Soul Cage--A Mystery

by Tetsuya Honda

“No, over in Kawasaki. I was asked to provide an estimate for redoing someone’s kitchen by … by the old man.”

  The old man …

  Mishima’s voice trailed off, and his face contorted.

  “Frankly, after what happened to … uh … Mr. Takaoka, I’ve got no idea if the kitchen job’s on or not.”

  “Won’t you be taking over the business?”

  “Me? I’m not ready.”

  Satomura came back in and dished out the teacups. Mishima stared at the steam rising from his cup to avoid eye contact.

  “I see,” replied Kusaka. “Did you and Takaoka handle most of the jobs that came in yourselves?”

  “We did, yeah. We call ourselves a construction company, but we’re a tiny little outfit, really. We’ve got a roster of regular clients, and we get work by calling around and asking them if they need our help with anything. Sometimes they hook us up with new clients. That’s how we got this Kawasaki kitchen job. Occasionally, big contractors get in touch and ask us to work as part of the team on large-scale jobs. Normally, though, we do stuff that the two of us can handle. I didn’t do a whole lot by myself.”

  “You were with Takaoka most of the time, then?”

  “Most of the time, yeah.”

  “But sometimes you worked separately?”

  “With jobs that came directly to us, Mr. Takaoka handled the money side of things, collecting payment, you know. He also handled the preliminary site inspection and drawing up cost estimates. When he had something like that to do, he’d go off and leave me working on whatever job we were doing.”

  Collecting payment?

  “The jobs you handle—what sort of sums are we talking about?”

  Mishima gave a little shrug.

  “I don’t know a whole lot about the money side of things. Don’t think we handle anything above ten million yen. I’m guessing, three, four, maybe five million is about as high as we go.”

  “Collecting payment—was it ever problematic?”

  Mishima swallowed and shifted in his seat.

  “Problematic? Sorry?”

  “I mean, was there ever any trouble with clients refusing to pay up?”

  “I can’t say it never happened.”

  A second later, Mishima’s head jerked up. He looked at Kusaka with a startled expression on his face.

  “What? You think that might have something to do with the old ma—I mean, Mr. Takaoka—being murdered?”

  “At this stage, we really don’t know,” replied Kusaka gently. “Mr. Mishima, if I may? The first time we heard the name Kenichi Takaoka was yesterday. We knew nothing about him then, and things are not all that different today. What kind of person was he? How did he spend his time? What kind of people did he socialize with? Did he have any problems? These are the sorts of things we need to know. From what you told Captain Kawada yesterday, we’re pretty confident that you are the person who knows the most about Kenichi Takaoka. Can you think of any reason why this might have happened? Did you notice any signs? Can you think of an event that might’ve acted as a trigger? Of course, it doesn’t have to be as obvious as that. It could be something that struck you as odd, maybe about Takaoka himself, maybe about someone he hung around with. Tell us everything you know. Nothing is too small.”

  Mishima cocked his head to one side.

  “To be honest, I don’t think not being paid was much of a problem for us. It’d be serious if someone tried to wriggle out of paying for a five-million-yen job, but nothing like that ever happened. It was more like someone saying, ‘Give us a discount of two hundred thousand,’ or, ‘Come on, why not round it down to the nearest hundred thousand?’”

  Mishima was silent for a few seconds. He was having trouble getting the words out.

  “Yeah, mainly it was stuff like people demanding a discount if they thought our work wasn’t up to snuff, or if we’d damaged something, you know, like scratched the floor. Screwups like that, nine times out of ten, I was responsible. Sometimes the client would beat the price down by three hundred or five hundred thousand yen. Discount or no discount, though, Takaoka always paid me my full day’s wages. Business wasn’t always easy, but Takaoka was a stubborn bugger. I’d be like, ‘It’s me that messed up, so take it out of my wages.’ He never did. He was always like, ‘It’s fine. It’s not your problem. Don’t worry about it.’”

  While Kusaka wasn’t prepared to write off the whole money-trouble angle right then and there, from what Mishima had just said it looked unlikely.

  “I’m afraid that we now need to revisit ground that you went over yesterday with Captain Kawada.”

  Kusaka flipped the file on the table open. Mishima’s eyes widened, his jaw tightened, and his face went pale.

  “Is it the pho … the photographs?” he stammered.

  Kawada had warned Kusaka that Mishima had vomited when shown the picture of the severed hand yesterday.

  “I’m afraid that identifying the victim is always unpleasant,” explained Kusaka gently. “Since Takaoka has no direct family, you’re the only person we can ask. Do you understand? One thing that I can do is to cover the injured part.”

  Kusaka pulled a photograph of the hand from the file. He covered the severed wrist with his hand and pushed the picture across the table toward Mishima.

  “You identified this hand as Takaoka’s based on a distinguishing mark on it?”

  “Tha-that’s right. It’s this scar here at the base of the thumb.”

  Sure enough, there was a scar at the join of the thumb and the index finger.

  “How did Takaoka get it?”

  Mishima exhaled loudly. He turned away from the photograph as if averting his eyes from something unholy.

  “It was about two years ago, when we were doing some renovation work in a house. Takaoka was slicing through a wooden pillar with a circular saw. Turned out there were some old nails stuck in it. The blade hit a nail, the saw jumped, and the blade cut into the old man’s—sorry, I mean Takaoka’s—hand. That’s how he got the scar.”

  “Were you there?”

  “Yeah. The old man bled like a stuck pig. It was kind of funny. I mean, he cut himself, but I ended up puking all over the place at the sight of blood. He’d sliced through a nerve and couldn’t use the hand for a while. The index finger’s still pretty useless now. Thank God it was the left hand.”

  The story certainly sounded convincing.

  “Any other distinguishing marks on the hand?”

  Mishima shot a quick glance at the photograph. Inspecting it carefully was the last thing he wanted to do.

  “The fingernails? Contractors like us are always lifting hard and heavy objects. The skin on your hands toughens up, and your fingernails thicken and harden.”

  Mishima placed his hands on the table. Kusaka saw that the boy’s nails were about three times thicker than his own. The nails of the hand in the photograph were the same.

  “But that would be true for any contractor?”

  “Uh, I guess so, yeah.”

  “So I should take only the scar as definitive proof that this is Mr. Takaoka’s hand?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  Mishima pouted impatiently. There was still something of the teenager in him.

  “That’s fine. I just needed to confirm the basis for your identification of the hand.”

  Kusaka returned the photograph to the file. In an effort to lower the level of tension, he started talking about the weather. Today was looking a little cloudy, he said.

  Mishima was hoping that the rain would hold off until at least late afternoon. A roofer friend of his was planning to strip the tiles from an old house nearby and replace them with new ones. Rain would force him to postpone the job.

  Kusaka sipped his tea, grunting from time to time. “Incidentally,” he broke in. “Could you tell us how you first met Takaoka?”

  Mishima sat upright in his chair. A faraway look came into his eyes.

  “My dad died when I was in fifth gra
de. He fell off the scaffolding of an apartment building that was under construction. Takaoka was working on the same site for a different subcontractor.… When I went there to collect my dad’s things, Takaoka introduced himself.… I guess he felt sorry for me. He knew that I had no family left.”

  Could Mishima remember the name of the company his father worked for? Kinoshita Construction, said the young man, volunteering that Takaoka had been working for Nakabayashi Construction, a medium-size general contractor, at the time. Kusaka guessed that Kinoshita Construction was probably there as a subcontractor to the larger Nakabayashi.

  Mishima sighed and sipped his tea.

  “After that, I was put in this orphanage in Shinagawa. Takaoka used to come and visit me there all the time. He’d swing by on weekends and take me out to amusement parks or for meals or whatever.”

  Kusaka asked the name of the orphanage. Mishima informed him that it was the Shinagawa Mercy College.

  “A few months before I was due to graduate, Takaoka asked me if wanted to work with him. He explained that working on different jobs all around Tokyo he’d built up a good network of potential clients and was planning to set himself up as Takaoka Construction, a proper business. I was over the moon.”

  Mishima went quiet for a moment.

  “Both my parents were dead. Academically, I was nothing to write home about. I’ve got no special talents. Yet here was this guy treating me like his own flesh and blood. I jumped at the chance. I said yes, right then and there. From that moment, I really saw Takaoka as being—I don’t know—a father or a big brother, someone very special, anyway. I was so thrilled.”

  Kusaka then asked Mishima detailed questions about Takaoka’s business. Mishima provided the names of several clients he hadn’t mentioned to Kawada yesterday, but he warned that, without access to Takaoka’s notebook, the names and addresses he was giving them might not be one hundred percent correct.

  “You’ve been working with Mr. Takaoka for five years?”

  Mishima did a quick mental calculation.

  “Guess so.”

  “Did Takaoka have a girlfriend?”

  Mishima cocked his head.

  “Uhm, no. Never. Kind of strange, isn’t it?”

  “That reminds me—do you happen to have a recent picture of Takaoka?”

  So far, the task force HQ had only managed to get their hands on one photograph of Kenichi Takaoka: an ID photo from the database of the motor vehicles department.

  “I’m not sure. I need to have a look at home.”

  “Please bring in any photos you find. We’ll copy them and give them back to you as fast as we can.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As far as Kusaka could tell from his driver’s license picture, Takaoka was quite handsome, definitely someone that women would find attractive. So maybe he swung the other way?

  “Should I take it that Takaoka was not … uh … very interested in women?”

  “Hey, he wasn’t, you know, like that.”

  Mishima placed the back of his right hand flat against his left cheek in the Japanese gesture for “gay.”

  “When he had money to burn, he would go out to hostess clubs. And we went to … uh … like those soapy massage parlors a few times together. No, the old man liked pussy as much as the next guy. There’s no doubt on that score.”

  “My apologies,” Kusaka said. “I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

  He had, but no matter.

  “Was there some joint he went to regularly? A ‘main squeeze’ he liked to spend his money on?”

  “No … not unless he was going someplace I didn’t know.”

  “You did your own thing in the evenings, then?”

  “Generally, yeah. I mean, occasionally we’d have dinner together. We always went to the same three places: a little local restaurant, a grilled chicken joint, or a pub.”

  Kusaka jotted down the names of the places: Mantei Bistro, Okada BBQ, and Bar Fujikawa.

  “Mainly, we did our own thing. I mean, we’re not fags or anything.”

  Mishima was clearly riled. Kusaka, reckoning that a further apology would only make a mountain from a molehill, just ignored the remark.

  “That reminds me, do you have a girlfriend?”

  Mishima looked a little uneasy. Was he just being shy, or was it something else? Kusaka couldn’t tell.

  “I don’t know if she’s really my, like, girlfriend.”

  “What about a certain Michiko Nakagawa, age nineteen, studying hairdressing. Have you two known each other long?”

  Mishima’s thick eyebrows twitched.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Let me explain. We know that you were with Ms. Nakagawa at that time the incident occurred. I just need a few more details about your relationship, so I can explain the background to the satisfaction of my colleagues.”

  Mishima snorted and puckered his lips. The kid was just going to have to get with the program. In any investigation, the police had to confirm the alibis of everyone involved. It was a cast-iron rule. They also needed to be alert to the possibility of close relationships leading to false testimony. The risk was greater when the relationship was a sexual one.

  “We met a bit over a month ago.”

  “Where?”

  Mishima hemmed and hawed and looked off to one side. Was it really so hard to recall something so recent?

  “At the place she works. The Royal Diner, the Route 15 one, a little way past Kawasaki City Hall.”

  Kusaka knew that already.

  “That’s quite far from where you live, isn’t it?”

  “I drop in on my way back from work.”

  “And you got to know one another that way?”

  “I’ve always liked the Royal Diner. I go whenever I have a job in Kawasaki.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re driving back from Kawasaki, the diner’s on the wrong side of the highway for you. Isn’t that a little inconvenient?”

  Mishima scowled.

  “What’s your problem, man? You don’t believe me?”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s just that I had a look at a map and wanted to ask you. Me, I’d probably drive on until I found another diner on the same side of the road.”

  “Well, me, I don’t. Like I said, I like the Royal Diner.”

  “You had the girl in your sights. I can understand.”

  Mishima groaned and leaned back in his chair.

  “Did you speak to her first or did she speak to you?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? Give me a goddamn break, will you?”

  “I need you to answer my question.”

  “Why?”

  Why indeed? Kusaka was only putting pressure on Mishima because he didn’t feel he was getting full cooperation from him.

  “As I said earlier, I need you to explain the nature of your relationship now to preempt any questions that might come up later.”

  “It was me,” said Mishima grudgingly. “I made the first move. I’d seen her a few times and thought she was cute. I think she recognized me and we got chatting.… You know how it is.”

  “Was Takaoka ever with you?”

  “Maybe one time.”

  “How come? You said that the two of you normally drive back from work together?”

  “I don’t fucking remember.”

  With a sudden movement, Mishima half rose from his chair and strained across the table, his nostrils flaring.

  “Fuck you, man. Maybe it was twice. Maybe three times. What the fuck does it matter? You can’t seriously think it’s got anything to do with what happened to the old man.”

  “We don’t yet know if there’s a connection or not. That’s the reason I’m asking. I’m not trying to be deliberately provocative,” said Kusaka, in his most soothing tones. Mishima sank back into his chair.

  Best to take another timeout for small talk. Cars would be as good as topic as any.

&
nbsp; “I hear you’ve got a Subaru Impressa. Did you take out a loan for it?”

  “Nah, I paid all cash.”

  “Expensive?”

  “It was a steal. I got it secondhand.”

  PART II

  1

  I was sent to Shinagawa Mercy College, an orphanage in Shinagawa Ward. The folks at City Hall must have set it all up. The buildings were on the old side, but the place itself was all right.

  I had plenty to eat, and they gave me new clothes too. And no one bullied me anymore. I thanked my lucky stars every single day of the week.

  “You’re settling in well,” the principal told me. “That’s great.”

  In fact, there was some pretty nasty stuff going on. You see, there was this older boy who was really mean to the girls. He also forced the weaker boys to hand over their candy and whatever pocket money they’d saved up. The high school kids lived in a separate dorm some way off campus. As a result, the ninth graders like him were free to throw their weight around if they wanted to. No way was I going to put up with that, though.

  “Think you’re tough, new boy?”

  “What’s your problem, Hiroki? Everyone hates you, so you take it out on grade-school girls. It’s pathetic.”

  “You cocksucker.”

  I started it. I wanted Hiroki to attack me. And I was ready for him. I had this piece of broken metal railing I’d found near the school. Even now, I’ve got to say it was a darn good weapon—hard and easy to handle. I’d used a saw to cut mine to the perfect length: thirty centimeters.

  I pulled the metal bar out the back of my trousers and got things going by whipping Hiroki across the shins. I knew right away who was going to win. I stomped all over Hiroki. By the end, he was bawling like a baby, saying how sorry he was. I called my classmates over and got them to pull his trousers down, then made him kowtow in the dirt and say sorry to them all directly. For the last act, I made him do a thousand squats—with his little dick out all the time, of course—and whacked him on the shins whenever he showed any sign of slowing down. Hiroki had made everyone’s lives hell, so none of the pupils told on me to the teachers.

  Did I take Hiroki’s place as the big bully of junior high? Nope. I guess I’d earned some sort of authority, or whatever you want to call it, but I never bullied the younger kids. Ever. I swear it.