Malice: A Mystery Page 5

  “No, of course not.” I dropped my eyes. If I wasn’t checking her alibi, what was I doing? I started to wonder myself.

  She sighed. “A detective visited me the other day and asked the same questions you’re asking me now. Except he was a little more obvious about it. He wanted to know if I bore any malice toward Mr. Hidaka.”

  “Right.” I looked up at her. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I bore him no ill will at all. I just wanted him to respect the dead.”

  “So it’s safe to say that you didn’t like Forbidden Hunting Grounds? You feel it offends the memory of your brother?”

  “Everyone has secrets. And everyone has the right to keep them. Even if they’re dead.”

  “What if somebody felt those secrets were moving? Do you think it’s such a bad thing to share that emotion with the world?”

  “Emotion?” She stared at me curiously. Then she slowly shook her head. “What about a middle-school student who rapes a girl could possibly be moving?”

  “Some things have to be said as the backdrop to a moving story.”

  She sighed again. For my benefit. “You’re a writer, too, aren’t you, Mr. Nonoguchi?”

  “Yes, well, I write children’s books.”

  “And are you so eager to defend Hidaka because you’re an author yourself?”

  I thought a moment before answering, “Maybe so.”

  “What a terrible profession.” She looked back at her watch. “I’m sorry, I have to go.” She turned and walked toward the waiting van.

  * * *

  I went back to my apartment building, where I found a piece of paper in my mailbox.

  “I’m at the restaurant where we ate the other day. Give me a call. Kaga.”

  A phone number I assumed was the restaurant’s was written at the bottom.

  I changed out of my mourning clothes and went straight to the restaurant without calling. He was sitting by the window reading a book. I couldn’t see what the title was.

  He noticed me and started to stand. I waved him back down into his seat. “Don’t bother.”

  “Sorry to call you out here like this.” He lowered his head. He was aware that today was Hidaka’s funeral.

  I ordered another hot milk from the waitress and sat down.

  “I know what you’re after. This, right?” I pulled some folded sheets of paper out of my jacket pocket and set them down in front of him. These were the most recent notes, which I’d printed out before leaving home.

  “Thanks so much.” He reached out and unfolded the pages.

  “Actually, could you not read it here? If you read the earlier notes, you know that I wrote about you, too. It would be embarrassing for you to read it in front of me.”

  He grinned. “Of course. I’ll just put these away for now then.” He refolded the pages and put them in his own jacket pocket.

  “So,” I asked after a sip of water, “I hope my notes are a little bit of help?”

  “Oh, they are,” Kaga said immediately. “There are things you can’t pick up about the atmosphere of the case just by listening to stories, but when you see it all written down, it’s easier to grasp. I wish the witnesses in my other cases would write down everything like this.”

  “Well, I’m glad.”

  The waitress brought my hot milk. It came with a spoon to scoop off the layer of froth on the top.

  “What did you think about the cat?” I asked.

  “I was surprised. You hear about cats causing trouble, but I don’t think I’d ever heard about somebody taking it quite so far in dealing with one.”

  “Are you investigating the owner?”

  “I made the reports to my boss, and someone else is on it.”

  “I see.” I drank my milk. I didn’t feel great about casting blame on someone else like that. “Well, other than that, I think everything in my notes is exactly as I told it to you.”

  “It was.” He nodded. “But it’s the details that have really helped.”

  “What kind of details?”

  “Well, like the part where you were talking to Mr. Hidaka in his office. You wrote that Hidaka smoked one cigarette during that time. If we hadn’t read your notes, we never would’ve known that.”

  “Yes … but just so you know, I’m not really sure it was only one. It could’ve been two. I just remember that he was smoking, so I wrote it like that.”

  “No, it was one cigarette,” he said with finality. “No mistake.”

  “Okay.”

  I had no idea what that had to do with anything. Maybe it was just another example of the odd way that detectives saw the world.

  I told Detective Kaga about speaking to Miyako Fujio after the funeral. He seemed intrigued by this.

  “I never did get it out of her,” I said, “but did she have an alibi?”

  “Someone else is looking into that, but it looks like she does.”

  “I see. So I guess there’s no point worrying about her too much then.”

  “Did you suspect her?”

  “I wouldn’t call it suspicion, but she did have a motive.”

  “You mean the intrusion into her brother’s privacy? But killing Mr. Hidaka wouldn’t fix that.”

  “What if she realized he wasn’t going to be sincere about his apology, got mad, and killed him in the heat of the moment?”

  “But Mr. Hidaka was still alive when she left the house.”

  “She could’ve come back later?”

  “Intending to kill him?”

  “Sure.” I nodded. “Intending to kill him.”

  “But Rie was still in the house.”

  “She could’ve waited for her to leave, then sneaked in.”

  “So Miyako Fujio knew that Rie would be leaving the house before her husband did?”

  “It might have come up in conversation.”

  Detective Kaga interlaced his fingers on the tabletop. He tapped the tips of his thumbs together repeatedly as he thought. After a while he said, “Did she come in through the front door?”

  “How about the window?”

  “So a woman in a suit came in through the window?” He grinned. “And Mr. Hidaka just sat there, watching her?”

  “She could’ve just waited until he’d gone to the bathroom. Then waited behind the door for him to come back.”

  “The paperweight in her hand?” Detective Kaga swung his right fist up and down.

  “I suppose so. Then Hidaka walks in”—I made a fist of my right hand, too—“and she smacks him in the back of the head.”

  “I see. And after that?”

  I thought back on what Detective Kaga had told me the other day. “Then I guess she strangled him. With the telephone cord, right? Then she fled the scene.”

  “How did she leave?”

  “Out the window. If she’d gone out the front door, it would’ve been unlocked when we got there later.”

  “That’s true.” He reached out for his coffee cup, noticed it was empty, and left the empty cup sitting there. “But why didn’t she go out the front door?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t want people to see her? Perhaps it was a psychological thing. Of course, if she has an alibi anyway, this is all just fanciful conjecture.”

  “True enough. She does have an alibi, which would indeed make the story you just told entirely fanciful conjecture.”

  Something about the deliberate way he repeated my own words struck me as odd. “You can go ahead and forget it then.”

  “Still, it was an interesting scenario. I was wondering if you could make another guess for me.”

  “I’m not terribly good at this, but sure. Fire away.”

  “Why did the killer turn off the lights in the room before leaving?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I said after a moment’s thought. “She wanted people to think no one was home. That way, even if anyone happened by, they would just leave. It would delay the discovery of the body. Which is, in fact, what did happ
en.”

  “So the killer wanted to delay the discovery of the body?”

  “Don’t all killers want to do that?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “If that was the plan, then why was the computer left on?”

  “The computer?”

  “Yes. When you came into the room, the screen was on. It was in your account.”

  “That’s true. Maybe she didn’t care whether the computer was on or not.”

  “I tried a simple experiment after leaving you the other day. We turned off all the lights in the room and left on the computer monitor. It turns out it’s quite bright. You can see it dimly through the curtains even standing outside the room. If she really wanted to make it look like no one was home, she would’ve turned off the computer.”

  “Maybe she couldn’t find the switch. People who aren’t familiar with computers don’t know about those kinds of things.”

  “She could’ve at least turned off the monitor. The switch is right there on the front. And if she didn’t understand that, she could’ve pulled the cord.”

  “I guess she forgot.”

  Detective Kaga stared at me for a moment, then nodded. “That’s probably it. She probably forgot.”

  Having nothing else to say to that, I remained silent.

  He stood, thanking me again for my time. “Will you be writing about today in your account as well?”

  “I expect I will.”

  “Then I’ll be able to read it?”

  “Fine by me.”

  He headed toward the cash register, then stopped midway. “Did you really think I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher?”

  I remembered writing something along those lines in my account. “That’s just my opinion.”

  He looked down again, gave a brief sigh, and walked out.

  I wondered what Kaga was thinking.

  If he’d already figured out something about the case, I wondered why he didn’t just tell me.

  2

  SUSPICION

  KYOICHIRO KAGA’S NOTES

  One of the things I took particular note of was the use of a paperweight as the murder weapon. I need hardly mention that the paperweight belonged to the late author and thus was in the office prior to the killing. This suggests that the killer didn’t come to the house with the intent of killing Kunihiko Hidaka.

  Had the murder been planned from the beginning, the murderer would have come prepared with a weapon. It’s possible that such preparations had been made, but then unforeseen circumstances necessitated a change in plans, making a blow to the back of the head with the paperweight the next-best option. However, that seems rather poorly premeditated. It makes most sense that the murder was an impulsive act, done in the heat of the moment, with whatever implement was at hand.

  This makes me wonder about the locked doors. According to the statements of the two who discovered the body, both the front door to the house and Kunihiko Hidaka’s home office door were locked.

  Rie Hidaka had this to say:

  “When I left the house just after five o’clock, I locked the front door. I was worried that, since he was in his office, my husband might not hear it if somebody walked in. Of course, I never imagined anyone actually would.”

  According to forensics, only the Hidakas’ fingerprints were found on the front doorknob. There were no signs of gloves having been used, or fingerprints being wiped off. I think it’s safe to assume that the door was locked by Rie Hidaka when she left and it remained so until she opened it upon her return.

  However, there’s a high probability that the murderer locked the door to Mr. Hidaka’s home office from the inside. Unlike the front door, the office-door handle showed clear signs of having been wiped clean.

  This leads me to believe that the murderer did, in fact, come in through the office window. However, this would seem to create a contradiction. If the murder wasn’t premeditated, why come in through the window? It’s highly unlikely that the intruder intended to steal anything. Even a thief seeing the house for the first time would soon realize there was nothing left worth stealing.

  However, one line of conjecture resolves this contradiction. What if we assume that the killer visited the Hidaka household twice in the same day? The first time, the killer came in the front door as a guest. Then, after leaving the house (or, rather, pretending to leave), the killer returned, this time entering through the window with a single purpose in mind. That purpose, I need hardly say, was to kill Kunihiko Hidaka. It makes the most sense to assume that this impulse to murder stemmed from something that happened during the killer’s first visit.

  Now we must consider who visited the Hidaka household on the day of the murder. At present, we know of two people: Miyako Fujio and Osamu Nonoguchi.

  At the beginning of our investigation, we focused on these two as the prime suspects. We were somewhat astonished to find that both of them had alibis.

  Miyako Fujio had returned to her home by six o’clock the evening of the day in question. We have two witnesses corroborating this: her fiancé, Tadao Nakazuka, and a man who was going to assist with their wedding, Kikuo Ueda. They were meeting to discuss the couple’s nuptials, to be held next month. Ueda is Nakazuka’s boss at work, with no direct personal connection to Miyako Fujio. It is difficult to imagine that he would falsify his account to cover for his subordinate’s fiancée. Furthermore, according to Rie Hidaka, Miyako Fujio left the Hidaka household a little after five o’clock, which, considering the transportation routes and distance between the Hidaka and Fujio houses means an arrival time of six o’clock makes perfect sense. We have to conclude that her alibi is sound.

  Now, for Osamu Nonoguchi.

  I can’t deny that I have some personal feelings concerning this individual. He was a colleague at my former position, and as such he knew me during those less-than-happy days.

  Were our personal connection to cast a shadow on my investigation in any way, I’d be obliged to remove myself from the case. However, I’m determined to view our shared history as objectively as possible while continuing to pursue this case. Note that I don’t intend to forget said history. For I believe that history could prove an important weapon going forward.

  The following is Mr. Nonoguchi’s alibi for the day in question:

  Having been visiting at the Hidakas’, he left around four thirty in the afternoon shortly after Miyako Fujio arrived. He went straight home and worked until around six o’clock. At that time, his editor from Dojisha Publishing, a Mr. Yukio Oshima, arrived and they began their meeting. Soon after, a call came from Kunihiko Hidaka, saying he wanted to talk about something, and asking Mr. Nonoguchi to come to his house at eight o’clock.

  Nonoguchi and Oshima went to a nearby restaurant and ate, after which Nonoguchi left for the Hidaka household. He arrived just around eight o’clock to find the house apparently empty. Growing suspicious, he phoned Rie Hidaka. He then waited in the Lamp, a nearby café. He returned to the Hidaka household at around eight forty, just as Rie Hidaka was arriving. Together they went inside and discovered the body in Hidaka’s home office, accessible via a hallway from the living room.

  Taking all of this at face value, Osamu Nonoguchi’s alibi seems nearly perfect. Mr. Oshima from Dojisha Publishing and the owner of the Lamp both corroborate his story.

  However, it’s not entirely ironclad. Even assuming his account is mostly accurate, he would have had an opportunity to kill Kunihiko Hidaka before phoning Rie. To do this, he would have had to go straight from dinner with Mr. Oshima to the Hidaka household, immediately kill Mr. Hidaka, then, after covering his tracks, blithely phone the victim’s wife as though nothing had happened.

  However, according to the autopsy, this scenario doesn’t work. For lunch that day, while out shopping with his wife, Kunihiko Hidaka had eaten a hamburger, and from the state of digestion, we can say that the time of death was between five and six in the afternoon, and certainly no later than seven.

  Osamu Nonoguchi’s alibi holds.r />
  However, I still suspect he is the murderer. My reason for this is something he said on the night of the murder. Something that, from the moment I heard it, made me consider the possibility that he was the killer. Though I understand it is extremely inefficient to operate on a gut feeling, I decided to give intuition the reins, if only this once.

  That Osamu Nonoguchi was keeping a record of the case came as a great surprise to me. Were he the killer, it would be against his best interest to make known any details about the case. However, when I read his account, I realized he had exactly the opposite goal in mind.

  The account is written in an orderly fashion, and this very orderliness gives it persuasive power. As you read it, you forget that the events it portrays might not necessarily be the truth. Therein lies Nonoguchi’s aim: to create a fictional account of the events in order to divert suspicion from himself.

  He must have realized it was only a matter of time before he became a suspect. He was looking for a way out when who should appear before him but someone he knew—a man who used to be a teacher at the same school. He decided to use this man by writing a false account and giving it to him to read. Nonoguchi probably reasoned that since the man hadn’t been much of a teacher, he probably wasn’t much of a detective either and would easily be taken in by his trick.

  Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. Perhaps I am trying so hard to keep my personal feelings out of the investigation that I am blinding myself to the truth. Still, in his written account, I discovered several traps carefully laid for the unwary reader. Then, ironically, I found vital evidence in that very account proving that he, and only he, could be the killer.

  I carefully went back over my own line of conjecture and, when I was satisfied, made my report. My superior in Homicide is meticulous and cautious, but he agreed with my line of reasoning. In fact, from the very first time they’d met, he, too, had suspected Osamu Nonoguchi. Though Nonoguchi’s account doesn’t mention this, the night of the murder he seemed excited and unusually talkative. Both my superior and I recognized this as one of the classic indications of guilt.

  “The problem,” my superior said, “is evidence.”