CHAPTER SEVEN

Outside on the sidewalk, silver sun glare stung my eyes. I slipped on my RayBans against the dull throb of the late morning as it burned through the haze. Brisk gusts of cool wind cut through the thin fabric of my jacket and chilled me to the bone.

I stood there a moment, my hands jammed into my pockets, and thought about home. It was nearing nine A.M. in Kona, and I knew Tino had long since arrived at my plantation, slamming across the red dirt road in his old Ford pickup, looking out past the dense green fields of coffee, southwest toward Tahiti, the trade winds drifting down off the volcano at his back.

I felt jet-lagged and empty, attempting to repress my growing anger toward my brother for dragging me back to this goddamned place. I think I had known it since my first year on patrol: When you’re out there, you’re constantly wading in the current of other people’s lives, but only when the tide is going out. Nobody calls a cop when they’re having a good time. It was a daily diet of bullshit you encountered on the street—and the real danger wasn’t as much about corruption as corrosion.

I shook myself out of it and slipped the cell phone from my pocket, punched in a number I knew I’d never forget. It rang twice.

“Homicide,” the voice answered. In the background were familiar sounds, the daily chaos of ringing telephones and office machines.

“Detective Yamaguchi, please,” I said.

A measurable hesitation, then: “One moment.”

There was no music on hold, only the sounds of passing traffic and the ambient noise of the city as I waited. I looked into the stainless steel sky, then off to the east where the tips of the mountains disappeared into the inversion layer. I was about to hang up and try again when my call was finally transferred.

“Detective Johnston.”

“Jeff Johnston?” I asked.

“How may I help you,” he said. His tone was all business.

“This is Mike Travis.”

“Sorry, Mike, they didn’t tell me it was you.”

“They didn’t ask,” I said. “Where’s Hans?”

Johnston was silent for a second too long; time enough to tell me that something was wrong. I heard the sound of his desk chair shuffling, could almost see him hunch over as he spoke to me in a voice so low it was nearly a whisper.

“Listen, Mike . . . uh . . . Hans is on admin leave.”

That’s not the kind of leave you take voluntarily.

“What the hell for?”

Another hesitation.

“You’d better ask him yourself,” Johnston said. “He’s been off for four or five days now.”

“He at home?”

“Far as I know,” he said. “But listen, don’t tell him you heard it from me, all right.”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks for the help.”

“Sorry, Mike,” he offered. “I know you guys were tight.”

Partners. More than that, even. Brothers. And unlike my blood brother, Hans wasn’t a man to tread uneven lines, certainly not in any way I could imagine that would bring Internal Affairs down on him. I hung up with a sour feeling in my stomach.

I had to talk with Hans, and the phone wasn’t going to get the job done.

Hans Yamaguchi lived with his wife, Mie, in a late-forties vintage bungalow near Old Town in Pasadena. The streets were lined with shade trees; a bucolic appearance more like a small Midwestern town than you’d expect to find in greater Los Angeles. It was the kind of place where neighbors still spoke to one another and children played ball on freshly mowed front lawns.

When I pulled to the curb, I saw their cars parked bumper to bumper in the narrow drive beside the house. Hans’s was dusted with a layer of grime and looked like it hadn’t been moved in several days. A weather vane in the likeness of a gamecock twisted slowly on a rooftop cupola.

I rang the bell and waited on the porch, listening to the mockingbirds and neighborhood sounds. Across the street an elderly couple busied themselves with yard work.

Mie came to the door wearing a simple housedress, a pink cardigan sweater draped loosely around her shoulders and buttoned at the throat. She was surprised to see me. She had cut her hair since I’d seen her last, and was still as petite as I remembered. She threw her arms around me, pressed her face against my chest, and took my hand in both of hers. She pulled me outside, softly closing the door behind us.

“I am so happy you are here,” she said. Her voice carried the cadence and inflection of her native Tokyo, but was uncharacteristically laced with emotion.

“How’s he doing?”

“Not very well, I think. He does not go out. Only stays home working on the house. He pretends to find things that need to be fixed.”

She looked past me, losing focus for a moment.

“He does not tell me anything. Only that what the people say about him is not true.”

I placed my hands gently on her shoulders, but looked squarely into her almond eyes. She felt fragile and childlike.

“You know what kind of man Hans is,” I said. “You know you don’t have anything to worry about.”

She drew a paper tissue from the pocket of her dress, dabbed at her eyes and pulled me through the doorway and toward the back of the house.

Hans was in the backyard, hunched over a two-by-four that rested on a pair of sawhorses, working it with a belt sander. He looked up as I approached, but I couldn’t read his expression behind the safety goggles he wore. He stopped what he was doing, stood straight and unyielding, and stared at me for long seconds.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

When he took off the goggles, I saw the luggage he carried underneath his eyes. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. A fine layer of sawdust powdered his clothes.

“Nice fence,” I said.

“It’s a gazebo.”

“Nice gazebo, then.”

He dropped the sander to the ground and hooked the goggles over the corner of the sawhorse. His eyes bored into mine as he brushed wood shavings from his shirt.

“You look like you’re running on the rims, Hans.”

“You don’t have a phone?”

“It was a last-minute thing,” I said.

Hans nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “So you know.”

“Less than you’d think,” I said. “You all right?”

The muscles in his square jaw flexed and he stared inward.

“Sure,” he said finally. There was a tone of resignation in his voice that I’d never heard before.

“Listen, Hans—”

“Assholes,” he interrupted, speaking more to himself than to me.

“I’m guessing you’re referring to Internal Affairs?”

“Who else?” Hans squinted and looked out over his backyard fence, shook his head. “But that’s not the best of it.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Wanna know who’s working my case?” He pulled a pack of gum from his shirt pocket, offered me a stick. He didn’t wait for my reply. “Dan fucking Kemp.”

Kemp had been assigned as Hans’s partner after I retired. But not for long. Kemp’s father had political connections that had gotten him moved up to Homicide. But after fewer than six months in the unit, Kemp’s own ineptitude had gotten him booted right back out.

“I thought he’d been sent over to Fraud,” I said.

Hans snorted and peeled the wrapper off the gum.

“Daddy got him a transfer to the rat squad instead.”

“Thought you had to be a sergeant for that,” I said.

“Promotion came with the transfer.”

“Kemp doesn’t fuck up,” I said. “He fucks upward.”

“Yeah, well he’s loving this shit.”

“Be grateful you don’t have a real cop on your ass,” I said. “He’s not splitting atoms on his day off.”

Hans smiled, but his eyes had the lifeless appearance of a taxidermic animal. A twin-engine plane droned overhead. Hans let it pass before he spoke again.

“Still drink tea?” he asked.

He reached out and finally shook my hand.

An hour later he’d told me the whole thing.

About a month earlier, Hans and his new partner, Roger Gaines, had been contacted by a detective from Austin, Texas. The Texas cops had arrested a suspect on an aggravated assault charge down there. When they ran the suspect’s prints, the guy came up as a suspect in a murder in Los Angeles. It was a case that belonged to Hans and Gaines.

After a boatload of haggling between the district attorneys for both jurisdictions, the cowboys agreed to allow him to be extradited to California to face the charge that carried more weight. So Hans’s lieutenant flew him and Roger Gaines down there to pick up the guy and bring him back to LA.

“The Austin detective—shithead’s name is Moss, by the way—picks us up at the airport,” Hans said. “We landed about six or so in the evening.”

“So you can pick up the suspect the next morning,” I said.

“Exactly. You know the drill.”

I nodded.

“So Moss says since it’s early, why don’t we get a couple of drinks down on Sixth Street, show us the town. I say fine, it’s been a long day. But I should have known better, Mike.” He shook his head. “I didn’t like the look of the guy from the start. A walking stool sample.”

Hans took a deep breath, exhaled a long sigh.

I waited while he regrouped.

“But I go along anyway,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

“Where was your partner?”

“Gaines wants to get dropped at the hotel, get us checked in, call the wife, blah, blah, blah.”

“So, you and Moss go on alone?”

“Yeah,” Hans said. “But we meet up with this other guy that Moss introduces to me as another Austin cop. I forget that clown’s name. Anyway, the three of us hit a handful of bars, have a beer or two along the way, listen to some blues and move on.”

I pictured the hot, smoke-filled clubs, could almost hear the Texas blues of Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Buddy Guy and Stevie Ray Vaughan. I pictured young waitresses with legs all the way to the floor, bearing trays full of sweating longneck bottles of Shiner Bock and weaving between the tables.

I tilted my eyes upward, squinting into what remained of the high overcast. Shadows were beginning to show themselves on the ground between my feet and brought me back to LA.

“A couple hours later,” Hans went on, “we ended up in this dump a few blocks off the main drag, a T and A club I wouldn’t let my dog walk into. After a couple minutes, Moss and the other cop get up from the table and disappear. I’m just sitting there nursing a ten-dollar beer, knowing I have to get up in the morning and haul our dirtbag back to LA, right?

“Moss and the other jack-off are taking a long fucking time, but I don’t really think about it. I got other things on my mind. But when he and his buddy finally come back, they’re in this big rush to take off. Moss waves at the bartender, and we all leave. I don’t even think about the tab. Never even crosses my mind.”

I waited, but Hans seemed to be finished.

“That’s it?”

Hans took a sip of his coffee, squinted against the emergent light of midday.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it. Except about three weeks later, I get called into the lieutenant’s office and there’s Kemp and this other IAD ass-hat sitting in his guest chairs. They got a call from Austin PD saying that Moss has been indicted down there. He’d evidently been on the pad for I don’t know how long. The other Texas cop we met up with was wired. They’d been watching Moss for a couple months. And the strip joint we went to is a front for some southern-fried wiseguy that Moss had been in bed with.”

“What does that have to do with you?” I asked.

“Well, according to Kemp, the fucking mobster is connected to organized crime all over the southwest.”

“Including Los Angeles,” I guessed.

“Yeah. Including LA. So they’re investigating me for conspiracy and a bunch of other crap. At a minimum, even when they clear me, it’s a rip for Conduct Unbecoming.”

The job was everything to Hans. There had been a time when I felt the same way. He wore the betrayal on his face and in his eyes.

“It’s all bullshit, Hans,” I said. “If Kemp had to eat the truth to survive, he’d weigh about a pound and a half.”

Hans stroked his chin and looked past me, lost again in some private thought. He looked older than when I had arrived, like he was going gray from the inside out.

“They can still bounce me, Mike,” he said finally.

“What does Loo say?”

Lafayette Delano had been in charge of Homicide since I’d first come to the squad. I knew how highly the lieutenant thought of Hans.

“Loo’s not there anymore, Mike,” he said. “He’s a captain now. West Bureau.”

That was Hollywood, West Los Angeles, the Wilshire district. A good promotion.

“New boss doesn’t know me from Adam,” he finished.

Hans had more time in than me. Nearly twenty-five years for him now. I had clocked out after twenty. I knew it was killing him that the department was putting him on the outside.

“Kemp’s Teflon. He’ll do me on his own time just for the hell of it.”

“And what’ll he come up with? He couldn’t find a turd in a sandwich bag.”

“I’m not sure it matters,” he said. “I don’t know if I even want to stick around after this.”

“I’ve done things I wouldn’t admit to a cockroach,” I said. “Don’t let that douche bag run you out.”

Hans shook his head.

“It’s not just Kemp,” he said. “He’s just the icing on the cake.”

“So what are you saying? You’re going to quit?”

He stared into his coffee cup, then up at me.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

“And do what?”

I followed his gaze as he glanced in through the kitchen window, at Mie standing at the sink. She couldn’t see him watching her through the glare. He turned back to me.

“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “But even when they clear me . . . I don’t know. Hell with it.”

I sat there in silence longer than I’d meant to. Hans was studying my expression.

“You came here for my help, didn’t you, Mike?”

I debated saying no. Hans had enough to deal with as it was. He didn’t need to get involved with my brother’s bullshit. But he was right: I did need someone to watch my back. And there was no point in lying to him. Nobody knew me better than he did.

“Forget it. They’re watching you, Hans.”

He shrugged.

“It’s like I told you,” he said. “I don’t believe I give a shit anymore.”

I shot my eyes toward the kitchen.

“What about Mie?”

He thought about that for a minute.

“She’ll back my play.”

I’d known them both a long time, knew he was telling me straight.

“They let you keep your shield?”

“Just my knockoff,” Hans said.

You learn young. When you’re a cop, there’s no greater sin, no greater humiliation, than losing your badge or your gun. Like most cops I knew, Hans had a replica of his department-issue badge—about seven-eights scale, and virtually impossible for a layman to distinguish from the real deal. More often than not, we’d carry the knockoffs when we were on the street, and leave the authentic ones in a safe place at home.

“Close enough,” I said. “One more thing.”

Hans eyeballed me in silence.

“I need a piece.”

One of the perks of being a detective with the kind of record Hans had was his access to confiscated weapons. On their way to the crusher, certain guns can be “requisitioned from source for training purposes.”

Without a word Hans disappeared into his bedroom. When he came back out, he handed me a mean little Stoeger Cougar with a fifteen-round magazine stacked with nine-mil rounds, wrapped in a cotton dust rag. It would nest nicely in the Mitch Rosen pocket-carry holster I had brought from home. I felt better already.

“You better get a shower and a shave. We don’t have a lot of time,” I said.

“This gonna be any fun?”

I told him it would be the investigative equivalent of a two-day search for a pair of reading glasses that were perched on the top of your head.

Hans smiled. And for the first time since I’d arrived, it looked like the real thing.