Villain a Novel (2010) (15 page)

Along with the summary of the murder details scrolling along the screen, the TV showed scenes of the freezing pass to dramatize the cruelty of the deed. In contrast, when they discussed the missing boyfriend, relating how he was the
most popular student on campus
, how he drove an expensive foreign car and lived alone in a condo in a
high-end section of Fukuoka
, the screen was filled with lively scenes from the upscale Tenjin and Nakasu neighborhoods. To viewers it was obvious from the newscasters’ tones that it was 99 percent certain that this boyfriend was the criminal.

Kanji Hayashi, an instructor at a local
juku
, a prep school, was one of these viewers. As he stared fixedly at the TV screen in his apartment, he didn’t seem to notice that the piece of toast with marmalade in his hand was growing cold. It was three p.m., about time he had to get going or else he’d be late to class, but he remained glued to his chair.

Hayashi had first learned of the murder two days before, after he got up in the afternoon and had switched on the TV, just as now. At first he’d just thought,
Hmm … over at Mitsuse Pass, huh?
but when the photo of the victim came on the screen he’d nearly choked on his orange juice.

To him she wasn’t Yoshino Ishibashi, but Mia, a girl he’d met three months ago online.

Hayashi hurriedly checked his call records, and though it was
unlikely he’d saved any since it was a while ago, he did find one e-mail from her:

Thank you very much for everything the other day. It was lots of fun. But as I was telling you, I’m being transferred next month to Tokyo and it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to see you anymore. I’m really sorry about the bad timing. Thank you so much. Bye bye. Mia
.

So the only message from her left on his phone was this last one, basically telling him not to get in touch anymore. All the enormous numbers of messages they’d exchanged before that had vanished, but not the memory of the day he’d met Yoshino Ishibashi/Mia. That was still crystal clear in his mind.

They’d arranged to meet in the lobby of a hotel next to the Fukuoka Dome. A long bench encircled the spacious lobby, and it was nearly filled with families staying at the hotel.

Mia showed up ten minutes late. She didn’t quite live up to the photo she’d e-mailed him, but to a forty-two-year-old bachelor like Hayashi, this young girl was still as cute as a ladybug. There was nothing hesitant about her. She pulled out a taxi receipt for the ride over to the hotel and asked him to reimburse her. He’d told her to take a taxi when she’d said that the hotel was far away for her, but still, when she pulled out the receipt and demanded payment before she’d even said hello, it struck Hayashi that their meeting was definitely a business transaction.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Mia told him. Hayashi decided to skip going to a coffee shop first, as he’d been planning to do, and they drove directly to a love hotel.

This wasn’t the first time Hayashi had done this. He handed over the thirty thousand yen he’d promised and they wasted no time going up to their cramped little guest room.

It was obvious that this wasn’t the first time for Mia, either. As soon as she got the cash, she stripped off her clothes and, just in her underwear, asked, “Okay with you if I order some drinks?” and called the front desk. Her ribs showed just below her full breasts, but her belly had a slight roll of fat.

Hayashi had never been with a prostitute, but watching her seated on the bed phoning the front desk, to him that’s what she looked like. She seemed to enjoy their time in bed. Her skin and vagina got so wet he couldn’t see it as just an act done for money.

An amateur pretending to be a prostitute, or an amateur prostitute—Hayashi couldn’t decide which was more erotic. Maybe it didn’t matter, they were women all the same, but Hayashi couldn’t help thinking that there was something very different about the two.

The talk-show report on the murder at Mitsuse Pass finished, and Hayashi finally put down his piece of toast, a neat half-moon of tooth marks from the single bite he’d taken carved out of it.

Over the past couple of days he’d mulled over this notion that a girl he’d met just once had been killed by someone, and though he could understand it on a conceptual level, emotionally he couldn’t absorb the reality.

If he were to compare it to anything, it was maybe like the mixed feelings he’d had when he saw a girl from his junior high school days appear on local TV as a newscaster, the mixture of ridicule and envy he’d felt when he couldn’t believe she was actually on TV reporting the news. Mia was no newscaster, however. The only reason she was on TV was because somebody had strangled her and dumped her body out in the cold.

The criminal must be somebody just like me
, Hayashi thought.
She met another guy like me online, the only difference being that this other guy turned out to be a murderer
.

Hayashi didn’t know if he was trying to justify, or ridicule, himself.
Of course I didn’t kill her
, he thought,
but the murdered girl is someone I knew, and was killed by someone very much like me
. The murderer must have viewed her as an amateur playing at being a prostitute. If he’d seen her as an amateur prostitute he might never have felt like killing her.

He was going to be late for class, so he switched off the TV and adjusted his tie before heading out. That’s when a knock came at the
front door. Thinking it must be a poorly timed delivery, Hayashi gruffly yanked open the door. Two men in suits stood there, like a wall blocking his way.

“Kanji Hayashi?”

At first he couldn’t figure out which one had spoken. Both men were around thirty, with identical crew cuts.

“Uh … yeah. Yes.”

He knew immediately that it was about the murder. He’d known this day would come. Once they examined her cell phone, his number would surely come out.

“We have a few things we’d like to ask you.…”

The two detectives spoke almost simultaneously. “I understand,” Hayashi said, nodding quietly, and hurriedly added, “No, that isn’t what I mean. You’re here about the murder at Mitsuse Pass, right?”

The two glanced at each other, then shot him a sharp look.

“I know her, but I don’t have anything to do with what happened.”

Hayashi let them come in and shut the door. The cramped entrance was littered with shoes and the three hulking men stood there awkwardly, trying not to step on them.

“I knew you’d be coming. You found out about me on her cell phone, right? About her and me having a, what should I say? A friendship.”

Hayashi spoke without any hesitation. Ever since he heard about the murder he’d been thinking about what he should say. The two crew-cut detectives listened silently, exchanging an occasional glance. Their faces were expressionless and it was hard to tell whether they believed him.

“I met her online about three months ago,” Hayashi went on. “We went out on one date, but that was it.”

“A date?” the detective with the polka-dot tie asked, smiling wryly.

“There’s nothing illegal about it. She was an adult and it was consensual.… And the money was … something I earned on the stock market and I just gave it to her so she could have some spending money, that’s all.…”

Spittle flew out as Hayashi spoke. One of the detectives stepped way back, crushing a discarded sneaker. “Take it easy,” he said, trying to calm him down while looking around for a better spot to stand.

As he looked up at the two tall detectives, Hayashi began to suspect that he wasn’t the first man they’d questioned who knew her.

“Let’s not get into the question of this spending money right now. But I do want to make one thing clear: we don’t know the contents of e-mails and conversations from cell-phone numbers we’ve retrieved.”

The polka-dot-tie detective finally pulled out his notebook, flicking it open in front of Hayashi. “Where were you this past Sunday? At about ten p.m.?” The detective, for some reason, rubbed his eyebrows as he asked this.

Here we go
, Hayashi thought, and let out a deep breath.

“I was at work then. I teach at a
juku
, and finished my last class at ten-thirty. For an hour after that I worked with some colleagues writing a supplementary curriculum for the winter break. Then I went out to a bar and left there at three-thirty. On the way home I stopped by a video-rental place. I still have the video here.”

They finished in under ten minutes. The detectives smiled and left, and without realizing it, Hayashi sank to the floor where he stood.

He’d been bold enough when he told them about his alibi for Sunday, but when the detective told him because of the nature of the crime they’d have to investigate his workplace, Hayashi pleaded with them not to. “Look, I’ve worked there twenty years,” he said. “It will put me in a real spot if you do that. Can’t you look into it in secret? Like, ask the owner of the bar, or use some other excuse to question my colleagues?” He nearly broke down in tears.

The detectives gave a noncommittal reply and left. It didn’t look as though they really suspected him, but neither did they seem to care about how this might affect his future.

Everything he’d told the detectives was the truth. But he’d never realized how hard it was to tell the truth.
Telling a lie would have been so much easier on me
, Hayashi thought. But he was late for
work. He’d just focus on doing his job, and if any of this happened to leak out, he’d apologize and promise never to do it again. And there was one other thing he could most definitely swear to. That he never,
ever
, had any sexual interest in the elementary school girls who studied at his
juku
.

He found he could talk again, though he was still frozen, slumped to the floor.

The detectives hadn’t given him an exact number, but had indicated that they’d questioned other men who’d had a relationship with the girl. These men had signed on to an online site for fun and had got to know her, and now they were at their wits’ end. It was the same with him—he couldn’t believe any of them had hooked up with her in order to kill her. But the fact remained: she’d been murdered.

A hooker having an evil customer and getting killed sounded like a stereotypical story line. But the girl in this case wasn’t a hooker. This was a young girl who hid her secret life, who worked hard every day as a salesperson for an insurance company. A girl who wasn’t a prostitute, but liked to pretend she was.

When they were in the love hotel Hayashi had complimented her. “Your body is so supple,” he’d said. Dressed only in her underwear, Yoshino had bent forward proudly to show him.

“I was in the rhythmic gymnastics club. I used to be much more flexible than this.”

Her spine showed through her white skin as she turned and smiled at him. He could never have imagined that just three months later that smiling face would be lying beside a road, dead.

On the morning of the same day, outside Nagasaki City and about a hundred kilometers from Fukuoka, Yuichi’s grandmother Fusae had bought some produce from the truck that came to peddle vegetables once a week, and was stuffing it into her refrigerator, all the while rubbing her throbbing knee. She’d bought some eggplants, thinking
she’d pickle them, but then regretted it, remembering that Yuichi wasn’t fond of the dish.

She thought a thousand yen would be enough, but the total had come to ¥1,630. The peddler had knocked off thirty yen, but Fusae had been left with so little in her purse that she knew she couldn’t wait until next week, as she’d been planning, to withdraw some cash from her postal account.

She planned to take the bus that day to visit her husband in the hospital. If she went to see him, he was sure to say something mean to her, but if she didn’t go he’d complain about that, so she knew she had to. The insurance covered all the costs of the hospital, but she had to pay for the daily bus fare herself. From the nearby bus stop to the stop in front of Nagasaki station cost ¥310. Then she’d transfer to another bus that would let her out in front of the hospital and that would cost another ¥180. A round trip every day set her back ¥980.

For Fusae, who was trying to keep their expenses for vegetables every week to ¥1,000, spending ¥980 every day on bus fare made her feel terribly guilty, as guilty as if she had been staying in a hot-springs inn, being waited on hand and foot.

After she’d put the vegetables away in the fridge, she took a pickled plum out of a plastic container and popped it in her mouth.

“Fusae-san, are in you in?” a man’s voice at the front door said, a voice she recognized.

Chewing on the pickled plum, she went out to the entrance, where she found the local patrolman and another man she didn’t know.

“Oh, having a late breakfast, are we?” the plump policeman asked with a friendly smile.

As Fusae removed the plum pit from her mouth, the policeman went on, “I just heard that Katsuji is back in the hospital?”

Fusae hid the pit in her hand and glanced at the man in the suit. His suntanned skin looked leathery and she noticed that the hands dangling at his sides had very short fingers.