If ever I suspected I might be a better actor than musician, that was the moment. “Miss Adams, yeah. Pretty lady with kind of purple eyes. That was way last summer.”
“You never mentioned her.”
“I just saw her a couple times, coming and going, you know.”
“She said she’s a photographer.”
“I didn’t know for sure what she was.”
“She said to tell you she still has the photo of you and it’s one of her favorites.”
I frowned as if trying to remember. “Yeah, she asked to take my picture once, out on the stoop. I don’t know why.”
“She said you’re very handsome and photogenic. She’s obviously got the good eye of a first-rate photographer.”
I pretended to be embarrassed by the compliment. “Yeah, I’m a regular Rock Hudson.” I was mortified, but only because I was in a box labeled HE LIES TO HIS MOTHER; and maybe I would never be able to get out of it.
She kissed me on the forehead. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your book. I know you love Heinlein.”
“He’s okay. You’re not an interruption.”
Getting up from the bed, she said, “I love you, Jonah.”
“I love you, too.”
“Remember to say your prayers.”
“I will.”
Leaving, as she pulled shut the door, she said, “Sleep tight, Mr. Hudson.”
I felt lower than dirt.
After that, I had no interest in The Star Beast.
I said my prayers and turned out the light, but I didn’t expect to sleep well.
In my mind, I kept hearing Fiona Cassidy from almost a year earlier: If you love your mama, then you think about what I said. I like to cut. I could make her a new face in half a minute.
In the dark, something kept tickling in my left nostril, but nothing was there. Not a tickle, really. A sensory memory of the cold point of the switchblade with which she’d threatened me.
Whatever Fiona Cassidy and Lucas Drackman and Mr. Smaller and my father and Miss Delvane might be planning, if indeed they were scheming together, they must be getting close to executing the plan. The purple-eyed witch had gone to Woolworth’s not primarily for lunch but to deliver a compliment that she wanted my mother to pass along to me, a compliment that was actually a threat, to be sure that I hadn’t forgotten the consequences of not keeping my mouth shut.
49
This next bit is based on hearsay. Because the source was Mr. Yoshioka, however, I’m certain it is reliable.
At the same time that my mother was telling me about Eve Adams having lunch at Woolworth’s, Mr. Yabu Tamazaki of the Daily News was sitting at the kitchen table in his apartment, in another part of the city, poring over the passenger manifest of the cruise ship on which, in October 1961, Mrs. Renata Kolshak had booked what turned out to be her death voyage.
Because he was continuing his investigation against the wishes of his superiors at the newspaper, Mr. Tamazaki had proceeded slowly and with caution. He had been delayed, as well, by avenues of inquiry that had proved to be dead-ends. After considerable patient effort, he had found a contact inside the cruise-ship company, Mrs. Rebecca Tremaine, formerly Rebecca Arikawa.
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sp; In 1942, at the age of twelve, Rebecca was removed from a foster home and sent to Children’s Village, the camp orphanage at Manzanar. The following year, she was raped by a nineteen-year-old internee who was a member of a gang. The rapist was transferred to the more secure camp at Tule Lake, where he stood trial. Late in 1944, at the age of fourteen, Rebecca was returned to her foster parents, Sarah and Louis Walton, who began the process of adoption. With the help of a loving family, she overcame the trauma of rape and eventually married.
On the advice of its attorneys, the cruise line kept passenger manifests of every voyage for ten years. Although that list of names and addresses was proprietary information—a source of likely future customers—Rebecca was persuaded that Mr. Tamazaki, a man of honor, had no intention of harming her employer in any way.
The passenger manifest contained 1,136 names. Mr. Tamazaki did not expect to find Lucas Drackman on it, and indeed he didn’t. He was looking for a suspicious name—comparable to Eve Adams—or any suggestion of falsity in an address, or the initials L.D., because both criminals of limited intelligence and those who were smart but cocksure often used aliases with that connection to their real names.