***
The two men left the restaurant and cut across the train tracks. After walking for fifteen minutes through a maze of bombed-out buildings, flimsy barracks, and older houses that had miraculously survived the war, they arrived at the midpoint between Ogikubo and East Ogikubo. The neighborhood was entirely residential, and the house they were looking for turned out to be quite large, though not terribly luxurious. In the spacious garden there was a ferro-concrete outbuilding that appeared to be a studio of some sort.
“Does Hisashi Mogami paint pictures?” Kyosuke asked.
“I really wouldn’t know about that,” Kenzo replied.
“Never mind, I’ll ask him myself. If he’s a painter, we’ll get him to show us some of his works of art. Often you can understand a person’s psychological makeup just by looking at one or two of his paintings.”
Kenzo rang the doorbell in the entryway. A plump, middle-aged housemaid told them that Hisashi Mogami was away on a trip and wasn’t expected back until the following morning. The two men said that they would call again the next afternoon.
“That was a real waste of time,” Kenzo grumbled as they trudged back to the station.
“It couldn’t be helped,” Kyosuke said cheerily. “You have to be prepared to put up with a little frustration, if you’re going to be an amateur detective.” Just then a sudden gust of wintry wind threaded its way between them, kicking up a great golden cloud of dried gingko leaves.
“It’s really cold in Japan, isn’t it?” Kyosuke said, pulling his overcoat closer around him. “I’d forgotten how cold it gets in this country.” Whether because he had recently returned from the steamy southern front, or because he was still recovering from illness, the cold seemed to penetrate his woolen clothing and go right through to his rangy bones.
Kenzo shivered sympathetically, although the cold didn’t really bother him. “So what shall we do with the rest of the day, until evening?”
“That’s a good question. I’d like to go take a look at the crime scene at Kitazawa. Do you suppose we could persuade your brother to come along?”
“It’s hard to say. I’m sure he’ll try to accommodate us as much as possible, but he has a very busy schedule.”
“In that case, call him up and say, ‘Kyosuke Kamizu would like to show you the solution to the mystery of the locked room, so please do us the honor of accompanying us to Kitazawa this afternoon!”
Kenzo stopped in his tracks and stared at Kyosuke. No one believed more deeply in the genius of his friend than Kenzo, but he couldn’t help being startled by that bold declaration. After all, this was a riddle that had stumped the entire investigative branch of the Tokyo police force for three long months and now Kyosuke was saying that he was prepared to solve it without ever having seen the murder site. “Are you serious?” Kenzo asked.
“I’m always serious,” Kyosuke said impishly. He gave Kenzo a look of bravado bordering on arrogance, and finished it off with one of his catlike smiles. Kenzo’s mind was a whirl of emotions as he stopped at a red public telephone and placed the call to his brother. When Daiyu Matsushita heard the reason for the call his voice was suddenly filled with excitement. This made Kenzo even more uneasy, for he knew how his brother hated wasting time on wild-goose chases.
“He’s leaving right away, and we’re to meet him at Kitawazawa,” Kenzo said, as he stepped out of the booth.
“In that case, we’d better get going.” There wasn’t a trace of anxiety in Kyosuke’s voice.
Kenzo put his arm on his friend’s sleeve. “Are you absolutely sure about this? If by some chance this demonstration should be a flop, it could make the rest of our investigation really difficult. I realize I probably sound like a fretful grandmother, it’s just that I’m so afraid of disappointing my brother again. He can be kind of scary, you know.”
“You’re still a worrywart, just like when we were in school,” Kyosuke said. “Listen, this so-called locked room mystery isn’t as big a deal as you think. Anything a human devises can be figured out by another human being.”
Right, Kenzo thought. Especially if that other human being is a bona fide genius.
48
An hour later, Kenzo and Kyosuke arrived at the former residence of Kinue Nomura in Kitazawa. That dwelling, along with the rest of Takezo Mogami’s property, had passed immediately into the hands of his younger brother Hisashi, who had expressed his intentions of renovating the house and putting it on the market. However, the Metropolitan Police had asked that the house be left alone until the case was solved. Even so, the household furnishings had been carted away.
“This place is about as it was at the time of the crime, right?” Kyosuke asked as he stood outside the gate, peering at the property with interest.
“It looks the same to me,” Kenzo said.
“This must be my lucky day,” Kyosuke said. “If the house had already been remodeled, I wouldn’t have been able to prove my theory.” Walking ahead of Kenzo, Kyosuke went through the gate.
During the months since the murder, the garden had run amok. People were afraid of entering the scene of a murder and, after the initial police investigation was moved down to headquarters, no one had passed through the gate. The dilapidated wreckage of dried-up tomato plants looked like the greenish-gray skeletons of extraterrestrial visitors, and the atmosphere of the entire garden was eerie and untamed. Kenzo’s stomach lurched as he remembered the high hopes with which he had walked through this same garden, believing he was on the way to an intimate romantic rendezvous.
“Where exactly were the fragments of that photographic plate?” Kyosuke asked.
“In the back garden,” Kenzo said, recovering his composure. He led Kyosuke around the corner of the building. “I’m sure it was right here,” Kenzo said, pointing at a spot on the dusty ground.
“I see,” Kyosuke said. “And that window with the horizontal metal bars across it, that’s the bathroom?”
“That’s right. But it isn’t possible to get in or out through the window.”
“What about this drainage ditch? Does the water come from the bathroom?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Kyosuke bent over and lifted up the cover of the drainage system. “Look, this opens!” he said. “So it’s just as I thought.”
“Surely you aren’t suggesting that a human being could fit through that opening?”
“We aren’t talking about Homo sapiens here,” Kyosuke said. “We’re talking about Limax maximus. I was just trying to find the slug’s footprints. You know, the trail of the slug?” Kenzo couldn’t help wondering whether Kyosuke had lost his marbles, but his friend’s amber eyes were perfectly clear, and sparkling with excitement.
“Ah, gentlemen, sorry to keep you waiting. I had a little trouble giving some pesky reporters the slip, so I came the long way round.” Wearing a black overcoat and booming out his unaffected laugh, the bulky, vigorous form of Detective Chief Inspector Daiyu Matsushita appeared.
After exchanging greetings, the three men entered the house. A thick layer of dust covered every surface, and Kenzo was immediately seized by a fit of coughing. He put his handkerchief over his nose, but even through the thin cotton he thought he could detect a lingering odor of blood circulating in the dusty air, and it made him feel sick to his stomach.
Meanwhile, Daiyu was giving Kyosuke a guided tour of the crime scene, illustrating his statements with the forensic photographs he held in his hand.
“This is where we found some bloodstains. This is where the tansu chest was. As you can see from the picture, the contents had been ransacked. In this room, we found a glass with some whiskey residue.”
“And where’s the problematical bathroom?” Kyosuke asked.
“At the end of this hall, on the right.” The three men walked down the hall single file and stopped in front of the bathroom. Through the opening in the brown door where a wide board had been cut out, they could see the white tile floor. Kyosuke stepped throu
gh the hole into the bathroom.
“Now, where was the slug?” he asked when Kenzo and Daiyu had joined him.
“On that windowsill,” the brothers replied, nearly in unison.
“And where’s the original crack in the door, the one Kenzo and Professor Hayakawa peeked through?”
“It’s here,” said Daiyu, pointing to the lower part of the door, “but as you can see it isn’t long enough or wide enough for a thread to pass through, much less a slug.”
“Ah, I see what you mean.” Kyosuke didn’t appear in the least perturbed. He stood quietly for a moment, as if lost in meditation. Then he said, “Okay, that’ll do it. I’ve unraveled the riddle now.” He looked at the two Matsushita brothers and smiled.
“You’ve figured it out already?” Daiyu Matsushita’s voice held a mixture of incredulity and hope. “Then tell us, quickly. How on earth did the killer get in and out?”
Kyosuke shook his head as if to say, Not so fast. “I’d like to conduct a little experiment right now, and show you exactly how it was done,” he said. “But first we have to be sure that all the conditions are the same as they were on the night of the crime.”
Kyosuke removed the stopper from the bathtub and turned on the faucet. Because it hadn’t been used for quite some time, the water that came bursting out at first was a deep reddish brown from the accumulation of rust. The color of dried blood, Kenzo thought.
“This will take a while,” Kyosuke said. “While we’re waiting, let’s go into the other room.” He led the way out of the bathroom. The sound of the running water followed the men down the hall, reminding Kenzo of that horrible morning when he and Professor Hayakawa had discovered the dismembered body.
With all its furnishings removed, the eight-mat room formerly used as a parlor looked dreary and uninviting, but the three men went in and sat down on the bare tatami-matted floor. Kyosuke began to speak, using a didactic tone of voice usually associated with the lecture podium. “In a typical Japanese house, it would be very difficult to create a locked room. While each room may appear to be independent, they share a common floor and a common ceiling. So an intruder could crawl along above the ceiling and enter the house through a clothes closet, or slink along under the floor and make entry by pushing up the tatami matting. Either way, a Japanese-style house presents no challenge to a resourceful burglar. However, this bathroom is different. The floors and the lower part of the walls are covered with tile, and there isn’t so much as a ventilation duct in the ceiling. The untiled areas of the bathroom are finished in wood, but it isn’t possible to separate or dislodge the boards. The same is true of the door. Unless, of course, you break it down the way the police did.”
Kyosuke smiled mischievously at Detective Chief Inspector Matsushita, who motioned impatiently for him to continue. “As for the windows, they were locked securely from inside, and the outside was protected with sturdy iron bars so narrowly spaced that not even a cat, much less a human, could have squeezed through. The door, too, was firmly bolted from inside, and there was no space above or below the door. There’s no secret passage of any sort, and we know that the criminal didn’t kill himself in here. It is a fact that the torso was dismembered and has never been found. We also know that the killer found some way of entering and leaving this room. The key to solving that mystery is the existence of the slug.”
“The slug? But how.…” Daiyu and Kenzo exchanged baffled looks.
“Think about it,” Kyosuke said. “According to Kenzo, when Hisashi Mogami heard about the slug in the bathroom, his face turned pale and he seemed very surprised. Since the three curses—the snake, the frog, and the slug—seem to be intertwined throughout this case, casting a weird shadow on everything that happens, it’s no wonder Hisashi was shocked to hear that an actual slug had turned up at the murder scene. But what about the killer? We can easily imagine his reaction. It’s a fact of psychology that criminals tend to be especially nervous and superstitious immediately after committing a crime. There’s no way such a painstaking criminal would have overlooked the presence of a slug in the bathroom, so we can assume that the slug entered the room after the murderer departed. If we could trace the path taken by the slug, I think the escape route of the criminal would become clear as well.”
Raising his voice a bit, Kyosuke continued, “As a rule, in a bathroom, no matter what type of construction is used, there has to be an intake and an outtake for the water. In this case the intake is directly from the water supply, so it would be impossible for a slug to have gotten in through the faucet. The outtake is the route used by the slug, and it was also used indirectly by the criminal to make his escape.”
Daiyu and Kenzo looked at each other in disbelief. They had both completely overlooked that possibility, as if it were a blind spot.
“Once you understand that, the rest is simple. It’s just a matter of needles and thread,” Kyosuke said casually.
From the bathroom, they could hear the sound of the water overflowing the bathtub. “Well, it sounds as if we’re ready to proceed with the experiment,” Kyosuke said as he stood up and stretched his long legs. “Shall we go?” With Kenzo and Daiyu close behind, he reentered the bathroom. The water had flowed over the sides of the bathtub and washed down the tile floor before spiraling into the drain.
“Let’s see, we’ll need three pieces of thread. We might be able to get along with fewer, but let’s try three just to be safe.” Kyosuke reached into the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a sheaf of linen thread and two large straight pins, along with three small chips of wood. He unrolled the thread and cut it into three sections, then attached a wood chip to the end of each piece of thread. He tied two of the remaining ends of thread to the two pins, stuck one pin into the door above the board, under the bolt, then lightly stuck another pin into the wall at the same height as the bolt. He made a small loop in the end of the last piece of thread, this he attached to the handle of the bolt, pulling it horizontal and making it go around the pin. From there he pulled it diagonal and wound it around the pin atop the door, finally wrapping it around the top of the padlock on the window.
“These three chips of wood will eventually be washed away, down the drain, by the force of the water from the tap. Of course, the water stream alone isn’t enough to put this apparatus into motion, but afterward the killer would have picked up the wood chip and manipulated the attached string, and that would do it. Watch from inside and I’ll show you.” Kyosuke ducked under the thread and closed the bathroom door behind him.
As if hypnotized, Kenzo and Daiyu kept their eyes fixed on the bolt of the door. After a moment, the thread began to move smoothly, manipulated from outside. The bolt was moved to the side and fell into the aperture. This loosened the pin which had been attached to the wall, and it fell to the floor and was washed down the drain. It all happened in the blink of the eye, and the next thing the watchers knew the door was perfectly locked and all traces of the mechanism—the strings, the pins, the wood chips—had vanished down the drain.
“I guess that concludes the demonstration,” Kenzo said with a faraway sigh, as if he were coming out of a trance.
“Mmm.” Daiyu Matsushita nodded his head without comment, his eyes shining with admiration.
“How about it? Did the lock catch?” Kyosuke asked rhetorically as he stuck his head through the hole in the door.
“Thank you very much for showing us that wonderful trick. I have to say, I was really surprised.” There was a quaver of emotion in Daiyu Matsushita’s voice, but Kyosuke’s face remained completely expressionless.
“A mechanical trick like this is nothing special,” he said, almost disdainfully. “There’s a much more important aspect, and that is the psychological trick that was used by the killer.”
“And what might that be?” Daiyu asked politely.
“You people have allowed yourselves to be chased into a psychological locked room. You’re stuck in that metaphorical room, making no progress at all, and yo
u haven’t been able to set foot outside it since the case began. This trick with the door isn’t the sort of thing someone could think up in ten or twenty minutes, so I think it’s safe to say that the killer was someone who was familiar with the inside of this house.”
“Is that so?” Daiyu Matsushita was silent for a moment, as if he were looking at a lineup of suspects behind his eyelids. Finally, he spoke. “I used to be confused about why the killer left the water running in the bathtub. Thanks to your demonstration, I understand that now. Having the water running was an indispensable part of the trick.”
“That’s true, but I think there was another reason for leaving the water running, besides needing it to wash the chips of wood into the drain. No, the running water definitely had another function.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that from the standpoint of criminal economics, the more use you can get out of a single prop, the more profitable your enterprise will be.”
The chief of detectives appeared to be fed up with Kyosuke’s cryptic remarks, and when he spoke it was in a low, annoyed voice. “Mr. Kamizu, let’s get to the point. Do you know who committed these crimes, or not?”
Kyosuke smiled. “Almost,” he said.
49
Professor Hayakawa had married money as well as beauty. He and his tattooed wife lived in Yotsuya in a splendid European-style brick house with leaded windows, wrought-iron balconies, and a classical English garden hidden away behind high brick walls. The house had been spared by some wartime fluke, while both of the formerly elegant dwellings on either side were now bombed-out ruins, overgrown with weeds. A deferential maid, wearing a white apron over a subdued kimono, ushered Kenzo and Kyosuke into a vast reception room. Kenzo couldn’t help crying out in surprise when he saw the extraordinary decor.
Tattoo Murder Case Page 24