Stalking the Angel Read online

  Pike’s mouth twitched. I cleared my place and washed the dishes. I went back upstairs, took another shower, then dressed and put the Dan Wesson under my arm.

  When I went downstairs again, Joe Pike was waiting.

  32

  It was midafternoon when we got to Mr. Moto’s. The lunch crowd was gone and so were most of the employees, except for a couple of busboys mopping the floor and setting up for happy hour. The manager with the hi-tone topknot was sitting at a table with the Butterfly Lady, going through receipts. He stood up when he saw us and started to say something about us not being welcome when I grabbed his throat and walked him halfway across the dining room, bent him back over a table, and put the Dan Wesson in his mouth. “Yuki Torobuni,” I said.

  The Butterfly Lady stood up. Pike pushed her back down. He pointed at the busboys, then pointed at the floor. They went down fast.

  I said, “Yuki Torobuni.”

  Mumbles.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  More mumbles.

  I took the Dan Wesson out of his mouth. He coughed and licked at his lips and shook his head. “He’s not here.”

  I let the gun rest against his jaw. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I dug my fingers into his throat and squeezed. I said, “Remember Mimi Warren? I am going to find her and I won’t think twice if I have to kill you to do it.”

  His eyes opened wider and his face got purple and after a while he gave us Yuki Torobuni’s address.

  Torobuni lived in a treesy section of Brentwood, just east of Santa Monica, in a large sprawling ranch house more appropriate to a western star than a yakuza chieftain. There were wagon wheels lining the drive and a genuine old west buckboard converted into a flower planter and a gate featuring a rack of longhorn horns. Ben and Little Joe were probably out back. Joe Pike stared at it all and said, “Shit.”

  Ben and Little Joe weren’t around, and neither was anyone else. No Torobuni. No guys with tattoos and missing fingers and stupid eyes. After a lot of knocking and looking in windows we turned up a Nicaraguan housekeeper who said that Mr. Torobuni wasn’t home. We asked her when he had left. She said he wasn’t home. We asked her when he might be back. She said he wasn’t home. We asked her where he had gone. She said he wasn’t home.

  Pike said, “I guess he’s not home.”

  “Maybe he’s with Eddie Tang,” I said, “Maybe they’re reading the Hagakure and celebrating Eddie’s promotion.”

  Pike liked that. “Maybe we should go see.”

  When we got to Eddie Tang’s there was a black-and-white parked at the fire hydrant out front with the same nondescript cop sedan I’d seen before double-parked beside it. Pike said, “I’ll wait in the Jeep. One of them might know me.”

  I nodded and got out. The glass security door was propped open by a large potted plant so the cops could come and go as they wanted. I trotted up the little curved steps and through the open door like I owned the place. There was a landing and a couple of indoor trees and a circular step-down lobby with a brace of nice semicircular couches for waiting and chatting. There was a small elevator to the right and a very attractive suspended staircase to the left that curved up to the second floor. A chandelier that looked like a spaceship hung from the high ceiling and a door under the staircase probably went down to the garage and the laundry facility.

  Two kids maybe eleven or twelve were standing by the elevator. One of the kids had a skateboard with a picture of a werewolf on it and the other had thick glasses. The kid with the glasses looked at me. I said, “What’s going on with the cops?”

  The kid with the glasses said, “I dunno. They went upstairs looking for some guy.”

  “Yeah? They find him?”

  “Nah.” Well, well.

  The other kid said, “We thought they were gonna bust down the door or something but the manager let’m in.”

  I said, “What room is that?”

  “212.”

  “The cops still up there?”

  “Yeah. They’re talking with the manager. She wants to screw one of them.”

  The kid with the skateboard smacked the kid with the glasses on the arm. The kid with the glasses said, “Hey, she screws everybody.”

  I said, “Well, you guys take it easy.” I walked across the little lobby and out through the rear door and down one flight of bare cement steps to the garage. There was a little hall with a laundry room across from the stairs. The other end of the hall opened out to the garage. I went out to the garage and walked around. Nope. No dark green Alfa Romeo. Eddie was out, all right.

  I went back to the laundry room and lifted myself atop an avocado-colored Kenmore dryer and waited. After about ten minutes I heard the door at the top of the stairs open, so I hopped off the dryer, fed in a couple of quarters, and turned it on. A uniformed cop in his early forties with tight sunburned skin came down the stairs and looked in. I frowned at him and shook my head. “Damn towels take forever,” I said.

  He nodded, continued on out into the garage, then went back up the stairs. I gave it another hour, then I went up to the lobby and looked out front. The cops were gone, and Pike had parked the Jeep across the street. I opened the door for him. We took the stairs to the second floor, went down the hall to 212, and let ourselves in.

  Eddie had a narrow entry with mirrors on the walls and ceiling, and some kind of imitation black marble floor. There was a little guest bath on the left. To the right a short hall went to a bedroom that had been refitted as an exercise room, then on to what looked like another larger bedroom. The entry stepped down into a long living room which opened onto a balcony. The living room elled left for a dining area and the kitchen. The living room walls were crowded with trophies for excellence in the martial arts. Hundreds of them. Gleaming first-place cups and championship belts from exhibitions and tournaments all over the United States. Best All-Around. In Recognition of Excellence. Black Belt Master. Over-All Champion. “Don’t worry about this stuff,” I said. “The guy probably bought’m.”

  Pike said, “Uh-huh.”

  Joe went into the kitchen and I went into the bedroom. Eddie had a king-sized walnut platform bed with matching nightstands and a long low dresser and a mirror on the ceiling above his bed. I looked twice at the mirror. It had been years since I had seen a mirror above a bed. On the wall opposite the bed there were about a million framed photographs of Eddie Tang breaking bricks and flying through the air and accepting trophies and competing in martial arts tournaments and raising his hands, sometimes bloodied, in victory. In the earlier pictures he couldn’t have been more than eight. Maybe he hadn’t bought the trophies after all.

  The master bath was as tastefully decorated as the rest of the apartment. Lots of mirrors and imitation black marble and flocked wallpaper. There were dirty underwear and socks in a plastic hamper and stains around the lavatory and in the tub. I looked in the medicine cabinet and the cabinet beneath the sink. There was no toothbrush and no toothpaste and no razor and no deodorant. Either Eddie was lax about personal hygiene, or those things were missing.

  I went back into the bedroom. I looked through the chest and the dresser and the nightstand. A stack of well-thumbed Penthouse magazines sat on the nightstand along with a couple of old Sharper Image catalogs and one of those globe lamps that makes electrical patterns when you touch it. In the nightstand drawer there were five lavender-scented notes from someone named Jennifer professing her love for him and half a dozen snapshots of Eddie with different women in different places and two postcards from a United Airlines flight attendant named Kiki saying she wanted to see him when she got back to town. There was nothing of Mimi. No snapshots, no notes, no proof of her presence in his life, nothing to indicate a Westwood apartment house or babies or any sort of shared dreams, I’m with people who love me. Sure, kid.

  There were also no clues to indicate where Eddie Tang might be or if Mimi Warren was with him or, if she wasn’t, what had been done with he
r.

  I put everything back the way I had found it and went out into the living room. Pike was waiting by the door. He said, “There used to be a suitcase in this closet. It’s gone.”

  I told him what I hadn’t found in the bathroom. “If Eddie went, he’ll be back. We can wait.”

  Pike stared at the trophies. They were clean and bright and had been dusted regularly. He said, “Why not.”

  Outside, we parked the Jeep down the block in front of a condominium that was being built. We decided to split shifts, six on, six off. I said I’d take the first shift. Pike said that was fine. He walked away without another word.

  I sat in the Jeep and waited. Two hours later the same unmarked cop sedan eased down the street and stopped by the fire hydrant. A cop in a brown suit got out, looked into the garage, then got back in his car and drove away. People went in and out of Eddie’s building and cars moved up and down the street and a woman walked a little black dog and slowly the sky grew deeper until it was night. There was a nice summer chill in the air and a breeze coming in from the water, and the breeze made the palm fronds move and whisper and remind me of old songs I did not know. If I could just wait long enough, Eddie would come. When Eddie came, I could find Mimi. Waiting doesn’t look like much, but it is something very important. Waiting is passive hunting.

  At ten minutes after twelve that night, Joe Pike slipped into the Jeep with a brown paper bag. He said, “I’ve got it. Take a break.”

  I shook my head. “Think I’ll just sit.”

  He nodded and took out two sandwiches. He handed one to me and kept one for himself. I didn’t open it. I wasn’t hungry.

  Pike pulled a translation of the Hagakure from the bag. Imagine that. He sat, and read in the dark, and neither of us spoke.

  Sometime very late that night I fell into a sort of half-sleep and dreamed I was having dinner with Mimi Warren. We were at a center table in the big back room at Musso & Frank’s Grill, the only diners there. Pristine white tablecloths and shining cutlery and the two of us eating and drinking and talking. I could not hear what we said. I had the same dream every time I dozed over the next three days as Pike and I waited for Eddie Tang. The dream was always the same, and I could never hear what we said. Maybe the saying wasn’t important. That we were together, maybe that was what mattered.

  On the fourth day, Eddie Tang came home.

  33

  It was twenty of ten in the morning. The metal garage gate lifted and Eddie’s Alfa cruised past and swung down into his garage. The Alfa was spotted and dust-streaked and there were mud splashes behind the wheel wells. Eddie had driven a long way.

  Pike said, “Now or later?”

  “Let’s see what unfolds.”

  We sat. We waited.

  One hour and ten minutes later a long white stretch limo came slowly up from Olympic and stopped in front of Eddie’s building. The driver was the midget with the stupid eyes who’d been with Torobuni at Mr. Moto’s. “Better,” I said.

  The midget got out of the limo, strutted over to the glass door, and buzzed Eddie’s apartment. He got up on his toes for the intercom, then swaggered back to the limo and leaned against the door. He didn’t even make it up to the top of the car.

  Eddie came out three minutes later in light blue slacks and a navy jacket and a yellow shirt with a white button-down collar and a pink tie. Sweet. Maybe Eddie had been away taking yuppie lessons. The midget climbed in behind the wheel and Eddie got in back, and a few minutes later we followed them down to Olympic, then west to the San Diego Freeway, then south. The limo stayed in the right lane and took it slow. Just before lunchtime, traffic was light, and it was easy to stay back and not worry about being seen. We went south past the Mormon Temple and the Santa Monica Freeway, then took the Century Boulevard exit toward LAX.

  I said, “If he gets on a plane, we’ve got trouble.”

  “No,” Pike said. “We just shoot it down.”

  I looked at him. You never know.

  We stayed two cars back and followed the limo onto Century Boulevard and past the airport hotels and into the LAX complex. Los Angeles International Airport is designed in two levels, the lower level for arriving flights, the upper level for departing flights. Eddie’s limo didn’t mount the ramp for the departure level. Pike looked disappointed. There went the ground-to-air.

  The limo followed the huge U-shaped design of the airport around to the Tom Bradley Terminal, where international flights are based, then pulled to the pickup curb and parked. Eddie got out and went inside. After a while, he reappeared with three Japanese men and a redcap with a load of baggage. Two of the men were in their late fifties and dignified, with dark hair shot through by gray, powerful faces, and stern mouths. The third man was in his early thirties and taller than the other two, almost as tall as Eddie, with a hard bony face and broad shoulders. His hair was short except for a lock growing directly out the back of his head. The lock was long and braided and fell down his back. Well, well, well. “How much you want to bet,” I said, “that those gentlemen run the yakuza in Japan?”

  “A visit from the home office?”

  “Yep.”

  “The Hagakure,” Pike said.

  I nodded. “Eddie gives it to Torobuni, Torobuni gives it to them. Everybody moves up.”

  Eddie and the three men got into the limo while the redcap and the midget loaded the trunk. When all the bags were stowed, Eddie leaned out of the car, gave the redcap a tip, and then the limo pulled away.

  We looped back around to the San Diego Freeway again, headed north to the 1-10, then went east across the center of Los Angeles. We cut just south of the downtown area, then up past Monterey Park, and pretty soon downtown and its skyscrapers fell away to an almost endless plain of small stucco and clapboard houses. Past El Monte and West Covina, the traffic thinned and the houses gave way to undeveloped land and railroad spur lines and industrial parks. The limo settled into the number two lane and stayed there for a very long time, and for a very long time there was nothing to see. We rolled past Pomona and Ontario and by early afternoon we approached San Bernardino. Service roads appeared, lined with Motel 6’s and Denny’s Coffee Shops and middle-of-nowhere shopping malls featuring BEDROOM SPECIALISTS and INDIAN DINING and UNFINISHED FURNITURE. At the southern edge of San Bernardino, we turned north on the San Bernardino Freeway toward Barstow.

  I said, “How we doing for gas?”

  Pike didn’t answer.

  The San Bernardino forked to the right under a sign that said MOUNTAIN RESORTS, and that’s the way we went. A little bit later it forked again, and this time when we followed we began a long slow climb into the San Bernardino Mountains toward Lake Arrowhead. The limo stayed in the slow lane and Pike dropped very far back. Maybe these guys were on their vacation. Maybe they were going to do a little fishing and water-skiing on the lake and grill some wienies down on the dock. That would be fun.

  The mountains were vertical giants, rocky and bare except for their shoulders and ridges, which were laced with a stegosaurus-like spine of ponderosa pine trees. Every couple of miles there were signs that said DEER CROSSING or SLOWER TRAFFIC USE TURNOUTS or BEWARE FALLING ROCKS.

  It took a half hour to reach a sign that said 5000 FEET ELEVATION, then the highway stopped climbing and leveled out in a heavy forest of ponderosas so improbably tall that we might have been in Oz. Two miles later the road forked again and another sign said BLUE JAY. An arrow pointed toward the left fork. That’s where the limo went. That’s where we went.

  The road was narrow and winding and little clapboard cabins and weekender houses began to pop up amidst the pines. Most had small boats out front or muddy motorcycles leaning against native-stone garage walls. More and more houses sprouted, and pretty soon there was a Pioneer Chicken and a couple of banks and a shopping center and two coffee shops and a Jensen’s Market and a U.S. Post Office and crowds of people and we were in Blue Jay. Up so high, Lake Arrowhead was a good twenty degrees cooler than San Bernard
ino below, and every summer the hordes ascended, desperate to escape the sweltering weather down in the flatland.

  The limo didn’t stop. It rolled slowly through the three-block stretch that was urban Blue Jay, and then the road forked once more. The town ended and houses reappeared but now the houses were larger and more expensive, big two- and three-story structures with lots of decking and stairs and high slanted roofs to shed the snow. We climbed, then leveled off, and we could see the lake, big and wide and gleaming in the summer sun. There were dozens of boats and skiers on the water, the powerboats and jet skis buzzing like angry mutant wasps.

  On the north shore, the limo turned off the main road and eased down a gravel and tarmac lane for a mile and a half past large older homes. Big money was on the north shore. These were old vacation mansions built back in the thirties and forties for Hollywood celebrities and movie moguls who hoped to get away for a little hunting and fishing. Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart and those guys. Wonder what Bogie would think if he knew a scumbag like Yuki Torobuni was living in his house?

  Pike pulled off the road and parked. “We follow down there,” he said, “they’ll spot us.”

  We got out and trotted after them on foot.

  A quarter of a mile ahead, the limo stopped at a private gate. The rear window on the driver’s side went down and Eddie Tang said something to an Asian man who was leaning against a cranberry-colored Chevrolet Caprice. The guard opened the gate and the limo went in. Pike and I moved off the lane into the woods and made our way past another couple of houses until we got to Torobuni’s place. There was a native-stone wall running from the road back into the woods. We followed it until we were hidden from the road, then I went up for a look and Pike continued on toward the lake.

  The grounds were ten acres easy, with a looping gravel drive and a huge stone mansion with a mansard roof and a smaller carriage house to the side. Ponderosas and Douglas firs grew naturally about the grounds, and in back there were gardens and flower beds and stone pathways and swings for lazy summer afternoons. The property ran a good four hundred feet in a gentle slope down to the lake. At the lake there was a stone entertaining pier and boat house and four boat slips. The three men Eddie Tang had brought were smiling and shaking hands with Yuki Torobuni at the limo while a lot of guys who were probably just hired muscle watched. Torobuni made a big deal out of pumping each man’s hand and bowing and there was a lot of back slapping. Home office, all right.