Tokyo Enigma

by Sam Waite

  "For what?"

  "Job well done. The client is happy with your work. You can come home now."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Kyle Solutions is satisfied with your investigation. It's over. Come home. We've got another case for you, in Portugal. You'll love it."

  "Nothing's ended here, Abe."

  "Not everything ends, Mick. Sometimes things just stop. That's what happened. Kyle said stop. That's it. You've got until tomorrow morning. Check out of your hotel, buy an air ticket and come home."

  "I'm not very happy with that, Abe."

  "Why did I expect you to say that? Here's the deal. Kyle cuts the cord at checkout time tomorrow. Get out of the hotel. Get on a plane. It isn't a complex proposition."

  I glanced at Sayoko, a young woman who was still in danger, not quite ready to get herself back together. Nozaka was a kick-ass pretty-boy, who'd put his life on the line. I'd disliked him at first sight, but had grown to respect the guy. As for Yuri, my feelings for her were off the charts.

  "Not going to happen. If I'm off Kyle's tab, I'll figure something."

  "Mick, as far as your job goes, I'll vouch for you. But, I'm not the only one who has a say in this. Do you understand? If we get a cowboy reputation, it would hurt the company for a long time. It'd be especially bad if a client told us to stand down, and we didn't. What if we dug in and ended up hurting the client? It's not a crusade, Mick. It's a business."

  Funny how things work out. Several more years and I would've retired to a place on the Gulf and done some fishing. If I got frisky, maybe some windsurfing.

  "I understand, Abe. Do me a favor."

  "You got it."

  "Tell Kyle to bite a big one. And Abe."

  "What?"

  "Same to you." I cut the connection.

  Chapter 27

  The next morning, I booked a cheaper room at the same hotel with my personal credit card. As soon as I settled in, I called Lance Allworth. His secretary said he was unavailable. She said the same thing when I showed up and walked into his office.

  "What's going on, Lance?"

  "Mick, I heard you were injured. Are you all right?"

  I hadn't come to talk about my health. "Why is Kyle pulling out?"

  "That decision was made at the home office. I filed reports, but otherwise, I'm out of that process."

  "The question on the table is 'why' not 'who made the decision.' If you insist you have no idea, this could be a long visit."

  "It's no reflection on your work, Mick. I've already sent in a high appraisal of your effort. That's been forwarded to your company. In fact, I think we could arrange a bonus. Say twenty-five percent over your standard compensation."

  "I say again, why?" I sensed Lance was about to shift from carrot to stick. Threaten to retract the "high appraisal" and the offer of a bonus. He obviously hadn't talked to Abe.

  "I suppose someone realized it was time to cut losses. You have to agree that the evidence against Dorian is damning. You've taken this investigation much further than we might have expected. I admire your dogged determination, and I praised that. On the other hand, someone else might have seen the futility earlier. That could have saved quite a bit of money, not to mention the needless physical risk."

  There was that stick.

  Lance must have mistaken me for a section chief bucking for department head. I shoved some family photos aside, sat on his desk and leaned in close. "Dorian didn't kill Hosoi. I think I know who did.

  "One was our friend at the park. He's certified dead. The other one, a private investigator, might be dead. We found the guy's business card in Hashimoto's office. Hashimoto is dead. I will put this all together. When I do, if I find out that you withheld evidence or any knowledge bearing on this case, I'll see you prosecuted."

  As I walked toward the door, I heard Lance's chair thump against the wall.

  "Don't threaten me!" A bulldog growl tinged his voice. The lad was miffed.

  I closed the door softly behind me.

  Maybe Ishii, the lawyer, hadn't gotten the word about the aborted investigation. I called and asked if he would set up another meeting for me with Dorian.

  "No," he said.

  I called Kuroda. He agreed to meet me, in his office this time. He looked pleased to see me when I arrived.

  "The two policemen are in custody. We have a warrant for Ito, and there will be others. Thank you for your cooperation."

  At first, I thought he was making a joke. My cooperation had been along the lines of keeping myself out of trouble and getting my client off the hook. I almost laughed, but he was serious.

  "I want to see Dorian. He has been terminated by his company, which disavows any association with him. He's on his own and so am I. I've been fired."

  Kuroda looked at me as though he didn't understand why I was still here.

  A police driver took us to the detention center.

  "I'm more convinced than ever that Dorian's not guilty, and I need your help to prove that. Not just for him. There're connections among yakuza and government officials that you are in a position to expose."

  "You helped me with my internal investigation, but how can I go beyond that?"

  "Dorian knows more than he's willing to reveal. I have no idea why, but I think he considered himself untouchable. Once I thought I needed to shore up his confidence, now I think we need to break him."

  Not only was Dorian in jailhouse togs again, he was in shackles, at my request. He'd been waiting alone for about an hour. Neither Kuroda nor I spoke. We just sat and looked at him. He was cool for the first minute or so. Then, he started making nervous movements with his hands.

  "Kyle's pulling out," I said.

  Dorian flinched at the sound of my voice. "They're leaving Japan?"

  "Not Japan. They're just leaving you. My company's contract ran out at one o'clock this afternoon. You hadn't heard?"

  Dorian started to speak. His voice caught. He tried again. "I wasn't told."

  "I saw Lance Allworth this morning. He figures it's time for Kyle to cut its losses. 'After all,' he said, 'the evidence against Dorian is pretty damning.'

  "I gave it my best, Mr. Dorian. Even got shot, just across the thigh. We caught some bad people. Danced all around the Maho murder, but we never danced with it. I have no more evidence to indicate that you didn't kill her than I did after the first time I met you. Like I've said, nobody else is looking."

  "I want to talk to my lawyer."

  "Haven't you been talking to him all along?"

  "Yes."

  "What was his advice before I got here?"

  Dorian looked at his lap as he spoke. "Plead guilty for a light sentence." His voice was scarcely audible.

  "That was then. Still an option, Kuroda-san?"

  Kuroda pulled down the corners of his mouth and shook his head.

  "If you plead guilty," I said, "and express sincere remorse and abject humility, then you'll probably escape the gallows. I know that much about the system here. That leaves you with maybe twenty-to-life. I've seen the inside of a Japanese prison, Mr. Dorian. It makes this place look homey."

  "I..." Dorian tried to swallow several times.

  He needed water, but I didn't offer to call a guard.

  "I want to..." he made a dialing motion with his finger.

  I handed him my mobile phone.

  He called his company and asked for Lance Allworth.

  Unavailable.

  "It's extremely important."

  Unavailable.

  "Please."

  Unavailable.

  Dorian's hands were shaking when he put down the phone. He didn't try to hand it back to me.

  "This is a private visit, Mr. Dorian. I'm not being paid now. In fact, I expect I've trashed my career because of this. I don't understand myself why I'm here now, but I can say that you won't see me again in this room."

  He couldn't speak at all now. He brought his hand to his lips.

  Kur
oda called a guard and asked for glasses and a pitcher of water.

  While we waited, I wondered what sort of plans Lance Allworth and his superiors were working on, now that they were ready to sacrifice Dorian. They had a few options that I could think of. For a people who are sensitive to minor social slights, Japanese are oddly forgiving of human foibles on the grand scale.

  With the right spin, Kyle might not incur too much damage. The company couldn't help it if their executive became consumed with carnal appetites. Play up the kinky mistress angle, and Dorian and Maho might have come out folk heroes, who gave up everything for passion. Not just in Japan, stories like that have played well in a lot of societies. They've become grand operas, Hollywood movies.

  When Dorian got his voice back, his tale was much more sordid, because it was devoid of passion. There was no way Kyle could recover from the truth. No wonder they were ready to let Dorian swing.

  "I'm not a regular Kyle employee. I was brought in to fix this takeover. It's what I do. How do you think the world functions? People like me make things happen when bureaucrats won't move unless money is in their hands.

  "In this case, money didn't work. The FTC commissioner was wealthy. I used Hashimoto to find out what would work. He knew someone. I don't know who. All I did was give him payoff money supplied by Kyle. Even if I don't remember what happened that night, I didn't kill anyone! Mick, you told me you were convinced I didn't.

  "Kyle saved this company. No one in Japan was willing to take a risk until Kyle spelled out what no one else saw. I didn't kill anyone. I just..."

  Blackmailed an FTC commissioner. It was easy to see why he had kept the story hidden. He'd just confessed to blackmailing a public official, but hadn't provided any direct evidence for his defense on a murder charge. He had, however, provided a motive for someone to frame him for murder.

  "So long, Mr. Dorian. I'll see what I can do."

  Chapter 28

  Kuroda gave me a ride back to the hotel.

  I called Will Simons and filled him in on the latest. "Can you set up a meeting with the commissioner's secretary?"

  "With the video and what you just told me? I expect so," he said.

  "Mind if I bring someone from MPD?" I glanced at Kuroda.

  He nodded.

  "Sounds entertaining," said Will.

  Ueno agreed to meet us the next day. I called Yuri and invited her to dinner. She suggested a late lunch, if I hadn't eaten. I hadn't. We met at a restaurant in my hotel.

  "I took sick leave, workman's comp." She pointed to her foot. "If I'd stayed on the job, they'd have given me another case."

  "You didn't have to do that."

  "The only reason I didn't take off right away was to work on this. I'm not going to stop now."

  "There's not much left for us. Will Simons has set up a meeting with our FTC pal. Kuroda's going to be there. You go should come. Could be the last hurrah. Whatever we do next will depend on what happens at the meeting."

  "You sure it's all right, if I'm there?"

  "We need to rattle him. Your foot alone will be an asset. He might know what's been happening, but that's not the same as seeing it up close and physical. Maybe I should wear shorts, show him my leg."

  I could sense the gears of Yuri's mind grinding as I carved a bite of fish away from the bone.

  "You got the news about Kyle yesterday. Why then?" she said.

  "My guess is that Allworth, somehow found out about Dorian's blackmail. Maybe someone else in the company knew. How ever he discovered the truth, it wouldn't take a genius to realize the jig was up if it got out."

  "Dorian said he didn't know what happened to the video."

  "Right, he probably never saw it. Morimoto uncovered a convoluted money trail from the FTC to Maho. You know what's on the video. A romp with a young chippie you might write off to alpha-male hormones, but not what we saw. Maho or Yokoyama might have figured they had a commodity that was worth more than expected. They kept it for themselves, a little free-lance blackmail on the side."

  "If Yokoyama had ties to the plainclothes that Kuroda was investigating or ties to Ito, then his safest route would be to make it look like Maho had gone independent."

  "Or Maho, actually did go independent. I don't think we'll ever know."

  Some things you can't figure out on your own. Other things you can, like what to do after lunch. We went to my room for dessert. I ordered wine, fruit and cheese. When we finished that, all we had was each other.

  I held Yuri against me and prayed against hope that some things would neither stop nor end.

  * * * *

  We awoke to a pristine blue autumn morning, only a short while from show time at the Imperial Hotel. Yuri and I arrived together. Will Simons and Kuroda showed up within seconds of each other. We were all early, as planned. A bellman directed us to the same room where Will and I had met Ueno before.

  Musashi, Japan's greatest swordsman, is said to have used late arrivals as a tactic to unnerve his dueling opponents. Ueno might have had him in mind when he kept us waiting half an hour, but he wasn't really a fighter. Each of the four people he now faced was.

  Yuri's crutches rested against a wall. Her foot was propped on a chair. She didn't stand when Ueno was ushered in. The rest of us did. We bowed in unison.

  Ueno returned Yuri's slight of not standing by trying to ignore her.

  No good. She spoke first. "Interesting video."

  We had a laptop computer set up with the video on it. Yuri turned it so the screen faced Ueno. She pressed PLAY.

  Ueno didn't react. Maybe he'd already seen it.

  Yuri translated as I told him about the girl. I talked about my trip to her hometown, her funeral, the bone ceremony and her brother's despair. I gave him Morimoto's report of the money trail that linked him to Maho.

  Kuroda stepped in and asked if he knew the names of the two plainclothes cops who were arrested.

  He didn't answer, but the fact that he didn't say no indicated that he did know.

  Kuroda laid out two scenarios. One had Ueno in prison for a very long time. The other had him cooperating fully, with a slap on the wrist.

  Ueno held out against the pressure for a long time. I don't think it was toughness. I think it simply took a while for him to realize that he was no longer above the fray, cloistered in the ethereal realm of top-level bureaucracy. Amakudari, descent from heaven, retirement, a golden parachute, a nest proffered by a controlled industry. Ueno didn't have much of a parachute, now. His descent was fast and hard. He gave us everything he knew and was meticulous in details.

  One of the most interesting of his recollections was the name and workplace of a young European man who had been hired to have a sexual encounter with Maho, and thus accommodate a coroner's report of sexual stimulation and the statement of the hotel's desk clerk. He had left the room to be replaced by Dorian who had been rendered unconscious by drugs.

  Ueno gripped his hands together. "No one expected for the girl to die. I have no idea how that happened."

  There were a lot of players and some things had taken odd turns. It'd take a while to find out who knew what. There was time. When Ueno finished, Kuroda took him to his MPD office to commit the story to legal proceedings.

  In the evening, all four of us met again and went to a nightspot in Roppongi. A bartender asked what we'd like. I gave the name of the European man we'd gotten from Ueno.

  "That would be me," he said.

  "This is Mr. Kuroda from the Metropolitan Police Department. He'd like to talk to you."

  Except for his paid encounter with Maho, the young man said he didn't know anything about what had happened, but he confirmed what Ueno had told us. That gave us a little more pressure to tighten the screws on the thumbs of those who did know.

  Chapter 29

  The two plainclothes cops started to crack the next day. They were talking in a trade-off to escape the gallows in the deaths of Panther and Yokoyama. They told Kuroda where Yokoyama's bod
y was. He had been stabbed several times in the body.

  Kuroda had accepted my story that I had stabbed him once in the neck in self-defense. I wouldn't be arrested. The man Yuri had kicked was still unaccounted for, but regardless of that outcome, her action was also self-defense.

  Murder charges against Dorian were sure to be dropped. However, there was the matter of blackmail. Kuroda sounded apologetic when he said it. I told him I hoped Dorian got the heaviest sentence possible and recommended that he investigate Lance Allworth for obstruction. He said he would.

  I stuck around a few days to give affidavits, but I had more on my mind than bad guys. Yuri and I spent most of that time together. I cherished each moment and didn't think about much else, until I saw it coming to an end.

  What to say? How to say it? Don't think, just talk. That was a lifelong strategy that had gotten me nowhere so far. It was all I had.

  Yuri said that Sayoko was being considered for a job at Protect Agency. She was smart and innovative, lots of possibilities. That was good news for her, and it gave me an opening.

  "She could take your place," I said, "if you were to move to the States or somewhere else."

  Yuri reached over and ran her fingers across the back of my hand.

  "I don't have a job now. But I have enough to get by for a while. Something will come up. I have a lot of contacts. We could start our own agency. You're bilingual, aggressive, street smart. You're wasting your talent here, Yuri. Since I single-handedly tarnished GRIM's reputation, we could hire their staff, steal their clients."

  I listened for a laugh that didn't come.

  "We could live anywhere," I tried again, "Europe, South America, Japan."

  She shook her head.

  "It isn't now or nothing. There's a world of options. Let's think about what they are."

  "I have thought about it."

  "But I just asked."

  "You didn't have to ask. I've been thinking about it since our first drink together. The ride in the taxi, we didn't say much, but it felt good just being next to you. It felt right." She closed her eyes.

  I don't know what she saw in the privacy of her mind, but I knew there were scars. "I wouldn't walk out on you, Yuri."