Читать книгу Deshi - John Donohue - Страница 11

3 SPLATTER

They argued about who would drive. “You sure you’re up to it?” my brother Micky asked.

His partner, Art, is pretty good-natured, but questions like this bother him. “Hey, get off my case,” he snapped. “What, you think I’m not up to it?”

Micky held up his hands in mock surrender. “Just asking. You don’t want to tax things.” He went to the passenger door. Art moved past him, grumbling, and got behind the wheel.

I sat in silence in the back and let the flow of the trip calm them down. This crabby exchange was typical and the tense atmosphere didn’t last long. Eventually, Art started to talk again. “So we say to ourselves,” he began saying to me as we drove crosstown toward the East River, “why not share the wealth?”

“Hey, asshole,” my brother Micky said, “you want to drive so badly, how about using two hands?” Now he was cranky.

Art was driving with his right hand and waving the other one around. It made me worry. Not too long ago, someone had sliced his right hand off with a sword. They had bagged it in ice and stuck it on the gurney when they wheeled Art away. No one paid much attention. The guy with the sword had done other damage and everyone expected Art to die.

He hung on. Micky and I tracked the swordsman down. Eventually, it came to a head on a steamy night in midtown Manhattan. I don’t like to think about it too much. The only good thing was that, at the end of it all, I didn’t die.

Neither did Art.

He spent quite a bit of time in ICU, hooked up to machines. I wonder if the doctors felt left out from the start and reattached the hand immediately just to have something to do. It turned out to be a good thing. Art got better and Micky would have refused to work with a partner that looked like Captain Hook.

Now we were rocking along the FDR drive with a cop’s casual disregard for speed limits. He swerved around other motorists in long swooping moves that would have induced motion sickness in the less stalwart.

I was sitting in the back of their car. The shocks were mushy. The back was awash in clipboards and old newspapers. A paper coffee cup rolled wetly around on the floor. I inched the window down a bit and sipped at the air in quiet desperation.

“I gotta say, Connor,” Micky commented, watching the scenery whiz by, “I thought, ‘no way’ when this call came through. I mean, come on.”

“Strange,” Art said in a thick, choked up weird voice.

“Let me get this straight,” I said, and tried to focus on something other than Art’s atrocious driving. “The Brooklyn cops called you in on a homicide because some bright light had read about what happened to us last time?”

“Famous, we are,” Art said in that same voice.

“Yeah, well,” my brother responded. “We got some Japanese guy. Apparent homicide victim. The only clue? Some calligraphy.”

“Come on!” I protested.

“Mystery, there is. And danger,” Art intoned.

“Art, I swear to God if you don’t cut that Master Yoda shit out right now I’m gonna go insane!” my brother yelled.

Art just chortled and swung around a slow-moving vehicle. “Yeah,” he said in his normal voice, “so we thought we’d bring you with us to take a look.”

“Great,” I said.

“You bet.” Art smiled as he glanced up at me in the rearview mirror. We coasted onto the ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge. “Only one change in plans,” he said, looking at my brother.

“Oh, yeah?” Micky asked skeptically.

“Yeah. If there’s a guy with a sword, you go after him this time.” Then Art put both hands on the wheel, as if suddenly remembering something disturbing. Micky looked at the side window, his face a mask.

There was a variety of uniformed types milling about the house when we arrived. Cops have a herding instinct. Most of the workday is indescribably boring. So when something big happens, they’re drawn to it. From all over. There were marked and unmarked cars sitting at various angles along the street. The nicely tended trees tended to break things up, but you could hear the chatter from a number of radios, like the sound of nasty insects. There were a few plainclothes guys smoking on the sidewalk and a few patrolmen in the traditional blue uniforms of the NYPD milling about. They all seemed to have large, square automatics riding on their gunbelts.

I looked at Art and Micky. They wear rumpled sportcoats and pants whose manufacturers claim never need ironing. This is not true. I, for one, had left my shinai in the trunk of the car and, bereft of a belt loaded with cop hardware, I felt conspicuously under-dressed.

How Art and my brother got sent from Manhattan on this call was anyone’s guess, but they threaded their way through a variety of suspicious uniformed people. We stopped briefly to ask questions at numerous points, getting shunted farther and farther back through the house and eventually into the yard at the rear.

Where the total crime scene experience was in full swing.

A guy in his early fifties was standing outside the hut and talking with a woman from the forensics squad. His suit was a stylish olive three-button number, but it was slightly wrinkled at the thighs. His hair, which was a speckled iron gray, looked freshly cut. Various people kept coming up to him to give brief reports. He didn’t say much. His face looked tired.

“Lieutenant Strakowski?” Art asked. The man turned to look at us with a “what now” expression.

“You the guys from Manhattan?” he asked. Micky and Art flashed their shields, introduced themselves, and shook hands. All part of one big happy club.

Strakowski turned to look at me. “You are?” Cops don’t waste much energy with the niceties. Micky and Art tried to explain my presence as if subtly conscious of my shameful lack of an appropriate firearm.

The Lieutenant nodded. “Oh, yeah. You’re the guy I read about. With the swords and all.” He turned to Micky. “He doesn’t look that dangerous.”

My brother shrugged.

“The Burkes are tricky that way,” Art chimed in. “I speak from experience.”

You could see Strakowski making connections as we talked. He was the one who had asked for us to come over. I saw him glance once at Art’s hand. The one that had been reattached. But that was it. Strakowski was not easily distracted.

“Lemme show you what we got,” he said and motioned us toward the hut. He trudged through the grass and we followed. “I gotta say,” he commented, “your Lieutenant was awful cooperative. Almost eager to send you here.”

“That’s easily explained,” Art answered.

“Yeah,” Micky concluded. “Lieutenant Colletti hates us.”

Strakowski paused and turned his head slightly in our direction. But he didn’t say a word.

I was pretty clear about my role in the crime scene investigation, since I’ve done this before. I was to avoid touching anything. To speak only when spoken to. In short, I was expected to avoid annoying the adults.

It’s just as well. Crime scenes give me the creeps.

First, there are all these cops stomping around with the heavy reinforced shoes they wear. You’d think a death scene would be quiet, reverential. It’s not. The little cop radios that are clipped to their shoulders squawk intermittently. The officers call loudly to one another about various things. The forensics people are quieter, but they add a sense of bustle to the whole thing that is unseemly. Particularly if the dead guy is present.

Fortunately, he wasn’t.

It was a relief. There’s something about the undignified postures and often messy conditions that are the frequent accompaniment to violent death that get to me. Besides, I was still feeling faintly nauseated from the car ride.

The calligraphy hut wasn’t a large place. It was meant to be a solitary refuge. Now, it was crowded with cops. Life is full of irony. Strakowski paused at the door and took a deep breath. A Hispanic plainclothes detective was lounging against the doorjamb, watching the forensics team working intently inside, but he looked up almost immediately at the Lieutenant. “Pete, give us a minute, here, would ya?” Strakowski said.

He gestured at the man with a thumb. “Sergeant Pete Ramirez.” Then he pointed at each of us in turn. “Detectives Burke, Pedersen from Manhattan PD. The other Burke.”

“The sword guy?” Ramirez asked.

I let out a long sigh. Some things are not worth getting into.

Micky smirked. “Hey, Connor. You’re famous.”

“Everyone’s famous for fifteen minutes, Mick,” I told him.

“Yeah, well, time’s up,” Strakowski said. He was not a man with a high tolerance for banter. He gestured the forensics team out. “Give us a few minutes, people, OK?” Then he looked at Ramirez. “Fill us in, Pete.”

Ramirez snapped back into focus and took a notepad from his jacket pocket. “Victim is Edward Sakura, fifty-eight. Works for Three Diamonds Productions, an entertainment agency or something.”

We moved into the hut as he spoke. A taped outline was on the floor, showing the points of Sakura’s last living contact with the earth. It was well done and you got a good sense of the arrangement of limbs. The area where the head lay was a dark, smudgy stain. You could smell the blood in the close confines of the room.

Art and Micky stopped once they were inside. They did it together, almost automatically, and slowly scanned the room as if imprinting it in their minds. Ramirez continued his briefing.

“Victim was alone at the time of the shooting.”

“You got a fix on the time of death, yet?” Art interrupted.

Ramirez shook his head no. “Just a rough estimate from the coroner’s guys. I haven’t seen the paperwork yet.”

“Get it as soon as you can, Pete,” Strakowski said tersely.

“Wife?” Micky asked.

“Yep,” Ramirez answered. “Gone all day. We’re checking it out.”

“Where is she now?” Art asked.

“She’s inside,” the Lieutenant said, “doped to the eyeballs. The doctor just left.”

Ramirez went back to reading his notes. “Apparent cause of death was a large caliber bullet wound. Entered the left temple and blew out the other side of the head.”

“Powder burns?” my brother asked.

“None visible. No weapon at the scene. Suicide is probably out. We’ll do a paraffin check on the corpse anyway.”

Micky and Art nodded their approval. “Do the wife, too,” Micky murmured.

Then he turned to look around, and I did, too. It was a typical layout for Shodo practice. White walls, with natural wood trim. A low, wooden table where the paper, ink, and brushes were arranged. A small cushion for sitting on. There were some bookshelves and drawers behind the spot where Sakura had sat. It looked fairly tidy in there. But the white outline with the stain ruined the effect.

A few calligraphy brushes lay on the floor, close to the tape outline of an arm. The cushion looked like it had been shoved around, probably by the movements of the body as Sakura took his last trip to the floor. Other than that, most things looked normal.

“No sign of a struggle,” Art said, as if reading my mind.

“Right,” Ramirez responded. “No real struggle. No evidence of forced entry.”

“Anything disturbed at the house?”

Strakowski let out a stream of air as if impatient with going over old ground. “No apparent breakin. Nothing taken. None of the neighbors saw anything. We’re checking the wife’s alibi. Looking for girlfriend trouble. Boyfriend trouble. Business trouble.”

Art and Micky looked at him without expression as Strakowski went on. “Look, we know what we’re doing. We know what we’ve got on our hands here.”

“Ya do, huh?” Micky asked.

“Sure,” Ramirez said. “It’s a homicide, pure and simple. Clean, efficient. In and out. No fuss, no muss, no bother.”

“Well, except for the floor…” Art commented. Strakowski looked pained.

“OK, if you’re all so smart, then why are we here?” Micky asked.

Strakowski looked at him, hard. My brother didn’t flinch. He saw the same look every morning in the mirror when he shaved. The only difference was that Strakowski had gray eyes and Micky had blue ones.

“Here’s the deal,” the man from Brooklyn said, puffing out his cheeks like he was bleeding off tension. “You looked at the crime stats for the sixty-eighth precinct?” We shook our heads no. “We had a total of two homicides here last year. Neat and tidy. No big mystery.”

“We mostly work larceny cases,” Ramirez added.

His boss glared at him. “And now I have Mr. Sakura meeting his maker in my nice, quiet community. It looks to me like a professional job.”

“Oh, definitely,” Ramirez commented.

Strakowski grimaced as if in pain, then continued. “And in the few precious moments he has left in this vale of tears, what does the victim do?”

“Scream. Cry?” Art suggested.

“Wet his pants?” said Micky. The rhetorical nature of questions is often lost on cops.

Strakowski lowered his chin and looked at the two detectives from Manhattan wearily. ‘’I’m beginning to understand your lieutenant.” He held out a hand and Ramirez put a manila envelope in it. Then Strakowski slipped out a sheet of paper encased in plastic.

“It appears that Mr. Sakura’s last action on earth was an act of calligraphy. Now what are we to make of that?”

“Pretty cool customer,” Ramirez offered.

His boss shrugged. “Maybe. And anybody that cool is gonna be doing what he does for a good reason.” It looked like Art was about to say something, so Strakowski held up a hand. “Maybe, I thought in my own feeble cop way, maybe this is a message for us. I mean, we’re no experts here in Fort Hamilton. Not like you pros from across the river. But maybe, just maybe it’s a…” he paused in sarcastic emphasis “… clue! But surely I am out of my element. Then I thought, hmmm. Calligraphy. Murder. Exotic Asian culture. Who can help me with this puzzle?” He looked pointedly from Ramirez to Micky to Art. Then he turned to me and stood there, waiting.

“Can I see the paper?” I asked.

It was Sakura’s last piece of calligraphy. A single sheet of fine paper, holding the black swirls of a dead man’s brush strokes.

“This was found on the desk?” I asked. It was a stupid question, but I often sound that way while I think.

“There was a sequence of different sheets lying on the table. This one was on top,” Ramirez answered.

“Ya think he got popped while doing this?” Art asked.

I didn’t respond. I was scanning the record of his calligraphy from his last session. Conjuring a mental image of Sakura in the Shodo hut, totally focused on his art in the last few moments he had to live. I spread the sheets out on a side table and arranged them in the sequence I thought made the most sense. I stepped back and nodded to myself. Ranged the way I had placed them, you could almost see something happen. The first warm-up exercises, the testing of ink consistency and brush conditions, reveal an artist forging a tactile link with his tools. Then Sakura had started a quote from the Platform Scripture. The characters were classic Chinese, like many of the old Zen documents, and they revealed balance and poise and a fidelity to discipline. The characters flow across the page for four lines before something happens.

There’s a break in the esthetic structure. It’s hard to describe. You need to look at a lot of this material to get a sense of the balance and rhythm. And you need to experience something of the focused concentration that facilitates it. The victim and I practiced different arts, but shared a common tradition.

I could see the cops fidgeting around me. I shook my head. “Sure,” I told them. “The murderer broke in while the victim was writing.” I pointed to different sheets as I spoke, so they could follow me. “This was a man of great focus and calm,” I told them. I sighed inwardly. The more we know of crime victims, the greater the sadness. The stronger the outrage. “The brush strokes don’t show any sign of interruption. Until the final moment.” I pointed some features out on the last page. “You can see that the balance of the calligraphy was done in one smooth motion. Even the final sheet. But there’s this slight squiggle at the tail end. If he were shot while doing it, I’m assuming it would make his hand jerk.”

“Micky rolled his eyes.” Uh, yeah, ya could say that.”

“And it would show up on the paper,” I finished, pointing at the echo of the bullet’s impact laid down in ink for us.

“What’s it say?” Strakowski asked. I hesitated. “You can read it, right?” He looked alarmed.

I shrugged. “Sure. But it’s not that simple.” Art looked pleased. Micky wagged his eyebrows at Ramirez.

Strakowski held out his hand for the paper. “How so?”

“We done in here?” I asked. “I could use some air.” It was getting a little thick in the hut. It may have been my imagination, but I thought that the smell of blood was getting stronger.

We ambled out toward the front of the house. Behind us, the technicians gleefully scurried back into the hut. Strakowski eventually turned and leaned his rump against a police cruiser, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked at me, then at the younger cop.

“Look, Burke,” Ramirez began, and licked his lips. “We know what we’re looking for, but we really don’t know what we’re looking for. Know what I mean? And the fact that it’s in Japanese doesn’t help.”

“I understand, Ramirez, but look, some of this stuff is pretty obscure. There have to be people more qualified than me to do this.”

I wasn’t trying to be humble. When I started my studies years ago, I thought of myself as an academic with an interest in the martial arts. Then I met Yamashita. Now I’ve come to the awareness that I’m a martial artist with some advanced academic credentials.

“We know there are people more qualified, Burke,” the Lieutenant groused. “We even spoke to one.”

The younger cop eyed me. “You know a guy at Columbia named Cook? James Cook.”

I got a mental image of Cook: tall, with long thin hair brushed back from a wide forehead. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a bowtie. We had crossed paths in grad school. Mentally, he never really left. I went for different lessons in Yamashita’s dojo.

“The Fujitsu Professor of Asian Studies,” I answered. “Quite the expert.”

Strakowski raised his eyebrows. “So he told us. Very impressed with himself.”

“He sniffs a lot,” Ramirez added.

I thought Cook was an insufferable snob, but I feel that way about a good many academics. So I kept quiet.

“Professor Cook, and here I’m quoting,” the Lieutenant said, “had neither the time nor the inclination to assist us in our… what did he call it Ramirez?”

“Colorful.”

“… colorful little problem.”

Ramirez looked at me significantly. “The guy’s an asshole,” he murmured.

“So it was our thought, since you appear to know something about things Asian, that we bring you on as a consultant,” Strakowski concluded.

I nodded in understanding.

“You read Japanese,” Ramirez said, tallying off the points on his fingers. “You’re familiar with the history and culture. You’ve worked with a police investigation before…”

“And I’m not an asshole,” I added helpfully.

Strakowski gave me a look and pushed himself off the car with a grunt “That,” he said, “remains to be seen.”

“What’s the calligraphy say?” Ramirez persisted.

I looked at them. “There’s a Japanese tradition about leaving a poem or a piece of calligraphy behind when you’re dying. It’s supposed to be a life statement. So these things are pretty elliptical.” I could tell from the looks I was getting that my explanation was not helping any.

“OK,” I tried again, “you have to understand that what this man wrote may be a clue. But it may not. If he knew he was going to be killed…”

“Hard not to notice,” Art said.

I nodded at that. “If he really knew what was about to happen, he might have had time to compose himself. But then again, who knows what goes through your mind at a time like that?” I gestured at the paper in Strakowski’s hand. “This could just be a random thought.”

“But you can read it, right?” Strakowski repeated.

“Of course he can read it,” Micky said. “He’s just bein’ a know-it-all.”

I shrugged. In some lines of work, you get to carry large caliber automatics. In my line, you get to be pedantic.

I held the paper up and the four cops looked at me. They were different people but, for a moment, they all had the same look: like dogs catching a distant scent and hoping it would be something to chase. “It says,” and I paused for effect, “Shumpu.”

“Is it a name?” the Lieutenant asked.

I shook my head no. “It means ‘spring wind.’”

Strakowski puffed his cheeks out and let out a long breath. He glanced, up at the gray sky, where thin rain clouds were getting blown in from the ocean, just out of sight.

Ramirez was incredulous. “His last words are a weather report?”

“This mean anything you can think of, Burke?” Strakowski asked me.

“Nothing specific right now. Let me think about it,” I said.

You could tell he was disappointed, but I wasn’t going to rush this. Strakowski’s head swiveled toward Micky.

“Anything you want to add?”

Micky shrugged in my direction. “He’s the expert.”

“Some expert. So far, I gotta say,” the Lieutenant looked off into the street and then back at us, one by one, “I am not impressed by you guys.”

Art narrowed his eyes and said, slowly and ominously, in his best Master Yoda voice, “You will be.”