“Well, I—”
“No, actually,” Ishigami cut her off, “before that, let’s move the body. We should clean up this room as quickly as possible. I’m sure there are mountains of evidence here as it is now.” Before he had even finished talking, Ishigami set about lifting the head and torso of the corpse.
“Move it? To where?”
“To my place,” Ishigami said, with a look that indicated this was the obvious choice; and he hoisted the body over his shoulder. He was surprisingly strong. Yasuko noticed the words Judo club embroidered in white thread on his navy windbreaker. Stepping out the door, Ishigami quickly made his way into the neighboring apartment, with Yasuko and Misato anxiously following. The teacher’s apartment was a mess, with piles of mathematic books and journals scattered about the front room. Still carrying the body, Ishigami kicked a few piles aside to clear a space on the tatami mats. Then he casually lowered his burden to the floor. The body fell in a heap, and the dead man’s eyes, frozen open, stared into the room.
Ishigami turned back to the mother and daughter, who stood at the open apartment door. “Ms. Hanaoka, I want you to stay here. Your daughter should go next door and start cleaning. Use the vacuum, and get it as clean as possible.”
Misato nodded, her face pale, and after a quick glance at her mother she vanished from the entryway.
“Close the door,” Ishigami said to Yasuko.
“Oh … okay.” Yasuko did as she was told, then stood in hesitation.
“You might as well come in. It’s not as clean as your place, I’m afraid.”
Ishigami pulled a small cushion off a chair and placed it on the floor next to the body. Yasuko stepped into the room, but she did not sit on the cushion. Instead, she sat with her back against one wall, turning her face away from the body. Ishigami belatedly realized she was afraid of it.
“Er, sorry about that.” He picked up the cushion and offered it to her. “Please, use this.”
“No, it’s all right,” she said, looking down, with a light shake of her head.
Ishigami returned the cushion to the chair and then sat next to the body.
A reddish-black welt had risen around the corpse’s neck.
“The electrical cord, was it?”
“What?”
“When you strangled him. You used an electrical cord?”
“Yes—that’s right. The kotatsu cord.”
“Of course, the kotatsu,” Ishigami said, recalling the pattern of the kotatsu quilt. “You might consider getting rid of that. Actually, never mind, I’ll handle that myself later. Incidentally—” Ishigami looked back to the corpse. “Had you planned on meeting him today?”
Yasuko shook her head. “No, not at all. He just walked into the shop around noon, unexpectedly. Then in the evening, I met him at a family restaurant nearby. It was the only way I could get him to leave the shop. After that, I thought I’d gotten away from him. Then he showed up at my apartment.”
“A family restaurant, huh?”
That rules out the possibility of there being no witnesses, Ishigami thought. He put his hand into the corpse’s jacket pocket. A rolled-up ten-thousand-yen bill came out, then another.
“That’s the money I—”
“You gave him this?”
She nodded, and Ishigami offered her the money. Yasuko didn’t reach for it.
Ishigami went to where his suit hung on the wall nearby and pulled his wallet from the pocket. Removing twenty thousand yen he replaced it with the bills from the dead man’s jacket.
“I can appreciate why you wouldn’t want his,” Ishigami said, handing the money he had taken from his own wallet to Yasuko.
She made a show of hesitating for moment, then took the money with a quiet “Thank you.”
“Well then,” Ishigami said, searching the corpse’s pockets again. He found Togashi’s wallet. There was a little money inside, a driver’s license, and a few receipts.
“Shinji Togashi … West Shinjuku, Shinjuku Ward. Do you think that’s where he was living now?” he asked Yasuko, after looking at the license.
She frowned and shook her head. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. I know he lived in Nishi-Shinjuku a while back, but he said something—it sounded like he’d gotten thrown out because he couldn’t pay the rent.”
“It looks like the driver’s license was renewed a year ago, which means he must have kept the papers for his old location while finding another place to actually live.”
“I’m pretty sure he moved around a lot. He didn’t have a steady job, so he wouldn’t have been able to rent anything long-term.”
“That would seem to be the case,” Ishigami remarked, his eyes falling on one of the receipts.
It read “Rental Room Ogiya.” The price had been ¥5,880 for two nights, paid up front, it seemed. Ishigami calculated the tax in his head and came up with a price of ¥2,800 per night.
He showed the receipts to Yasuko. “I think this is where he was staying now. And if he doesn’t check out, someone there will empty out his room. If he left anything behind, they might wonder, and call the police. Of course, they might not want the trouble and just do nothing at all. They probably have people skip out on them all the time, which is why they make them pay up front. Still, it’s unwise to be too optimistic.”
Ishigami resumed searching the corpse’s pockets. He found the key. There was a round tag on it with the number 305.
In a daze, Yasuko looked at the key. She looked like she didn’t have the faintest idea what she should do.
The muffled sound of a vacuum cleaner bumping against the walls came from next door. Misato was in there, cleaning every nook and cranny with the desperation of someone who doesn’t know what she should do, and so pours everything into doing what little she can.
I have to protect them, thought Ishigami. He would never be this close to so beautiful a woman ever again in his life. He was sure of that. He had to summon every last bit of his strength and knowledge to prevent any calamity from happening to her.
Ishigami looked at the face of the dead man. Whatever expression he’d been wearing had already faded. He looked more like a lump of clay than a person. Still, it was possible to see that this man had been a real looker in his youth. Though he had clearly gained a little bit of weight in recent years, his was the kind of face women found easy to like.
And Yasuko fell in love with him. When Ishigami thought this, it was like a little bubble popped inside him and envy spread through his chest. He shook his head, embarrassed at his own capacity to have such feelings at a time like this.
“Is there anyone he kept in contact with, anyone close that you know of?” Ishigami resumed his questions.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for years.”
“Did you hear what he was planning to do tomorrow? Did he say if he was going to meet anyone?”
“No,” Yasuko said, her head sagging. “He didn’t tell me anything like that. I’m sorry. I know I’m not much help.”
“No, I just had to ask. Of course you wouldn’t know any of those things. Please don’t worry about it.” Ishigami reached out with a gloved hand and pushed open the dead man’s lips, looking inside his mouth. He could see a gold crown on one of the molars. “He’ll have dental records, then.”
“He went to the dentist regularly when we were married.”
“How long ago was that?”
“We were divorced five years ago.”
“Five years?” That was too recent for any reasonable hope that they had thrown out his charts. “Does he have a criminal record?”
“I don’t think so. Of course, I don’t know what he’s been doing since we broke up.”