The Bride's Kimono (28 page)

Jamie shook her head. “How strange. Allison can be resentful, but I can’t imagine why she would deliberately sabotage an event at the museum. Any failure would reflect on her, wouldn’t it?”

“I think she wanted to look good, and me to look like a disaster, to save face in front of the Japanese men in the audience.”

“What Japanese men?” Jamie looked confused, and I realized that she hadn’t heard anything from Allison about the theft of the bridal kimono. Interesting. Swiftly, I outlined what had happened.

“Oh, how awful!” Jamie said, hugging herself as if she felt chilly. “Please believe me when I say that I feel really terrible about what’s happened. If only I hadn’t pointed out that we already had a bride’s kimono on display—I could have made room for your kimono, I should have been more open—”

It was true, of course, but there was no point in scolding Jamie. What was done was done. All Jamie could give me now was information.

“Who decided which kimono to request from the Morioka Museum—was it you, or Allison?” I asked.

“Well, we both looked at the slides. I view things from a conservation angle, so I wanted to get kimono in really excellent condition. Allison was after examples that showed a wide range of dyeing techniques and decorative motifs.”

“If that was the case, how did you two wind up requesting only kimono that belonged to the two women who were rivals for the same man?” After I asked my question, I saw Jamie flush, so I pressed on. “You had to have known. You knew about the Dunstan Lanning book—in fact, you own it. Isn’t that a copy on your bedside table?”

Jamie’s eyes darted to the table. “I got it through an antiques dealer, and I knew it would have great stuff for your lecture. I couldn’t just lend it to you outright, though, because Allison—well, I think she would have blown a fuse if I showed that I had some knowledge that she didn’t. I have to say I’m stunned at how much you managed to pull out of your reading. I never realized that Ai Otani was the character Lanning called Miss Love.”

“That kimono that was stolen was Ai Otani’s wedding robe. It really is very important.” I paused. “Anyone selling the bride’s kimono could get a very good price, now that there’s evidence that it’s a Tokugawa relic.”

“We’re not in the business of selling things at the museum. We cannot appraise items because it’s against our code of ethics—”

“Maybe you can answer a question for me,” I said. “Why do you use the computer at the office to look at offerings on eBay?”

“You saw our computer?” She sounded startled.

“Yes, during the couple of times I was in the office.”

“It’s a research tool,” Jamie said. “In addition to studying what objects sell for at big auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s and Butterfield, we consult the Internet auctions. eBay’s democratized things. They don’t have a lot of fine things, but they are a good benchmark in learning what’s out there, and how low its price can go. We use that kind of data when we make decisions about acquisitions.”

“You’ve acquired quite a bit yourself.” I looked around the bedroom. “You look as if you’re an awfully good shopper.”

Jamie flushed. “I like old American furniture. I work with Asian stuff all day. It’s relaxing for me to spend my nights with the kind of things I grew up with.”

The
kind
of things she grew up with. This meant her pieces weren’t family heirlooms, but something else. How did a woman earning $20,000 a year, living in a cheap apartment in a borderline part of northeast Washington, live so extravagantly?

“I should get going. I promised my parents we’d only stop here for a minute,” I said.

“So, are your parents here to help you pay for the lost kimono?”

“I would never ask my parents to cover my bills,” I said tightly. “They came because a young woman was murdered, a Japanese tourist whom the police assumed was me, since she was carrying my passport. Hana had
been missing for a few days before they found her. That’s why I came here to see you. In my mind, you were missing. I thought the two situations might have a connection. I’m very glad that you’re alive.”

Jamie’s eyes widened again. “You mean…that death of a Japanese tourist in Northern Virginia that was written up in
The Washington Post
today?”

“I haven’t seen the paper, but I imagine so.” I bit my lip. “One of the problems…the police think I might be connected with that death. In a bad way. I told them I was here at the request of the museum, but I don’t think they quite believe me. I wouldn’t be surprised if they visit Allison to ask her about me. If they do come to the museum…will you let me know?”

“Of course. Rei, when are you going back to Japan?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I haven’t done a thing about replacing my passport or trying to book another ticket. It seems hopeless, but I want to do everything possible to find that kimono.”

“And lingering here keeps you near Hugh.”

“That’s crazy!” I said, but of course, it was true. I knew how the unconscious worked. I’d managed to see Hugh every day of my stay, despite my initial declarations of wanting to be alone, and the longer I was waiting for my passport, the more I’d continue to see him. Once I returned to Japan, it would be over. Life would once again mean working and living alone all week, and corn-and-octopus-pizza takeout with Takeo on the weekend. How did Jamie know so much about the way I felt?

Suddenly I had to see that bedside photograph that she’d turned facedown upon my entry in the room. When Jamie’s fat white cat strolled out from under her fancy bed, I knew how I’d do it.

“Hah—choo!” I faked the largest sneeze imaginable and kept my hands over my face when I was done.

“God bless you,” Jamie said automatically.

“Thanks. Um, this is a little embarrassing, but do you have a spare tissue? I need to make a major wipe-up. I didn’t say this before, but I’m actually allergic to cats.” The truth was that they made me nervous. You could say it was an emotional allergy.

“Oh, sorry! I’ll just run into the bathroom and get you some tissue.”

The instant she was out the door I flipped over the photograph. It was taken aboard a boat and showed a smiling couple: Jamie, wearing a bikini, with an older man in a Lacoste polo shirt with both arms around her, hugging her from behind. There was possessiveness in the man’s gesture, though it looked as if Jamie didn’t mind.

I’d feared all along that the photograph would show Hugh Glendinning. It didn’t. Yet this was a man I recognized, whose hand had gripped mine a little too sensuously when we’d met.

There was no question about it. Even minus the business suit, I could tell that Jamie’s boyfriend was Dick Jemshaw.

M
y parents were cuddled up close on Jamie’s sofa when we rejoined them. My mother had her nose in a copy of
The Arts of Asia
and my father had his head on her shoulder, as if he were trying to catch a tiny nap. It was a sweet scene, and it tugged at my heart a little bit. My parents, long ago, had made the kind of choice that Jamie and I were both struggling with—and everything had turned out right.

“Time to go home. Thanks, Jamie,” I said.

“I hardly helped at all. And look how tired your parents are.” Jamie was looking at them, but she obviously wasn’t thinking about what I was—she just saw a middle-aged couple slumped on her sofa.

My mother and father rose to their feet and said their good-byes, then the three of us hustled into the Corolla and locked all the doors.

“Do you know anything about an antiques dealer called Dick Jemshaw?” I asked my mother after we’d sorted out the directions and were heading back toward Virginia.

“I don’t know a person by that name, but I saw a booth called Jemshaw Limited or something like that in the Washington Design Center.”

“Did you look at the merchandise?”

“Oh, yes. Some English and American antiques, but most of the pieces on display were reproductions crafted out of old hardwoods—you know, the kind of thing that’s being made in Asian countries for the U.S. market. A lot of the pieces were great looking and they would have fit my clients’ budgets. It’s not exactly my taste, though. If I were buying something made in Asia, I would want it to look Asian. Like your father,” she said with a laugh. “And like Takeo.”

“What about the furniture in Jamie’s apartment? Do you think it could have come from Jemshaw Limited?”

“Hmm, that’s interesting. I think pretty much all of Jamie’s pieces are reproductions, but they’re very good ones. I can’t tell you for sure whether they were Jemshaw pieces because I didn’t study his catalogue closely, but they seem to fit the general mood. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious, Mom. Thanks for your expertise.” I was beginning to put together a theory. Dick Jemshaw, being generous to his young mistress, either lent or gave her items from his business. He might need to surround himself with the right furnishings in order to feel sexy. I myself had a serious fixation with Hugh’s sleigh bed. Furniture mattered to me in a way that clothes mattered to other people.

If Dick Jemshaw’s business focused on reproduction European and American furniture, though, why was he chair of the advisory committee for the Museum of Asian Arts? And how happy was Jamie with him as her partner? “Go away,” she’d said when I’d buzzed her apartment. Now I recalled that when we’d gone to the museum’s restaurant, she’d tried to avoid the table where Dick and Hugh had been sitting. Allison had pushed her to go—Allison, whom Jamie accused of being hard to work for.

Maybe Allison really didn’t know about Dick Jemshaw and Jamie, but as I remembered her comment about women in their twenties falling into the laps of trustees, I thought that she had to understand the threat that a trustee’s interest in her subordinate could pose to her own survival as curator of the museum.

I was in twenty-first-century America, not Edo-period Japan, I reminded myself. Women didn’t have to sleep their way to high places.

But as I recalled the woman who’d been leaning into the window of a car on Florida Avenue, I brooded about the many forms solicitation could take. In a better section of northwest Washington, the girls might wear cashmere sweaters as comfortably as their Georgetown and Yale degrees. The client wouldn’t pay with anything as crass as money—dinners in fancy restaurants and old furniture with the perfect patina would suffice. I liked these things myself, I was ashamed to admit.

I
t was midnight when we reached the Washington Suites. My parents and I parted and made our ways to our separate floors. There was a message on my telephone from Kyoko. She said that because of the funeral home’s heavy schedule on Sundays, Hana’s body would not be packed for travel until Monday. She and Yoshi were scheduled to fly home Monday evening. In the meantime, she wanted to know if I could escort the two of them to a museum on Sunday.

I slept fitfully until my telephone shrilled around seven.

“Hello?” I answered groggily.

“This is Detective Harris.”

“Aren’t you ever off duty?” I grumbled, thinking that
I should have let the call go to the hotel’s answering service.

“For a case like this, I do what needs to be done. And if that means waking up a reluctant witness, I’ll do it.” He paused. “You sound like you were out late last night.”

“Not so terribly late for us—but I guess it was late for
you
.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d thought you were the most likely candidate to have been tailing me from Virginia to Washington the last few evenings. Thanks for confirming my theory.”

“If a car followed you, why didn’t you go to a police station?” He sounded as skeptical as ever.

“What, and deliver myself into a nest of your classy friends? The ones who treat me like a twenty-first-century Suzy Wong?”

“Ms. Shimura, I don’t know if you’re being hassled by your pimp or someone else you have issues with, but if you’d like police protection, I can arrange it.”

“I don’t want a cop messing in my life, thank you very much—”

“Yeah, I guess it might cramp your style, going back and forth between your gentlemen—”

“You
are
following me!”

Detective Harris chuckled and said, “I don’t need to follow you to know what you’re doing. I get my information from a good source. And the information I’ve gotten has led me to ask you about your travel plans today.”

“I’m not traveling anywhere. If your source mentions seeing me driving to the airport today, it’s because I’m seeing my parents off. I won’t leave Washington without the bride’s kimono.”

“Don’t you think that kind of work is best done by professionals?”

“Sure. Except in this case, you’ve got a more pressing issue to deal with. Leave the little stuff, like a fifty-thousand-dollar stolen kimono, to me.”

“The death of an innocent tourist is a tragedy—and my priority, as a homicide detective. If I’m able to identify a suspect, though, there could be every chance you’ll find out about your missing kimono.”

I paused to soak up what he’d just said. He now believed that Hana was an innocent tourist—Kyoko and Yoshi must have successfully restored her honor. That was good. Maybe there would be justice for me, too. “I understand your point,” I said, in my most humble voice—the one I pulled out to bargain with dealers at the Tokyo shrine sales. “But don’t you think that locating the kimono might lead you to either the killer—or someone who saw the killer? And I want to ask you something else. Does anyone in your headquarters know how to do research on the Internet?”

“Of course. We have links to the FBI and police departments and jails around the country.”

“Well, I think you might find the thief or killer or whoever by hunting for the kimono at Internet auction sites.”

“It’s true that some of our guys have caught a few burglars in the past selling goods on-line. But it’s always been more popular kinds of merchandise—TVs, Pokémon cards, what have you.”

“I’ve got a color slide of the kimono that was stolen. I’d be willing to share it with you on a couple of conditions.”

“Oh?”

“The first is that you’ll actually try to do something about finding the kimono, instead of just giving me this second-priority business. And the other thing I want you to do is stop treating me like a hooker. It’s really getting tiresome.”

Detective Harris laughed. “I don’t think of you as a woman who gets easily tired. You were at the Hotel Sofitel
twice
yesterday, according to our account.”

“Well, if your source didn’t tell you already, during the morning I had a chat in the lounge, with the registrar from the Morioka Museum, and later on, I had dinner with my parents and a friend who’d just flown in from Japan.”

“You’re very smooth—”

“I’m just being honest. Talk to my parents. Whatever. But I’ll tell you this—I’m going to be out of the hotel all day, so I need to know now if you have any interest in my slide.”

Harris cleared his throat. “I do. I can come to get it now, if that’s convenient.”

F
or lack of inspiration, I dressed in the jeans I’d bought the day before and a taupe silk shirt my mother must have bought at Magnin’s in the 1970s. It was a simple look, after all the dressing up I’d done to please Allison and my mother. But it was comfortable, and I didn’t think it looked anything like what a prostitute would wear.

Detective Harris still looked me over a touch too long when I gave him the slide. I gave him a few last-minute ideas about auction houses where the kimono might have wound up, and then closed the door on him. I needed to call Kyoko Omori and my parents to get on with the day. My parents’ flight was scheduled to leave mid-afternoon, which meant we would have to head to the airport at one. When I mentioned that Yoshi and Kyoko wanted to go to a museum with me, they insisted on coming along.

“They want to see the Museum of American His
tory,” I said to my mother. “I don’t know if that’s something you’d like to do.”

“Sure. I haven’t been to the Smithsonian Institutions in years, but I’ve always retained my membership. This means I receive a nice discount in the museum shops—I can help them buy souvenirs. And why don’t you ask Takeo? After all, he’s traveled so far and seen very little of you.”

I dialed Takeo, feeling more dutiful than enthusiastic. He was not in his room the first time I called. It was only when I’d gotten downstairs to the Washington Suites lobby, and had met up with Kyoko and Yoshi at nine
A.M
., that I tried to call Takeo again, and he picked up.

“You mean…another group activity?” He didn’t bother hiding the dismay in his voice after I explained about the trip to the Smithsonian.

“This is Kyoko and Yoshi’s last day. We’ll have plenty of time together in the future—” As I said it, I realized why I wanted to go on this outing. I was trying to find safety in numbers. Hana had been killed when she’d gone off on her own.

“I don’t like groups. I want to wander around somewhere just with you,” Takeo said.

The last thing I wanted to do. Briskly, I said, “Never mind. This was an invitation I extended to you out of courtesy.”

“Can you come see me in the afternoon?” Takeo demanded.

“Maybe, after I’ve seen my parents off. Maybe that’s the time we can spend talking. As I mentioned to you yesterday, something’s changed in my life that I want to talk to you about.”

“I know it! You’ve decided to go back to being an American. That’s why you won’t sleep with me anymore—it’s a rejection of your Asian heritage.”

“What a ridiculous idea,” I said.

“Of course you deny it. You poor girl—I’m so sorry!” Takeo said, sounding completely sarcastic. “Maybe your psychiatrist father can help you with your pitiful frame of mind.”

Totally fed up, I banged down the pay phone I’d been using and turned to Kyoko, who’d been hovering nearby with an anxious expression.

“My friend is not coming along.”

“Hugh-san? What a shame.”

I’d forgotten that Kyoko didn’t know about Takeo. Well, there was no point in introducing the topic of a Japanese boyfriend who’d begun to hate me. “That’s right, he can’t come. Well, at least this way the car won’t be too crowded.”

Still, it was a tight fit with Yoshi, Kyoko, and me in the backseat. Kyoko and Yoshi both volunteered to take the tight spot in the middle, but as I was the smallest, and the daughter of the drivers, I felt duty bound to be there. My father drove and my mother pointed out landmarks, the same landmarks I’d pointed out two nights before, but that Kyoko and Yoshi were polite enough to pretend they were seeing for the first time.

“And here is the Washington Mall, a lovely system of rectangular park grounds that were designed in the early nineteenth century on a French model,” my mother said. “The museums we’ll visit are mostly bordered by Constitution Drive and Independence Avenue, but parking is always very tight, so we will park in the first spot we see.”

“What do you think if I just park around here where it’s less crowded?” my father asked, ever the practical one.

“Good idea,” my mother said. “Oh, look, there’s
something halfway up the block. A little small, but I bet you can squeeze in.”

My parents were used to parking in the Bay Area, so for them, a spot with only a foot of space on each side was generous. Yoshi complimented my father on his skill. “Driving in America seems difficult, yet drivers seem greatly skilled. Rei’s friend Hugh-san was able to swiftly drive away from a pursuing criminal. His reaction time is very quick and as daring as anything you’d see in the movies.”

“What?” My father gave me an outraged look as we all got out of the car.

“It’s not that he was a daredevil, Dad, it’s just the same kind of driving situation that we were all in last night,” I explained. “What would you prefer I do?”

“I’m starting to think that what’s happening to tourist drivers in Washington is like the terrible rash of car-jackings a few years ago in Miami,” my mother said. “I’ll be glad when we return this car to the airport. Whatever you do, Rei, don’t ride in any more private cars, and please don’t expose your friends to them!”

“Mrs. Chiyoda, our tour group leader, said a shuttle bus or a taxi are the safest methods of travel,” Kyoko said.

“Uh-huh. Mom, are you sure you know the way?” I asked, wondering how miserable this walk to the Museum of American History would be.

“We’ve got the Tidal Basin behind us, which means we’re headed in the proper direction,” she replied. “Things haven’t changed that much in the last twenty years.”

“Excuse me for interrupting, but I think we should be a few streets to the north,” Yoshi said, holding out a tourist map.

“Yes, that’s true,” my father said. “Let’s cut through on the next cross street to the north.”