Kirin black label. Then I reread a Haruo Sato short story from years ago. It was a lovely uneventful spring evening. The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.
When I tired of reading, I put on the Stern-Rose-Istomin Trio playing Schubert's Opus 100, a piece I always reserve for spring. It breathed with the lush sadness of the night. Where off in the depths of gloom drifted six white skeletons. Life was sinking into an abyss, bones hard as memories positioned before me.
32
Gotanda swung by at eight-forty. He was wearing a perfectly ordinary gray V-neck sweater over a perfectly ordinary blue button-down shirt with—you got it—perfectly ordinary cotton slacks. And still he looked striking. Extraordinarily so.
He was curious about my digs, so I invited him in.
«Nice,» he said with a shy smile. Such a sweet smile, it made you feel like offering to let him stay for a week.
«Takes me back,» he said, as if to himself. «Reminds me of the place I used to have—before I hit it big.» From anyone else, the comment would have been an unbearable snub, but from him it was a compliment, straightforward and pure.
I offered Gotanda a big cushion and got out my fold-away low table from the closet. Then I brought us black beer with my spinach-and-whitefish concoction and put on the Schubert again.
«Fantastic!»
«Really? How about something else?»
«I'd love it, but I don't want you to have to go to the trouble.»
«No trouble at all. I can whip something up quick and easy. Nothing too fancy, though.»
«Can I watch?»
«Sure,» I said.
Scallions tossed with salt-plum.
«Amazing,» sighed Gotanda. «You're a genius.»
«Very kind of you to say so, but I assure you, it's real simple. Just throwing together stuff I have around.»
«Sheer genius. I could never do it.»
«Well, thank you, but I could never imitate a dentist.»
«Aaa—,» he said, dismissing my return of compliment. «You know, would you mind if we didn't go out tonight? This stuff is great.»
«Fine by me.»
So we drank and ate. When the beer ran out, we switched to Cutty Sark. We listened to Sly and the Family Stone, the Doors and Stones, Pink Floyd. We listened to the Beach Boys'
No alien showed, but from ten o'clock it did start to rain. Softly, quietly, barely audible on the eaves. Almost silent as the dead.
As the night wore on, we stopped putting on music. My apartment didn't have the thick walls of Gotanda's condominium, and loud noise after eleven asked for complaints. With the music off, the whisper of the rain underscored the tone of our conversation. The police hadn't made much headway on Mei's case, I lamented. No, they haven't, Gotanda sighed. He'd been checking the newspapers and magazines too.
I opened a second bottle of Cutty Sark, and for the first round we toasted Mei.
«The cops have narrowed their investigations down to prostitution rings,» I went on, «so they must have gotten a
hold somewhere. I'm worried that'll lead them to you.»
«There's a chance,» said Gotanda, knitting his eyebrows slightly. «But it's probably okay. I was a little nervous, so I asked the folks at my agency about it. Whether that club's as tight-lipped as they claim. And you know what? Seems the club has a lot of political connections, some pretty big names apparently. So even if the club did spill to the police, they wouldn't be able to go sniffing too far. They couldn't lay a hand on anybody. And for that matter, my agency has a bit of clout too. Some of the bigger stars have very close friends in high places. Sometimes in not-so-nice places. So either way, the cops don't have a lot of room to maneuver. And because I'm a money tree for the agency, they don't want anything to happen to me. I'm a major investment. They don't want to see my value plummet. True, if you'd mentioned my name to the cops, my ass would've been hauled in for sure. All the political connections in Ginza couldn't have kept that from happening. But no fear of that now. The rest is a power play, one system against another.»
«It's a dirty world,» I said.
«Isn't it, though,» said Gotanda. «Dirty to the core.»
«Two votes, dirty.»
«Say what?»
«Two votes for dirty, motion adopted.»
He nodded, then smiled sadly. «Two votes for dirty. No one can be bothered to think about a murder victim. Everyone's busy looking out for Number One,» he said. «Myself
included.»
I went into the kitchen to replenish the ice, bringing out
crackers and cheese.
«I want to ask you a favor,» I said, sitting down. «Could you call up the organization and ask them something for
me?»
He pinched his earlobe. «What do you want to know? Anything to do with this case is out of the question. They'd never crack.»
«Completely unrelated. I want to know about a call girl I
met in Honolulu. I've heard a girl overseas could be arranged through the club.»
«Who told you that?»
«Someone with no name. I'm willing to bet that the organization this guy was talking about is the same club we're talking about. Because you got to be rich and famous to join. Neither of which I begin to approach, or so I was told.»
Gotanda smiled. «Yeah, I think I may have heard about a service like that. One phone call does the trick. I haven't had the pleasure, but it's probably the same setup. So, what about that hooker in Honolulu?»
«I just want to know if the club has a Southeast Asian woman named June working for them.»
Gotanda thought about this, but didn't ask anything more. He jotted down the name in his datebook.
«June what?»
«Gimme a break. She's a call girl,» I said. «It's just June.»
«Got it. I'll ring the place up tomorrow.»
«Thanks. I owe you,» I said.
«Forget it. After what you've done for me, this is a pittance.» He winked and gave me a thumbs-up. «You go to Hawaii alone, by the way?»
«Who goes to Hawaii alone? I went with a girl. She's only thirteen, though.»
«You slept with a thirteen-year-old girl?»
«What do you think I am? The kid doesn't even wear a bra yet.»
«Then why'd you go with her?»
«To teach her table manners, interpret the mysteries of the sex drive, bad-mouth Boy George, go see
