The Lady Killer

by Masako Togawa

  “Did Mr. Hatanaka tell you to publish this every day?”

  “Yes, for at least a month.”

  “Pity we haven’t got a photo.”

  “That’s what Mr. Hatanaka says. He says we might be led on a wild-goose chase and end up with the wrong person.”

  Shinji went over to the window and looked down on the park below. The pigeons that congregated every morning on the windowsill were gone about their noonday business. There was a delicate haze over the woods of the park; the sky above was scattered with cumuli. Somehow or other, he thought, they would not track down Keiko Obana’s sister. She had vanished, and it was due to the crimes.

  His premonitions, dark as winter, contrasted with the vigorous skies of summer outside.

  INSERTION

  A Monologue

  The woman stretched her hand slowly to the pillow on the bed where she lay. These noises in her head; she must calm them.

  Her lean hand looked like a dehydrated chicken leg: no flesh, only skin and bones.

  That dry hand clawed under the pillow and took out a large notebook. The cover was soiled, with inky fingerprints showing on certain parts.

  On the cover were brushed the words “The Huntsman’s Log.” But the word Huntsman was so stained as to be almost illegible. It had been read so often… it sent away, for a while, the noises in her head.

  She brought the notebook to her breast. After a while, she opened it and flipped the pages, stopping at the tenth page. Her eyes were concave, like black holes drilled in her head, like the eyes of a rotting corpse. Just visible in the dark hollows were muddy pupils, which no longer seemed to focus.

  The lean hand flipped the pages precisely, but the eyes did not seem to see. This was her daily routine, so most of the words in the diary were inscribed in her heart. Her hand came to rest at a certain page.

  Prey had a strong head for drink. Anyway, no resistance, no hysterics, no overacting. Just put herself into my hands. Felt like a god accepting a human sacrifice.

  Did her best to satisfy my every need, but was too tense and kept trembling. Took two hours to kill. She was a virgin; drew blood.

  “Silly, silly little girl. Don’t say you cried in his arms; don’t tell me that you were crushed under his body. Don’t try and tell me any of those things. I bet you were biting your lip with those sharp little teeth of yours that you always kept so clean; I bet you bit so hard that the blood came. Silly little girl!

  “Silly to shed blood for his enjoyment! That man, to steal two hours of pleasure, pressed his filthy lips against your girlish and unsullied skin. He left his sticky seed of sin within your childlike body, not yet mature, and all for his own selfish satisfaction! Was it in spite of that seed, or was it because of it, that seed growing in your body, that you were forced to die? And as you were preparing to kill yourself, that man had long forgotten you and was tasting the flesh of some other woman… But it’s all right now, darling; don’t cry any more. Curse him no more, though you lie underground being eaten by worms!

  “For I have taken revenge, in spite of these sounds in my head. I have put him away into prison, where he can never touch any woman’s body again. Now he faces the hard wall of a cold cell, doubtless inscribing upon it your name, yours and the names of many other women, with his anecdotes of those nights spent together. Soon, they will take him away and hang him, and then they will place a heavy tombstone above him. It will press down upon him firmly so he won’t be able to budge an inch ever again. So there! Instead of pressing himself upon your body, upon the bodies of other women, the stone will press him! Cruel stone, press him!

  “Now let me tell you how I made that man taste the same agony with which he fed you…”

  THE BLACK STAIN—CONTINUED

  1

  A week passed after the advertisement was placed in the newspaper, and many leads came about Tsuneko Obana, but all of them were false trails. And then there came the first real clue. It was from the manager of an apartment building called the Midori-so, the building where Mitsuko Kosugi was murdered. He reported that a woman with a mole on the right side of her nose had been residing there under the name Keiko Obana since last September.

  The woman was a little over thirty and worked as a model for a cosmetics company. This work took her to department stores the length and breadth of Japan, so she only spent about two days a week in the apartment. And for the last two months, she had not shown up at all.

  “Well, she’d paid six months in advance, so at first I thought nothing of it. But recently I got worried and was thinking of going to the police, when I saw your advertisement.”

  The manager, who had the air of a war veteran, talked in tones that bespoke his honesty. His linen suit, shiny with age, was well pressed and stank of mothballs; obviously, it was only worn on special occasions. The mole, the age, the recent disappearance… all added up to the elusive Tsuneko Obana.

  “Right under our noses, so we didn’t see it!” Shinji exclaimed. The old man said nothing, and Shinji then reflected that there was something fishy; why use Keiko Obana’s name? Wasn’t that a giveaway?

  The old man seemed to be thinking the same thing; he chewed his cigar in a perplexed manner.

  “Let us suppose that the woman really is Tsuneko Obana, as seems likely,” he said. “Then it seems that she used her sister’s name to make clear her intention of revenging her sister. In that case, we can presume that she has vanished again, this time perhaps for good.”

  At all events, they decided to visit the apartment immediately. The old man sent for his secretary and told her to give the manager the reward, which was handed over in a brown paper envelope, the manager protesting politely at first. A hire car was called, and soon they reached the Midori-so at Asagaya. Until they arrived there, the old man spoke not one word but merely pondered, chewing his cigar the while.

  First of all, they looked into Mitsuko Kosugi’s room. In spite of the housing shortage, no one had moved in—naturally enough, in view of the fact that somebody had been murdered there. Both the door and the windows stood open, as if to wash out some half-sensed odor of the mortuary.

  There was nothing to see, so they went upstairs to the Obana room.

  It was very neat and tidy. The manager, half-fearfully, opened the door of the closet, but it proved to contain no more than a set of bedding. All seemed in order, and yet Shinji felt strangely uncomfortable. Why did the woman with a mole rent this apartment under the name of a dead woman? Why had she now abandoned it? He thought of hermit crabs moving from shell to shell; had she not thus, once more, effected her escape? Would she ever return? Where was she now?

  A deep sense of disappointment suffused his body and mind.

  He went to the window and looked out. The street below, with its stepping-stones set in the mud, looked commonplace and dirty by the light of day. But at night, in the dark, would it not become the theater of horror from which Ichiro Honda had stumbled?

  The old man called him, and he turned and went over to the low Japanese table where Hatanaka was standing. The drawer was open, and the old man was pointing at a large notebook that lay within. Shinji’s body tensed with a thrill similar to vertigo.

  “The Huntsman’s Log!” he breathed.

  “Yes,” said the old man, turning the pages quickly, staring at them myopically through his thick glasses. “But the passage about Keiko Obana has been removed.” He showed Shinji where the pages had been violently torn out.

  “Did you find something?” asked the manager.

  “This,” said the old lawyer, quickly slipping it into his pocket. “And I’m going to keep it as evidence.” On such occasions, Hatanaka was adept at glossing over the boundary between the requirements of the law and of reality.

  Impressing upon the manager the need to contact them immediately if Obana showed up, they left the Midori-so. In the car, Shinji broke the silence.

  “Will she come back?”

  The old man shook his head. “I don’
t think so. The bird has flown, all right. She left the Huntsman’s Log deliberately, just for someone like us to find if we could.” He began to read the diary with care, Shinji peering over his shoulder.

  He saw the passage referring to Michiko Ono, the librarian, and he felt a stabbing pain in his heart. He turned away and gazed out of the window.

  The town lay in the dust of a summer’s afternoon. The air conditioner of the car was blowing on his neck, no matter how he moved. They passed Shinjuku Station; some construction work was going on in the forecourt, and there was a temporary wooden sidewalk laid, over which the crowds moved slowly through the summer heat. Dump trucks came and went, dropping piles of earth onto the road.

  Of what avail had it been for him to visit men with Rh-negative blood and to track down the woman with the mole? Was he not, in spite of it all, no more than a bystander? The real protagonists—Ichiro Honda, Michiko Ono, the woman with the mole, the murdered women, even—they had gone to the edge and looked down into the depths of life, and in some cases had returned. He had been nowhere. He had watched from the outside.

  The old man was still buried in the diary. He looked up, beaming. “He really has got a good memory!” he exclaimed. “His reconstruction was almost perfect, even down to the order of things!” He turned the pages again, and suddenly his face stiffened.

  “But there’s a page missing at the very front—look, can you see where it has been torn out?” It was true.

  “Who did he say his first victim was? Surely it was… Yes, it’s the woman who appears as number two in this book. But there was obviously somebody before her—who could it have been? And why is the page missing?”

  The old man closed his heavy eyelids and began to think. Eventually he spoke, half to himself.

  “If we are not careful, we are in danger of making a big mistake.”

  He spoke with pain; had he suddenly realized some mistake that he had already made in his theorizing? Shinji tried to engage him in conversation as the car rolled through the town, but to no avail. When the car stopped at a red light at Hibiya, the old man broke his silence; leaning forward, he said to the driver, “Sugamo Prison, please.”

  On the way to the jail, Shinji’s mind was in a turmoil. He longed to read the Huntsman’s Log, which was reposing on the old man’s knee, and yet he half dreaded the thought. What had Honda written about his affair with Michiko Ono? How fully did he describe his lovemaking? In what tones had Michiko spoken to him? He realized that he was jealous.

  For him, curiosity about his old lover meant as much as the torn-out page in the diary meant to the old man.

  2

  The waiting room at the prison was hot and stuffy; Shinji’s face ran with sweat. The old man sat steady as a rock, his black bag, containing the diary, on his knee. At last their turn came, and they went into the interview room.

  The condemned man naturally wore no necktie, and this added to his appearance of shabbiness and depression. Just as the old man had said, he looked as if all the fight was gone from him. He was in need of a shave, and his hair was dry and disheveled. And above all, the light was gone from his eyes.

  Was this the man who had held Michiko Ono close to his breast? Shinji realized that he was glaring at Honda and quickly adjusted his countenance to one of total unconcern—unconcern toward Honda, toward the stone walls and the flagged floor.

  “We have found the diary,” said the old man. Behind the wire netting, Ichiro Honda was momentarily speechless.

  “Where?” he said at last, his lips twitching. His deep voice was somber.

  “At the Midori-so, where Mitsuko Kosugi was murdered. Obana’s sister had an apartment on the second floor of the same building. We had advertised for her, and the manager of the apartment came to see us today. She moved in there in September, but hasn’t been near the place for the last two months.”

  “I see,” said Honda, hanging his head low, his hands joined loosely between his knees. “Now I understand. When I went there, I noticed the name ‘Obana’ on a shoe box at the entrance, but I didn’t associate it with the key-punch operator.”

  “If the criminal who entrapped you had a room there, your whole explanation becomes rational. No wonder your shoes disappeared; not surprising that the door was locked on you. Maybe she was hiding in the broom cupboard opposite the door.”

  “But then why did the key turn up in my pocket?”

  “You now say that you may have unconsciously removed the key when you stepped into the room, and put it into your pocket. But that isn’t what happened at all. I think the criminal put it into your pocket when the jacket was hanging in your apartment in Yotsuya. The woman with the mole had access to that room; we know that, because she stole the diary. Reading it, she could predict your activities and play her tricks upon you.”

  “But how come the blood was my type?”

  “She got the names of donors of your type from blood banks and must have collected from one of them—we know she made contact with at least four. Shinji, the man next to me, interviewed them all.” Honda glanced at Shinji and then looked back at the old man.

  “There’s a lot I still don’t fully understand. Why was there no sign of a struggle in any of the cases?”

  “Perhaps the criminal used an anesthetic—chloroform or something like that. That would explain the sweet smell you noticed in both Fusako Aikawa’s room and also Mitsuko Kosugi’s.”

  “Chloroform. That fits.”

  “And the semen. That was collected from the blood donors, too.”

  “It’s mad!” exclaimed Honda, tugging at his hair nervously. “Why me?” Watching him vacantly, Shinji realized that he had no more than a walk-on part in this drama.

  The old man took out the notebook. “Your memory was very good. However, the criminal tore out the pages referring to Keiko Obana. That I can understand. What I cannot understand is why he tore out this page—the first one. Who was the woman described here?” The old man displayed the book to Honda. Looking at it, the prisoner’s eyes gradually became hollow. It was as if his whole core had suddenly melted, leaving him no more than a soft doll. Watching the scene, Shinji felt even more of an outsider. Ichiro Honda knew whose name had appeared in that missing page… and so did the old man. The closeness of the room began to irritate him.

  Honda opened his mouth for a few seconds, like a landed fish that finds the density of the air too much. “I can’t remember who it was,” he said at last. “Please give me time to think about it.” From the way he would not meet their eyes, Shinji realized that Honda knew the name of the woman very well but was not saying. The old man knew, too, he was certain. But the old man was silent. Without a word, he stood up, and gazed at the prisoner with sympathy before leaving the room.

  On the way back to the office, Shinji wondered what the old man was going to do with the diary. What was the old man thinking about, his head on his chest, a cigar in his mouth?

  Shinji, for his part, felt the slow stain of jealousy creep toward his heart. All of that diary that he wished to read was the passage referring to Michiko Ono.

  3

  About a week passed, and then there was a sudden development that took Shinji by surprise. Honda asked for an interview with the director of the prison and confessed his guilt, asking to be allowed to withdraw his appeal.

  “Just what I feared,” said the old man mysteriously. “We’re off on our travels—get ready at once.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To Osaka. I’ve got to talk to the father-in-law of our client.”

  They left Tokyo that evening, and on the next day Shinji waited at the hotel whilst the old man went off to see Ichiro Honda’s father-in-law. Before leaving, Hatanaka had been once more to Sugamo Prison, but Honda would say nothing about the missing page, merely asserting his guilt. Even Shinji understood that the reason for Honda’s new stance was based upon the missing page at the front of the diary.

  The old man had been to Osaka already, o
n his own, for five days from the day after the two of them had interviewed Honda in prison. He was uncommunicative about his trip, and Shinji did not feel that he could question him about it, confining himself to grumbling to Mutsuko Fujitsubo about the old man hogging the case now that it was getting interesting. He did at least gather that the objective had been to visit Honda’s wealthy father-in-law as well as his wife. He had to admire the vigor of the old man, now over seventy, in undertaking this trip.

  Now Shinji waited in the Osaka hotel. An hour passed, and the old man returned. Where had he been? Shinji did not ask, but got into the car and accompanied his chief to Ichiro Honda’s wife’s home.

  They were met by the old housekeeper. She was plainly expecting them and conducted them immediately to the atelier at the back of the garden. Within, it was almost dark despite the brightness of the day outside; the only sound to be heard in the otherwise cavernous silence was the hum of the air conditioner. The old retainer took a long pole and slid back the cover to the skylight; immediately the room was flooded with light.

  In the corner stood an old-fashioned iron bedstead, upon which a woman was lying. The housekeeper fetched a couple of wooden stools, which looked as if they were meant for children rather than adults, put them by the bed and invited the two men to sit on them with a silent gesture.

  Shinji looked at Taneko, the wife of Ichiro Honda, for the first time. Although she was said to be under thirty, she looked like a sick woman in her forties. Was it his imagination that told him that the room was suffused with the smell of death, just like a cancer ward?

  “Your husband has withdrawn his appeal,” said the old man in measured tones. The woman on the bed made no reply. She seemed to be quite insensible to their presence. The old woman bent over the bed and whispered something in the woman’s ear; there was no response, and she straightened up and shook her head at the two men.