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  “What time do you think it was?” asked Satoko, turning to Naho.

  “Six or six thirty—something like that.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t before six?” asked the detective.

  “Oh, maybe you’re right.” Naho clapped her hand to her mouth. “I’m really not sure. It was still light outside, I think.”

  “It stays light until around seven at this time of year,” the detective said. “Anyway, I take it you’re not sure about the exact time?”

  “Down to the exact minute and the hour … no,” said Satoko dubiously.

  “And what was Mr. Takura here for?”

  “It was with regard to the paperwork necessary to file a claim for my recent hospitalization. He needed my medical certificate, apparently, so I gave it to him.”

  “And how long did he stay here?”

  “Let’s see.” Satoko thought for a moment. “Ten minutes or so, I reckon.”

  Naho silently nodded her agreement. She was watching Kaga, who was inspecting the rice crackers in the glass display case and appeared to have no interest in the conversation.

  “Did he say where he was going next?” the geezer detective went on.

  “Back to the office. To take care of the paperwork for my claim, he said.”

  “That makes sense.” The detective nodded. “How did he look?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did Mr. Takura look any different from normal?”

  “He didn’t, did he?” Satoko glanced at Naho for confirmation.

  “He had on a different suit,” Naho ventured. “The time before his suit was navy blue, but yesterday it was gray. It suited him better. That’s why I remember it.”

  “I’m not talking about his clothes. Was he on edge? Did you get the impression he was in a hurry? Anything like that?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Despite seeming a little disappointed at Naho’s responses, the detective squeezed out a smile in an effort to keep things friendly.

  “So to sum up, you don’t recall the precise time when Mr. Takura was here. It could have been before six, and it could have been after six. Can I safely say, ‘sometime between five thirty and six thirty’?”

  “That sounds reasonable,” replied Naho, looking at her grandmother.

  “Good. Thank you very much for making time to talk to us.”

  “Excuse my asking, but is Mr. Takura all right?” Naho asked.

  “Let’s just say that this is an ongoing inquiry and leave it at that.” The detective jerked his eyebrows at Kaga, who thanked the family and bowed at them.

  The three men left the store.

  “I hope this hasn’t got anything to do with what happened at Kodenmacho,” blurted out her father.

  “What do you mean?” Naho asked.

  “Haven’t you seen the papers?” Fumitaka frowned. “A good barber should always read the papers.”

  “I’m not going to be a barber, Dad,” protested Naho. She darted back into the living quarters and opened the newspaper.

  The crime Fumitaka had referred to was featured on the local news page. The body of a forty-five-year-old woman who lived alone had been found in her apartment in the Kodenmacho area. She’d been strangled. The fact that the room showed no signs of a struggle suggested that she knew her attacker. The local police and Tokyo Metropolitan Police were treating the incident as a homicide.

  “There’s no way that Mr. Takura was involved in that. The man’s a true-born Tokyoite with our natural dislike for anything underhand,” Satoko said. She was standing next to Naho, reading the paper over her shoulder.

  “From the questions the detective was asking just now, my guess is he was checking up on Mr. Takura’s alibi. Doesn’t that mean he’s a suspect?”

  “Oh, come off it. It doesn’t matter what the police think. By testifying that Mr. Takura was here yesterday, we cleared him.”

  “But remember how insistent they were about the exact time he was here. That has to be important.”

  “Can you really not remember the precise time?” said Fumitaka, sticking his face through the door from the shop.

  “We only know that it was sometime between half past five and half past six. We can’t be any more precise than that.”

  “You’re useless, you two.”

  “That’s not fair. I mean, it’s not like you know what you’re doing every minute of every day either, Dad.”

  Eager to avoid a confrontation, Fumitaka pulled his head back out of the doorway.

  “Well, I, for one, am very worried.” Satoko knit her brows. “I just hope they can clear Mr. Takura very soon.”

  * * *

  After dinner, Naho went to close the electric-operated roller shutter in the front of the store. It was about halfway down when she noticed a man standing on the other side of it. She automatically pressed the stop button.

  The man bent down and peered up from under the shutter. It was Detective Kaga. Their eyes met, and he grinned and ducked under the shutter and into the store.

  “Can you spare a minute?”

  “Uh … yes. Shall I call my father?”

  “No, just you is fine. There’s one thing I need to double-check.”

  “What?”

  “It’s about what Mr. Takura was wearing—you said he had a suit on, right?”

  “Yes. A gray suit. And the time before it was dark blue.”

  Kaga smiled sheepishly and waved her remark away.

  “I don’t care about the color. Do you remember if he had his suit jacket on when he was here?”

  “He did, yes.”

  “Really? I thought as much from what you said about him looking good in it.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Not quite sure myself yet, but thanks anyway.” Kaga plucked a packet of rice crackers off the shelf. “These look nice. I’ll take them.” He handed Naho 630 yen.

  “Thanks.”

  “Right. Good night, then.” Kaga ducked back under the shutter and out onto the street.

  Naho just stood there blankly for a while, then walked over to the shutter switch. Before pressing it again, she squatted down and surveyed the street outside.

  A handful of businessmen were strolling along the lamplit street. Work was over for the day, and they were probably heading out for a drink somewhere. Kaga was nowhere to be seen.

  3.

  The next day was freakishly hot from early morning. When Naho got off the train after class that afternoon, the short climb up the station stairs to the street level was enough to make her break into a sweat.

  Fumitaka was outside the shop putting up the awning. “Oh, you’re back,” he murmured, noticing his daughter.

  “Hi, Dad. Any more detectives come around today?”

  “To our place, no,” Fumitaka said in a quiet voice. “But it sounds like they’re talking to everyone around here.”

  “I wonder why?”

  “Rumor has it they’re still checking up on Mr. Takura. They’re asking every man and his dog if they saw him that day. Seems like the time that he was at our place is crucial.”

  “Our testimony alone isn’t good enough for the police?”

  “I guess not.” Fumitaka went back into the shop.

  Naho looked around. She wondered if the police were busy making inquiries nearby right now.

  Her gaze wandered to a café diagonally across the road. She caught her breath: there was a face she recognized behind the big plate glass window. The other person, realizing he’d been spotted, grinned awkwardly back.

  Naho crossed the street, went into café, and strode over to a table overlooking the street.

  “Who are you spying on?” she asked Kaga, who was sitting there.

  “I’m not spying on anyone. Why don’t you sit down?” Kaga raised his hand to summon the waitress. “What’ll you have?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No need to stand on ceremony.” Kaga pushed the me
nu toward her.

  “Okay then, I’ll have the banana juice,” Naho told the waitress as she sat herself down. “Are you keeping our store under surveillance?”

  “Come off it. Like I said, I’m not watching anyone.”

  “What are you doing, then?”

  “Nothing. Or if you insist, I’m just enjoying this iced coffee—slacking off, in other words.” Ignoring the straw, Kaga tipped his ice coffee down his throat.

  “Is Mr. Takura a suspect in the Kodenmacho murder case?”

  Kaga’s face tensed. He glanced around at the other tables.

  “I’d be grateful if you could keep your voice down.”

  “Give me an answer or I’ll turn the volume up to eleven.”

  Kaga sighed and ran his fingers through his shaggy hair.

  “Mr. Takura’s on our list of suspects, yes. He visited the victim’s apartment on the day of the crime, and we found his business card and an insurance pamphlet there. He, of course, claims that he was there on insurance-related business.”

  “Is that all you’ve got?”

  “It’s significant enough from a police point of view.”

  The waitress brought Naho her banana juice. She drank it all in one swallow through a fat straw.

  “Does it really matter what time Mr. Takura came to see us?” she asked, after a brief silence.

  Kaga thought for a moment, then nodded curtly.

  “Mr. Takura claims to have left the victim’s apartment at around five thirty p.m. The victim was still alive at that point. We know that for sure because we’ve confirmed that she went out shopping a little after that.”

  “Really? Shopping for what?”

  Kaga blinked and peered at Naho. “What does that matter to you?”

  “It doesn’t. I’m just curious. I mean, it was right before she was killed, wasn’t it?”

  “She probably had no idea that someone was going to kill her. Why shouldn’t she go shopping? She bought some kitchen scissors, if you really want to know. You may know the store, Kisamiya?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Anyway, enough about that. Let’s get back to Mr. Takura. He claims that after leaving the victim’s apartment, he dropped in to your place and then went back to his office, where he handed all the documentation for your grandmother’s insurance claim to a female colleague and then went home for the day.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “On his way home, he went out for a drink with a friend. Now, if we calculate backward from the time at which this friend told us they met, we end up with Takura leaving his office at six forty. Takura’s female colleague, however, says that he left the office at six ten. That leaves us with a gap of roughly thirty minutes unaccounted for. Thirty minutes is enough time for him to run over from his office to the victim’s apartment, commit the murder, and then set out for home. When we confronted Takura on this point, he stated that he did leave his office at six forty and did not stop off anywhere before meeting his friend. He thinks that his colleague at the office simply got her times wrong.”

  “Maybe he’s right?”

  “The trouble is, another witness came forward to say that they saw Takura returning to the office after six p.m. We cannot ignore that discrepancy. On the other hand, Mr. Takura’s testimony and that of his female colleague do agree in one particular: both of them peg the time he spent in the office at just ten minutes. That’s what makes the precise time he visited you so important. You can walk from here to New City Life Insurance’s head office in under ten minutes. Takura claims to have gone straight from your store back to his office; if we knew what time he left your place, we’d be able to verify his entire account.”

  Kaga delivered this explanation at high speed, so Naho needed a little while to digest it all.

  “Now I understand why you were so obsessed about the precise time.”

  “Exactly. Since neither you nor your grandmother can recall the precise time Takura was with you, I’ve been visiting all the other stores along this street, asking if they saw Mr. Takura that afternoon. Unfortunately, no one saw him going into your shop. I asked the staff at this café. Drew a blank here, too.”

  “What’s your next step?”

  “Not sure.” Kaga stretched and leaned against the back of his seat. Naho noticed that his eyes were still focused on the street outside. “As we don’t have any other plausible suspects right now, the Metropolitan Police guys have the hots for Takura.”

  “That’s ridiculous. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “That’s what murderers’ friends always say—even after they’re convicted.”

  Naho didn’t like the detective’s tone.

  “Come off it. Mr. Takura’s got no motive.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What’s ‘hmmm’ supposed to mean?”

  “It means that we almost never know the motive until the perpetrator himself tells us. Maybe the Met guys will get it out of him any moment now.”

  “You sound like you’re perfectly happy to leave everything up to them.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, sounds to me like you couldn’t care less.”

  Kaga had finished his iced coffee. He picked up his glass of water instead.

  “The Tokyo Metropolitan Police are the lead investigators on this case. We precinct cops provide support and show them around the neighborhood. Basically, we just do what we’re told.”

  Naho frowned as she looked at Kaga’s lined face.

  “What a letdown. There I was, thinking you were different from the normal run of cops. With your attitude, you’ll stagnate at the local police level and never get anywhere.”

  “I’m not stagnating. The thing is, I just got transferred to this precinct and I honestly don’t know much about it yet. I’m just easing myself in, familiarizing myself with the place. It’s an interesting district. I was in the local watch store; they had this extraordinary clock. It was a prism with clock faces on all three sides and all three clocks moved together. I wonder what sort of mechanism it’s got.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. You weren’t joking when you said you were goofing off, were you?” Naho put money on the table for her banana juice. She didn’t want Kaga to pay for her.

  “It’s hot again today,” murmured Kaga, looking out the window. “Look. All the businessmen walking up this way from the Ningyocho subway station—see how they’ve got their jackets off and their shirtsleeves rolled up?”

  “What the heck do I care?” Naho said sharply. She could no longer bother to be polite.

  “You see? Here comes another one. He’s taken his jacket off and slung it over his shoulder. Poor chap.”

  “Why shouldn’t he, in this heat?”

  “It’s cooler than it was earlier, though. See? Here’s a guy who’s kept his jacket on.”

  Sure enough, a rather stout man strolled by with his suit perfectly in place.

  “Are you trying to tell me something?” Naho couldn’t keep the note of irritation out her voice.

  “Take a good look. What do you see? Most of the men walking from right to left—in other words, from the Ningyocho neighborhood to Hamacho, the next neighborhood over—have taken their jackets off. With the men walking from left to right, it’s the opposite: they’ve all got their jackets on.”

  Naho swiveled around in her seat to inspect the street.

  A gaggle of businessmen passed by, going from right to left. Naho’s jaw dropped. Kaga was right: nearly all of them had their jackets off.

  “It’s true,” she murmured under breath.

  “Interesting, eh?” said Kaga.

  “But why? Is it just a coincidence?”

  “You shouldn’t dismiss something like this as a coincidence. That’s too easy. You should assume there’s a reason for it.”

  “Do you know what that reason is, Detective Kaga?”

  “Perhaps I do.” Kaga smirked.

  “What are you grinning for? Why are you so pleased with you
rself?”

  “I’m not being conceited. To be honest, once I’ve told you the reason, I doubt you’ll be very impressed. A lot of office workers walk along this street, but most of them work for firms with offices in Hamacho. Okay, so here’s my question. The time now is half past five. What sort of people would you expect to find walking from right to left, in other words from Ningyocho toward Hamacho, at this time of day?”

  “Well, given what time it is…,” said Naho thoughtfully, as she stared at yet another businessman walking by in his shirtsleeves, “they must be on their way back to their offices.”

  “Right. In other words, these are the people who’ve been out of the office all day. They work outside, probably in sales or service, stuff like that. The people who are going from left to right are the opposite: they’ve been in the office all day. Because they’ve been in an air-conditioned office most of the day—in contrast to their colleagues who are all hot and bothered from running around outside—they’re a little on the chilly side if anything. That’s why they’re wearing their jackets. Plus by this time in the afternoon, the temperature has gone down quite a lot. Take a closer look at the people coming from the direction of Hamacho. On the whole, they’re on the older side. My guess is they’re quite senior and their jobs don’t involve much running around outside the office. That also helps explain why they get to leave at five thirty on the dot.”

  As she listened to Kaga’s explanation, Naho inspected the men walking down the street. There was the occasional exception, but all in all she had to admit that the detective’s theory was very plausible.

  “Wow … I think you’re right. I’ve lived here my whole life, but I never noticed that until you pointed it out.”

  “Well, it doesn’t have much practical value.”

  Naho nodded, then suddenly looked at Kaga wide-eyed.

  “Does this have any connection to the murder?”

  Kaga picked up the check from the table.

  “You remember me asking you what Mr. Takura was wearing?”

  Naho blinked in acknowledgment.

  “He looked smart and had his jacket on.…”

  “But Mr. Takura is one of those people who are out and about all day. He told us that he went to visit you after going to the victim’s apartment in Kodenmacho. That would have involved quite a lot of walking. Given the circumstances, he did well to have his jacket on and look so neat and tidy.”