Sensei (5 page)

"Nothing much," I replied. "The teaching, working out."

We were driving on Fourth Avenue, heading north. This time of morning, it was a better bet than the Gowanus. Neither Art nor Micky said much. They had that smoldering cop silence about them, which was unusual. One of these guys was my brother, and Art had been his partner for eight years, so he was no stranger to me either. But I wasn't getting any information from either of them. They drove and watched out the window as the tired-looking brick of Brooklyn slid by. Somewhere down these streets, our parents had roller-skated as children.

""You're a little off the beaten path here, Mick," I said.

"Yeah," he admitted. Then he began to grope around for a Marlboro.

"Don't you light up one of those things in my car," Art warned him. He had quit about two years ago and was slowly, inexorably, forcing Micky into doing the same. "You light up in here, we're gonna end up like a bunch of hams cured in a smokehouse."

"Ah, gimme a break, Art."

"Give ME a break. Idiot," Art fumed.

"Asshole," Micky mumbled. It was like listening to a crabby married couple. But I noticed that Micky didn't light up.

They also didn't say much about why we were heading over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan.

Eventually, however, the stop and go of city traffic seemed to shake something out of them.

"Still doing that martial arts stuff?" Art asked.

I grinned. "Oh, yeah. A deadly weapon."

Micky snorted. "Some people never learn. Black belt, no black belt. No one can dodge a bullet."

"The trick," I said in my best Asian master voice, "is being where the bullet is not."

Art looked at me like I was insane.

"What's this I hear about you working for Bobby Kay?" Micky slipped the question in, but I sat up a little straighter.

"Yeah," I admitted. "How d'you find that out?"

Art slewed the car around a cab that shot across two lanes without warning to pluck up a fare, cursed under his breath, and asked, "You read the paper this morning, Connor?"

"No. Why?"

Micky was rooting around in the trash in the back and came up with a copy of the Daily News. He slapped it onto the seat back between us and said "Check it out, buddy boy."

The headline read "Kung Fu Killer" with the sort of creative alliteration I usually associate with the Post. The crux of the article was a homicide. Early this morning, Mr. Robert Akkadian, noted entrepreneur, had gone to his Samurai House gallery for a scheduled early appointment with his personal trainer. The trainer, identified as Mitchell Reilly, a martial arts expert, had been found in Samurai House's performance space, dead of an apparent broken neck. While NYPD was still investigating the cause of death, the News speculated it was caused by a "karate chop. "Theft does not appear to have been a motive for the killing and the investigation was ongoing.

"Oooh," I said, "a karate chop. Hence the visit. Bobby Kay turn me in, fellas?"

I said it half-kidding, but the response I got was anything but. "Look, Connor," my brother said, "we just need to talk with you a bit on this." Micky wasn't exactly apologetic. If it bothered him at all to pick up his own brother for questioning, it didn't show. Just doing his job. The questions were really almost automatic for him by this time.

"C'mon, Mick. You don't seriously think I'm a suspect!" Micky held up a calming hand. Art, however, wasn't going to let it go. Today, he was Bad Cop.

"Akkadian likes you for it." There was silence. "Here's what we've got, Connor," Art continued. "The esteemed Mr. Akkadian, noted entrepreneur and tough guy wanna-be, gets a call from his janitorial staff early this A.M. to hightail it to his office. By the time he gets there, the uniforms are on the scene stretching yellow tape. Old Bob takes a good look around. Pokes about in his office. Then he goes over to the gallery. He takes one good look and that about does it."

"You mean he said I did it?" I asked skeptically.

"Well," Art continued, "first he had to stop barfing. Then he got cleaned up and started talking. And ..."

"Presto," Micky concluded, "your name pops up."

I looked from one to the other and couldn't think of a thing to say.

"Here's where we are, Connor," Art went on. "You doing a job for Bobby Kay. Reilly in the mix. The two of you have some sort of confrontation. Some sort of mysterious martial arts stuff. Mitch tells Bobby about it. Day or so later, Mitch turns up dead. So..."

"So," Micky picked up the thread, "we got Bobby Kay babbling about some karate-grudge death match. I personally think it's a crock, but..."

"Motive." Art held up his hand, index finger pointing up like a DA making a telling point to a jury. "Then we got all this 'death touch' hype. You should read the Post's version." Micky was digging around back there looking for it but gave up after a few seconds.

"So now, Mr. Martial Arts Expert," Art said, holding up finger number two, "we got the means."

'"You do anything last night, Connor? Out with friends? A date?"

"No." I got a sinking feeling as Micky ran down the list of possibilities, trying to see whether I had an alibi. "I stayed in grading papers."

"Phone calls?" I shook my head.

"And," Art said with a flourish, raising finger three, "opportunity."

We came to a halt in front of Samurai House. There was a police cruiser on the scene and a cop by the door.

"Hey, come on. "You guys can't be serious," I protested.

Art let out a long, fuming sigh. He put a cardboard sign with an NYPD sticker on the dash and shut the car down.

"Nah," Micky said. "We'll have to run it down in terms of an alibi..."

"And you'll have to make a statement... prints, that sort of thing," Art added.

"But what we really want is some advice on this one," Micky said as he climbed out of the backseat.

The three of us stood for a minute, looking at the front of Samurai House, the chrome and granite looking no worse for wear and the business of the city flowing past it as if nothing had happened there. But the cops were coming and going. Thirty minutes ago, I'd been running by the shore. Now I was in a very different world. Forensic guys in white coats were taking out little paper bags with stuff in them. Radios gabbled. My T-shirt had dried and my legs had that good, used feel they get from exertion. Though I stood there in my hi-tech sneakers, feeling fit, it didn't do much for my confidence.

Micky tapped me lightly on the shoulder and took me by the arm. "Don't worry," he said quietly in a voice I recognized as my brother's. "It'll be OK."

"Besides," Art concluded, "we're afraid if we tried to take you in, you'd kill us with your freakin' ninja death touch."

"Be afraid, Art. Be very afraid." I used my most menacing voice, but it was an effort.

Art appeared unimpressed. "Come on," he said as we walked toward the door, "you ever been on a crime scene, Connor?"

"No." I watched Micky dawdle on the pavement, fingering his pack of cigarettes and wondering whether he could get in a quick smoke.

"One cardinal rule," Art continued. "OK." I looked over at him. "Don't touch anything."

We went in past the uniformed cop, whose eyes briefly refocused as we approached, but glazed over once the boys flashed their shields. The waterfall bur bled with a relentless lack of consideration for the solemnity of crime. The plastic yellow crime scene tape was strung across the scenic little entrance Bobby Kay had showed me with such pride the other day. Inside the gallery, the room was empty. I let out some air, realizing that I had been holding my breath in anticipation of having to see the body.

But it was long gone. There was the taped outline of Reilly's last earthly location on the floor, but that was about it. The room was an empty one to begin with, so there wasn't much to look at. There were some small pieces of paper and tape laying around the detritus of the crime scene people but not much else.

Then I saw the wall.

I could feel their eyes on me, but Micky and Art didn't say much. It's a thing cops develop. They're hunters of a sort. They learn by watching and waiting. They were both very still.

I did a double take and moved slowly toward the wall and what was written there. It must have been done with one of those thick magic markers. The black strokes had none of the esthetics of brushwork, but they were well formed and confident, nonetheless. It was calligraphy of a type. I had seen the characters before.

"Oh, man," I murmured.

"Can you read that, Connor?" Micky asked.

"Lookin for a translation. We got a call in for a PD liaison from Chinatown, but no luck yet," Art added in explanation.

I turned to look at them. "You sure this wasn't here before? Not part of Kay's show?"

Art flipped through his notebook. "No such luck. This wall was set to have a display hung on it and was painted last week."

"We're assuming whoever got in here and nailed the victim did it," Micky added. "No trace of the magic marker, right?" He looked at Art, who shook his head. Micky ran a hand through his white streak and squinted at me. Our Dad used the same expression: a squint created from a lifetime of looking at the world through the smoke from a Lucky Strike. "So, can you read it?"

"Oh, I can read it," I said.

"What's it say? "They asked in unison.

I looked from one to the other. A uniformed cop drifted closer to eavesdrop. "Fellas," I said, "let's get a cup of coffee."

We ended up in a diner, hunched over the table in a booth near the back. The waitress wandered over, a Pyrex in hand, and topped up our cups.

"Thanks, that's it," Art said to her. She looked disappointed that he didn't ask for donuts, but Art struggled manfully against stereotype.

Then they sat there and simply looked at me with the flat expectancy of their profession.

"What you've got here," I lectured, "is a message in Japanese. It says, "I am here." "

"Ooh. Ominous," my brother said.

"What's really interesting is that the note is signed." I dipped my finger in the coffee cup and drew the characters we had seen from the wall on a napkin. "The characters read ro-run. Translates as 'wave man.""

"Sailor?" Art suggested.

"Hmmm. Surfer?" Micky countered.

"Psycho surfer," Art grinned, happy with the sound of it.

"Guys," I said, trying to rein them in a bit, "in feudal Japan, a warrior without a master to serve was called a ronin, wave man. He was adrift, without moorings, without social place."

"Like Palladin," Micky said, eyeing Art.

"Have Gun Will Travel." Art, more than equal to the task, barely missed a beat.

"Well, yeah," I admitted, "although it doesn't have quite the same attraction for the Japanese. A ronin was an essentially tragic figure. In Japan, your identity is bound up with the group. The individual outside group boundaries is an outcast. He has no status. In stories about a ronin, it usually doesn't end well for him."

Art snapped his fingers and pointed across the formica. "Like Shane."

"Well, yeah," I said, "but Americans tend to romanticize the gunslinger story. It pops up everywhere. Cowboy flicks. Private-eye flicks. Cop flicks. Same story, different costumes. The lone fighter is heroic for us, not really tragic."

"I think Shane pretty well captured the tragic aspect," Art began as a protest.

"So, what's that got to do with offing this Redly guy-" Micky wanted to get to the point before Art digressed into the lesser known works of Jack Palance and Alan Ladd.

"Hey, you're the detectives," I countered. "Detect."

"What we have here ..." Art began.

Micky picked up the thread. "Is a murder in the public space of an art gallery specializing in Asian objects related to all that martial arts stuff you do."

"Victim appears to have been done in without an apparent weapon," Art added.

"Then again, the perp could have used a pipe and taken it with him." Micky nodded as he mulled over his own statement, looking at Art expectantly.

His partner nodded in agreement. "We'll check with the M.E."s report. Pipe. Club. Cosh. It got done. We'll see if they pick up anything from the autopsy that IDs a weapon."

"You mean like splinters or stuff?" I asked.

"Yeah." But he waved it away. "Now the graffiti. Here's a new wrinkle. What's that all about?"

"People who sign their work, they want to be known," Micky pointed out. "Even with an alias." "Yeu don't think this was just a robbery gone bad?" I said.

"Connor," my brother explained slowly, as if to a simpleton. "Someone breaks into an art gallery. They take ..." he raised his eyebrows, waiting for the answer.

"Well, art, I guess," I replied.

guess right. "Vbu don't thread an electronic alarm system in midtown, go through all that planning, knock someone off, and take ... what?" He looked at Art for confirmation.

"Nothing of any real value. Nada. Zip." He consulted his notes and quoted, "A personal inventory by Mr. Akkadian confirms nothing missing except an old wooden sword that formed a minor part of the display."