Blood Hina (23 page)

Although he had experienced some rough patches in the 1980s, Itchy Iwasaki was making a tidy sum in his mortuary partnership, especially because he was in charge of the Japanese bereavements. Funerals were big deals in this ethnic community—you could just see from the paid obituaries in the
Los Angeles Times
. At least one and sometimes even up to three—what a bonanza!—of the approximately twenty obits was topped with a Japanese name. And more often than not, if it was a man’s name, an image of an American flag accompanied it, a testament to those who had fought in either World War Two, Korea, or Vietnam.

Of course, it didn’t mean one out of twenty people in Southern California was Japanese. The reality was much, much less. But if you judged from the hoopla in the obituary
section, you would come to a very different conclusion.

Mas had initially thought that Itchy, who joined the mortuary in the eighties, had been related to Spoon, but now he was convinced that the connection was on Ike’s side. It had been hard for Itchy to establish himself in the field, with so many competing mortuaries southwest of Lincoln Heights in Little Tokyo. It had required Itchy to take some desperate measures—maybe not so harmful, but perhaps not so ethical, either.

So Mas pounded up the stairs to Itchy’s office, in search of two dead men. Once he received his answer, he knew what he would say to the widow in her home in Montebello.

Like the doll man, Spoon did not come to her door no matter how many times the doorbell rang. There was nothing musical about Spoon’s bell—it seemed to administer an electric shock to the comatose house. Except for Sonya sneaking looks through her drapes, there was literally no one in their homes on the cul-de-sac during the day, so Mas could be as
urusai
, noisy, as a bloodthirsty watchdog. He altered his tactics and began pounding the door with his good left fist. He had ripped the middle of his T-shirt and wrapped it around the cut on his right hand to stop the bleeding. The dried blood was brick red, already crusted like old paint over rags.

Finally the doorknob began to turn, and it was Spoon, in her trademark off-white sweater. Keeping the chain on the door, she cringed to see the blood on the side of Mas’s face and glanced beyond his silhouette, as if she were worried
that someone else was on the porch. She then closed the door, removed the chain lock, and reopened the door.

“Come in,” she whispered.

After Mas entered, Spoon resecured the door and the chain lock. She offered no explanations and excuses for why she’d first ignored Mas’s ringing of the bell. And why she was being so cautious now. Didn’t Haruo say that sometimes Spoon forgot to lock the front door at night?

“What happened to you?” she asked meekly. When Itchy had asked the same question, Mas lied and said it had been a tree-cutting accident.

This time he offered no explanation, only that he’d just come from Itchy’s mortuary in Lincoln Heights.

Spoon nodded. “He called me.” She sank down on one end of the couch and hugged an embroidered pillow to her chest as if to cushion a blow. Mas noticed that the Girls’ Day platform of stacked shoe boxes was gone. Spoon gestured for Mas to sit across from her on a love seat.

What had Itchy told her? When Mas had arrived at his office, the mortuary man seemed congenial at first, pulling at his sunburned earlobes as usual when he said hello. But when Mas mentioned Ike Hayakawa’s name, it was harder for Itchy to keep up the sides of his smile.

“Itchy wanted to know how you found out,” reported Spoon.

It had been a weird hunch. Maybe all this time Mas wondered about Itchy’s good luck and his sudden cash infusion in the eighties. When you yourself didn’t have much good fortune, you were brutally aware of another man’s jackpot.

“You know what he did?”

Spoon shook her head. “Not until recently.” Her face was the color of rice paste—she really looked unwell but not shocked. If Mas had recently discovered that a stranger’s dead body had been substituted for his spouse’s, he would not be so calm.

It hadn’t only been a nagging suspicion about Itchy’s launching of the mortuary partnership back in the eighties. That was tangential, actually, the piece that was helpful in tying up the loose ends. What was much more curious was that both Ike and Jorg had indicated to their children that they were expecting to die on the same day. They were just driving to Hanley, not flying to the Middle East on a combat mission. And then, what a coincidence, each had taken out a million-dollar life-insurance policy. Quite convenient to guarantee a strong future for both their respective families.

And then there were the dead bodies that had been found at the Hanley car crash. Blanco had said that they’d most likely been doused with gasoline and set on fire. Mas knew enough about burned remains—you always went for the teeth. The teeth left a trail leading to their owner.

That’s why before the Buckwheat Beauty got out of his truck at the residential facility, he’d asked: “Youzu papa gotsu dentures?”

“Yes,” she said, “he got them all extracted when he was still in his fifties. Too much candy, I guess. That’s why he always told Uncle Jorg to go to the dentist, but Uncle Jorg didn’t listen to him. Funny, such a big man afraid of the dentist.”

So no teeth trail—Mas filed that information away. He
then felt confident to charge into Lopez, Sing, and Iwasaki Mortuary and demand some answers.

Itchy instantly became jittery, his left thumb dancing against the papers on top of his desk.

“Okay, Ike came to me,” Itchy finally admitted. “Said that he need two corpses. One about his size and one about six feet tall. I told him that he was crazy—I couldn’t just hand over two of our clients’ bodies. That would be against the law.

“But I had my connection with the coroner’s office, and they have a backlog of indigents, unclaimed bodies—whaddaya call it, potter’s field. They are cremated, filed, and later buried in a lot over there on the side of Evergreen Cemetery.

“So I told them that we were willing to take on the cremations as a service, even look after some of the burials. They were more than willing to work with us.

“Out of all those bodies, I found the two that fit the profiles Ike gave me. I didn’t know what he wanted with them. He said that he wouldn’t be hurting people, that actually he’d be saving lives. He told me to extract all the teeth from the shorter man before I prepared the bodies for him.

“They came here to pick up the bodies in huge athletic duffel bags. I didn’t know what they were going to do with them. But those were dead bodies already. I didn’t kill anyone and neither did they. Later, when I heard about Ike and Jorg dying, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t want to get the business in trouble, so I kept quiet.”

And kept the money Ike gave you
, thought Mas. This Ike
Hayakawa was a detail person. The type who made plans and actually followed them. He was a headman, a smart man who could move in different circles deftly and elegantly like a ballroom dancer. He wasn’t like Mas, who didn’t know how to water down or sweeten an insult or alter the way he spoke or walked into a room.

Mas stared directly at Spoon. “I know heezu alive,” he said. She immediately lowered her eyes, which meant she knew it, too.

The back bedroom door then flew open and Mas literally leaped out of his seat.

The figure in the doorway walked closer to the light. The same thick hair in the photographs, only now it was all silver gray. He’d replaced the aviator glasses with rectangular plastic-framed tinted ones that artists and actors wear. Instead of a short-sleeved button-down shirt, he had on a baby blue velour sweatsuit, the uniform of suburban wannabe rappers.

Mas had only one question for the dead man, Ike Hayakawa. “Whatchu do wiz Haruo?”

The dead man wanted to start from the beginning, so Mas let him. Minutes and hours were ticking away, but Ike claimed that he knew nothing about Haruo Mukai, other than that he was going to marry his wife. He sat on the couch next to Spoon, nursing a fizzy drink and a lit cigarette.

“Occupational hazard,” he explained. “I had quit a while back and now everyone around me is smoking.”

Mas surprisingly didn’t crave the tobacco smell at that
moment. His stomach was completely
kara
, empty, and the only way it could be sated was with explanations. He couldn’t help noticing how comfortable Ike was in his former home. How long had he been there? Ever since Spoon had kicked out Dee, Mas imagined.

“My family started off growing pompons in Montebello. You know what they are?”

Mas nodded. He was familiar with the fat chrysanthemums that the Japanese used to grow. They were sometimes as large as cabbages, their stems bent from all the weight they carried.

“My family was one of the early ones who came before the alien land laws. We were able to actually buy land. Can you believe it? We built a greenhouse, a real one with pane glass, not those temporary fixtures with cheesecloth muslin.”

The Hayakawas were among the elite, that’s for sure. They didn’t have to wander throughout the desolate desert every season, following around truck farmers. They didn’t have to sleep in shacks and carry blankets on which they could rest their heads.

The Hayakawas owned land, so they could stay put, build a house, go to the same school for several years, be smart.

“My father was the one who was close to Mr. de Groot. The de Groots first belonged to the other side of the market, the European side. But we both farmed in Montebello, and Jorg and me, we grew up together. A group of these Nisei boys were giving Jorg a hard time, him being so big, you know, and quiet. So I spoke out. My mother told me that my words could cut like a knife. Didn’t have to beat on anyone,
make physical threats.

“My dad died right before World War Two, so I guess that I was the man in charge. The de Groots offered to take care of the farm, didn’t know what we would do if it hadn’t been for them. We got married in camp—” Ike paused and grinned at Spoon, who had been tearing at her dead cuticles the whole time of his monologue. “And then just when the conflict overseas was ending I got drafted, can you believe it? Was part of the Counter Intelligence Corps and spent some time in Japan. We helped interrogate prisoners of war, were a watchdog for communism.”

“Spy,” Mas couldn’t help but to murmur and Ike nodded.

“I guess we were. Counter intelligence officer sounds a lot better.”

“Hina
. Those
hina
dolls come from Japan. Spy dolls.”

Ike nodded again. “It was a pet project of one of the other officers. He didn’t want to bring it back to the States so I asked him if I could. We just used them as regular Girls’ Days dolls and you know what, I completely forgot about them having a recording device. That is, until Dee started getting into trouble.” Ike’s voice became thin and fragile—quite a contrast to the relaxed, friendly way he’d started the conversation. The ice cubes in his drink had melted and his cigarette had long been extinguished.

“Whatsu on tape?” Mas brought the conversation back to what was in his pocket.

Ike looked up sharply and Mas immediately realized that he’d shown his hand too early. “You know where it is? Who has it?”

“Dat doll man in San Diego.”

“I knew he was hiding something. He switched the dolls, didn’t he?” Ike got up quickly before Mas stopped him. The tape felt like it was on fire in his pocket, and his hand instinctively went to his thigh to protect it.

Ike remained as still as a hstatue, and as he slowly bent down onto the couch, his knees cracked. His pupils seemed to expand like a rabid dog’s.