The Devotion Of Suspect X (23 page)

“Quite sure, yes.”

The day Shinji Togashi was murdered.

“Do you remember what time you called her?”

“Well, it was after I’d gone home for the day, so I’d say around one in the morning. She’d called me before midnight, but I was still busy here at the club and in pickup.”

“How long did you talk?”

“Oh, I’d say about half an hour. We usually talk that long.”

“And you called her? Her cell phone?”

“No, actually. I called her at home.”

“Erm, sorry to be so particular about this, but it was one o’clock in the morning, so you mean you called her on the eleventh, not the tenth, correct?”

“That’s right, it would have been the eleventh, wouldn’t it?”

“You mind me asking what sort of message she left on your phone?”

“She only said she wanted to talk to me, so I should call her when I was done at the club.”

“What did she want to talk about?”

“Nothing much, really. She wanted to know the name of this shiatsu massage place I went to for therapy. Lower back pain, you know.”

“Shiatsu? Okay. Had she called you about things like that in the past?”

“Oh, she calls about all sorts of things, none of them terribly important. I think she just wants to talk, you know. That’s why I call her.”

“And always so late at night?”

“I wouldn’t say always, but it’s not unusual. Late nights come with the territory. I suppose mostly we talk on days I have off, but she had called me, so…”

Kusanagi nodded and thanked Sugimura for her time. He tapped Kishitani on the shoulder and the two of them got up to leave. But as he made his way out of the club Kusanagi found he still wasn’t satisfied.

He mulled it over on the way back to Kinshicho Station. The phone call Sugimura had mentioned at the end of their conversation bothered him. Yasuko Hanaoka had been talking on the phone in the middle of the night on the tenth of March. Her home phone. Which meant she had already come back by that point.

A theory had been going around the department that the actual time of the murder was sometime after eleven o’clock on the night of the tenth. This was little more than a theory based on the assumption that Yasuko Hanaoka was the murderer. If Togashi had been killed that late, then Hanaoka could have done it even if her alibi at karaoke held up. Still, nobody gave the theory much credit—even the ones who had suggested it in the first place. If it was true, Hanaoka would’ve had to leave the karaoke bar and go immediately to the scene of the crime in order to get there by midnight. And if she had done the deed then, there would have been no way for her to get back to her house by public transport. Few criminals wanted to leave an obvious trail by taking a taxi. In any case, taxis hardly ever passed by the riverbank where Togashi’s remains had been found.

Then there was a matter of the stolen bicycle. The bicycle had been taken after ten o’clock in the morning. If the bicycle was a plant, that meant that Yasuko had to have gone to Shinozaki Station by that time. If it wasn’t a plant, and Togashi had stolen it himself, then that raised the question: what had Togashi been doing between the time that he stole the bicycle and the time that he met Yasuko near midnight?

Having worked through this line of reasoning early on, Kusanagi hadn’t seen the need to establish an alibi for Yasuko after karaoke on the night of the murder. And even if he had wanted one, he now knew she could provide it: she’d been on the phone with Sonoko Sugimura.

And that was what was bothering him.

“Remember the first time we talked to Yasuko Hanaoka?” Kusanagi asked Kishitani abruptly as they walked.

“Sure. What about it?”

“Do you remember how I asked her about her alibi? Did I ask her where she had been on the tenth?”

“I don’t remember exactly how you asked, if that’s what you mean, but it was something like that, yeah.”

“And what did she say? She went to work that morning, and out that night with her daughter. They went to the movie, then to eat ramen, then to karaoke. Which got them home after eleven, right?”

“Sounds about right.”

“And according to the
mama
we just talked to, Yasuko was on the phone with her after that. She left a message asking for her to call, even though it wasn’t about anything serious. So the
mama
calls her a little after one o’clock, and they talk for thirty minutes.”

“So? What of it?”

“Well, when I asked her for an alibi, why do you think Yasuko didn’t mention the phone call?”

“Well, I suppose she didn’t think it was necessary.”

“Why not?” Kusanagi stopped and turned to the junior detective. “If she used her home phone to call someone, that’d be proof she was at home.”

Kishitani stopped, too. He pursed his lips. “That may be so; but from Yasuko Hanaoka’s perspective, telling you about her night on the town must have seemed like enough. I bet if you’d asked her about what she did when she got home, she’d have told you about the phone call.”

“You think that’s the only reason she didn’t say anything?”

“Can you think of another? I mean, if she was hiding the fact that she didn’t have an alibi, that would be one thing, but she had an alibi—she just didn’t tell us about it. Seems a little strange to get worked up over that.”

Kusanagi turned from his partner and resumed walking, scowling faintly. The junior detective had taken Hanaoka’s side even before they knocked at her door that first night. It was no use expecting anything like an objective opinion from the man now.

Kusanagi’s noontime discussion with Yukawa resurfaced in his mind. The physicist had said that, had Ishigami been involved, it was unlikely the murder had been premeditated. It was too sloppy for that. He had seemed quite adamant about that point.

“If he had planned it, he never would’ve used the movie theater for an alibi,”
Yukawa had noted.
“He would’ve known that the movie story was unconvincing—true enough, as evidenced by your suspicion. Ishigami would have understood that. And it raises another, larger question. What possible reason would Ishigami have to assist Yasuko Hanaoka in murdering Togashi? Even if Togashi had been giving her a hard time and she had gone to her neighbor for help, Ishigami would’ve thought of a different solution for the problem. Murder would have been his last choice.”

“Why, because he’s not vicious enough?”

Yukawa had shaken his head, his eyes cool.
“It’s not a question of temperament. Murder isn’t the most logical way to escape a difficult situation. It only leads to a different difficult situation. Ishigami would never engage in something so clearly counterproductive. Of course,”
he had added,
“the converse is also true. That is, he’s quite capable of committing an atrocity, provided that it’s the most logical course of action.”

“So how do you think Ishigami could’ve been involved?”

“If he was involved, then I think he was not in a position to assist with the actual murder. In other words, by the time he became aware of the situation, Togashi was already dead. So what were his options? If it had been possible to conceal what had happened, he would have tried that. If it was impossible, he would have done what he could to hinder the eventual investigation. He would have given explicit instructions to Yasuko Hanaoka and her daughter, telling them how to answer detectives’ questions and what evidence to reveal at what time. A script for them to follow, in other words.”

Which meant, according to Yukawa’s theory, everything Yasuko Hanaoka and Misato had told them so far wasn’t their own, unsullied testimony, but one prepared by Ishigami, who had been behind them, pulling the strings the whole time.

“Of course,”
the physicist had added quietly,
“this is all merely my conjecture—a theory constructed on the premise that Ishigami was somehow involved. That premise itself might be wrong. In fact, I hope it’s wrong. I hope deep in my heart that he had nothing to do with it.”

Yukawa’s expression when he told Kusanagi this had been unusually pained—and, the detective thought, a little lonely. Perhaps the physicist feared losing an old friend so soon after becoming reacquainted with him.

But Yukawa had never told Kusanagi the reason why he had come to suspect Ishigami in the first place. It seemed that he had somehow come to the conclusion that Ishigami had a crush on Yasuko—but he hadn’t mentioned any evidence he had to support that theory.

Still, Kusanagi trusted Yukawa’s skills of observation and deduction, almost to the point that, if Yukawa thought something was so, the detective assumed it was correct unless proven otherwise. Which made what Kusanagi had heard at Club Marian all the more interesting.

Why hadn’t Yasuko come to them with an alibi for the night of March 10? If she had committed murder and prepared an alibi, she would have wanted to tell them about it as soon as possible. But that might not be so if Ishigami had instructed her
not
to tell them. Maybe he had given them instructions to never say more than was absolutely necessary at any given time.

Kusanagi remembered another remark Yukawa had made, back before he had shown any real interest in the case. When Kusanagi told the physicist that Yasuko Hanaoka had retrieved her ticket stubs from the movie pamphlet, what had he said?

“If we assume that the tickets really were bought to establish an alibi, that she put them in the pamphlet expecting you to come and ask her for them, I’d say that makes her an adversary to be feared.”

It was just past six o’clock, and Yasuko was about to remove her apron, when a customer entered Benten-tei. She smiled and gave a reflexive “Hello!” in greeting, but when she saw the man’s face, she hesitated. It was a face she knew, but not well—that of Ishigami’s old friend.

“Remember me?” he asked cheerily. “I came here before, with Mr. Ishigami.”

“Oh, oh yes. I remember you,” Yasuko said, regaining her poise and her smile.

“I happened to be in the area, and remembered your lunch boxes. The one I had the other day was really quite good.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“I’m thinking today I’ll … let’s have the special. I know that’s what Ishigami always gets, but you were out of them last time. How about today?”

“No problem,” Yasuko said, giving the order to the kitchen and undoing her apron strings.

“Oh? Were you on your way home?”

“Yes. I work until six.”

“Oh, I see. So, you’ll be going back to your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Mind if I join you for a bit, then? There was something I wanted to talk with you about.”

“Talk about? With me?”

“Yes, well … I wanted your advice, I should say. It’s about Ishigami.” The man smiled.

Yasuko grew uneasy. “Oh, I’m sorry but I hardly know Mr. Ishigami, actually.”

“I won’t take much of your time at all. We can talk while we walk,” he offered, his tone soft but his words insistent.

“All right, then, for a little, I suppose,” Yasuko replied, seeing no easy way out of the situation.

The man introduced himself as Yukawa. He was an assistant professor at the university where Ishigami had studied.

After a few moments Yukawa’s lunch box was ready, and the two left the shop together. Yasuko had ridden to work on her bicycle, as usual. Now as they set out down the street she pushed the bike along beside her, until Yukawa said, “Let me take that,” and began to push it for her.

“So you’ve never talked much to Ishigami?”

“Not much. Just a word or two when he comes to the shop.”

“I see,” he said, and then fell silent.

“You said you wanted some advice?” Yasuko asked. She felt the tension growing inside her.

But Yukawa did not reply. Yasuko’s unease became a physical pain that spread across her chest and was starting to make her shoulders ache when finally he said, “He’s a simple man.”

“What?”

“He’s simple. Ishigami, I mean. I don’t mean stupid—I mean he’s straightforward, direct. The solutions he looks for in his work are always the simplest. He doesn’t start a problem by looking for many answers at once. And he always chooses a simple approach to get where he’s going. That’s why he is so good at what he does. There’s no indecision, and he doesn’t give up over trifling obstacles. It’s great for mathematics, but not so great for day-to-day life. You can’t always shoot for one result, for all or nothing. And yet he’s constantly doing just that, and winding up with nothing to show for all his efforts.”

“Mr. Yukawa, I…”

“I’m sorry, I know I’m not making myself very clear.” Yukawa smiled wryly. “Did you meet Ishigami for the first time when you moved into your current apartment?”

“Yes, when I went around to meet my neighbors.”

“And you told him you were working at the lunch shop then?”

“I did; but why do you ask?”

“I guess that’s when he started frequenting Benten-tei?”

“I suppose it was, yes.”

“I know you didn’t talk with him much, but did anything he said make a lasting impression on you? Any little thing?”

Yasuko was confused. This was the last sort of question she had expected to hear.

“May I ask why you want to know? Maybe if I knew, I could give you better advice.”

“Well,” Yukawa shot her a sidelong glance as they walked, “it’s because he’s my friend. He’s a very important friend of mine, and I want to know how he’s been lately.”

“I’m afraid we speak so little, there’s really nothing much to say.”

“Yet for him, that connection to you was far more important than you make it out to be. I think you understand why.”

Yasuko caught the serious look in Yukawa’s eyes, and it made her skin prickle. It suddenly occurred to her that this man knew about Ishigami’s interest in her and wanted to know why it had started.

Yasuko realized for the first time that she had never given a moment’s thought to that herself. She knew from years of experience that she wasn’t the kind of beauty with whom men fell head over heels in love at first sight. It had to have been something else.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t think of anything. Really, I could count the number of times we’ve spoken on one hand.”