A Dog in Water (25 page)

“Why the fuck haven’t you left yet?!”

I headed towards the voice. Kawakubo sat drinking alcohol on an absurdly large sofa in an expensively appointed living room. Several plates of hors d’oeuvres lined the table. Once he caught sight of me, his raised glass tumbled to the floor, the soft carpet preventing it from shattering.

“So I’ve been deceived,” Kawakubo muttered with disgust. “Have you come to avenge your cop friend?”

“No, that wouldn’t make him happy.” I truly believed that.

“Then what? Haven’t you come here to kill me?”

“I haven’t yet decided what to do with you.”

“Hmph. If you want to kill me, then kill me. I’ve killed tons of people in my time. I’m not scared of being killed myself.” Kawakubo’s expression didn’t have even the slightest hint of composure.

“I want to know the truth,” I said. “You killed Toshikawa, didn’t you?”

Kawakubo surveyed me in silence for a long moment. “How did you know?”

“I knew it as soon as I met you.”

“Hmph. I figured a guy who had his son killed while he was doing time for murder would be wallowing in despair. Turned out to be a pretty decent fellow. I don’t need any decent fellows in my organization,” he scoffed.

“And so you killed him?”

“He dared tell me that even if he’d committed a crime, he’d never get involved with a filthy business like mine.”

“…”

“Just knowing people like you and him exist pisses me off.”

“When did you kill him?”

“I think it was the day after Kamata brought him to me.”

“Wasn’t it November 19th?”

“Like I remember the fucking date.”

“According to the call records of this cell phone under contract to Toshikawa beginning on November 8th, no calls have been placed after November 19th.”

“Then I guess that was it. So what? Are you gonna hand me over to the police? They’ll never find the corpse. It won’t even merit an investigation.”

“What did you do with the body?”

“Cleaners took care of it. Do you know how cleaners dispose of corpses?”

“No …”

“Out by Haneda, around Heiwajima and Katsushima, you know there are a whole lot of cold-storage facilities, don’t you? Several belong to the yakuza. They flash-freeze the bodies at minus seventy degrees. Ever see that on television? It’s a world where you can hammer nails with bananas or crush rose petals into dust. The bodies are frozen to the marrow, then run through a grinder. Human shaved ice, ready to serve. Flush it down the drain and nothing is left behind. DNA testing isn’t even an issue.”

“I see.” Had Katsuya Yamamoto been disposed of in that manner too?

“You’ll be good and leave now if you don’t want to meet the same fate.”

“Think you’re still in a position to be talking down to me?”

“I’ve ordered all my men to kill you on sight. That order will still stand even if I die. You’ll be hunted for the rest of your life. But if you withdraw now without doing anything I’ll cancel the order. I’ll forget about everything you’ve done. What do you say?”

“I’ve been thinking this whole time,” I replied. “I can’t come up with any reason to let you live.”

Kawakubo was staring at me. He believed he could still bargain with me, his eyes said. “Hmph, you can’t kill me. You aren’t motivated by greed. You’ve probably got a pronounced sense of justice. Am I right? A man like you couldn’t kill a defenseless old man.”

“I wonder.”

“I’ve seen the faces of countless killers in my time. A murderer’s eyes always give him away. You don’t have a killer’s eyes.”

“The fourth.”

“What?”

“You’ll be my fourth.”

I disengaged the thumb safety of the Government. Kawakubo, his mouth open, didn’t budge.

The elevator doors slid open. I headed towards the corridor that led to the underground garage. I didn’t need a key to exit. As soon as I turned the knob and opened the heavy metallic door a gunshot rang out. I felt an impact in my abdomen that threw me off balance. There was more gunfire.

Sparks shot out right next to my face. I aimed towards the flash of orange light I saw in the edge of my field of vision and fired four rounds. The terrific roar of the Government’s discharge reverberated through the garage. I saw Kamata let go of his revolver and slam to the ground. He remained motionless. I had no idea if he was dead or alive, and I had no intention of finding out.
Instead of going to the doctor’s you went and got a gun and came back? How conscientious
. I walked over to the Mercedes, biting back pain. I opened the trunk to find the bodyguard looking up at me fearfully. I aimed the gun at him, then handed him back his keys.

“You can leave.”

A look of disbelief ran across his features, but perhaps fearing I would change my mind, he jumped out of the trunk in a hurry and raced at full-tilt towards the service entrance. I climbed into my own car and started the engine. Just then my cell phone rang. It was my informant.

“Where are you?”

“Tennozu, but there’s still some place I’ve got to get to.”

“I see. Then I’ll just tell you over the phone …”

He told me what information he’d been able to dig up for me. I
carved each item into my brain.

“I’ll give you the details when I see you. You gonna be in the office tomorrow?” he asked.

“Possibly not,” I answered.

“Then I’ll call ya. Later, Dick.”

“Oh, by the way …”

“What?”

“Remember when I treated you to lunch because you had something to tell me? You still haven’t told me what that was.”

My informant laughed. “Oh, man, you’re right. Totally slipped my mind. I’ll tell you that, too, when I see you next. Look forward to it.”

“I will,” I said and hung up. I put the car into gear and drove out. It was nearing 1:00 a.m. on the morning of the fourteenth, Johannes’s time limit in my reckoning.

I arrived at Yuko Kuroki’s apartment building around 2:00 a.m. She appeared to have already come home as the lights were on in her apartment. Gripping the handrail, I walked up the exposed steel staircase to the second floor. I stood in front of her door, the second one in from the stairs. The door opened as soon as I knocked.

“Where’s Shiori?” she asked the second she saw me. She hadn’t yet removed her make-up and her face was just as lovely as the night before.

“Sorry to call on you at such a late hour. I’ve come alone,” I said.

A shadow of suspicion crossed her features. “You’re looking rather pale, Mr. Detective. What has happened to you?”

“Just feeling a bit under the weather.”

“Well, come in, please.”

“No, here is fine. I’ll be leaving soon.”

“Oh. Well then, what is it?”

“Your last name, Kuroki, is the name of your deceased husband. Why do you continue to use the name of a man you hated so much?”

“What?”

“Before that, you were Yuko Nishizaki. But that surname, too,
you’d assumed from a man you were wed to for just four months. Your permanent residence has changed twice, and your hometown is Takasaki City in Gunma Prefecture, not Ibaraki.”

Yuko’s beautiful face grew increasingly saturated with anger. “Why did you investigate me? I never asked you to do that!”

“You hired me to find Johannes. And you are Johannes.”

“Wha—” gasped Yuko. She seemed to be quickly losing control of her emotions and glared at me with ferocious eyes. “Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Did you find Mr. Toshikawa?”

“Mr. Toshikawa is deceased.”

“Lies!”

“He was released from prison on the third of November and murdered on the nineteenth. Therefore he was not the one who sent the letter from Johannes.”

“…”

“You sent that letter to yourself, am I right?”

Yuko stood stock still, eyes cast downwards. Just inside the doorway was a combined kitchen and dining area and beyond that I could see a child’s writing desk. The bookshelves next to the desk were lined with illustrated books,
Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Aesop’s Fables
and a number of editions of
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
.

“I wanted … I wanted to see Mr. Toshikawa again …” she said after a long stretch of silence. “He called me right after he was released. ‘Let’s just forget it,’ he said. ‘Please have a happy life with your daughter.’ That was all. But I was desperate to see him. I wanted to see him and atone for what I’d done. That’s what I had waited seven years for. I wrote the letter to get someone to find him for me, since I wasn’t a relation …” Her eyes brimmed with tears.

“That’s a lie too. The only parts of your story that held fast were Mr. Toshikawa going to prison for having murdered your husband and your killing Yuta Toshikawa. I wasn’t able to find a shred of evidence concerning anything else you said.”

“So you think it’s all lies?” Yuko’s eyes had regained their sharpness. “There are plenty of truths in this world that can’t be proven. You
have no evidence that I was lying, either.”

“I was able to learn some things that you didn’t tell me,” I said. “Your maiden name is Yuko Yoshida. At age nineteen, you gave birth to your first child. You were arrested for killing your ten-month-old infant and dumping the body in a river.”

“Liar!”

“That’s the real reason you left your hometown and your family cut all ties with you, correct?”

“No!”

“You then spent just over two years in a medical reformatory in Fuchu.”

“…”

“You left that part out when you told me your story. Why?”

“It was irrelevant.”

“I see it this way: You didn’t hire me in order to find Mr. Toshikawa. You wanted to turn me into a witness. To witness just how far into a corner you’d been driven.”

“No!”

“In your case, you don’t kill the child because you’ve been pushed to the brink. You push yourself to the brink so you can kill the child.”

“What the hell do you know?”

“So you used Mr. Toshikawa’s existence. As a motive for killing your child.”

“That’s nothing more than your imagination talking. In the first place, why would I want to kill Shiori? I love Shiori!”

“Didn’t you love Yuta Toshikawa? And your first child, too?”

“…”

“I don’t know what kind of darkness occupies your heart. But this needs to end.”

“End how? Are you going to turn me in to the police? I haven’t done anything to Shiori yet. Is it a crime to send a fake letter? If there’s no case, the police won’t move an inch.”

“Precisely.”

“In fact, I could press charges against you for kidnapping. I am
Shiori’s mother, I have custody of her. If you’re arrested she’ll be handed back to me. There’s nothing you can do,” Yuko said with a haughty smile.

I was out of time. “You’re living within a peculiar tale of your own making. I don’t know the reason why, and I can’t rewrite the plot.” I aimed the barrel of the pistol at her chest. “All I can do is end the tale.”

Then I pulled the trigger.

There was a fair amount of blood pooled in my left shoe. I slipped as I started to walk down the exposed staircase and tumbled all the way down. I grabbed the handrail and managed to right myself and started walking, placing each foot carefully in front of the other.

A gentle rain began to fall, dulling the surrounding streetlamps. I left the narrow, nameless alley outside the apartment building and, leaning against the concrete-block wall for support, headed towards my parked car. But I couldn’t make it. The lower half of my body felt lifeless and I collapsed onto the asphalt. I didn’t have the strength to stand. I couldn’t even move a finger. I closed my eyes. I suffered no pain. I fell into a pleasant doze, the first I’d had in quite a while. The rain became more intense, enveloping me like a shower.

“Does it itch anywhere?”

“No …”

“Your next appointment is on Christmas Day. Please do come. Don’t forget!”

“I’m planning on bringing my daughter a gift that day, actually.”

“Then how about Christmas Eve?”

“Okay. I’ll try …”

The girl sitting before me was crying. She was fifteen years old and wearing a school uniform.

“He was the greatest man I ever knew. Not some crazed killer like the media made him out to be. I wanted you, at least, to know that.”

The girl nodded at my words. She wiped away her tears with the sleeve of her cardigan and looked me in the eye. “Will you tell me more about my father?”

“Yeah, someday I will.”

The girl stood up, bowed deeply and left the coffee shop.

I headed out of the coffee shop near the train station and wandered around the streets of Nakano. Since the detective never showed up, Shiori was still in my care. I didn’t want her to have to transfer schools so I ended up moving myself.

Every day Shiori buys a single stalk of the cheapest white flower on sale that day from the florist on the shopping street and pays the detective’s grave a visit. Who knows how long that will last.

The detective’s grave is in an old, musty temple on the outskirts of Nakano. His informant and I agreed to pitch in and buy a very fine grave marker, but the informant still hasn’t paid his share. It’s about time I teach him what happens to someone who shirks payments to me of all people.

The detective’s office in Nakano is still in operation as a detective agency. Rumor has it the new owner is an ex-yakuza but no one’s yet said a good word about them.

My bad. Heh.

Legendary manga milestone
Be-Bop High School
creator Kazuhiro Kiuchi made his debut as a novelist in 2004 with the action thriller
Shield of Straw
(recently adapted into a major motion picture directed by Takashi Miike). The second of Kiuchi’s growing body of prose offerings,
A Dog in Water
is his first to become available in English translation.