then dressed and put the Dan Wesson under my arm.
When I went downstairs again, Joe Pike was waiting.
Chapter 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 downstairs 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
