Tattoo Murder Case

by Akimitsu Takagi

  “And what might that be?” Kyosuke asked playfully. “Are you having trouble with calculus again?”

  Kenzo ignored the schoolboy joke. “It’s a long, strange story,” he said in a serious tone. “The short version is, I’ve been dragged into a very complicated murder case. Somewhere along the way I made a huge mistake and caused the investigation to lose a major clue that might have broken the whole thing wide open. My brother is having a terrible time with this case too, and that’s why I’m humbly begging for your assistance. Please, Kyosuke, won’t you kindly lend us your magnificent brains for a little while?”

  Kyosuke laughed. “I didn’t realize you knew how to speak such exquisitely polite Japanese. You sounded as if you were talking to a stranger! Seriously, I don’t know whether I can be of any use or not, but I’d be more than happy to help to the best of my ability. I wouldn’t call it an ulterior motive, exactly, but I do have reasons of my own for wanting to make the world a safer place to live.”

  44

  Kenzo and Kyosuke sat down under a graceful umbrella-shaped willow tree on the banks of the pond. While Kenzo gave a detailed account of the case, from his first meeting with Kinue Nomura to the horrific, heartbreaking murder of Tsunetaro, Kyosuke sat in silence, eyes closed. His face was so perfectly calm and expressionless that it appeared as if he had fallen asleep. Even after Kenzo had finished his recitation, Kyosuke continued to sit like a meditating Bodhisattva.

  Finally he opened his eyes and spoke. “You’re right, it is devilishly difficult,” Kyosuke said. “Yet it’s by no means impossible to solve.” He bent down, picked up a flat pebble that was lying at his feet and tossed it into the dull green pond. As the ripples spread in shimmering circles around the point of entry, he watched quietly, a reflective smile on his comely face.

  Geniuses really are different from you and me, Kenzo thought, as he tried to imagine what might be going on in Kyosuke’s superior head.

  “Actually,” Kyosuke said after the last ripple had faded away, “I’ve believed for many years that you have an exceptional gift for observation, and for accumulating and analyzing data. But putting all that data together through synthesis and cooperation, that’s another matter entirely.”

  Kenzo nodded his assent, remembering the notes-from-the-teacher that he used to carry home from elementary school, pinned to his sky-blue jacket: “Quick to learn, but does not work well with others.”

  “Fortunately,” Kyosuke continued, “it just so happens that synthesis and cooperation are among my strong points.” To a stranger, that statement might have sounded like the bluster of an egomaniacal braggart, but Kenzo knew that his friend had the substance to back up every word.

  Kyosuke seemed to be waiting for a response, but when Kenzo just nodded in silent admiration, he began to speak again. “I see what you mean when you call this murderer an evil genius. There does seem to be a sort of genius in the way he made his plan, and carried it out. I’ll give you that, without argument. The trick is to match your own thinking with the thought patterns of the killer’s disturbed mind. If you’re unable to make that leap of imagination, then you’ll be wandering around endlessly in a maze of contradictions and absurdities, utterly stupefied by the complexity of it all. At that rate, the case might well go unsolved forever. However, I have no intention of letting that happen.”

  “Kyosuke, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Are you saying that you think you can solve this case?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “How long do you think it would take?”

  “Oh, I’d say… by the end of the week I should be able to give your brother the wherewithal to arrest the murderer.” Kyosuke tossed another stone into the tranquil pond.

  Coming from an unknown, inexperienced young man, that was an awfully ambitious declaration, and Kenzo was astounded by Kyosuke’s brash self-confidence. He opened his mouth and out came a rainbow, he thought, recalling the proverb about a person who talks a bigger game than he can deliver.

  After a long silence, Kenzo recovered himself sufficiently to say, almost pleadingly, “Don’t tell me you’ve already figured out the secrets of this case.”

  Kyosuke gave him one of his trademark sphinxlike smiles. “No, no, not even close. All I’m doing right now is considering various hypotheses, trying them out in my mind one at a time. From among those possible explanations, I’ll choose the one that seems to be the most Logical. Then I’ll see whether it matches up with the available data without any major discrepancies. Once I’m sure of the facts and have determined the identity of the murderer, my final step will be to place some psychological pressure on the killer. After that, it’s just a matter of standing back and waiting for him to self-destruct. That’s really all there is to it.”

  “That may be all there is to it for you, but for us mere mortals, it hasn’t been quite that simple. Tell me, have you found the magic hypothesis yet?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have. But it’s such an utterly bizarre theory that if I tried telling it to anyone at this early stage, I’d probably be laughed out of the room.”

  “But how—“ Kenzo stammered.

  “The thing is,” Kyosuke interrupted, “I wouldn’t blame anyone for laughing. This hypothesis of mine surprises even me. By comparison, Professor Hayakawa’s remarks about non-Euclidean geometry seem quite plausible. First of all, we have to discard the idea that parallel lines never meet, even at the point of infinity. I mean, you can’t solve a problem of non-Euclidean geometry by using Euclidean geometry, am I right?”

  Kenzo was dumbstruck. “I guess so,” he said.

  “You have to learn to think in paradoxes, because we’re talking about a world where black becomes white,” Kyosuke declared. “I’m very impressed with Professor Hayakawa for having been the only one to figure that out so far. He can be quite sharp at times. In this particular murder case, the theory of positive versus negative—in a photographic rather than a conceptual sense—has been put into practice most ingeniously. Black becomes white, and white becomes black. All the investigators were confused by the criminal’s elaborate trick, which I admit was diabolically clever. Everyone mistook the positive for the negative, and vice versa “

  “Wait a minute. Are you talking about those photographic plates that Professor Hayakawa found in the garden?”

  “Yes, that, too, but there’s more to it. Those discarded bits of film that the killer scattered around the garden are just a small part of the puzzle. Right now I’m trying to take a more sweeping view of the character of the case, rather than getting preoccupied with minuscule details.”

  “Oh, I get it. But in scientific terms, in order to prove a hypothesis, you have to verify every single one of its elements. How are you planning to do that with these tangled-up murders?”

  “Well, based on the fact that Tsunetaro apparently saw through the entire case based on one glance at the photographs you showed him, I’m assuming that those tattoo pictures are the first key. The second is to do a psychological analysis of each suspect. In the first case, the police investigation came up with five possible suspects, am I right? Of those five, Takezo Mogami is dead, and Usui had already been arrested on the day before the third murder. So let’s eliminate those two from suspicion for the time being. That leaves Professor Hayakawa, Gifu Inazawa, and your old school friend Hisashi Mogami. He’s the same one they used to call the Black Sheep, I assume?”

  “One and the same,” Kenzo said, amazed anew at Kyosuke’s memory for detail.

  “At any rate,” Kyosuke went on, “if the culprit is lurking among this group, then we should be able to determine who committed all the murders by doing a psychological analysis of these three men. However, in this case there is a hidden element, which I’ll call the X factor. The killer probably couldn’t have committed the murders without the help of this X Person. X hasn’t yet appeared before us, of course, but as we proceed with our investigation this mystery character will inevitably be smo
ked out of its hiding place.”

  “You say ‘it,’ but X is a woman, right?”

  “That’s exactly right, because three minus two equals one.”

  “I see,” Kenzo said excitedly. “So the three tattooed siblings minus Orochimaru-plus-Jiraiya equals Tsunedahime, right? That’s my theory exactly, that Tamae Nomura is alive and was somehow involved in the murders.”

  With a faint, cryptic smile, Kyosuke gazed up at the great mass of gray-lined cumulus clouds overhead, as if they might be loaded with clues and not with rain. After a moment he said, “What I’m wondering is why you didn’t notice a fundamental difference between the nature of first two murders and that of the third. Not only you, of course. It strikes me as odd that even the experienced detectives in the police department seem to have overlooked this difference.”

  “What difference is that?”

  “Let’s call it a difference in style. Remember, you said that Hisashi Mogami had compared this crime to a checkmate? That’s one way of looking at it, but I think it would be more accurate to liken it to the beginning of a chess game. This crime isn’t just an artistic creation. It’s an outright challenge to an opponent. ‘Go on,’ these murders seem to say, ‘try to solve us.’ I don’t mean a match between the killer and the police investigators. Rather, it’s a match between the murderer and Fate. The person who committed the first two murders calculated the risks and took every circumstance into account, and then just as he was taking a breath of relief, thinking he had literally gotten away with murder, Fate tossed another chess piece onto the board and laughed in the killer’s face. That was Jirarya, of course; the one piece the murderer had overlooked. As the killer was pondering his next move, he suddenly became aware that this new piece had the power to destroy him. The killer knew he had to find a way to dispose of the threat. And that was the end of Jiraiya, also known as Tsunetaro Nomura, the quintessential man who knew too much.”

  “Ah,” said Kenzo, rendered speechless by Kyosuke’s clever metaphor.

  “Because of the impromptu nature of the most recent murder, there is a flaw in it. Naturally, he tried to conceal the crime, but he didn’t have the luxury of time to plan as he did with the first two killings. I’m certain that the murderer must have grown arrogant after those early successes, and conceited people tend to make mistakes.”

  “And what was that mistake?” Kenzo’s head was spinning.

  “As I see it, it’s the fact that the mystery woman, whom the killer has kept hidden until now, has finally come out into the open. And this is a woman who for some reason needs to cover her arms with bandages, down to the wrist.”

  “Of course!” Kenzo exclaimed. “Tamae, covering up her tattoos. But why was she wearing a kimono, instead of her usual long-sleeved dress? Oh, I know. I’ll bet her savior, her wonderful man, was one of those traditional types who won’t permit his woman to wear Western clothes.”

  Kyosuke gave Kenzo a tolerant smile before continuing with his own train of thought. “The next thing that struck me as odd is that even while he was carrying out his bizarre handiwork, the killer made no attempt to conceal his crimes. In the first murder, he chose Kinue’s own house as the staging ground. Maybe that was unavoidable, but it doesn’t make sense that he would cut up the body and hide the torso somewhere, while leaving the head without a mark on it. And while the killer went to all the trouble of locking the bathroom in order to hinder the discovery of the body, he seems to have deliberately left the lights on in that same room. There’s no way that the people in the neighborhood wouldn’t have eventually noticed that the light had been left on, particularly since they already took a lively interest in Kinue’s every move. Even if you and Professor Hayakawa hadn’t come along the next morning, the body would have been discovered before too long. That’s all fine. However, there was no common-sense reason to believe that the body would be found during the night. So the killer must have had some inside information that led him to predict that someone would see the body in the locked room before morning. I think the light was left on in order to attract the attention of that someone, like a beacon in the night.”

  “But why?”

  “Perhaps it was to tempt a person with peeping-Tom inclinations to look through the crack in the door in the hopes of glimpsing Beauty in her bath.” Kyosuke gave a fleeting smile, then continued. “This way of thinking can be seen in the other two murders as well. In the death of Takezo Mogami, a building slated for imminent demolition was deliberately chosen as the stage for the drama. In the third murder, after going to so much trouble to remove the tattoos from the body, why didn’t the killer smash the face into unrecognizability while he was at it? If the face had been obliterated, it would have been quite difficult to identify the victim.” Kyosuke paused for a moment, but before Kenzo could reply he began to answer his own question.

  “Do you understand, Kenzo? Do you see the reason why the killer purposely set it up so that his crimes would be discovered?”

  “No, I don’t see at all. Is it some sort of psychological disorder, like an exhibitionistic-crime fetish or something5”’

  “No, it has nothing to do with mental illness. This criminal is like an audacious film director. Nothing is left to chance; he calculates everything down to the millisecond, and he only acts after weighing all the possible ramifications. If you look at it from a utilitarian point of view, that method is infinitely preferable to the usual reckless impulsiveness found in murderers. Am I right?”

  Kenzo’s mouth opened and closed as if he were a carp gulping air. When no sound came out, Kyosuke continued. “Do you know how to be an ingenious liar? The trick to deceiving people is not to lie your head off from start to finish. On the contrary, out of a hundred things you say, ninety-nine should be completely true. Then at the very end you tell one single, magnificent lie. That’s the basic premise of the Machiavellian philosophy of foreign relations: if you overwhelm them with ninety-nine bits of truth, they’ll never notice if you sneak in one little lie. This is a basic formula in psychology, too. Thus, our killer seems to have gone to extremes to disclose various aspects of the case—almost gratuitously, it would appear—while being careful to protect certain crucial secrets that were essential to his survival, in the most literal sense.”

  Kenzo should have known what to expect from the super-brain of Kyosuke Kamizu, whose other schoolboy nickname, besides Boy Genius, had been the Reasoning Machine. Nevertheless, after listening to Kyosuke’s impromptu analysis, he couldn’t find the words to express his wonderment and awe. Instead he stood up, dusted off his rumpled khaki trousers, and beckoned to his friend, who was skipping yet another stone across the gray-green water.

  “Come on,” Kenzo said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  45

  A short train ride later, the two men sat in Kenzo’s small second-floor room in his brother’s house. On the chipped burgundy lacquer table between them were two untouched cups of green tea and two small round dishes. Each dish held a shimmering dark brown square of bean-paste jelly, which Kenzo’s sister-in-law had served with her usual quiet grace before closing the door discreetly behind her. A few minutes later, the discordant sound of one of Manko’s less diligent pupils attempting to plow through the easiest of “Five Easy Pieces” floated up from downstairs.

  Spread out on the table were the photographs Kinue had sent to Kenzo for safekeeping. Kyosuke perused each print carefully, while Kenzo stared at his old friend’s face, watching for changes in expression. A faint smile played about the corners of Kyosuke’s mouth. He didn’t say a word.

  Next he picked up the assorted notes that Kenzo had prepared on the case over the past few months. Kyosuke was an unusually rapid reader, and he ran his eyes over every line, up to the final page. There he began to make some notes of his own in the margins, with characters so tidy and symmetrical that they might have been mistaken for movable type. Kenzo leaned across the table and swiveled his neck until the cartilage made an omin
ous cracking sound, trying to see what Kyosuke was writing.

  Addendum to Note #3, he read. In the third murder, only the tattooed skin was taken. In the first murder, the entire torso disappeared. What is the reason for this difference?

  “You overlooked one important point,” Kyosuke said, laying down his pen. “I took the liberty of writing it in.”

  ***

  Fortunately, on that day Detective Chief Inspector Daiyu Matsushita came home early for once. Kenzo left Kyosuke in his room studying the case notes while he went downstairs to tell his brother everything that had happened that afternoon. Daiyu had already taken a bath and changed into a loose brown lounging kimono. Now he listened in high good humor, sipping a glass of Sapporo beer.

  “I see,” he said, when Kenzo paused for breath. “So this is the friend you’ve spoken of so often, the genius who published a world-class theorem in high school? And you think his powers of reasoning could be applied to solving these murders? Perhaps he’ll become a famous amateur detective, just like in your mystery novels, and put us all to shame.”

  Daryu’s tone was teasing and jocular, but the expression in his eyes told another story. “Kenzo,” he went on, “I’d like very much to meet this friend of yours. If he somehow manages to solve this case, I promise that I’ll take off my hat and pay homage to him for accomplishing what I’ve been unable to do. Hell, if he gets me out of this predicament, I’ll do better than that. I’ll eat my blasted hat.”

  Kenzo could hardly keep his mouth from falling open in disbelief Coming from the fearsome Matsu the Demon, who never asked anyone for anything, this request for Kyosuke’s help was an extraordinary concession.

  A few moments later Kenzo led Kyosuke downstairs and introduced him to Daiyu. Kyosuke was deferential yet self-confident, and his behavior toward the chief of detectives evidently made a very good impression. When Kyosuke attempted to take his leave, Daiyu all but barred the door, insisting that Kyosuke stay for dmner.