Naomi Hirahara - Santa Cruz Noir

“Why’d you wake me up so early?”

“I wanted to walk with you on the beach. I don’t want to scare anyone with my face like this. It’ll be empty for a little while. Let’s go.”

They bundled up and strolled along the wet sand in silence. Neither made any attempt to talk and it was soothing just to listen to the crashing of the waves.

“In all my life living in Watsonville, I’d never been to Santa Cruz except when I was in juvie up the road. I didn’t realize it was like twenty miles away. The first time I came over here was when I started going to Cabrillo after I got my GED in County.”

“County jail?”

“Yeah,” he said. “First juvie. Then I got transferred to County.”

“For what?”

“A whole bunch of things. Liked it better inside than I did out.”

“Is that why you didn’t want me to meet your family?”

He grunted. “What family?”

They passed a man in a baseball cap walking his golden retriever. The man nodded to them, doing a double take when he noticed Vicente’s face.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“You didn’t look in the mirror?”

“I was afraid to.”

“I’m surprised you’re alive, let alone walking on the beach.”

“I always could take a punch.”

Marcela wanted to bring the conversation back. “What do you mean what family ?”

“After my dad died, my mom, she struggled. I was in and out of foster homes.”

“Is that why you joined a gang?” she asked.

He scrunched up his face. “What do you mean?”

“You know : didn’t have a family so you found one.”

“I wasn’t in a gang,” he said.

She looked up at him. Through his swollen face, she couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not.

“Then what about your strawberry tattoo? Don’t tell me that’s just Watsonville pride.”

“Naw, that’s my favorite fruit.”

She burst out laughing. “You think you’re funny, Vicente.” She felt his arm around her waist. He turned her toward him.

“Look at me,” he said.

She was cold and she pushed herself closer to his warmth, though she couldn’t look up. She didn’t want to.

“Look at me,” he said again.

She allowed herself to stare at his disfigured face. The ice had helped. His eyes were no longer as swollen, yet his face was still covered in welts, cuts, and bruises. She reached up and gently touched his busted bottom lip, then the cuts on his nose. She moved a little higher and ran her fingers over the veins of his swollen eyelids. His eyes were closed. She could hear his breathing and feel his breath on her forehead. He was shivering slightly. She touched his swollen, bruised cheek. He winced, but she kept her hand there anyway.

With the tips of her fingers she dug into his skin and expected him to back away, but he didn’t. She pressed harder and harder until she realized that he was resisting, pushing back hard against her fingers — and then he grabbed her wrists. “Hit me.”

“No,” she whimpered as she tried to wrest her hands away. “Let me go, you’re scaring me.”

“Hit me,” he said again.

“Hit your fucking self.”

“I can’t!” he screamed — and then softer, “I can’t hit anyone.”

She stopped struggling. “I’m not going to hit you, Vicente.”

He let go of her wrists and her arms fell to her side. She turned and walked quickly back toward the beachfront. She didn’t want to look back, but she couldn’t help herself. Vicente was still where she’d left him, staring after her through swollen eyes.

Seacliff

I was in my apartment, above The Mediterranean, Seacliff’s favorite dive bar, on Center. If you don’t drink and you don’t dive, you’ll still know the joint, or at least the location, because it’s next door to Manuel’s, the best Mexican restaurant in Santa Cruz County. My apartment is spitting distance from my office, a realtor’s shack on blocks on unused state park land. Estelle Richardson, the realtor who rents me a desk, figures we’ll be here for life.

I poked my head out the window to scan the weather and see what the day would bring. There was a girl sitting on the steps of the office, a redhead, reading a book with a finger in her curls. It was nine, an hour at least before Estelle would show, and I didn’t think the kid was looking for real estate.

I have access to the Mediterranean’s espresso machine, a reliable Gaggia that fires up and delivers in three minutes. In five, I was walking up to my office, coffee in one hand, key in the other to indicate my intent. Red looked up, showing an unspoiled face, freckled, quizzical. I looked at her book. It was Carter Wilson’s classic, Crazy February. She closed it on her finger and stood up.

“Are you looking for an apartment?” I said.

“I’m looking for a detective,” she replied. “I’m looking for Ms. Sukenick.”

“It’s Sukie,” I said, and put the key in the lock. “Come on in.”

She sat down across from me. I studied her face. I couldn’t figure out where she was from. I mean, from her speech I knew she was a California kid. She had that accent that Californians don’t think they have, compressed words, raised inflection, like they’re asking a question. But I couldn’t place her face. The freckles and coppery curls could have been County Cork, but there was something different in the eyes, which were a shifting green-gray. Then the cheekbones. If I had to make a guess, I would have said some Irish missionary once made a convert in Beijing.

“So, ” I said, “what does an anthropology major from UC Berkeley want with me?”

She gave a little gasp. “Wow, you really are a detective. How did you know that?”

She probably thought she hadn’t given me any clues, but the blue-and-gold knit cap stuffed in her backpack was definitely Cal and the essential clue was her reading material. Crazy February is a classic in Mesoamerican anthropology, about a murder in the Maya highlands of Chiapas, and I knew Lars Guthrie, the Berkeley professor who assigned the book to his upper-division anthro students every quarter.

What I said was, “If you hang around long enough, you learn some things. What can I do for you?”

She gathered herself. “My name is Kelly Wong. I’m looking for my father, Leonard Wong. Do you know him?”

I didn’t know the man personally, but I’d eaten in his restaurants and any reader of Good Times in the seventies and eighties knew him from his chatty weekly advertisements. “Chef Wong,” in his towering toque, had introduced Szechuan peppers and triple-X chile oil to Santa Cruz County.

Something didn’t scan. I had to ask. “Were you adopted, Kelly?”

She laughed. “I get that a lot. No, Leonard was my father as far as I know. I know the Mayan dicho about you only really know who your mother is, but she said Leonard was her one and only. My mom was Uyghur from Xinjiang. There’s a lot of red-haired kids there.”

“Okay,” I said, and took up my pad and pen. “So when did you last communicate with your dad?”

“That’s the thing,” Kelly said. “Usually, we would talk on the phone every week. He’d call from the restaurant. Sometimes I could tell he’d been drinking, but he always called. Two weeks ago, he didn’t. I wasn’t too worried because I knew there was a big cockfighting tournament in Watsonville. He usually stayed up all night for those.”

She’d mentioned the drinking and I’d seen that at Wong’s restaurant. “XO sauce” was a craze developed in Hong Kong and Chef Wong was determined to improve on the recipe. The “XO” symbolized rarity, like XO cognacs, but there wasn’t actually cognac in the Hong Kong recipe, just Shaoxing wine and pricey dried seafood.