Ghosts

“First pawnshop was on Ainsley and Third,” Hawes said. “Second one was on Culver and Eighth. We figure he’s holed up somewhere in the precinct and is trying to get rid of the stuff at local pawnshops.”

“How many are there in the precinct?” Byrnes asked.

“We get daily transaction reports from seventeen of them.”

“Out of the question,” Byrnes said at once.

“We wouldn’t want to cover all—”

“How many then?”

“Eight.”

“Where?”

“A ten-block square, north and east from Grover and First.”

“Eight shops. That’s sixteen men you’re asking for.”

“Right, sixteen,” Carella said.

“Have you checked the hotels and motels for a Jack Rawles?”

“All of them in the precinct. We came up negative.”

“How about outside the precinct?”

“Genero’s running them down now. It’s a long list, Pete. Anyway, we think he’s someplace up here. Otherwise, he’d be shopping pawnbrokers elsewhere in the city.”

“Where’s he staying then? A rooming house?”

“Could be. Or maybe with a friend.”

“Sixteen men,” Byrnes said again, and shook his head. “I can’t spare anybody on the squad. I’d have to ask Frick for uniformed officers.”

“Would you do that?”

“I’ll need fourteen,” Byrnes said.

“Sixteen,” Carella said.

“Fourteen plus you and Hawes makes sixteen.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I wish I could ask him for ten. He’s very tight-assed when it comes to assigning his people to special duty.”

“We can make do with ten,” Carella said, “if you think that’ll swing it.”

“I’ll ask for an even dozen,” Byrnes said. “He’ll bargain for eight, and we’ll settle for ten.”

“Good,” Carella said. “We’ll work up the list of shops we want covered.”

“He won’t be hitting the two he already tried,” Byrnes said. “I’ll call the captain. Get your list typed up. When did you want to start?”

“Immediately.”

“Okay, let me talk to him.”

The stakeout started at 10:00 that morning, shortly after it began raining. In this city there was a wintertime pattern to the weather. First it snowed. Then it rained. Then it grew bitterly cold, turning the streets and sidewalks to ice. Then it snowed again. And then, more often than not, it rained. And turned to ice again. It had something to do with fronts moving from yon to hither. It was a supreme pain in the ass. Snug in the back room of Silverstein’s Pawn Shop on the Stem and North Fifth, Carella and Hawes complained about the weather and sipped hot coffee from soggy cardboard containers. Elsewhere in the precinct, ten uniformed cops were similarly ensconced, waiting for someone fitting Jack Rawles’s description to appear, preferably bearing large hunks of jewelry stolen from Craig’s apartment.

“There’s something I ought to tell you,” Hawes said.

“What’s that?”

“I took Denise Scott to dinner last night.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Carella said.

“Well…Actually, she was in my apartment when I spoke to you.”

“Oh?” Carella said.

“In fact, she was in my bed.”

“Oh,” Carella said.

“I’m mentioning it only because she’ll be a material witness when we get this guy, and I hope that doesn’t complicate—”

“If we get him.”

“Oh, we’ll get him.”

“And if he’s our man.”

“He’ll be our man,” Hawes said.

“He’s got to be our man, don’t you think?”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” Carella said.

“Why do you figure he did it?” Hawes asked.

“I’m not sure. But I think…” Carella hesitated. Then he said, “I think it was because Craig stole his ghosts.”

“Huh?” Hawes said.

Adolf Hitler must have thought of himself as a hero; Richard Nixon probably still thinks of himself as one; every man and woman in the world is the hero or heroine of a personal scenario. It was therefore understandable that Carella considered himself the hero in the continuing drama that had started with the murder of Gregory Craig on December 21. He did not for a moment believe that Hawes might similarly consider himself the hero. Hawes was his partner. Heroes sometimes have partners, but they are only there to say, “Kemo sabe.” In Hawes’s scheme of things, he was the hero, and Carella was his partner. Neither of them could possibly have guessed that yet another hero might make the arrest that cracked the case.

Takashi Fujiwara was a twenty-three-year-old patrolman working out of the Eight-Seven. His fellow police officers called him “Tack.” Like all men, he considered himself a hero, even more so on this night of December 29, when the stakeout was two days old and the snow had turned again to rain. It was Fujiwara’s devout belief that no one in his right mind should be walking a beat in the rain. He wasn’t even sure that anyone should be walking a beat at all, rain or not. What was the matter with putting all the city’s patrolmen in cars? What was all this bullshit about foot patrols deterring crime? Fujiwara had been walking a beat for two years now, and he had not noticed a discernible decline in the city’s crime rate. He did not know that at two minutes past 5:00 on this shitty, miserable rainy Friday he would become a hero not only in his own mind but in the eyes of his peers. He did not know that before the new year was a week old, he would be promoted to detective/3rd and become an honored and honorable member of the team of men up there on the second floor of the station house. He knew only that he was soaked to the skin.

Fujiwara’s parents both had been born in the United States. He was the youngest of four sons and the only one of them to join the police force. His eldest brother was a lawyer in San Francisco. The next two brothers owned a Japanese restaurant downtown on Larimore Street. Fujiwara hated Japanese food, so he rarely visited his brothers in their place of business. His mother kept telling him he should learn to appreciate Japanese cuisine. She kept serving him sashimi. He kept kissing her on the cheek and asking for steak.

It had been his mother’s misfortune, when she was just sixteen and when Fujiwara and his three brothers were not even the faintest glimmer in her eye, to accept from her grandmother in Tokyo an invitation to visit her. Reiko Komagome—for such was her maiden name—was at the time attending a private school in the San Fernando Valley, her parents being rather wealthy Japanese immigrants who owned and operated a brisk silk business with its base in Tokyo and its primary American outlet in Los Angeles. Reiko’s Thanksgiving holiday started on November 21 that year, and she was not due back at school till December 1. But since her birthday fell on November 10, a Monday, and since a trip to Japan could, after all, be considered an educational and cultural experience, Reiko’s mother was able to convince the school authorities to let her out a week and more before the start of the scheduled vacation—provided she diligently did her assigned homework while she was in the Orient. Reiko left for Japan on November 9. Toward the end of her stay there, however, she came down with a severe cold and an attendant fever, and her grandmother was fearful of sending her on the long voyage back to the States. She called Los Angeles and received Reiko’s mother’s permission to keep her in Tokyo at least until the fever abated.

The year was 1941.

On December 7—when Reiko’s temperature was normal and her bags packed—the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. She did not return to Los Angeles until the summer of 1946, when she was twenty-one years old. She got married the following year to a man who subsequently taught her the intricacies of the jade business and the joys of sex (Reiko was delighted to learn that Japanese prints did not lie) and who incidentally impregnated her with four handsome sons, the youngest of whom was Tack Fujiwara.

The way Fujiwara got to be a hero and subsequently a detective/3rd came about quite by accident. He had relieved on post at a quarter to 5:00 and was walking a singularly dreary stretch of Culver Avenue some three blocks from the station house, an area of grim tenements interspersed with several greasy spoons, a billiard parlor, a check-cashing store, a pawnshop, a bar, and a shop selling tawdry lingerie of the breakaway variety. Most of the stores would be open till 6:00 or 7:00, he would not have to start shaking doorknobs till then. One of the greasy spoons would be open till 11:00, the other would close at midnight. The billiard parlor generally closed its doors sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., depending on how many customers were in there shooting pool. He had checked with the sergeant riding Adam Six, who’d told him to keep his eyes open for a brand new, blue Mercury sedan reported stolen that afternoon and who jokingly advised him not to drown out there in the rain.