A Dog in Water (6 page)

I called Bar Smokey and asked their hours of operation. The girl
who answered said they were open from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. I thanked her and hung up.

I put on my coat, left the office and headed towards the parking garage. While in hospital I’d asked the informant to have my car returned there, having left it on a street near Bar Smokey on the day of my confrontation. There was an orange loop around the left side mirror.

I turned on the engine and headed towards Shinjuku. The car was an automatic so the cast on my left hand was not a hindrance.

It was a little after 1 a.m. when I reached the alley that Bar Smokey was on. I parked not far from the entrance to stake it out. Seeing the spot where I’d been beaten brought my humiliation back full force.

Had I really intended to kill Katsuya Yamamoto that time? No, that wasn’t the case. I’d merely gotten drunk on my own words:
In that case, my only choice is to kill you
. I’d possessed neither the resolve nor the ability to kill him. No wonder he’d laughed at me.

Kill me? You? Ha ha ha!

His voice still rang in my ears. He could have killed me at any point had he so wished. Yet he hadn’t put an end to me. More than the beating, the fact that he’d spared my life shamed me.

What can I do? What do I want to do? What am I trying to prove?
Such thoughts raced through my mind.

At 2:00 a.m., ejected bar patrons emerged onto the street. A little less than an hour later, I spied the figure I’d been waiting to see. Fellow employees waved their goodbyes and walked away. I could easily tell who he was even from a distance thanks to his oversized head. I waited until he’d made some good headway and slowly followed his Afro in my car. He entered a parking garage surrounded by a chain-link fence. I parked my car and pursued him on foot. The garage was narrow, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else.

Just as he was about to unlock his car door, he noticed my footsteps and swung around. He saw me and froze to the spot.

“Remember me?” I stood right in front of him.

“You’re …” He looked terrified. Of course, anyone would be, approached late at night by a man wearing an absurdly large nose guard. This worked to my advantage.

“You know where Katsuya Yamamoto lives, don’t you?”

“No.” His face said otherwise.

“Tell me plainly so I won’t have to give you any trouble.”

“Fuck off. You wanna get banged up worse?” He was doing his best to look intimidating. He was thin, lanky, a matchstick in human form.

“I’ve learned my lesson. I didn’t come empty-handed.”

Afro turned his gaze toward my right hand, which had never come out of my coat pocket. This was making him wary. “I’m the one who called you an ambulance, you know,” he noted timidly.

“So you can call one for yourself.”

His face twitched. “I-If I hadn’t noticed, you might be dead! You owe me your life, man. Is this how you treat your savior?”

“Tell me and I won’t lay a finger on you.”

“…”

“Why won’t you tell me? You really that chummy with him?”

“The hell I am! I ain’t nothing like him!” He sounded truly offended.

I started to like this guy. “Then what reason do you have not to tell me?”

“Nothin’ … It’s just … He’s got backup.”

“What kind?”

“The Sasaken Group. A while back he beat up some yakuza thug in Kabukicho and was in real trouble. Word on the street is some higher-up from Sasaken made the problem go away.”

I knew the name. A prominent organization headquartered in Kawasaki, they were affiliated with Japan’s largest crime syndicate, Kobe’s Hishiguchi Group. Sasaken was considered the eastern hub for Hishiguchi.

“I just don’t wanna get dragged into anything.”

“I’m not here to get you in trouble.”

“If I tell you, you’d better promise you won’t tell him it was me.”

“I don’t need to tell him anything, and I’m sure he won’t even care.”

The address Afro gave me was a corner sandwiched between Shokuan Street and Okubo Street in Wakamatsu district, Shinjuku.

I removed my right hand from my coat and held out a ten thousand-yen note.

“If you dare tip him off that you gave me this info, I’ll make sure you won’t ever get yourself an ambulance.”

He took the money and nodded silently.

“Thanks for calling an ambulance for me,” I said and walked away.

I heard him get into his car in a fluster and start the engine. His car sped out of the garage.

Once back in my car I pulled out the monkey wrench from my coat pocket and tossed it onto the front passenger’s seat. I’d hardly done anything but my whole body throbbed with pain. While I’d doubted the painkillers were helping at all, now that they’d worn off I was forced to appreciate them. I felt my body heating up rapidly.

I made a call to a number my informant had given me a while back.

Thirty minutes later I exchanged cash for a paper bag from a black van stopped on Yasukuni Avenue. I got back into my car and opened the bag. Medical-grade morphine hydrochloride. I daubed some on my finger and plastered it around my nostrils. I inhaled deeply.

My mood turned happy.

I woke up feeling like I’d rested properly for the first time in ages. It was past 10 a.m. Though I hadn’t slept six hours, my mind was oddly clear. I took my prescribed medicine and a small hit of morphine.

My scalp itched but I still couldn’t work up the courage to shower. While I could wrap the cast on my hand in a plastic bag, I didn’t think I could wash my hair without getting the wounds on my face wet. Instead I decided to use a hot soaked towel to wipe myself clean. Irritatingly, I couldn’t wring out the towel properly with just one hand.

It sure did hurt when I wiped around the plaster on my chest, but eventually I was able to do my whole body. I put on clean underwear and lit a cigarette. I went into the bathroom, cigarette in mouth. My urine was a dark yellow now. I could feel my body recovering day by day. I peered into the mirror as I washed my hands. Perhaps I’d just grown accustomed to the nose guard, but it almost looked charming.

The stubble on my chin was threatening to become a beard, but I let it go. I was taming my bedhead when a thought occurred to me. I finished getting dressed and left the office.

I knew there was a small salon on the same side of the street as my office’s building, but I had never been inside. I usually patronized a barbershop in front of Nakano station.

The instant I entered the salon a young female employee shrank back with an “Agh!” A middle-aged man wearing a huge nose guard
was utterly out of place in a stylish beauty parlor.

“Could I trouble you for just a shampoo?”

She took in the state of my face and my left hand and immediately put the pieces together. “Right this way,” she said with a charming smile. Unlike barbershops, a salon would have me lying face-up for a shampoo and keep my face from getting wet.

I was a bit bashful at first by how close the young lady’s face was to mine, but I soon got used to it. It felt so good I nearly dozed off. When she asked if I itched anywhere, I simply replied no. Where I did itch was under my cast.

As I left the salon feeling refreshed thanks to her fairly thorough job, my phone rang. It was my informant.

“Where are you?”

“Near the office. Just about to grab a bite to eat.”

“Perfect. I’ll join you.” He gave the name of a restaurant nearby and hung up.

The place was a snug Mexican joint located underground behind Shinjuku Koma Theater. I ordered an enchilada and a ginger ale. The informant was already sipping a Venezuelan beer with chorizo to go with it.

“I got a call last night from the young lady.”

“Yeah, on my recommendation.”

“So she said. At any rate, are you dropping her case, telling her to go to another P.I.?”

“No, I haven’t paid back this debt yet …” I pointed at my face.

The informant looked at me with dismay. “Lemme ask you. Will you be doing this for your client? Or for yourself? Which?”

I couldn’t answer. Not that I was holding back—I honestly wasn’t sure.

“Geez. You’re not cut out for this P.I. gig.” He swigged his beer straight from the bottle. He seemed to be in lecture mode today.

“Really? I think it’s my calling …”

“Listen, a detective’s gotta be a cool spectator. Do nothing more
than what was asked of you and forget about the client as soon as the job is done. That’s the proper way to go about it since not all clients are saints. But you, you let yourself get sucked into their problems. You always make it personal.”

I had never thought of it that way before. Was that how things looked from the sidelines?

“The client might think of you as a good, dedicated detective, but if you ask me that’s not what occupations are about. You are the last man on earth who should be doing detective work.”

The waiter brought our food to the table. The dish placed in front of the informant was something I’d never seen before.

“Owner chef’s special. Not on the menu, but it’s the best thing they serve here. Try it.”

Ground meat sautéed with eggs lay coated in what looked to be hot chili oil. I scooped up a spoonful and tasted it. It was indeed very good. The next instant, however, the back of my nose flared with intense pain. The informant was laughing as he piled some of the mixture onto a tortilla and happily tucked in.

I silently returned to my own dish. My sense of taste was coming back compared to the day before. Maybe it was thanks to the morphine.

As the informant continued eating heartily he dove back into his lecture. “Same goes for your face. I bet you think you get into fights now and then out of bad luck. You tell yourself it’s just part of being a detective. But that’s not it. You summon the violence.”

I didn’t understand. Why would I want to do that? Not that I’m a pacifist, but I’m not the sort to seek out violence.

“You probably don’t even realize it, but that’s why you quit the force, huh?”

What was he talking about when he had no idea of the circumstances? I decided to ignore him and give my meal undivided attention.

“I wouldn’t tell anyone else to walk around carrying a pistol. I say it to you because you’re you. You’re too damn precarious.”

I ordered a refill on my ginger ale.

“Carry a gun and you might use it and kill your opponent. You’ll have to think twice first. That’s my thinking, that maybe you’d start skirting violence a little. But you go ignore my advice and nearly get yourself killed …”

I was really getting sick of his blathering on. Why did this man care so much about me, anyways?

“Compared to you, that young lady knows when to listen. Well, she’s gotta see to protecting herself, don’t she, given how you’ve ended up.”

The hell are you saying? What’s this about Junko Tajima?

“She asked me for a gun along with a fake ID so I introduced her to a dealer.”

My fork stilled. My appetite died instantly.

She was planning to take the matter into her own hands. Having lost faith in me, she intended to kill Katsuya Yamamoto herself for the sake of her and her unborn child’s happiness.

“Listen, to be honest I think you’re a little nuts. Not that I mind that there’s one P.I. like you out there …”

I wiped my mouth with my napkin and lit a cigarette. Then I told the informant: “All right, I’ll heed your advice.”

The gun dealer set up the meeting at a public housing complex over in Katsushika. Large eight-story buildings all at least thirty years old crowded the area. They had the air of old-style projects.

I entered one of the buildings and got into the elevator. The inside was riddled with graffiti. I got out on the seventh floor and stepped into a dim, vacant elevator hall encased in cement and nothing more. Several cheap tricycles printed with anime characters sat abandoned. I walked down the long, narrow, dingy corridor. Sooty dust-covered steel doors continued endlessly.

I rang the intercom at exactly 1:00 p.m. as appointed.

“Come in, it’s open,” came a male voice.

I opened the door and walked in. It was terribly filthy. I guessed it
had easily been ten years since anyone had cleaned the place. If there hadn’t been a pair of black suede shoes by the entrance, I wouldn’t have bothered to remove my own footwear.

Two men were sitting in what would normally serve as the living/dining area. They sat facing each other across a small table next to the kitchen. One was chubby and past middle age, while the other seemed to be about mine.

“Sit, over there,” the older man said. He was missing a front tooth. He closely resembled the owner of a porn shop I’d investigated once upon a time. This man was apparently the arms dealer. He had indicated a sofa set that seemed to have been hauled away from someone’s curbside trash.

“If you’re with a client I can come back later,” I said.

“No, this is a regular customer of mine from way back. He came to check up on the old fogey since it’s been a while.”

“Don’t worry about me. Just think of me as a staffer,” said the regular. He seemed indistinct—medium build, shortish hair, forgettable face. If his suit were a little less fine he’d pass as an assistant manager at some small company. Yet his eyes were strange. At first I thought he was blind since they didn’t seem to be beholding anything. When they met mine, however, I had the opposite impression. It was as if he saw right through me to the wall behind my back.

What kind of a man would be a regular customer of an arms dealer? Only one answer presented itself.

The spongy inside of the sofa bulged out of the fabric at random. I sat down.

“Want some coffee?” asked the old man. I shook my head and lit a cigarette. “Mr. Informant tells me you’re a trustworthy guy.”

I didn’t know how to respond. “Yes” would sound odd but there was no point in acting coy. “I won’t cause you any trouble,” I said.

The old man grinned, exposing the gap in his front teeth. “Ah, I like his attitude. Manly,” he remarked, turning for agreement to the regular, who smiled too and nodded. I felt roundly mocked. “So, what type do you want?” Standing up, the old man placed a dozen sheets of
A4 paper stapled together on the table in front of me. It was a list of guns, complete with photographs.