“I’m not interested in standing out,” said Uesugi softly. “I’m a scumbag. I don’t deserve to be in the police. I applied for early retirement back then, but I let myself be talked out of it. I regret changing my mind. I wish I’d just walked away.”
“Why don’t you share your regrets with the suspect and see what happens?”
Reaching for his iced coffee, Uesugi shook the glass. The ice cubes clinked and rattled.
“That’s just bullshit,” he muttered.
8
Yosaku Kishida was even thinner than the last time Uesugi had seen him. His cheeks had hollowed out further, and his eyes sunk even deeper into his skull. His shoulder blades protruded through the fabric of his jacket. He was like a skeleton in a suit.
Kishida was not looking at Uesugi. Are those eyes actually seeing anything? Uesugi wondered. They were unfocused, staring off into the middle distance.
“There’s this one rather bossy detective in this precinct,” Uesugi began. “He insists that I’m the only person who can do this. That’s why I’m here to interview you again. To be honest, I have no idea whether I’ll succeed in getting you to speak. I’m not confident in my chances. Still, at least do me the favor of hearing me out. I can’t do more than that.”
Uesugi sipped some tea from his cup.
“I’m going to be fifty-five this year. I’ve been married twenty-one years. I was keen to have kids from the get-go, but we had trouble conceiving. It took my wife three years to get pregnant. When she had a baby boy the next year, I was jumping up and down for joy.”
Although Kishida didn’t seem to be listening, a subtle change came over his expression, and his eyebrows were twitching.
“Maybe it was because I was already middle-aged by the time he came along, but I adored the boy; I was infatuated. Even when I was on stakeouts, I’d call the house when the other guys were out of earshot so I could listen to my son saying words he’d just learned in that sweet little voice of his. I was the original doting dad. I knew I was being ridiculous, but I felt more proud than ashamed.”
Again Kishida’s expression seemed to change. From staring vacantly at the table in front of him, his eyes swam into focus, as if he was making an effort to see something.
“I adored my son. No one can deny that — but adoring someone and taking proper care of them are two very different things. If you want to take proper care of your child, you make the choices that will give them the best possible future. I couldn’t do that. I was happy floating on cloud nine, thrilled to have someone to pour my love into.”
Uesugi took another swig of his tea.
“Then, miracle of miracles, my little boy started growing up. Kids can’t stay adorable bundles of cuteness forever. They start causing all sorts of problems. Most dads react by running away, taking refuge behind that convenient old pretext of ‘being busy with work.’ I know I did. When my wife tried to talk to me about our boy, I’d just blow up at her. I never made a serious effort to discuss his problems with her. If she criticized my parenting, I trotted out the line about ‘already having one full-time job’ and deftly shunted all the family’s difficulties onto her shoulders. I wasn’t overly concerned when she warned me that our son was hanging out with a bad crowd. ‘It’s just a phase that any normal, healthy kid goes through,’ I told her. I was determined to look on the bright side. I was deceiving myself.”
Kishida shot a glance at Uesugi. The instant their eyes met, the older man looked away.
“It happened three years ago. I was on standby at Metropolitan Police HQ in central Tokyo when a call came for me. It was a local cop. We’d worked a case together one time. Anyway, this guy says he’d picked up a kid who was just about to ride off on a motorbike without a helmet on, and that the kid was making a big song and dance about his dad being ‘Detective Uesugi of TMPD Homicide.’ The cop was calling to confirm that he was my kid. He gave me the details, and I confirmed that yes, the kid was my son. I was pretty shocked: riding without a helmet was bad, but worse still was that my son didn’t have a driver’s license to begin with. The cop asked me what he should do. I said I was really sorry, but could he see his way to turning a blind eye just this once?”
Uesugi’s voice was getting croaky. He reached for his teacup, but his hand stopped in midair when he realized that the cup was empty.
“The cop did as I asked. Since he’d not actually caught my son riding the bike, he was able to send him home with just a warning. It was a huge relief. The boy had just got into a good high school and could have been expelled. It was only later that I realized what a disastrous judgment call I’d made. I should have been tough. I should have asked the cop to follow the rules and come down on him like a ton of bricks. Perhaps then...”
Uesugi’s voice caught in his throat. He sucked in a couple of deep breaths.
“Of course, I gave the boy a good telling-off myself. I don’t think that anything I said really registered with him. He could probably tell that I didn’t really mean it. It was a week later that I got the news: my son had been killed in an accident on the expressway. He took a sharp curve at eighty miles per hour, lost control, and smashed into a wall. He still didn’t have his license, of course. The bike was borrowed from a friend; it was the same one he’d been caught trying to ride without a helmet the week before. I later discovered that he’d been bragging to all his friends that he could get away with anything by throwing around the name of his ‘big-shot detective’ father.”
Pulling himself upright in his chair, Uesugi looked at Kishida, who was half hunched over the table.
“My son did something wrong, and I tried to protect him. In fact, all I succeeded in doing was pushing him even farther down the wrong path. I failed both as a parent and as a cop. Parents have a duty to set their kids on the right path, even if being loathed is the only reward they get. If parents don’t do it, who will? You committed murder, Mr. Kishida, and you’re going to pay for your crime. But do you want to pay that price without even confronting the truth? Chances are that will only lead to more disasters down the road. Well?”
Kishida was trembling all over. As the trembling slowly increased in intensity, a groan burst from his lips. When he finally lifted his head, his eyes were red with tears.
“Tell me the truth,” commanded Uesugi.
9
For the first time in several weeks, the sky was a cloudless expanse of blue. As if the clear weather came with a penalty clause, though, the sidewalk radiated heat. By the time Uesugi reached the coffee shop, his back was drenched with sweat.
Detective Kaga was sitting at a table that overlooked the street. He was busy jotting something down on a napkin. He grunted hello as Uesugi came up.
“What are you adding up there?” asked Uesugi, sitting down opposite him. The napkin was covered in pen strokes.
“What this?” Kaga screwed the napkin into a ball with his fist. “It’s the number of men going by with and without jackets. The number of people with jackets on has gone down.”
Uesugi called the waitress and ordered an iced coffee.
“We’ve verified how much Katsuya Kishida stole from his employer. It was close to fifty million yen.”
“Wow, definitely not peanuts,” Kaga replied, looking rather bored.
It turned out that Yosaku Kishida hadn’t been siphoning money to cover debts of his own. He had started embezzling money — reluctantly — when Katsuya, his son, came begging for his help. Katsuya had been embezzling money himself from the construction company where he worked and, with an audit imminent, was about to be found out.