When he called, Yukawa picked up almost instantly. Skipping the niceties, he simply said, “So you got my message?”
“How do you even know?” Kusanagi said, getting straight to the point. “That Hasunuma’s dead, I mean.”
“I was at Namiki-ya last night. Some guy overheard the police talking about it over near the crime scene. He came straight over to the restaurant to report the news.”
“Okay, but what were you doing in Namiki-ya to start with?”
“I was there for dinner. What else? Come on, it was you who told me about the place.”
“Go there often?”
“I’m not quite sure what level of frequency the word ‘often’ denotes. I probably go there about twice a week.”
That made him the most regular of regular customers.
“Why do you want to talk to me about Hasunuma’s death?”
“Because the proprietor of my favorite restaurant and his family could be suspects in a murder case. It’s hard for me not to care.”
Kusanagi snorted. “That’s an unusually human thing for you to say. Your time in America has turned you into a softy.”
“That’s nonsense. Come on, just tell me what you know.”
“Sadly, I don’t have any information to share.”
“Meaning it’s information that you can’t share with an ordinary civilian?”
“You know you’re not an ordinary civilian. That’s not the problem. We really don’t know much. The cause of death is still unknown, so we can’t yet determine whether or not it was murder.”
“Oh, I see. I guess I’ll have to be content with that for now. Thanks for calling me so early like this. I appreciate it.”
Yukawa sounded as though he was about to hang up. “Wait,” Kusanagi said hastily to stop him doing so. “You were in Namiki-ya last night, you said. There are a few questions I’d like to ask you. Have you got the time to get together today?”
“I’m free this morning. I haven’t the time to travel into central Tokyo, though.”
“Central Tokyo? So where are you?”
“I’m staying in the staff accommodation at our Kikuno research institute.”
“Why didn’t you say so? Had breakfast?”
“No, not yet.”
“Good,” said Kusanagi. “Then have it with me. My treat.”
About thirty minutes later, Kusanagi was sitting across from Yukawa at the train station coffee shop. It was the same place they got together the last time.
“I never expected to see you again here like this,” Kusanagi said.
“You chose the place.”
“Because it’s easy to find. Anyway, that’s not what I meant. What I meant is that I didn’t expect to see you here as part of an investigation.”
“Am I part of an investigation?” Yukawa raised his eyebrows.
“No, uh...” Kusanagi faltered. “We can’t refer to it as an investigation since we don’t know yet if a crime occurred.”
Kusanagi briefly ran through the facts: how Hasunuma was staying in the room of his one-time coworker; what the crime scene looked like.
“You said the cause of death was unclear.”
“There were no external injuries and no marks of strangulation on the neck.”
“Did Hasunuma have any preexisting conditions? Heart disease, for example?”
“Not that I’ve heard — though he certainly was a hard-hearted bastard.”
“I wasn’t talking about metaphorical hearts. Either way, there’s a low likelihood of disease being the cause of death. Do you think that some kind of drug could have been used?”
“We don’t know yet. Personally, I think that’s the likeliest—”
The waitress came to the table and Kusanagi broke off with a dry cough. They both watched in silence as she put the dishes down in front of them.
“The problem is getting him to ingest the stuff,” said Yukawa, reaching for his coffee cup after the waitress had gone. “The poison, I mean.”
“Exactly. Hasunuma was no fool. Not the kind of person to swill down a suspicious drink without even a second thought.”
“By ‘suspicious drink,’ you mean one prepared by a person with the intention of killing him?”
Taking a bite of his sandwich, Kusanagi nodded as he chewed and swallowed.
“Let’s get down to business. That’s precisely what I wanted to talk to you about. You were at Namiki-ya last night, right? Tell me how the people there were behaving. How did they react when they got the news of his death?”
Yukawa stuffed what was left of his sandwich into his mouth and looked thoughtfully upward and off to the side. Kusanagi guessed that he was trying to picture the scene in the restaurant on the previous night.
“In a nutshell, there was general surprise.”
“General?”
“Everyone at the restaurant. Last night, all the customers were regulars, so they all knew who Hasunuma was.”
“I’m only interested in the ones with murderous intent. I don’t care about the rest of the regular customers.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Yukawa placed his hands flat on the table and looked intently at Kusanagi. “How are we meant to separate people who have murder on their mind from people who don’t? It’s not possible. The best you can do is to pinpoint the people who might have such an intention toward Hasunuma. If we’re only talking about a matter of possibility, then that group will end up being everyone who knew about Hasunuma.”
Kusanagi frowned and scratched the side of his nose. Yukawa had a good point.
“Okay, I’m sorry. It was a poorly phrased question. What I want to know is how the Namiki family reacted; Yutaro Namiki, the father, in particular. How did he respond?”
Yukawa grunted and crossed his arms on his chest.
“There was uproar when the regulars heard that Hasunuma was dead. At that point, Yutaro Namiki and his wife were in the kitchen, so I didn’t see how they reacted. After a few minutes, the customers quieted down. That was when Namiki came out and said something like, ‘Let’s just wait and see how this turns out.’ He was calm and I didn’t detect anything strained or unnatural in his behavior. I can’t tell you about his wife because she didn’t come out of the kitchen. As for Natsumi... well... she looked stunned. That’s all I can tell you about the family.”
“Okay... And what’s your personal opinion?”
Yukawa wrinkled his brow slightly as if he hadn’t understood the question.
“Do you think those three have got anything to do with Hasunuma’s death?”
“If you’re asking, do I think they killed him, I’d say no, they couldn’t have. The police interviewed them and said that each of them had a solid alibi for the rough time of death. I imagine the detectives have already verified the details.”
Yukawa then explained that he had spent the afternoon of the previous day watching the parade with Natsumi until she had to go cover for her parents, who were taking a customer to the hospital.
“From what I know, both Yutaro and Machiko Namiki have almost flawless alibis and while it’s true that Natsumi was alone for a certain amount of time, that was in response to an unanticipated event. She couldn’t have committed the murder.”
Kusanagi groaned softly. “It sounds like they’re above suspicion, then.”
Yukawa put down his salad fork. “We can safely put to rest the question of whether they killed Hasunuma themselves. That still leaves us your original question: Do I think that the three of them had anything to do with Hasunuma’s death? My only answer to that is, I don’t know. We have a man on a murder charge, almost certainly guilty, who’s been released because of insufficient evidence, who then dies mysteriously during a parade that’s held only once a year. We have the family of the murder victim, each with fortuitous, ironclad alibis. I’m not able to ascribe all that to coincidence.”