snapped back into focus and took a notepad from his jacket pocket. “Victim is Edward Sakura, fifty-eight. Works for Three Diamonds Productions, an entertainment agency or something.”
We moved into the hut as he spoke. A taped outline was on the floor, showing the points of Sakura’s last living contact with the earth. It was well done and you got a good sense of the arrangement of limbs. The area where the head lay was a dark, smudgy stain. You could smell the blood in the close confines of the room.
Art and Micky stopped once they were inside. They did it together, almost automatically, and slowly scanned the room as if imprinting it in their minds. Ramirez continued his briefing.
“Victim was alone at the time of the shooting.”
“You got a fix on the time of death, yet?” Art interrupted.
Ramirez shook his head no. “Just a rough estimate from the coroner’s guys. I haven’t seen the paperwork yet.”
“Get it as soon as you can, Pete,” Strakowski said tersely.
“Wife?” Micky asked.
“Yep,” Ramirez answered. “Gone all day. We’re checking it out.”
“Where is she now?” Art asked.
“She’s inside,” the Lieutenant said, “doped to the eyeballs. The doctor just left.”
Ramirez went back to reading his notes. “Apparent cause of death was a large caliber bullet wound. Entered the left temple and blew out the other side of the head.”
“Powder burns?” my brother asked.
“None visible. No weapon at the scene. Suicide is probably out. We’ll do a paraffin check on the corpse anyway.”
Micky and Art nodded their approval. “Do the wife, too,” Micky murmured.
Then he turned to look around, and I did, too. It was a typical layout for Shodo practice. White walls, with natural wood trim. A low, wooden table where the paper, ink, and brushes were arranged. A small cushion for sitting on. There were some bookshelves and drawers behind the spot where Sakura had sat. It looked fairly tidy in there. But the white outline with the stain ruined the effect.
A few calligraphy brushes lay on the floor, close to the tape outline of an arm. The cushion looked like it had been shoved around, probably by the movements of the body as Sakura took his last trip to the floor. Other than that, most things looked normal.
“No sign of a struggle,” Art said, as if reading my mind.
“Right,” Ramirez responded. “No real struggle. No evidence of forced entry.”
“Anything disturbed at the house?”
Strakowski let out a stream of air as if impatient with going over old ground. “No apparent breakin. Nothing taken. None of the neighbors saw anything. We’re checking the wife’s alibi. Looking for girlfriend trouble. Boyfriend trouble. Business trouble.”
Art and Micky looked at him without expression as Strakowski went on. “Look, we know what we’re doing. We know what we’ve got on our hands here.”
“Ya do, huh?” Micky asked.
“Sure,” Ramirez said. “It’s a homicide, pure and simple. Clean, efficient. In and out. No fuss, no muss, no bother.”
“Well, except for the floor…” Art commented. Strakowski looked pained.
“OK, if you’re all so smart, then why are we here?” Micky asked.
Strakowski looked at him, hard. My brother didn’t flinch. He saw the same look every morning in the mirror when he shaved. The only difference was that Strakowski had gray eyes and Micky had blue ones.
“Here’s the deal,” the man from Brooklyn said, puffing out his cheeks like he was bleeding off tension. “You looked at the crime stats for the sixty-eighth precinct?” We shook our heads no. “We had a total of two homicides here last year. Neat and tidy. No big mystery.”
“We mostly work larceny cases,” Ramirez added.
His boss glared at him. “And now I have Mr. Sakura meeting his maker in my nice, quiet community. It looks to me like a professional job.”
“Oh, definitely,” Ramirez commented.
Strakowski grimaced as if in pain, then continued. “And in the few precious moments he has left in this vale of tears, what does the victim do?”
“Scream. Cry?” Art suggested.
“Wet his pants?” said Micky. The rhetorical nature of questions is often lost on cops.
Strakowski lowered his chin and looked at the two detectives from Manhattan wearily. ‘’I’m beginning to understand your lieutenant.” He held out a hand and Ramirez put a manila envelope in it. Then Strakowski slipped out a sheet of paper encased in plastic.
“It appears that Mr. Sakura’s last action on earth was an act of calligraphy. Now what are we to make of that?”
“Pretty cool customer,” Ramirez offered.
His boss shrugged. “Maybe. And anybody that cool is gonna be doing what he does for a good reason.” It looked like Art was about to say something, so Strakowski held up a hand. “Maybe, I thought in my own feeble cop way, maybe this is a message for us. I mean, we’re no experts here in Fort Hamilton. Not like you pros from across the river. But maybe, just maybe it’s a…” he paused in sarcastic emphasis “… clue! But surely I am out of my element. Then I thought, hmmm. Calligraphy. Murder. Exotic Asian culture. Who can help me with this puzzle?” He looked pointedly from Ramirez to Micky to Art. Then he turned to me and stood there, waiting.
“Can I see the paper?” I asked.
It was Sakura’s last piece of calligraphy. A single sheet of fine paper, holding the black swirls of a dead man’s brush strokes.
“This was found on the desk?” I asked. It was a stupid question, but I often sound that way while I think.
“There was a sequence of different sheets lying on the table. This one was on top,” Ramirez answered.
“Ya think he got popped while doing this?” Art asked.
I didn’t respond. I was scanning the record of his calligraphy from his last session. Conjuring a mental image of Sakura in the Shodo hut, totally focused on his art in the last few moments he had to live. I spread the sheets out on a side table and arranged them in the sequence I thought made the most sense. I stepped back and nodded to myself. Ranged the way I had placed them, you could almost see something happen. The first warm-up exercises, the testing of ink consistency and brush conditions, reveal an artist forging a tactile link with his tools. Then Sakura had started a quote from the Platform Scripture. The characters were classic Chinese, like many of the old Zen documents, and they revealed balance and poise and a fidelity to discipline. The characters flow across the page for four lines before something happens.
There’s a break in the esthetic
