The Case of the Kidnapped Angel: A Masao Masuto Mystery (Book Six) (13 page)

“I did look, yes.”

“Why? Was there some special reason?”

“The window was open. I heard Mr. Kelly call out.”

“From where? I mean, where was Kelly?”

“I guess in his room over the garage.”

“And you heard his voice. What did he say?”

“I think, hey, Angel.”

“Angel? Not Mrs. Barton?”

“Once I heard him call her Angel,” Mrs. Holtz said. “Like he was making fun of her.”

“And from the window, you saw Mrs. Barton?”

Lena nodded. “Coming up the driveway. Walking slow, like she didn't hear Mr. Kelly at all.”

“She didn't respond to his shout?”

“No.”

“How did she look?”

“Terrible. She was dragging herself.”

“Did you see a taxi pulling out of the driveway?”

Lena shook her head and began to sob.

“You go to bed,” Mrs. Holtz said. “Right now, you go to bed.”

Still sobbing, Lena Jones stood up and walked out of the kitchen.

“Sit down,” Mrs. Holtz said to Masuto. “I make you a nice cup of tea. Or maybe coffee?”

“Tea will be fine.”

She put a kettle of water on the stove and started the light under it. “A few minutes,” she said. “Tell me, you like your tea strong like the British drink it or weak like the Americans drink it?”

“Weak.”

“I'm sorry I don't have Japanese tea. It's green, yes?”

“Sometimes.”

“And you're Japanese? I mean I know you was born here, the way you talk, and on the police.”

“Yes, I'm Japanese. When we're born in America of Japanese parents, we're called nisei.”

“I'm asking too many questions? I'm nosy?”

“Please feel free to ask me anything.”

“Myself, I'm Polish. I was in a concentration camp.” She pulled up her sleeve to show the tattoo mark. “I was a young girl. I don't like to talk about how I survived.” As she spoke, she cut several slices of sponge cake and set the plate in front of Masuto. “Mike's favorite cake. Poor boy.”

“It looks delicious,” Masuto acknowledged. “But I'd rather not.”

“Japanese don't eat cake?”

“Of course they do. But my wife is waiting up for me with dinner, and if I don't finish every bit of it, she'll be hurt.”

“You're married! So if your wife is waiting, why don't you go home already?”

“Because I wanted to talk to you again, Mrs. Holtz.”

“You give me credit for more brains than I have. Tell me something, I know you're not Jewish, so what are you, a Christian?”

“I'm a Buddhist.”

She shook her head. “I think I heard about it, but I don't know what it is.”

“It's a way of living, acting, being, of knowing who you are.”

She poured the tea and placed it in front of him. “Sugar?”

Masuto shook his head.

“So tell me, please, how do Buddhists feel about Jews?”

“The same way they would feel about any other people.”

“And none of them hate Jews?”

“Buddhists try not to hate.”

“That's nice.” She sat at the table, facing him, a shapeless woman whose lined face was etched with suffering. “That's very nice, Mr. Masuto. Hate is so crazy, so unreasonable. Someone like Kelly, he has to hate Jews, he has to hate colored people, he has to make life miserable for poor Lena.”

“I thought he was very fond of Mr. Barton.”

Mrs. Holtz shrugged. “Not so fond. Sure, Mike was good to him. Maybe nobody was ever so good to Kelly as Mike. And Kelly liked his job. But he'd get mad at Lena and yell, ‘Get that lousy Jew nigger out of here.' Then he'd complain about the Jew food I cooked. Not with Mike where Mike could hear him. And I'll tell you something else. He has a gun.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Lena was cleaning his room and she saw it.”

“Perhaps Mr. Barton wanted him to have a gun.”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“We think,” Masuto said, “that Mrs. Barton was blackmailing her husband. Miss Newman seems to feel that strongly. Do you have any notion of what she might have held over him?”

Mrs. Holtz shook her head. “They had terrible fights at first, and then, about a year ago, they stopped fighting.”

“Do you know what the fights were about?”

“I wouldn't listen. I liked Mr. Barton too much. I couldn't bear to listen.”

“Did Lena listen?”

“Lena's a good girl. She wouldn't listen.”

“No, of course not,” Masuto said, his tone easy and without threat. “But you yourself, Mrs. Holtz, you live here, you must have known what went on in this house.”

“I'm not a spy,” she said with annoyance.

“No, of course not. And I'm not talking about ordinary blackmail on Mrs. Barton's part. It was something she knew about him, or something about herself. Miss Newman indicated that it would wreck Mr. Barton's film career if it came out—and that this was the reason he stayed married to Angel.”

“He must have had a reason. They weren't like a man and a wife. They had separate rooms. Sometimes for days they didn't even talk to each other.”

“Was he in love with Elaine Newman?”

“You think Elaine killed Angel? You're crazy, Mr. Policeman.”

“No, I don't think she killed Angel.”

“She loved him, he loved her, that's a sin?”

“Did Angel know?”

“What do you think? She knew and she didn't care. She had Mike's money. She lived like a queen.”

“Who do you think killed Mike Barton?”

Mrs. Holtz answered without hesitation. “Kelly. He killed both of them, and now Lena and me, we're here alone with him. Why don't you do something about that, Mr. Policeman?”

“I don't think you're in any danger, Mrs. Holtz. We'll have a policeman in the front hall all night, and tomorrow we'll go into the question of whether Kelly has a permit for the gun. Only one more question. Who were Angel Barton's friends?”

“Who could want to be her friend?”

“I'm sure she had friends. She was a beautiful woman. Who did she go out of her way to see?”

Mrs. Holtz thought about it for a while, her face set. Then she shrugged. “Maybe they were her friends.”

“Who?”

“That congressman, Hennesy, and Netty Cooper.”

Masuto had finished his tea. “Thank you,” he said to her. “You've been helpful. Try to get a good night's sleep.”

In the hallway, Officer Voorhis was dozing over a copy of
Sports Illustrated.
He blinked sleepily at Masuto. “I wasn't really asleep,” he explained.

“Try being really awake.”

It was a cold night for southern California, the temperature down to forty-five degrees. Masuto drove through a Beverly Hills as dark and empty as a city long forgotten and deserted, as dark and empty as a graveyard. Too much had happened in a single day; he couldn't cope with it or digest it properly, and he did what Zen had trained him to do. He emptied his mind of all thought and conjecture and let himself become one with his car, the dark streets and the night, along Olympic Boulevard and south on Motor Avenue to Culver City. It was a half hour past midnight when he pulled into the little driveway alongside his cottage, entered his house, and embraced Kati.

“It's so late. Why did you wait up for me?”

“Because my day doesn't finish until I see you. I have good things for tempura. It will only take a few minutes.”

“I couldn't face real food now,” Masuto said. “A boiled egg and some toast and tea.”

“Then have your bath and it will be ready. The tub is full, and there are hot towels.”

“The children are all right?”

“The children are fine. Ana won a prize for her ecology poster. She drew a beautiful picture of a deer. Do you think she will grow up to be an artist?”

Masuto laughed. It was good to be back in this world. “She is an artist,” he said to Kati. “Perhaps we all begin as artists. Then it leaves us.”

“Must it?”

“Perhaps not with Ana, if we are wise.”

“It's very hard to be wise,” Kati said.

“The hardest thing of all, yes.”

“But much easier to be helpful. Have your bath and I'll prepare some food.”

“In a moment. I want to step outside and look at the roses.”

“In the dark?”

“There's a moon, and the smell is best at night. It's some small consolation, Kati. November is the best month for roses, and I've hardly looked at mine.”

Of course they showed no color, even in the moonlight, but the air was full of the odor, subtly threading its way through the stronger scent of night-blooming jasmine. The rose garden was Masuto's hobby, his delight, his own proof that even as a policeman he retained some small trace of the artist. His backyard was small, thirty feet wide and forty feet deep, but he needed no more space than that. Except for the explosive climbers that made a fence around the yard, the roses were spare, skeletonlike stems that burst into a variety of glory. That appealed to Masuto—the thorny stems and the marvelous blooms of color and scent.

He stayed with the rosebushes a few minutes, but it was enough. Then he went into the house and had his bath.

The Zendo

When Masuto's universe was too greatly askew, when the face of reality dissolved into too many grotesques, he would rise early in the morning and drive to the Zendo for meditation. Ordinarily, he did his meditation each morning in his tiny room in the house; but to meditate with others in a place given to meditation was more gratifying. Now, dressed, he kissed Kati gently. She opened her eyes and complained that it was still dark.

“It's half past six. I go to the Zendo first.”

“The children won't see you,” she said plaintively.

“Perhaps I can get home early this evening. I promise to try.”

The Zendo was in downtown Los Angeles, a cluster of half a dozen once-dilapidated California bungalows that the students and monks who lived there had restored. All around it was the decay and disintegration of the inner city. The dawn light was just beginning when Masuto parked his car in front of the Zendo, and then as he stepped out, he felt himself grabbed in a tight embrace from behind. A second young man appeared in front of him, put a knife to his stomach, and said, “Just take it easy, turkey.” Then, still holding the knife to Masuto's stomach, he pulled aside his jacket and saw Masuto's gun. “Son of a bitch, the chink's a cop! We got us a fuzz!”

Masuto felt the grip around his arms slacken for just an instant, enough for him to drive his elbow into the ribcage of the man behind him, at the same time, pivoting, so that the knife thrust intended for him took the man who was holding him in the side. The wounded man screamed and let go of him, and Masuto leaped away with his gun out.

Fifteen minutes later, a squad car drove away with one of the muggers, while an ambulance carried off the second one, and Masuto found himself abashedly and uncomfortably facing a group of monks in their brown robes. They made no comment, and Masuto, who was trying to frame an explanation or apology in his own mind, found none that would do. Whereupon, he bent his head and walked into the meditation hall. Half a dozen people were still there, sitting cross-legged on cushions on the two slightly raised platforms that ran the length of the room. At one end of the room, the old rashi, the Japanese Zen master, sat in meditation. The half dozen included two monks, a young, pretty woman, and three middle-aged men who looked like business executives. Masuto took off his shoes and joined them, his folded hands still shaking from his experience. He tried to fall into the meditation, but after what had happened outside, it was very difficult.

One by one, the other meditators finished, made their bow to the rashi, and left, until only Masuto and the old man remained. Masuto's half-closed eyes were fixed on the floor in front of him. He heard the rashi move, and then the old man's feet, encased in straw slippers, appeared in front of him. Masuto looked up.

“You bring violence with you,” the rashi said, speaking Japanese.

“It met me on the street outside.”

“Ask yourself where it came from.”

“I am deeply sorry. I disturbed the peace of this place.”

“Are you all right?”

“I am not hurt, if that's what you mean.”

“I can see that you're not hurt.”

“Then I must answer no.”

“Then look into yourself. Even a policeman can know why he is a policeman.”

“I will try, honorable rashi.”

Leaving the Zendo, Masuto realized that he was ravenously hungry, and he pulled into a short order place on Olympic. Bacon and eggs and fried potatoes and four slices of bread and two cups of coffee helped to restore his equanimity. It was ten minutes to nine when he arrived at the station house. Beckman was waiting for him, along with Frank Keller, the FBI man.