“Aren’t we locking the doors?” I asked after I’d lifted his garment bag and laptop out of the back seat.
“This is one of the cheaper cars in the garage. No one with half a brain would think of touching it.” Hugh limped off toward the elevator, and feeling like his mule, I picked up the luggage and followed.
The elevator doors opened with an electronic chirp on the twenty-second floor to a hall carpeted in cream wool. I glanced in the mirrored wall and frowned at my windblown, exhausted appearance.
“I know it’s ridiculously seventies,” Hugh said, as if my unhappy face was a reaction to the decor. “Inside the flat it’s the same. Almost everything’s rented, so don’t slag me off.”
That relaxed me enough to anticipate something truly wretched. The door opened to a tiled entryway hung with a large, expensively framed print of rugby players locked in a mud-covered embrace.
“You’re such a guy!” I was blown away.
“I thought I turned the lights off when I went off for the holiday. My electric bill’s going to be a nightmare,” Hugh moaned as I slipped off my shoes and followed beige wall-to-wall carpeting into a giant living room where a solid glass wall revealed Tokyo Tower and Hotel Okura lit up gorgeously against the dark sky.
The view was the best thing in the huge room furnished with sterile leather furniture in a shade that matched the carpet. The dining room was hardly better, dominated by a glossy rosewood table and six rigid-looking chairs. One wall was mirrored and the other held a pair of reproduction screens depicting a flowing river banked by plum trees. I’d studied it as an undergraduate, so the identification came easily: Red and White Plum Blossoms by Ogata Krin, an early eighteenth-century artist.
“Setsuko chose that.” Hugh sensed my unasked question about the only Japanese thing in sight.
“No wonder. From you, I would have expected Sumo wrestlers or something more akin to your rugby players.”
“The wrestlers are in the bedroom,” he said with a ghost of his old smile.
“You have more room than you need, don’t you?” I was trying hard to keep my cool. In the two rooms I’d seen so far, I could fit my apartment five times over. I had a fleeting thought of how my art and textile collections could warm the environment but pushed it away.
“Excuse me,” I said, noticing a half-opened door to what looked like a powder room. Walking in, I caught a quick movement in the mirror. I yelped and started to step back, but my hand had already hit the light switch. In a millisecond, track lights shone down on the man slammed up against the linen closet: Kenji Yamamoto, looking frightened but very much alive.
19
“The exterminators were here scarcely a month ago, so please don’t tell me—” Hugh stopped short.
“Sumimasen, I’m so sorry!” Yamamoto, wearing what looked like one of Hugh’s expensive Scottish sweaters over his ski pants, dropped to the ground and began the kind of bowing appropriate for temples.
“Sorry? I damn near broke my ankle because of you!” Hugh waved a crutch at him.
“Please forgive me. Please understand!” Yamamoto cried.
“Do you mind?” I looked at the two of them significantly. Yamamoto got to his feet and Hugh limped out after him.
When I emerged a few minutes later, the two were sitting at the dining table with a bottle of Scotch between them.
“This is Cadenhead’s, one of my favorite single malt whiskeys. You haven’t tried it yet.” Hugh held out a glass to me.
“You’re drinking with someone who might have killed Setsuko and was willing to let you take the fall. Why not lie down and hand him a knife to finish you off!” I stormed away from them and into the kitchen, where I was hit with multiple shocks at the sight of the full-sized stove and oven, the dishwasher, the small center island with a butcher-block top. It was unbelievable. I hadn’t seen a kitchen this luxurious since I’d left America.
“While you’re in there, could you pull some shepherd’s pies from the freezer? I think everyone could use a bite,” Hugh called after me.
What did he think this was, a dinner party? I rummaged around the freezer, setting aside packages of ice cream, fish fingers, and lamb curry until I came up with a two-pack of shepherd’s pie. I slid it into a spotless microwave mounted on the wall and began looking for something for myself. I wound up with French crackers—it seemed none of his food was Japanese—spread with Patak’s Original Lime Pickle and some thin slices of a wan tomato.
“Do you have place mats?” I asked when I came out.
“Second drawer in the sideboard. Thanks. But you’re not eating a pie?”