I dialed Goro. “You won’t believe who I ran into just now,” I said to him as soon as he answered.
“Well, you can tell me all about it in person. We’re heading into Etsuko’s apartment right now. Come on by and help us out.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Once I got Yamida back home, I stomped through the snow and ate instant ramen from the convenience store. I scowled down at the styrofoam cup as I slurped up the last of the noodles. This stuff was awful! How had I eaten this all those years living in Tokyo? I tossed my chopsticks into the empty cup and then recycled the different pieces of my lunch, angry at myself for a hundred reasons. I used to love junk food. Cheap ramen and cold green tea on my thirty-minute lunch break were a part of my life. I adored it. I craved it. Now, I stood in front of the recycling bins at the convenience store and realized my few months with Yasahiro had changed me. His love of food — quality, local, healthy food — had transferred to me. And I couldn’t even cook it. Turning on a burner on the stove made me sweat and my heart race. I had cooked eggs the other day, and it had been the most harrowing fifteen minutes I’d had since I almost died in the barn fire.
I wondered… I wondered if I asked him, would Yasahiro teach me how to cook? He was in Paris right now teaching other young students to cook. Would he do that for me? I stepped over to the window of the store and stared out at the snowy chaos on the streets of Chikata. The buses were running and people were walking around in high boots and carrying umbrellas. I let my eyes blur and imagined being taught to cook by Yasahiro. In my mind, he showed me how to handle a knife, his arms wrapped around me. I chopped vegetables slowly, and he complimented me on how good I was doing. My chest constricted when I imagined the two of us working in the kitchen together. But the scene immediately devolved into us tearing each other’s clothes off and having sex on the dining room table.
I shook my head and tried again, but we ended up in the bedroom. Clearly, my brain had other ideas about what I could be doing with Yasahiro in our “spare time.”
“Can I help you find anything else?” the store clerk asked, passing me on his way to stock the shelves. I blushed, sure he could read my dirty thoughts. I should’ve bought a sponge and dish soap to clean up my brain.
“No. I’m just psyching myself up to go back out there.” I waved at the wintery mess outside.
“Only way to do that is to charge right out. Thinking about it too much will only make it worse.”
I buttoned up and put my hat on. “Story of my life. Thanks!”
I plowed through the streets, avoiding clumps of people, and puddles of dark, slushy water that could swallow me whole. When I reached Murata’s building (Etsuko’s old building), three police cars and a van were parked outside, and an officer I didn’t recognize guarded the front door.
“Only residents are allowed inside right now,” he said, blocking my way with his arm.
“Hokichi-san told me to meet him here.” I stepped to the side while he conferred with someone inside on his radio. Pulling my phone from my pocket, I found a text from Yasahiro checking in on me. I smiled as I texted him back that I was good and keeping busy. I hesitated, but I gathered enough courage to admit that I missed him too. I didn’t want to seem needy, but I also didn’t want him to think that I didn’t think about him while he was gone. These are the things I always had difficulty with early in a relationship. Sometimes, I came on too strong. Other times, I was too distant. This relationship was different because I hadn’t even believed it existed in the first month! I had trouble accepting that I was really dating Yasahiro, though clearly we were a couple now.
“You can go up,” the officer said, knocking me out of a daydream about Yasahiro coming home from Paris and sweeping me off my feet.
Outside of Etsuko’s old apartment, a long, neat line of boots sat on a meter long piece of brown heavy paper. I added my boots to the end, glanced at Murata’s door, and entered Etsuko’s instead. I hadn’t been here since the night she was murdered, but the place didn’t feel anything like that night because it was crawling with police officers. A trio of people sifted through her DVD collection, her desk, and cut open her couch. From her bedroom, bits of cotton fluff trailed out into the hallway. When they had said they’d take the place apart, they’d meant it.
“Goro-san?” I called out. Everyone’s heads snapped up and the young man cutting up the couch jerked his head at the bedroom. I bowed multiple times as I made my way down the hall. The place was a mess. Etsuko’s bed linens were stuffed in large evidence bags and another officer used a knife to cut open her mattress. Goro was half in her closet, pulling out boxes.
“Mei-chan! Welcome!” The excitement on his face cratered my stomach. No one should be this happy tearing up someone else’s life.
“Ugh. How can you guys even do this?”
“Do what?” They both asked, their hair dusted with cotton and purple nitrile gloves on each hand.
“Destroy someone else’s house. It just doesn’t… It doesn’t feel right.” This bothered me to my very core. One of the principles we were taught growing up was to show respect for others, their property, and their privacy. A search this intense violated every single one of those tenets.
Goro left his post and came to me. “This is part of the job. We want to find the person that killed Etsuko, right?” I nodded my head in agreement. “Finding him requires a thorough search. She would be okay with this. Besides, the sooner we do this, the sooner her parents can have everything.”
“Right. Makes sense.” I swallowed and accepted that Etsuko would be okay with us going through her underwear drawer, though I wanted to destroy everything I had so no one could paw through it when I was gone.
“We need to search for money,” I blurted out, and both men stopped. “Jun, that guy from the escort service, followed me this morning and talked to me while Yamida-san was getting her physical therapy. Whatever happened to Etsuko, it involved a whole lot of money.”
“Wait wait wait… You don’t think…?” Goro rubbed his face, his eyes darting around the apartment, landing for a long time on the bags of her bed linens. There may have been DNA evidence in there.
“I don’t know what to think,” I said, my shoulders slumping. “What if she was a prostitute on the side? Or she had a gambling debt? Or she was handling money for the mob? I don’t know.”
“Whatever she did, she was careful. I never had any clue she was doing anything but working and seeing Hisashi. I don’t think Kumi did either. And we never found fingerprints in the apartment of any felons or foreign nationals.”
“It could be anybody. Anything.”
“Right.” Goro slipped past me into the main room. As I followed him and passed the bathroom, I waved to his partner, Kayo, standing at the sink.
“She had expensive taste in makeup,” Kayo said, showing me Etsuko’s stash. I focused on a bottle of moisturizer I knew to be at least 9000 yen at regular price. Expensive was right.
“Listen up everyone!” Goro yelled in the main room and everyone shuffled to be within eyesight of him. “We’re looking for money. Possibly large sums of cash.” He sighed, glancing around the room. “This means that if you haven’t found anything yet in obvious places, we’re going to have to be creative and start looking for hiding spots in the walls. Be sure to open every single one of those bento boxes too.”
Everyone nodded and got back to work.
“Mei-chan, grab a pair of gloves and search the kitchen, will you?”
I set my bag on a small kitchen table and snapped out a pair of gloves from a box sitting there. “Do I get paid for doing this? I have to go across the hall to Murata-san in two hours.”
Goro smiled. “I’ll let you keep the money I gave you yesterday.”
“Okay!”
“Perfect,” he grumbled as he walked away.
Since everyone else was making a huge mess of the place, I forced myself to make a
mess of Etsuko’s kitchen. It was a small space with only a few cabinets, a half-size refrigerator, a toaster oven, and two electric burners. I started with her refrigerator, which was pretty bare to begin with. Most of her food had gone bad, so I left it since I didn’t know what to do with it. What if it was against some police search procedure to trash or recycle things? Despite wanting to clean and bleach everything, I moved on.
I opened the top cabinets and emptied out the plates, bowls, and glasses making stacks along the far wall. Once everything was out, I hopped on the counter and looked inside the bare cabinet. Nothing — nothing in the corners or taped to the walls. I did the same with the bottom cabinets, taking out the pots, pans, cleaning supplies, dry food goods, and random stuff Etsuko had shoved in there at some point. I even found a few packs of unused nylons and a desiccated carrot. As far as I could tell, there was nothing more in the cabinets.
All the searching and organizing made me break out in a sweat, so I shed my coat and started in on the area around her stove. I pulled up the top and looked inside. I searched through her baskets of utensils. I opened every box of dry goods and cereal on her shelf to the left of the stove. Nothing.
I sat at the kitchen table to think. The guys in the living room had moved the couch away from the wall and were tearing off the trim with crowbars. I winced at the sound of nails squeaking against the wood.
Goro exited the bedroom and grabbed a bag from next to the door. “Any luck?” he asked, opening a thermos and drinking from it.
“Nothing.” I pointed to the plates, pots, and pans lining the one open wall. “I looked in everything.”
“Did you go over the cabinets with your fingertips and a flashlight?”
“No. I didn’t. Should I?”
He laughed. “Amateur. You know, normally, you wouldn’t be able to do this kind of thing. But because I’m here supervising, it’s fine.” He pulled a flashlight from his belt and handed it to me.
I knelt on my hands and knees and shined the flashlight into the empty cabinet.
“Look up. Were you able to open the drawers? If so, then the money isn’t attached to the bottom of them, but it could be taped up along the rear of the drawer.” Goro stood behind me and tapped his foot against mine.
I lit up the drawers, sliding each out and looking at the wall. Nothing.
“Sides?” he asked, and I examined them too, not seeing anything.
“Now the bottom. Tap it. There’s usually a space under the cabinets, between the cabinet and the floor.” I tapped along the bottom shelf of the cabinets, hearing the same echo — thonk, thonk, thonk. But the sound began to change, becoming duller, less loud, as I neared the side next to the stove. I tapped again and the wood rattled.
“Wait,” I said, being careful not to hit my head on the inside of the cabinet. I ran my fingers along the wood and detected a seam, so I pushed on a few spots, but it didn’t move. “I need a knife or something thin.” I ducked out of the cabinet for a breath of fresh air and Goro slapped a kitchen knife into my hand with a smile.
Heading back in, I put the flashlight on its side, slipped the knife into the seam, and pushed down. The piece jumped up with a pop. Inside, underneath the cabinets where Etsuko kept her pots and pans, where she cooked every day, a dozen stacks of cash were lined up neat, like pencils in a brand new box.
I honestly hadn’t thought I’d find anything! And my blood cooled, looking over all the money. There was a lot here, way too much for someone working at their family’s izakaya. Her izakaya salary had probably gone into savings. This money wasn’t supposed to belong to her. To the side of the plastic-wrapped stacks was a manila envelope. I was afraid to open it.
“The search is over,” I said, backing out and shining my light down at the jackpot.
“Kayo!” Goro called and she ran over.
“Sugoi!” she cried, covering her mouth. The other men and women in the apartment halted and joined us.
Goro knelt on the floor and handed each stack to Kayo. She placed them on the table, grabbing her notebook and making notes about everything. She unwrapped one bundle and flipped through it, her eyes flicking as she followed the 10,000 yen notes. She set her hand on each, moving her lips and muttering numbers.
“My guess is each of these is about fifty bills and there are… Forty bundles. Chikushō. That’s 20,000,000 yen.”
Everyone forgave Kayo’s burst of profanity and stared at the money. Goro reached into the cabinet and grabbed the manila envelope. He pulled out a cluster of papers, a thin booklet, photographs, and a key.
Goro studied the papers and photos, beads of sweat forming on his brow, before he put them back in the envelope, showing no one.
“Kayo-san, clear the room. Everyone returns to the office. Leave the place as-is, just take your stuff with you when you go.”
The men and women grumbled but obeyed, slowly filing out the door. Kayo spoke to them in the hallway and then shut the door behind her. I helped Goro up off the floor and we sat at the kitchen table. He placed the key next to the envelope.
“We’re in a lot of trouble on this one…” Goro stared past me to the window and the snow falling outside.
“What’s in the envelope?” I whispered, though my heart told me I shouldn’t ask. My brain had other ideas.
Goro opened the envelope and pulled out the photos. I averted my eyes immediately, counting to three, and looking again. Kayo, over my shoulder, gasped and swore again.
It wasn’t so much the pictures of two men in bondage that bothered me. That stuff was all over the internet, and I understood that people had kinky tastes in sex. But it was the man in the submissive position that caused the wave of shivers to fall over me.
This was the person Jun and I had in common! “He’s a powerful man,” Jun had said.
“Fujita Takahara,” I whispered. The ladies’ man, the bachelor of the year, the Midori Sankaku regional manager, the one who kept propositioning me every time I saw him. “Oh… My…”
“And that’s not all,” Goro said, flipping the stack of paper and the booklet around to me. The booklet was an accounting ledger, columns of numbers lined the top graph paper with dates and yen amounts. On the front cover, Bento Number Nine was printed in neat characters with an address in Sumida ward, old town Tokyo over by the Skytree.
Goro tipped over the envelope and Etsuko’s passport fell out. He thumbed through the pages and groaned, clutching at his forehead. “Singapore, several times over the past two years.”
“What does that mean? I thought she was visiting Hisashi.” I craned my neck to look at the passport.
“Apparently not. What’s he going to say when I ask him about this?”
This seemed like a rhetorical question so I didn’t answer.
“So…?” Kayo asked, her voice indicating she needed information from Goro.
“Definitely money laundering. Possibly some blackmail too. We’ll have to give this to a forensic accountant and see what he or she thinks. I wonder if Hisashi is involved too?” Goro stroked his chin.
“No. No way. He doesn’t strike me as the type.”
But I doubted the words as they came out of my mouth. I didn’t know him that well. Could he have done something like this? I picked up her passport and looked through the pages. She’d been going to Singapore every couple of months for the past two years. He had to have noticed.
I tossed the passport on the table. “I don’t know,” I said, sighing. “What about the key?”
“A safe deposit box. It has a number stamped on it. We’ll have to go through the ledger and search this place in Sumida to find out.”
Goro put everything in the envelope but the ledger. He looked between the ledger and the money on the table. “The money has to be hers. Damn. Why didn’t she spend it? That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“What do you mean?”
Goro rubbed his face again, his eyes tired. “When you launder money, you’re supposed to take your cut and sp
end it on luxury items… At least, that’s what I was taught.” He glanced at the piles. “She must have been saving it.”
“Well, now we know how she afforded to pay her bills on time and travel, too. Plus, look at her bento box collection and expensive taste in makeup.”
Goro laughed. “You’re supposed to spend it on cars and diamonds, Mei-chan. Not makeup.”
“Well, I doubt she was very experienced at laundering money. Hisashi was only a few months from living here. If I were her, I would have saved the money too. For things like a wedding dress, a honeymoon… Baby items.” I swallowed, my throat dry. “She was probably saving for her future. And I’m sure she wanted out of the mess before he moved here. What if she tried to quit and whomever she was working with freaked out and killed her?”
Goro glanced at the envelope again. “I’m betting it was Takahara.” He stood up and adjusted his belt. “I’m going to arrest him.”
“Wait,” I said, grabbing his arm. “We should gather more evidence first.” I pointed to the envelope. “Right now, Etsuko looks really bad. Everything’s in her name, and all we have are photos that could have been manipulated.”
Goro bit his lip.
“We need more,” I insisted. “Hisashi looks bad too. He was dating her. How did he not notice a whole business she was running? This Bento Number Nine, whatever it is.”
“Mei-san is right,” Kayo said, and I jumped. I had almost forgotten she was there. “This is bad for Etsuko. What if Hisashi was involved? What if Takahara is just an accomplice? The real motives could be anything.”
“Fine.” Goro sat back down. “But we need to get to work right away. Right now. You in?”
I glanced at Kayo and we nodded. “I’m in.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Since Goro and his crew had to return evidence to the police station and question Hisashi again, I volunteered to come by the station once I was done helping Murata for the afternoon.
The Daydreamer Detective Braves the Winter Page 18
