A Dog in Water (8 page)

Katsuya’s face was rapidly losing color. “Because my brother asked me to. He needed a chance to end things with you.”

Junko Tajima stood stock still as if frozen. Katsuya’s face contorted into what might pass as a smile.

“He’s a worse piece of shit than I am. Can’t even break off an affair …” His eyes no longer seemed capable of sight. “Everything he told you was a lie. He’s in no mind to get a divorce. He only got his new place ’cause his wife’s gone home to have a kid …”

“You’re lying!” she cried, but it was unlikely that the words reached Katsuya’s ears.

“He got tangled up in the lies he kept telling you to show you a good face … I’ll give him credit for finally getting fed up and deciding
to ditch you, but then he couldn’t bring himself to tell you …” His voice was getting weak and losing intonation. “Says it’s ’cause he loves you. Says he doesn’t want you to hate him even after you break up. Heh heh, crazy, right? Doesn’t care … what happens to you … as long as you don’t … hate him …”

His face had turned paper white. It was not the color of living flesh.

“If you’d just … gone away already … it would’ve … all … been fine …” The wound in his neck didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore. “Happiness? You … never stood … a chan …”

His words faded away. Suddenly Katsuya looked like a doll.

I tossed the knife away and stood up. I didn’t bother wiping off my fingerprints. She was staring into space, the gun still in her right hand. I took it from her and returned it to her bag.

My clothes were fairly soaked with Katsuya’s blood. I picked up my coat and wore it. Pressing her back, I urged her towards the door. She walked slowly, and only as much as I pushed.

We didn’t exchange a single word as we filed down the exposed stairway. It was Junko Tajima who finally broke the silence, just after we stepped out onto the street along the front of the building. “Today marks exactly one week. Please send me an invoice.”

I couldn’t detect any emotions on her face. I shook my head. “In the end I was unable to do anything for you. I can’t accept payment.”

She seemed to give this some thought before suddenly plunging her hand into her bag. For a moment I thought she might shoot me without reason. What she pulled out, however, were a driver’s license and a standard-size photograph.

The name on the license read “Eiko Yamamoto”; the face on it belonged to Junko Tajima.

“My name is Eiko Yamamoto. Please find my husband, Koichi.”

I looked at the standard-size photo. It showed a tall, bespectacled man standing next to Junko Tajima. This one required no search. I took out my pocketbook, tore off the page with the address of the
Yoyogi Uehara apartment and handed it to her. “Here. Gratis.”

She bowed quickly, turned her back to me and walked away in a straight line.

Not that I’d been expecting a word of thanks, but I felt loneliness suddenly washing over me. I had at least hoped to see her smile.

I walked back to where my car was parked. Lights were flickering on in the surrounding buildings. Evening was making her usual appearance.

Perhaps, once I got back to the office, I could put together the plastic model of the battleship
Yamato
. I couldn’t think of much else to do at the moment.

Junko Tajima was about to pay a visit to Koichi Yamamoto’s apartment. With a .38 revolver in hand.

I was in no position to stop her. I was a common murderer. I prayed that she might at least consider her unborn child and think it over.

But as far as I was concerned, it was old business.

A man rapes a woman, one soul betrays another, someone kills somebody.

A case of little importance, a dime a dozen in this city.

His black school backpack was bouncing up and down. The little boy ran up the slope in the residential district at full tilt pressing his school-issued navy blue hat to his head with his right hand to keep the wind from snatching it away.

Today his homeroom teacher told him that one of the drawings he’d done in class had been secretly submitted to a contest held by a newspaper and that he’d won first place. It was the best thing that had happened to him in his four years since starting grade school. He wanted to tell his mom right away. He ran, panting for breath, unable to suppress the smile that bloomed on his face.

Even after cresting the hill, the boy never slowed his pace as he ran.

Masayuki Takeda tried desperately to regain his composure. He needed to process what was happening in his home as reality.

The gun pointed at him did not look like a fake. At any moment, the deep dark hole barely half an inch in diameter could rob everything he had with a burst of flames.

“Where’s the money?!” yelled the man in a black ski mask as he kept the gun trained on Takeda. From his voice, he seemed to be no older than twenty-five.

Damn thug!
Anger churned in Takeda’s guts. He desperately
reined it in. He kept his voice as calm as possible. “I don’t know who told you what, but no one keeps valuables at home anymore.”

Don’t fight back, but don’t show fear. Fear can all too easily tip over into panic
.

Takeda knew. When dealing with guys like this, panicking usually ended up getting you killed. You had to negotiate calmly, neither resisting nor showing fear. Even if they seemed to have the upper hand, you had no choice but to continue to negotiate.
They won’t kill me before they get what they want
, Takeda told himself.

“Stop talkin’ bullshit, asshole!”

The man in the ski mask suddenly stomped on Takeda’s stomach. Bringing both hands to his belly, Takeda curled on the living room floor. He acted as though he was in far more pain than he really was. If he didn’t, the attacker was sure to deal a second blow.

“Where’s your safe?! Tell me or I’ll kill your wife!”

Ski Mask went to the sofa where Takeda’s wife Yumi was laid out. He hauled her up into a sitting position and pressed the large, angular automatic pistol into her neck. Yumi’s scream was muffled by the gag in her mouth.

“The money is yours, but I mean it, it’s not anywhere in this house,” Takeda said to the other intruder, a man in a hockey mask. Ski Mask was too violent, unsuitable as a negotiating partner. He decided to bet on Hockey Mask.

“Stop,” interceded Hockey Mask, who had been silently pointing a gun at Takeda the whole time.

“You saying I had bad intel?” Ski Mask released Yumi and turned towards his accomplice. “This asshole is tryin’ to give us the slip! Rough ’em up a bit more and he’ll spit out the truth!”

Hockey Mask ignored this outburst and asked Takeda, “How long will it take you to get the money ready?”

“If stones would do I can get them to you first thing in the morning.”

“Stones?”

“Diamonds. You can’t trust banks these days, so I convert most
of my earnings into top-grade diamonds that I keep in a safe-deposit box.”

“The fuck you do, you bastard! You’re gonna try and fool us with glass fakes!” Ski Mask barked.

“It’s gotta be cash. Even if the diamonds were real, we have no way to turn them into dough …” Hockey Mask said. He didn’t seem to be much older than Ski Mask, yet he was far more calm.

“I see. Well, if you want cash it’ll take a few days. You understand, don’t you?”

I can buy myself some time
. Takeda felt a small measure of composure return. He wanted to get the intruders to leave his home as soon as possible. Persuading them that he meant to surrender cash but that it would take a few days was how. He wanted to put his family out of danger. He was prepared to become a hostage if that’s what it took.

“I’ll definitely get you the money and not contact the police. Won’t you trust me?”

“One hundred million yen in bills. You have until tomorrow night,” Hockey Mask said.

“Impossible. I need at least another day—”

“You and your wife will die otherwise. Get it done.”

“F-Fine. I’ll do my best. So, please—”

That instant, the front door opened.

“I’m home!” called a child’s voice. The intruders exchanged glances.

I took too long
. Takeda felt himself begin to tremble.

Late at night, the exposed hallway of the apartment building turned the echo of high-heeled footfalls into shrill pings. The woman who was walking had her coat collar turned up and seemed to be in her mid-twenties. Her finely proportioned face was frighteningly devoid of emotion.

She stopped before an apartment door, confirmed the number and took a deep breath. She pressed the button on the intercom. After a moment a man’s voice responded.

“Yes …?”

“It’s me.”

“Huh?” The intercom went silent.

“Open up.” It was a command. The woman reached into her shoulder bag.

The lock clicked and the door opened a crack. The security chain was still fastened. A man around forty wearing glasses peered out. “H-How did you …?” he asked incredulously.

She removed her right hand from her bag and held it before the man’s face. A compact revolver glinted silver in her grip.

Just as the man peered into the dark hole to see what could have been thrust into his face, a burst of flame shot out with a roar. The 130-grain .38 Special bullet pierced his eyeglass lens and right eye, splattered the walls with an outpouring of blood and gray matter through the back of his head and then vanished from sight. The man’s body collapsed backwards.

Inserting the barrel into the crack in the door, the woman fired at the supine form repeatedly. She kept pulling the trigger even after she’d run out of ammunition. When she realized the deafening sound had stopped, she removed her finger from the trigger and heaved a sigh. She took in the sight of the blood-soaked mass and stepped backwards. She turned heel and started to run.

Sergeant Arita of the Yoyogi Precinct’s Criminal Investigations Sub-Section One climbed the staircase of the mixed-use building. Unable to find a spot nearby to park the patrol car, his partner Officer Koga had stayed in the vehicle.

When Arita opened the door to the office, there was a man sitting at a desk in the back. He seemed to be assembling a plastic model.

“Are you the P.I.?”

The man looked up when he heard Arita’s voice but only stared at him in silence. The “P.I.” wore a large protective device in the center of his face to shield a broken nose, and the ring and little fingers of his left hand were in a cast.

“The hell happened to you? Get into a car accident?”

The man ignored Arita and continued to work on the model, depositing adhesive on a mouse-gray piece. Apart from the desk at which the man worked, the fifteen-mat-sized room was furnished with a shoddy sofa set and several steel cabinets. Arita rudely sauntered over to the desk.

“Seems like you’ve got time to spare.”

The detective still didn’t respond. He seemed to be working on an Imperial Navy battleship. Arita felt a small twinge of anger.
You’re too old to be engrossed in a damn plastic model
. He skipped the niceties and dove into the main subject.

“You know who Koichi Yamamoto is, don’t you?”

The detective continued to work in silence as if he hadn’t heard Arita at all.

“He was killed last night. Took five bullets from a .38.”

Arita was mystified by the fact that the detective’s face didn’t shift even slightly.
Why? Can it be that he already knows?

“Sorry for the intrusion, but please accompany me to the station, Mr. Detective.”

Placing the cap on the tube of adhesive, the detective slowly got to his feet.

Arita let Koga drive and was in the backseat with the detective.

“So, what was your case on Koichi Yamamoto concerning?”

“I don’t discuss matters that touch upon my clients’ privacy,” the detective finally spoke.

Arita snorted, “Hmph, gimme a break. You’re an accomplice to a murder.” He pulled his pocketbook out of his jacket pocket and flipped through the pages. “On the sixteenth of this month a woman calling herself Eiko Yamamoto requested that you determine his whereabouts after he took up with another woman and stopped coming home. You reported your findings to her around 5 p.m. yesterday. Isn’t that so?”

The detective did not respond.

“The driver’s license she showed you was well-made but a fake. The real Eiko Yamamoto left for her parents’ house in Utsunomiya last month, apparently in preparation for childbirth. Was the woman you met heavily pregnant?”

“She wasn’t showing yet …”

“Yet?” Arita couldn’t begin to wrap his head around the detective’s reply.

“She turned herself in this morning along with the instrument of murder …”

The detective’s face seemed to contort slightly at those words.

The woman sat in the interrogation room, her face visible through the one-way mirror. The detective stared at her in silence. On pins and needles, Arita spoke to the detective.

“No mistake?”

“No. That’s my client …”

“Her real name is Junko Tajima. Works as a hostess at Club Zion in Roppongi. Started having an affair with the victim four years ago.” He flipped through the suspect’s statement as he spoke.

“What is she giving as her motive?” the detective asked.

“Uh, nothing yet …” A bitter laugh escaped Arita. “Affairs, lovers, woman kills man. Man kills woman. Nothin’ unusual about it.”

“You don’t understand a thing,” said the detective, his face grown somewhat grim. “In a hundred murder cases you’ll find a hundred different motives.”

“Heh, sounds like you’ve been watching too many made-for-TV movies.” Arita took a sip of the tea Koga handed him. “So? What do you know that I don’t, detective?”

“I have no intention of telling you anything my client has not revealed herself.”

“Hey, cut the crap. If you hadn’t discovered the victim’s address, this case wouldn’t have happened. Even if she pulled a fast one on you, aren’t you feeling any moral responsibility?!” Arita’s voice had risen. “His wife got pregnant, so to prioritize his family he wanted to cut
things off with his lover. But his lover wasn’t having any of it. Well, maybe he’d figured she’d be dangerous if she ever got pissed off. This victim desperately went into hiding, all right?!”