The Floating Girl: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mystery #4) (21 page)

I blubbered for help, making no sound and taking in a mouthful of water instead. I wasn’t a great swimmer, but I’d thought at least I had enough skill to tread water. Somehow that move had gone wrong; with my panicked kicking, I’d gotten a searing cramp in my foot. This was how people drowned. I opened my eyes in the murky water and couldn’t see anything. My head actually grazed the sandy bed; the water couldn’t be more than six feet deep. What a stupid place to drown.

I no longer thought that I’d been caught by seaweed. What was touching me had a hook, almost like an umbrella handle. Suddenly I flashed back to James Bond movies and criminals who had hooks for arms.
Oh, God,
I thought. Maybe it was the Sunglass Man, come back.

A human arm grazed my body.
Please let it be another swimmer come to my rescue, and not the Sunglass Man shoving me to the bottom of the sea.

Two strong arms hauled me up suddenly, and my face was out of the water, with my feet on the ground. The place where we were was shallow: not six feet, as I’d first thought, but only four-and-a-half feet. At present, my feet were firmly on the sandy bottom and my head was above water. I coughed, not caring that my nose was running in front of a stranger, because I was so glad to be alive.

I wiped my eyes and opened them, looking straight into the face of a middle-aged man I’d never seen before. At least, I thought so. I pulled out the memory of the ephemeral Sunglass Man. He’d seemed younger than this fellow. I wasn’t sure.

I coughed violently, whipping my head around so that I could search for swimmers near enough to call to for help. Ten feet away were a couple of teenagers shooting each other with water guns. They had been having so much fun, they’d missed the fact that I’d almost drowned. I knew now that seaweed had not pulled me down; rather, it had been the curved rubber pipe of a snorkel. Now that the job was done, the man calmly slipped his snorkel in the side of his mouth.

“How are you?” he asked conversationally. It was like hearing someone talk with a cigar in his mouth.

“Fine!” I answered, though it was pretty obvious from my breathing I was not. I looked at him. He had flat, unhandsome features, narrow eyes, a chicken pox scar on his forehead. He was balding. This was no Kunio Takahashi, that was for sure.

He raised a hand over his eyes as a shield against the sun and looked straight at me. His gaze was chilling. “You asked the wrong fellows about business,” he said. “I can tell you what you need to know.”

He really was
yakuza.
Even though the hand over his eyes had all the fingers intact, I suddenly knew. The fact that he still had his pinky finger meant that he hadn’t been punished for making any mistakes.

I said, still spitting out some water, “I don’t think so. You’re more interested in hurting me than helping me.”

“I was simply trying to get your attention. At the bar you didn’t notice me.” The man spoke politely, with a faint accent from the Kansai region. He sounded very different from the delivery men I’d mistaken for gangsters.

“You almost killed me,” I said.

“No. My superiors have no interest in harming you.”

“Who hit me at the train station?”

“Not us. I repeat that I am here to help.”

I coughed out the last bit of water in my lungs and said, “I think that your help is designed to steer me away from the truth.”

“I give you my word that my organization had nothing to do with the death of Nicky Larsen,” the gangster continued in his unemotional tone. “If such an operation had been ordered, it would have been done correctly. The body would not have washed up on the shore of the Sumida River for a fisherman to discover.”

I could not fathom that I was having such a conversation with a balding man in the middle of Hayama Bay. I saw a wave coming—not huge, but big enough to move me away from this creep. As the wave came, I pointed my body in a straight line for the shore. The wave carried me twenty feet closer to shore. I touched ground and saw that the gangster had body-surfed alongside me. There was no escape.

“You were saying,” I said, pretending that I was completely calm and hadn’t tried to run away, “that when your organization works, bodies simply disappear. I wonder if that’s what happened to Nicky’s friend Kunio Takahashi.”

“Takahashi-san is a gifted man,” the gangster said. “In my boss’s opinion, he could someday be regarded as one of the nation’s living treasures. We wouldn’t want to lose him.”

“What do you mean, lose him? Is he …one of you?” I asked.

“No. I was speaking out of respect for his craft. He has many years of great artistic work ahead. But he is a poor young man without connections. We would certainly protect him if we could find him.”

Ah, here was the reason for making contact. Looking straight into his eyes, I said, “I don’t know where he is.”

“I know,” the gangster said, sounding weary. “I was at Bojo the evening you were talking with those college kids about your search to find Kunio Takahashi. I sensed that you were holding something back from them, so I borrowed the little book you were carrying to check your information. Nothing there but addresses of your relatives and friends.” He eyed me, and I got the underlying message:
I know whom to hurt if you don’t cooperate.

“I’d appreciate having the address book back,” I said.

“Of course. I’ll return it later. I did not carry it into the water.”

“I want to ask you something. Were you watching me in the anime coffee shop?”

“No. What happened? If someone is bothering you, perhaps I can help.”

“You must be the craziest yakuza on the beach.” There—I’d used the word, and he seemed to smile at it. This man really was getting on my nerves. At times, he was distinctly threatening; at others, almost fatherly. I guess that’s why organized-crime groups were sometimes called families.

“I’m a forty-five-year-old typical Japanese.” The man raised his hands in a feigned gesture of helplessness. “I coach my son’s baseball team, I give money to a home for the aged, and I clean my neighborhood graveyard once a month. I ride in a Cadillac for work, but at home all I have is a Subaru Justy. We don’t all live like the guys in the movies.”

“I’m not interested in your lifestyle,” I said. “I want to know if there’s another organized-crime group that is responsible for Nicky Larsen’s death.”

“No,” he said flatly. “We made inquiries. That was not a professional job. That circle on Larsen’s forehead was the
Mars Girl
symbol. Nothing more.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see someone tall and slim wading out to us. I thought I recognized the shaggy hair, now wet and flat and plastered over much of his face.

“Your boyfriend’s swimming out here. I hope he’s not the nervous type,” the gangster said to me.

“Not really,” I said, my pulse starting to race.

“Be careful what you say to him about our encounter. I wouldn’t want him to believe that someone who came to help you had harmed you.”

“It’s not what I tell Takeo that you should worry about. It’s what I tell the readers of the
Gaijin Times.”

A smile creased the gangster’s face. “We’re expecting some mention. That’s another reason why I’m here. You wanted information. We request that you share our message that we are not responsible for that pathetic little murder. Your magazine is small, but if you report my words, the news will be picked up and carried in all the Japanese papers.”

“How can I report your claim when I don’t know who you are?”

“They call me the Fish. I don’t have time to tell you more, and as you said, you aren’t interested in my lifestyle. Ask your police lieutenant about The Fish, if you like. I’m well known.” The man gave me a slight bow. Then he pulled his snorkel mask over his eyes and paddled off.

There was a slight stinging feeling on my upper thigh—a jellyfish sting, maybe. I ignored it and stared after the Fish, who was calmly moving through the waters, attracting no attention, a shark in the midst of unknowing bathers.

There was a great splashing sound as Takeo reached me.

“You’re okay!” he said, breathing hard. “I saw through my binoculars that you were struggling for a bit, but fortunately someone was out there to help you. Who was that good Samaritan?”

“I never learned his actual name.” What else could I say?

“Frankly, I’m surprised you went in that deep. You told me last time that you aren’t a strong swimmer.”

I looked at Takeo. He hadn’t realized that the man who’d saved me was the one who’d jerked me under the water. Something about the memory of the Fish’s cold eyes told me not to tell him, at least not yet. I smiled faintly and said, “I was only in four and a half feet of water. My problem was a cramped foot. I’m afraid it made me panic.”

“I see. Let’s walk in, then, quite slowly. Whatever made you run into the water like that, anyway? I thought you would tell me what your plans were after the interview.”

“I got a little overheated. And I didn’t want the guys in the bar to see me go straight to you—they were a little suspicious that we might be together,” I said.

“Oh, really! I can see why you did that. I would have come out after you immediately, but my sister showed up. When I saw that you were in jeopardy, I had to throw her off with an excuse about needing to cool off.”

We walked out onto the sand, and Takeo picked up his binoculars, safely wrapped in a towel on the sand. He put them to his eyes and scanned the beach.

“Those thugs you were talking to earlier are still at the bar. We should go straight back to the house, but let’s walk some distance apart, so they don’t know we’re together. When we’re home, I’d like to hear what they said.”

“Okay,” I agreed. I did want to walk alone, so I could go over in my mind how much I could tell him. I wanted to be honest, but there was no use in giving him more information than he needed. After having met the Fish, I was fairly certain that
yakuza
had not killed Nicky. That still didn’t explain the Fish’s interest in Kunio Takahashi. There was something there, some connection.

An hour later, I had washed off the salt water and changed into a favorite sundress, long and fairly modest except for the side slits. I sipped a glass of chilled barley tea, thinking I should be mellow, but I was still trying to decide how much to tell Takeo.

My first and most natural inclination was to tell him everything: to tell him that the two men I’d spoken to in bar were just deliverymen, but my conversation with them had been overheard by a gangster who pulled me underwater and then brought me to the surface, stating for the record that organized crime had had nothing to do with Nicky Larsen’s death.

The second idea was to let Takeo think that the two men I’d talked to in the bar had told me the same thing. I could communicate the truth while not mentioning the Fish, per his instructions.

I’d had a strange encounter, which I’d survived. I didn’t think I’d see the Fish again. I doubted I’d ever be able to recognize him with dry hair and a business suit. As far as I was concerned, the Fish was a shark who had circled me briefly and then departed forever.

The Fish was gone, and I was safely recuperating in the Kayamas’ beautiful garden of moss and stones. The house was high enough that one could see the water. The sides of the garden that edged other people’s property were guarded by ancient, sculptured bushes. The fact that one could sit here and see and hear nothing of others seemed like the ultimate luxury.

My meditation in the silent garden was jarred by the sound of Natsumi Kayama’s voice. I turned to look through the window and saw her, rail-thin in a green one-piece suit, standing in front of her brother and demanding something. Money. She wanted to borrow fifteen thousand yen because the Korean barbecue restaurant where she was taking her friends did not accept credit cards.

“Remember, you still owe me forty thousand,” Takeo said. “From two weekends ago. You said it was a Russian restaurant that didn’t accept credit cards.”

“I’ll pay you back when I get to the cash machine and
…
oh, and I’ll pick up some of those croissants you like to have for breakfast tomorrow.”

“At a Korean barbecue restaurant?”

“No! I’ll make a side trip to that silly place you like.”

“Thanks.” Takeo sounded surprised. “Come back early tonight, okay?”

“Don’t tell me what to do. I’m two minutes older.” Natsumi laughed cheerfully as she left.

When Takeo came out, carrying his own glass of tea, he smiled at me.

“We have a nice, long evening ahead of us,” he murmured.

“But you told her to come home early.”

“I said it to make her annoyed enough to stay out really late. That’s how my sister reacts.”

“Ah. Reverse psychology, my father would say.”

Takeo pulled a teak chair next to the rock where I was sitting. He straddled it and leaned forward. “You haven’t told me much about your father.”

“He’s a psychiatrist with academic appointments and a busy side practice. I was lucky to see him one or two hours a day while I was growing up. Those hours were precious to me. I love him very much.”

“We don’t say love in my family.”

“That’s a shame.” I reached out and squeezed his hand. “I think that your father nevertheless has shown his respect and affection for you by giving you
carte blanche
with this house.”

“What do you mean?” Takeo looked quizzical.

“He owns the house. But I think… this house is all you. The way you’ve changed it. The way it’s so open and bright.”

“It’s not his house.” Takeo grinned at me.

“Isn’t he the owner?”

“No. The house came from my mother’s side, and it technically belongs to Natsumi and me. My father owns the other summer house in Hakone, the one that he likes better. It’s more secluded.”

“But you haven’t done anything with the house until this summer?”

“That’s right. This is the first opportunity I’ve had. First I was
too
young; then I was working too hard. These days I’m just a dilettante.”

“Now I understand why you care about the house so much.”

“No,” Takeo said. “A house is just a dwelling. You’re the one I care about.”

Takeo’s mouth touched mine, not lightly, as had been his recent habit, but with serious pressure. It felt good to be kissing like this in a garden overlooking the sea. The cicadas covered the sound of our breathing. It was all so heady.

Takeo ran his fingers over a bruise on my arm. “How much do you hurt?”

“I’m bruised but not broken,” I said staunchly, taking Takeo’s hand and kissing each finger. His hand was clean but rough. I imagined these fingers sliding down my body, and shivered with pleasure.

We didn’t say much to each other after that. We linked hands and went inside, first to the bathroom for the essential cleansing rituals, and then into Takeo’s room. He had made up his futon with a sheet so fresh that I could still see the ironing marks on it; I was touched by that, and also by the fact that he had an unopened pack of condoms hidden in an antique lacquered sweets box by the futon.

Takeo put his hand in my hair, gently pinning me to the pillow so that I couldn’t move. He kissed my cheek and then my throat. When he opened my robe, he was unable to get the sash off. I was too inflamed to fuss with the tiny knot, so I just left it on.

By the time the old grandfather clock in the front hall chimed seven, we were finished. It had been less than half an hour. I was relaxed but not completely fulfilled. I’d been thinking about how close the Fish was: whether he knew where I was at that moment, and what I’d just done.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked, stroking the hair away from my face.

“Not much,” I lied.

Takeo slid out of bed and put on his robe while facing me. He had a beautiful body: lean but not skinny. I felt a small flutter of desire, but I knew it couldn’t go anywhere, not with my growing sense of dread.

“After we wash, let’s call out for some sushi,” Takeo said. “I’m starved.”

“I am, too,” I said softly, but doubted he caught my meaning.

***

That night, Natsumi probably would have been pleased to see me unhappily tossing and turning. It hadn’t seemed natural to fall asleep in each other’s arms. I lay awake, listening to the tree frogs outside. After hours I heard the sound of a creaking door.

“Natsumi,” Takeo mumbled. “Finally.”

I hadn’t known that he couldn’t sleep, either. He’d been utterly silent.

“Are you getting up to go and talk to her?” I asked.

“No. I don’t think so. I’m just glad to know she made it home. I worry, you know.”

Out in the hallway, a man’s voice spoke instead. “Where are they?”

Flooded with shock and fear, I reached across the space for Takeo. But he was already tripping over my backpack on the way to the door.

“Don’t go!” I whispered. “It could be dangerous. Let’s go out the window to safety.”

“This way?” The man’s slurred voice was oddly familiar.

“It’s my house. I tell you that you can go wherever you like, in whichever room!” The answering voice was female and whiny. Natsumi.

“She’s brought a stranger home!” Takeo sounded horrified.

I sat up and reminded him, “She said she was seeing a friend.”

Takeo put a cautionary hand on my arm but didn’t say anything.

“You’re beautiful.
Tres belle
,” came the voice, and Natsumi’s answering giggle.

“Marcellus!” I whispered to Takeo. When he looked at me blankly, I added, “It sounds like the dancer from Senegal. Let me go out and talk to him. It’s important, for my article.”

“Why can’t it wait until tomorrow… when you’re dressed?” Takeo regarded my lace teddy with a dubious expression.

“He’ll be gone by then,” I said. “This is obviously a one-night stand. One-night stands don’t linger for breakfast and conversation.”

“How about a bath?” Natsumi’s voice sounded thick as she spoke to Marcellus. “I’d like to scrub your back.”

“The wood around the bath isn’t sealed yet,” Takeo muttered. “If they get it wet, it’ll ruin everything.”

So that was what would get him moving: the thought of his precious home renovations being ruined. I hugged my knees to my chest and watched him grab the robe that I’d tried to put on myself earlier.

“Stay here, Rei,” Takeo said just before he headed out the door.

I didn’t answer because I had no intention of obeying. Instead I slipped into shorts and a T-shirt and opened the sliding window to the garden. My plan was to wait in front of the house. Marcellus would probably slip out once he was done. It was strange to think of someone I’d considered my friend hooking up with Natsumi Kayama. I didn’t like it.

The garden air was deliciously cool, and the cicadas that had croaked an early evening chorus were now in full operatic mode. The insects were almost loud enough to cover the sound of revelry on the road beyond the house, but not quite. Motorcycles roared down the lane, one after the other.
Bousouzoku,
dreaded motorcycle tribes of young toughs, drove their noisy way through many Japanese cities. It didn’t surprise me that they had come to the beach. I looked at my watch, which read 3:32. My guess was that the beach bar had closed and the
bousouzoku
were heading home.

It was hard to hear what was happening inside the house with so much noise outside. I waited on the stone landing outside the front door, swatting at the mosquitoes circling me, their unexpected midnight snack. The outdoor light was on, making me all the more visible to the bloodthirsty instincts.

A loud bang startled me. Was it a motorcycle backfiring?

I listened to the throbbing motorcycle engines, wondering whether in fact the gate leading to the Kayama estate was closed. But it sounded as if some of the motorcycles had entered the drive. I walked down the drive, striding as confidently as I could, intent on appearing like the lady of the house. As I passed the bank of hydrangea bushes that hugged the bend in the stone road, I caught the glare of headlights. My worst fears were realized. Natsumi had left the gate open upon her return, and a line of motorcycles was roaring in, spraying the precious river pebbles every which way.

The drivers wore helmets with face shields, so I couldn’t see them as I faced them, and that made it all the worse. I wasn’t standing in their path, but in the middle of the hydrangeas. They wouldn’t run off the road into bushes, I reasoned. They wouldn’t want to scratch their big, shiny cycles.

The first driver roared up to the front of the house and executed a sharp turn, heading toward the gate. Two more followed him, but a third motorcyclist turned the other way, roaring across the lawn toward the moss garden.

Takeo had told me how long it took to grow moss, and how even a human footstep could hurt it beyond belief. Should I defend the moss garden? As I struggled to get up the courage, the motorcycle rider hurled a brown package into the center of the velvety green.