'Good Lord. You've got to be shitting me!
'Not at all. The first husband's name was Lamb. Aaron Lamb. He met Machiko when she was working in Tokyo after the war.
'When she was working as a hooker? I asked innocently. I'll be damned if I was going to let Ames think he was the only one holding any cards in this particular game.
'That's right. She had evidently lost her entire family and wanted to come to this country in the worst way. Machiko says now that she thought at first that Lamb loved her. Once they were here in the States though, he turned mean and abusive. He beat her constantly. She didn't dare leave or ask for help because he told her that if he divorced her, she'd be deported and sent back to Japan.
'What does the sword have to do with all of this?
'It was her most prized possession, her only possession. A gift from her grandfather. He told her never to draw it unless she intended to use it, but that if it became necessary, she should use the sword to defend her honor or her life.
'One day Lamb came home drunk. He accused Machiko of hiding money from him. While he was looking for the money, he found the knife. He had never known about it before, had never seen it. Machiko had brought it with her, concealed in her luggage. Lamb came after her with the knife. He had it out of the box and was threatening her with it, demanding to know what else she had hidden away in the house. And that's when Tadeo Kurobashi happened to show up. He was out delivering groceries.
'And killed the husband?
'Unintentionally. With Machiko's sword, Ames added. 'Tadeo was trying to disarm him but in the struggle, Lamb went down, fatally wounded. Machiko was terrified that without Lamb, she'd be shipped back to Japan. Kurobashi was scared, too. It was such a short time after the war. He was afraid he'd be facing lynch-mob mentality, not justice. He didn't think anyone would believe he had acted in self-defense, so he and Machiko disposed of the body. Kurobashi came back for it that night in his grocery truck. They carted the body out to Ballard and dumped it into Salmon Bay, where it was found a week later.
'And no one ever suspected? I asked.
'Think about it, Ames said. 'It was just after the war. Lamb was a lowlife to begin with, a thug, married to a Japanese woman, an ex-prostitute he had brought home with him. The spoils of war, as it were. I don't think anybody cared very much.
'No, I said quietly. 'I don't suppose they did. I thought about it for a moment. 'So why did the Kurobashis keep the sword hidden all those years?
'Out of some form of irrational fear that they'd be found out, Ralph Ames answered. 'For years it was in the safe at Kurobashi's office. Until last week.
'What happened last week?
'I don't know, but whatever it was, it made Kurobashi change his mind. He called Machiko late Sunday morning and told her that he had decided to go ahead and sell the sword. He said they would use whatever proceeds they got from it to start a new company.
'Where's Machiko now? I asked.
'Archie put her up down at the Four Seasons. That's fairly close to the Public Safety building, where we'll be meeting with Dr. Yamamoto tomorrow.
'The Four Seasons! Isn't that a little steep? I asked. 'How can she afford it?
'She can't. Archie's paying for it. Cost of doing business and all that.
'Making sure he gets first dibs to handle the sword?
'That too, Ames replied. 'He wouldn't be doing it if he didn't think it would be worth it in the long run for both of them.
I was feeling more than moderately irritable with Ames and Archibald Winter both. Ames sounded smug. Not only had he stepped into my business with Dr. Wang, here he was, along with his high-toned friend, messing around in more of my business, solving a murder, a forty-year-old one at that, an unsolved murder nobody had looked at in years.
'Is Machiko going to go to the memorial service tomorrow afternoon? I asked.
'I don't think so, Ames replied. 'At least she didn't mention it. Our appointment with Dr. Yamamoto is scheduled for eleven. Before that we're meeting with Chris Davenport. He's anxious for Machiko to sign off on some of the bankruptcy proceedings, and I'm not sure that's wise.
'What have you done, Ames, taken another chick under your protective wing?
'I just don't want to see her rushed into something that wouldn't be advantageous, considering the situation with Archie and the sword.
Outside I heard the deep-throated honking of a horn announcing the arrival of the ferry. 'I've gotta go, I said quickly. 'Once I get to Seattle, I'll stop by Harborview long enough to see if there's anything I can do for Dana Lions, then I'll be home. See you in the morning.
The few inbound cars were already unloaded and the cars waiting in line behind me were already starting their engines as I reached my vehicle. Barely missing the previous ferry guarantees you a front-row seat on the next one. I drove all the way to the restraining chains at the front of the ferry and settled deep into the Porsche's chilly leather seat for the thirty-minute ride to Seattle. I leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes, but I didn't sleep. I didn't even doze.
I was still plucked by what I regarded as Ames' and Winter's interference in my case, even though, at the same time, I was dazzled by all the information those two interlopers had managed to glean. If any or all of it was true, then the dynamics of Tadeo and Machiko's marriage were much different from what I had supposed and from what other outsiders had assumed. I found myself examining the Kurobashis' marriage through a prism of new information.
George Yamamoto had seen Tadeo's total absorption in Machiko, had watched it draw Tadeo's affections away from his sister Tomi. He had tried to understand it, finally explaining it to himself as some kind of sexual entrapment, a web of eroticism only a street wise prostitute could weave.
Now I felt certain that Machiko's fascination for Tadeo had been far less complicated than that, far less sinister. I saw it as the simple magnetism that often draws the strong to the weak, the powerful to the helpless. Tadeo had literally wrested Machiko from certain death at the hands of her brutal husband. That act had bound the two of them together in such a symbiotic, mutually dependent relationship that even Kimiko, their well-loved child, had not been able to penetrate it, much less understand it.
What Kimiko had seen as a prison, Machiko had viewed as a haven, a refuge. The father, the villain Kimiko regarded as her mother's ruthless jailer and dictator, had chosen to alienate his daughter, to go without speaking to his only child for nine long years, rather than reveal his own terrible secret, a secret he and his wife had shared and lived with and carried together for more than forty years.
So what had changed? What event had, in a single day, triggered such a fundamental change in Tadeo Kurobashi's life? What had made so great a difference that he had been willing, after all those years, to sell the sword? He must have known that Machiko's sword was indeed two-edged, that it held the promise of bringing them much needed financial relief, but that it also carried the threat of bringing with it questions and an investigation that might reopen that forty-year-old nightmare.
That weekend, something had made such a profound impression on Tadeo Kurobashi that he had been willing to risk revealing the desperate act he and Machiko had kept hidden for so long.
There was only one thing I knew for sure about that Friday. It was the day Clay Woodruff had called and left a message for Tadeo Kurobashi with Bernice Oliver. Was that call the catalyst? Was that what had sparked Tadeo's sudden change of heart, or was it something that happened later at the meeting in Port Angeles on Sunday?
I had no way of knowing, and no way of telling which side Woodruff was on, to say nothing of which way he might have pushed Tadeo. Woodruff had claimed that he was doing something for a friend, a final favor. Maybe that had been a lie, something Woodruff threw in to keep me off guard. If so, it had worked like a charm. Clay Woodruff had outfoxed me six ways to Sunday. He had gotten away clean without my having any idea where to look for him.
Frustrated with thinking about how stupid I was, I went back to thinking about Tadeo Kurobashi, struggling to come to grips with this changed vision of him, to understand how this newly revised and heroic version was tied in with a gangster named Aldo Pappinzino in Chicago, Illinois. No matter how I shoved the pieces around on the
