Soul Cage--A Mystery

by Tetsuya Honda

  Hashizume slammed his fist onto the desk.

  “So damn what? What’s that got to do with our case? I don’t care if our victim is Takaoka or Naito—I want to know who killed him.”

  You’re such a sweet man. NOT.

  “So stop faffing around and find me the murderer pronto. All this fake Takaoka this and real Takaoka that—it does my head in.”

  Duh! That’s why I was explaining it.

  “Sir, the victim’s background is an important part of—”

  “That’s enough. Stop it, Himekawa. Just shut up. Come back and deliver another report after you’ve followed up all your leads and can build a convincing case. If you want to tool around expounding crackpot theories, please go and do so elsewhere. Right, who’s next?”

  Captain Imaizumi took over the mike.

  “Kikuta, it’s your turn.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Reiko saw Kikuta casting anxious glances in her direction. She nodded discreetly to let him know that she was fine with him going ahead.

  No one else at the meeting had anything earth-shattering to report.

  The main investigation was at a standstill: the search team scouring the river hadn’t found any more body parts, and the investigation into Kenichi Takaoka’s family, friends, and associates hadn’t turned up anyone with a possible motive for murder. The only point of possible interest was gossip to the effect that the homeless people based by the baseball ground beside the river were living it up, with boozy barbecues on a daily basis.

  Hashizume, however, wasn’t interested in that either.

  “So damn what?” he said contemptuously. “Homeless people sometimes win the lottery too, you know. Besides, the meat they’re barbecuing—they probably filched it from a trash can somewhere.”

  Now the only person left to speak was Kusaka. He was normally the first person to deliver his report, but he’d been a little late back to the police station this evening, so his name had been pushed down the list. He was scheduled to speak after Reiko, but a call had come into his cell, so he had been out of the room then too.

  Reiko scrutinized Kusaka’s face. He exuded self-confidence. Not a good sign.

  “In my report yesterday I mentioned Makio Tobe, the person who handles insurance for Kinoshita Construction. I’ve been making additional inquiries about him and found one or two points of interest.”

  Kusaka flipped open the file on the table in front of him.

  “Makio Tobe is forty-one years old. His mother, Yuko Tobe, died six years ago, at the age of sixty-two. Yuko was the mistress of Masayoshi Tajima, the first boss of the Tajima-gumi.”

  The room began buzzing. “I can’t believe the far-out shit people are coming out with today,” Reiko heard one precinct officer say.

  “However, some people believe that Makio Tobe is not Yuko’s son. They believe that his biological mother is actually Miyuki Ogawa. Who is she? Let me explain. Masayoshi Tajima has a younger brother called Toshikatsu. Toshikatsu Tajima chairs a real estate management company and is not directly involved in organized crime. Toshikatsu had only one child—Miyuki, a daughter. Miyuki is married to Michio Ogawa, the founder of Nakabayashi Construction. According to rumor, she had a child when she was forty—Makio Tobe—and Masayoshi was the father. In other words, Miyuki had a child with her own uncle, related to her by blood. I got this information from several ex-Tajima-gumi people—I can’t reveal their names—so there’s a good chance it’s more than just malicious gossip.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” grumbled Hashizume. “But again, so what?”

  Imaizumi indicated to Kusaka to keep going.

  “Thank you, sir. Tobe attended a public high school, where he made a name for himself as a troublemaker, though more in the lady-killing than the fighting department. He was adept at squeezing money out of his girlfriends and always had loads of cash and a posse of hangers-on as a result. After leaving school, he worked in some capacity for the Nakabayashi Group—perhaps his birth mother, Miyuki Ogawa, helped set this up—though he did little in the way of serious work there. For the last ten or so years, he’s hung his shingle at Kinoshita Construction. That’s about everything I’ve learned about him so far.”

  Kusaka shuffled the papers in the file in front of him.

  “Oh, one more thing I should mention.… Tobe seems to deploy the same talents he showed at school in his work life. That’s how he managed to get the insurance companies to issue numerous policies for Kinoshita Construction employees where the company is simultaneously the signatory and the beneficiary. As you know, life insurance in Japan is sold primarily by an army of door-to-door saleswomen. Tobe specialized in seducing them. Once they were his lovers, it was easy for him to get them to modify or falsify policy documents and to bypass their companies’ screening processes. My source here—again, I won’t be naming names—is an insurance saleswoman, no longer employed there, who herself had a sexual relationship with Tobe.”

  Kusaka raised his eyes from his file and looked at the executives at the front of the room.

  “Tobe has not come into the offices of Kinoshita Construction since Takaoka’s death on the third of December. I believe that locating him should be a matter of absolute urgency. That brings my report to an end for today.”

  The report was both concise and dense. Hardly Kusaka’s usual style.

  Who is Makio Tobe, serial womanizer, insurance fraudster…?

  Hashizume had once again launched himself halfway across the table.

  “What the hell’s got into you all today? First it was Himekawa, and now it’s you, digging up all this peripheral information! I want my investigators to do their digging in the center of the problem, not around the edges.”

  “I believe, sir, that you will find that my approach and Lieutenant Himekawa’s differ materially in a number of points.”

  What the fuck?

  Reiko was annoyed, but she held her tongue.

  “It’s the goddamn same to me, Kusaka,” Hashizume snapped. “Let me ask you a question. Do you have any clear grounds for thinking that this Tobe guy bumped off Takaoka?”

  “No, sir. But it’s to get to the truth of the matter that I’m trying to track him down.”

  “All right, what motive would Tobe have for whacking Takaoka?”

  Kusaka exhaled loudly through his nose. Reiko understood the frustration he felt. She sympathized despite herself.

  “Of course,” he began. “I cannot speak to the reliability of Himekawa’s report—”

  “Now just a minute, Kusaka,” she interrupted, smacking a hand on the table.

  He turned and stared at her with cold, reptilian eyes.

  “If I’ve annoyed you, I’ll apologize later,” he snarled. “For now, just shut up and listen, okay?”

  You bastard! You complete and utter bastard.

  Kusaka turned back to the front of the rom.

  “For the sake of argument, let’s accept Himekawa’s hypothesis that our victim, Kenichi Takaoka, was in fact Kazutoshi Naito. It’s highly possible that Tobe was involved in arranging the identity swap. In that case, Kenichi Takaoka aka Kazutoshi Naito would have witnessed Tobe putting his fraud schemes into action. In addition to his own case, he might have witnessed the cases of Tadaharu Mishima and Noboru Nakagawa and possibly others we don’t know about. Maybe he thought he knew enough to turn the tables and start blackmailing Tobe.”

  A spark ignited somewhere deep in Reiko’s brain. Something was moving in there, but what it meant, she didn’t yet know.

  “Tobe wasn’t going to take that lying down, so he murdered the fake Takaoka.” Kusaka went on. “There’s one other possible scenario we should consider, though the methodology is different from the Mishima and Nakagawa cases. What if the victim arranged his own murder?”

  There was a ferocious scowl on Imaizumi’s face. “What?” he exclaimed. “Are you seriously proposing that the fake Takaoka hired Tobe to kill him in order to tr
igger the insurance payout to his sister Kimie?”

  “I’m only saying that it’s one not totally impossible scenario—”

  “I’ve said it over and over again already tonight,” interrupted Director Hashizume. “Let’s get back to reality.”

  Hashizume looked down the front table at the other brass, with an exasperated look on his face. None of the other brass backed him up. Reiko felt a little sorry for him.

  * * *

  After the task force meeting came the executive meeting. Reiko consulted her watch when it was finally over: it was just before ten.

  The other members of her squad were already at the local bar. If she went and joined them now, she’d be several drinks behind, stuck at the table with a bunch of drunks. Instead, she decided to try out the sauna at a sports center near the station. As she was getting her things ready, she took a look in her makeup bag: she was out of cleansing lotion. Shouldn’t be a problem. There was a convenience store on the way.

  Reiko pushed a change of clothes and her makeup bag along with her cell phone and wallet into her shoulder bag and walked out of the station. A little way ahead of her was a familiar-looking figure wrapped in a coat.

  “Captain!”

  Imaizumi stopped, and Reiko scampered up to him.

  “Are you going for dinner?”

  “No, going to buy a razor.”

  Imaizumi’s stubble was thick and legendary for its toughness. Apparently, electric razors couldn’t handle it; the only thing that worked were cartridge razors with three or four blades, which Imaizumi would use once and then have to throw out.

  “At the convenience store?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I’m going for a sauna, but I need to drop into the convenience store on the way. I’ll go with you.”

  Imaizumi was walking very slowly. He must be exhausted, thought Reiko. Still, it meant more time to talk.

  “You know, Captain?” she began.

  “What?”

  “No, it’s nothing in particular. I mean, it’s not like it’s something that started today.…”

  “Spit it out. I know it’s about Kusaka.”

  Reiko couldn’t suppress a grin.

  “The two of us, we’re apples and oranges, complete opposites. I just can’t get my head around Kusaka’s hatred of theorizing of any kind. I never have and I never will.”

  Imaizumi smiled drily. “Did you know that Kusaka once worked with Katsumata in Homicide Unit Four?”

  “I had no idea.”

  Imaizumi nodded knowingly. “Back then, Kusaka was still a sergeant, and Katsumata had just made lieutenant. The two of them hated each other’s guts. They had raging arguments in meetings.”

  “What were you doing back then, Captain?”

  “I was a lieutenant, but in Unit Nine. What I’m about to tell you is mostly secondhand.”

  “Right.”

  They’d arrived outside the convenience store.

  “Just wait here a second, Captain.”

  The conversation with Imaizumi was more of a priority than buying cosmetics.

  She nipped in and emerged with a couple of canned beverages. She handed a coffee to the captain and kept the corn soup for herself.

  “Or would you prefer the soup, Captain?”

  “I’m fine with coffee.”

  They pulled off the tabs, clinked cans, and took a swig. The hot liquid turned their breath into thick white clouds of steam in the night air.

  “Anyway, the long and the short of it is, Kusaka was set up—by Katsumata.”

  Reiko frowned quizzically at Imaizumi. He took another swig of coffee, then continued.

  “They were both on a task force that was handling a robbery-murder in Kyodo, in Setagaya Ward. Kusaka figured he knew who’d done it, and the higher-ups on the case all encouraged him to bring his suspect in. The only person who didn’t actively support the move was Katsumata, Kusaka’s immediate boss. But he just kept quiet. He stood back and let Kusaka arrest the wrong man.”

  “Why?”

  “To take him down a peg, I guess. Katsumata knew that Kusaka was a good detective, and for him, that was a good enough reason to engineer a pratfall. This sergeant who worked the case with them told me that Katsumata even faked evidence designed to lead Kusaka to the wrong guy. Kusaka’s suspect had been in custody several days, when suddenly Katsumata brings in a completely different guy—the real perp—and proceeds to demolish Kusaka’s case. Kusaka was hung out to dry by his superiors: he got all the blame, and his reputation took a big hit. At the time, he was doing his promotional exams for lieutenant first grade, and they failed him—he didn’t even make lieutenant second grade.

  “Since then, Kusaka won’t allow himself—or anyone else—to speculate about cases. He conducts his investigations flawlessly and always builds a rock-solid case. Talk about unintended consequences! Katsumata lived to regret his dirty trick. He’s been grumbling for years about having created a Frankenstein’s monster.”

  Imaizumi tipped the last of his coffee down his throat and threw the empty can into the trash.

  “You don’t need to hold back. Feel free to demolish Kusaka’s theories, if you don’t buy them. In a way, that’s what Kusaka wants.”

  “You’re joking,” burst out Reiko in surprise.

  “Kusaka has a great deal of respect for you. I know he does, believe me. Even if he doesn’t show it. The guy’s got a bigger heart than you think.”

  Imaizumi patted Reiko on the shoulder and walked through the automatic doors of the convenience store.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then. ’Night.”

  The door whooshed slowly shut behind him.

  Oh, dammit! I forgot the cleansing lotion!

  Following him inside now, however, didn’t seem like right thing to do.

  PART IV

  1

  I didn’t expect to get much out of Matsumoto, the electrician, so I started to probe some of the other old guys we worked with.

  The plasterer, the lumber merchant, the plumber, and the guy at the building supply store—they all knew about Nakagawa’s accident, but none of them knew anything about his family. They hadn’t been friends with him, after all. I eventually met an architect who’d helped out at Nakagawa’s funeral. By a stroke of luck, he had the details of the man’s only child, a daughter.

  She was called Michiko and lived in an apartment in Wataridamukai-cho in Kawasaki Ward. The architect gave me her cell phone number.

  That evening after work, I went straight around to her place. She was out. The next day I went a little earlier, probably around eight o’clock, but had no better luck. It was only on my third visit that I managed to see her.

  I got to the front of her building at half past seven. No sooner had I arrived than the door to her apartment opened and a delicate little girl, whose arms and legs looked to be about half the thickness of mine, came out and locked the door behind her. She had on a plain gray half coat and jeans. Where was she going that late in the evening? She certainly wasn’t dressed up for a night out.

  She walked in the direction of the local train station. I followed her from a distance. After about ten minutes, I was surprised see her walk in the back entrance of the Royal Diner on Route 15. I’d driven past the place more times than I could count, though I’d never actually stopped there.

  I went inside like an ordinary customer. The girl appeared at exactly eight o’clock. I called her over and ordered the beef curry set dinner with a Coke to drink.

  “Thank you, sir. Let me repeat your order to you.”

  She was pretty enough, though she looked a little worn out. A male server brought me my curry and salad, but she brought me my Coke.

  My only goal that day was to give her the once-over. I went home without trying to talk to her.

  * * *

  After that I continued going to the Royal Diner, a couple of times with the old man, mostly by myself. On nights when I went and found that the girl wasn’t
working there, I’d have a quick snack, then walk over to her place, leaving my car in the diner parking lot. I’d go to the back of her building because I could see if the lights in her place were on from there. Sometimes they were, and sometimes they weren’t.

  I wondered if I was doing the right thing. She had now gotten to know my face at the restaurant, though our relationship was only that of a waitress and a customer. Maybe it would have been better if I’d dropped in on her at her place without letting her get to know my face first. I was worried that accosting her after I’d already been to the diner so often would make me look like a stalker.

  One night I was watching her place from the street out front when something happened that changed everything.

  The door of her apartment was thrown open and someone came out. All the lights had been off when I’d checked earlier, so I’d thought no one was home. But it wasn’t the girl who came out; it was a man. He was tall with closely cropped hair and wearing a long dark coat. Shutting the door behind him, he stumbled toward me. When he passed under one of the streetlights, I got a good look at his face.

  It was him.

  It was the man who’d given me the money after my father died. The man that the boss had looked at so strangely when he appeared at that house we were working on. The man who worked for Kinoshita Construction.…

  He glanced casually at me and walked on by. He hadn’t recognized me. What was going on? I stayed in the street feeling rather helpless.

  A little later, the door of number 102 opened for a second time. This time it was the girl. She had on the same gray half coat I’d seen before, but this time her legs were bare and her feet were thrust into a pair of sandals. With one hand she was pulling her coat collar shut, while she held something in the other.

  Was it a cup? No, it was a jar.

  She plunged a hand into the jar, picked up a handful of white powder, and sprinkled it outside her door. She did it again. Beneath her open collar, I caught a glimpse of almost painfully white skin.

  I guessed that it was salt. Some kind of purification ritual, perhaps? Her hand began moving faster and faster; eventually she just turned the jar upside down and spilled whatever salt was left on the ground. Then she squatted on her haunches and started bashing the jar on the cement.