Tattoo Murder Case

by Akimitsu Takagi

  “How the hell do you know this is Tsunetaro Nomura?” Daiyu demanded, shaking Kenzo’s upper body with so much force that his teeth seemed to rattle. “Quickly, quickly, tell me everything you know.”

  As Kenzo tried frantically to marshal his thoughts, he was acutely aware that this was one of the lowest, most miserable moments of his life He took a deep breath and blinked back his tears. Then, making the story as concise as he could, Kenzo related his experiences with Tsunetaro in a trembling voice. When he had finished, his brother exploded m such violent wrath that Kenzo felt as if he had been struck by a thunderbolt.

  “You stupid idiot! What the hell do you think you were doing! How dare you withhold something so important from me! Goddamn son of a bitch! Stupid little brat! Thanks to your incompetent interference, this case is even more screwed up than it was before! Damn, damn, damn!” Daiyu Matsushita pounded the nearest wall with all his might, and loose plaster flew in every direction.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so very, very sorry,” Kenzo cried, involuntarily throwing himself on the ground at his brother’s feet. “I was completely wrong, and I don’t know how to apologize. I wish I were dead.” Kenzo burst into tears of grief and shame. After a few minutes, as he continued to grovel in the dirt begging incoherently for forgiveness, the tears turned into dry heaves.

  For a moment or two, Daiyu Matsushita stared at the abject form of his younger brother with a stupefied expression. A second later, though, he seemed once again to be filled with his usual dauntless fighting spirit, and he turned to Officer Akita and began barking out orders. “Go check out Shibuya! Find out everything you can about the victim’s movements until now!”

  Without pausing for discussion, Officer Akita gave a quick salute and dashed out the door. Daiyu immediately turned his attention to the forensics expert in charge of the crime scene. “How many hours has it been since the time of death, can you tell?” he asked in a calm, professional manner.

  “We’re probably looking at fifteen or sixteen hours,” the forensic pathologist responded. He was a thin, sober-faced man in a white lab coat.

  “So that means the crime was committed last night around six or seven P.M.?”

  “That would appear to be the case.”

  “And what was the cause of death?”

  “The body has the symptoms of some sort of prussic acid poisoning, but we won’t be able to verify that until an autopsy has been performed.”

  “There probably isn’t much traffic in this area at night, is there?”

  “Almost none, apparently.”

  “And would an amateur be able to remove the skin this way?” Daiyu Matsushita tweaked aside a corner of the straw matting that covered the desecrated body of Tsunetaro Nomura, and winced in spite of himself.

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that one would have to be a professional to remove the skin from a body like this. However, I don’t happen to think this crime was committed by a sheer amateur. I would guess that the person has some degree of basic scientific training, and I also think he must have better than average digital dexterity and hand-eye coordination.”

  “And how long do you think it would have taken to strip off the skin?”

  “Probably about an hour.”

  “In that case, the victim was probably poisoned somewhere else. The dead body was then brought to this burned-out building, where the skin was removed. It hardly seems likely that the skin would have been removed at another location and the body brought here afterward, does it?”

  “That’s correct. If they had tried to move the body soon after such a radical operation was performed, there’s no way they could have coped with all the blood.”

  “But why on earth would the killer have wanted to take the tattooed skin? The face is completely unmarked, so it wasn’t to disguise the victim’s identity. It looks to me as if this criminal has some sort of preoccupation or obsession with tattoos.” Daiyu Matsushita seemed to be growing more chagrined by the moment. While they were still trying to figure out what had happened to the tattooed torso that vanished from the scene of the first murder, the killer had issued a brazen challenge by murdering Tsunetaro Nomura, who very probably held the key to the case. Just to make the crime more egregious, he had stripped off Tsunetaro’s tattooed skin right under their noses.

  Three hours went by in a blur of activity. At the end of that time, Officer Akita returned from his mission to Shibuya and gave an account of the events of the previous evening. “Just after six o’clock yesterday evening, the victim went out with a woman dressed entirely in black.… The proprietor thought she must have come to discuss getting a tattoo.… Her forearms were covered with white bandages.…”

  Just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, Daiyu Matsushita had Officer Akita repeat his report twice. Then he once again shouted orders at his subordinates.

  “Professor Hayakawa, Gifu Inazawa, Hisashi Mogami: find out what these three men were doing last night, and check out their alibis under a microscope. After that, find the prostitute who disappeared from Yurakucho, the one who looked like Kinue Nomura. I’m serious, I want you to canvass all the red-light districts. Look under every American G.I. in Tokyo, if you have to. It’s a long shot, but we can’t afford to leave anything unchecked. I’m going to solve this case if it kills me!”

  Kenzo cowered in a corner while his brother rampaged around the building in a frenzy, like the Hindu-Buddhist demon Asura. There was no way he could have brought himself to look Daiyu in the face at that moment. If Kenzo had said just one word to his brother before all this, a human life could almost certainly have been saved. Reeling under his unbearably heavy load of regret and guilt, Kenzo felt a new storm of tears welling up. He crept behind a pile of crumbling bricks, put his face in his hands, and wept as if his heart would break.

  41

  The police detectives spent a busy day pursuing leads and interviewing suspects. Toward evening Detective Chief Inspector Daiyu Matsushita called a press conference and released some information regarding the alibis of the three prime suspects in the grisly murder of Tsunetaro Nomura. The reporters scribbled furiously, while flashbulbs popped.

  The first suspect was Hisashi Mogami, brother of the late Takezo Mogami. Hisashi went to visit a female friend in Yokohama and stayed there until around five o’clock. After that, he said, he ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant, went to a movie, and took a stroll around Isezaki-cho. Around eight thirty he checked into the White Swan Hotel in Honmoku and spent the night. Both the proprietor of the hotel and the woman he was with until five o’clock confirmed this account. To go from Honmoku to the scene of the crime in Yoyogi would have taken an hour and a half at least, even if Hisashi had been very lucky with changing trains. It would have been all he could do to make the round trip from Honmoku to Yoyogi. There was simply no way he could have committed the murder, stripped off Tsunetaro’s skin, and disposed of the remains in such a short time.

  The second suspect, Mogami Group manager Gifu Inazawa, claimed to have spent the entire evening at a dance hall in Shinjuku called the Red Jewel. He wasn’t a regular patron, and there wasn’t a single person who had noticed his presence that night, so there was reason to doubt his story. Inazawa could easily have ducked out of the dance hall, committed the murder, and sneaked back in. It was only a fifteen-minute walk from the dance hall to the scene of the crime.

  Suspect Three was Professor Hayakawa. He had been with a friend in Shinjuku until around six o’clock. He took a look at the hospital his colleague was managing, and then the friend treated him to a dinner of shabu-shabu. After leaving the restaurant, he claimed to have walked around the Ginza until about nine o’clock, and then returned home. The question was whether the Ginza in its present state of disrepair had sufficient charm to move a middle-aged man to stroll aimlessly around for three hours on a chilly late fall evening. Professor Hayakawa’s behavior was definitely suspicious, nor did he lack for motive. However, there still was no direct evide
nce to tie him to the case.

  While the suspects were being interviewed, there had been one small development on another front. A team of detectives had discovered that the name of the streetwalker the chief had them search for was Sumiyo Hayashi. Because of the shady sort of business she was in, though, there was no way of knowing whether that was her real name or an alias, a nom de nuit. More than half a year had passed since Sumiyo Hayashi had last been seen in the Yurakucho area, so her trail was seriously cold.

  No real leads, no viable suspects. The investigation seemed to have run aground as all the formerly promising threads of the case were snipped, one by one. The murder of Tsunetaro Nomura, and the attendant loss of valuable clues, seemed to be the straw that broke the detectives’ already sagging spirits. No one was more disappointed than Daiyu Matsushita, but he took this latest setback like a man. After his volatile blow-up at the crime scene, he didn’t say another critical word to Kenzo.

  ***

  In the days that followed, the investigation went idly around in circles like a dog chasing its tail. One rather interesting bit of information did surface, however. While it cast some light on the complex background of the case, it couldn’t by any means be called a direct clue.

  In the course of investigating Horiyasu’s past, the detectives found out how Horiyasu’s wife—that is, the mother of Tsunetaro, Kinue, and Tamae—had spent the latter part of her life. After abandoning her husband and children, she became a notorious female burglar. The lover who lured her away was a much younger man, a career criminal whom she had met when her husband was doing the man’s tattoos. She was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment for her part in a sensational robbery-murder case, a crime for which her partner received the death sentence. After serving many years in a women’s prison in Tochigi, she fell ill and died in her cell, alone and unmourned.

  After hearing that story, Daiyu Matsushita thought he understood what Professor Hayakawa meant when he whispered to Kenzo, “Horiyasu put a curse on the mother of his children.” When the chief of detectives reviewed the mother’s unwholesome life, he seemed to gain a clearer understanding of how two of the siblings could have met their deaths as the victims of such appalling murders. The third child being in Hiroshima was not exactly a stroke of luck, either. Police detectives are supposed to be relentlessly rational, but Daiyu couldn’t help thinking that the Nomuras had been a singularly ill-starred family.

  Meanwhile, Kenzo was in his own private hell. His grand ambitions of solving the case had been completely pulverized, and he felt as if he had fallen from the heavens into the bowels of the earth. Cheerful no more, he languished in his room in an unleavened state of depression and self-loathing. He tried rereading The Maltese Falcon and Farewell, My Lovely, but the translated words blurred before his eyes.

  Again and again, Kenzo went over what had happened since he first met Tsunetaro, torturing himself with guilt and recriminations. He always ended up at the same excruciating realization that because of his own shallow-brained thinking, a gifted artist had been murdered and mutilated As a result, Kenzo had lost his brother Daiyu’s trust and respect, his brother had lost face in front of his subordinates, and the investigation had been thrown into a tailspin. Kenzo wanted desperately to redeem himself somehow, but his self-confidence was gone.

  Hour after hour, he sat staring despondently at the wall, chainsmoking like a junior Locomotive. Between meals he munched on dried squid and American candy bars, washed down with endless glasses of cold tea brewed from roasted barley. He racked his brain for ways to atone for his mistake and advance the stalled investigation. He made elaborate lists and time lines, but he always seemed to end up with a headache from thinking in circles.

  Kinue’s shocking death had broken his heart, but this was different. Tsunetaro would almost certainly still be alive if Kenzo had not approached him in the first place, and Kenzo felt that the perpetrator had somehow killed a part of him as well. To survive the war and then to die like that.… The murderer had already touched Kenzo twice, indirectly. Now a genuine fear for his own safety was mingled with the feelings of grief, anger, and remorse that had consumed him since Tsunetaro’s death. Theoretical thinking was all very well, but Kenzo had lost faith in his own judgment, and he lacked the courage to put his plans into action.

  As he was sitting in his darkened room, wallowing in his own impotence and despair, there was a knock on the door.

  “Kenzo, dear, I’m worried about you,” said his sister-in-law Mariko’s sweet voice. “You haven’t been out of the house in days. Are you sure you aren’t ill?”

  “I’m just getting ready to go for a walk, right now,” Kenzo said. The words were a fib when they came out of his mouth, but then an idea struck him. Grabbing his jacket and briefcase, he ran down the stairs. Without a word of explanation to his astonished sister-in-law, he jumped into his combat boots and dashed out the front door, with his untied shoelaces trailing behind him like baby snakes.

  “It’s late for a stroll,” Mariko called after him, anxiously. “Please be careful.”

  42

  When Kenzo left the house around ten thirty, the starless sky was the color of charcoal and the air was heavy with the promise of rain. He hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella, but he decided that someone who had managed to return alive from the hellish jungles of the Philippines should be able to survive a few raindrops. After a brisk five-minute walk through quiet residential streets, Kenzo found himself at the back entrance to the train station.

  A number of vendors had set up mobile food stands in the narrow, crooked alleys behind the station, and they were doing a lively business. Customers perched on wooden stools, their upper bodies hidden by flapping canvas curtains that bore decorative ideographs advertising fried noodles, saké, and roasted rice cakes. Kenzo could hear the clink of glasses and the murmur of tipsy conversation, mixed with an occasional off-key snatch of song. Ordinarily he might have been tempted to stop for a quick snack, but on this night he was galvanized by a welcome sense of mission.

  The Yamanote Line train wasn’t terribly crowded. In Kenzo’s car there were only a few bleary-eyed office workers heading home after an evening of mandatory drinking with colleagues and clients, three black-uniformed students reading paperback novels, and a rosy-cheeked peasant woman with a mouthful of gold teeth and an immense cloth-wrapped pack on her permanently stooped back.

  Unsold vegetables, or some sort of farming supplies, Kenzo speculated, his amateur detective’s brain going full speed as usual. He settled into a blue plush seat in the corner of the car and resumed his ruminations. There were so many questions, and so few answers.

  Why did Horiyasu etch three unlucky tattoos on his own children? Did Kinue really ask Professor Hayakawa to come to her house that morning, or was he lying? Why was Kinue’s torso cut off and taken away, and how was that done? Who was the mysterious woman in black who lured Tsunetaro out? What was the meaning of the bandages on her arms? Could she have been Tamae, covering up her tattoos? Speaking of tattoos, why did someone peel them off Tsunetaro’s body? What was the motive for his murder?

  And the question that had catapulted Kenzo out of his smoky depressive’s lair and onto this late-night train. What was the true identity of this woman who called herself Sumiyo Hayashi, and where did she disappear to?

  “Otemachi,” the conductor announced sadly, as if he were the bearer of tragic news. The train stopped and two attractive young women dressed in expensive kimonos got on. One of them looked exactly like Miss Ogi, the young secretary at Kenzo’s research lab. Kenzo had occasionally caught Miss Ogi staring at him, and she always went out of her way to bring him coffee and green tea before he asked. If he hadn’t been so wrapped up in the case, and so busy carrying a torch for Kinue Nomura, Kenzo might have noticed that he had made a conquest.

  He was halfway out of his seat, beginning to bow, before he realized that the woman on the train was a stranger. From a distance the resemblance had been striking, b
ut at closer range Kenzo could see that this woman had slightly fuller cheeks and a more prominent chin. Aside from those physiognomic details, her hairstyle, build, coloration, carriage, gestures, and expression were startlingly similar to those of Miss Ogi.

  “Doppelgänger,” Kenzo said softly, under his breath. He had taken three years of German as part of his premed studies, and had always been fascinated by that word. Doppelgänger: double-walker. The word had originally had mildly supernatural connotations—“a wraith of one alive,” said Kenzo’s German-Japanese dictionary—but it had come to mean simply a double, or an uncanny look-alike.

  There was a saying that everyone on earth had a double, a duplicate so identical in every way that they might have developed from the same zygote. Perhaps because Kenzo had no obtrusive or extraordinary features, people frequently told him that they knew someone who looked exactly like him. “Spitting image,” they would say. “He might be your missing twin, separated at birth!” So far Kenzo had managed to avoid being introduced to any of these walking wraiths, but he had a feeling that if he ever did meet his own doppel, he would gäng away in the opposite direction as fast as possible. More likely, from what he had heard about such meetings, neither man would be able to see the faintest resemblance to himself.

  These thoughts led him, inevitably, back to the labyrinthine murder case. The one thing he was sure of was that the body in the bathroom at Kinue’s house had belonged to Kinue. According to the photographic evidence, Kinue’s calves and forearms were not tattooed, whereas her sister Tamae’s were densely patterned.

  Tamae could not have been killed in Kinue’s stead for whatever reason, because there would have been tattoos on the lower arms and legs of the dismembered body. No such tattoos were found. Therefore one thing, at least, appeared certain: the victim was Kinue Nomura. That didn’t mean that Tamae might not be involved in the case in some other capacity. Kenzo had a hunch that Kinue’s sister was alive, and he was determined to find the proof, perhaps (with luck) this very night.