The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(68)
“Oh no. We haven’t gotten to the good stuff yet.”
“How about any of the stuff on these shelves?” Kovac asked, more interested himself in the family photos: a wedding picture of the professor and his bride; photographs of Lucien Chamberlain receiving various awards, of him traveling in far-flung corners of the world. Photos of the professor outnumbered the rest of the family three to one.
“I don’t know that much about the art objects,” Sato said. “That’s not my area of expertise.”
“I guess Stuart Kaufman would have been the one to help us with that,” Kovac remarked.
From the corner of his eye he could see Sato bristle.
“Do you think I killed him, too?”
“I don’t know that anybody killed him. But it would make me a little nervous if the candidates for the job I wanted were dropping like flies.”
“Stuart got sick and died. People do. I don’t see that one death has anything to do with the other. It’s an unfortunate coincidence.”
Kovac bobbed his eyebrows and made a noncommittal humming sound as he looked at a photograph of the Chamberlain children dressed up in their white karate outfits, standing ramrod straight, bare feet wide apart, arms crossed, their expressions grave. They must have been around eight and ten, he thought. Even then Diana towered over her brother.
“Did you know Diana when she was in and out of rehab?” he asked.
“She put that behind her several years ago.”
“Has she ever talked about any of the rehabs she went to?”
“No. You don’t think she could be connected to this handyman suspect, do you? He came out of a drug rehab, right?”
Kovac didn’t answer.
“She doesn’t hang with any of those people.”
“That’s not to say someone couldn’t remember her, and think her family is loaded,” Kovac said. “You see?”
He led the way down the hall to Lucien Chamberlain’s study. “Watch your step. The crime scene unit has already processed the scene, but I still don’t like to mess up bloodstains and footprints if I can help it.”
Sato tiptoed around the dried bloody shoe prints like a cat.
“Charlie tells us Diana is bipolar,” Kovac said. “Do you know if she’s on medication?”
“You’d have to ask her,” the professor said, his voice chilly. He was about done with the subject of Diana. He looked pointedly at his watch. “Can we get on with this? I have an appointment in an hour.”
“Sure,” Kovac said. “We’ll get the insurance report on the values, but I want you to look at what was taken and tell me if you think the thief knew the significance of what he was stealing.”
“Okay. Let’s start here,” Sato said, gesturing to an empty display case. The glass had been shattered. A brass plaque described the missing item as SAMURAI MEMPO—JAPAN—CIR. 1800. “Mempo was the mask worn by the samurai in battle,” he said. “This one covered the entire face and was made from leather with a detachable iron nosepiece. It’s lacquered white on the outside with red accenting the lines of the face, and lacquered bright red on the inside. The hallmark of these masks is a terrible grimacing facial expression, meant to intimidate the enemy. The missing one also had a horsehair mustache. They added those so that decapitated heads on the field of battle wouldn’t be mistaken for women’s heads and discarded.”
“There were women on the battlefield?”
“More than you would think. There were actually female warriors—onna-bugeisha. They participated in battles a lot more than the history books say. The remains of a hundred and five bodies at the Battle of Senbon Matsubaru in 1580 were recently DNA tested. It turned out thirty-five of them were women.”
He shook his head at a memory. “Lucien and I actually argued about it. Misogynist that he was, he tried to find every alternate explanation he could to diminish the significance of the onna-bugeisha. And yet, he has their weapon of choice in his collection—the naginata. Fucking hypocrite,” he muttered.
Kovac looked up at the wall to a thing that appeared to be a spear on one end and a curved sword on the other, and imagined a pack of angry women armed with them.
“He also chose to adamantly ignore the samurai practice of wakashudo,” he said with disgust. “Ridiculous homophobic dinosaur.”
Kovac raised an eyebrow. “There were gay samurai?”
“They didn’t label people that way. Like the Spartans, they accepted and actively encouraged relationships among the warriors. Wakashudo literally means ‘the way of the young men.’ It was a normal part of a mentor-student relationship among warriors. It wasn’t until Westerners and Christian missionaries came to Japan that homophobic attitudes were imposed on the society.
“Opening to the West was the demise of samurai culture in every way,” he continued. “And the Victorian attitudes of Westerners kept details like the onna-bugeisha and wakashudo—truths they didn’t approve of—out of the history books.
“That’s where Lucien’s soul lived—in Victorian times,” he went on. “He was rigid, judgmental, sexually repressed. The irony, of course, is that the Victorians were secretly some of the most sexually deviant, f*cked-up people ever.”
“Do you think Chamberlain was that, too?” Kovac asked. “Deviant? Some of what I see in Diana’s behavior makes me wonder if there’s a history of abuse.”