It’s been years, but ya never know when someone with a grudge will show up.”
“Hell of a way to make a living, Mick,”
My brother took a sip of beer and closed one eye as he looked at me. “It’s a wonderful world.”
The two detectives drank silently. I knew that they had found something, but they didn’t seem particularly eager to share it. Yet I could pick up that sense of suppressed emotion cops have: men who had been disappointed too often to show much excitement, but it was there anyway.
I couldn’t stand it. “So what else have you found out?”
Art licked beer foam off his lips. “Well. We’re looking at Sakura’s business dealings, but there’s not much there. So we went back yesterday and worked some angles.”
“Angles?” I said.
He nodded. “We went back and spoke with the secretaries.”
I nodded back in appreciation. From my perspective at the university, these were the people who really knew what was going on.
“I thought you questioned them pretty good first time around,” I said.
“Yeah, we did,” Micky admitted. “But we mostly asked them about Sakura. His schedule. His day. So we went back.”
“And?” I said.
“OK,” brother said, warming to his topic. “The guy wasn’t really dong much at work anymore. Showed up one or two days a week. Mostly, the secretaries said, he was using the office to make calls, mail stuff. Things like that.”
“Can’t blame him,” Art said, remembering the place. “You should have seen the offices Sakura had, Connor. Nice. Corporate. And the people who show up there tend to fit that mold, too.”
“Riffraff tend to be kept down in the streets,” Micky agreed.
“How’d we get in?” Art wondered out loud.
Micky ignored him. “Well, anyway, I asked the receptionists if Sakura was up to anything else. You know, while he used the office.” He took another sip of beer and went on. “Now get this. He was obviously pretty well known for his skill in,” he looked up at me, “… you know…”
“Shodo,” I said.
“Yeah. He had started doing things with that. Appraisals. Some museum consulting. The day before the murder, he had sent some calligraphy off to another appraiser for a second opinion. I got the name and address from the FedEx receipt.”
“So what’s so special about it?” I asked. Micky didn’t react for a minute.
Then he looked at Art triumphantly, and held up a hand. “Same day as the murder, someone came to Sakura’s office. An Asian. Asking about some calligraphy he claimed the old man was looking at. You had to hear the receptionist describe this guy. She said he was spooky.”
“He have an accent?” I asked.
Micky nodded. “Yeah. His English was fluent, but accented. A big guy, she said. Huge. The guy said that the stuff was his property and he wanted it back. He got all worked up, she said. She got flustered and mentioned the FedEx. He told her that Sakura wasn’t authorized to send the document anywhere else. He almost blew a gasket.”
“So?” I said again.
“So,” Micky replied, “they gave him a Xerox of the receipt so he could track it down. To get rid of him.”
“Notice that he didn’t ask to call Sakura,” Art pointed out to me.
“Yeah. Like maybe he knew he wasn’t gonna be answering the phone anymore,” Micky concluded.
“Did he leave a name?”
“Wong,” Micky said.
“It’s a common name. Like Smith,” I said.
“And probably fake,” Art grunted.
“If I could get a look at this calligraphy, it might give us a motive,” I said.
“Ooh, good point. Sherlock,” Micky cracked. “So what’s the next question you’re gonna ask?”
“Well… where’d the package go?” I said.
“It got sent to Georgia,” Micky said.
The two cops talked for a while about the possibility of lifting some latent prints from the office that could match the crime scene. The dim likelihood of getting a positive ID. The mysterious Asian visitor. And the fact that someone would probably get to take a trip below the Mason-Dixon line to try to find the missing calligraphy.
“The South,” Micky complained.
“They say it’s gonna rise again,” Art offered.
“More than I can say for Sakura,” my brother concluded.
Yamashita hates crowds. He has trained for a long time to be able to spot the subtle muscular shifts that signal murderous intent. But if you put him in a room with a crowd of people, he gets antsy. The Japanese say that everything has ki, a type of energy that can be sensed if you’re good enough. And Yamashita certainly was. The more mystically minded would say he is so sensitive to the energy force people give off that he’s overwhelmed.
I was trying to be open to the whole invisible-world stuff, so I asked him about this issue with crowds and tried out the ki explanation. We were standing around after a training session. The students had bowed and shuffled away. Some nursed bruises. All were worn out. I held a wooden training sword in my hand. It was made of white oak and the handle was discolored from the sweat and grime that had been ground into it over the years. After a good workout, Yamashita seems pleased with the world, and is often more talkative than usual. As his senior student, he’s also a bit more forthcoming with me. So I brought up the issue.
His bald, bullet head swiveled to look at me. The brown eyes glittered faintly. You can never tell whether it’s amusement or the excitement of the hunt that does it. My master let me squirm for a moment and then replied.
“I like it. It is a colorful explanation. The intense ki of crowds.” He made a slight rumbling noise deep in his chest. It’s his version of a chortle. “If I were writing for one of the cheap magazines American martial artists consume so avidly, I would use your explanation, Professor.” He always calls me that, even though he knows I’m not a faculty member at the university. Sometimes I think it’s a mark of respect. Other days, I can’t be sure.
We walked over to the weapons rack, where I placed the bokken down. He smiled a little at me. “I assume your question is sincere?” It was a rhetorical question. He knew that I had learned a long time ago not to waste his time.
“So…” he began in the characteristic Japanese way. “It is true that crowds present a mix of sensations. Noise. Heat. Smell. Even, I suppose, ki. But ki is like smoke, Burke. When you try to grab hold, it
