Stalking The Angel

American.

There was a yellow dial phone on a little table beside a Barcalounger chair across from the Zenith. Beneath the phone was an address book with listings for things like paramedics, doctor, fire, police, Ed and Diane Waters, and Bobby's school. Probably code names for yakuza thugs. I put the address book down and went into the kitchen. There were messages held to the refrigerator by little plastic magnets that looked like Snoopy and Charlie Brown and baskets of flowers. A picture of Ishida's wife sat on the counter in a frame that said KISS THE COOK. She looked like a nice woman and a good mom. Did she know what her husband had done for a living? When they were young and courting, had he said, 'Stick with me, babe, I'm gonna be the biggest thug in Little Tokyo,' or had he simply found himself there while she found herself with children and PTA and a loving husband who kept business to himself and made a comfortable life? Maybe I should introduce her to Malcolm Denning's wife. Maybe they would have a lot to talk about.

Pike materialized in the doorway. 'Back here,' he said.

We went back through the family room and down a short hall to what had probably once been a child's bedroom. Now, it wasn't.

'Well, well, well,' I said. 'Welcome to Nippon.'

We were in a small room with a lot of furniture and all the furniture was lacquered rosewood. There was a low table in the center of the room with a pillow for a chair and one of those lacquered boxes with a phone inside. A matching file cabinet stood in the corner, and a low table ran along two walls. On the table were four little stands, each stand holding a pair of horizontal samurai swords, a longer one on the bottom, a shorter one above it. The swords were inlaid with pearls and gems and had silk ribbons wound about the handles. Separating the stands were very old samurai battle helmets shaped like the helmets the Federation Storm Troopers had worn in Star Wars. A beautiful silk robe was framed on the wall above the helmets. It looked like a giant butterfly. There were wood-block prints on the opposite walls and a silk-screened watercolor under glass that looked so delicate that a ripple of air might fray it, and two tiny bonsai trees growing in glass globes. On the outside wall, shoji screens softened and filtered the early morning sunlight. It was a beautiful room.

Pike went to the low table and said, 'Look.'

Three books were stacked on the edge of the table. The top book was an excerpted English translation of the Hagakure. The second book was a different translation. The third was titled Bushido: The Warrior's Soul. Pike thumbed through the top Hagakure translation. 'They've been read a lot.'

'If Ishida had the real thing, maybe someone found out and wanted it bad enough to try to make him turn it over to them.'

'Uh-huh.' Pike found something he liked and stopped to read.

'Perhaps we can find a clue as to whom.'

Pike kept reading.

'As soon as we finish reading.'

Joe read a moment longer, then put the book back on the table. 'I'll go up front and keep watch.'

When he was gone, I looked around. There was nothing on the low desk but the books and the phone, and nothing on the wall tables but the swords and the helmets. Not even dust. The file cabinet was absolutely clean, too, but at least there were the drawers to look into. The top drawer had neatly labeled files devoted to home and family: the kids' schools, medical payments, insurance policies. The bottom drawer held art catalogs, vacation brochures, and supply catalogs from Ishida's import business. There were no financial records from his business. Those were probably with his accountant. Filed under C for Crime.

In the third folder from the back of the drawer I found Ishida's personal credit card records. The charges were substantial.

Nobu Ishida had two Visa cards and two MasterCards and American Express Platinum and Optima and Diners Club. Most of the charges were at restaurants or hotels or various boutiques and department stores. The Ishidas had gone out a lot, and spent a lot more than people living in this house in this neighborhood might spend. I was looking for patterns, but there didn't seem to be any. All the hotels were one-shots and so were most of the restaurants. Go someplace for a bite, maybe not go back for another couple of months, if you went back at all. There were a few repeats, but those mostly to places I recognized. Ma Maison is not a yakuza hangout.

I had gone through the old stuff and was working on the recent when I noticed that two or three times a week, every week for the past three months, Ishida had gone to a place called Mr. Moto's. There were mostly small charges, as if he had gone by himself to have a couple of drinks, but once every two weeks, usually on a Thursday, there was a single large charge of between four and five hundred dollars. Hmmmm.

I put the credit card receipts back in their file and the file back in its folder and left the cabinet as I had found it and went back to the low table. I used the phone and called information.

A woman's voice said, 'What city?'

'Los Angeles. I need a number and address for a restaurant or bar named Mr. Moto's.'

If all you want is a number, they put on the computer. If you want the address, a person has to tell you. The person gave me the number and the address and told me to have a good day. Something the computer never does. I hung up and wiped the beautiful lacquered box free of unsightly fingerprints, then went out to Joe Pike.

He nodded when he saw me. 'Didn't take long.'

'The best clues never do.'

We let ourselves out, walked back along the side of the house, got into the Corvette, and drove to Mr. Moto's.

Chapter 16

Mr. Moto's was a storefront dance club just off Sixth downtown. Hi-tech deco. Whitewashed front with porthole windows outlined in aqua and peach, and Mr. Moto's spelled out in neon triangles. Japanese and Chinese cuisine. Very nouveau. There would be buffalo mozzarella spring rolls and black pasta miso and waiters with new wave football player haircuts and more neon triangles on the inside. A sign on the door said CLOSED. Another sign said LUNCH – DINNER – COCKTAILS – OPEN 11:30 A.M. It was twenty minutes after ten.

We drove another three blocks and stopped at a Bob's Big Boy to clean up in their restroom. There was an older guy with a copy of the Jewish Daily News standing at one of the lavatories combing his hair when we walked in. Pike went to the lavatory next to him, pulled off his sweatshirt, then unhooked his hip holster and put his gun on top of the soap dispenser. The old man looked at the gun, then at Pike, then left. He forgot his newspaper.

When we were as clean as about a million paper towels and soap that smelled like Pledge could make us, we walked the three blocks down to Mr. Moto's. It was ten minutes before noon when we went in the front door and the slim Japanese maitre d' said, 'Two for lunch?' The hair on the right side of his head was shaved down to a quarter-inch buzz cut, the hair on the left was long and frizzed. New wave, all right.

I said, 'We'll sit at the bar for a while.'

It was a nice-looking place, even with the neon. The front was all aqua plastic tables and peach wrought iron chairs and a tile floor the color of steel. There was a sushi bar on the right, with maybe twenty stools and four sushi chefs wearing white and red headbands and yelling anytime somebody walked into the place. About halfway back, the room cut in half. Tables continued along the wall on the right all the way to the kitchen in the back. On the left, you could step up underlit tile steps to a full bar and a little drinking area they had there with more tables and plants and neon triangles. A modern steel rail ran around the edge of the drinking platform to keep drunks from falling into someone's California roll. There were three women together at one of the little tables up in the bar area, and four couples in the dining room. Business people on their lunch hour. Pike and I went back through the dining area and up the little steps to the bar, one of the three women staring at Pike's tattoos.

The bartender was a Japanese woman in her late twenties. Hard face and too much green eye shadow and a rich ocher tan. She was wearing black, sprayed-on pants and a blue and black hapi coat with red trim that had been tied off just below the breasts so her midriff was bare. A tattoo of a butterfly floated