Kyosuke reached into his briefcase and placed a publicity still from a recent Japanese movie on the table. The picture showed an Edo Period ukiyo-e artist in the act of drawing the rough sketch for a tattoo of Yama-Uba, an evil-looking mountain witch, onto the naked back of a beautiful woman. Daiyu and Kenzo stared at the photograph for a moment. Then, almost in unison, they let out a loud Ahhh of comprehension.
“Suppose that someone wants to get a tattoo,” Kyosuke said. “The first thing the tattoo artist will do is to bring out his portfolio and show the potential client his flash, the tattoo designs in his repertoire. These invariably include an assortment of birds, flowers, humans, mythical beings, and background designs such as clouds, shells, and sea creatures. The client leafs through that big book of possibilities and eventually finds a design that captures his, or her, fancy. Does the tattoo artist immediately whip out his needles and start puncturing the skin? No, the first thing he does is to draw an outline of the chosen design onto the client’s skin, with sumi ink and a bamboo brush. The reason for this precaution is obvious. Once the tattoo is under the skin, it can’t very well be changed, even if the client decides that it looked better in the sample book. Usually this preliminary sketch is just a simple outline. But sometimes, in special circumstances, the tattoo artist will go to the extra trouble of adding colors and shading.
“Do you see what I’m saying? The photograph of the Tsunedahime tattoo shows one of those elaborate drawn-on-the-body sketches, not an actual permanent tattoo on human skin. Once you become aware of that fact, you’ll realize that there is something unnatural about the Tsunedahime tattoo in the photographs. There’s a subtle lack of modulation in the shading, and it is all somehow more garish than the muted shades you expect in a tattoo. Tsunetaro and Professor Hayakawa were both tattoo experts, and they noticed the fakery right away. Even Kenzo sensed that something was odd about the photographs, months ago. At the time he dismissed it as a trick of the light, but he wasn’t far from the truth.” Kenzo had just stuffed a large piece of fermented-soybean roll into his mouth, but he tried to look simultaneously sagacious and modest as Kyosuke continued talking.
“I have no way of knowing why Tamae chose to have that design painted on herself. I can only guess that it was a macabre joke. She eventually got some other design tattooed on her skin, but we have been unable to ascertain what that design was. We can be absolutely certain of one thing, though. It wasn’t Tsunedahime. Once you solve this fundamental problem, all the other riddles and mysteries of the case melt away like summer snow.” A light film of perspiration had formed on Kyosuke’s brow. He took out a monogrammed white handkerchief, blotted his forehead, and folded the handkerchief fastidiously before returning it to his pocket.
“Last night we obtained the most graphic proof that Hisashi Mogami and Kinue Nomura were lovers and murderous co-conspirators,” he said. The three men lowered their eyes at the recollection of the shockingly intimate scene they had inadvertently glimpsed through the laboratory’s windows.
After a moment of reflective silence, Kyosuke continued. “The fiendishly clever idea for the murders popped into Hisashi’s head one day when he happened to see a woman who looked like Kinue in Yurakucho and realized it was her sister Tamae, whom everyone had assumed was killed when the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Hisashi had already decided to kill his older brother Takezo, but until then all his murder plots had been discarded due to some fatal flaw. It’s not that he was ambivalent about wanting to kill his brother, he just hadn’t been able to figure out how to make it a foolproof crime. He saw Tamae as the missing piece of the puzzle, his passport to the perfect murder. In order to carry out his plan, Hisashi first seduced Tamae and then hid her away in a room somewhere; this explains her sudden disappearance from Yurakucho. Making Tamae his willing slave was not a difficult task by any means. As we’ve seen, women find Hisashi remarkably attractive, and he seems to be endowed with an ability to bewitch them.
“Tamae was simply a victim of Hisashi’s greed, as was Kyoko Kawabata, to a lesser degree. Considering the way things turned out, you could even say that Kinue Nomura was ultimately sacrificed because of Hisashi’s lust for money. But it does appear that he was genuinely in love with Kinue, whereas Tamae was just a convenient tool. When his own gain was involved, a human life had no more significance than a mosquito’s. As for Kinue, if she had any reservations about colluding in the murder of her own sister, Hisashi managed to talk her out of them. She was as greedy for material things as he was, she was eager to be rid of her odious patron, Takezo Mogami, and most important, like her poor deluded sister, she was madly in love with Hisashi and would have done anything to keep him. From what we’ve heard, Kinue had never been close to Tamae, and had thought she was dead in any case. Perhaps that was how she rationalized it—that Tamae should have died in the bomb blast. Or perhaps she didn’t rationalize it at all. From all accounts, she was a cold-hearted, self-centered, hedonistic woman, just like her mother. It seems likely that she was more upset at the thought of Hisashi in bed with her sister than at being a party to that sister’s death. At any rate, she was a full partner in the plot.”
Kyosuke took a deep breath, and slowly let it out. “So Kinue entered the tattoo contest, and there she met a splendid foil in the person of Kenzo Matsushita. Hisashi, too, realized immediately that Kenzo could be used to advance his nefarious plan.”
Kenzo sat in silence, hanging his head, overwhelmed by feelings of remorse, humiliation, and scorn for his own foolish gullibility. But as always, in the corner of his consciousness, there was a small voice whispering, There’s no shame in being a fool for love, and I’d do it again in a minute.
“If Kenzo hadn’t turned up,” Kyosuke went on, “they probably would have sent the photos to some newspaper reporter. But because of Kenzo’s connection with the police department, he was the ideal conduit for the information—or rather the misinformation—that Kinue gave him.
All the things she told him about fearing for her life and so on were specifically designed to make Kenzo, and everyone else, assume that the dead body in the bathroom belonged to her. It was all a big charade. If you think about it in a rational manner, the things she said were very strange indeed. At that time, Kinue hadn’t yet received the threatening letter from Ryokichi Usui, and it’s hard to believe that a woman from such a tough background would get into a tizzy over some vague feelings of foreboding. But because the circumstances of the murder seemed to coincide with her fears about someone wanting to kill her and steal her skin, no one ever questioned the veracity of her original remarks. From the time she met Kenzo, every action Kinue took was focused on making it appear that she had been murdered. The photographs she gave to Kenzo, the words she spoke, the photographic plates that were dropped in the garden behind the bathroom; everything was carefully designed with that one objective in mind. As for the photo album, one page was ripped out and almost certainly destroyed. There must have been some explanation of the tattoo photos written on that page, and it would have been disastrous if that information had fallen into the hands of the police.”’
Kyosuke paused and helped himself to a piece of rolled sushi made with the pungent leaves of the shiso plant and tart umeboshi plum paste. After savoring those distinctive flavors for a moment, he said, “Regarding the second crime—that is, the murder of Takezo Mogami—there’s no need to add anything to the explanation I set forth yesterday. By the time Takezo learned about Hisashi and Kinue’s affair and began talking about changing his will, some time after the tattoo contest, Hisashi was just about ready to kill him in any case. In fact, it was Hisashi who arranged for word of the affair to reach Takezo’s ears. Prior to that, Takezo just had a vague suspicion that Kinue might be fooling around behind his back.”
Kenzo flushed, even though he knew his friend couldn’t possibly be talking about him. Oblivious to Kenzo’s discomfort, Kyosuke forged ahead.
“Once he had killed his brother, Hisashi was able
to pour his energies into Tamae’s murder, which I’ll keep calling the first because it was discovered first. In order to make it appear that the body parts in the locked room belonged to Kinue, he had to use only the portions of Tamae’s corpse that corresponded to the placement of Kinue’s tattoos. This was an absolute condition, but it wasn’t his only concern. He also had to make sure that the body would not be autopsied. With modern forensic medicine, the time of death can be estimated quite precisely by dissecting the internal organs. Not having access to Tamae’s internal organs, they estimated her time of death at between six P.M. and midnight, which turned out to be correct. But just as Hisashi imagined it would, that estimate left a lot of latitude. During that time, Kinue made a point of going to the public bath and showing off her tattoo. On the way home she purposely stopped and chatted with a neighbor in order to advertise the fact that she was still alive at that hour. Thus, since the investigators knew that Kinue was alive as late as nine o’clock, they were tricked into shortening their estimate of when the crime was committed to the hours between nine and eleven P.M. That, of course, was a time period for which Hisashi had a perfect alibi. With what we know now, we can confidently estimate that the murder and mutilation of Tamae Nomura actually took place between six and nine.
“Since the corpse belonged to Tamae and not to Kinue, I can state with confidence that the scene of the murder was not Kinue’s house in Kitazawa. It would have been ruinous to have the people in that neighborhood catch a glimpse of the living Tamae, or even to guess at her existence. If anyone realized that Tamae had survived the war, then Hisashi’s elaborate plan would have fallen apart. In that case, where was the murder committed? I’m absolutely certain it took place in Hisashi Mogami’s laboratory. Do you remember last night when Kinue blurted out those horrifying words, ‘Even if you dissolve me in sulfunc acid. . . ?”
The Matsushita brothers nodded somberly.
“Well,” Kyosuke went on, “Hisashi was conducting experiments, using a giant pressure cooker to make amino acids and dextrose by means of chemical reduction, right? That kettle was lined with lead. If you filled it with sulfuric acid and turned on the heat and the pressure, disposing of a human body or two would be a relatively simple matter. So, after coolly killing his brother, Takezo, with his own gun, Hisashi rushed back home to wait for Tamae to arrive for what she doubtless thought would be a tender romantic rendezvous. Hisashi would have given his maid the day off, and his house is in a residential neighborhood so there isn’t much foot traffic. On top of that, the laboratory is in a separate building that can be reached without going through the main gate, so it was a nearly ideal place to carry out his plan. After Tamae entered the laboratory unseen by anyone, Hisashi probably strangled her from behind. He may have used chloroform or his favorite offering, the poisoned cocktail. Once she was dead, he cut off her head and limbs. He stuffed her torso, including the thighs and upper arms, into the kettle. He then turned on the heat and the pressure, poured in the sulfuric acid, and dissolved her body. The entire operation would have taken an hour or two. He then packed up the remaining head and limbs, and sped over to Kitazawa by car. So you see, it wasn’t a matter of the torso’s having been taken away.” Kyosuke’s voice was filled with excitement.
“Instead, the head and limbs were carried in.”
60
The Matsushita brothers were awestruck by Kyosuke’s revelation that the severed head and limbs found in Kinue’s bathroom had been imported, and the much-talked-about torso had never been present at all.
“That’s just diabolically clever,” Daiyu said, pounding his forehead with the heel of his hand. “He really played us for a bunch of fools.”
“I never would have figured it out in a million years,” Kenzo said, shaking his head. “No, make that a billion years.”
While his audience was still reeling, Kyosuke proceeded to reintroduce the pet theory he called “criminal economics.” From the point of view of a criminal, he suggested, a crime is a sort of entrepreneurial business enterprise.
A cool, cerebral criminal like Hisashi Mogami, who concocted his murder scheme with the primary aim of material gain for himself, couldn’t very well afford to overlook the basic rules of economics. Not only would it have been a lot of trouble to cut up the body at Kinue’s house and then attempt to smuggle the torso out, but there was no need to do it that way. It was infinitely easier to commit the crime elsewhere and bring in the necessary body parts. It was a sort of optical or psychological illusion, like an Escher print. To figure it out, it was necessary to perceive white as black, and black as white.
Turning the bathroom into a locked room was just a mechanical trick, albeit a rather sophisticated one. But why would a murderer take the trouble to turn the scene of the crime into a locked room in the first place? The most common reason would be to make it appear that the victim had committed suicide, but that obviously didn’t apply here. It might be that the criminal wanted to make his escape without leaving any traces. A third possibility is that he just wanted to lend a tinge of the supernatural to the case, since there is something intrinsically eerie about a locked-room murder.
Whatever Hisashi’s motivation, the fact was that the locked room helped conceal the larger plot, by diverting the police’s attention. The ploy didn’t involve magic or the supernatural—it was a purely mechanical trick, a feat of engineering—but the locked room did lend an extra measure of creepiness to the murder scene. Mogami must have known that sooner or later someone would figure it out, but in the meantime he managed to confuse and distract even the most seasoned investigators.
Here Kyosuke evoked one of his favorite concepts. “Even after the actual locked room ceases to be a mystery,” he intoned with an oracular air, “the locked room of the mind remains an enigma. From the time that all of you saw the locked room, you were completely convinced that a crime had taken place inside that room, and that preconception colored your investigation. There was no way for you to escape from the psychological locked room constructed in your own minds. This complicated and obfuscated the case, and it also caused the crucial clue of the photographic plates to be overlooked. On that point, Mogami’s thinking was so brilliant as to be truly scary.”
The Matsushita brothers made sounds of assent as Kyosuke moved on to the next topic. “The fact that there were no traces of blood in the garden is perfectly natural, since the actual murder, which must have been incredibly bloody, had taken place miles away in Hisashi Mogami’s laboratory. Mogami couldn’t very well cart along buckets of blood when he transported the body to Kinue’s house, just to make it look like the scene of a gruesome murder and dismemberment, but if too little blood were found at the spurious ‘scene,’ then people might suspect that the crime had been committed elsewhere. Leaving the remains in a bathroom was a splendid solution. Because he left the drain open and the water running, Mogami was able to create the impression that all the blood had been washed away. However, being the perfectionist that he was, it’s likely that he also put a fair amount of blood in a bottle or jar and brought it along. He would have used this to create the signs of a struggle elsewhere in the house, and then poured the rest down the drain, knowing it would show up eventually in the forensic investigation.”
Next, Kyosuke touched on the difference between the way the tattoos were disposed of in the first and third murders. In the first murder, he explained, Mogami needed to make the time of death appear as wide as possible so that his alibi would work, while in the third murder he simply abandoned Tsunetaro’s body after removing the tattoos, so he didn’t have to worry about carting off the bulky torso.
“Why,” Daiyu Matsushita asked, “did Kinue invite Inazawa to visit that night?”
“For the sole purpose of having him discover the corpse. Because he’s such a simple man, his behavior was absolutely predictable, and sure enough, according to Mogami’s script, Inazawa was distraught after finding the body and ran off without notifying the police. The only deviat
ion was Usui’s unexpected appearance, which delayed Inazawa’s discovery of the body, but in the end that didn’t cause so much as a tremor in Mogami’s alibi. His plan worked perfectly. At around seven o’clock he transported Tamae’s head and limbs to Kinue’s house by car, dumped them in the bathroom, and turned it into a locked room. Then he went to the Ginza and picked a fight with some drunken yokels. He got himself arrested and spent the night safely in jail, thus arming himself with a seemingly unshakable alibi.”
“But what about Kinue’s strange behavior?” Daiyu said. “She goes around saying she fears for her life, but instead of hiring a bodyguard, she fires her maid, thus leaving herself alone in the house. She then invites Ishikawa to her house for a midnight rendezvous, and telephones Kenzo and Professor Hayakawa. She removes her cash and valuables from the house, makes it appear that she has been drinking whiskey with a visitor, and after setting up all the stage props, she disappears.”
Tattoo Murder Case Page 31