The Last Train (Detective Hiroshi Series Book 1)

by Michael Pronko

  Outside on the sidewalk, Takamatsu said, “Golden Showers was next on the list.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The girls urinate. That’s the golden shower. It costs double if you want it on you.”

  Hiroshi contemplated this with drunken curiosity. “Kind of a pervert,” Hiroshi said at last.

  “Who?”

  “The dead guy.”

  “He’s not a pervert now. He’s dead.”

  Hiroshi nodded. “What’s after that?”

  Takamatsu looked it over for a minute: “Roomful of Mirrors.”

  “It has to be cheaper than fresh urine!”

  “Let’s hope.” Takamatsu charged ahead. “Still, it’s Roppongi genius to turn girl piss into profit.”

  The front entranceway of Roomful of Mirrors had a signboard featuring photos of the girls inside. At the door, a young man wearing a tuxedo waved them in through a mirrored wall that turned out to be a sliding door.

  The interior had mirrors covering every surface. Beams of blue, green, red, orange, purple, and yellow light reflected off of tables and plastic-covered sofas dotted with small mirrors. Wall mirrors were set at various angles, all visual sense of up and down was lost, reflection and reality reversed. Only the tug of gravity kept everyone upright.

  Naked girls in high heels, thongs and barrettes, danced on alcove stages and small platforms hanging from the ceiling, while others ambled among the tables. Their bodies were covered in pasted-on glitter from which sparkles changed colors as they moved.

  Takamatsu and Hiroshi stood stunned for a minute before two girls came over to lead them to a sofa. The men flopped down next to the naked, friendly and twinkling women.

  “What’s your name?” the woman next to Takamatsu asked.

  “Uh, Mizoguchi,” stuttered Takamatsu, “And that’s Sato.”

  “Where have you been tonight?”

  “A lot of places,” Hiroshi stammered. He felt drunk already.

  Takamatsu lit cigarettes for the girls, “And what’re your names?”

  They leaned back to inhale, which lifted up their breasts.

  Hiroshi stared.

  “Yoko from Osaka and Yoko from Sapporo.”

  “Easy to remember.”

  “You have to remember the city.”

  Takamatsu laughed. Hiroshi felt strange sitting with two naked women who acted as if everything were normal. He couldn’t remember ever just sitting with a naked woman he didn’t know; he remembered lying down, having sex, showering, but never sitting casually on a sofa. Could one of these women be capable of pushing a man in front of a train?

  A whiskey bottle appeared with four glasses, ice cubes and bottled water. Takamatsu’s Yoko bobbed up to mix the drinks, strong for the boys and weak for the girls. Hiroshi wondered how strong the whiskies were and how many the girls drank each night.

  “This is a nice club,” said Hiroshi.

  “They keep it too cold,” said Hiroshi’s Yoko.

  Takamatsu’s Yoko said, “I’m shivering by the end of the night.”

  “You need to be warmed up,” leered Takamatsu.

  “Ooohhh, you’re right!” both Yokos laughed. Takamatsu rolled up his sleeves and let his hand drop onto her thigh.

  “You work every night?”

  “We’re part-time.”

  “Do you have a day job?”

  “Sort of,” they laughed again. “That’s part-time, too!”

  “Where do you work?” they asked.

  Takamatsu quickly leaned forward. “We’re in foreign trade. So, we’re just checking this place out to see if it’s good to bring customers.”

  “We have foreigners here all the time,” said Hiroshi’s girl.

  “You do?”

  “They always get more embarrassed. It’s fun!”

  “I guess they would,” said Takamatsu. “Wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe it’s because they never bathe together like in Japanese families?”

  “One time, this guy kept choking on his drink. It was so funny. So inhibited, the foreign guys.”

  “Until they get you in a room!” They both laughed at this.

  Takamatsu took over the drink mixing. He handed two tumblers to the Yokos who eyed them to be sure they were not too strong. Takamatsu, knowing their stay-sober game, laughed. The girls poured more water in theirs when Takamatsu leaned back to light a cigarette.

  “You like working here?” asked Hiroshi.

  The Yokos looked confused at the question.

  “I used to work as an office lady, but this pays better.”

  The other Yoko said, “The last place I worked the customers could paint our bodies with Day-Glo paint that lit up under black lights.”

  “What?” Hiroshi blurted, stifling a laugh.

  “They had brushes or used their hands and covered our bodies with glowing colors. It was a mess at the end of the night. We had to really scrub in the shower. You can’t believe where the paint would end up,” she said.

  “And they always painted your nipples. It was caked on there by the end of the night, and hurt!” Both Yokos touched their breasts and laughed.

  They had more drinks and paired off to chat.

  At last, Takamatsu said, “Well, girls, we must get going. What time do you get off? We’ll take you out for a meal later, what do you say?”

  The girls hesitated. “There’s a strict no dating policy,” they both said.

  “It’s not a date. It’s dinner.”

  They both giggled.

  “No need to tell anyone. It’s just dinner,” Takamatsu insisted.

  They squirmed in their seats and whispered to each other.

  “Give us your number. We’ll call you when we’re done. We get off at one or one-thirty.”

  Takamatsu smiled and wrote out his and Hiroshi’s numbers on two pieces of paper—one for each girl. “Put this someplace safe!” he said.

  They giggled, and tucked them inside the front of their thongs. When he peered down where they tucked them, Hiroshi noticed that the thongs actually had a small inner pocket. Maybe for tips, he wondered.

  “What are your real names?”

  “I’m Mina.”

  “I’m Sae.”

  “We’ll take you to a nice meal.”

  The girls bowed deeply, their breasts bobbing as they stood up to walk them out through the maze of mirrors. At the mirrored door, the two girls waved good-bye. The cashier/doorman took the money from Takamatsu and handed him a discount coupon for the next visit.

  Outside on the street, Hiroshi said, “It’s a little strange, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Sitting with naked girls. It’s more about power than sex.”

  “That’s why it costs so much,” Takamatsu said. “The clothed ones were more expensive.”

  “Will they call?” asked Hiroshi.

  “They’re our only bet for getting inside the David Lounge.”

  The men walked to an all-night book store to get out of the rain and stood reading under the bright lights with other customers, all of them seeming to be waiting for someone or something.

  Just after one, Takamatsu’s phone rang, and he nodded happily into his phone, rolling down his carefully folded sleeves and shooting his cuffs into place.

  “We’re on,” he said from the aisle across from Hiroshi, who put his magazine back onto the rack.

  Chapter 19

  Hiroshi’s eyes refused to open at the first buzz of his cell phone. He elbowed himself up and reached for its jittering body in the pocket of his jacket, which was flung over a chair, under his crumpled pants. He only had to lean over as the room had just enough space for a double bed and a chair.

  He tried to cobble together what happened the night before—dinner, drinks, dancing, kissing, what-was-her-name, Mina, fumbling with clothes, fumbling with condoms. Nothing sharpened to believability in his mind.

  He pushed back the nausea and answered his cell phone.

&nbs
p; “Hai?”

  He held it a ways from his ear, but Takamatsu’s voice came through, “Where did you go?”

  “Good question.”

  “You and Mina took off.”

  “We did?”

  “I can understand why.”

  “Weren’t you with—what was her name?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “I have a surprise for you here.”

  “Where’s ‘here’?”

  “Your office. Where you usually are—except today.”

  “I’m on my way. Did you get in to the David?” Hiroshi asked.

  Takamatsu hung up.

  Hiroshi flopped back onto the bed. He recognized the love hotel décor from his college days. Cheap red velvet upholstery, mirrors on the ceiling and walls giving the illusion of a bigger room. He remembered they ate a big meal and drank a lot of wine in an Italian place. Wine on top of whiskey. He looked at himself in the ceiling mirror. The mirror framed his solitude and the hangover hung it to the wall. When had she left?

  He remembered fleeting bits of sex—the first since Linda—her reflection in the mirror when he opened his eyes. He felt her still. He threw his legs over the edge of the bed and went to the bathroom, turned on the light, turned it off, turned the water very hot and let the shower jumpstart his body. His eyeballs felt like they were roasted in salt.

  ***

  Outside he hailed a cab. His clothes were still damp from the rain. His socks were sodden. He suddenly panicked, thinking he had lost his wallet. He slapped his pockets and found his wallet, then panicked it would be empty. He opened it and everything was still there. Had he paid for anything? Had she paid for it all?

  She was pretty when she relaxed, gorgeous in the shower, almost as tall as he was, and easy inside her own body. Did he get her number or she, his? He had not been so drunk since Linda left, when he had been drunk every night for weeks.

  Mina had been lively, active, pushing him onto the bed, pulling at his clothes, whipping hers off in a kind of dance, dragging him into the shower and back out again, whipping him with a towel, thumping him with one of the pillows. She knew how to enjoy herself—something Hiroshi had forgotten.

  He could remember bits and pieces: her looking down on him from above, grinding into him, using him—slowly, repeatedly, methodically. Mina had known what she wanted and got it. Hiroshi wondered if he had, too.

  He hurried into his office before anyone could see him. He kept a clean shirt, underwear and socks in a file cabinet drawer. He was unwrapping the plastic from a dry-cleaned shirt when a woman he’d never seen before walked in.

  She let out a surprised, “Oh!” and almost dropped her armload of folders. She juggled them to keep them from tumbling to the floor. She gaped at his naked chest—hairier than most Japanese men—and his unbuttoned pants.

  She set the folders on the desk and turned away, but didn’t retreat. Working with homicide detectives, she thought she had heard it all. Now she could say she had seen it all.

  Hiroshi turned away from her, talking over his shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said, as he worked buttons. It was an effort; he felt like even his fingers were hungover. “What—”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m Kido. Akiko.”

  Hiroshi shook his head, confused.

  “Didn’t Takamatsu tell you? Your new assistant?” Akiko said, speaking to the wall.

  “Guess he wanted to surprise me.”

  “He succeeded, it seems.”

  “I’m, well, you know who I am, I guess. Hiroshi Shimizu. Please call me Hiroshi.”

  Akiko was like a setter on a volleyball team: sturdy and solid. Most Japanese would consider her plump the way her body rounded out her knee-length skirt and tight-knit top. But she was narrow in the waist and had a thin face with wide, brown eyes.

  “Please call me Akiko,” she said, bowing to the wall.

  “I usually dress at home.”

  “But not always?”

  “Not today.”

  Hiroshi tucked in his shirt and zipped his pants up with as much dignity as he could muster.

  “I brought the folders from Takamatsu,” she said, trying to decide whether to say more, or wait for him, or just stand there.

  “I usually don’t come in so late,” he said, adjusting his belt, and then, finally straightening up and turning toward her. Sensing him dressed now, Akiko stole a glance.

  They both looked down at his bare feet.

  He reached for a pair of fresh socks from the file drawer and sat down at his desk to pull them on. He rolled up his damp clothes from the night before, bundling them into the ripped-open dry cleaning bag.

  “Was Takamatsu here?”

  “He was, but he left. He said for you to go ahead and solve the case and he’d be down in an hour.” Her face had lovely, crescent-shaped dimples. Her eyes were wider than most Japanese woman, which reminded him of Linda’s. Her hair was dyed light brown and cut squarely along the ends.

  “I decided to put my desk here. Is that all right?” she asked. That was what was different. He was too hungover to notice the desk on the way in.

  “That’s about the only space left,” Hiroshi said. They both sat down and started to arrange things on their desks in silence.

  “How is Takamatsu paying you?” Hiroshi asked in a serious tone.

  “What do you mean?” she said, cocking her head.

  “I mean, well, Takamatsu got money from somewhere.”

  “I came over from administration, if that’s what you’re asking.” A note of indignation slipped into her voice.

  “I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter. I, we, I could use your help.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Do you speak English?”

  “I went to Ohio State for four years.”

  “What did you study?”

  “Sociology,” she said. “Listen, is this an interview? Maybe you don’t need—”

  “No, just—look, it’s not an interview. I’m not used to having to apologize when I come in to work.”

  “Do you come in like this every morning?”

  “Did Takamatsu say what you would be doing?”

  “Look, I can probably still get moved back.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.” Hiroshi wished Takamatsu had said something about her. “I’m just not used to having anyone else around. I just—”

  Akiko looked around his office, hoping for the best. It was a small office with just one detective and she was used to being in a big room with dozens of them. She thought it would be a nice change, but now, she wasn’t so sure. She stopped herself from sighing by asking, “Are there any other files you need now? Or just these?”

  Hiroshi thought for a minute, self-consciously doing one last shirt button. “I requested a list of train suicides. Could you check on that?”

  “It’s there in the pile.” She leaned back with a little bounce.

  “If you could search the databases to find out how many suicides were reported, and where they were, I want to check them against the railway reports.”

  “I’ll start someone on that. What else?” She leaned over her desk to write on a notepad.

  “There’s a list of places the dead man went in one of the files. Find out who owns those places and whatever else you can,” said Hiroshi.

  “Do you want information or scuttlebutt?”

  “Both.”

  She picked up the files, raised her eyebrows and asked, “Anything else?”

  “I, I mean, we, want to see where the trails of information and money cross.”

  “Where would those trails start?”

  “I don’t know, but they have to start somewhere.”

  Akiko wondered what she was supposed to say back to that. Usually, detectives were brimming with confidence and clear directions.

  “Do you drink coffee?” Hiroshi asked.

  “Yes, I’ll go get some. What—”

 
; “No, I want to make it for you. I have a good coffee maker.” He said, nodding toward the shelf that held a gleaming red Italian coffee maker.

  “Oh, well, OK, yes, I love coffee.” She was so used to getting detectives tea, she’d stopped thinking about it. Having coffee made for her would at least make the new arrangement tolerable.

  “I don’t trust anyone else with it,” he said. “And I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like coffee. Hope you like it strong?”

  “Very strong.”

  “Even better.”

  “I’ll take these folders over and be back in a few minutes.”

  “Coffee’ll be ready by the time you get back.”

  She returned after a few seconds. “Does it smell like disinfectant in here?”

  Hiroshi looked up and started to explain about the room having been storage and the lack of windows, but Akiko cut him off.

  “I’ll get a fan from maintenance,” Akiko said, and left.

  Hiroshi sat back with a pad of paper and put his feet up on the desk. He closed his eyes while the hangover bloated his thoughts with confusion, guilt, nausea, and irritation. He hadn’t asked for anyone to come help him. Takamatsu was a pain. He hadn’t even thought of using a fan to get the smell out, though he’d start letting it run all night.

  The foreigners whose scams he tracked always left a trail. It was like they couldn’t help themselves. Many of them got caught only because they wanted to stick their tongues out at the authorities. To find them was a process of finding the right thread and then pulling it, pulling it hard.

  Chapter 20

  “You’re dressed,” Akiko said with brisk confidence, arranging the folders in her hands for his easy reading. “You are isolated over here. It’s a bit of a walk.”

  “You’ll soon find that’s a good thing.”

  “Here are the reports on suicides. Last year there were over 2,000 suicides at train stations in Japan,” she read, “And over 30,000 suicides for the year.”

  Hiroshi whistled. “That many?”

  “One suicide every fifteen minutes. Five or six a day by train.”

  “We just need the foreigners. And just on trains.”