The Lady Killer

by Masako Togawa

  The policemen on either side of him reeked of tinned salmon or of bean-paste soup with spring onions. These homely smells bespoke domestic peace and quiet.

  The examination at the police headquarters went on for twenty days, and all he could do was deny that he was guilty. He began to wonder if he was going mad. They refused to allow him to see anyone, even a lawyer. The line that the police took was not the customary one of urging him to confess. Instead, they thrust more and more irrefutable evidence before him and asked him how he could possibly deny his guilt. It was like a psychological torture for him; his only alibis were worthless, or rather uncallable.

  They asked him where he had left his Italian shoes, and when he said that they had vanished from the shoe box by the entrance, they laughed and told him that they had turned up wrapped in newspaper in Mitsuko Kosugi’s closet, and that the only fingerprints on them were his—and hers.

  They produced the herringbone jacket, which they had recovered from his father’s house. Out of the pockets came the maroon tie—and a nylon stocking and a key. He remembered the tie, but was not conscious of having had the stocking used in the murder of Fusako Aikawa or Mitsuko Kosugi’s room key.

  He began to think that perhaps, after all, he was guilty, that he had committed the murders without being conscious of it.

  Furthermore, they told him, although he claimed only to have been in the rooms of the two murdered women for a very short time, they had found semen of his blood group in the bodies of the women. This was evidence suggesting that he had spent at least long enough there to have had sexual intercourse with his victims.

  A rare blood group, and one that was found in a bloodstain at one of the scenes of his crimes: AB Rh-negative. Only one person in two thousand had it—and he was one of them. He was at a loss for words.

  And so he relapsed into silence, saying nothing no matter what they showed him or told him. After he was committed for trial, he sat staring blankly at the prison walls, asking himself again and again, “Who did it? Who did it?”

  But then he ceased to ask himself this question, because in his heart of hearts he knew that there was no way to find out the answer to it.

  INTERVAL

  Ichiro Honda, engineer, aged 29, sentenced to death on June 30 at Tokyo District court on charges of sex-related murders. The defendant denied the charges.

  On a charge of murdering Kimiko Tsuda on November the 5th, he was found not guilty on grounds of insufficient evidence.

  On a charge of murdering Fusako Aikawa on December the 19th, and on another charge of murdering Mitsuko Kosugi on January the 15th, he was found guilty.

  There were no extenuating circumstances in either case.

  The verdict was handed down a hundred and fifty-six days after the arrest of the accused at the Toyo Hotel.

  The defendant immediately filed notice of appeal to the Tokyo court of appeals, claiming that the verdict was wrong.

  Important items of evidence upon which expert witnesses testified:

  A pair of low-heeled gentleman’s shoes of Italian manufacture, left by the defendant in Mitsuko Kosugi’s room.

  A maroon-colored tie, the size of which corresponded exactly with the strangulation marks on Mitsuko Kosugi’s neck.

  A woman’s brown stocking, which, it was testified, was of a size corresponding to the strangulation marks on the neck of Fusako Aikawa.

  Transcript of evidence given on the third day of the trial.

  Examination of expert medical witness by the Public Prosecutor:

  Question. Was there any evidence to suggest that the victim, Mitsuko Kosugi, struggled with her assailant?

  Answer. The only evidence was the presence of blood under all her fingernails, except her two thumbs and the little finger of her right hand. The blood was deeply engrained under her nails.

  Question. Of what type was this blood?

  Answer. Type AB, Rh-negative.

  Question. Of what type was the victim’s blood?

  Answer. Type O.

  Question. Then you would agree that the blood found under the victim’s nails could not have been her own?

  Answer. Yes, I agree.

  Questions put by the judge to the defendant:

  Question. What is your blood type?

  Answer. Type AB, Rh-negative.

  Question. When did you learn this was your type?

  Answer. When I entered Asia Moral University and my blood was tested by the Institute of Biology there.

  Question put by the judge to the arresting police officer:

  Question. When you examined the defendant after taking him into custody, did you find any scars or other indication of recent injury?

  Answer. I had no warrant to carry out a physical examination, so I could not carry out a full check. However, I noticed that there were small scabs on both his left cheek and the back of his right hand.

  Summation of points arising from the foregoing evidence made by the judge:

  Whether or not there were any wounds on the defendant’s body, which appear to have been made on about January 15th.

  There were such wounds.

  The blood type of the defendant.

  Type AB Rh-negative.

  The blood type evinced in the defendant’s semen.

  Secretion type of type AB.

  Evidence presented by the prosecution was based upon thirty-five man-days of research. Amongst the witnesses called were:

  A hotel receptionist.

  Gave evidence that on the day of one of the crimes, Ichiro Honda returned to the hotel in the early morning.

  A policeman employed on foot patrol.

  Testified that he passed Ichiro Honda in the vicinity of Fusako Aikawa’s apartment early in the morning on the night of the murder.

  Two taxi drivers.

  Each swore that on the night of a murder they had picked up Ichiro Honda in the small hours and carried him to the vicinity of Yotsuya Sanchome.

  The manager of the Meikei-so.

  Testified that Ichiro Honda had been his tenant.

  Friends of Fusako Aikawa and Mitsuko Kosugi.

  Gave evidence on the relationship of the accused with the murdered women.

  Other witnesses, also.

  But, most significantly, the accused was unable to call a single witness to testify as to his alibi.

  PART 2

  Collecting the Evidence

  THE LAWYERS

  1

  Hajime Shinji hastily got up from the mattress and quilts on the floor, which made up his bed, and pulled a shirt with a dirty collar over his torso. Without pausing to choose, he grabbed the nearest tie he could find and knotted it around his neck. The rest of his toilet was just as perfunctory, and within minutes he was on the way out of his room, leaving the bedding rumpled just as it was on the floor. There was a newspaper in his letterbox; without glancing at it, he rolled the pages, which still smelled of fresh ink, and stuffed it into his pocket and hurried off down the street.

  Such had been the daily pattern of Hajime Shinji’s life since he had graduated from the Regal Institute of Law and Research and begun work as an attorney at the Hatanaka Law Office.

  On the station platform he bought two bottles of milk and gulped them down as he waited for the train. It arrived, and he was borne along in the throng and squeezed into the crowded compartment.

  Shinji was not tall—a mere five feet three inches—but his swarthy face and muscular body gave him an appearance of intrepidity. His main problem nowadays was that he was beginning to lose interest in the work that had so fascinated him when he had first joined the law office. As his curiosity had become blunted, everything he did seemed to become reduced to mere routine and became meaningless to him. The courts, which had once seemed to him to be the personification of legal solemnity, now seemed no more than gray buildings where the same futile arguments were continuously repeated. Hajime Shinji was bored.

  The chief of the law office where he worked was Kentar
o Hatanaka. A senior figure in the profession, he had completed two terms as president of his local lawyers’ association and was well known for the articles he wrote for magazines. He had saved many men from the death sentence and was much in demand as an appeal lawyer. But he had his enemies. They would say of him that he courted publicity, or that, with his reputation, he took work away from other lawyers. It was further alleged by his critics that he only took on cases when victory seemed certain. And, most of all, his colleagues criticized him for taking on cases even when it seemed certain that the defendant could never pay. This was regarded as a particularly obnoxious form of self-promotion.

  Shinji had no patience for such views. The reason that he had joined Hatanaka’s practice in the first place had been his deep sense of respect for this upright old man, alone in the world without wife or child, a humanist whose whole life rotated around trials in court, and who applied himself to everything he did in a manner that made it clear that he believed it to be worth doing.

  And yet, despite his respect for Hatanaka, Shinji’s life had recently come to seem empty. For his ambition had always been to be a judge and not a lawyer. It had been this dream that had sustained him through all those night classes at the Regal Institute after his grueling day’s work as a forwarding clerk at a department store. When, to reduce the long vista of study that lay before him, he had opted for the attorney’s course rather than the judicial one, he had felt guilty; he was letting society down, he thought, merely for considerations of his own welfare. And this feeling still remained with him.

  A lawyer should be proud of his profession; he knew that. But what was the purpose of a life passed as a public defender in so many trivial cases? It had become his lot to defend petty filchers, sneak thieves, and demented people who set fire to garbage piles and were accused of arson. Once, he had been involved in a case where a teenage boy had stabbed a taxi driver in order to rob him of the princely sum of two thousand yen. His ambition was to become involved in some great and dramatic case where love and hate were intertwined; gradually he had come to realize that, in real life, such cases did not exist for him.

  Such, then, were his thoughts as he went to work today. But today, had he but known it, was different, for the Hatanaka Law Office had just accepted the Appeal Court case of Ichiro Honda.

  It was a week later when Shinji was sent for by Hatanaka. He found his chief deeply ensconced in the comfortable leather chair behind his desk, smoking a pungent cigar.

  “Sit down,” the old man said. “Yes, there will do. Now, you have read the reports of the Ichiro Honda murder trial, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Shinji replied. “I even went to one of the sessions, as the defending counsel, Wada, was my senior at law school.”

  “Indeed? Well, Wada will be helping us in the appeal case, too. A serious-minded fellow, that. All right in his way, but lacks flexibility, wouldn’t you agree? He’s too cautious; unimaginative, too. Well, I won’t ask you to comment on your senior.”

  The old man fell silent for a moment, his worn-out eyes fixed upon the drifting smoke of his cigar. Then he began to speak again.

  “What do you think of the Honda case?”

  Shinji had observed Honda in the prisoner’s box at the trial, although he had mostly only seen his profile. To tell the truth, he had felt no particular interest in this man who had sat with downcast eyes as the prosecutor had launched into a peroration on how he had strangled women merely to satisfy his abnormal sexual instincts.

  “Well, I got the impression that although Honda is essentially a weak man, he could, nonetheless, be capable of the cold-blooded acts of which he was accused.”

  He picked his words carefully and the old lawyer detected this and smiled.

  “Yes, well, I daresay you are right. But nevertheless I’m not satisfied. It doesn’t fit, somehow; murder doesn’t go with my image of the defendant.”

  He paused again and then went on.

  “Think of it this way. We know that Honda was a lady’s man. Why, then, did he only become a monster with those three women? With so many victims of his sexual charm, why only those three? Did he try it and fail in other cases, I wonder? If he is such a pervert, did he have, shall we say, unconsummated affairs? Were there others he tried to strangle without success?”

  “I don’t think the police went into this aspect far enough. They were just out for a conviction; that’s their job, I suppose. But I agree that the other women of his acquaintance should have been investigated. I suppose they didn’t want to come forward for obvious reasons.”

  “Quite. So I’ve got a little job for you. I want you to contact Honda’s other girlfriends and see what you can find out.” Hatanaka looked quizzically at Shinji, blowing a smoke ring the while.

  “But how can I find them?”

  “Oh, that’s easy enough; I’ve got a list. Here it is. Wada got a detective agency to track them all down. Of course, it’s only a fraction of the women he has been involved with, but it will do for a start. Find out if he ever seemed violent or threatening with them.”

  He passed the list across the desk, and Shinji studied it. Names and brief personal histories appeared, together with sketch maps of the apartments and workplaces of the women.

  “Those are all that Honda remembers for sure, it seems. There were plenty more, but he says that they were all listed in his hunting diary, which he claims vanished from his hideout.”

  “Hunting diary?”

  The old man explained.

  “Did he really keep such a diary, do you think?”

  “Well, if he did, and if we can find it, it could be an important key to this case. But for the time being, concentrate on the women we know about, and keep me informed.”

  He dropped his glance back to the documents on his desk as a symbol of dismissal.

  During the next week Shinji applied himself to the task that Hatanaka had given him whenever he had a spare moment between his routine cases. Not only was this a big case by his standards: he had another reason of his own for being so interested in it. For on the list of Honda’s conquests, a mere five women, there was one name that he recognized. The name and the personal history fitted. They belonged to a clerk at a lending library whom Shinji had known at school.

  This coincidence struck Shinji as being ironic and in a way amusing. But was there not something of destiny in it, too?

  2

  Shinji decided to tackle the two most difficult women first, the ones who had refused to say anything to the police. He felt like a child saving the best things on his plate till the end. But after all he could get nothing out of either of those two. In one case, he had gone to a modern apartment block in Meguro; the door had been opened by a woman cradling a baby in her arms. She drove him away fiercely, treating him as if he were a door-to-door salesman or something. It was hardly surprising, he reflected; what married woman was going to endanger her position by talking about an old romance with a convicted murderer?

  The third woman on his list was a Miss Kyoko Matsuda, aged nineteen, working in a coffee shop in Shinjuku. He decided to drop in there on the way to the office in Hibiya.

  When he got there, he found that the shop was tucked under a bridge that carried the Koshu Kaido expressway over a humbler road. It was a cheap nighttime drinking area, and the neon signs and signboards looked dusty in the strong sunshine of the day. There was a big sign outside the shop: MORNING SERVICE, COFFEE AND TOAST. He went in. As he had expected, it was not crowded at this hour; the only customer was a man immersed in a racing paper.

  “Is Miss Kyoko Matsuda in?”

  The cashier to whom he had put this question nodded in the direction of a cheap restaurant opposite. “She’s gone to early lunch over there.”

  “Can you tell me what kind of clothes she is wearing?”

  The woman looked at him suspiciously for a moment, her surprise creasing the heavy makeup she wore even by day. Eventually she shrugged and replied, “She’s in
a yellow cardigan.” Shinji thanked her and left the shop.

  The restaurant to which he had been directed was long and low; in his fancy, it looked like a stranded eel. Arrayed in the windows of the narrow frontage were wax models of the various dishes served: peas boiled in honey and sweet bean jam, azuki bean soup with rice cake, rice balls, a few Chinese dishes, pork cutlets. He pushed his way in through the low door.

  Inside, all the customers were women; there was not a male to be seen. He quickly identified Kyoko Matsuda; she was sitting at a table by the door, her back to him. He took the seat opposite her.

  “I apologize for disturbing you,” he said, presenting his name card.

  “Quite all right,” she said cheerfully, still plying her chopsticks. Shinji began to feel a glimmer of hope.

  Just then a waitress came up and presented him with a menu. He would have to order something; without thinking, he pointed at a dish called tokoroten, a vinegared seaweed jelly flavored with horseradish. Too late he regretted ordering such an eccentric dish; moreover, it was one that women tended to eat more than men. But Kyoko looked up smiling.

  “How delicious! I’ll have one, too.” And she pushed her empty plate toward the waitress.

  When they were alone, Shinji smiled at her wryly.

  “I hear you were a friend of Ichiro Honda.”

  “Yes. About a year ago.”

  “Did he come to the coffee shop, then?”

  “No.” She shook her head and went on. “He was sitting next to me at the cinema. That’s how I met him. He told me he was a second-generation American Japanese, and my aunt lives in San Francisco, so that’s how we got talking. I found him interesting, and we both got the same idea at once—to go out and paint the town red together. We went to a bar I know and drank gin fizzes—lots of them.” She giggled.