There’s nobody home except Fido here.”
“Oh,” she said in a funny kind of voice. Then she said, “His name’s Tomodachi. That means ‘friend’ in Japanese.”
“Yeah,” I said, “sure.”
“What’d you do, just walk in on him?”
“I didn’t see him. Or any Beware of Dog sign.”
“Used to be a sign. Some kids stole it.”
“Look, ma’am, you suppose you could do something about getting me out of here? I don’t like the way he keeps staring at me.”
“Well, he can be vicious sometimes,” she said. “Tomodachi! Get away! Leave the man alone!”
The Doberman turned his head and gave her a quick look. But he didn’t obey; he swung his gaze back to me and snarled some more and shuffled his front paws. I got ready to defend myself, but nothing happened.
“Damn,” the woman said. “I never could talk to him. Or get near him unless Sanjiro was around. Might be a way, though. I’ll be right back; you stay where you are.”
Lady, I thought, where am I going to go?
She trotted away to her own property, disappeared inside her house for about two minutes, reappeared, and came hurrying back to the Masaoka gate. When she neared it I could see what it was she was holding in one hand: a couple of beaten-up old tennis balls.
“Tomodachi likes to play ball,” she told me. “He likes it more than just about anything.”
“More than attacking strangers, I hope.”
“I’ll try to get him to fetch,” she said. “Then I’ll open the gate and you make a run for it.”
“Like a world-class sprinter,” I said.
“Ball!” she said loudly to the Doberman. “Ball, Tomodachi! Let’s play ball!”
It got his attention. His ears pricked up again, his head came around, and his tongue rolled out of his mouth like a flag unfurling. The woman showed him one of the tennis balls, kept on chattering at him until she succeeded in getting him half turned around and dividing his attention between the two of us. At which point she pulled her arm back and yelled “Fetch!” and uncorked a throw Willie Mays would have been proud of, over toward where the tree stumps were piled.
The Doberman wheeled, she got ready to yank open the gate, I got ready to run like hell… and the dog ran five feet and stopped and came back and snarled at me some more.
The woman said, “Shit.” Which were my sentiments exactly.
So we had to go through the whole thing again, only longer this time, like extended foreplay, in order to get the dog all hot and bothered over the idea of playing fetch. She teased him with words, juggled the ball from one hand to the other, pretended three or four times that she was going to throw it. The last time she cocked her arm, he scooted away a few feet in anticipation; he was as ready then as he would ever be. And so was I.
The woman glanced at me, and I nodded, and she hauled her arm back again and yelled “Fetch!” and let fly, in the general direction of the hippie-relic bus. The Doberman and I both took off at the same time. I sailed down over the four porch steps without touching any of them, stumbled when I landed, saw that the woman had the gate open, saw that the dog had put on the brakes and was starting to twist back toward me with his fangs bared, caught my balance, and charged ahead slipping and sliding on the muddy path. I got to the opening just as the dog launched himself at my backside, and went galumphing through. The woman slammed the gate shut; the Doberman must have barreled right into it because I heard him yelp. But if he got his dignity wounded, so did I: I had been running so fast that I couldn’t slow down soon enough and I caromed off the side of my car, did a crazy pirouette to one side, tripped, and splashed down into one of the rain puddles.
I said some things that ought to have blistered the paint off the car. The woman didn’t even flinch; she’d come over to the edge of the puddle and was trying not to laugh at me. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m just dandy.” I got onto my feet and sloshed to the car and leaned against the front fender. The Doberman was making lemme-at-him noises and glaring at me through the wood-stake fence; I glared back at him in the same malevolent way. Dogs. Phooey.
The woman said, “Come on over to my place. I’ll let you use a towel.”
“Thanks. And thanks for the rescue.”
“Always glad to be neighborly,” she said. She was still trying not to laugh at me.
We went to her house and she gave me the towel and the use of her bathroom to repair some of the damage to my suit. When I came out she had a cup of coffee for me. She said her name was Ethel Pinkham, grimaced to let me know she hated both ends of it, and told me to call her Pink. Everyone did, she said, and went on to explain that when her late husband was alive he’d been Pink One and she’d been Pink Two. I gave her my name, but not what I did for a living or what my business was with Masaoka. And she didn’t ask.
She said, “Poor Tomodachi. I been feeding him-scraps over the fence; he won’t let me come in the yard either. But he needs care and a new home. One of Sanjiro’s cousins was supposed to come pick him up three days ago. If she doesn’t get here by tomorrow morning I’m calling the SPCA.”
“I don’t follow, Pink. Why does the dog need a new home?”
“Oh, that’s right-you don’t know. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come looking for Sanjiro.”
“Don’t know what?”
“He’s dead,” she said. “Been dead eight days now.”
It took me a couple of seconds to absorb that. Then I said, “How did he die?”
“Some kind of fall. Nobody knows for sure.”
“Where did it happen? His house?”
“No. Out toward the point. He’d been abaloneing by himself, like usual, and he must have fallen off the rocks. One of those freak accidents.”
“This happened eight days ago, you say?”
She nodded. “Early in the morning. Couple of kids found him wedged in amongst the rocks. Hadn’t been dead more than a few hours at the time.”
“Was he married?”
“Widower. His wife died three… four years back.”
“So he lived alone?”
“Just him and Tomodachi.”
“What about this cousin? Does she live around here?”
“Nope. Over in Fresno.”
“Where she and Masaoka close, do you know?”
“Sanjiro wasn’t close to anybody after his wife died,” Pink said. “Took it pretty hard and kept to himself after that. Hardly ever had any visitors or left the village. That’s why I was so surprised to see you over there today.”
“You didn’t know him well, then?”
“Well as anybody around here. We were neighbors twelve years. His wife Yoshiko and I used to take tea together sometimes. Nice woman, real pretty. She died of cancer. He carried her picture with him all the time in a little gold locket.”
“Locket? What sort of locket?”
“Little gold one, like I said. Shaped like a heart.”
“With a pearl on one side?”
“Why, that’s right. How did you-?”
“I’ve seen lockets like that,” I said quickly. “In fact, I’ve been planning to buy one for my wife.” But I was thinking: First the medallion and now the gold locket-both of which could have come off men newly dead. What in the name of Christ is going on here?
I wanted to ask her if Masaoka’s locket had been missing from his body when he was found, but I doubted it was something she’d know. And it was the kind of provocative question that might arouse her suspicions and lead to difficulties. Instead I asked, “Did Masaoka ever mention any friends in San Francisco?”
“No, not that I recall.”
“Does the name Simon Tamura mean anything to you?”
“Let’s see-Tamura. Is kind of familiar, come to think on it. Didn’t I read something about a Tamura in the
