, but I didn’t see the woman I was looking for, so I went to the theater.

  The Paradise Vineyard is an old converted movie theater on the western edge of downtown Los Angeles. The facade of the theater is weathered, and the once-bright gold, red, and yellow designs on the theater’s front are now muted and worn.

  The marquee on the front of the theater promises “Girls! Girls! Gi ls!” The missing “R” looked as though it had been gone for a long time. Underneath the triple proclamation of what could be found within was a yellow and black banner with the words “Old Time Burlesque!”

  I parked my car and walked to the front of the theater, where I was disappointed to see that there were no pictures of the dancers, just a poster informing me that “Cutie Valentine” and “Yolanda LaHuge” were the featured acts. At least they were plumb out of Gingers and Brandies, even though I had a good idea about what it was about Yolanda that was so huge. Still, without photos, it was impossible to tell if the woman I met was dancing there.

  “You know someone here?”

  I knew that voice, and it was the worst person I could think of to catch me in front of the theater.

  “Hello, Officer Hansen. I don’t know anyone here.”

  “That’s Detective Hansen,” he said. His eyes were already narrowed in suspicion. “If you don’t know anyone here, why are you standing in front of the theater?”

  “I was hoping to find some picture in front so I could see if the woman I met in Matsuda’s room was a dancer here.”

  “How did you know to come here?”

  “I got a list of strip clubs in downtown L.A. and marked the ones near the hotel on a map. Do you want me to show it to you?”

  “Yes.”

  We walked to my car with my face burning red. “I imagine you’re doing something similar,” I said, as I showed him my Thomas Brothers map with the clubs marked on them.

  “I’m interested in why you’re doing this,” Hansen said.