I said, “She left another Polaroid here. Come on. I’ll show you.”
I led him along the hallway to my bedroom. He stood swaying from side to side on the threshold, looking uncomfortable, and wouldn’t enter. I got the candy tin and brought it to him.
He smiled at the painting of the woman on the lid, tapped it with one finger, and said, “La Belle Ferroniere.”
In truth, at the time, I didn’t quite know what he said, except that it sounded French, which seemed strange coming from someone who was so obviously not French. Anyway, I was eager to show him the picture of me sleeping.
“Did not the flashbulb wake you?” he asked.
“Nothing much can wake me when I really want to sleep.”
Frowning, he stopped swaying back and forth on the threshold and shook his head instead. “This is not good. This is very bad. What does your mother say?”
“I haven’t shown it to her yet. I wanted to think about it first. I didn’t want to worry her.”
I took the fabric eye from the box and explained its history, but he couldn’t quite understand.
“This is an eye from your stuffed toy?”
“Not from my toy. I don’t know whose toy. A wind blew it along the alleyway, blew it but nothing else, until it just stopped at me. I thought it had some juju, you know, so I saved it.”
“What is juju?”
“Kind of like voodoo.” When I saw the word meant nothing to him, I said, “You know, like in the movies.”
“I do not attend the movies.”
“Well, there was a voodoo-in-the-city thing on TV not long ago.”
“I do not watch television. I have often been told that I should purchase one, but I do not believe I ever will.”
“No TV? Gosh, what do you do, then?”
“I work.”
“I mean when you’re not working.”
“I read. I think.”
“I read, too. And my mom. We like books.”
After puzzling over the fabric eye one more time, he gave it back to me, and I carefully stored it upside down in the La Florentine container.
As I returned the tin box to the nightstand, Mr. Yoshioka said, “There can be only two logical explanations. Either Miss Eve Adams is a most expert lock-picker or she possesses keys to our apartments.”
Mr. Yoshioka was the essence of cool, but his kind of cool was unique to him. His precise way of speaking, without contractions or slang, never dropping the g at the end of a word, had appealed to my ear for music from the start of our relationship. Now, as we were engaged in deduction, trying to solve a mystery, though he had no accent, he reminded me just a little bit of that intellectual, supersmart detective Charlie Chan, in those old movies. In 1966, Charlie Chan films were still run on TV. Nobody yet found them racially offensive and worthy of censorship, maybe because Mr. Chan was always the smartest person in every scene. Charlie Chan, of course, was Chinese American, and Mr. Yoshioka was Japanese American. I could tell the difference, though I was just nine, because I had seen Mr. Moto on TV, in a series of funky old films about an intellectual, supersmart Japanese American detective based on a series of short stories and novel-length mysteries by John P. Marquand, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a mainstream novel titled The Late George Apley. To tell the truth, Fiona Cassidy, aka Eve Adams, scared me, but there were moments when the fun of playing sidekick to Mr. Yoshioka outweighed my fear of that mystery woman, probably because there never had been a series of movies featuring an intellectual, supersmart Negro detective, which was how I was beginning to see myself.
Closing the nightstand drawer and returning to the doorway in which my visitor stood, I said, “She must be a master lock-picker. Because where would she get keys?”
“Perhaps the building superintendent gave them to her.”
“Mr. Smaller? He wouldn’t do that. He could lose his job for doing something like that.”
“I am told that men do reckless things for pretty women. In fact, I have seen it.”
I shook my head. “Mr. Smaller says women break your heart so often you can’t count how many times. He says don’t let them start. Besides, he doesn’t like his bosses downtown, and they sent her here to do the work in Six-C. He says they’re all black-hearted company men, they get big pay for just picking their noses. Anyway, since they sent her from downtown, he probably thinks she’s a Bilderberger.”
Mr. Yoshioka’s mouth moved as if he were working the word around his tongue, trying to taste some meaning in it. “What is a … what you just said?”
“It’s a long story,” I replied. “Not important. Mr. Smaller wouldn’t have given her the keys, and black-hearted company men probably wouldn’t, either. So she must be a fantastic lock-picker. What did you bring in the shopping bag?”
“A device to guarantee your safety in the night.”
“What—a shotgun?”
He smiled, but it was a thin and nervous smile. “Let us hope that it does not come to that.”
31