“I understand. But please allow me to handle the matters of the letter under a false name and the tape. I’d like to be able to prove at least one incidence of Okada’s involvement. Once the police have identified the suspect and how they acquired Okamura’s letter, we’ll withdraw our claim.”
“I understand. That’s all I wanted to say. I’m sorry to bother you so late.”
“It’s no problem. Thank you for coming down here.”
It happened just then, as Kurata reached over and pushed the elevator call button for Shiroyama. In the brief moment when Kurata extended his arm, a pungent smell wafted from his body. Shiroyama’s nose wriggled unconsciously, but by the time he had realized it was the smell of whisky, the elevator doors had already opened.
Shiroyama stepped into the elevator and stared back at Kurata, who stood outside the door and bowed once. He searched for the right words, but the door proceeded to close, and Kurata disappeared from sight.
4
Shuhei Handa
Shuhei Handa got off the train at Shimbamba Station and thought to himself, I must’ve stepped on something. Skipping the hassle of removing his shoe to check what it might be, he kept walking to Shinagawa Police Department and had run up only a few stairs when a grinding pain finally shot through his right big toe. Handa moved aside to the wall, took off his right shoe, and flipped it over.
A shard of glass had pierced the worn-down rubber sole of his shoe. Handa stared at it for two seconds—his first thought was that it would cost him ten thousand yen to buy a new pair of shoes. Then he saw the bloodstain at the toe of his sock and smirked. Plus another five hundred. He gave himself a little self-diagnosis: desperation has made me quite generous lately. He seriously considered taking this opportunity to buy himself a pair from Gucci or Bally as, still standing on one foot, he tried to dislodge the deeply embedded glass with his fingertip.
While he stood there, he heard light footsteps coming up the stairs and a voice say, “Excuse me,” in passing. Handa lifted only his gaze and saw stark white sneakers on a man’s feet running up the stairs.
It was the young assistant police inspector assigned to Investigation Headquarters from Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. His name was Goda or something like that. In contrast with his unobtrusive suit and trench coat, the man’s obviously lightweight and comfortable-looking white sneakers were so bright they made Handa blink. He was at a momentary loss—loafers from Gucci or Bally suddenly paled in comparison. Did wearing sneakers with a suit mean that the guy was simply tasteless, or that he had tremendous self-confidence? I don’t like it either way, Handa thought as a shiver ran down his spine.
Tossing aside the glass shard he had finally managed to remove and putting back on his shoe, Handa stood on both feet again. The action caused him to look up, and he realized that the sneaker guy who had just run up the stairs was standing on the second-floor landing, looking down at him. As if momentarily lost in a void, the man’s colorless eyes focused above Handa’s head for a second or so, rebuffing Handa’s scrutiny. Then, just as abruptly as he had stopped to linger, the man disappeared.
The incident was fleeting, and Handa ascended the rest of the stairs, unable to make sense of it. In such slivers of time when the rhythm of his day was disrupted, Handa always liked to indulge in a certain daydream. Were he not to, the sliver would rupture into a deep fissure, which could transform into a torrent of anger that might destroy him. To keep this from happening, he had subconsciously equipped himself with this self-defense mechanism, a reverie that always involved him catching the Investigation top brass off guard by beating them to the punch.
In the dream, he raises his hand slowly at an investigation meeting. Confronting the wannabe-bureaucrat showoffs from MPD with definitive evidence, he says, “The prime suspect is So-and-So.” Just as the room is thrown into tumult, the top brass start whispering among themselves in a state of confusion. He’d probably piss himself from such pleasure, such giddy satisfaction that particular moment would give him.
He shuddered at the mere thought, it was so dark and obscure, but Handa convinced himself of this final twist in his horrible diversion by telling himself that every last one of the forty thousand cops at the MPD lived in a constant state of gloom, always on the verge of dying in a fit of indignation.
Handa played out such innocuous daydreams several times a day, but now, as he briefly gave himself over to his habitual fantasy, a dull agitation began to whirl inside his head. The sensation felt exactly like a washing machine full of dirty laundry, lumbering through a cycle with its heavy load. Yet for the past two weeks or so, since the start of the month, his daydream no longer seemed so groundless. He had been trailing a number of possible suspects on his own, without permission from Investigation Headquarters. He had no physical evidence yet, but if even one of his hunches proved correct, the day when he might pull the rug out from under those MPD bastards was not just a distant dream.
Handa pondered this as, at ten minutes to eight, he reached the door of the meeting room located on the second floor of headquarters, but before he could open it, a colleague from the Criminal Investigation Division came up behind him and said, “Chief wants you upstairs.”
It didn’t amount to a foreboding, but Handa felt his irritability mounting. The wound from the shard of glass in his right foot suddenly began to throb. On his way up the stairs to the third floor, he removed his shoe again and looked at his right big toe. He touched it and confirmed that his black sock was slick with blood. As he was fumbling along, a certain thought slowly occurred to him, flickering behind his brow. Right, must be about my extracurricular investigations. But then immediately, instead of the panic of being driven to the edge of a cliff, the usual daydream came surging in as if to compensate.
Today marked the hundredth day since, at the height of summer, the corpse of a man with his head beaten in had been found in the bushes of a park behind a school in Higashi-Shinagawa. The victim was a senile seventy-six-year-old who liked to wander, a resident of a special care nursing home located just inside Minami-Shinagawa, about one kilometer from the crime scene. Around ten in the morning on August tenth, children who had come to play in the park found his corpse. After receiving the call, Handa—as an officer in CID—had run to the scene from the Shinagawa Police Department, which was not far away. The body had already been there for about half a day in the August heat, and showed significant livor mortis.
The neighborhood around the crime scene was dense with businesses and long-standing residences, creating a labyrinth of one-way alleys. The streets were practically deserted at night so there were no eyewitnesses; they were unable to recover any helpful footprints from the pavement where the corpse was found, nor a weapon. There were no signs of struggle on the victim’s clothing, and no articles left at the scene that might belong to the perpetrator.
On the victim’s head there was a laceration above the right auricle, which appeared to have been made by a blunt weapon with a relatively large surface of impact. Since there was no evidence of a struggle, at first it was suspected that the crime had been committed by an acquaintance, but when Handa saw the crime scene, his immediate thought was, Practice swing with a baseball bat or a golf club. Handa did not play golf, but to relieve stress he often went to a park in his neighborhood to swing a bat or a bamboo sword. He always made sure there was nobody around him before he started swinging, but once in a while a child would dart out from nowhere and give him a scare. Perhaps his hunch sprang from this habit.
From the results of a detailed analysis of the crime scene, it was known that, based on bloodstains and bits of skin and clothing fibers recovered from the pavement, the victim had been struck in the head, then—with both hands holding his right auricle—he had been thrust down diagonally, falling on his side, after which he was dragged for about one meter and laid down in the bushes. The temporal bone where he had apparently been struck with a he
avy blunt weapon suffered a depressed fracture, and from the cut on his scalp, they recovered a piece of film coated with traces of carbon resin. Judging from the victim’s height and angle of the active surface of the fracture, the presumed weapon was either a driver or 2- or 3-wood golf club with a heavy carbon head that had been swung diagonally from below—and based on the paint chip, it could even be narrowed down to two or three brands. Handa’s intuition had been correct.
The investigation began during the hottest part of summer, and Handa too had been dispatched from his precinct to Investigation Headquarters; for days he had canvassed the immediate vicinity of the crime scene on foot. An investigation could not move forward unless it could be backed up with the goods.
Early on in the initial investigation, he learned that the victim had no debt or savings to his name, and given his age, it was unlikely a crime of passion, so the investigation could reasonably be narrowed down to two possibilities: a grudge attack or a random crime. The victim’s wanderings were just that—they had no fixed course—and although the nursing home had filed a missing person report on the ninth, the day before the crime, it was unclear even when he had disappeared from the facility. A few witnesses had been in the vicinity of the building, but the time and location of these sightings were all different, and when pieced together, one could only surmise that the victim had been roaming about a five-hundred-meter radius of the facility until early evening.
What was more, the victim’s social circle was particularly limited; he had no friends at the nursing home and was not in correspondence with anyone outside of it. No one in either of his two sons’ families had visited the home for years. The family members had no motive, and their whereabouts before and after the estimated time on the day of the crime had all been confirmed. Under these circumstances, it seemed unrealistic to imagine the profile of a suspect who held such a hardened grudge against the victim that they had attacked him and bashed in his skull with a golf club.
On the other hand, following the theory that someone happened to be taking a practice swing in the park with a driver, the first step was to determine whether someone may have been near the crime scene with an object of appropriate length, or whether there was someone who regularly practiced swinging in the park. This process had to begin along the road that led to the crime scene, gradually expanding outward and checking off the thousands of businesses and residences one by one.
Reports had started to filter in little by little during the investigation meetings that took place each morning and evening. However, hardly any strayed from a variant of: “So-and-so keeps a driver in his locker at the office. On the day of the crime he was at work.” Everyone kept any further information to themselves so that nothing seemed clear, no matter how many of these reports came in. As a result, it was impossible for the lowest-ranking investigators to gain any perspective on where to focus their search. There was no evidence to be found in the area where Handa’s team had been assigned—not even anything worth hiding—and as the autumn equinox came and went, that was still the case. To be sure, the area within a two-kilometer radius of the crime scene had been divided into six sections, and the eastern section assigned to Handa’s team consisted largely of landfill in Higashi-Shinagawa with Shibaura canal in between, as well as the southern half of the Shinagawa wharf on the opposite shore.
On the wharf, there was only a container terminal, a thermal power plant, and oil storage tanks. The landfill in Higashi-Shinagawa, on the other hand, was occupied by three warehouse companies, the storage facility of a trading company, two buildings that housed, respectively, the Toyo Suisan seafood corporation and the fishing industry union, three municipal housing complexes, and finally, a facility under construction, a vacant lot, and the Tennozu baseball field. Handa spent all day long wandering back and forth along roads where only trucks passed, peering into trash cans, writing down the license plate number of every car that occasionally drove by, learning the faces of all the residents of the housing complexes—he even tracked down about a dozen of them who practiced their golf swings—but that was it. And yet, every morning and evening at the investigation meetings, his nature as a detective made him listen keenly in spite of himself, hoping that something good might turn up.
It was early October when Handa decided to stray from the landfill industrial zone. One Sunday, in the empty lot in front of the housing complex within his designated area, Handa came across a resident, with whom he had a nodding acquaintance, happily swinging a driver. “That must be brand new. How nice,” Handa said, and as he soon grew bored of listening to the guy’s long-winded explanation of the firmness of the shaft and the angle of the loft and whatnot, an idea suddenly flashed in his mind: a pawnshop. The suspect would have gotten rid of the golf club once it had been used as a weapon, but a driver was expensive to begin with, and if the thing had cost him a hundred thousand yen, all the more likely that he would dispose of it not in the garbage but at a pawnshop.
Handa spurred his partner, a police sergeant named Kimura, to join him and, starting from their base in Shinagawa, together they began checking out pawnshops. Handa had no particular expectations; he simply figured it was better than napping on the baseball field. Detectives often went around to pawnshops in search of stolen goods, so he had his fair share of contacts. It started out mostly as a way to kill time, but in mid-October, he almost ran into two detectives from MPD at a pawnshop within the Meguro precinct where he used to work and, after learning that this was in fact where they were focusing their efforts, he grew even more fired up about his rogue mission. He reconsidered every person they had identified so far as owning golf clubs, he paid closer attention on his pawnshop visits, and he decided to select a number of people who either worked at one of the businesses or lived in housing near the crime scene and began to trail them.
Then the following month, he narrowed down his targets even further and shadowed them for two weeks. One was a man who lived in Fuchu and used to go to the driving range every Saturday but around summertime had stopped all of a sudden. One man was a resident of Higashi-Shinagawa Public Housing No. 4 who had quit his job some time after the crime and now worked for a different company. Yet another was a self-employed businessman who replaced his full set of golf clubs shortly after the crime. The names of each of these men were now written in Handa’s pocket notebook.
And today was Saturday, November 17th. They found out that I’ve gone off course, Handa thought to himself again vacantly. He had no memory of whether he had considered the consequences when he decided to go rogue, knowing all along that he would eventually get caught. Most likely he hadn’t thought about anything at all.
The fact that he had been discovered at this point in time clearly meant that somebody had ratted him out, but he had not even processed this yet. There was someone out there who had pulled the rug out from under him before he could outwit anyone. He had been done in. Before a bud could even sprout, his seed had been plucked and trampled underfoot. He had been defeated. He kept all such thoughts at bay—for were he to acknowledge them, he would shatter into a million pieces.
Since the workday had not begun, there were only a handful of people from the white-collar crime and burglary units in CID, and another few from records and forensics. If you were to take away everything colorful in a public school teacher’s lounge—the plastic desktop files and flower vases—and instead run it through a mousy filter and pipe in a hushed and chilled silence, you would be left with the CI office of the precinct police department.
Handa had grown up in company housing for an ironworks in Kamaishi, and when he graduated from university in Tokyo, he did not care where he worked as long as the place saw daylight. He applied to several private companies, but when he learned that all the available positions were technical and would have him working in a factory, he figured he would be better off in the police force so he became an officer. After he signed on, though, he realized that only
MPD headquarters in Sakuradamon enjoyed a certain bland brightness, while the other bureaus were so bleak and damp that mushrooms could grow.
A superintendent named Miyoshi sat at the chief’s desk in front of a window with the blinds drawn even though it was morning. Standing next to him was an inspector acting as deputy chief; both had a glassy, dreary look, their eyes like the tightly closed shells of dead clams. When Handa came in, the deputy chief motioned to him like a customer in a restaurant calling over a waiter, and Handa obediently walked over and stood before the desk.
“Starting today, you no longer report to the second-floor Investigation headquarters,” said the deputy chief. “You know why, don’t you?”
Handa thought about this as best he could, and for the time being, decided to go with, “No, I don’t.”
The dead clam thundered, “You idiot!” His bellow reverberated off the steel desks and lockers, rushing over the heads of his colleagues who were holding their breath and pretending not to notice, and bounced up against Handa’s back.
“I know where and what you’ve been up to these past six weeks.” This time Miyoshi spoke. “Would you argue that you’ve haven’t infringed on someone else’s turf, while neglecting your own duties?”
The deputy chief started shouting again, spraying spittle. “This deviancy is inexcusable!”
It wasn’t that he couldn’t explain himself; rather, in the police force, the very act of explaining was unacceptable. Handa knew on a gut level that the police way was to agree with the higher-ups when they told you something was black, and then to agree again when they told you it was white. Each time he uttered such token “yeses” he lost another shred of dignity. Of course he was pretty used to this by now, but lately Handa had the feeling that a new and unfamiliar identity was forming within him.
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 12
