Tattoo Murder Case

by Akimitsu Takagi

  “So,” Kyosuke wound up, “I ruled out Usui and Ishikawa as possible suspects.”

  “Whatever your methods, I’m in complete agreement with your conclusions so far,” said Daiyu Matsushita. “What about Professor Hayakawa?”

  “On the face of things, he appears very suspect indeed. Hisashi Mogami made clever use of all the professor’s weak points in order to throw suspicion onto him: his own uncle!” Wearing a look of righteous indignation, Kyosuke turned his attention to the idea of Professor Hayakawa as serial killer.

  In the first murder the tattooed torso was removed from the rest of the body, while in the third murder, the tattooed skin had been completely stripped away. Thus it appeared that the crimes were motivated by a desire to possess those tattoos. More than anyone else, Professor Hayakawa had what might be called an obsession with tattoos. Indeed, it was generally acknowledged that there was no one in the entire country with a more consuming interest in decorated human skin. But would a successful middle-aged scholar, blessed with status, worldly possessions, and a beautiful tattooed wife, be driven to commit murder simply because of his desire to own more tattooed skins?

  It’s true that a fanatical obsession with anything, including tattoos, can become so irrational that it overrides common sense. From that point of view it wasn’t unthinkable that if the professor happened to stumble upon a gorgeously tattooed corpse, he might be tempted to make off with the tattooed portion. Nor would it be entirely inconceivable that he might have committed a subsequent murder to protect his own interests, if someone had threatened him with exposure. However, Professor Hayakawa had a license to collect tattoos, and he had already built up a world-class collection without resorting to illegal means. The only thing lacking in that collection was one of Horiyasu’s works of art, but surely the professor would eventually have been able to obtain a sample of Horiyasu’s work without having to risk his own skin by killing for it.

  Kyosuke paused for dramatic effect before delivering his final argument. “So the question is, why would the professor risk everything for the sake of one single specimen, which he would have had to keep hidden away in any case?”

  Daiyu looked at his younger brother, then back to Kyosuke. “Still, you can’t say that sort of thing never happens. I remember a case, before the war, where a well-known archaeologist stole some ancient documents which had been designated national treasures, and he ended up in prison. After the verdict came down, he was quoted in the newspaper as saying that he didn’t know what had come over him. He just had an uncontrollable urge to own those documents. ‘Possessed by demons,’ that was the phrase he used.”

  “You raise a good point, Chief Inspector, and Hisashi Mogami may have had that very case in mind when he planned to frame Professor Hayakawa. But there’s something in the professor’s character that would make such an action unlikely.”

  “What’s that?” Kenzo asked, still on the edge of his seat.

  “This may sound strange, but it’s the professor’s famous sarcasm, and his wicked tongue. There’s at least a trace of evil lurking in the heart of every man, and the people who express those dark impulses through speech are less likely to have that spiritual poison settle in the internal organs, eventually erupting in some shocking crime. I mean, consider the shy, quiet conformist who goes berserk one day with a rifle or a sword.”

  Daiyu Matsushita nodded. “Yes, like that soft-spoken bricklayer last week who murdered his next-door neighbors with a sashimi knife because they refused to do anything about their dog’s incessant late-night barking.”

  “At any rate,” Kyosuke went on, “in order to test the professor’s psychology I challenged him to a game of go. As a rule, in matches of chess and checkers, when you find yourself at a disadvantage, there are two ways to try to win. One is to go into a defensive mode and wait patiently for the opponent to make a mistake. The second is the reverse: to launch an all-out attack, turning the board into a site of chaos and confusion. The all-out attack is the method favored by big-time gamblers, but the professor chose the rational, deliberate road. He painstakingly followed the classical rules, taking when it was proper to take, protecting when it was proper to protect, and waging a clean, pretty game. As it turned out, I ended up winning both games. When the last game was over, I was able to eliminate Professor Hayakawa from the list of murder suspects, without a shadow of a doubt. Call it instinct, but I would stake my life on that.”

  Daiyu Matsushita had been listening intently. The expression on his face was half admiring, half skeptical. “Mr. Kamizu, your methodology is unconventional, to say the least, yet what you say seems plausible enough. But in that case, why did the professor pick up that photographic plate? Was he just possessed by an irresistible urge, born of his mania for tattoos?”

  “I don’t think that was it,” Kyosuke said. “That plate hinted at a huge secret, the unraveling of which would have made it possible to solve the case almost immediately. I think the professor must have realized that as soon as he picked up the fragments. He probably wanted to take the pieces home and study them at his leisure; he saw that something was fishy, and that’s why the remark about non-Euclidean geometry slipped out. Actually, Kenzo, I hate to say this, but you did a really unfortunate thing.”

  Oh, great, Kenzo thought, more guilt, but the look Kyosuke gave him was pitying rather than accusatory.

  “What I mean,” Kyosuke said, still looking at Kenzo, “is that if you had just left him alone after he took the plates, this case could have been solved by the professor himself months ago. Of course, that’s assuming that he would have been willing to cooperate with the police. At the very least, the third murder would have been prevented.”

  Kenzo hung his head, and Daiyu said, “Why wouldn’t the professor provide an alibi for the time in question?”

  “That must have been tearing him apart.” Kyosuke rubbed his eyes. “If he could just have offered proof of his whereabouts, he wouldn’t have had to put up with being interrogated and held in jail. Yet he didn’t dare say the one word that would have saved him from all that inconvenience and discomfort. This is just conjecture, but I think that on that evening the professor was at a place he didn’t want the police to know about.”

  “What sort of place?” Kenzo asked eagerly, his feelings of guilt forgotten as his curiosity reasserted itself.

  “Again, this is pure conjecture. It’s hard to imagine the professor as a member of a secret society, and I doubt that he was lurking about in some illegal gambling joint. If he had been at another woman’s place, he wouldn’t have wanted his wife to find out, but there’s no reason why he couldn’t have told the police in confidence, man to man. So, knowing what we do of the professor’s character and interests, that leaves just one possibility: that he was at the studio of some outlaw tattoo artist.”

  “Yes!” Kenzo said.

  Kyosuke’s theory was that the professor was at a studio to observe someone being tattooed, possibly paving the way for the eventual purchase of that person’s skin. Tattooing was still highly illegal, and the ban was actively enforced. If Professor Hayakawa were to give away the address of the tattoo artist, he would be betraying that person’s friendship, and he would risk losing his access to the glamorous, insular world of the art tattoo, forever.

  “That was why he refused to speak. He was confident that the truth about the case would eventually come out, but if the worst came to the worst and he was formally charged, he probably felt certain that the tattoo master would forgive him for revealing that artist’s address in order to save himself. In essence, the professor decided to risk his own skin to protect someone else’s.”

  Kyosuke smiled slyly. “Of course, this was one reason why you were blundering around in a labyrinth until I came along,” he said. “At any rate, the more I learned about the case, the more it appeared as if the only plausible suspect was Hisashi Mogami. Then I met with him and, as you probably heard from Kenzo, he set forth a most surprising hypothesis. Althoug
h his reasoning appeared to be impeccably clear and logical, I immediately sensed that this was just another page from his diabolical plan book. His speech was liberally irrigated with sincerity—the man really is quite an actor. That speech was his trump card, and he had been biding his time, waiting for the perfect opportunity to play it. That was his fatal mistake, choosing Kyosuke Kamizu as the sounding board for his fake theory.”

  Kyosuke paused for a moment, and an odd look flitted across his fine-boned face, as if he were feeling a twinge of sympathy for his prime suspect. After a quick recapitulation of Hisashi’s spurious “theory,” he continued his own hypothesis:

  “The investigation floundered, and Hisashi just sat back on his seemingly impregnable alibi and watched the police chasing their tails. He was close to his aunt, so Hisashi must have known that his uncle, the professor, went out every night to some unknown destination. Knowing his uncle’s proclivities, he probably put two and two together and figured out where he was going. So he knew the professor would be in a bind when the police asked him for an alibi. The first and second murders went almost exactly as planned. Of course, Hisashi couldn’t have foreseen that Ryokichi Usui would choose that night to break into Kinue’s house. He did know that Inazawa was planning to call on Kinue later that night, because that invitation was part of the scheme. Hisashi deliberately left the light on in the bathroom, so that Inazawa would be sure to peek in and see the body. He predicted correctly that Inazawa, who had gone to the house of his boss’s mistress with the most scandalous of intentions, wouldn’t rush to report his gruesome discovery to the police.”

  Kyosuke paused and took a long gulp of tepid green tea. “As it turned out, Inazawa couldn’t have behaved more perfectly if he had been a Bunraku puppet, and Hisashi the black-hooded puppeteer,” he said. “But Fate had another idea, and an unexpected chess piece appeared on the board.”

  “You’re talking about Jiraiya, right? Tsunetaro Nomura?” Daiyu Matsushita said.

  “Exactly. When Tsunetaro showed up, holding the key to the secret on which the whole case turned, Hisashi was amazed, and alarmed. He knew he was in danger, so he had to take rapid action, without the luxury of planning that went into the first two murders. He lured Tsunetaro out, killed him, stripped off his skin, and left him in that desolate warehouse. For Hisashi, a tattoo wasn’t an object of desire, quite the contrary. But he thought that by removing the tattoos he could draw a parallel with the first murder, and cast even more suspicion on Professor Hayakawa. It was a clever strategy, no doubt about that.” Kyosuke paused again and picked up his teacup.

  “Shall I order you some hot tea?” Daiyu asked solicitously.

  “No, this is fine,” Kyosuke said, draining the cup. “One thing about the war, it made things like whether or not a cup of tea is hot seem very trivial. Anyway,” he went on in a brisk tone, “let’s take a careful look at Hisashi’s alibi for the third murder.”

  “There was a three-hour blank space in Hisashi Mogami’s account of his activities. He claimed to have spent that time in a movie theater, but there would have been plenty of time for him to rush back to Tokyo by car, commit the crime, return to Yokohama at high speed, and still have an hour left over. The police assumed he would have been traveling by train, in which case it couldn’t have been done. However, because Hisashi’s alibi for the first murder was seemingly impregnable, his alibi for Tsunetaro’s murder was evidently accepted without being rigorously questioned by the police.”

  Once again, the chief inspector’s face wore a complicated expression: a mix, this time, of embarrassment and annoyance. “Go on,” he said shortly.

  “Of course, I didn’t conclude that Hisashi was the killer on the basis of these things alone,” Kyosuke said. “After he had presented his hypothesis, which seemed to suggest Professor Hayakawa as Tsunetaro’s killer, I pointed out some inconsistencies. Hisashi appeared agitated by my questions, which he rebutted with varying degrees of success, but he refused to abandon his thesis that the crime had been committed by someone with a tattoo mania. He also made a point of expressing his own deep aversion to tattooed skin.”

  The Matsushita brothers exchanged a significant glance. “Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much!” Kenzo murmured, paraphrasing some dimly recalled high-school Shakespeare.

  Kyosuke smiled appreciatively, then cleared his throat. “At that point,” he went on, “I proposed a friendly game of chess. I hold a third-level certificate, and an ordinary person couldn’t begin to play against me. However, Hisashi Mogami is a professional player, and I knew that trying to use the chessboard to my advantage was not going to be simple by any means. I launched a mad-dog attack, and by the end of the middle game victory appeared to be within my grasp. But Mogami is what they call a born big-game player. It requires a mysterious combination of brains, courage, and recklessness, and he has them all. He detected a small opening, and he launched a do-or-die offensive. Although I ended up losing the match, I learned enough about Mogami’s character to be certain that he was the culprit. It’s difficult to put into words, but as I said before I would stake my life on my instincts, the way I did on so many occasions during that horrible war.”

  Daiyu Matsushita had listened to Kyosuke’s monologue in attentive silence. He was clearly filled with admiration, but his face still bore a shadow of doubt. “Mr. Kamizu, your arguments sound very convincing. However, please forgive my rudeness, but I must point out that everything you’ve said so far is theory or fanciful conjecture that exists only in your own head. I mean, I can’t very well charge a man with murder because he beat you at chess.”

  “That’s perfectly reasonable. And that’s exactly why I asked you to call Kyoko Kawabata in for questioning. When she arrives, please grill her in detail about Mogami’s actions between three and eight P.M. on the day of the murder. And then if you wouldn’t mind, please permit me to ask her a few questions. I know it’s somewhat irregular—“

  “I have no objection to your questioning the witness,” Daiyu interrupted, “but why are you so concerned about that particular time period?”

  “For the rest of that night there are numerous witnesses to Mogami’s whereabouts. During those five hours, the only witness is Kyoko Kawabata, and I have reason to believe that she wouldn’t hesitate to lie to protect the man she loves. Also, I think there is plenty of room to doubt the circumstances of Takezo’s death as they have been reconstructed.” Kyosuke’s eyes were alight with determination.

  Just then, Officer Ishikawa came into the room and whispered in the ear of the detective chief inspector. “Bring her in,” said Daiyu Matsushita.

  56

  Kyoko Kawabata was a pretty, intelligent-looking woman in her late twenties, with glossy black hair done up in a French roll. Her slender, willowy figure was sheathed in a simple dress of dark blue jersey, and a ruby-studded brooch in the shape of a heart glittered on her lapel. Nervously clutching a lace-trimmed handkerchief, she sat down on a folding chair and smoothed her skirt over her knees.

  Detective Chief Inspector Daiyu Matsushita immediately got down to business. “You are acquainted with Hisashi Mogami, is that correct?”

  “Yes, we sometimes go out together as friends.”

  “So your relation is strictly platonic?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.” Kyoko Kawabata looked a bit indignant, but she answered calmly enough.

  “You have stated previously that on August twenty-seventh, you attended the Togeki Theater with Mr. Mogami. If you don’t mind, we would like to ask you a few more questions about the events of that day.”

  “I see,” Kyoko Kawabata said in a doubtful tone of voice.”As I explained in my previous statement, Mr. Mogami and I had a long-standing date to go to the Togeki Theater on that day. The women who work in my boutique have a tendency to poke their noses into other people’s business, so rather than having Mr. Mogami pick me up at work we arranged to meet in front of the theater around three. The curtain went up at about three thirty a
nd we were together the entire time, sitting in adjoining seats. After the show ended at seven thirty, Mr. Mogami escorted me to Yurakucho Station and saw me onto a train for Meguro, which is where I live. That was where we said good-bye, a few minutes before eight.”

  “Did you stop off anywhere for a cup of tea on the way to the station?”

  “Mr. Mogami suggested that we stop for refreshments, but.… This is a bit embarrassing, but I was feeling a little under the weather, so I just wanted to get home and lie down as soon as possible.”

  “What did you do for your evening meal, then?”

  “I had brought some rice balls and a thermos of green tea, so we ate in our seats.”

  “You didn’t buy any food at the concessions in the theater lobby?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What sort of seats did you have?”

  “I believe I gave the officers the ticket stubs when I was questioned the first time.”

  “Oh, here they are.” Daiyu Matsushita reached into a file labeled KAWABATA, KYOKO. “So you had two adjoining seats in Row G, next to the hanamichi runway on the right side, is that correct?”

  “That’s entirely correct, sir,” Kyoko said politely.

  “While you were inside the theater, did you happen to meet anyone you know?”

  “No, not a soul.”

  “Did anything unusual happen at the theater on that day? For example, were any of the actors taken suddenly ill, or were there any last-minute changes in the cast, or did any of the actors mess up their lines, or fall off the stage?”

  “Yes. Now that you mention it, at the end of the second act there was an uproar because someone had apparently committed suicide by jumping from the third-floor balcony, and the beginning of the third act was delayed because of that.”

  “I see. And may I ask what you were wearing that day?”