Tokyo Zangyo

by Michael Pronko

  But where did the money come from? Some of the accounts Shibutani turned up were in Onizuka’s name and others were in Senden’s name. One number might be the employee ID number for Onizuka inside Senden, but he’d have to check. Maybe the HR woman, Chizu, would confirm it.

  Hiroshi was about to LINE message her but saw something in one of the documents that made him set down his phone—his own family name. He stopped to think about that, checked it again, looked at his half-eaten corn soup and spooned more in, thinking.

  He looked through his phone for the number and was about to call, but stopped himself, deciding to stop by his uncle’s in person instead. There was no way around that now.

  Hiroshi called Akiko instead. “Sugamo’s going to bring some account files in. Be sure Sakaguchi gets these files in as evidence. And don’t tell the chief anything about this, OK?” Hiroshi pulled out his cellphone and started taking photos as he talked.

  “You’ve got to be back here in time to go with the chief to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare at four,” Akiko said.

  “Yeah, I know. We’ll start with the forex and digital money accounts. And then move on to the Cayman Islands and Panama accounts. Let’s get those in order to send to Interpol. And don’t tell the chief.”

  “You said that already.”

  Hiroshi kept turning pages one by one, taking a photo of each and forwarding them to Akiko.

  Akiko sighed. “You really will be back by four, won’t you? The chief’s called three times already.”

  “And call Senden and tell them we need to see the roof again.”

  “When? After the ministries?”

  “We need to see it at night.”

  “Need, need, need. Anything else you need?”

  “We need everything at this point,” Hiroshi said. “I need to get over this hangover.”

  Hiroshi finished the photos, sent them to Akiko, paid and went outside. It was going to be a lot longer day than the last two, and just as confusing. He didn’t notice Sugamo and Takamatsu drive up until Sugamo honked.

  As soon as he got in the car, Takamatsu turned around. “So?”

  Hiroshi said, “Shibutani pieced most of it together. Onizuka had a lot more money floating around than we thought.”

  Takamatsu laughed. “You’re telling me this case is about money too?”

  “As always. And Mayu’s father had a couple of priors in the Philippines.”

  “Where to?” Sugamo asked.

  Hiroshi said, “We’ve got accountants to see.”

  “Another exciting afternoon.” Takamatsu reached for his cigarettes and rolled down the window to smoke.

  ***

  The first accountant’s office was halfway between Yotsuya Station and Shinjuku. The ground floor was a pizza delivery place with delivery scooters lined up neatly along the sidewalk. The building was an old one retrofitted for earthquakes. Huge steel trusses crisscrossed the outside of the building down to concrete mooring blocks that took up half of the sidewalk. The seismic braces turned the building into a lattice of giant Xs.

  Sugamo pulled up to let Hiroshi and Takamatsu out. Takamatsu didn’t even ask him how he knew the place and why they were going. It was clear it was in the files Hiroshi had just gone through. Hiroshi wondered if Takamatsu was actually starting to trust him.

  Hiroshi tapped the files and handed them to Sugamo. “Sneak these in with the other evidence. Sakaguchi will sign it into the chain of custody.”

  Sugamo waited for them to get out and pulled off with a word.

  Hiroshi watched Sugamo leave. “Was he pissed off about breaking evidence protocol?”

  Takamatsu shrugged and tapped the delivery warmer of one of the three-wheeled pizza bikes. “What is it with this pizza thing? It’s all over the place.”

  Hiroshi ignored him and headed into the open-air entrance. He checked the building’s directory and pressed the button on the elevator.

  On the eighth floor, Hiroshi knocked on the glass door, and pushed it open gently. The office contained a dozen tables under bare fluorescent lights and a row of unwashed windows that looked out on Shinjuku Dori, a wide street lined by the tediously functional ten- and twelve-story buildings of Yotsuya’s business district.

  The five women hunched over their desks barely looked up when Hiroshi and Takamatsu entered. Finally, a woman sitting at one of the desks near the front stood up and asked them what they wanted.

  “We need to see Kato-san,” Hiroshi said.

  She turned to the back desk. “Kato-san,” she called out in a slight voice.

  Kato looked up from his computer and frowned at the interruption before standing up. He was tall with a thin frame that looked all the thinner because he walked with a slight limp. He came around the desks, bowed slightly, and sniffled as he waited for the detectives to speak first.

  “I’m Hiroshi Shimizu and this is Takamatsu. We’re homicide detectives. We need to talk with you about your auditing work for Senden Central Infinity.” He handed over his meishi.

  Kato nodded, his face an oval of inscrutability. “I used to work for Senden, but not any longer. You should talk to the current auditors.” He spoke in a low, calm voice.

  Hiroshi said, “We talked with Shibutani.”

  Kato’s face stayed blank.

  Hiroshi said, “We need to double-check a few points.”

  Kato turned to the five employees, their heads down at their desks. “I’ll be gone for about half an hour,” he told them.

  They looked up in unison, nodded and went back to work.

  Kato sighed and sniffled. “Follow me. We can talk on the roof and I can smoke.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Takamatsu said.

  They followed Kato down the outside hallway and up a narrow stairwell. It switched back three times before opening onto the roof. In the sun, Kato stopped to sneeze. Kato sneezed again as he took out his cigarettes and headed toward a red bucket set next to three plastic chairs faded from sun and rain.

  He stopped by the chairs, but didn’t sit down. One of the seats was cracked. The bucket was filled with a thick stew of brown water and cigarette butts. It stank, so Hiroshi took a step back as Kato and Takamatsu lit up.

  After they sighed with relief, Hiroshi said, “Kato, you did the auditing on Senden—”

  “That was three years ago,” Kato said. “And I was with a different firm then.”

  Hiroshi flipped through the photos of files in his cellphone. “Nishimura Auditing?”

  Kato nodded, sniffling and snorting to clear his sinuses.

  Hiroshi wanted to recommend some allergy medicine to him. “And now you work here?”

  “After I worked for the firm that handled Senden, I leased this space and started out on my own. I had some inheritance from my mother.”

  Kato looked off at a distance over the low wall around the roof. The view of Shinjuku Gyoen Park and the Akasaka Palace grounds was unimpeded. Farther away, the skyscrapers of West Shinjuku thrust gray and rectangular into the plain afternoon sky.

  Hiroshi said, “You were fired?”

  Kato looked back at Hiroshi. “Call it what you want.”

  “What was it that Senden didn’t like about your auditing?”

  “Their internal financial guys are not so smart. I tried to tell them how to move their money out of Japan discreetly and safely—and legally—but they thought they knew best.”

  “Did they?” Hiroshi asked.

  “They left a trail of crumbs anyone could follow.”

  “You helped them with tax shelters, too?”

  Kato nodded, snuffling through his nostrils. He finally pulled out a tissue and blew his nose, coughed and snuffled again, and got back to smoking.

  Hiroshi showed the photo of Onizuka’s forex account to Kato. “You’ve seen these before?”

  Kato’s eyes stayed thin as he read. “Not this one, but one like it.”

  “And these?” Hiroshi scrolled through the photos of the other files Shi
butani had gathered.

  Kato hummed confirmation. “I saw most of those right before they fired me. If you find the originals, bring them back here and I’ll check them for you.”

  Hiroshi said, “We might need you to do that. So, after that, Senden fired your firm?”

  “No, Senden made my firm fire me. And not only that, they reported me to the JICPA and the public tax accountants board, too. I had to go defend myself.”

  “They didn’t like your advice,” Hiroshi said.

  “No, they liked it a lot,” Kato said. “They wanted me to take the fall if the Tax Agency caught up with them. I wouldn’t do that.” Kato coughed and looked at the tops of the park trees in the distance.

  Hiroshi said, “How did they hide things at Senden?”

  Kato breathed in and out more quietly. “Mostly they keep everything important on paper and misfile it.”

  “Misfile?”

  “Like a misfiled book in a library, you can never find it unless you know where it is. Only one or two people know, but no one else.”

  “You have to know to know?” Takamatsu asked.

  Kato coughed and snuffled and nodded.

  Hiroshi took a breath and looked off in the distance. “And personnel files?”

  “I guess it’s the same. Their misfiling system gives some people inordinate power.”

  “Knowledge is power?” Hiroshi prompted.

  “Hidden knowledge is more powerful,” Kato said. “They run the company on it.”

  Takamatsu and Kato flicked their cigarettes into the red can of murky water and the butts went out with a swift fizzle.

  Chapter 18

  Outside the office, Takamatsu waved down a taxi. “I’m starting to like talking to people in offices. I can smoke and don’t have chase anyone down dirty alleys.”

  “I’m not sure which is more depressing,” Hiroshi said, getting into the taxi first.

  “At least in the alley you end up with something for your effort,” Takamatsu said.

  Hiroshi gave the driver directions. “The next one’s just another accounting firm. I’ll handle it.”

  “All right. I’ll check up on Mayu’s father. After a night in jail, maybe he’s concocted some new alibis.”

  “I’ll meet you in Shibuya later?”

  “Sugamo and I can pick you up at Kanda Station. How much time do you need?” Takamatsu pulled up his crisp cuffs and checked his gold watch.

  “Give me an hour.” Hiroshi got out in front of a newly built five-story building not far from Kanda Station and Takamatsu rode on in the taxi.

  Inside the automatic glass doors, the outside entryway had a small alcove in the stone wall with a shiny silver panel for contacting the offices. Hiroshi pressed the right combination of buttons and explained who he was to the voice in the speaker.

  The buzzer sounded and he pushed into the atrium. The elevator was already descending. Beside the elevator door, a large freestyle ikebana arrangement with tight-packed white flowers and split zigzags of bamboo seemed to reach out for him, the bud-laden twigs curling forward like beautiful claws.

  On the fifth floor, Hiroshi was met by a neatly dressed woman with a deep bow. She led him down a quiet corridor of offices to a meeting room, bowed again and left him alone with the chairs and a wide, oval table. He’d only visited the office twice before.

  In a few seconds, his uncle walked in.

  His father’s younger brother was as tall as Hiroshi’s father, taller than Hiroshi too and grayer than he recalled. He had been a ladies’ man when he was young, Hiroshi remembered his father saying, and he looked as if he still could be.

  More likely, he worked most of the time. That was the only way to build up a consultancy firm that handled auditing, accounting, budgeting, personnel issues and government regulations. It was a small business considering its actual size, but large based on its contacts, which, according to what he’d just read in Shibutani’s files, included Senden Central and its new overseas venture Senden Infinity.

  His uncle flashed a curious smile as he shut the door and sat down across the table. “It’s been a while. Do you want coffee or anything?”

  Hiroshi sat down, took a breath and said, “I’m only here for a few minutes. I was in the neighborhood.”

  Hiroshi’s uncle smiled. “What does my detective nephew need today?”

  “Information about Senden Central.”

  “That’s a good reason to be in the neighborhood.” Hiroshi’s uncle looked down at the shiny table. “Onizuka, right?”

  Hiroshi shifted in his chair to stifle a wave of nausea from his hangover.

  His uncle straightened his light-brown button-down shirt. “What do you want to know?”

  “You did consulting work for the company.”

  “Accounting mostly. We had a contract, but it ended.”

  “It ended from your side or theirs?”

  “It was mutual. I think they were just fishing to see what we’d do.”

  “Did it end because you didn’t want to—”

  “Because they didn’t listen to our recommendations.”

  “Recommendations about…?”

  “All aspects of their business. That’s what consulting is.”

  “Is it?” Hiroshi said it with more sarcasm than he’d intended.

  “You were so quiet when you were young. Agreeable.”

  Hiroshi thought of his mother and father’s loud, angry arguments, and how quiet his father had been after her funeral. They’d barely spoken until he died not long after.

  Hiroshi’s uncle sighed. “So, Senden was going global, and they wanted to expand. They also wanted to know the full range of options about overseas taxation and foreign accounts.”

  “How to keep their foreign profits out of sight of Japanese officials.”

  “That’s about it, yes.”

  “Do you still have the files from—”

  “They took everything back, even sent someone to be sure the files were erased from our server. All that was in the initial contract, but they were determined to carry it out. We still consult on a few issues with them, but frankly, I was glad to be done with them.”

  Hiroshi looked at his uncle. “Because of how many irregularities there were?”

  “Partially that, but also because they wanted to purchase a lot of overseas real estate and put more money into offshore accounts. We’d have been besieged.”

  “By government regulators?”

  “The Tax Agency would be all over it, yes, but we could deal with that. It was more that company people share inside tips, so every company would want in on it. I wasn’t going to be the go-to firm for that kind of work. There are a lot of lines I don’t cross. You should know that already.”

  Hiroshi met his eyes. “I know that.”

  “Then why are you asking?”

  Hiroshi couldn’t remember his uncle ever speaking to him in an angry way before. He would have welcomed an argument or two when he was younger, but his uncle never gave him that chance. After Hiroshi’s mother and father died, his uncle took over as guardian. Without much input from Hiroshi, his uncle had decided his nephew would study in the States, and he took charge of the money for him, covering tuition, and sending ample spending money. His aunt had sent care packages, Japanese noodles, furikake seasonings, and photos of his cousin. Hiroshi studied whatever he wanted in his courses, alongside what his uncle paid for—accounting. It was like a six-year vacation, with the occasional exam. He’d got the degree for his uncle and took the other classes, history mostly, for himself.

  Hiroshi couldn’t blame his uncle, but he couldn’t warm to him, either.

  “Your name, our name, was on a list an investigator had. He was tailing Onizuka and looking into a girl’s suicide.”

  “Of course, our name would be in there somewhere, but I don’t know anything about a girl’s suicide.”

  “You know the case of Mayu Yamase? Her mother sued Senden and won.”

  “From
the news.”

  “It was Onizuka who harassed and overworked the girl to the point of suicide,” Hiroshi said. “Now he’s died, on the anniversary of her death.”

  His uncle frowned and hummed. “Senden has a tough corporate culture. I’m surprised there’s only one girl like her.”

  “Only one we know of.”

  They looked at each other.

  Hiroshi said, “I thought all this is what you wanted me to get away from when you sent me overseas?”

  Hiroshi’s uncle cleared his throat and started drawing his finger along the top of the table. “I wanted you to get to something, supporting yourself with a practical skill, accounting, and a global skill, English. I didn’t want you to be dependent on anyone, not even on me. Your father would have been furious to see you not making your own life choices.”

  “You cut off my choices,” Hiroshi said, the words sticking in his dry throat. “You pressured me to work for you.”

  “That wasn’t pressure, that was help. Your father and I were very different people, but we were still family. You were only twenty when you left. I set you up for the most practical career around.”

  “A bit too practical.”

  “Maybe, but it was the best I could do at the time. Your father was my older brother. I relied on him my whole life. When he died, I wasn’t sure what to do.”

  “You didn’t even ask me what I wanted.”

  He raised his finger from where it was pressing into the table and took a big breath. “You know, I miss your father too.”

  Hiroshi took a big breath. “I know.”

  “What else do you need to know about Senden?”

  “Are they that corrupt?”

  “They believe they can bend anything to their will with hard work. They called it thinking outside the box, but it was often outside the legal box.” Hiroshi’s uncle shrugged. “Their corporate culture relies on micromanaging every detail of the company efficiently and completely.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “By working their asses off and expecting everyone to do the same. Even an outside firm like ours was expected to follow their lead. When our contract with them finished, everyone here breathed a sigh of relief. It was a nightmare to work with them. That was pressure.”