“Oh, that’s right, I’m sorry. I was talking about a time before then. Oh, about three or four days after Mr. Togashi dropped in. She’d left a message for me, so I called her back.”
“Around when was that?”
“Let me see—” Sugimura retrieved her cell phone from the pocket of her suit. Kusanagi expected her to go into her list of calls made and received, but she pulled up her calendar instead. She studied it for a moment, then looked back up at him. “March tenth.”
“The tenth?” Kusanagi echoed, raising his voice. He and Kishitani exchanged glances. “Are you sure?”
“Quite sure, yes.”
The day Shinji Togashi was murdered.
“Do you remember what time you called her?”
“Well, it was after I’d gone home for the day, so I’d say around one in the morning. She’d called me before midnight, but I was still busy here at the club and in pickup.”
“How long did you talk?”
“Oh, I’d say about half an hour. We usually talk that long.”
“And you called her? Her cell phone?”
“No, actually. I called her at home.”
“Erm, sorry to be so particular about this, but it was one o’clock in the morning, so you mean you called her on the eleventh, not the tenth, correct?”
“That’s right, it would have been the eleventh, wouldn’t it?”
“You mind me asking what sort of message she left on your phone?”
“She only said she wanted to talk to me, so I should call her when I was done at the club.”
“What did she want to talk about?”
“Nothing much, really. She wanted to know the name of this shiatsu massage place I went to for therapy. Lower back pain, you know.”
“Shiatsu? Okay. Had she called you about things like that in the past?”
“Oh, she calls about all sorts of things, none of them terribly important. I think she just wants to talk, you know. That’s why I call her.”
“And always so late at night?”
“I wouldn’t say always, but it’s not unusual. Late nights come with the territory. I suppose mostly we talk on days I have off, but she had called me, so…”
Kusanagi nodded and thanked Sugimura for her time. He tapped Kishitani on the shoulder and the two of them got up to leave. But as he made his way out of the club Kusanagi found he still wasn’t satisfied.
He mulled it over on the way back to Kinshicho Station. The phone call Sugimura had mentioned at the end of their conversation bothered him. Yasuko Hanaoka had been talking on the phone in the middle of the night on the tenth of March. Her home phone. Which meant she had already come back by that point.
A theory had been going around the department that the actual time of the murder was sometime after eleven o’clock on the night of the tenth. This was little more than a theory based on the assumption that Yasuko Hanaoka was the murderer. If Togashi had been killed that late, then Hanaoka could have done it even if her alibi at karaoke held up. Still, nobody gave the theory much credit—even the ones who had suggested it in the first place. If it was true, Hanaoka would’ve had to leave the karaoke bar and go immediately to the scene of the crime in order to get there by midnight. And if she had done the deed then, there would have been no way for her to get back to her house by public transport. Few criminals wanted to leave an obvious trail by taking a taxi. In any case, taxis hardly ever passed by the riverbank where Togashi’s remains had been found.
Then there was a matter of the stolen bicycle. The bicycle had been taken after ten o’clock in the morning. If the bicycle was a plant, that meant that Yasuko had to have gone to Shinozaki Station by that time. If it wasn’t a plant, and Togashi had stolen it himself, then that raised the question: what had Togashi been doing between the time that he stole the bicycle and the time that he met Yasuko near midnight?
Having worked through this line of reasoning early on, Kusanagi hadn’t seen the need to establish an alibi for Yasuko after karaoke on the night of the murder. And even if he had wanted one, he now knew she could provide it: she’d been on the phone with Sonoko Sugimura.
And that was what was bothering him.
“Remember the first time we talked to Yasuko Hanaoka?” Kusanagi asked Kishitani abruptly as they walked.
“Sure. What about it?”
“Do you remember how I asked her about her alibi? Did I ask her where she had been on the tenth?”
“I don’t remember exactly how you asked, if that’s what you mean, but it was something like that, yeah.”
“And what did she say? She went to work that morning, and out that night with her daughter. They went to the movie, then to eat ramen, then to karaoke. Which got them home after eleven, right?”
“Sounds about right.”
“And according to the mama we just talked to, Yasuko was on the phone with her after that. She left a message asking for her to call, even though it wasn’t about anything serious. So the mama calls her a little after one o’clock, and they talk for thirty minutes.”
“So? What of it?”
“Well, when I asked her for an alibi, why do you think Yasuko didn’t mention the phone call?”
“Well, I suppose she didn’t think it was necessary.”
“Why not?” Kusanagi stopped and turned to the junior detective. “If she used her home phone to call someone, that’d be proof she was at home.”
Kishitani stopped, too. He pursed his lips. “That may be so; but from Yasuko Hanaoka’s perspective, telling you about her night on the town must have seemed like enough. I bet if you’d asked her about what she did when she got home, she’d have told you about the phone call.”
“You think that’s the only reason she didn’t say anything?”
“Can you think of another? I mean, if she was hiding the fact that she didn’t have an alibi, that would be one thing, but she had an alibi—she just didn’t tell us about it. Seems a little strange to get worked up over that.”
Kusanagi turned from his partner and resumed walking, scowling faintly. The junior detective had taken Hanaoka’s side even before they knocked at her door that first night. It was no use expecting anything like an objective opinion from the man now.
Kusanagi’s noontime discussion with Yukawa resurfaced in his mind. The physicist had said that, had Ishigami been involved, it was unlikely the murder had been premeditated. It was too sloppy for that. He had seemed quite adamant about that point.
“If he had planned it, he never would’ve used the movie theater for an alibi,” Yukawa had noted. “He would’ve known that the movie story was unconvincing—true enough, as evidenced by your suspicion. Ishigami would have understood that. And it raises another, larger question. What possible reason would Ishigami have to assist Yasuko Hanaoka in murdering Togashi? Even if Togashi had been giving her a hard time and she had gone to her neighbor for help, Ishigami would’ve thought of a different solution for the problem. Murder would have been his last choice.”
“Why, because he’s not vicious enough?”
Yukawa had shaken his head, his eyes cool. “It’s not a question of temperament. Murder isn’t the most logical way to escape a difficult situation. It only leads to a different difficult situation. Ishigami would never engage in something so clearly counterproductive. Of course,” he had added, “the converse is also true. That is, he’s quite capable of committing an atrocity, provided that it’s the most logical course of action.”
“So how do you think Ishigami could’ve been involved?”