Tokyo Enigma

by Sam Waite

  A car came toward us and Morimoto pulled over as close as possible to one of the cinderblock walls that fronted many of the houses on the road. The other driver eased his car around ours. He had about a six-inch clearance. Morimoto slowed at some intersections to check parabolic mirrors for reflections of traffic from otherwise unviewable cross streets. Once we stopped behind a Yamato "Black Cat" van and waited for the driver to deliver his package. He repeatedly nodded either thanks or apologies to Morimoto as he scurried back into the van and drove on.

  It wasn't clear to me why half the population of Japan had not been eliminated in flare-ups of road rage, but Morimoto took it in stride. While we waited for the van to move, he called the modeling agency again for a new set of directions, because he couldn't find it, even though his car had a navigation system.

  We finally found Foxx Starr on the third floor of a small building. Its office comprised a sitting room and an office. A table at the end of a sofa carried photo albums of models. That was the only evidence of the nature of the business. There were few frills. Depending on your point of view, it could have been sparse elegance or fly-by-night. Not much to pack if creditors came calling.

  The receptionist greeted us with an attitude that said she had better things to do, like stick another star on her see-through, paste-on fingernails. She had strawberry-blonde hair and a rose-colored tattoo at the fringe of cleavage. I wondered where the tattoo ended, but then I guess that's what it was for. Even Morimoto had trouble looking her in the eye when he asked to see the boss.

  Maika Ito, the agency's owner, already had a guest, a wide man with square shoulders and a boot-camp haircut. His thighs and neck were thickly muscled. He had flat features except for a hawk-beaked nose. Only his eyes moved as he watched us like a panther eyeing an impala, sizing us up in case we met again when he was hungry. He sat splay-legged and wore a thin jacket that had a short-barrel .38-size lump under the left-breast pocket. I thought pistols were banned for civilians Far East of the Pecos.

  Ito stood. She was tall and lithe. Deep-set eyes gave a discordantly hard aspect to her delicately boned face. Ignoring the panther, she came around her desk and sat across from Morimoto and me. If she spoke English, she didn't let it show. She and Morimoto traded business cards and did a lot of bowing even though they were seated. I supposed he was expressing sympathy for Hosoi. After Morimoto finished his rituals, he said he was ready to interpret.

  "Hosoi-san had worked for Foxx Starr agency about a year and a half on a non-salaried basis. She was paid by the job," he said.

  "So how much was she paid? How often did she work? What kind of modeling: cat walk, fashion, adverts, swimsuit?"

  Morimoto hiccoughed a few times as he launched into Japanese.

  Ito responded in a voice that was at once hard-edged and smoky smooth. After she quit talking, he translated. "She said payments are confidential. She didn't answer my question about specialization, but she did say Hosoi-san was in a travel poster recently for a railway company. "

  "Did she have any friends in the agency?" I said.

  Thin lines around Ito's eyes and mouth deepened when she inhaled on a brown cigarette, which she pinched between her thumb and forefinger. When she exhaled, she didn't care whose face she blew toward. She leaned back languidly, like a Stanislavsky protégé acting out ennui. A few more minutes, and she might affect sleep with maybe a dainty snore and a faint smile to suggest dreams of elegant debauchery. Or maybe it was just my mind wandering too far.

  "Hiyaa," she finally said, "Mama, jai nai. "

  Morimoto didn't have to translate. She was no one's mother. Personal relationships aren't her business.

  "Do you mind if we question some of your models? Anyone who had worked with Ms. Hosoi."

  Morimoto's translation brought Ito to life. She uncrossed her legs, leaned forward and, in a husky voice that had just dropped a couple of notes, talked so long that Morimoto started to fidget.

  When she finished, he did a cough routine that could have sprung from either nerves or tobacco poisoning. "It's difficult," he said.

  I tried for a few seconds to fit his reply into a logical niche. I gave up. "It took her thirty seconds to say, It's difficult? What's difficult? We get some phone numbers, we call, set a time and place. Maybe you have to call a person two or three times, but that's it. It's not so hard."

  "Ah..."

  "Ah, what?"

  "She doesn't want to disturb her staff."

  "I'll be polite." I smiled at Ms. Ito and even gave the panther a what's-a guy-to-do shoulder shrug.

  He didn't respond, but I watched him long enough to see that he was breathing.

  "We can do it here." I said.

  Morimoto started hacking like a cat about to spit up a hairball. I edged away from him as he held a handkerchief to his mouth. He finally translated.

  It had been a long time since I'd studied the language, but I understood Ito's reply. It was short this time.

  "Sore wa chotto muzukashii."

  The way she snapped her head forward and emphasized the word chotto, made it clear she meant impossible. So did the set of her jaw.

  "Doesn't she want to find out what happened to Ms. Hosoi?" I said.

  Morimoto made no response, so I nudged him.

  "Ask her."

  He kept his handkerchief pressed against his upper lip as he translated. By the time Ito finished answering, he was wiping perspiration from his forehead.

  "She read about it in the newspaper. The murderer has been caught. The police would not have arrested Mr. Dorian, if he was not guilty." Morimoto put away his handkerchief. "She said she doesn't think there is anything else for us to talk about."

  "Thank you very much." I bowed to Ito and nodded to the panther before we left.

  On the way back to my hotel, I tried to draw Morimoto out. I wanted to know why he was as nervous as a peasant proposing to a princess. I'd seen Japanese get jittery because of language problems, but his English was good, so I figured it must be something else. He fielded my questions with "uh's" and "ah's" and air sucked through his teeth, anything to avoid communication.

  All he told me was that he wouldn't be able to meet me tomorrow, because he had to wind up another assignment. However, his agency had put two investigators on the Dorian case. The other was Taen-san who would see me the next day. When we got to the hotel, I gave it one more try and invited him for a drink. He apologized and said he needed to get home. I suppose it was just as well.

  His little cat coughs had started again.

  Chapter 2

  I'd stayed up transferring Dorian's pictures from the camera to a notebook computer so I could blow them up to get a closer look at details. Maybe jetlag, or the beer before bedtime, had addled my mind. Something about the pictures bothered me, but I couldn't nail down what it was. If I figured it out, I could add it to the list of things I already considered odd about the case, such as the apparent lack of a struggle between Dorian and Hosoi and the chilly reception we got at Foxx Starr.

  This morning, there were two other male foreigners in the hotel lobby. If Taen was anything like Morimoto, he might need medical attention by the time he decided which of us to approach. I tried to keep an eye out for a nervous individual while I read a newspaper, whose sports pages gave top coverage to soccer and about equal space to American football, rugby and hockey. I was reading a story about a judge who was forced to resign for paying a fifteen-year-old girl twenty thousand yen for sex, when I heard my name. At first, I thought the woman standing next to my table was paging me for a phone call, but she was dressed strangely for a hotel employee. She wore a loose black sweater, black slacks and rubber-soled sports shoes.

  "Mr. Sanchez?" she repeated.

  "Yes."

  She pulled out a chair and sat down. "I'm Yuri Taen. Expected a man?"

  My surprise wasn't just that she was a woman. There was a regional accent in her speech that I couldn't fit to the face.

  "Yeah, I did. Mr.
Morimoto only gave me your last name. He didn't say anything else."

  "He didn't say, 'Yuri?'"

  "It wouldn't have helped. I would have pictured a Russian cosmonaut."

  "Well anyway, call me Yuri. I prefer that, even at the agency, and..."

  Her eyes were a lighter brown than her hair, which was slightly tinted and woven in a complex braid in back. It was long, but it wouldn't get in her way.

  "Call me Mick. Are there many women in your agency?"

  "I don't know the percentage, but it's kind of high, maybe fifty percent or a little less. Investigation is one business that passes for equal opportunity employment in Japan. A lot of customers are women, so women handle women's problems."

  "What about the Dorian case?"

  "The victim was a woman, and I speak English. I'm what we call a 'kikokujo', a returnee raised some years abroad. I went to junior high, high school and college in New Orleans."

  She pronounced it in the Yat vernacular of the Big Easy's natives. It was a weird effect, but at least it explained the accent, and I was glad for it. I was from Laredo, Texas, an upscale village on the Rio Grandé. Not exactly the Deep South, but close enough to stir some nostalgia and comfort.

  Yuri was attractive, well educated, physically fit and appeared street savvy, which raised a question.

  "What's the story on Morimoto?" I said.

  She didn't move her mouth, but her eyes gave away a smile. "He speaks English, and he needed a job. You'll have to ask him the rest."

  "He won't talk about himself. At least, he wouldn't yesterday."

  Yuri nodded slowly and gazed quietly at the tabletop as though her conversational skills had taken leave. The waiter brought coffee. She poured sugar and cream into it and stirred, still silent. The clink of the spoon when she put it down broke the spell.

  "So, what's the agenda this morning?" she said.

  I recapped my encounters with Morimoto and said I wanted to talk to anyone close to Hosoi, relatives, friends or work associates. I also wanted to talk to the hotel clerk who was there when Dorian and Hosoi checked in.

  "Let's start with yesterday." Yuri's coffee cup was half full. She gulped it down. "If it's all right with you, I want to see the pictures of Dorian."

  We went to my room. I booted the computer and opened the folders that contained the photos.

  "OK, no injuries to Dorian that looked like a strangulation victim fighting back," she said. "Let's look at his hands." She enlarged images of those bruises, folded her arms and hummed softly while she rocked back and forth. I half expected her to say she had divined exactly what had happened. Agatha Christie meets Marie Laveau, the New Orleans Voodoo Queen.

  After a few minutes, she shut down the computer. "I have a suggestion for how to get Foxx Starr to cooperate even if they don't mean to," she said.

  "I don't see the connection."

  "To what?"

  "The photos."

  "There isn't any. I thought you wanted to talk to some models. I'll see about having someone call and ask for a shoot. We can find out what services they offer. From what you described, the girls might do more than have their pictures taken."

  "I asked Dorian something on those lines. He said no."

  "Maybe the police made him shy. Whatever, it gives us a shot at someone Hosoi had worked with. You said she was in a travel poster?"

  "Yeah, for a railway, but I don't remember the name. You'll have to ask Morimoto."

  Yuri called her agency.

  I couldn't follow what she was saying, but it seemed like she'd spoken to a few people before she cut the connection.

  "I want to see pictures of Hosoi's neck. The law firm ought to have access to any evidence available to prosecutors. You got the number?"

  "Yeah." I handed her Ishii's business card. "I wonder why Morimoto didn't suggest that. I'd been pushing him to get an interview with Dorian, but still it seems pretty important."

  "He's a by-the-book kind of guy."

  "You mean things have to be spelled out for him."

  "Unn," Yuri waggled her left hand as she punched in the phone number. When she hung up, she was smiling. "They have copies of the pictures, and they gave me the name and shift of the hotel clerk, four to midnight."

  Dorian's lawyer met us in his office with the postmortem photos of Maho Hosoi. A bruise on her neck indicated it had been constricted by a cord that crossed on the front left side. There were also two faint oval bruises on either side of her hyoid bone just above the mark left by the cord. Pressure at those points would close the carotid arteries. That would knock out or kill a person a lot faster than trying to cut off air supply, seconds instead of a couple of minutes. I asked Ishii if that could have been the cause of death.

  "The trauma from the cord is greater," Taen said. "As far as I know, that's considered the cause. I'm not sure prosecutors care which injury caused the death. They care who did it. First hands then the cord or the cord then hands. I don't think it will make much difference to the case."

  "Probably not to the legal staff on either side. But what about to the truth?"

  Taen just clicked her tongue.

  It was early afternoon when we left the law office, but the sun was already low in a cloudless sky. It gave a golden cast to the cityscape. Skyscrapers were brilliant on their western faces and cloaked elsewhere in stark shadow. Autumn's kind illusions imparted grandeur to vapid architecture before the buildings were bared to winter's unforgiving overcast. Sort of like middle age, when you still feel fit and wonder if the bright white hairs and deepening facial lines are just decorations.

  The hotel where Dorian and Hosoi were found was near Shibuya, a nexus of railway lines and a combination street party and costume ball. Yuri drove through the central area, past groups of young men and women dressed outlandishly but identically. A cluster of girls wearing blue blazers, white shirts, tartan micro skirts and cork-soled shoes carefully ignored a clutch of boys in denim jackets, jeans and boots with buckles. The tee-shirt of one bore an image of James Dean. Young rebels fashion-coded their statements of individuality, the same as in other countries, but with finer co-ordination and greater flair than I'd seen elsewhere.

  Yuri had called the hotel earlier and booked an hour in the murder room. She pulled into an underground parking area that had spaces for five cars. "Got anything with your picture on it?"

  I gave her my driver's license.

  She wrinkled her nose. "That it? How about a passport?"

  "What are you doing, Yuri?"

  "Testing the clerk's memory."

  I gave her my passport.

  "Follow me, but stay out of sight of the clerk until I motion for you, okay."

  Yuri led the way through an automatic door and walked past a row of potted plants.

  I stopped at the first plant, while she went ahead to the window. When she spoke Japanese, her manner changed abruptly from cozy to cold. She showed the clerk my passport. She pointed to the document and then motioned for me to go to her.

  I walked up and smiled at the clerk.

  Yuri poked her finger in my direction. "Kare, ka?"

  My beginner's Japanese class had covered the phrase delivered in rough masculine construction. "This him?"

  The clerk's mouth opened a bit, and his face went a shade paler.

  "Kagi jyodai." Yuri held out her hand.

  The clerk developed a twitch near his eye and handed her a key.

  She turned toward the elevator. "Let's go. I told him that I was here to double check what he'd already told the police, and then he identified your photo as that of the foreign man who checked into this hotel with Hosoi. That doesn't sound good to me. How about you?"

  I shook my head.

  The room was a gloriously pagan tribute to St. Valentine's Day. A heart-embossed spread was draped across a heart-shaped bed. There was a heart-shaped bath built for two and a floor-to-ceiling, heart-shaped mirror next to it. We checked every drawer and nook in the room. We didn't even find d
ust.

  "It's hard to see how Dorian could have strangled the girl without injury from a struggle unless she was already unconscious. If that's the case though..." I left unsaid that the prosecutors' rough-sex theory wouldn't make sense.

  "Let's test that." Yuri lay across the bed face down. "Sit on my back."

  I could see her point, but I wasn't sure I wanted to go through with it.

  "Go on. I won't break."

  She put her arms to her sides to maximize her immobility. I straddled her hips and pressed my legs against her arms.

  "Take off your belt."

  I hesitated.

  "Take it off and wrap it around my neck, just don't squeeze anything."

  She turned her head so that the left side faced me. Even so, the only way to cross the belt at the same point the cord crossed on Hosoi's neck was to press my left fist a foot or so deep into the mattress and pull up with my right hand. Hard to do.

  "Be careful now. I'm going to squirm."

  Yuri didn't exactly squirm. She crunched her stomach muscles like a giant inchworm and twisted to the side. I didn't move much, but it was enough for her to free one arm. She raked her fingernails lightly across the back of my hand.

  "That would have put a scratch on Dorian and skin under Hosoi's nails. It wasn't that hard. You sure you tried?"

  I nodded. "Maybe Hosoi's not as strong as you. She'd also been drinking."

  "Dorian's not a big as you either. Let's say it's improbable but not impossible. Now you lie down. It's my turn to be on top." She smiled and pushed my shoulder.

  "What for? You can't hold me down."

  "That's not the point. I want to get as much a feel of what did or did not happen as I can. Might help me think."

  Yuri sat on my hips, pressed her shins on my elbows and looped the belt around my neck. I tried to push up with my arms but couldn't, so I bucked and twisted like she had. The difference was, she was tossed enough for me to turn completely over. She ended up straddling my groin.

  "Wao!" She laughed and slapped my chest. "Turn your head so I can cross the belt at the same spot we saw on Maho's neck. Hold still. I'm going to tighten a little." She leaned forward to get better leverage. "She would have to have been on her back. But you wouldn't just lie still with your head in that position if you were conscious, while some was strangling you. I wonder..."