As usual, Iwata woke at dawn. He opened the bedroom window and breathed in the chilly air as he listened to the groundswell of distant traffic. He dressed in an old T-shirt and went outside to stretch under the bougainvillea. The cityscape was still black, but the sky beyond it was turning musk melon. As Iwata clutched his kneecaps to his stomach he had a vague feeling it was going to be a productive day.
It took him half an hour, running through the near-empty streets, to reach Downtown. As he ran he thought about his life, though he stayed in the shallows.
In 2011 Iwata had left Japan blindly, arriving back in California with nothing. A few days later he passed a private investigations agency in Hollywood. There was a sign in the window:
WE’RE HIRING
Iwata already had the requisite six thousand hours of paid investigative experience and he figured he was too old to hone another skill-set anyhow. He aced the two-hour multiple-choice exam on laws and regulation, and learned the Private Investigator Act by heart. He paid his $175 to the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services and applied for his licence. $32 went to the Department of Justice for a fingerprint-processing fee and $19 to the FBI for the same. Within a month Iwata was officially a private eye, though he preferred the term ‘professional investigator’.
Originally assuming it to be a simple pay cheque, Iwata quickly learned what a competitive industry private investigation was. But he had pedigree. Languages. He had cleared major cases. Back in Tokyo, his last homicide investigation had become a national media event.
Those that knew him wondered openly why he didn’t apply for LAPD, reasoning that he could waltz his way to a detective’s desk in a few years. After all, he’d already graduated from the academy. Peers would laugh at him, seeing a Michelin-star chef working at a Taco Bell. But it didn’t bother Iwata.
After a year at the Hollywood agency and a quietly solid reputation he took out a loan and set up his own firm. The work poured in and the months floated by. For the first time he could remember Iwata felt a mild contentment with his life. His stint with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and the Shibuya Homicide Division felt like another Iwata – a strange, grey golem of himself.
Of course, leaving Japan behind had come at a cost. On a superficial level there was the relinquishment of his police career. Iwata had not only brought the killer to justice in the infamous Black Sun Murders, he’d also exposed deeply entrenched corruption in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police and beyond. His name had been in all the papers. Now he was riffling through Anthony Floccari’s rubbish.
But he’d walked away from the TMPD in a heartbeat. Homicide demanded its disciples to live in death and Iwata had lost his stomach for death a long time ago, if he’d ever had one in the first place.
Leaving Japan also meant abandoning Cleo. Not that she knew much about it; his wife had been in a persistent vegetative state, or unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, or whatever the neurologists were calling it now, for several years. He hated the idea of leaving her at the sanatorium; the guilt of it was all he could taste for months. But he knew he couldn’t stay in Japan any longer.
Cleo died in her sleep two years later. In a broken relief, he had her ashes split between their daughter’s urn and another one he sent to her family. Even before her death he knew his guilt would never truly leave him. Like the scars on his body, Cleo would always be there inside him.
But realizing that meant accepting it. He no longer went to bed with vodka on the bedside table. He craved the chalky crunch of sedatives less frequently. No more did he wake up sobbing. Iwata had started a new life and though he didn’t feel he deserved it he had found something approximating peace.
Stopping behind the opera pavilion, he bought a bag of diced mango, cucumber and jícama. He heaped on the tajín powder and added extra lime juice. The old lady behind the cart, her grey hair up in a bun, her golden crucifix gleaming in the morning sun, told him to go with God.
Iwata headed for Pershing Square subway station at a stroll. There was plenty of time to get home and shower before work. Downtown rose up all around him, abandoned grandeur slowly being gentrified, the homeless, for so long left in peace, now being moved along, out of the gaze of the open-top tour buses.
The smell of garbage and exhaust stung Iwata’s throat; the spicy fruit burned his tongue deliciously. The sun refracted through skyscraper glass, overlaying glinting rectilineals and curlicues on the streets below. The homeless sat in clusters, coughing, glad for the warmth.
Soon they would curse it.
Patience was the cornerstone of Kosuke Iwata’s job. An impatient private eye was a used-car salesman without the blarney. But patience came easy on billable hours. Not so much on the free consultations, Iwata thought, tapping his foot under the old metal bureau.
It was a bright, broiling afternoon and the walls of the small unit were too narrow for the huge redheaded man before him. Ninety thousand people went missing each year in LA County and the man was convinced his wife was one of them.
Iwata asked if any clothes had been packed, if her job had been vacated, if there had been any problems in the relationship. When the man confirmed all three, Iwata politely turned him away.
Next up was a college student who suspected her boyfriend of infidelity, though she did not have the means to meet Iwata’s rates for a single day, let alone the several he required as policy. After her, it was the unwanted regular – an elderly man who claimed to know the whereabouts of Osama bin-laden, who, of course, was not really dead. Last week, it had been Jack the Ripper. Iwata told the man, as he told him almost every week, that it probably wasn’t the case for him.
The sun was setting and Iwata was about to close up for the day when the door opened one last time. A small woman walked in. Iwata was debating whether or not to accept her consultation when he realized he recognized her. He stood on reflex, unable to speak.
‘We need to talk,’ she said.
Iwata nodded at the black-and-white floor tiles as though he were a chess piece with nobody to move him. Heart thudding, he led her into the consultation room. The woman sat on the end of her chair and declined water. Iwata sat across from her, unable to meet her eyes. Instead, he gazed at her wrinkled hands, the veins beneath them sea-green. She was in her early sixties, fair skin, with short blonde-grey hair and dark blue eyes. People might have assumed her to be beautiful in her youth but Iwata had seen old photos of her – she’d always looked severe.
‘You can’t look at me, can you?’
Iwata remembered her voice as accusatory. Now it was just drained.
‘No,’ he replied. He was sweating, his voice feeble. ‘You look too alike.’
Charlotte Nichol was gripping her handbag so tightly her knuckles had blanched. ‘People always told me Cleo was the spit of me.’ She nodded vigorously, as if someone had questioned the point.
They sat in funereal silence for a long while, Iwata’s eyes not leaving the woman’s hands. The ceiling fan quietly rattled and car horns could be heard distantly.
Finally, Charlotte opened her bag and took out a photograph. With a liver-spotted hand, she slid it across the table. Iwata turned it over to see a woman – familiar somehow.
‘My boy,’ was all the woman said.
Iwata realized it was Cleo’s younger brother. Julian had transitioned gender years ago, though Iwata had never been close with the Nichol family and did not know much beyond the fact that Julian was now Meredith.
‘Look at that face,’ Charlotte said, her bag pulled tight against her chest. Iwata already knew where this was going. The woman wouldn’t have ventured a thousand miles south from the Nichol home in Kennewick for anything other than calamity. With a bellyful of dread, he returned his gaze to the photograph.
‘Look at it.’
Iwata looked. Meredith was looking to camera, maybe in a restaurant somewhere. Her mouth was open, she was speaking – telling a joke, he guessed from her expression. A gold hoop earring peeked out behind brown, pampered hair. Though her forehead was broad and her jaw had some heaviness, her eyes were vivid blue and her lips had been rouged perfectly.
When Iwata looked back up Charlotte Nichol was crying. He was used to that in this space, but the sight of his dead wife’s mother’s tears was unbearable.
‘Mrs Nichol …’ He shifted in his seat but she flung up a hand.
‘Don’t touch me.’
‘Okay.’
‘Don’t you ever touch me.’
‘No.’
‘You’re a son of a bitch.’
‘I know.’
‘Good,’ she wept. ‘Good.’
Taking back the photograph, Charlotte Nichol caressed it. ‘My boy was murdered two weeks ago.’ She looked up at the ceiling fan and tears dropped on her lap. ‘The police have done nothing.’
‘I’m sorry. I –’
‘No.’ She shook her head angrily. ‘I don’t want that. Not from you. I’ve come here because Meredith was murdered and you’re going to do your work for me. Do you understand? You’re going to find the fucking person who did this. You owe me that much for Cleo.’
Iwata looked at the floor. She was right. Charlotte Nichol had lost one daughter to him, and now another child to murder. The inequity of it was almost preposterous. A normal person might have felt sympathy for this woman, but Iwata’s overriding emotion was fear. A clear, crystalline terror at having to care once again. Apathy was all that could be contained within him now; anything more would cause him to split open. Iwata had surrounded himself with misery. He had cauterized his own wounds with the tears of this city. Tears that were real to Angelenos but, to Iwata, just business. Maybe it was an ugly way to get by in life but he didn’t know many better ones.
Charlotte stood up. ‘You’re going to do this for me.’ It was decided.
Iwata thought about his empty apartment. His Spanish classes. The quiet streets on his morning runs. Existing was simple these days. But now Cleo’s mother had come for him, like a faded ghost.
Iwata closed his eyes. All he would ever be was a hunter of bad men.
‘All right.’ It was the only thing he could say.
‘I won’t ever forgive you for what you did to Cleo. But maybe you can still do some good in this world.’ Charlotte Nichol stood and placed two items on the desk. One was a large envelope. The other was a business card:
Joseph Avery Silke
Detective II
Robbery / Homicide Division
‘That’s the detective. He’s useless. The police have said some cruel things about my boy. All lies, of course. Julian was confused, that’s all. He was a good Christian who made mistakes in his lifestyle. But we all have our sins.’
Iwata nodded.
‘Kosuke, you find the man that did this. If you can’t have him arrested, ruin him.’ She paused at the door. ‘That much I know you have a talent for.’
Then she was gone.
Iwata opened the envelope. It contained ten thousand dollars. He swivelled in his chair to look down on Wilshire Boulevard, which crept all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In the winter, it was a corridor for the cold to drift along, deep into the city. But today, the street was bleached white in the heat, the palm trees parched brown.
Iwata saw a familiar face, caked in grime. He could read the man’s lips as he trundled along the street. ‘The best of luck! The BEST of luck!’
Iwata couldn’t help but feel he was talking to him.
It was 2 a.m. These were the good hours, mostly just drifters left. Benedict Novacek sat at the bar of Club Noir drinking a Rum Swizzle. He wore a black leather flat cap and, tight on his bearish frame, a blue Hawaiian shirt – a big jungle canvas of parrots and plumeria flowers. He was in his late forties, with short black hair, a greying box beard and, despite his size, an osseous face. He wore silver rings and tattoos on his hairy arms. On his forearm, in Latin, the words ‘Only God forgives’ were inked. Between sips of his Swizzle he nibbled on his fingernails, wide and circular, like old nickels he was testing for authenticity.
Novacek liked this seat. The mirrored bar afforded him a perfect view of the dance floor without giving away the fact that he was looking. Under the brim of his flat cap, he could watch to his heart’s content, his raw-oyster eyes freely grubbing through the bodies. Sometimes he would sit here for hours, drinking slowly, saying nothing. He would stay until he found the right one. And Benedict Novacek usually did.
It was a noir theme night, an entire room in mimesis of an ersatz era, a hundred femmes fatales and desperate dicks recreating a long-held fabrication – that there ever was a glorious age in the City of Angels. On the wall there was a framed print of Marilyn Monroe beneath which ran her words:
HOLLYWOOD IS A PLACE WHERE THEY’LL PAY YOU A THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR A KISS AND 50 CENTS FOR YOUR SOUL
Novacek whispered the words to himself as the woman sat down in the chair next to him. There were other seats free. She didn’t need to choose this one. He listened to her order a Sazerac. It was a good voice.
Novacek looked her over in the mirror. The make-up was a little too heavy and he preferred ones that didn’t have so much mileage, but she was in good shape. It was a decent waist, and the tit-work obviously hadn’t been scrimped on. The package wasn’t thrilling, but she had, in a way, offered herself to him. That made things easier.
Benedict Novacek took a sip of his Swizzle, padded his mouth dry with a napkin and pointed his cocktail cherry at the woman. Then he uttered the only sentence he ever needed.
‘How would you like to make a lot of money?’