“Hey, if you’re fine, I’m fine,” Sawamura said, the concern plain on his face.
“Thanks for waiting,” Kuwano announced brightly on the deck behind them. “We’re all ready, so if you’d please come to the conference room. We have cold drinks for you!”
THIRTY-ONE
Kusanagi stood outside a restaurant that served okonomiyaki pancakes a short walk from Azabu Juban Station. The name on the sign read “Flower,” making him wonder if the name of the place wasn’t a play on their specialty’s main ingredient. The entrance was up a flight of stairs on the second floor.
As he stood looking up at the sign, a young man came out of the door—an employee, by the red apron he was wearing. He flipped over a small placard on the door so the side facing out read “Closed” and went back in.
It was just after two in the afternoon. A couple, the restaurant’s last customers, came out and walked down the stairs. Kusanagi waited for them to leave before going up. He opened the door, hearing a small bell jingle above his head.
The employee he’d seen on the stairs looked up from the cash register. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Lunch’s all over.”
“I know. I’m not a customer,” Kusanagi said. “Is Mr. Muroi here?” He looked around the place while he talked. The tables all had hot plates in the middle so customers could cook their own okonomiyaki. A white-haired man was sitting at the nearest one, facing away from the door, reading a newspaper. When he heard Kusanagi, he looked around. He had his fair share of wrinkles, but his skin was tan, making him look young for his age. He, too, was wearing a red apron.
“Who’re you?” the man asked.
Kusanagi flashed his badge as he walked over to the table. “Mr. Muroi?”
The man blanched. “Yeah. What do you want?”
“I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about your time at Bar Calvin.”
“Calvin? That’s ancient history. Haven’t been there in over a decade.”
“I know. I spoke to the manager last night.”
Calvin was a bar on a side street off of lower Ginza. The interior featured gaudy décor, with expensive-looking leather upholstery on the sofas, reminiscent of Japan’s economic boom days back during the bubble.
Bar Calvin was where Hidetoshi Senba and Nobuko Miyake had shared a drink the night before he killed her. Masao Muroi was the bartender who served them, and his statement led to Senba’s arrest.
When Kusanagi told him what he wanted to ask about, Muroi’s eyes went wide.
“Now that’s really ancient history. What could you possibly—” Muroi started. Then he quickly folded his paper and sat upright in his chair. “Wait a second. Is Senba out already? You think he wants revenge?”
Kusanagi chuckled. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Senba’s been out of prison for quite some time now. You haven’t seen him?”
“No. Okay. Wow. I didn’t realize he’d already done his time.”
“Did you know the two of them well?” Kusanagi asked.
“I wouldn’t say ‘well,’ but, yeah, I knew who they were. That night was the first time they’d been to Calvin in a while. I was pretty surprised when I heard what happened the following day.”
“The case report said they weren’t exactly getting along very well that night.”
“Well, they weren’t fighting or anything. But it was kind of an odd scene,” Muroi said, hesitating a bit before adding, “I mean, you don’t normally see a guy crying like that.”
Muroi asked Kusanagi whether he’d had lunch yet, and when he said he hadn’t, Muroi offered him some okonomiyaki and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“I was born up here,” Muroi told him. “But when I was in middle school, my family moved down south to Osaka. There was this fantastic okonomiyaki place down the street from us there, and it was always my dream to have a restaurant like that of my own.” Muroi stirred a bowl of batter while he talked. His hands moved with an effortlessness that bespoke long years of practice.
“How many years were you at Bar Calvin?” Kusanagi asked.
“Twelve, exactly. They took me on as a bartender when I was in my midthirties. I’d done my time at a few other places before then, but Calvin was the best. Still, I didn’t want to be someone else’s employee the rest of my life, so about ten years ago I left and started this place. I know it don’t look like much, but I’ve done all this without needing to borrow a single yen,” Muroi said, pouring the batter out on the hot plate in front of them. There was a loud sizzle as drops of oil began to dance on the plate.
“I understand Hidetoshi Senba used to be a regular there? Around what time was that?”
Muroi folded his arms across his chest. “I wonder,” he said. “I don’t think I’d been at Calvin a decade around the time he started coming, so I’d say that was about twenty-two, maybe twenty-three years ago?”
“Right,” Kusanagi said, doing some calculations in his head. “So about six or seven years before he was arrested.”
“Yeah, sounds about right. Senba was a big spender back in those days. Had his own company and all. But, after a certain point, he stopped coming altogether, and when I saw him next, well, it was clear he’d fallen on hard times. Cheap clothes, you know the look. That was the night.”
“What about Nobuko Miyake? Was that her first time to Bar Calvin in a while, too?”
“It was, but she hadn’t been away as long as Senba. Maybe only two or three years. Nobuko stopped coming when she quit her hostessing job. She used to bring customers from her place over for drinks at Calvin afterward. Senba was one of ’em.”
“Do you happen to know why she quit?” Kusanagi asked.
Muroi paused to check how the okonomiyaki was coming along before leaning forward in his chair. “Actually, I heard a rumor about that.”
“What kind of rumor?”
“I heard she got fired. Something about her causing trouble.”
“Any idea what that was?”
Muroi chuckled. “Borrowing cash from customers and not paying them back.”
“Yeah, that’d get a hostess sacked.”
“She’d have these lines, like she lost her wallet to a purse-snatcher, or one of her customers had rung up a big tab and gone missing and the restaurant wanted her to pay them back, and she’d borrow ten or twenty thousand yen from her regulars, just a little bit at a time, but it started building up, and customers started complaining.”
“Do you know how she made ends meet after that?”
“Good question. She wasn’t no spring chicken anymore. I figure she had it pretty tough.”
Nobuko Miyake had been forty when she was killed. If Muroi’s story was true, that would make her thirty-seven or thirty-eight when she got fired. If she had a lot of well-heeled regulars to keep her afloat she might have been okay, but without that, it would’ve been hard for her to find work as a hostess again.
“She was never too careful with money, so when I heard about what happened, I wasn’t too surprised. I’m guessing Senba would’ve been a prime target for her little loan scheme.”
“And you’re sure about what you told me earlier?” Kusanagi asked, lowering his voice. “He was really crying?”
Muroi flipped one of the pancakes and said, “It wasn’t just me who saw him. A few of the other guys at the bar were talking about it, wondering why he was so worked up.”
“But you don’t know what they were talking about?”
“Sorry, can’t help you there.” Muroi shook his head and chuckled. “If it was a pretty young girl who was crying, well, I might have gone up and asked what the trouble was, but when a middle-aged man is crying next to a woman, you keep your distance. I thought maybe that’s just what he did when he got drunk, you know.”
A scene began to form in Kusanagi’s mind: a man and woman meeting again for the first time in a long while. The man, a successful businessman who had lost everything, even his wife. The woman, a former hostess who’d reaped what she’d sowed and woun
d up broke. What could’ve possibly transpired between them that he would’ve cried over their drinks, then run up to her the following day and stabbed her to death?
“What about friends?” Kusanagi asked. “You know anyone close to them? Or maybe another bar they might’ve frequented?”
“Well, not really,” Muroi said, scratching his neck. “It was a long time ago. And we didn’t talk all that much.”
“Right,” Kusanagi said, putting away his notebook in his pocket. It was over twenty years ago, as it was. He hadn’t been expecting Muroi to even remember as much as he had.
“All done—eat up while it’s hot,” Muroi said, spreading some rich, dark sauce on the okonomiyaki before sprinkling it with seaweed and bonito flakes and cutting it on top of the hot plate. “Oh, almost forgot the beer.”
“Can’t drink while I’m on duty, but I’ll definitely help myself to this,” Kusanagi said, breaking off a piece of the pancake with his chopsticks and putting it in his mouth. The surface was nicely browned, but the inside was still soft and moist. He could clearly taste each of the ingredients. “That’s really good,” he said through his first mouthful.
Muroi smiled. “I get a lot of people in here from down south, and they always say I nailed the taste. Okonomiyaki is comfort food down there.” Then his face got more serious, and he said, “Actually, that reminds me.” His eyes got a faraway look in them.
“Yeah?” Kusanagi prompted him.
“No, it’s just,” he began, rubbing his forehead and trying to remember something. “I just remembered them talking a bit about comfort food once.”
“You mean Senba and Nobuko?”
“Yeah. They were talking about the food from back home. They even brought me something once.”
“What was it?”
Muroi folded his arms across his chest and groaned, deep in thought. Finally, he shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t recall.”
“If you remember, could you drop me a line?” Kusanagi asked, writing down his cell phone number on a piece of paper and placing it next to the hot plate.
“Sure thing. But don’t get your hopes up. I can’t see how it’ll help, even if I do remember. Sorry, I probably shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Not at all. You never know what you’re going to find until you start looking.” Kusanagi took another bite of his okonomiyaki, then heard the sound of an e-mail being delivered to his phone. He glanced down at the screen. It was from Utsumi.
He looked at his mail after leaving the restaurant. It read: “Checked Arima Engines. Shigehiro Kawahata was in the records.” He called Utsumi.
“Yes?” she answered.
“Good work. How’d you get access?”
“I went to the main office in Shinjuku and asked someone in HR if I could see their employee records.”
“And they just showed them to you?”
“They had me sign a piece of paper saying that I wouldn’t use them outside of the investigation, and I wouldn’t pass them on to any third party. They wanted me to write the name of my supervising officer, too, so I gave them your name.”
“Fine. If that’s all it took, we got off easy.”
“Also, they really wanted to know what our investigation was about.”
“Please don’t tell me you told them anything,” Kusanagi said, a growl in his voice.
“Of course not.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Kusanagi said. “So he worked there.”
“Yes, he was a section chief in the technological services division of their Nagoya branch until he left the company fifteen years ago.
“Nagoya? So he wasn’t in Tokyo?”
“That’s what it said in the records. Except, his residential address was in Tokyo.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. He was listed as living at an address near Oji Station. There was a note on it indicating that he was in a subsidized apartment that belonged to the company.”
That probably meant his family was living in Tokyo while he was on an extended business trip in Nagoya. It wasn’t that unusual in the tech industry.
“Anything else in there other than his address and workplace?”
“I have an employee number—which is determined by the year the employee enters the company, I’m told. I got the name of the school he graduated from, and a home phone number as well.”
“Was there anyone who entered the company the same year as Kawahata and came from the same school?”
“Unfortunately, no,” was Utsumi’s reply. “But I did copy the records for about fifty people who entered the company around the same time. Also, I got the records for the four people who were working beneath him during his last year. Incidentally, all of their addresses are in Aichi Prefecture, near Nagoya.”
“Got it. I think our first stop should be the subsidized housing. If it even still exists, that is.”
“It does. Though it’s getting pretty old.”
“Okay. Meet me at Oji Station, then.”
Kusanagi hung up and began walking with long strides toward the subway. As he made his way down the steps into the station, he reflected on his phone call with Yukawa the night before. The physicist had tantalized him by throwing out a possible suspect, yet not even hinting as to what he was thinking. He wouldn’t even tell him why he wanted him to look into the Kawahata family. That was all par for the course, but it was what Yukawa had said before he hung up that stuck with him the most.
“I trust you, and I’m telling you this because I think it will lead to the resolution of this case. Please understand, I’m not acting as an official informant to the police here.”
Kusanagi failed to see the distinction Yukawa was trying to make, but he grunted over the phone to show he understood.
“I’m almost a hundred percent certain that the Kawahata family is involved with this case,” Yukawa continued. “But I need you to refrain from telling that to the police here. In fact, I’d prefer if we could uncover the truth of this on our own. If the local police tried to force the truth out into the open, I’m afraid there might be some … irreparable collateral damage.”
This also made little sense. Kusanagi had asked him what he meant by “irreparable collateral damage,” and Yukawa had told him, “If this case isn’t handled properly, there’s a good chance it will seriously disrupt a certain person’s life. I’d like to avoid that, if at all possible.”
But Yukawa wouldn’t say who that person was. He had continued, his voice lower, almost solemn. “I know this is asking a lot, but I promise, if I do uncover the truth, I’ll tell you straight away. And what you do with that knowledge will be entirely your decision.”
Something very unusual was going on, that was certain. Kusanagi had learned a long time ago that asking a lot of questions at this point would do no good. Instead, he had agreed to look into the Kawahata family and hung up.
Now he was left in a bit of a bind. They’d received hardly any information about Shigehiro Kawahata from the local police. The local police didn’t consider him involved enough that there was any need to share more information with Tokyo. Nor could he ask directly about Shigehiro or his family without raising a lot of uncomfortable questions and potentially directing suspicion toward the proprietor of the Green Rock Inn. Doing that would constitute a breach of his agreement with Yukawa.
He had been wondering exactly how they were going to start this investigation when, that morning, Yukawa had called him again with the name of the company where Shigehiro used to work. He had sent Utsumi off to Shinjuku right away.
It was an interesting case, Kusanagi thought as he sat in the gently rocking subway car. A man dies out in the countryside, but the key to finding out why is far away in Tokyo—and the task force officially assigned to solving the case hasn’t a clue.
Kusanagi looked out the window at the sliding gray walls of the subway tube, picturing his physicist friend’s face and wondering just who it was he’d met out
in Hari Cove.
THIRTY-TWO
Kyohei’s eyes opened wider behind his goggles as he watched the little fish dart from behind the shadow of a rock. It was only the length of his fingertip, its scales a bright, shimmering blue. He reached out for it, but it was far too swift, so he settled for following its quick, jagged movements with his eyes until it disappeared behind another rock. He waited a while for the fish to come back out, but he was running out of air, and his snorkel was entirely submerged.
Kyohei returned to the surface, taking off his goggles and rubbing his face. Swimming on his back, he paddled with his legs back toward shore. He’d always been a good swimmer.
He switched to walking when he reached the shallows. The beach had been busy when he went in, but now only a few other swimmers remained. Most of the tents and beach umbrellas had been cleared away. Kyohei recovered his sandals from where he had thrown them and slipped them on before braving the hot sand above the waterline. His uncle Shigehiro was asleep on a beach chair beneath the lone remaining umbrella, a magazine spread open on his belly.
He called out to him, and his uncle’s eyes opened immediately.
“Hey there, Kyohei. Ready to head home?”
Kyohei nodded and pulled a bottle of water out of the cooler next to the beach chair. “Yeah, I’m pretty pooped. Hungry, too.”
“Right,” Shigehiro said, sitting up and checking his watch. “It’s after three already. Let’s get home. I think we have some watermelon in the fridge.”
“Cool,” Kyohei said. “Hey, guess what I saw? A blue fish. It was really bright, about this big.” He held his fingertips apart to indicate the size.
“Yeah, there’s all kinds in there,” Shigehiro said, not sounding particularly interested.
“I wonder what it’s called.”
Shigehiro shrugged and got off his beach chair. “You should ask Narumi. She knows that kind of thing.”
“But you were born here. You never learned the fish?”