“Who?” Kusanagi asked, wondering if it was Yukawa.
“It’s Ishigami, the math teacher who lives next to Yasuko Hanaoka.”
“Ishigami? He wants to talk to me? Why didn’t he just call?”
“Uh, I think it’s more important than that,” Mamiya replied, his tone severe.
“Did he tell you what this is all about, Chief?”
“He says he won’t talk about the details to anyone but you. That’s why we need you here now.”
“Right, fine, I’m on my way.” Kusanagi put his hand over the receiver and tapped Kishitani on the shoulder. “Chief wants us down at Edogawa Station.”
Mamiya’s muffled voice came over the phone. “He says he did it.”
“Huh? What was that?”
“He says he killed Togashi. Ishigami’s turning himself in.”
“What the hell!?”
Kusanagi sat up so fast his seatbelt nearly left a bruise.
SIXTEEN
Ishigami, his face expressionless, was staring at Kusanagi. Or maybe his eyes just happen to be pointing in my direction, the detective thought. Maybe he’s not seeing me at all. The mathematician’s face was entirely devoid of emotion; it was as if his gaze was fixed on some faraway place and Kusanagi just happened to be sitting in that blank trajectory.
“The first time I saw him was on the tenth of March,” he was saying, his tone perfectly even. “He was loitering near her door when I returned home from school. I caught him putting his hand inside the mail slot in her doorway.”
“I’m sorry, this man—who was he, exactly?”
“Mr. Togashi. Though, of course, I didn’t know that at the time,” Ishigami answered.
Kusanagi and Kishitani were with him in the interrogation room. Kishitani sat off to one side, taking notes. Ishigami had asked that no one else be allowed in the room. He’d said he wouldn’t be able to tell them what he needed to say if a bunch of officers were there asking questions.
“I wondered what he was up to, so I called out to him. He looked surprised, and told me he had business with Yasuko Hanaoka. Said he was her estranged husband. That’s when I realized who he was, and I knew he was lying, but I pretended to go along with his story so as not to alarm him.”
“Wait a second, how did you know he wasn’t telling you the truth?” Kusanagi asked.
Ishigami took a short breath. “Because I know everything there is to know about Yasuko Hanaoka. I know she’s divorced, and I know she had been moving around, trying to escape her ex-husband.”
“How could you know all these things? I had heard that you hardly spoke to her, despite the fact that she’s your neighbor. That you only saw her because you frequented the lunch shop where she works.”
“That’s what we tell people, yes.”
“Excuse me?”
Ishigami straightened himself in his chair, puffing out his chest ever so slightly. “I am Yasuko Hanaoka’s bodyguard. It has been my duty to protect her from men with less than good intentions. And for obvious reasons, neither of us wanted people to know about it. I am a schoolteacher, too, after all.”
“But you told us you hardly talked to her at all when we first met,” Kusanagi pressed.
Ishigami sighed quietly. “You came to my apartment to ask questions about Togashi’s murder, didn’t you? Of course I couldn’t tell you the truth. You would have suspected something immediately.”
“Okay…” Kusanagi hesitated. “So now you’re telling me that you know everything about Yasuko Hanaoka … because you’re her bodyguard?”
“That’s correct.”
“So you’ve been close to her for some time. Since before this incident?”
“Yes. As I said before, our arrangement was a secret. We were very careful to keep our communication hidden. Not even her daughter knew about it.”
“How exactly did you do that?”
“We employed several means. Would you like me to tell you about them now?” Ishigami looked questioningly at the detective.
None of this was feeling right to Kusanagi. He had been genuinely shocked at the suggestion that the math teacher had anything like a close relationship with his attractive neighbor, and the background the man was now giving them seemed vague at best. Still, if there was any truth to this story at all, he wanted to hear it.
“No,” Kusanagi said, “I’ll ask you about that later. I’d like to hear about your dealings with Mr. Togashi first. You said that you first met him outside Yasuko Hanaoka’s apartment, and that you pretended to believe he was still married to her. What happened then?”
“He asked me whether I knew where she was. So I told him she wasn’t living there anymore—that she’d had to move recently for work. That surprised him, as you might imagine. Then he asked me if I knew where she’d moved to. I told him I did.”
“Where did you tell him she’d gone?”
Ishigami grinned. “Shinozaki. I told him she’d moved to an apartment along the Old Edogawa River.”
I wondered when Shinozaki would come up, Kusanagi thought to himself. “Is that all?” he prodded. “That wouldn’t be enough for him to find her by. That’s quite a stretch of river, and there are lots of apartment buildings along there.”
“Of course, Togashi wanted to know her new address. I told him to wait while I went back into my room, looked at a map, and wrote down an address—the address of a water treatment facility. You should’ve seen his smile when I handed him the paper. He told me I’d saved him a lot of trouble.”
“Why did you give him that address?”
“To get him to go where there wouldn’t be many witnesses. I’m familiar with the lay of the land out there, you see.”
“Wait a second.” Kusanagi stared hard at Ishigami’s face. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “So you’re telling me that from the very moment you met Togashi, you planned to kill him?”
“Of course,” Ishigami replied, his voice matter-of-fact. “Like I just said, it’s my job to protect Ms. Hanaoka. If someone showed up who I knew intended her harm, it was my responsibility to eliminate the problem.”
“And you believe that Mister Togashi intended her harm?”
“It’s not a question of belief, I know he did. He had given her all kinds of trouble already by that point. She moved next door to me to get away from him, after all.”
“Ms. Hanaoka told you that herself?”
“Through our usual channels of communication, yes.”
Ishigami spoke smoothly and without hesitation. He certainly had plenty of time to get his story straight before coming in here, Kusanagi reflected. And yet there was a lot about the story that seemed suspicious at best. For one thing, nothing he was saying matched the mental image of the stodgy high school teacher that Kusanagi had of him until now. Still, there was nothing to do about it but hear the rest of what the man had to say, whether it was true or not.
“What did he do after you gave him the address?”
“He asked if I knew where she was working now. I told him I didn’t know where it was, but I’d heard she was working at a restaurant. I also told him I’d heard that she got off at eleven o’clock, and that her daughter would go to the restaurant after school and wait so they could go home together. Of course, I was making all that up.”
“And why did you fabricate this information?”
“To make it easier to predict how he would act. I couldn’t have him dropping by my selected location too early. It might be out of the way, but there are still people in the area during daylight hours. I knew that if he thought Yasuko wouldn’t be getting off work until that time, and that her daughter would be with her, he would have no reason to visit her apartment before then—”