Japantown (2 page)

Three weeks after my seventeenth birthday, Shig Narazaki—Jake’s partner and “Uncle Shig” when he visited our home for dinner—took me on a “watch-and-see.” It was a simple information-gathering stakeout for an extortion case involving the vice president of a major electronics firm and a local gang of yakuza wannabes. Just a recon trip. No action, no approach. I’d been on dozens like it.

We sat for an hour in a car tucked up an alley watching a neighborhood yakitori shop long closed for the night.

“I don’t know,” Shig said. “I may have the wrong place.” And he left to take a look.

He did one circuit around the restaurant and was heading back when a street thug sprang from a side door and clubbed him with a Japanese fighting stick while the rest of the gang escaped out another exit.

Shig collapsed and I leapt from the car and yelled. The attacker zeroed in on me, glaring and cocking the stick like a baseball bat, which told me he had no training in the art of bojutsu. Then he charged. Luckily, the stick was the short version, so the instant his front foot shifted, I rammed my shoe into his kneecap. He went down with a howl—enough time for Shig to recover, snag the guy, and take me home with a story that made my father proud.

Unhappily, the incident demolished what was left of my parents’ rocky marriage. While Jake loved his adopted country, my mother never really took to it. She felt like the perpetual outsider, a pale-faced Caucasian in a size fourteen dress surrounded by a sea of eternal size sixes. “Putting me at risk” was the last straw in a precariously high haystack. We flew to Los Angeles, and Jake stayed in Tokyo. The arrangement became permanent.

But that was fifteen years ago. A lot had happened in between: my mother passed away, I moved to San Francisco, and I got a handle on the art trade—soft work, according to Jake, but a world I found as fascinating as my mom had, though it was filled with its own brand of shark.

Then nine months ago, not a word between us in years, Jake died
suddenly, and when I flew to Japan to attend the funeral, I landed in the path of real yakuza this time, not Uncle Shig’s cheeseball yaki hopefuls. I managed to hold my own against them—barely—in the process tracking down a long-lost tea bowl that belonged to the legendary tea master Sen no Rikyu. The events made the headlines and I became something of a local hero.

Which was another reason I’d been invited to Japantown. That, and the fact that I had resources the SFPD did not: Jake had left me half of his agency, despite our estrangement.

Both my parents were gone, and I was being sucked into the life that had driven them apart. Which is how, at the age of thirty-two, I found myself juggling an art store and a detective agency. Refined on the one hand, brutish on the other.

In short, I was the bull in the china shop—except I owned the shop.

And tonight I had a very bad feeling about where that might lead.

CHAPTER 2

S
HIELDING
me from the curious looks of his colleagues, Renna clipped a police ID to the lip of my shirt pocket, then pulled the pocket flap over the photograph. With his barnlike mass, the lieutenant could have blocked out a whole squadron. Even my tallish frame and broad shoulders were smothered in the shadow of his looming six-four brawn with an upper trunk wider than that of most NFL defensive linemen. When he pointed a gun and yelled halt, sensible people did.

“There,” he said, inspecting his work. “No one will look twice.”

“Reassuring.”

Renna took in my jeans and lightweight flannel shirt, then squinted at the lettering on my baseball cap. “What’s the
HT
stand for?”

“Hanshin Tigers.”

“Who the hell are they?”

“Japanese ball club out of Osaka.”

“I tell you wear a cap, you give me exotic? Why can’t you do anything like normal people?”

“Part of my charm.”

“Someone somewhere probably thinks so.” Renna jerked his head at the badge. “Says you’re undercover. Means you’re here but you’re not. Means no one expects you to talk much.” Renna’s steady gray eyes looked weary. This was going to be bad.

“Got it.”

Dropping back a step, the lieutenant favored me with another thoughtful inspection.

“There a problem?” I said.

“This is . . . different from your usual stuff. It’s not, uh, stolen goods.”

Behind his words I heard doubt: he was wondering if I could make the leap from things people created to things they destroyed. Lately, I’d been wondering the same thing.

I’d met Renna years ago when he and his wife had walked into Bristol’s Antiques in the Outer Richmond, near the end of Geary. They’d come for the English walnut lowboy in the show window. As soon as Miriam Renna pointed to the piece, her husband had grown unnaturally still and glanced my way. The sparkle in Mrs. Renna’s eye told me the piece had caught her. She’d probably dreamed about it. Lost sleep over it. Begged and wheedled until her husband had caved, helpless to curb her compulsion. When a good piece of art grabs you, that’s how it works. And it was a good piece.

I could have closed the sale with a few choice comments about the quality of the inlay and the elegance of the cross-banding. I knew it and Renna knew it. But his expression and her modest jewelry told me the purchase would be a painful one, so I guided her toward an equally elegant nineteenth-century Pembroke table a century newer and a quarter of the price. With time, I told her, the piece would appreciate.

On that day, a bond of trust was born between the Rennas and myself that has deepened over the years, not unlike the patina of their Pembroke. Back then I was winding up my apprenticeship as an art dealer with old Jonathan Bristol, who specialized in European antiques. These days I had my own place out on Lombard, with a strong focus on Japanese artifacts and a scattering of Chinese, Korean, and European. After our first meeting, Renna had taken to swinging by on occasion to ask my opinion about some Asian aspect of one of his cases, usually in the evenings over a pint of Anchor Steam or a good single malt. But this was the first time he’d invited me to a crime scene.

Renna said, “This is going to get grisly. You want, tomorrow I could bring snapshots. You wouldn’t have to look at the rest. None of the guys you know are around, so you can still walk.”

“I’m here. Might as well do it.”

“You sure? This is leagues away from inlay and filigree.”

“I’m sure.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Fair enough,” I said, squinting into the glare of the flashing police lights.

“Nothing fair about it,” Renna muttered under his breath, and I understood he was referring to whatever lay beyond the barricade.

Far above our heads, a chilly gale bullied a dense fog bank past, smothering the city’s loftier peaks in brooding billows but leaving the flatlands, where we stood, bare and exposed to capricious wildcat winds.

“Awful big turnout this late at night,” I said, speculating about the crowd of uniformed and plainclothes cops milling about the mall entrance. “Any particular reason?”

“Everyone wants a look-see.”

This is going to be real bad,
I thought as Renna led me toward the kill zone.

—

On a rooftop two hundred yards away, a man who used the name Dermott Summers when he traveled lay flat on his stomach and watched Lieutenant Frank Renna walk toward ground zero with a recent arrival.

Summers sharpened the focus of his night-vision binoculars and frowned. Jeans, flannel shirt, hat, an obscured badge. No city official would show up dressed like that.

Undercover cop? Maybe. But then why did the lieutenant go over to greet him?

Summers zoomed in on the newcomer. There was something in his stride, but no, he wasn’t law enforcement. Summers set down the binoculars and picked up his camera. He adjusted the range of the telephoto lens and captured several shots of the new guy.

This time he noticed the
HT,
and the hairs on the back of his neck rose. Japanese ball cap? Bad news. But just the kind of news he was charged with discovering—and defusing. That was the beauty of Soga. With deep-cover surveillance on site
after
the kill, no one could trip them up.

Summers trained his camera on the new man’s car and snapped a close-up of the license plate, several of the Cutlass, then called in the number. He’d have name and vitals inside thirty minutes.

At the thought, Summers’s trigger finger twitched. The takedown had been perfect. He’d brooded over being sidelined during the kill, but here was a bonus straight from heaven. He might see some action yet.

CHAPTER 3

T
HE
kill zone fell midway between the rest areas.

The one-block stretch on Buchanan between Post and Sutter had been converted to a pedestrian mall long ago. Soft red brick replaced cold black pavement, and a sushi shop, shiatsu parlor, and a few dozen other shops sprang up along the concourse. Two rest areas provided benches and sculpture and were originally designed to allow shoppers a place to pause and refresh body and mind. Now they framed a scene I would never forget.

As we approached, portable klieg lights brought the victims into focus: three adults and two children.

Children?

My abdominals tensed and something in my stomach began to curdle. Inside a circle of yellow crime-scene tape was a parent’s worst nightmare. I could make out the small neat bodies of a boy and a girl.
Someone’s daughter
—and the same age as my Jenny, give or take. Nearby lay two men and a woman. A family. And a Japanese one at that. Tourists. This wasn’t a murder scene. This was sacrilege.

“Hell, Frank.”

“I know. You gonna be okay with this?”

Why did there have to be children?

Renna said, “You can still opt out. Last chance.”

I waved the suggestion away. Someone had decimated what had once been a vital, functioning household, leaving in the wake of their attack with high-powered weaponry a tossed salad of shredded flesh, frayed garments, and clotted blood.

The sourness stirred in the pit of my stomach. “This has got to be the work of a psycho. No sane person would do this.”

“You been around any gang action lately?”

“Good point.”

When my parents’ divorce flung me back to Los Angeles, I’d spent five years on the cusp of South Central in a gang-infested neighborhood, then put in two more here in the Mission District grunge before I could afford decent quarters in the Sunset and, after marriage, in my present cupboard apartment in East Pacific Heights. I’d seen my share of corpses, but this outdid nearly any scenario gangland could summon up. Slick purple-red pools of blood had collected in the spaces between the bodies, and viscous streams threaded their way through the brickwork.

I took a deep breath to settle my nerves.

Then I saw the mother’s death mask. A tortured face. Despairing. Aware, in the last seconds of life, of the horror playing out around her.

The sight left me breathless and depleted. Maybe I
wasn’t
up to this. My limbs grew leaden. Ramming my fists into the pockets of my jeans, I gritted my teeth to restrain my fury.

One minute the family was strolling through Japantown, the next they faced darkness and death in a foreign land.

Not a trace of the thief

but he left behind

the peaceful stillness

of the Okazaki Hills

Years ago, long before we married, Mieko had whispered those words in my ear to ease the pain of my own mother’s passing, my second encounter with the poem. Unbidden, it came to mind a third time when Mieko was killed, leaving Jenny and me to struggle on without her. Now the verse made its presence felt once more and I knew why. Embedded in those four lines was the balm of a larger truth, a comforting kernel of wisdom stretching back generations.

“You still with me?”

I dragged myself away from personal demons. “Yeah.”

Renna rolled a couple of imaginary marbles around in his mouth as he considered my answer. A full head of black hair capped deadpan cop eyes and rugged features. He had a hard face with deep lines, but the lines had soft edges. If his face were a catcher’s mitt, you’d say it was broken in just right.

Renna stepped up to the crime scene tape and said, “How’s it going, Todd?”

Inside the tape, a forensic tech scraped up a blood sample. His hair was clipped short and his ears were large and pink. “Some good, mostly bad. This was late night in a commercial district, so we have an uncontaminated site. That’s the good news. Other side is, Henderson was grumbling louder than usual. He’s saying nothing we got is gonna tell us squat even though he’s fast-tracking it. He gathered debris, fibers, and prints and rushed back to the lab but did a lot of frowning. Fiber’s old. Doesn’t think it’s from the shooter.”

“What kind of prints?” Renna asked.

Todd glanced my way, then with a look queried Renna, who said, “Todd Wheeler, Jim Brodie. Brodie’s consulting on this one but keep it to yourself for now.”

We exchanged nods.

Todd angled his head at an alley. “Hasn’t rained for a while so we got footprints in the passageway alongside the restaurant. Soft and padded and probably silent. A treadless loafer or moccasin-type shoe. Probably the shooter waiting.”

Renna and I looked at the alley. An unlit walkway ran between a Japanese restaurant and a kimono shop to public parking in the rear. With a balcony extension overhead, the lane was steeped in shade. I scanned the shops to the left and the right. On the other side of the mall was a second alley, but it offered less cover.

My stomach muscles twitched and I returned my attention to the victims. They lay in a close-knit cluster, arms and legs crisscrossing in places like some grotesque game of pickup sticks. In the brittle white glare of the kliegs, eye ridges cast dark shadows over sinking sockets and highlighted round cheekbones, chic haircuts, stylish clothing. A look I saw three times a year when I flew across the Pacific.