7:27 p.m.

T.I. again. The same cell block and sweat room.

Ashida sat with Elmer Jackson. A cuff chain cinched them up. They were working the same ploy.

I’m Japanese, like you. I serve the police. Still, they oppress me. Aren’t I sympathetic? Answer my questions, NOW.

Captain Parker sent him down. The ploy derived from their 459 at Jim Larkin’s bungalow. The ledger. The assumed link to the house/​farm buyouts.

Ashida and Parker discussed the ledger. Parker showed him the Feds’ subversive lists. They cross-checked them with the T.I. arrest log. Ashida matched up four initial sets.

T.A. equaled Thomas Akahara. G.Y. equaled George Yamato. W.O. equaled William Okamura. R.M. equaled Rollo Moriyama.

Elmer said, “This cuff routine is bullshit. I’ll unhook you if you want.”

Ashida smiled. “There’s a point to it. I’ll tell you about it someday.”

“I did a hitch in the Marines, and it was from hunger. I don’t want to go back, war or no war.”

Ashida said, “You’ll be draft-exempt. You’re friends with the Chief and the mayor.”

“You mean Brenda is. I just run bag and do the scut work.”

“You’ll be declared ‘police-essential.’ I’m sure of it.”

Elmer relit his cigar. “This white man’s police force has been good to us. You, especially. Remember that when they start carting your people off to some hellhole, and you get rightfully inclined to hate me.”

Ashida checked his notepad. He had opening questions prepped. Who approached you about your property? Why was the sale or potential sale attempted and/​or recorded in secret? Were the buyer or buyers in any way suspicious to you?

Elmer smoked up the room. An MP walked in Thomas Akahara. Mr. Akahara seethed. He was fat. He sported a Hitler mustache.

Ashida stood up and rattled his cuff chain. Ashida dredged up Japanese phrases and dispensed a formal hello.

The MP uncuffed Akahara. He pulled out a news clip and spit on it. He bared Tojo teeth and glared.

Elmer hooted. The MP shrugged and recuffed Akahara. They about-faced and scrammed.

Elmer said, “Dr. Hideo Ashida. Reluctantly notorious and despised by his own kind. The only yellow man on the Los Angeles PD.”

“Let’s go back, Elmer.”

“Okay, but let’s stop at Lyman’s first.”

The guard captain poked his head in. “Telephone call, Sergeant.”

Elmer uncuffed Ashida and followed him. Ashida teethed on that missing something at the Watanabe house. He missed something at Larkin’s place. Two somethings tweaked him now.

He brain-walked through both locations. He walked room-to-room. He got something/​nothing a dozen times over. Elmer walked back in.

“We got to put a rain check on Lyman’s. There’s three dead Chinamen in Griffith Park, and Bill Parker wants you.”

7:54 p.m.

They double-timed down the catwalk. Inmates held newspapers up to the bars. Ashida caught peripheral views.

Mariko ran her mouth again. The papers spieled the gist. Viva J. Edgar Hoover! God Bless the L.A. Police and Special Agent Ward J. Littell!

They shagged to Elmer’s car and peeled northbound. They crossed the bridge. The shoreline blackout swaddled them. It pressed down the sky. It smothered the ground. You got white pavement lines and no more.

Elmer said, “I can add, and I can go ‘one plus one makes two.’ That Scotty kid pops a Four Families boy last night, and now we got three dead Chinks. That adds up to ‘tong war’ in my book.”

Ashida stared out his window. They hauled north. The blackout lifted six miles up. Elmer tapped his headlights and siren.

They caught a long dead stretch and made Western Avenue. The siren bored them straight to L.A. proper. They cut west to the park road.

Note the door-to-door canvass. Note the blues holding back civilians. Note those lights in the Observatory lot.

A sentry waved them up. Elmer killed the siren. See that? It’s night arc-light glow.

Outdoor homicide. Follow the glow.

They made the lot. City vehicles packed it. Prowl cars, K-cars, meat wagons. Morgue men trudged a hiking path.

Follow the glow.

They parked and hiked up the path. The glow built to a blaze. A shitload of cops talked dead-man talk. Their voices boomed.

A clearing. Four bluesuits, three morgue men. Thad Brown, Buzz Meeks. Captain Bill Parker, civvy-clad.

Arc lights pointed down. Flashlights pointed down. Dirt soaked blood maroon. Entrail stink. No bodies, per se.

Ashida counted limbs. Six arms and legs meant three dead men. Four bedrolls in plain sight. That meant a fourth man snuffed somewhere else or plain gone.

Three heads. Forehead entry wounds, rear-head exit wounds. Mouth wounds. Exploded jawbones and teeth. They’re shot in the forehead first. They gasp for air. Second shots go straight in their mouths.

Ashida studied their faces. Ashida studied the severed limbs and matched up skin tone. Eugenics. Race science. Asian racial distinctions.

Skin color. Physiognomy. Hair density. He could subdivide Asians by race. Most Asians thought they could—but could not.

One victim was Asian mixed-blood. Two were Japanese. He based his ID’s on racial instinct. Scattered shells. Obvious .45’s. Dumdum bullets. Mouth wounds that blew noses up.

A cop said, “Check Tojo. He’s got his snout all over this.”

Thad Brown said, “Shut up.”

Bill Parker said, “Meeks, what are you doing here?”

Meeks said, “I caught the Bureau squeal. Slant-eyed homicides interest me these days.”

Ashida scanned the ground. Spilled blood oozed past the clearing. The path dirt was hard-packed. It would not imprint footsteps.

Three heads. No personal gear with the bedrolls. A rising-sun tattoo on one arm. A shotgun-size rubber bullet.

A knife beside the bedrolls. Unbloodied and undeployed here. A short handle. A central puncture blade. Six smaller blades welded to a metal strip.

Crude manufacture. Anachronistic. A torture weapon—vaguely feudal-style.

Ashida knelt by the bedrolls. He recalled the Goleta Inlet. The blade marks on the dead man. Similar to these blades.

A cop said, “Charlie Chan’s on the job.”

Thad Brown said, “Shut your mouth.”

Ashida studied the knife. Cigarette smoke diffused the death stink. A cop puked in the bushes. A cop squeezed prayer beads.

Elmer said, “I see a Four Families scarf. We got ourselves a tong war.”

Ashida stood up. Parker and Meeks scoped the rubber bullet. It was riot-gun knock-you-flat size.

Meeks said, “Makes you think of Huey C., don’t it, Cap? There were four other guys on the van heist, but we only got three here. Is this all a little close for you?”

Parker walked up to Ashida. He hopped a severed leg and gestured down the path. The arc-light poles swayed. Arc-light heat juked up the stink.

Ashida followed Parker. They found a quiet spot. Ashida felt arc-light burns on his neck.

Parker said, “Preliminary impressions. Tell me what you think.”

Ashida said, “They’re Japanese, not Chinese. One man may be mixed. It’s imprecise science, but I’m reasonably sure of it.”

Parker lit a cigarette. “Meet me at Nort Layman’s office later. He’s got something new on the Watanabes. He called over for Dudley, but I picked it up.”

Ashida said, “I missed something at Larkin’s bungalow. It’s driving me crazy.”

Parker tossed his cigarette. “Break in again.”

“Elmer Jackson’s driving me. I don’t have my car.”

Parker handed him a key ring. “Take mine. The plate number is QF-661.”

Morgue men wheeled gurneys past them. Parker turned tail back to the clearing. Ashida walked down to the lot.

QF-661 stood by the park road. A half-full jug was there on the seat.

Ashida got in and U-turned. The park road got him past the sentries. Vermont got him to Sunset and that twisty shot to the beach.

The K-car was unwieldy. The shift lever stuck. The clutch squeaked and slipped. He drove west and got synced with it.

Hollywood to the Strip. The Strip to Brentwood. Brentwood to the Palisades.

He hit SaMo Canyon. He got out and walked to the door. He was 459-proficient now. One pick tweak got him in.

He shut the door. His penlight carved a path. Living room, kitchen, bedroom. He studied the koi stream and pond. The koi spoke to him.

There’s no telephone.

There’s no address book with names and phone numbers listed.

Lyman’s back room. The Wednesday-to-Thursday-midnight briefing. Stray talk. The Watanabes called Santa Monica pay phones.

Nearby pay phones. Near the SaMo aircraft plants—Boeing, Douglas, Lockheed.

There was one other something. It was seemingly prosaic.

Ashida shut his eyes. He went someplace calm. He smelled powdered fish food. The koi spoke to him.

The Sheriff’s bulletin. An inventory. Items found on Jim Larkin.

“Right-front trouser pocket. Three pay-telephone slugs.”

Something or nothing? Connecting thread or non sequitur?

Ashida walked back to the K-car. He U-turned to the coast road and Sunset east. He drove downtown. He’s a Jap in a cop sled. Colored fish talk to him.

He parked outside the morgue and walked in. Gurneys lined the central hallway. Body parts were gauze-wrapped and paper-pinned. Arms, legs, heads. All tagged “Griffith Park/12-12-41.”

He smelled thawing flesh. He traced it to Nort Layman’s exam room. Nort and Captain Bill had a jug. Ryoshi Watanabe was stretched out on a slab.

Ryoshi was six days and seven hours dead. Nort had sliced his back into chunks. The cuts were ten by ten. Freezing facilitated the slicing. Nort pointed to a chunk. It was tagged “upper-right posterior.”

The thawing revealed an old wound. It was etched in subcutaneous tissue. It was barely detectable.

It was a knife wound. It was a multiple-blade wound. It reprised the knife in the clearing and the knife scar on the Goleta man.

Nort said, “It’s a very old wound, so it wasn’t visible on the surface of the skin. I looked up the blade pattern in Ray Pinker’s weapons text. It’s a knife out of eighteenth-century Japan. Warlords poison-dipped the blades. It was quite the perverted thing.”

Parker said it first. “We just found a knife like that in Griffith Park.”