The Lady Killer

by Masako Togawa

  “I was passing by so I thought I’d drop in.”

  “I’ll be off in half an hour—we close at five-thirty.”

  He glanced at his wristwatch. “Well, then, maybe I can do a little research while I’m waiting. Graduates are allowed to borrow books, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, provided you don’t take them away. Use the reading room.”

  “Well, do you have anything on blood types?”

  She ran through her cards with a practiced hand and soon produced two volumes.

  “This is all we seem to have—unless, of course, you look in the encyclopedias, too.”

  Thanking her, Shinji carried the books to the reading room. He had wanted to talk to her for a little longer, but he knew the library rules—no talking or disturbing other people. The books she had given him were, as one might expect in a legal library, works on forensic medicine. He extracted all he could find that he thought might be of use, noting it in a small notebook that he carried, and then closed the books and lay back in the chair, smoking aimlessly and gazing up at the dirty ceiling until Michiko came.

  She had changed and was ready to go home. “Were the books useful?” she asked.

  “Oh yes, thank you. I found all I wanted.”

  “So you are working on a case involving blood types? It must be pretty complicated.”

  “Yes,” said Shinji, and then, summoning up his courage, “in fact, I am working on the defense of Ichiro Honda. You know, the Sobra case.”

  Her countenance immediately darkened. “Oh, so you have only come to see me to talk business. Am I right?”

  “Frankly speaking, yes, though it’s wonderful to see you again. Honda gave us the names of five women whom he could remember and… your name was one of them. A big coincidence, I felt,” he stated sadly.

  The reading room was empty apart from the two of them; it was shrouded in silence, now that he had stopped speaking, broken only by the faint cries of students indulging in sports somewhere in the distance.

  In this silence, there came back to him a memory of his primary school days. School had been over, and nearly everyone had gone home. Then, too, in the distance he had heard sounds—a faltering étude being played in a distant classroom.

  And that was the time he had hit his friend who had passed an insulting remark about his father. Shinji’s father had been a mine broker and thus rarely at home, so the other children used to tease him by saying that his father must be in prison. Even when he grew up, Shinji believed he knew how children with fathers in prison must feel.

  Bringing himself back to the present, he continued.

  “Yes, a coincidence, one I didn’t really want to believe. So I put off seeing you till the last.”

  Michiko hesitated a moment before speaking. Then, “It’s true,” she said quietly. “I did know him. I needed someone to talk to, someone who would speak to me in an endearing way. And he did that, which is why I went with him to the hotel. It was only once, though. You might as well know that.” She gathered up the books and walked toward the door and then, turning, spoke again.

  “You must think I’m gullible. And worse still, I got pregnant by him.”

  Shinji felt as if the ground was opening under his feet.

  “Michiko! You can’t have!”

  She smiled back at him quietly. “But I did. And my son is now nine months old. He has begun to speak baby talk.”

  Shinji was flabbergasted. Michiko had borne Honda’s child. There had been nothing in the detective’s report about that. He ran after her. She stopped and gazed out over the campus, not looking at him.

  “Yes, you must be surprised. My mother takes care of him, you know, so I can continue to work.”

  “But didn’t you want Honda to recognize the child as his?”

  “Why? It’s nothing to do with him. I decided to have the child on my own responsibility,” she said firmly. “So it’s mine, not his.”

  Shinji realized that this woman had voyaged to lands of experience that were far beyond his ken.

  “And you feel no anger or hatred toward him for his irresponsibility?”

  “How can he be irresponsible if he doesn’t even know about it?”

  Shinji was stumped for a reply. Eventually, he spoke.

  “If it had been me… if I had fathered your child, would you have still kept silent?”

  His words seemed to turn to bubbles as they fell from his mouth, so that his question was almost inaudible. It sounded as if he was speaking from the bottom of a deep lake.

  “Had it been you, of course I would have visited you and asked you if you would have liked to be the father.”

  She smiled at him and turned and walked out of the library, Shinji following her. They reached the gate. Shinji knew that he had nothing more to ask her. To ask if Ichiro Honda had put a rope around her neck was plainly quite meaningless.

  Michiko turned. “Goodbye,” she said, and was gone.

  Watching her retreating back, Shinji was at a loss as to what to do.

  Of one thing he was certain beyond all doubt. He had lost something and it was gone forever.

  5

  Shinji climbed the cavelike staircase, his footsteps the only sound echoing in the dim gloom. Up and up: seven floors, and his feet, worn out by walking all day, felt like lead. After six the elevators ceased to function and the hall lights were turned off. At last he reached the seventh floor and paused to wipe the sweat from his brow.

  He opened the office door. Here, too, dusk had fallen deeply. Mutsuko Fujitsubo, secretary to his chief, was sitting all alone, a vacant expression on her face. She was a modest-looking but ill-favored girl, with her heavy glasses with their thick, amber-colored rims, and she had joined the office immediately after graduating from junior college two years before.

  “Hello! Sorry to be back so late! Is the old man still around?”

  “Yes. He’s reading the report from the detective agency.” She pointed resignedly to the door at the far end of the office, worn-out by the long wait.

  Shinji washed his face with cold water and, refreshed, went into Hatanaka’s room, the girl following him, her shorthand pad in her hand.

  The old man straightened up in his deep chair. “You’ve been working hard, I see.” He spoke gruffly, his voice seeming strangled by phlegm. Shinji sat down and without further ado took out his notebook and, watching the girl out of the corner of his eye to see that she did not fall behind, began to make his report. In all that silent building about which the dusk had fallen, it seemed as if only his voice could be heard.

  “Today, I completed my interviews with all the women on the list. It transpired that they had all been interviewed by the police, and that the thrust of their questions was the same as mine: did Ichiro Honda ever attempt to strangle them?”

  “And did he?”

  “I couldn’t get a word out of two of them. And even with the others, you must realize, it wasn’t an easy question to come right out with. But the three who would talk… two denied it plainly, and it was clear to me that there was no such incident in the third case.”

  “No wonder they were not called to give evidence by the prosecutors,” snapped the old man.

  “Yes, but why didn’t the defense summon them?” asked Shinji.

  “Because the fools were trying to cover up his relationships with women! They thought it best to conceal the fact that he was a lady killer; I disagree with them entirely, of course. Honda Ichiro was on trial in a court of law, not a court of morals!”

  Just what I thought, too, thought Shinji approvingly. He went on: “I did find out something quite interesting today, though. Michiko Ono, who works at a library, has a nine-month-old son and claims that the father is Ichiro Honda. If we work on her, she might be persuaded to give evidence on our behalf.”

  “And for how long did her relationship with Honda last?”

  “Only just the once,” said Shinji sheepishly, and the old man groaned audibly.

  �
�But the child isn’t mentioned in the detective agency report. I wonder why she told you about it?”

  Shinji realized that he would have to confess. “Well, I knew her when I was a student,” he said. “I was in love with her for a time. I suppose that’s why she told me.”

  The old man was silent. The secretary, her pencil stilled, set her shoulders in a pose suggesting astonishment. The sun had finally set, and the desk light was hardly enough to see by. “I’ll put on the light,” said Shinji, breaking the silence. He got up and went to the switch, his motions disturbing the air of the room, which had become like a sealed tomb. The old man slowly lit a fresh cigar.

  “And does this young woman, what’s her name?”—gazing at the report—“Michiko Ono, does she have any intention of telling Honda about the happy event?”

  “She says it’s nothing to do with Ichiro Honda, that it is her affair entirely,” replied Shinji.

  “Perhaps because the child’s father might be a murderer?”

  “She doesn’t believe he committed any of the crimes.”

  “Why do all these women believe in his innocence, I wonder?” mused the old man. “Is he particularly good to women, do you think?”

  “That’s the main point about him,” said Shinji. “His abnormality, if we are looking for one, seems to lie in the fact that he can get inside women and win their sympathy. He deceived them all, but none of those women see it that way. I just don’t know how to explain it, but plainly it’s true.” He was surprised that his growing familiarity with the case had planted inside him feelings about Ichiro Honda of which he had not been aware. This did not mean that for a moment he approved of Honda’s behavior.

  The old man seemed to be satisfied with Shinji’s report. He jotted a few notes down on a pad, but Shinji could not see what they were. Finally he looked up and said, “I went to see him today, you know.” There seemed to be almost a tone of intimacy in the way he said “him.”

  “He’s been in jail for three months now, and it seems to have turned him into a mere shadow of himself. It’s impossible to visualize him as an attractive man who can sweep women off their feet. The death sentence has plainly knocked him all of a heap. I tried to put some life back into him; I advised him to reconstruct his lady-killer’s diary instead of just moping in his cell. He can do it if he tries; being a computer engineer, he has a better memory than most people. He should be able to remember most of it, given time—I’d bet on it.” He took out a fresh cigar and bit off the end.

  “What do you think is the salient point of this case—the one we’re going to have to overcome at the appeal?” he asked as he fiddled with his lighter.

  “The defendant’s rare blood type.”

  “I agree. They found blood under their fingernails—minute quantities, but enough. It’s one of the first things you look for in cases of strangulation; often the victim manages to scratch the killer’s face. Well, when they first analyzed, they were a bit cursory and put it down as AB. But after Honda’s arrest they found that he had a rare group—AB Rh-negative. So they went back and analyzed again and found that the blood was not merely AB but also Rh-negative. So their suspicions were confirmed—proved to all extents and purposes. This evidence as good as put the rope around his neck.”

  “Yes,” said Shinji, “and there’s a related bit of evidence—the sperm type. They detected type AB in the vaginas of the victims. Only this evidence is less overwhelming; you can identify a blood type from either saliva or sperm, but you can’t go further than A, B, AB, or O in such cases—it’s only from blood that you can detect Rh-negative.” Shinji thought that his earlier research in the library had been useful after all.

  “Very good. Now, blood types apart, there is one other bit of evidence that weighs heavily against the defendant, in my view.”

  “The lack of an alibi,” replied Shinji, as promptly as if he were a primary school student who had done his homework well. He was enjoying this dialectic with his senior.

  “Indeed, yes. On the fifth of November, whilst the first murder was being committed, Ichiro Honda claims to have been with Fusako Aikawa. However, on the nineteenth of December, on the night that Fusako Aikawa was killed, he claims to have been with Mitsuko Kosugi, who was inconveniently killed next. This non-alibi that he submits in place of an alibi interests me greatly. On first study, it looks like a cock-and-bull story, doesn’t it? If we are to believe him, he would have perfect alibis—except that, unfortunately, the women who could give them to him were murdered in their turn. Absurd, you say? But it raises interesting possibilities, too. Let’s just stop and think about motive, shall we? Contrast Honda’s rather unconvincing excuses for alibis with the question of motive. What motive did the prosecution put forward, do you remember?”

  “Yes, sir. They claim that he strangled the women during sexual intercourse to satisfy his abnormal sexual tastes. And in support of this they got the family doctor who attends upon him and his wife to testify as to his impotence when he is with his wife.”

  “Correct. The court was convinced of the view that he was a sexual criminal. However, I don’t agree. If his motive was sexual perversity, then why stop at two or at most three? It’s inconsistent, isn’t it? Why spare all the other women? He should have felt the same abnormal feelings toward them—and we know that he didn’t. So let me present a hypothesis. Let us imagine that the killer of all three women is called ‘X.’

  “Now, if X equals Honda, then you can be excused for thinking that all three murders were committed for sexual reasons.

  “But if X isn’t Honda, if it’s someone quite different, then we are left with another motive, one we didn’t think about when we thought that X was Honda. Do you follow me?”

  Shinji thought for a while. “I see,” he said at last. “You mean that X was trying to entrap Honda?”

  “Precisely, a trap. And I will tell you this. X, having committed the murders, didn’t seek to put the blame on Honda to save his own skin. How perfectly it was all contrived! No, something far more deliberate was involved.

  “The women were murdered in order to frame Ichiro Honda.”

  He spelled out these last words slowly and with great clarity. After a pause to let his words sink in, he continued. “Thus, in my opinion, the motive of X was a grudge against Honda. I felt increasingly sure of this when I was talking to the defendant today. What I now need is a list of all people who might hold such a grudge against him—that’s why I want him to reconstruct his diary.”

  The old man spoke with increasing ardor, carrying Shinji along with him. It was like listening to some great advocate making a speech in court. The logic was beautiful, but could it hold together? Shinji doubted it; there was too much of a jump somewhere.

  “I think,” went on Hatanaka, “that the rock-firm, the adamantine evidence presented to the court has been deliberately contrived by someone. It is the cunning work of a human being, not a sequence of accidents.”

  “But can you convince the court of that?”

  “Probably not. I must find evidence no less hard with which to confront the evidence against us.”

  Shinji did not ask him how he intended to do this. He was overwhelmed by the old man’s sense of commitment.

  “So,” the senior lawyer went on, “I’m going to make full use of that detective agency. Luckily the father-in-law is paying the bills, and he is rich—we can spend as much as we like. Acting on my conviction that all the evidence is planted, I’m going to start off by finding out how one gets hold of Rh-negative blood if one wants to.” He relit his cigar, which had gone out. “My mind is full of the righteous justice of the ancient Greeks,” he went on. “To them, Justice was the median line drawn between the defendant and his accusers. In this case, someone has tampered with that line, and I’m going to put it back where it belongs.”

  The conversation was over, and Hatanaka stood up to leave. Shinji helped the secretary close the windows. Outside, the robe of night had fallen on the city;
gazing into the dark streets, he felt that, against all the evidence, the zeal and devotion of one old man could possibly change the whole balance of the trial after all. The vast, dark sky was no broader than the old man’s commitment.

  Behind him, Hatanaka shuffled out of the door, stooping, his briefcase in his hand.

  THE BLOOD BANK

  1

  A week passed before the old man sent for Shinji again.

  “I’ve got another job for you,” he said. “Sit down and take a look at this.” He passed over three typewritten pages stapled together. “It’s the report I got back from the detective agency today. You will see that it lists the names, addresses, and workplaces of six people, together with an outline of their daily schedules.”

  Shinji looked at the papers. “Yes, I’ve got it,” he finally announced. “But what do you want me to do?”

  “Well, the blood type of everyone on that list is AB Rh-negative.”

  “The same type as Ichiro Honda, in fact?”

  “Correct. And what percentage of the population has that type, do you think?”

  Shinji cast his mind back to his studies in the library. The book had said that fifteen percent of Caucasians had Rh-negative blood, but that in the case of Orientals, the ratio fell to only half a percent.

  “One in two hundred, I seem to remember.”

  The old man smiled. “No, much less. Certainly one in two hundred exhibit the rhesus factor, but AB Rh-negative narrows it down even further. Only ten percent of Japanese have AB blood. So the answer to my question is one in two thousand!”

  “So how many does that make for the whole of Tokyo?”

  “Well, taking the population of Tokyo at ten million, that makes five thousand.”

  “From amongst whom you have listed six?”

  “Ah, but five thousand is a sort of meaningless statistic. How many of those five thousand know that their blood is AB Rh-negative? In wartime, people tend to know their blood type, but not in peace. To be honest, I don’t even know my type.” He laughed mischievously, rolling the cigar around in his mouth.