Soul Cage--A Mystery

by Tetsuya Honda

  Satomura shook his head.

  “It was sitting on the twenty-eighth. It’s a one-month scheduling board, and today’s the seventh of December, so that has to mean the twenty-eighth of last month. All the other nameplates were in the ‘Currently in the Office,’ ‘Out on Site,’ or ‘Pending’ boxes. Tobe’s was the only name in the schedule grid. That has to mean something.”

  “Excuse me,” came a voice from behind them.

  They turned around. It was Ms. Yashiro, the woman from Kinoshita Construction. She was wearing a moss-green coat over her uniform and panting; her breath formed little clouds of white vapor.

  “What is it?”

  “I … uh … I wanted to talk to you about Makio Tobe.”

  Her glasses began to mist over.

  Without being aware of it himself, Kusaka was staring at her so hard that he looked positively angry.

  * * *

  Ms. Yashiro had about an hour to spare, so the three of them went to a dowdy local café.

  “So, what can you tell us about Tobe?”

  The girl gulped down a whole glass of water and ran her eyes around the café’s interior.

  “I overheard some of what you were saying to the boss. Has Tobe done something bad connected with insurance? Are you going to arrest him?”

  “Why do you think we’d want to do that?”

  Their coffee arrived. The girl stared at the black liquid in her cup.

  “Why? Because the guy’s a total bastard, that’s why.”

  “A bastard?”

  “He’s a yakuza. A gangster.”

  “That’s a serious accusation. As far as we can see, Kinoshita Construction is a normal, regular company. Why should it want to put a yakuza on the payroll?”

  The woman exhaled slowly. It looked like an attempt at keeping her emotions under control.

  “Are you familiar with a firm by the name of Nakabayashi Construction?”

  Kusaka shot a glance at Satomura.

  “Yes, we know it.”

  “Nakabayashi’s a front for the yakuza.”

  “We’ve heard the rumors too. What’s the connection to Tobe?”

  “I don’t know his official status at the firm, all I know is that he was seconded to Kinoshita from Nakabayashi. He told me so himself.”

  Kusaka’s mind began sparking, making connections.

  “That would explain why he never comes to the office more than one or two days a week. And why he never does a stroke of work when he’s here.”

  “He wasn’t in today?”

  “No. He’s not been in for a while.”

  “How long since he was last there?”

  The girl counted the days by tapping her fingertips on her knee.

  “He showed up last Wednesday. Briefly. I think that’s the last time he was in.”

  Kusaka’s guess of November 28 had overshot the mark. Last Wednesday was December the third—the day Takaoka was murdered. If Tobe had been a no-show since then …

  Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but it’s definitely intriguing.

  “What did you mean when you said that Tobe never does a stroke of work?”

  The girl grimaced.

  “Me and the other woman at the office, we have this room we use as a changing room. Tobe’s always barging in on us there. It’s not just the things he says—he tries to feel us up, you know, grope us. That’s just a regular day at the office for him. When he made a move on me, the president heard the noise and physically intervened, pulled him off me. So I was okay, but my coworker—you saw her just now—well, he did the same thing to her. She says she’s fine and he didn’t do her any serious harm, but my guess is that something bad happened and she’s not okay at all. He’s just so—”

  The woman drank a mouthful of coffee in an effort to calm herself.

  “He always stinks of booze. He never comes to the office in the evening when the guys who work on the construction sites are back in. He’s happy to throw his weight around with girls like us, but the construction workers, even the older guys, could wipe the floor with him. That’s the sort of sneaky bastard he is.”

  “So why do you think the president keeps a troublemaker like him on the company books?”

  The girl dropped her gaze to the floor, looking more uncomfortable than ever.

  “I’m not sure about this, but there was this one time when the president was out and we heard two people shouting at each other up on the third floor. Then, Tobe comes strolling down the stairs, with this big grin plastered across his face. The man’s got no business going to the boss’s flat up there, none at all. Mrs. Kinoshita is younger than her husband and quite pretty. Maybe something happened between them that Tobe is using for leverage.… I’m guessing that Mr. Kinoshita can’t get rid of the bastard, even if he wants to.”

  Although Kusaka was careful to take everything the woman said with a grain of salt, he was getting a sense of the kind of man that Tobe was.

  “Why don’t you quit?”

  Ms. Yashiro jerked upright.

  “No way. Except for that pig Tobe, everyone at Kinoshita is good people. The guys who work on-site, Kawakami the accountant, Mr. Kinoshita, his wife—they’re all really nice. It wouldn’t be fair for me to run off and leave them.”

  She leaned across the table toward Kusaka.

  “Can’t you arrest that pig Tobe?”

  “We have no cause,” explained Kusaka, with a shake of his head. “But if you’re willing to file a complaint about what he did to you, then we’ll do everything in our power to help. I get the impression that’s not something you want to do, though.”

  The woman’s shoulders sagged and her head lolled forward.

  “It’s no good then.… That’s what I thought.”

  Kusaka took the opportunity to mentally review everything they had learned so far.

  Tobe had been seconded to Kinoshita Construction from Nakabayashi Construction, where he was in charge of insurance. It looked highly likely that he was involved in insurance frauds linked to both Tadaharu Mishima and Noboru Nakagawa. It still was too early to know if there was a link between those frauds and Kenichi Takaoka’s murder, but Kusaka thought it was more likely than not. And there was the fact that Tobe hadn’t been seen at Kinoshita Construction since the murder on the third.

  “Filing a complaint for sexual assault is quite a complex business, Ms. Yashiro. There’s also a very real possibility that you could lose when the case comes to trial. On the other hand, if Tobe is involved in the case we’re investigating, we may very well arrest him for that.”

  Her black eyes opened wide with excitement.

  “So, Ms. Yashiro?”

  “Yes?” she said, a solemn expression on her face.

  “I’d like to ask you to do a couple of little things for us. First off, we’d like you to provide us with Tobe’s cell phone number. Then—if it’s okay with you, of course—we’d like you to keep calling him until he picks up, then say whatever you need to say to get him to come into the office. Call us immediately when you make contact and call us if he just happens to shows up at the office anyway. Do your best to keep him on the premises. We’ll come around right away. Can you do that?”

  Ms. Yashiro nodded and rapidly punched a number into her cell phone.

  “Hey, Niki, is that you? Yeah, I’m fine. I’m talking to the police. Could you text me Tobe’s cell number? Yeah, the police want it. Great. Thanks. Later.”

  A minute later a jingle erupted from her cell phone. It was the opening bars of a song Kusaka knew—something by the Beatles, though he couldn’t remember the song’s name.

  3

  Reiko had spent the last few days interviewing people from South Hanahata who’d known Kenichi Takaoka when he lived there. Taichi Suzuki, the proprietor of Suzuki Real Estate Sales, had tracked them down for her.

  They’d all been at primary and junior high school with Takaoka. And they all said the same thing: they’d not been in touch with him at the time
he was evicted him from his house.

  “He didn’t really stand out from the crowd at school.”

  “He just sort of blended into the background.”

  “He was the class wimp. Everybody bullied him.”

  “I don’t remember much about him.”

  Takaoka really was Mr. Forgettable!

  The photographs Reiko showed them didn’t do much to jog their memories.

  She also pursued other lines of inquiry, but it was difficult trying to uncover details from more than a decade ago. Some local residents remembered a candy-and-toy store run by a couple called Takaoka; none of them remembered them having a son.

  Things weren’t looking promising.

  Her phone rang. It was Suzuki the real estate agent again.

  “You remember the noodle restaurant I told you about, the one a couple of doors down from the Takaoka Store?” said the estate agent. “Well, I managed to track down the owner’s son. I’ve got his contact details for you.”

  Reiko called him immediately. They arranged to meet in a coffee shop next to the Kinokuniya bookstore in Shinjuku.

  She pressed the redial button on her phone as soon as she and Ioka got there. A man sitting at a table by the window overlooking the big boulevard outside reached for his phone while scanning the restaurant. She caught his eye, bowed, and went over to his table. He was a good-looking, stylishly dressed man in his early thirties.

  “Good afternoon. Are you Yuji Sawai?”

  “That’s me. So you must be … uhm … Lieutenant Himekawa.”

  After exchanging name cards, Reiko and Ioka sat down opposite Sawai. According to his card, Sawai worked in human resources for a well-known appliance company.

  Sawai was having a coffee, so Reiko and Ioka ordered one each themselves.

  “Suzuki says that you’re interested in Ken Takaoka from the Takaoka Store?”

  “That’s right. Were you two friends?”

  The waitress returned with Reiko’s coffee. She waited until she’d left before she went on.

  “Before we start, though, I just need to ask for your age for our records.”

  Thirty-eight, said Sawai with a grin. He certainly didn’t look it. Reiko had pegged him as two, possibly three years her senior. He looked like a model or an actor.

  “That makes you five years younger than Takaoka?”

  “Yes. He looked after me when I was little. We used to walk to primary school in the same group. Just for my first year.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Rather shy and timid, I suppose. He was very sweet to me—like a big brother. He was crazy about Japanese language and literature, and really good at it. You know how you have to write book reports over the summer vacation? Well, Ken Takaoka did most of mine for me. The guy was such a bookworm that he’d read almost all the assigned books anyway. And he could adjust his writing style and vocabulary. Like, when I was in first year, he wrote all my reports in the style of a first-year student. It was brilliant. All I had to do was copy what he’d written into my exercise book. Yeah, he was good to me.”

  That dovetailed with how Takaoka had given Kosuke Mishima a job and behaved like a surrogate father to him, but the bit about him being good at Japanese was a surprise.

  “What about your school handicraft and engineering projects? Did he help you with those?”

  Sawai shook his head.

  “That was one subject Ken was complete crap at. He was more of an arts than a sciences kind of guy. I was always better at handicrafts than him. I’d have been happy to give him a hand, but getting help from a kid five years his junior—he’d have died of embarrassment!”

  Takaoka was “crap” at handicrafts and engineering!

  Her confusion must have showed in her face. Sawai glanced anxiously at Reiko, then at Ioka.

  “Is Ken in some kind of trouble?” he asked tentatively.

  “Uhm … we’ll get to that later.”

  Since Reiko hadn’t told Suzuki that Kenichi Takaoka was dead, Sawai had no way of knowing either.

  “When was be the last time that you saw Takaoka?”

  Sawai’s face clouded over.

  “It was one or two weeks before he was forced out of his home.”

  “Go on.”

  “Twelve years ago,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I was still in the sales department back then, crisscrossing the city by car every day.”

  “What about your parents’ restaurant?”

  “They’d already had to close the place. They got set up. A fake food-poisoning episode.”

  “We heard about that,” said Reiko.

  “You knew?” Sawai exclaimed in surprise.

  “Suzuki told me.”

  “That old chatterbox,” Sawai murmured, with an affectionate smile.

  “I’d only just started working when the restaurant shut down. I wasn’t yet earning enough to fully support my parents. They’d lost their livelihood and were in a state of shock. My two sisters saved the day; they got jobs instead of going to college. Not that I could’ve paid their tuition anyway.”

  He lowered his eyes and sighed.

  “After what happened to us, I couldn’t forget about what everyone in the old neighborhood was going through. I had this sales call to make nearby, so I thought, Why not drop in for a look? It was a graveyard—no lights, no people, nothing. There was one house down a back street where the lights were on. It was the Takaokas’ place. The father and the mother were dead, but Ken was still living there. That got me thinking about old times, so I parked the car and went over to the house.”

  Reiko imagined a cluster of unlit, decrepit old houses standing on the site of the new apartment building. “Graveyard” was perhaps an exaggeration, but she knew similar neighborhoods—sad, bleak places that felt as though time had passed them by.

  “I didn’t want to shout in case Ken thought I was a heavy sent in by the land sharks. I knocked and rang the bell and said, ‘Hey, it’s me, Noodles Sawai.’ Nobody came. They hadn’t got around to demolishing the house next door. There was this alley running between it and the Takaokas’ where we used to play as kids.… It was more like a gap than a proper walkway. I had to turn sideways and edge down it. I wanted to go to the back of the house because I knew I could see into the living room from there.…”

  Sawai’s face contorted horribly.

  “… What I saw was Ken squatting in the passage in between the living room and the bathroom. He was holding this great big carving knife in his hands, just staring at it.

  “I knew exactly what was going on,” went on Sawai. “He was psyching himself up to kill himself. So I banged on the window and shouted his name. I was just about to smash the glass, when Ken turned and looked at me. It took him a while to recognize me. I just kept saying, ‘It’s okay. It’s me, Yuji.’ Eventually the tension left his body, and his face sort of melted into this slack-jawed, idiot grin—I know that’s not a nice way to put it—and he came over to the window.”

  Sawai sighed. A deeper, longer sigh this time.

  “I went around to the front door and he opened up for me. He was still holding the knife. The thing was completely brown with rust. It was a piece of garbage. I just lost it and started yelling at him: ‘What the hell are you doing with that thing?’”

  Sawai was getting so emotional that he was having trouble getting his words out. Even Ioka looked upset.

  “And then, grown man that he was, he burst into tears. ‘I want to sharpen this damn knife, but I can’t find a whetstone anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking and looking and looking and I just can’t find one.’ I noticed he had these bumps and bruises on his forehead.… Lieutenant, have you ever heard of a firm called Nakabayashi Real Estate?”

  Reiko nodded.

  “When I asked about his bruises, Ken told me he’d gotten into a fight when he was drunk. That was an obvious lie. Ken was the last person to get involved in a pub brawl. He was timid and quiet, not a fighter. He just wasn
’t equipped to handle the harassment Nakabayashi subjected him to. They’d do anything to get the residents out.”

  Takaoka afraid of physical violence? Takaoka no good at handicrafts and engineering? A nonentity whom the other kids pushed around, according to all his old classmates. How could you reconcile that with Takaoka, the powerfully built carpenter who’d taken Kosuke Mishima under his wing?

  “I can’t get in trouble for something I did ten years ago, can I?” said Sawai, suddenly all sheepish and awkward.

  What’s this about?

  “I’m afraid that I took Ken out for a drink. I was probably over the limit when I drove him home.”

  Sawai hung his head apologetically.

  Reiko looked at him with mock sternness.

  “As long as you’re more careful now.”

  “I never drink and drive.”

  “The police are a whole lot stricter about that sort of thing these days.”

  “You certainly are,” said Sawai, scratching his head in embarrassment.

  “So while we were having that drink, Ken told me what was going on.” Sawai’s face darkened. “How the real estate people made his life hell by calling his phone day and night, and how changing his number was no good because they always managed to get hold of the new one. They’d even stuffed a dead cat into his mailbox. It was awful.”

  Reiko felt a sense of mounting indignation. However, her annoyance—anger would be too strong a word—was directed more toward the victim than the wrongdoers.

  “Takaoka should have gone to the police. Confiding in you wasn’t going to do him much good.”

  Sawai glared disgustedly at Reiko, then his gaze moved to her name card on the edge of the table in front of him.

  “Lieutenant, I see from your card that you’re from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police.”