When Mas went to pick Yuki up at the Bonaventure the next morning, the journalist was waiting with two large paper cups of coffee. The parking attendant opened the door for Yuki, who offered one of the hot cups to Mas. “Black, desho?” Yuki asked. “I didn’t think you took your coffee with anything extra.”
Mas was impressed to get something—even a cup of coffee—from the boy.
“I read Kanzo Hirose’s manuscript last night,” Yuki said, pulling out his digital tablet from his bag. “It’s in English, so it was a little difficult for me to get through it.”
His coffee squished next to the emergency brake, Mas pulled out of the Bonaventure driveway onto Grand Avenue.
“But at the end, guess what? There was an afterword by Itai-san.”
“Eigo?”
“Yeah, all in English. His English wasn’t bad, especially his written English. Let me read it to you.”
At the stoplight, Mas took a big sip of the coffee, which burned his tongue.
“Afterword. By Tomo Itai,” Yuki began reading. “Kanzo Hirose was my uncle, one of the closest relatives I ever had. I wasn’t related to him by blood, but by marriage. The most important thing about my Uncle Kanzo is that he gave me a love for baseball.
“I thought it was only a sport from the United States, but he corrected me. He taught me that baseball is more than a sport. It is a rhythm of life. Some people choose to go after the home runs of life, to go for the big, dramatic arcs, but Uncle Kanzo told me to look for the small plays. The plays that the fans, sometimes even the umpires, don’t catch. The plays that make for a winning life.
“My uncle began to embrace baseball when he was interned in a concentration camp in the United States. It was on an Indian reservation, and when the Japanese Americans moved in, this camp became one of the largest groups of people in the whole state. Among those imprisoned was a man named Kenichi Zenimura, who was known as the father of Japanese American baseball. There in the desert, he helped establish a baseball diamond and a thirty-two-team league.
“My uncle didn’t want to go on that boat, the Gripsholm, and later the Teia, but the US government said they had to.
“When they lived in Japan, they had absolutely nothing. My uncle Kanzo told me that he was most worried about his younger brother, Hideaki. To give him hope, he’d play baseball with him all day long.
“I myself have gone through hard times. Times of self-doubt and despair. But Kanzo taught me to embrace a baseball life.”
“Not bad, desho?” Yuki said. “But Sunny never mentioned that baseball was that important to him.”
“Maybe no big deal for Sunny,” Mas said. “Maybe playin’ baseball help the brotha more than him.”
They parked in the same lot at the top of Dodger Stadium that they always did. Mas took the paper bag he’d brought.
“What’s that?” Yuki asked.
“Sumptin I gotsu take care of.” Yuki wasn’t the only one with a job to do.
The attendance at the press conference was light. Only about a third of the former journalists they’d seen before showed up to find out who had killed their colleague. Most of them seemed to be local press, including a photographer for The Rafu Shimpo, who nodded a greeting to Mas.
The rest of the media must have headed home to Japan, Mas thought. Their stories had been filed, recorded, and broadcast. They were onto the next story, the next game, the next scandal.
Yuki took a seat, and Mas took the one next to him. With so few attendees, it made no sense to stand in the back.
Detective Williams, wearing a purple tie, stood in front of them, while his partner, Garibay—was he still in the same clothes?—stayed on the side.
“Thank you all for coming. We wanted to provide an update on the murder of Tomo Itai, a longtime reporter for the Nippon Series,” said Cortez Williams.
“Yesterday we arrested a seventy-eight-year-old male, Hideaki ‘Sunny’ Hirose, and charged him with first-degree murder in Mr. Itai’s death. Mr. Hirose is the victim’s cousin. He came forward to police headquarters yesterday and gave a full confession. He apparently placed cyanide in medication that the victim was taking for high blood pressure. Mr. Hirose had worked in the jewelry business and had access to highly toxic chemicals used to polish silver, including cyanide.”
“What was the motive?” a young Asian American woman in the front row asked.
“Mr. Hirose and Mr. Itai had gotten into a verbal altercation on Monday evening over a personal matter. That led to Mr. Hirose poisoning his cousin’s capsules while the victim was sleeping.”
No matter how many times a reporter urged Williams to reveal the “personal matter,” he would not. Maybe that was the deal in securing Sunny’s confession. To keep his motive under wraps.
“They didn’t give us any credit,” Yuki whispered in Mas’s ear.
Mas was relieved that Williams didn’t mention them. He didn’t want to feel responsible for sending an old Nisei to jail. Maybe it was a feather in Yuki’s cap, but Mas didn’t want that on his conscience. While Yuki would be flying back to Japan, Mas would still be here in California, wondering how Sunny was faring in one of its prisons.
Mas heard the familiar tap-tap of high heels against the concrete floor. This time, Amika was wearing a royal blue dress.
“Oh, you’re here,” Yuki merely stated. He obviously wasn’t thrilled to see her, but he seemed to be tolerating her more than he had in the past.
She said, “Let me give you some sisterly advice—”
“Sister?” Yuki cried out. “Don’t you mean oba?” Oba, old hag, was a supreme insult to a woman in her forties.
“Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “First of all, don’t worry about what the public says about the media. They need to be furious at someone, so it might as well be us. Don’t forget that, Kimura-kun. Never sacrifice your ethics. Maybe the readers will hate you. Even your colleagues sometimes. But you can’t worry about that.”
Amika put her hands on her hips and leaned toward Yuki. “By the way, we didn’t have sex that night. You’re a total lightweight. Two drinks and you were out.
“And you,” Amika said to Mas. “I will really miss you. Maybe I’ll see you around someday. Maybe in Japan.”
Don’t count on it, Mas thought. “Chotto, I’zu one question for you.”
“Yes.” She leaned back on her heels.
“Whyzu Itai scared of Sawada?” He described how Itai cowered when Sawada challenged him on the field on that first day of the World Baseball Classic.
“Oh, that?” Amika said, smiling. “Sawada’s father was a sportswriter, too. He was Itai’s senpai.”
Smitty Takaya hadn’t been at the press conference. Maybe he knew that attendance would be limited to the third- and fourth-string journalists. Smitty seemed savvy about how to best spend his time.
Mas made his way to the front office. There were a couple of receptionists sitting at a curved desk, but as Mas approached, Smitty happened to be walking through the wide corridor with a walkie-talkie in his hand.
“Well hello, Mas. You were at the press conference, I figure.” He signaled for Mas to follow him. They went out the door and down some stairs toward the left field pavilion. “Terrible about Itai’s cousin being responsible,” Smitty said. “Shocking, even.”
“You knowsu Itai before?”
“Knew him well enough. I guess anyone in baseball dealing with Japan has crossed paths with Tomo Itai.”
They walked inside the stadium. Smitty spoke into the walkie-talkie and waited for a response. Mas, meanwhile, opened up the paper bag he was carrying and dumped the contents onto one of the wooden benches. The decimated baseball, its guts hanging out like rolls of gauze bandages.
After responding to a message on his walkie-talkie, Smitty frowned at the mess. “What’s this?”
Mas picked up the leather casing with the Japanese baseball commissioner’s signature. “Dis ball from Japan.”
Smitty barely glanced at the signature. “Yup.”
“Youzu have one just like it.”
“I do?”
“Youzu show me first time I meetcha.”
Mas pointed down on the field. “There, the day Itai died.”
“I guess I may have.”
“Sumptin wrong with dis ball, but then you knowsu about dat.”
“What do you want from me? I don’t have any money, if that’s what you’re after.”
Mas grimaced. Just what did this big-shot baseball executive think he was?
“Tomo thought there was something wrong with these new balls that the Japanese league was going to use,” Smitty said. “He brought over about a dozen of them; he wanted me to check them out. I gave them to Zahed to try at practice, and yeah, they were lively. Too lively, in fact.”
“So whatchu gonna do?”
“There’s not much I can do. This is Japan’s business, not mine. Tomo was the one who was taking them to task.”
“You’zu gonna just keep your mouth shut?”
“What do you think, Mas? I know we’re cut from the same cloth. Don’t want to make waves, right? I’ve also kept my head down and have done what’s been expected of me. A hundred and ten percent.” Smitty glanced at his watch. “Listen, I have to cut some checks. I don’t want anyone having to wait for their money.”
Mas didn’t move. “Youzu don’t seem happy about Jin-Won being pitcha here.”
Smitty, again, looked taken aback. Realizing that Mas wasn’t going to budge without a response, he finally said, “I mean, it’s fine for the overseas leagues, if they want those kinds of circus acts. But what we want is power pitchers who can throw a ball at one hundred miles an hour. The public doesn’t want to watch knuckleball pitches. They’re too unpredictable.”
Mas sighed inside. The fastest always seemed to win. That’s the way it was, in baseball as in life.
As Mas was leaving, he looked down on the field. No wonder the executives wanted offices right at this angle. The way the sun hit it, the grass shined like a carpet of green emeralds.
Mas took the elevator to the field level, just to get his head back on straight. Itai’s job was to dig, dig, and dig. For years, Mas’s job had been to fill those holes with seeds and plants. Digging, frankly, always made Mas’s head ache. Maybe it was time to give up digging for good.
He walked the dirt sidelines, admiring even the placement of the chalk. And then, appearing out of nowhere like an angel, was Uno-san, sitting in the dugout. Mas blinked his eyes hard, wondering if he was seeing things. He was wearing a regular sweatsuit and no baseball cap. But there was no mistaking those high cheekbones and angular chin. What was the superstar senshu doing here? The players from Japan had all left days ago.
Mas couldn’t help but take a few steps forward.
“Konnichiwa,” Uno-san said to him.
How did he know that Mas could speak Japanese?
Mas saw a canister of some kind of cleanser next to Uno-san on the bench. He was rubbing his mitt with a rag, and Mas noticed that his cleats were also on the bench.
“Osoji,” Uno-san said. Cleaning.
Mas was tongue-tied. His legs were frozen in place. He couldn’t escape even if he wanted to.
“You like playing in America?” Mas asked in Japanese. A bakatare comment, but it was the first thing to come to his lips.
“Sah, the stadiums are all a little different. Not all the same like in Japan.” Uno-san then put his mitt down and admired the field. “Beauty of America, ne. Real, natural grass.”
THE END