The Daydreamer Detective Braves the Winter

by S. J. Pajonas

  She hobbled to the door. “Hopefully, they’ll keep coming until I’m dead.”

  “Well, isn’t that cheerful?” Sheesh. The whole elderly mindset was so final, but I kind of enjoyed the raw reality. There was something comforting about knowing you only had so much time left, so you made the most of it. This was nothing like the terrifying feeling of seeing your life come to an end at the age of twenty-six. I stared into space, the flames in the barn swirling around me. “You had a second chance, and look what you did with it. Nothing.” I’m doing something now, Tama.

  Shaking away the daydream, I counted the papers in the stack in front of me. Murata wanted to clean up her place so she could entertain and see people in her last years, and I admired that. I was happy to help her.

  She opened the door, and I heard Goro on the other side introduce himself and ask to enter.

  “Look at how big you are now! I remember when you were just a young boy, running and playing in the park with your friends.” Murata smiled, doting on Goro as his crooked grin grew. “And now you’re a police officer. How do you like your job?”

  Goro bowed to her. “I like it very well, Murata-san. Thanks for letting me come by to talk to you.” He angled past Murata and nodded to me. “Mei-chan. I see you’re busy.”

  I nodded to him. “I am. Murata-san has a lot of recycling to do.”

  “I’m also baking bread in the kitchen, so please come with me.” She waved at Goro to follow her, and he did after unlacing and kicking off his shoes at the door.

  I had a good view of the kitchen from my spot, but I kept busy with sorting and bagging, stacking bags of paper by the door. I wanted to make sure I had enough to take down in a few trips without overloading the bins so other people couldn’t use them. When this was done, I’d vacuum and dust.

  “You knew Etsuko-san a long time, isn’t that right?” Goro asked, pulling out his notebook. I smiled at the familiar gesture. He was a fastidious note taker.

  “She lived across the hall from me for the past five years. Got the place when her parents started employing her full-time at the izakaya. Such a wonderful family.” I glanced up to see her shake her head as she lifted a cloth from a bowl. “The funeral is tomorrow. Will you be there?”

  “I will indeed.” Goro nodded my way. “Will you be there Mei-chan?”

  “I plan to be. I have to help another client get to her physical therapy appointment, but I can come after.” Whatever I earned here today would go into an envelope for the funeral tomorrow. Easy come, easy go. “Then I can come back here in the afternoon. Murata-san, please let me know if you need help getting to and from the funeral.”

  “Sure, Mei-chan.” She floured the surface of her counter and dumped the bowl of dough onto it, folding and kneading it.

  “So tell me more about Etsuko-san and anything you may know about her… activities.”

  “Now I don’t want to be a gossip,” Murata began, “but she had a lot of people coming and going from her place. Her boyfriend was around one weekend per month. Then there were other men I saw, and she had a book club that met every other week.”

  Goro smiled. “Yes, my wife was a member. She was good friends with Etsuko.”

  “Then she must know about the men who came and went from there.” Murata shook her head and clucked her tongue. “I don’t think she was dating any of them because, when I asked her if she had broken up with her boyfriend, she always said no. But that doesn’t explain the men I’d run into on the stairs.”

  “Is that it? You’d just run into them on the stairs?” Goro’s pen was poised in mid-air.

  “No,” she said, dipping her head. “I would hear them come and go and peek through my peephole.” She waved at the door. “Once I heard arguing in the hall. Etsuko said, ‘You can’t keep coming up to my apartment so often. People will notice.’ But that was our landlord, always in his fancy suit. Maybe she was behind on the rent or something. I only ever caught sight of the other men. Once or twice, in passing.”

  Hmmm, I contemplated this as Murata kneaded the dough on the counter. Punch, slap, turn, punch, slap, turn. Maybe Etsuko didn’t pay her rent on time like her bills? I bet Goro would look into it. But what about Hisashi? Was she cheating on him? Did he kill her because she was unfaithful? I tried to imagine the situation in my head, and I couldn’t. I could usually daydream up any situation, but this murder scene refused to stick no matter how hard I tried.

  “If you can describe any of the other men, I’ll have a sketch artist come by and ask you questions. Would that be all right?”

  “Sure,” she said, pausing and throwing more flour on the dough. “I want to help out. She was such a sweet girl. Whatever she was into, it didn’t matter to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, maybe she was running a brothel? Or maybe a gambling ring or something?” Murata poked Goro’s arm with her floury finger.

  He looked over at me when Murata returned to her dough and rolled his eyes. I smiled back as I set another stack of bagged paper by the door.

  “It’s probably a lot less sinister than that,” he assured her.

  “Well, she’s dead, isn’t she?” Murata countered, and both of our smiles fell.

  “Yes. That’s very true.” He cleared his throat. “What else can you remember?”

  Murata paused for a moment, turning her eyes to the ceiling before picking up her dough and plopping it into the bowl again.

  “There was one other thing. I heard her mention a sleeping fox quite a few times. Ne kitsune. Ne kitsune. She said the phrase quite a few times. ‘I’m grateful for ne kitsune.’ She said that to one of the men once. Who’s grateful for sleeping foxes? Unless you’re superstitious and hope those foxes don’t possess you.”

  She laughed at her own joke and turned the temperature dial on her oven. Goro took notes, nodding but not giving away any thoughts.

  “Can you describe any of the men who left her apartment?”

  “Yes. Two of them.” She dusted off her hands. “They were both young and good looking.” She shrugged her shoulders. “You know young men these days. The crazy hair, skinny clothes, and soft spoken ways. They’re all the same.”

  I tried not to laugh. Our generation must have been so confusing to these older folks. I came out of high school relatively moderate, never having gotten into any of the Tokyo fashion trends or body modifications that were so popular now, but plenty of my friends had money to burn on those hobbies. Weekends in Shinjuku, parading around and letting foreigners take their pictures. It was fun but didn’t last.

  “Hmmm,” Goro said, chewing on the end of his pen. “I’ll have to search on this one.”

  Me too. As soon as I got to some WiFi, I was going to start searching for sleeping foxes.

  “Notice anything else?” Goro asked as he folded up his notebook and pen. He’d obviously hit the end of his questioning.

  “Just the crazy amount of bento boxes that girl loved. I swear she got more every week. I have a box of them addressed to her,” she said, waving at a cardboard box in the corner. We both glanced at it, and there was nothing distinctive about it except the stamp on the outside, “Bento Box - 12 ct.” I remembered the collection of bento boxes in Etsuko’s apartment, lying on the floor around her body and on shelves, undisturbed. She certainly seemed to love them.

  “I’ll have someone come by and pick that up soon.” Goro nodded and stored his notebook in his pocket.

  I couldn’t delay any longer on my job. “I’m going to take these down to the bins,” I said, gesturing at the piles by the door. “I’ll be in and out.”

  I would’ve loved to stay and hear more of what they had to talk about, but I slipped on my shoes and grabbed a stack of bags, holding the door open with my hip. I glanced over at Etsuko’s doorway before I descended the stairs. I imagined her, out on the landing, talking to some hip, young man. Had she been flirting when she said she was thankful for sleeping foxes? What did that have to do with him? And
did this have anything to do with her murder?

  On the first floor, I found the room for trash and recycling and added Murata’s bagged paper to the piles already stacked in the room. The property manager would come and move the bundles out to the curb on the proper days.

  When I ascended the stairs and entered the apartment, Goro was finishing up.

  “Thanks for lending me your time, Murata-san. I really appreciate it. Here’s my card. Call me if you think of anything else? Anything. Even tiny details you may think are insignificant will be helpful.” Murata took his card in both of her hands and slipped it into her apron.

  “Mei-chan, can I help bring those down for you?” He gestured to the piles by the door.

  “Sure. Murata-san, I’ll be right back up, and then I can vacuum and dust before helping clean the kitchen.”

  She waved me on and Goro said good-bye as we grabbed the piles, and I followed him down the stairs. We added the bundles to the stacks in the trash room, and Goro stretched his back before sighing.

  “I’m not going to lie, Mei-chan, but this is a strange case. No one has any idea why Etsuko would be killed.” He ticked off points on his fingers. “She was a great student in school. She was a loyal family member. She worked hard and never paid her bills late. Kumi thought the world of her, and you know how Kumi is.” He rubbed at a shadow of a beard on his cheek. “It looks like a crime of passion and Hisashi swears he had no idea. He’s been a wreck since we brought him in on Monday. All of our questions don’t break him. He says he was on one of the afternoon trains back to Tokyo. That he left, and she was alive, said goodbye to him at the door. His story checks out, too. There was a train ticket purchased and cameras in Tokyo Station captured him getting off the train.”

  “Then why don’t you let him go?”

  “We can’t,” Goro insisted, exasperated. “He’s our only suspect. We’ve checked everything. As far as we can tell, she had no outstanding debts or connections with organized crime…”

  My heart skipped a beat. “You don’t suppose… Tama?”

  “No.” He laid his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t. Tama and Etsuko only ever saw each other at the izakaya, and even then, they barely ever talked. The izakaya carried the beer of the distributor that Tama knew, but that’s about it. Honestly, we don’t expect to ever see Tama again. He’ll be locked up for good.”

  “But I’m here and alive. So is Akiko. That wasn’t a part of his plan, and it’s possible people could come and collect on his debts.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “We don’t know what his plan was, and there’s been no chatter about it anywhere. The Tokyo and Kobe police departments have wiretaps and surveillance. No one batted an eye at his arrest. Knowing Tama, he thought he was a lot more important than he really was.”

  That could’ve been the case. Tama blew everything out of proportion. I mean, who kills their former girlfriend because her mother loved her? Only someone totally out of touch with reality.

  “Anyway,” Goro continued, “there’s literally no reason to kill Etsuko.”

  “There’s no reason we know of,” I stressed. The image of her talking on the phone, adamant and angry, popped into my head. “There must be something. Have you checked her mobile phone? The night we all went out, on Saturday, she took a call and went outside. I remember watching her and she seemed upset to me.”

  Goro’s mouth twisted. “Well… So here’s the thing. I definitely suspect her of something because she regularly deleted the call logs on her phone. When we got it, there was no history. We’ve contacted the phone company and asked for the records but it’ll be another day or two.”

  My scalp prickled, and I hugged myself against the cold of the recycling room. “She was hiding something, whatever it was.”

  “Let’s keep digging. Call me if you think of anything.”

  We bowed to each other at the front door, and I re-joined Murata in the apartment.

  I felt the need to dig even further into Etsuko’s life, but I didn’t want Murata to think I was a gossip, so I changed the subject.

  “Murata-san, I was wondering something,” I said, stepping into her kitchen and lifting the towel on the bowl of dough, already rising again. “Could you teach me to make bread?”

  Murata raised her eyebrows at me.

  “I’m hopeless in the kitchen, and I want to learn how to make a few things. Bread doesn’t look too hard.”

  She laughed, slapping her hand on the counter.

  “Baking is harder than cooking,” she said, her voice rising in incredulity.

  “Well, I believe there’s less chance of me setting fire to something if I bake.” I lifted my index finger in the air and smiled.

  “Indeed,” she said, nodding. “Okay. When you come back tomorrow, I’ll teach you some basics.”

  “Thank you,” I said, bowing. “I look forward to learning from a master.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere with me, Mei-chan.” She laughed again and my insides warmed at the sound. “The vacuum is in the hall closet. Get to work.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The street was dark when I exited Murata’s apartment building. Evening descended swiftly in the winter, the sun setting at a ridiculous 16:30 and earlier every day. A cold wind whipped up the street and blew straight through me, turning me to into a walking block of ice. After spending my day warm at the bathhouse, the restaurant, Yasahiro’s place, and Murata’s apartment, I dreaded returning to the farmhouse because the evening would be as cold as a brick. Plus, we had no food at home.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket as I began to walk home. There was a voicemail I missed while cleaning out Murata’s paper piles. “Mei-chan, I’ve brought home food from work and am going to turn in early tonight. We can go to the funeral tomorrow after I’m home from working at the school. Don’t be too late tonight. It’s going to be below zero, and we’ll need to sleep together again to keep warm.” The voicemail ended, and I checked the number of the caller. She must have called from the landline at work because her mobile phone was turned off. I was only lucky to have mine because of Yasahiro.

  I paused on the sidewalk and turned around. I could see Yasahiro’s apartment from here, only two blocks away. Inside, the kitchen light glowed faintly behind the drawn blinds. I knew it was warm and empty in there, but I should go home to Mom. I turned to keep walking. But we’d have more food at home if I wasn’t there to eat it. I stopped walking again. What if I spent the early evening at Yasahiro’s? I could help myself to some food, sit in the warmth, and then I’d take the bus home around 20:00.

  Reaching into my pocket, I closed my gloved hand around the key he gave me. He told me to come to his apartment whenever I wanted to. He told me to make myself comfortable.

  But I had just been there. Wouldn’t it have been selfish of me to take advantage of this?

  It wasn’t selfish if he told me to do it, right?

  Two people passed me and stared at me. I jolted out of my head and apologized for standing in the middle of the walkway. I must have looked crazy, staring into space.

  Screw it. I was going to Yasahiro’s.

  I turned and hustled to his street, speeding up my legs and trying to keep them from numbing into oblivion.

  Inside his apartment, the light came on, and after taking off my boots and coat, I fiddled with the home controls until I found a lighting solution I was happy with. I set my bag on the large dining room table and pulled my keys out. Wrenching the key ring open, I slipped Yasahiro’s key and cat keychain on with all my others. There. Now it was semi-permanent.

  I’d been carrying my computer around all day and still not done any work, so I pulled it from my bag and turned it on. While it was booting up, I had time to wander around. I grabbed a block of cheese from the fridge, an orange, and some crackers, put them all on a plate and set them next to my computer. I’d love to open a bottle of wine, but I had no idea what to choose from the giant wine rack in the pantry. I resisted the
urge to write Yasahiro a note about the food I took. He told me to help myself.

  Taking my glass of water with me, I stepped into his bedroom, running my hand along the soft duvet before coming to his computer desk on the other side of the room. I shuffled through the pieces of paper on his desk until I found what I was looking for, the WiFi password. I smiled at a photo that must be his whole family. He looked five years younger in the photo, and they were all on a cliff near water.

  With WiFi access, I turned on music on my computer, ate cheese and crackers, and got to work. I couldn’t help glancing up often to take in my surroundings. This was my boyfriend’s apartment. He gave me the key. I smiled like an idiot as I sent out resumes and applied to part-time positions on various contractor websites. Many of the jobs were in Tokyo, but what could I do? I needed work. The 14,000 yen I’d make a week taking care of elderly clients was not going to work for me long-term, though I already loved it. I wished I could parlay it into a full-time job somehow.

  Around 18:00, I started to feel sleepy, yawning and stretching, and unable to keep my eyes open. My choices were to figure out Yasahiro’s Italian coffee maker or take a nap, neither of which was a good idea. I forced myself to concentrate on my computer and tried Googling “sleeping foxes ne kitsune” but all that appeared were adorable photos of sleeping foxes. I scrolled and scrolled, but I didn’t see anything even remotely pertaining to something other than furry forest creatures.

  I set my head down on my arms. Maybe I could take a nap. Yeah. Yeah, I’d take a thirty-minute nap, get on the bus, and go home to Mom. It wasn’t like I slept well at home any way, so I doubted taking a nap now would hinder me falling asleep later.

  I glanced behind me to Yasahiro’s bedroom. The bed sang to me, “Come! Sweet tired person, lay your head upon my fluffy, warm pillows” in an Italian operatic falsetto. How could I resist?