“And you think this Usui sneaked into Kinue’s house sometime last night?”
“It certainly looks that way. The problem is, Usui has shown absolutely no indication of having the kind of intelligence required to commit this crime. We can’t know for sure until we arrest him, but I suspect that if Usui had wanted to kill Kinue he would have simply stabbed or strangled her. That would probably be the best he could do. My intuition tells me this is going to be a very difficult case to solve.”
“What about the maid? Did you find her?”
“Yes, we checked at her family home, and they said she had gone to the country. She should be back in two or three days.”
Kenzo looked somber. “Actually, I had a couple of unexpected visitors today: Professor Hayakawa’s wife and Hisashi Mogami, Takezo’s younger brother.”
“Professor Hayakawa’s wife, eh? I see. According to the police officer who went to her house, she’s quite an intelligent woman. Attractive, too. I didn’t meet her myself, but she came to the police station. I imagine she came to see you because she was unbearably worried and wanted to find out what you knew about the case.”
“That was my impression, too. She evidently dragged Hisashi Mogami all over town with her.”
“Hisashi Mogami, huh. I can’t say I don’t find him a bit suspicious, too.” Daiyu bit his lip.
“But he has a perfect alibi. He went to see a play at the Togeki Theater with some woman, and afterward he got in a big brawl on the Ginza and spent the night in jail in Tsukiji or somewhere. That can easily be checked out, right? Kinue was seen alive in Kitazawa around nine o’clock, which is just about the same time Hisashi was being thrown in jail, so that pretty much puts him out of the picture.”
“We can check .The Togeki Theater is a different matter. The quality of the ushers isn’t what it used to be. Unlike the old days, they no longer have any recollection of who was sitting in which seat.”
“The Togeki lets out around eight o’clock, right? So that portion of his alibi really doesn’t have any bearing on the case.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true.” Daiyu took a deep drag on his cigarette, lost in thought. A parade of wobbly, oblong smoke rings emerged from his mouth. Then he spoke. “Why on earth did the murderer run off with the torso? I really think that’s the key to solving this case. Did Hisashi Mogami say anything about that, by any chance?”
“Not really. Except when I mentioned having seen a garden slug crawling on the window of the bathroom, he turned very pale.”
“Sounds like he’s more superstitious than you might think. I wonder if he thought the slug had fallen off the Orochimaru tattoo? That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.” Daiyu’s hearty laugh resounded through the thin-walled house, momentarily drowning out the sound of his wife, Manko, struggling valiantly with a difficult passage in Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in the adjoining room.
Kenzo decided not to bother explaining that it was the Tsunedahime tattoo that featured a slug, not Orochimaru. Instead, he gave voice to a question that had been on his mind all day. “What sort of motive could a murderer possibly have for chopping up a body and making off with one of the parts?”
“Usually it’s to keep the victim from being identified. The most common practice is to hide the head of the murdered person, or burn off the fingerprints. In this case, because there were tattoos on the body, I can understand why someone would have wanted to hide the torso, but you’d think he would have taken the head away with him as well. It’s strange to go to so much trouble to disguise the identity of a murder victim who is killed right in her own home.”
“Isn’t it possible that the murderer cut up the body to make it easier to carry and then hid the pieces in the bathroom, intending to take them away a few at a time?”
“You’ve got to be joking. It’s not like carrying a bag of vegetables home from the market. You can’t just toss severed heads and sawed-off limbs around a murder victim’s house and then wait two or three days to cart them off. If the perpetrator was going to take the rest of the body away, he would have done it the night of the murder.”
“But the fact is that the murderer locked the body parts in the bathroom. Maybe he thought they wouldn’t be discovered for another two or three days.”
“Your reasoning is really amateurish sometimes, you know that? If that were the case, why would he have left the light on in the bathroom? Assuming that Inazawa’s telling the truth about finding the light on, then you have to wonder why, if the perpetrator wanted to hide the body, he wouldn’t at least have turned off the light. After all, the switch is right there in the hall. Looking at it from this perspective, you have to conclude that the perpetrator had no intention of hiding the body.” He slapped the desktop in frustration.
Kenzo said, “Okay, let’s say that the killer didn’t particularly care about disguising the identity of the victim. What other reason could he have for hiding just one part of the body?”
“I think what we’re dealing with here is an abnormal mentality,” Daiyu said. “You remember the famous case of O-Sada, the one who cut off her dead lover’s penis and carried it around in her pocket for several days? In this case, don’t you think it’s possible that the perpetrator has a peculiarly obsessive attachment to tattoos?”
“If that’s the case, then Professor Hayakawa would seem to be the prime suspect.”
“Of course. But Professor Hayakawa wasn’t the only person with an abnormal attachment to that tattoo. For all we know, there could be some other person we don’t even suspect, someone who is just as obsessed as the professor but whose irrationality isn’t so readily apparent.”
Kenzo nodded thoughtfully. “Whoever the killer was, do you have any idea how he got out of the locked bathroom?”
“One possible scenario is that the perpetrator somehow sneaked into the house between eight and nine while Kinue was out, committed the murder between nine and eleven, then hid somewhere and left while Inazawa was in the house, or else ran away himself after Inazawa fled. I checked it out. It doesn’t look possible to climb over the concrete wall. So the perpetrator must have left either by the front entrance or the garden gate. But that area was under surveillance from nine to eleven, by the people next door. Kinue came home around quarter of nine. It would hardly have been possible to commit such a complex murder in ten or fifteen minutes. So no matter where you start, you end up back at the same conclusion.”
“Is it possible that the killer hid himself in the bathroom until the next morning?”
“That doesn’t make sense. Suppose Inazawa had called the police instead of running away. The killer would have been a sitting duck, if he was still hiding in the bathroom. Of course, this is all based on the assumption that Inazawa was telling the truth. If Inazawa were actually the perpetrator, that would change everything.”
Kenzo gave a big sigh and hesitated for a moment before he finally addressed his brother. “Tell me, do you really think the dead woman is Kinue Nomura?”
“Well, if it isn’t Kinue Nomura, then who the hell is it?”
“This is just a thought, okay? Suppose that her younger sister Tamae, whom everyone has been assuming was killed by the bomb in Hiroshima, was really alive all along, and that she was the one who was murdered?”
Daiyu began shook his head no. “Please, spare me the convenient solutions!” he said in a withering tone. “You’ve obviously been reading too many detective novels. The two women may have been sisters, but these photographs clearly show that Tamae had tattoos below her elbow and below her knees. The arms that were found had been cut off above the elbow, and there was no trace of a tattoo at all. Same with the legs. If it was a simple tattoo, that would be another matter, but surely such an elaborate tattoo couldn’t simply be erased?”
“Oh, that’s right,” Kenzo said dejectedly. “I forgot. It’s been a long, strange day and a lot has happened. With the heat and everything.… I’m sorry.”
“It’s no won
der. Even for me, this bizarre case is a first,” Daiyu muttered, exhaling as he spoke. With the same breath, he blew a parade of perfectly circular smoke rings toward the ceiling. “It seems unlikely that Tamae Nomura survived the bomb,” he said thoughtfully. “According to our information, she was living right in the center of Hiroshima. But if she did survive by some fluke, I wouldn’t be looking at her as a possible victim, since the photos prove that’s impossible.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that if she were alive, which I doubt, I would want to interview Miss Tamae Nomura as a Person of Interest, or even a possible suspect in this case.”
“But surely she couldn’t have done something so horrible to her own sister? I mean, moral considerations aside, a woman wouldn’t have the strength, would she?”
“No. She would need a male cohort to do the heavy lifting, and probably the butchering as well.”
Kenzo winced at the thought of Kinue’s beautiful body being hacked to pieces like a side of beef, but he quickly resumed a poker face. “What could her motive have been?” he asked. “Theoretically.”
“You name it,” Daiyu said. “Jealousy, resentment, a long-simmering grudge. Hardly a month goes by that we don’t see a truly heinous case of family members killing each other, often over the most trivial things. Of course, many of those cases are murder-suicides. Just the other day I heard about a case in Kyushu where a divorced mother threw her two tiny children into the mouth of a volcano. The man she wanted to marry didn’t want to be a stepfather, and she had no relatives to farm the kids out to. I like to think I’m unshockable, but that really made my blood run cold. Whoever said that erotic love was a form of insanity hit the nail on the head. This case is a disturbing one, too. I have to admit I was knocked for a loop by the gruesome scene in that bathroom.”
Unable to hold back any longer, Kenzo blurted out, “Please let me help with this case. My involvement could be completely unofficial and off the record, and I promise not to do anything to mess it up.”
“Let you help?” Daiyu sounded incredulous.
“That’s right. I wouldn’t be able to contribute very much, but by some strange karma, I seem to have been dragged into this from the beginning. And in terms of the scholarly aspect, I can’t help thinking there’s a possibility that some of my medical knowledge might be useful. After all, my specialty is forensic medicine.”
Daiyu Matsushita nodded. “Okay,” he said slowly. “You can help, but be careful. This isn’t one of your sanitized mystery novels. We’re looking for a nasty killer, and it could get very dangerous.”
27
On the day after the murder, the saw that had presumably been used to dismember the corpse was found in a bombed-out building about two hundred and fifty yards from Kinue’s house. There were dried bloodstains clearly visible on the saw’s blade, and the blood type matched that of the victim. No fingerprints were found, and the saw itself was a very ordinary, well-used tool with no distinguishing features of any sort. So in the end, this dramatic discovery didn’t yield a single useful clue.
Day by day, the investigation moved along. Kinue Nomura’s former maid, Fusako Yoshida, returned to Tokyo after visiting her family in the country. She was fingerprinted and interviewed. The technicians were able to confirm that one of the sets of fingerprints found at the scene belonged to her. The police showed her the bloody saw. She had never seen it before. From this they deduced that the murderer didn’t impulsively grab the nearest saw and cut up the body after the murder.
One thing surprised the official in charge of the examination, the revelation that she had not left the job by choice. Kinue had fired her. Evidently several days prior, a letter in a brown paper envelope had been delivered to the house. When Kinue read it, all color had drained from her face. “Immediately afterward,” said the maid, “she sentenced me to my fate.”
This aroused a certain amount of suspicion among the officers in the investigation. If the letter was the same one that was stuck between the pages of the photo album, then it contained a terrifying death threat. Given that Kinue was frightened and feared for her life, one would think that rather than firing the maid and leaving herself unattended, it would be natural to have surrounded herself with as many people as possible, for comfort and protection. Most of the officers assigned to the case found Kinue’s behavior incomprehensible.
However, there was one dissenting opinion, from an outspoken junior detective. “That woman, Kinue Nomura, seems to have had an almost excessive amount of confidence in her own appeal,” he theorized. “Hate is the flip side of love, and it’s possible that the man threatening her life was someone who was once in love with her. Perhaps she thought that if he were actually in her presence, she could use her feminine wiles to defuse his anger and recapture his heart. The maid might have gotten in the way of such a scenario, and that’s why Kinue Nomura made a point of letting her go. At least that’s the way it looks to me.” The theory sounded reasonable, but there was no way of knowing whether it was right or wrong.
Kinue’s personal effects were examined carefully. Many of her clothes were missing and there was no trace of any cash, gemstones, or precious metals. According to the maid, Kinue had had her assets frozen once before and didn’t trust banks. She kept large amounts of cash in the drawer of a chest in her sleeping room. That drawer had been emptied, and there wasn’t so much as a one-yen coin left in the house.
There was something old-fashioned about the maid. She was dressed in traditional Japanese style, and the only modern touch in her appearance was the somewhat frizzy permanent wave in her short black hair. When asked to describe Kinue’s usual conduct, Fusako Yoshida replied in this way:
“It’s been about six months since I began working for the missus… for Miss Nomura. During the war my father became obligated to the master—you know, Mr. Mogami—and that was how I got the job. At first I didn’t know about the tattoos. When I found out, I was really shocked. Even the missus said, ‘Because of these tattoos, every time I find a new maid she gets scared and runs away.’ In fact I wanted very much to quit that job at first, but after a while I got used to seeing the tattoos, and they didn’t bother me so much anymore. Most of the time the missus was a very pleasant, generous person. She gave me all sorts of nice things, like some really beautiful kimonos that hadn’t been worn more than two or three times. If I admired something of hers, she would simply give it to me, without hesitation. But when she was in a bad mood, it was a different story. She would snap at me about the most trivial things and find fault with everything I did, so I really suffered a lot. Anyway, the master used to come over almost every evening, and he would usually spend the night. At that time the missus didn’t go out at night at all. During the day she would go shopping, or to a play or movie, and the rest of the time she was at home. Then she got involved in opening a bar on the Ginza—I gathered it was some sort of membership club catering to businessmen. Until the beginning of this month she was working there in the evenings. Lately, though, she seemed to have quit that job. Oh, you were asking whether she got along with the master? At first they seemed to be getting along very well, although even then I couldn’t have sworn that she loved him with all her heart. It wasn’t that there was another man around. Nothing like that. But about ten days ago the missus entered a tattoo competition, and ever since then the master seemed to be in a really foul mood. Whenever he came over they would get into loud, nasty arguments, and he would storm off in a huff. And then the missus suddenly told me she wouldn’t be needing my services anymore.”
Having run out of things to say, the maid began to gather up her things. When one of the detectives asked her whether she had noticed any unusual occurrences in the Nomura household recently, she sat right down again.
“Now that you mention it, there was something around noon, three or four days ago. I had gone out to buy some tofu, and when I came home there was a suspicious-looking man standing in front of the house. He was tryin
g to peer inside. When he noticed me, he glared really hatefully, then turned and walked away very fast. He wasn’t bad-looking, but he had a scary look in his eyes and a scar on his chin, and his hair was cropped so short that his scalp looked almost blue. I’d guess he was about five foot three or four, and fairly well built. He was dressed in some filthy trousers and a ragged shirt, khaki-colored, like an old army uniform. I couldn’t tell whether he had any tattoos or missing fingers, but there was definitely something gangsterish about him.”
Here, at last, was a major clue. Ryokichi Usui was known to have gone to visit his brother-in-law in Mito after being released from prison in July, but after that he seemed to have vanished. When the maid was shown a photograph of Usui, she immediately identified him as the man she had seen loitering outside Kinue Nomura’s house. There was a sample of Usui’s handwriting on file at the central police station, and it turned out to be a perfect match for the writing on the threatening letter Kinue Nomura had received.
***
The house of Takezo Mogami was thoroughly searched. The most interesting thing the police detectives found there was an empty pistol case hidden away in a chest of drawers. According to the housekeeper’s statement, two or three days before he disappeared, she had been startled to see Takezo polishing his pistol. He had what she called “a terrible look” on his face.
Tattoo Murder Case Page 14