The constable had come back, leading a small party of men in dark suits, carrying suitcases. The men bowed at Saito and Saito returned the greeting, adjusting the depth, or lack of depth, of each bow to the colleague he was facing. The doctor grunted and asked for light. Several powerful torches lit up the grisly scene. A camera began to click. A light fed by a heavy battery was set up on a tripod.
Saito touched the sergeant’s sleeve and they stepped back together. “Where is the hotel where these other Westerners stay?”
“The old gaijin, sir? They stay at the Mainichi.”
Saito nodded. “I will go there now. And then I will come back to the station. Later on I will speak with the Reverend Ohno. Bring the young men and the boy Tanaka to the station so I can question them. Your information has been very clear. Thank you, Sergeant.”
The sergeant bowed twice, deeply.
“I have served in this neighborhood for many years now, sir. I try to know what goes on.”
“Yes,” Saito said and closed his eyes. The sergeant had spoken loudly and he had a high voice.
“I see,” the old gentleman in the bathrobe said. He had knelt down on the tatami-covered floor of the hotel’s reception room and seemed quite at ease on the thick straw mat. Saito sat opposite the old gentleman, with the two elderly ladies on his right in low cane chairs. They were both dressed in kimonos printed with flowers. They weren’t the right sort of kimonos for old ladies to wear. Flower patterns are reserved for young girls, preferably attractive girls.
“My name is McGraw,” the old gentleman said, “and my friends here are called Miss Cunningham and Mrs. Ingram. They are spending a year in Japan and I have lived here for several years now. We are studying with the good priests of Daidharmaji.”
Saito acknowledged McGraw’s opening by bowing briefly.
Miss Cunningham coughed and made her thin body lean forward.
“Are you a follower of the way too, Inspector?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Do you meditate?”
“No, Miss Cunningham, I do not practice. My family belongs to a temple in another part of the city. I go there with my parents on special days and the priests visit our home. That is all.”
“What a pity,” said Mrs. Ingram. “Meditation is such a marvelous exercise. It has done wonders for us. But you are very busy, of course. Perhaps later, when you retire?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ingram.” He felt proud that he could remember the difficult names and that he was speaking English. He had studied English because he had wanted to be a police officer in Tokyo. There were many foreigners in the capital and English-speaking police detectives were rapidly promoted. But so far he had been confined within the limits of his home city, Kyoto, the city of temples.
He cleared his throat and addressed himself to McGraw. “Please, sir, what do you know about Miss Davis?”
McGraw’s heavy-lidded pale-blue eyes rested on the neat impassive form of the inspector.
“May I ask, Saito-san, what sort of trouble Miss Davis is into?”
“She is dead.”
While the two ladies shrieked, McGraw’s eyes didn’t change. They remained gentle and precise. “I see. And how did she die?”
“We are not sure yet. I would think she had been knifed.”
The two ladies shrieked again, much louder. Saito closed his eyes with desperate determination.
When he left the small hotel a little while later Saito carried some information. Miss Davis had spent only two months in Japan. She was rich. Her father manufactured most of the shoe polish used in the United States. She could have lived a life of leisure, but she had not; she had been very diligent, never missing an evening’s meditation at the priest Ohno’s temple. She had managed to master the full lotus position, wherein both legs are crossed and the feet rest upside down on the opposite thighs. She had been in pain but she had never moved during the half-hour periods in which the two-hour sessions were divided. She had been very good indeed.
McGraw was most positive about the young woman’s efforts. He himself, Miss Cunningham, and Mrs. Ingram couldn’t be compared to Miss Davis. The three older students had some experience in the discipline, but even they still moved when the pain became too severe and they still fell asleep sometimes when they happened not to be in pain and Ohno-san often had to shout at them to make them wake up. Miss Davis never fell asleep. She had been an ideal student, yes, absolutely.
But McGraw knew little about Miss Davis’s personal life. He didn’t know how she spent her days. He had asked her to lunch once and she had accepted the invitation but never returned it. They had conversed politely but nothing of consequence. All he had learned was that she had lived in New York, held a degree in philosophy, and had experimented with drugs.
And tonight? Had he noticed anything in particular?
No. It had been an evening like the other evenings. They had sat together in Ohno’s magnificent temple room. When the two hours were up and the sound of Ohno’s heavy bell floated away toward the garden, they had bowed and left. McGraw had walked Miss Cunningham and Mrs. Ingram home and Miss Davis had left by herself, as usual.
Saito sat in the back of the small Datsun and asked the young constable to drive slowly. When he spied a bar, Saito asked him to stop. He got out and drank two glasses of grape juice and one glass of orange juice and swallowed two aspirin provided by the attractive hostess, who snuggled against his shoulder and smiled invitingly. But Saito thanked her for the aspirin and hurried back to the car.
The Datsun stopped under a blue sign with the neat characters that make up the imported word “police.” Saito marched into the station. The sergeant pointed to a door in the rear and led the way. Saito sat at the desk. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes. After a phone call.”
The doctor’s hoarse voice described what Saito wanted to know. “Yes, she died of a knife wound. A downward thrust, with considerable force. The blade hit a rib but pushed on and reached the heart. Death must have been almost immediate. The knife’s blade was quite long, at least three-and-a-half inches. I can’t say how wide for it was moved about when it was pulled free.”
“Sexual intercourse?” Saito asked.
“Not recently, no.”
“Thank you. Can you connect me with whoever went through her pockets? I noticed she had no handbag.”
Another voice greeted the inspector politely. “No, Inspector, there was no handbag, but the lady carried her things in the side pockets of her jacket. We found a wallet with some money, almost ten thousand yen, and a credit card. Also a key, cigarettes, a lighter, and a notebook — excuse me, sir, I have a list here. Yes, that’s right, and a lipstick. That was all, sir.”
“What’s in the notebook?”
“Names and phone numbers.”
“Japanese?”
“No, sir, American names. And the phone numbers begin with 212, 516, and 914.”
Saito nodded at the telephone. “New York area codes. I have been there once. Very good, thank you.”
The sergeant was waiting at the door and led Saito to a small room where two surly young men sat slumped on a wooden bench in the back. A chair had been placed opposite the bench. The sergeant closed the door and leaned against it. “The fellow on the left is called Yoshida, and the other one is Kato.”
Saito was thirsty again and wondered whether he should ask the sergeant for a pot of green tea but instead he plunged right in. “O.K., you two, where were you tonight? You first — Kato, is it?”
The two young men were hard to tell apart in their identical trousers, jackets, and shirts. They even wore the same hairstyle, very short on top, very long on the sides.