When Isobe and his men walked in, the Kawahatas stood up from their bench in the lobby. Shigehiro bowed his head deeply. “I’m sorry for causing everyone so much trouble.”
“It’s okay, you can all sit down,” Isobe said, taking off his shoes and stepping up into the lobby. His men followed suit.
Nishiguchi paused, unsure whether he should follow, and ultimately remained standing by the entryway. He looked up with a start to realize that Motoyama and Hashigami had arrived and were standing next to him.
“We’ll get the story in more detail down at the station,” Isobe said, looking down at the family, “but if you just give me a general idea?” Next to him, Nonogaki took out a notepad and prepared to take notes.
Shigehiro looked up. “It was my fault, all of it. I was lazy, and Mr. Tsukahara paid a horrible price for it.”
“Sorry?” Isobe asked. “Lazy?”
“I knew the boiler and the building were getting old, but I did nothing about it. I was wrong. That’s why this … accident happened.”
“You’re saying it was an accident?”
“Yes, an accident. I should’ve told the police right away, but then I … I’m so sorry.” He bowed his head deeply once more.
A perplexed look passed across Isobe’s face, and he scratched his head. “I think you should start by explaining exactly what happened.”
“Right, of course. Well, like I said in an earlier statement, that night I was outside in the backyard with my nephew setting off some fireworks.
“A little while before that, Tsukahara came down to the kitchen and asked if we had any good strong drink. When I asked him why, he said that he always had trouble sleeping on trips. I know I shouldn’t have, but I gave him a sleeping pill I’d gotten from a doctor friend years ago. It was only one, I swear. Anyway, Tsukahara thanked me and went back to his room. Right after that, I called Kyohei and told him to come on downstairs so we could set off some fireworks in the backyard.”
Later, at around eight thirty, Shigehiro had gone back inside to call Tsukahara’s room and ask when he wanted his breakfast in the morning, but Tsukahara didn’t pick up. So he went back out to the backyard and resumed the fireworks. They finished a little before nine. He tried phoning Tsukahara again, but there was no answer. He went to check the baths, found them empty, then went up to the Rainbow Room on the fourth floor, where their guest was staying. He found it unlocked, with Tsukahara nowhere in sight. Eventually, Setsuko came back from town in Sawamura’s truck, and he told them about their missing guest. Sawamura said he would help check the area around the inn, so with Shigehiro in the passenger seat, they drove around, but found no sign of Tsukahara—all of this was exactly as Shigehiro had said in his earlier testimony.
What he didn’t say, however, was what had happened next.
After Sawamura went back to town, Setsuko took another look around. It was then that she noticed some light spilling out of the doorway on the fourth floor, the door to the Ocean Room. She opened the door and noticed a faint smell of something burning. When she went inside, she was astonished to find Tsukahara lying there on the floor. He wasn’t breathing. Panicked, she called Shigehiro. Shigehiro took stock of the situation and hurried down to the basement, where he discovered that the boiler had stopped.
The boiler room in the basement was connected by a single pipe to the chimney on the roof of the inn, bringing the exhaust from the boiler up through the walls and outside. The pipe ran past some of the guest rooms, including the Ocean Room, where it passed just behind the main closet. It had never been a problem, except the gradual deterioration of the building and an earthquake several years earlier had resulted in a crack in the back wall of the closet. The pipe itself wasn’t airtight. The Kawahatas had noticed an occasional smell of soot in the room before, and generally avoided using it for that reason.
Tsukahara, sprawled on the floor in his yukata, was dead, except his skin color looked unusually healthy. Having worked many years at an engine manufacturer, Shigehiro realized immediately it was carbon monoxide poisoning.
As to why Tsukahara had been in the Ocean Room in the first place, he could only guess. He thought maybe he had heard the sounds of fireworks going off in the backyard and come to take a look. In order to make things easier when they did cleaning, they rarely locked the unused rooms. To Tsukahara’s misfortune, he’d already taken the sleeping medicine he got from Shigehiro. Shigehiro thought he must’ve fallen asleep while he was watching the fireworks and never noticed the smell of gas in the room.
“I know I should have alerted the police immediately, but I didn’t. I don’t know what came over me,” were the words Shigehiro Kawahata used. He had suggested to Setsuko that they move the body somewhere else. Carbon monoxide poisoning wasn’t something readily apparent, so if Tsukahara were wounded in some other way, Shigehiro figured the police might never look any closer.
“I suggested we throw him over the seawall. My wife resisted. She said we should call the police. But I pressured her.” Shigehiro sat with his head hanging, his hands clenched into fists on his knees.
Setsuko looked like she might say something, but Isobe held up a hand to stop her.
“If you would, ma’am, please hold your testimony until later when we’re all back at the station. I’d like to hear everything your husband has to say first. Mr. Kawahata?”
Shigehiro coughed once before resuming his story. “My wife and I carried the body. It wasn’t easy, with my injury and all, but we got him into the van. Then we took him down to the seawall and, after we were sure no one was looking, we threw him over. I put an overcoat on the body before we dropped him so it would look like he had gone out for a walk. I threw the sandal down too. Then the two of us went back up to the inn. Our daughter and our only other guest, Mr. Yukawa, came back right after that. That’s it. That’s everything.” When he had finished speaking, he lowered his head again slowly.
Isobe nodded, rubbed the back of his neck for a moment, then turned to Nonogaki. “You get all that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Detective,” Shigehiro said, looking up. “I hope you understand, it was all my fault. My wife was just doing what I told her to. Please—”
Isobe held his hand out in front of Shigehiro’s face to silence him. “That’s enough of that,” he said in a low, cold tone. “I think we get the general picture. We’ll speak to both of you individually down at the station. We’d like your daughter to come down too.”
Narumi nodded silently.
“Okay, this hotel is off-limits to anyone not on the task force,” Isobe said in a loud voice. “We’ll take all the keys. And, didn’t you have a relative staying here? A boy?”
“His father came to pick him up this morning.”
“His father?” A cloud passed over Isobe’s face. “So he took the kid back home?”
“No, they’re still in town.”
“Good. Give me the number. We need to talk to the kid, too. Also, where is your other guest, this Yukawa fellow?”
“We had Mr. Yukawa move to a different hotel. We told him something came up and we had to leave town for a few days.”
“You know which hotel he’s staying at, then? We’ll get that number from you too.”
Isobe told his men to take the Kawahatas down to the station. Then he picked a few other detectives to close off the crime scene and had someone give forensics a call.
Nishiguchi stood and watched as the three Kawahatas were shepherded into three separate police cruisers. He wanted to call out to Narumi and tell her not to worry, but she was surrounded by officers, and he couldn’t get close enough to talk to her.
FORTY-EIGHT
Kyohei looked up from his notebook at the sound of a phone buzzing. His father swore under his breath and checked the display before answering it. It was the fourth call in less than an hour—probably Mom again.
“What? Look, I told you I don’t know anything.… Yeah, we’re at the hotel. We checked in, now we
’re just waiting. I said we’re waiting. Look, given the circumstances, the police are definitely—” He stopped speaking for moment and looked around, then continued in a quiet voice. “The police are definitely going to want to talk to Kyohei.… No, what good would you coming here do? That would just make things even more confused than they already are.… No, we can’t. We absolutely can’t delay the opening.” Still holding the phone to his ear, he stood from the table and walked away.
Kyohei drank his orange juice through a long straw. They were sitting in the hotel lounge. The only people in the pool were a little kid wearing a floatie and a woman—probably his mother.
Kyohei’s father stood in a corner of the lounge, still talking. From the way it sounded, he’d left everything in Osaka up to Kyohei’s mom. Kyohei knew it was no little thing getting a new store open. He could imagine his mother fretting up a storm. “How dare they pull a stunt like this when we’re up to our necks in work!”
At first, his father had been mum about why he’d suddenly come to pick Kyohei up, but after they left the Green Rock Inn and checked in at this resort hotel, he had told him the truth. The guest, Tsukahara, had died because of a boiler malfunction at the inn. His aunt and uncle had tried to dispose of the body to hide that fact.
“They should’ve just called the police right away, but because they didn’t, well, now they’re in a bit of trouble. They might even have to spend some time in jail,” his father told him with a dark face.
Kyohei thought back to the way his aunt and uncle had been acting in the days after Tsukahara went missing: the strained conversations, the dark looks in the car. Suddenly it all made sense.
Kyohei slurped at his drink, becoming aware of someone standing next to him. He looked up. “Hey, Professor!”
“They send you here?”
“Yeah, with my dad. Did they put you up here too?”
“This is the hotel where DESMEC made my initial reservation. I hardly imagined I’d be taking them up on it under these circumstances.”
Kyohei looked up at him. “You knew what happened, didn’t you?”
The physicist pushed his glasses up with the tip of his finger. “Knew what?”
“About the accident at the inn. That it was my uncle’s fault.”
“Accident?” Yukawa raised an eyebrow. “I had some theories. How long will you be staying here?”
“I don’t know. We might head out tomorrow, but Dad says we might leave later tonight if we can.”
“I see,” Yukawa said, nodding. “That’s probably for the best. This isn’t a good place for you to be.”
“Why not?” Kyohei asked.
“I should think you’d know that better than anyone else.”
Kyohei looked up at Yukawa, but then he saw his father putting his phone in his pocket and turning back around. Yukawa nodded and walked away with long strides.
“Who was that?” Kyohei’s father asked him.
Kyohei didn’t answer. His eyes were on Yukawa’s back, watching him leave.
FORTY-NINE
No matter which way they asked the questions, Narumi’s story remained the same. She’d been with her friends at the bar that night. She was still there when she heard that Mr. Tsukahara had gone missing. After going home, she’d gone to her room and hadn’t come out until the following morning. She hadn’t heard anything about a boiler malfunction.
“So last night was the first time you heard the truth?” Detective Nonogaki asked.
“How many times do I have to tell you? Yes.”
Nonogaki crossed his arms and frowned. “It’s just, I have a hard time believing you didn’t notice anything strange.”
“What can I say? It’s the truth,” Narumi said, looking down at the floor.
She was sitting in a conference room down at the Hari police station, empty save for herself and the detective. She imagined her mother and father in tiny questioning rooms in some other corner of the station, getting the full shakedown, and it made her chest ache.
Her father had told her he’d be turning himself in the night before. When she asked what happened, her father had glumly replied it was an accident. Except when he should have called the police—he’d tried to hide it and only made everything worse.
“I know the police will figure it out sooner or later, and frankly, I can’t go on like this, it’s too painful,” he’d told her. “I’m sorry. They’ll probably arrest your mother, too, but as long as I make it clear that I forced her to help, she’ll get off easy.”
Narumi was shaken and confused. It terrified her to picture her mother and father trying to hide the body. Except, in the middle of that nightmare, a part of her mind was relieved. As long as Tsukahara’s death had been an accident, the fault of an old inn and an old innkeeper, then there was a light in the darkness.
Or was there? Was her father telling her the truth? Had it really been an accident? Was this just another attempt to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes? Narumi didn’t give voice to her doubts. It’d been hard, but she’d decided to take her father’s confession at face value. And if she was being honest, she wanted it to be true.
Setsuko hadn’t said a word the entire time. Narumi didn’t think it was just because her father told her to be quiet. She sensed that Setsuko had her own version of what happened but that she had decided to let her husband handle this his way.
Narumi didn’t ask many questions after hearing her father’s confession. She kept it simple. What would they do with the inn? And with Kyohei? Her father had already figured it all out. For one thing, he said with a lonely laugh, they would definitely be closing down the inn.
She’d barely slept that night. She feared the coming dawn, the daylight that would see her parents being arrested. At the same time, a different worry played through her mind. Would this really be the end of it? The call from her middle school friend, Reiko, still bothered her. What if the police in Tokyo were still investigating, still digging up the past?
“Well, did you?”
Narumi blinked, suddenly aware that Nonogaki was asking her a question. “I’m sorry, did I what?”
“I was asking you if you played any sports when you were younger.”
“Oh, right. I played tennis in middle school.”
“Tennis, okay,” he said, giving her a look-over. “You were a diving instructor too, weren’t you? You’re pretty tough for a girl.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said, a little coldly.
Nonogaki slowly tapped his finger on the table. “I just don’t think those two could’ve pulled this off by themselves. Your dad’s got his leg, and your mom’s pretty short, and frankly, she doesn’t look like she has much lifting power. We’re supposed to believe they carried a body down from the fourth floor and tossed it over the seawall? Doesn’t seem very likely. What do you think? You think they could pull it off?”
“That’s what they said, so they must have, yes.”
“Yeah, they did say that,” Nonogaki said, stretching his neck. “But there’s no way. No way at all.”
Narumi shrugged.
Nonogaki rested his elbows on the desk and looked her in the eye. “I can understand why your parents would want to protect their only child. They can live with turning themselves in, but they don’t want to see their baby behind bars.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. You’re going to let your aging folks go to prison while you live a life of ease? That the plan?”
Narumi’s cheeks tightened. “You’re suggesting I helped?”
Nonogaki smiled. “We’re not idiots, you know. All we have to do is get them to try and reenact how they pulled it off, and it’ll be pretty clear their story’s full of holes. They’re protecting someone, and it’s not hard to guess who.”
Narumi shook her head. She felt her face burning. “I didn’t do anything. That’s the truth. If I had helped them, I would tell you. I wouldn’t just stand by while t
hey took the blame!”
Nonogaki shook his head and picked at his ear with his fingertip. Act all you want, you won’t fool me, his look said.
There was an abrupt knock at the door, and it opened slightly. Someone outside called for Detective Nonogaki.
Nonogaki stood, his chair making a loud noise as he pushed it back, and he walked out, a sour look on his face. He slammed the door behind him.
Narumi put a hand to her forehead. She knew they were going to ask her questions, but she hadn’t anticipated becoming a suspect. She imagined that they were grilling her parents now too, trying to get them to admit that she’d helped. But she had to admit that what the detective said made sense. It would’ve been next to impossible for the two of them to manage a grown man’s body.
The door opened again, and Nonogaki came back inside, his expression a little different than it had been a moment before. His brow was still furrowed with consternation, but now his eyes looked a little twitchy, like he was excited.
He sat back down in his chair and began tapping his finger on the table again, only to a much faster rhythm. Finally he stopped and looked up at Narumi. “You said you got to the bar around nine o’clock?”
“Yes,” she replied, returning his gaze.
“And you were there when Mr. Tsukahara died. Are you sure you arrived at nine?” Nonogaki asked again, irritation in his voice.
“Yes, very sure,” Narumi answered, growing bewildered.
“You said that this man, Sawamura, gave your mother a ride home, right? What time did he get back to the bar?”
“He came back a little before ten o’clock. I thought he’d been gone a long time for just having given my mom a ride home, which is when he told me that a guest had gone missing from the inn—why are you asking me this?”
Nonogaki looked like he was about to say something, then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he muttered under his breath. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Is it my parents?”
A Midsummer's Equation: A Detective Galileo Mystery Page 24
