Sensei (8 page)

As a parting shot, he added, "I was telling Mr. Akkadian how glad we were to be of service to him. We look forward to a long friendship. I am sure you will agree, Professor." He didn't even wait for a reply, but strode across the yard calling for the provost.

Bobby steered me to the end of the bar. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out two envelopes. He looked at the identifying marks on them, put one back, and handed me what turned out to be the long-awaited check. It was for the amount we had agreed on. Was it rude to peek? My landlord wouldn't think so.

"Well," I said, "things are looking up." I was sure that the o or other envelope was for the president. It explained his manic good spirits.

"You bet." Bobby took a long, grateful pull from his glass. It told me he was finding a private session with Domanova to be somewhat stressful. He gestured to the bartender for another and seemed to brighten at the prospect.

"You would not believe the interest this thing is generating, Burke."

"So the brochure worked out for you? That was quick."

"Hmm? Oh, well, actually I went a step farther. I'm still creating the glossy piece for the opening. But to get things moving I put it on the Samurai House Web page."

"How digital."

bet." The ice cubes clinked against his teeth as he drained the glass. "You've got to stay on top of this emerging technology, Burke. Otherwise the competition will eat you alive."

"And what is the competition doing these days, Bobby?"

He gave me that Bobby Kay smile, the one that told me he was feeling a bit more himself away from the president. "The competition is eating their hearts out, Burke. You know, I was worried. What with the killing, I was afraid that the whole show would fall apart. With the setup costs, it could have been a disaster."

Then his predatory optimism just ate right through that rare moment of doubt.

"But let me tell you, buddy," he broke into a grin as his vodka was reloaded, "the news coverage has just revved up interest even more. Phone ringing off the hook. The Web page is getting, oh, I don't know, like ten thousand hits a day! All in all, things couldn't have worked out better."

"Except for Reilly," I mentioned. "What with the death thing and all."

He looked momentarily chastened again, but it was an emotion that struggled futilely with the selective conscience of the businessman. It took a lot to keep Bobby down for long.

"Want to see your stuff? C'mon, we'll use Peters computer." He drained his third drink and we headed toward the house.

The transition from the sunny yard to the dim quiet of the Big Man's study was a bit hard on the eyes, and for a moment I stood there waiting for them to adjust. Domanova's home office was something of a disappointment. I knew some people who thought he slept there in a coffin, but it was really just a tastefully appointed study. Real wood paneling. Abstract artwork. The noise of our footsteps was swallowed up by a deep Persian rug.

Bobby booted up the computer. I noticed the machine had a university property tag stuck to the side of it. I wondered whether the art did, too. Bobby tapped merrily on the keys for a minute and wiggled the mouse.

The Web site loaded and we were off on a guided tour of his little cyber-kingdom.

"OK, here's the home page." It was a pretty nice graphic image of a waterfall, much like the one in the gallery. Vaguely Asian lettering identified various points of interest. He clicked on "Legacies of the Samurai" to show me the text and pictures of what would eventually be the exhibit catalogue. Sure enough, there was my stuff.

Something on the screen caught my eye: "Modern Masters."

"Hit that," I asked him, touching the screen.

A graphic appeared. It was a shoji one of those sliding paper doors the Japanese use in traditional homes. Akkadian clicked on it and it slid to one side, revealing a shot of the dojo at the Samurai House. Superimposed over the picture were the characters for meijin, or master. He clicked again. A video clip of Mitch Reilly in action appeared.

The picture quality was not the greatest, but there was no mistaking the dense power of the man. It took about two seconds for the ghost to charge the screen with a slashing sword attack, then the image froze and a laudatory summary of Reilly's achievements and expertise appeared.

It didn't mention the fact that he was dead.

"What's this?" I asked.

Bobby tried to act surprised. "Oh. I guess we need to update that." He reached over for the mouse. Is it possible to click guiltily? We popped back to the home screen. A little message at the bottom informed us we were the 75,486th person to visit the site.

"See what I mean?" he asked, "you can't beat this thing for publicity. And cheap? Oh, man." He almost kissed the monitor. "I love these things."

"I don't suppose it hurts to have Reilly dancing around there so every reader of the Daily News can get a chance to see him, huh Bobby?" I never really knew Reilly, but flogging his image to drive sales was a bit much.

The grin faded on him. "Hey, that was on for weeks before the ... incident. Besides, I have it rigged so there's a new master every month or so, and there are links to their dojo and more free publicity than they ever imagined. Don't get all cranky on me, Burke. Everyone makes out."

He gave me a hard look. "Including you." Bobby was usually all smooth and glad-handy, but I had heard he would cut a competitor's throat in a minute. Seeing that look, I could believe it.

He was right, of course the check I had in my pocket was Samurai House money. But it didn't make me feel better. Bobby picked up on the sudden coolness in the room. He looked at his watch. "Ah, God! I better get back out to Peter. Got a little donation ceremony to do." He patted his breast meaningfully. "See you, Burke." The tone told me that it would be quite some time.

The Burke clan springs from a very shallow gene pool: we all look pretty much the same. When I pulled up in front of Micky's house on the South Shore, a row of almost indistinguishable kid heads popped up from behind the palisade fence. "Hi Uncle Connor!" they shrieked and collapsed back down out of sight, giggling.

"Hello, you monkeys," I called. Thomas, one of Micky's kids and the birthday boy of the moment, came charging out and grabbed me by the leg.

"Where's my toy? Where's my toy?" He demanded.

"Toy? What toy?" I said. Then, feigning surprise, "Who are you, little boy?" He stopped tugging at me long enough to look confused for a second.

"Uncle Connor!" He insisted, "You know who I am!" Thomas was almost sure of it, but kids are well aware that adults are strange and unpredictable. Almost anything was possible.

Micky's wife, Deirdre, had spotted the open gate and came scooting out to drive him back into the corral. "Thomas!" she said in that tone mothers everywhere use. "Behave."

I laughed. "OK, Mr. T. The loot's in the car." He seemed briefly relieved that I hadn't lost my mind, then went scampering off to get his gift. "Hi, Dee," I said.

Dee has a broad, open face. She smiled, which made her eyes narrow into slits. "The riot is being held in the back," she said. As an in-law, Dee has a somewhat more objective view of the family than I do. She has also benefited from a decade of experience with us. Dee was nice but usually got right to the point. Life with Micky was not an adventure in subtlety.

Thomas lumbered by with a wrapped box almost as big as he was. Dee and I followed and closed the gate.

It was early in the season, but Micky had taken the bold step of opening the pool for the kids. Long Island is like the Mekong Delta in the summer: hot and humid but with more concrete. A succession of aboveground backyard pools had punctuated the vacation months of our childhood, and Micky had replicated that experience for his kids.

There were at least twelve bodies flailing around in the water. I knew there were redheads, brunettes, and even blondish Burke units in there, but soaking wet, they all looked alike. Occasionally, a skinny one would emerge for a toweling down, lips blue, trembling with cold, and then leap back in for a screaming, splashing dance with hypothermia. The fatter Burke kids only came out to eat.

Most of the guys were by the barbecue. My two other brothers, Tom and Jimmy, were there. So was Art. I spotted his wife, Marie, over by the sliding glass door that led to the kitchen and gave her a wave. My sister Peggy was doing lifeguard duty by the pool. My other sister, Irene, was probably in the kitchen, deep in recipes concocted with huge globs of mayonnaise.

My brothers-in-law were two pleasant guys who, as time went on, began to get looks on their faces that said life with my sisters was more than they had bargained for. Between the two of them,

they had nine kids under the age of ten. They enjoyed the barbecues: they got to talk to adults, tell off-color jokes they had been hoarding for weeks, and furtively drink more beer than permitted. Both men were starting to lose their hair.

There were music and stories, various minor accidents with the kids, and the normal type of socializing that goes on with a group of people who know each other very well, and generally get along well despite the fact. In short, the rest of the afternoon passed in the subdued not that passes for get-tog ethers with my family.

After cake and presents, as evening came on, I sat on a molded plastic lawn chair, a little apart from the crush of the family. You could still smell the charcoal in the air. One of the neighbors had a baseball game on the TV and the faint roar of the stadium crowd washed in the background like the sound of the sea. A few of the smaller kids were rolling around in discarded wrapping paper from the presents.

This was pretty much the way it was for us growing up. When I think about it, I mostly remember crowds kids and adults Christmas, birthdays, and barbecues. I jerked my legs out of the way as one of Irene's kids shot by, trying to catch a lightning bug. I had memories of similar hunts, running with small tribes of children on broad expanses of freshly cut lawns. The breathless pursuit in the moist blue of a summer night.

My mother was in Maryland visiting her sister. Otherwise, we'd probably be at her house destroying her lawn. My dad, the king of barbecues, died five years ago of cancer. He gave it a good fight. But at the end, there wasn't much left. Just some fierce eyes. You'd think thoughts like that would get to you, but I smiled and looked around the backyard. At times like this, I recall him the way he was. I can almost hear him in the crowd. It's one of the reasons I keep coming to family parties, I suppose.

Micky had been shooting me looks all day, squinting significantly through the smoke of barbecue and birthday cake candles. With everyone fed and presents unwrapped, it was time to rendezvous in the family room. Art slipped in after me, pulling the sliding glass doors to the yard closed.

The family room looked like the place old overstuffed furniture went to die.

"What's up, Mick?"

"Art's been following up with that guy Schedel from LA. Getting details to see whether there's some sort of connection between the two murders."

I turned to Art. "And?"

"You, my man, are looking at the Dick Tracy of cyberspace," he commented with a big smile.

"Well, at the very least, we are looking at a dick," Micky commented under his breath.

Art shot him a look and went on. "It turns out that there have been at least two other homicides of this type in the last week."

"Come on!" I protested. "The papers would have a field day."

"Yeah," Art answered, "but they didn't take place in the same area. Homicide is local crime, and these things happened in different states. Unless you're looking, you wouldn't find em."

"Method is slightly different each time," Micky commented.

Art shrugged, "Basic underlying pattern is the same."

"What's that?" I could guess, but I wanted the details.

"The other two victims also were prominent martial arts instructors." Art ticked the points off on his fingers one by one as he talked. "They checked out OK. No problems with gangs or drugs. No disgruntled students."

"No disgruntled lovers," Micky added.

"Both were killed in somewhat exotic ways." I lifted my eyebrows and Art answered the unspoken question. "The first vie tim, the guy in LA, was stabbed to death with a broken stick. Coupla days later, a Japanese national in Phoenix named Kubata goes down."

"Sanjiro Kubata?" I interrupted.

""You know him?"

I nodded appreciatively. Kubata was the real thing. A champion in kendo who had capped a successful tournament career in Japan by relocating to the U.S. to promote kendo here. I'd never met him, but he was said to be charming and talented. He was, from all reports, a master technician, a skilled teacher, and had a real flair for self-promotion. The Japanese had loved him. They called him the "Jewel of the Budokan," and when he left that famous training hall in Kyoto, his fans wailed.

I couldn't believe that Yamashita hadn't mentioned it. I couldn't believe he was dead.

"Believe it," Art said. "He sustained a number of serious injuries from some sort of weapon, but the actual cause of death there was strangulation."

"No rope," Micky said. "Bruises are consistent with a fairly sophisticated choke technique."

"OK, pretty gruesome," I admitted, still trying to adjust to the surprise. "But how is it unusual?" I asked.

Micky fielded the question. Behind him on the wall, an old Republic Pictures poster for Sands of the Iwojima was beginning to curl away from the scotch tape that held it to the paneling.

"Most homicides are fairly routine in turns of MO. You got guns, knives, and blunt instruments."

"With beatings," Art said, "you usually get a victim who has been worked over. All over. Death is usually from internal bleeding and it takes a while."

"Now for stranglings," Micky jumped in, "you got your ropes, wires, and what have you. Ligature strangulation and manual.

Crime of passion, lots of thumb marks on the front. They like their victims to see them." He and Art were really warming to their topic.

"But what we see here is different."

"How so?" I asked Art.

"Whoever did this was a pro," he said. "The victims in both LA and Phoenix were not subject to wild, unfocused beatings, which is what you usually get. Rage killings. In these cases, someone pounded the shit out of them, but boy oh boy, he knew where to pound. The choke job was the same type of thing. Focused."

"You know, it's hard work beating someone to death." Micky said reflectively, like he had considered the option. "Most times, it takes a while. Usually, some restraints are involved. But not here. These killings were almost surgical. The bruises tell us that a pro did it."

"Let me ask you a question," I said. "You're always talking about bruises on the victims. It seems to me that it takes a while for a bruise to form. I know you get some discoloration on a body after death..."

"Postmortem lividity," Art said.

"Right. But that has to do with blood settling. How do you get bruises like the ones you're talking about? If the victim is killed relatively quickly after the injury?"

Micky's eyebrows shot up. "Pretty smart, Connor," he said.

Art looked at him, "Are you sure you two are related?"

Micky grinned. He gestured for us to wait. The glass door slid back and let some of the party noise wash into the room. He came back in with some beers from the big orange cooler on the patio and shook the ice chips off as he handed them to us. Then he walled the family off again and continued.

"When you first look at the corpse, you don't see the bruises,"

my brother told me. "Then you have the M.E. stick him in the cooler overnight." He popped the tab on the can and took a drink. Micky had stopped being squeamish a long time ago.

"Then you see the bruises," Art commented. "Sort of like developing a picture."

"OK, I got it," I said.

"To get back to the issue here," Micky continued, "both the other victims appear to have been killed somewhere in the early part of the morning. And ..."

"And," Art chimed in.

"Someone signed "Ronin' at each scene."

I sat back in my chair. "Oh, no."

"Oh, yes," Art answered. "The messages are slightly different..."

"How so?"

"The LA murder just had the signature "Ronin,"" Micky replied. "In Phoenix, the killer added something: "I am coming." Then the same signature," Art said.

"So what does that tell you?" I asked.

"Details of the Ronin thing were not released to the press in the Ikagi murder. So a copycat is out." Micky trotted out the other details. "Killings are geographically dispersed, but they follow a pattern."

"We got a request in for a DNA sample from the LA killing," Art told me. "We'll compare it with samples from the Kubata and Reilly murders. It'll take a few days, but we'll see if they match up."

"Itbu know they'll match up, Art," Micky said.

"OK," I asked, "and if they match up, what does that mean?"

"It means," Micky said, "that we have a nut job on the loose who eets off starring in his own Tackle Chan snuff film."

"Well, does it narrow things down for you in terms of suspects?" I persisted. "You know, give you a handle on what the killer might look like?"

"We know he's probably a male," Micky said. "But that's not a big help. Statistically, most killers are. He's about five feet nine or ten inches and probably right handed."

"Gee, Sherlock, did you figure all that out by yourself?" Art asked. Then he looked at me and smirked. "Don't be too impressed, Connor." He gazed at his partner. "I read the site analysis from the crime lab too, Mick."

My brother looked sheepish.

"They do an analysis of this kind of thing," Art explained. "You'd be amazed. From splatter marks, position of the body..."

"Star signs, phases of the moon, mood rings ..." Micky added.

"... they can come up with a profile of the killer. Probable sex, age, size. It's weird."

"Yeah," Micky agreed, "but I have to admit, it works. I know old-timers who claim the walls of a murder scene can talk to them." He looked at me. "But it's bullshit." Art nodded in agreement as Micky went on. "These forensic guys, on the other hand, seem pretty good."

"Yeah, but other than that, we don't have much. The DNA comparison is only gonna help us when we get a suspect in custody," Art pointed out.

Micky squinted off into the distant yard, thinking. "Right now, Connor, our assumption is that this guy is Asian. Japanese. Whoever it is has been pretty well trained. It's the same in both cases. He's into this martial arts shit as his method. You look at the victims; they're connected by the arts. And killed by them."

It didn't sound like much when you said it out loud. He continued anyway. "You don't learn this stuff at the neighborhood Y."

"So?" I asked.

"It narrows things down some more. Theoretically, at least."

"Does this help things?" I asked.

"Maybe," Art explained. He held up his empty beer can and looked at it as if he suspected evaporation as the culprit. Micky sot us another round.

"On the one hand, we probably don't have any records like prints on this guy. Have to go through Interpol. Then again, if he's a Japanese national visiting the area, we should have INS records."