In the third folder from the back of the drawer I found Ishida's personal credit card records. The charges were substantial.

Nobu Ishida had two Visa cards and two MasterCards and American Express Platinum and Optima and Diners Club. Most of the charges were at restaurants or hotels or various boutiques and department stores. The Ishidas had gone out a lot, and spent a lot more than people living in this house in this neighborhood might spend. I was looking for patterns, but there didn't seem to be any. All the hotels were one-shots and so were most of the restaurants. Go someplace for a bite, maybe not go back for another couple of months, if you went back at all. There were a few repeats, but those mostly to places I recognized. Ma Maison is not a yakuza hangout.

I had gone through the old stuff and was working on the recent when I noticed that two or three times a week, every week for the past three months, Ishida had gone to a place called Mr. Moto's. There were mostly small charges, as if he had gone by himself to have a couple of drinks, but once every two weeks, usually on a Thursday, there was a single large charge of between four and five hundred dollars. Hmmmm.

I put the credit card receipts back in their file and the file back in its folder and left the cabinet as I had found it and went back to the low table. I used the phone and called information.

A woman's voice said, "What city?"

"Los Angeles. I need a number and address for a restaurant or bar named Mr. Moto's."

If all you want is a number, they put on the computer. If you want the address, a person has to tell you. The person gave me the number and the address and told me to have a good day. Something the computer never does. I hung up and wiped the beautiful lacquered box free of unsightly fingerprints, then went out to Joe Pike.

He nodded when he saw me. "Didn't take long."

"The best clues never do."

We let ourselves out, walked back along the side of the house, got into the Corvette, and drove to Mr. Moto's.

Chapter 16

Mr. Moto's was a storefront dance club just off Sixth downtown. Hi-tech deco. Whitewashed front with porthole windows outlined in aqua and peach, and Mr. Moto's spelled out in neon triangles. Japanese and Chinese cuisine. Very nouveau. There would be buffalo mozzarella spring rolls and black pasta miso and waiters with new wave football player haircuts and more neon triangles on the inside. A sign on the door said CLOSED. Another sign said LUNCH – DINNER – COCKTAILS – OPEN 11:30 A.M. It was twenty minutes after ten.

We drove another three blocks and stopped at a Bob's Big Boy to clean up in their restroom. There was an older guy with a copy of the Jewish Daily News standing at one of the lavatories combing his hair when we walked in. Pike went to the lavatory next to him, pulled off his sweatshirt, then unhooked his hip holster and put his gun on top of the soap dispenser. The old man looked at the gun, then at Pike, then left. He forgot his newspaper.

When we were as clean as about a million paper towels and soap that smelled like Pledge could make us, we walked the three blocks down to Mr. Moto's. It was ten minutes before noon when we went in the front door and the slim Japanese maitre d' said, "Two for lunch?" The hair on the right side of his head was shaved down to a quarter-inch buzz cut, the hair on the left was long and frizzed. New wave, all right.

I said, "We'll sit at the bar for a while."

It was a nice-looking place, even with the neon. The front was all aqua plastic tables and peach wrought iron chairs and a tile floor the color of steel. There was a sushi bar on the right, with maybe twenty stools and four sushi chefs wearing white and red headbands and yelling anytime somebody walked into the place. About halfway back, the room cut in half. Tables continued along the wall on the right all the way to the kitchen in the back. On the left, you could step up underlit tile steps to a full bar and a little drinking area they had there with more tables and plants and neon triangles. A modern steel rail ran around the edge of the drinking platform to keep drunks from falling into someone's California roll. There were three women together at one of the little tables up in the bar area, and four couples in the dining room. Business people on their lunch hour. Pike and I went back through the dining area and up the little steps to the bar, one of the three women staring at Pike's tattoos.

The bartender was a Japanese woman in her late twenties. Hard face and too much green eye shadow and a rich ocher tan. She was wearing black, sprayed-on pants and a blue and black hapi coat with red trim that had been tied off just below the breasts so her midriff was bare. A tattoo of a butterfly floated two inches to the right of her navel. She said, "What'll it be, guys?"

I said, "Not too busy."

"It picks up about twelve-thirty."

We ordered a couple of Sapporo in the short bottles, and Pike asked for the men's room. The bartender told him, and Pike went back through the kitchen. I said, "First time here. A friend of mine raves about the place, though. You might know him. A regular."

She reached under the bar and music started to play. A Joan Jett rip-off. "Who's that?"

"Nobu Ishida."

The bartender shrugged. "So many faces," she said.

A man and a woman took two stools at the end of the bar. The bartender went down to them. I leaned over the bar to watch her. Nice legs.

The three women at the table took their drinks and went down to the dining area. I brought my beer and Pike's and took their table. Pike came out of the back a couple of minutes later. He said, "Restroom in the back with a pay phone. L-shaped kitchen running the width of the building and a cold room. Door out the back. Office off the kitchen. Five men and four women working the place."

We sipped our beer. Mr. Moto's filled with lots of men in Giorgio Armani suits and women in black biking tights and female lawyers. You could tell the lawyers because they drank too much and looked nervous. There was a smattering of Asians in the place, but most everybody else was white or black. "You'll notice," Pike said, "that the only people in here who look like thugs are me and you."

"You, maybe. I look like Don Johnson. You look like Fred Flintstone."

Sixteen hours with nothing to eat and the Sapporo was working wonders. Pike flagged a waitress and we ordered sashimi, sushi, white rice, miso soup, and more Sapporo. Sapporo is great when your back is stiff from an all-night stakeout.

Several young women who looked like models came in. They were tall and thin and wore their hair in flashes and swirls and bobs that looked okay in a magazine but looked silly in real life. They spent a lot of time touching themselves.

Pike said, "Maybe we should interrogate them."

The food came. We'd ordered toro and yellowtail and octopus and freshwater eel and sea urchin. The urchin and eel and octopus were prepared as sushi, each slice draped over a molded bullet of rice and held there by a band of seaweed. Sashimi is sliced fish without the rice. The waitress brought two little trays of a dark brown dipping sauce with a sprinkling of chopped green onion in it for the sashimi. In an empty tray I mixed soy sauce and hot green mustard for the sushi. I dipped a piece of the octopus sushi in the sauce, let the rice absorb the sauce, then took a bite. Delicious. Pike was looking in his miso soup. "There's something in here."

"Black pasta," I said. "Nouveau cuisine."

Pike pushed the soup aside.

By one o'clock the place was packed. It was SRO up by the maitre d' and the crowd noise was threatening to drown out the music. Just after one a second bartender came on duty. He was younger than the Butterfly Lady, with short spiky hair and very smooth skin and a little-boy face. Someone's grad student nephew, given a part-time job to make a few extra bucks during the summer. The Butterfly Lady said something and the new kid looked our way. Worried. I smiled at Pike. "Well, well. I think we're making progress."