Newcomer, page 25
He began with something that had happened at a rice cracker shop. It involved an insurance salesman who became a suspect when he concocted a fake alibi for the police.
The next episode, which was about an old-style ryotei restaurant, was connected to the single wasabi-spiked snack cake discovered in Mineko Mitsui’s apartment. That was followed by stories involving a china shop Mineko Mitsui frequented; the proprietor of a clock shop whom she knew only by sight; then a friend of hers who was a translator. Although none of the individual stories had a direct link to the murder, Uesugi was kicking himself as he listened to Kaga. The precinct detective had looked into things that the rest of them had all dismissed as insignificant, keeping at it until he got to the truth, regardless of whether there was a connection to the murder or not.
Kaga finally got around to the pastry shop they were in. Uesugi was startled when the name of Koki Kiyose came up in this context. Kaga explained how Mineko Mitsui had made the mistake of assuming that the pregnant girl who worked there was the girlfriend of her son.
“That’s the girl there,” said Kaga, rolling his eyes at the girl behind the counter. Sure enough, her belly was somewhat swollen.
“Let me guess how this particular story goes: Ms. Mitsui was so thrilled that her son was about to become a father that she moved to be closer to him. Since, however, he was an aspiring actor, her precious boy didn’t have a proper full-time job or salary to go with it. The idea of claiming compensation from her ex-husband came out of her desire to help him out?” Uesugi sighed. “No wonder he seemed different today.”
“That’s not the only thing that affected him.”
Kaga then launched into another story—the most surprising one so far, thought Uesugi. Yuri Miyamoto, who was widely believed to be Naohiro Kiyose’s mistress, was in fact his daughter.
“Keep that under your hat, please. The two of them haven’t gone public yet about their relationship,” Kaga said.
Uesugi was shaking his head in amazement.
“I can’t believe that so many other things were going on in the background of this case. Anyway, if that’s not enough to inspire the son to get serious about life, nothing will. He must have learned not to take his parents for granted.”
“You’ve put your finger on it, Uesugi.” Kaga leaned toward him. “Doing this job, this is something I think about a lot. When a terrible crime like murder is committed, of course we need to catch the person who did it. But we also need to follow through until we’ve figured out why the crime happened in the first place. Unless we can identify the cause, there’s nothing to stop someone else from making the same mistake. Learning the truth can teach us all sorts of valuable lessons. Look at Koki Kiyose: he learned his lesson, and he changed as a result. Can you think of anyone else who would be better off changing?”
Uesugi was using his straw to stir his iced coffee. His hand came to a complete stop. He looked Kaga in the eye.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I think you know what I’m getting at. Kishida is hiding something from us. Why aren’t you working harder to get him to come clean?”
Uesugi looked down at his hands. “I still don’t get what you’re saying.”
“Maybe you sympathize with Kishida? But are you satisfied with the way things are now? Seriously, are you?”
“You listen to me.” Leaning forward slightly, Uesugi glared at Kaga. “If there’s something you want to say, why don’t you just come out and say it.”
“Okay then, here goes.” Kaga’s face darkened, and his eyes gleamed with an intensity Uesugi had not seen before. “You’re the only person who’s capable of getting Kishida to open up. So why don’t you? Make him tell us the truth.”
The bastard! Uesugi realized that Kaga must know all about him. He wouldn’t be speaking to him like this unless he knew about the unspeakably foolish mistake he had made three years before.
“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.
“The incredible thing was that Katsuya had absolutely no idea how his father got his hands on all that money. He just thought that his dad had the money on hand. Astonishingly obtuse! Katsuya’s wife was equally oblivious about her husband’s embezzling. She seemed barely aware that their lifestyle was more lavish than normal.”
Kaga said nothing. He was staring at the street beyond the window. Uesugi followed his gaze to the signboard of a rice cracker shop on the far side of the street.
Uesugi’s iced coffee arrived. He tossed it down without bothering to use the straw.
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. When did you first zero in on Kishida’s son?”
Kaga tilted his head quizzically.
“I never really ‘zeroed in on him.’”
“You sure? I think you figured out early on that he was involved and deliberately chose me as your partner.”
Kaga’s head tilted even further over, to signal complete incomprehension.
“When a detective’s as sharp as you, you can partner with anybody; it doesn’t matter. You chose me, and I know why. You’d heard about what happened to my son, and you thought I’d be the perfect person to get Yosaku Kishida to open up. Am I right?”
That was certainly the way things had turned out. Uesugi was convinced that this precinct cop had stage-managed the whole saga from start to finish.
Kaga smiled amiably and gave a little shake of his head.
“You’re giving me way too much credit.”
“Why did you choose me, then?”
“Two reasons.” Kaga held up a couple of fingers. “The first is that you were responsible for investigating Yosaku Kishida. If someone else had been in charge, I’d probably have worked with them instead. What I knew about your son was the second reason. I heard that you very nearly quit the force because of what happened to him. It was a terrible experience, but the more terrible the experiences we go through, the more we should try to apply them to the work we do as detectives. That’s why I chose you as my partner.”
Kaga looked at Uesugi with cool, detached eyes. Uesugi looked away, wiping the moisture drops off his glass with a fingertip.
“You talk like you know all about me. How much do you really know?”
“You know that I was right about you.”
“Were you?” murmured Uesugi. He was tempted to fight back. I know all about you, he wanted to say. He still recalled the story he’d heard just before he was assigned to this task force.
Kaga had once been in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide Division. He’d been demoted back to a precinct detective after being summoned to appear in court as a circumstantial witness in a murder case. The victim’s family had made a formal complaint about the “investigator’s inappropriate emotional involvement” having delayed the resolution of the case. (As a matter of fact, Kaga’s efforts had made a decisive contribution to unraveling what was a very difficult case.)
In the end, though, Uesugi kept his mouth shut. Detective Kaga probably wasn’t the kind of person to waste time wallowing in regret.
“Yosaku Kishida’s trial will be starting any day now. It was all too brief, but thanks for everything.” Uesugi stood up, putting the money for his coffee on the table.
“Let’s do it again sometime. I can show you around the neighborhood.”
“Maybe next time we can choose a cooler time of year?” replied Uesugi, as he headed for the exit.
Just then, a young girl came in from the street. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, and her hair was dyed brown and symmetrically cut. She made a beeline for Kaga.
“Goofing off again, Detective Kaga?”
“Absolutely not. I’m on patrol.”
“Pull the other one. You’ll never get promoted at this rate.”
Kaga chuckled merrily.
“Want a banana juice? My treat.”
“No thanks. I’ve got to come up with some new hairstyling ideas. I’ll be seeing you.”
The girl left the café, crossed the street, and went into the rice cracker shop.
“She’s the daughter of the family that runs that place,” said Kaga. “She’s studying hairdressing.”
Uesugi walked back to the table. “May I ask you one last question, Detective Kaga? What kind of man are you?”
Picking up a fan that was lying on the table, Kaga flicked it open and began fanning himself.
“Me? Nobody special. In this neighborhood, I’m just a newcomer.”
BY KEIGO HIGASHINO
THE DETECTIVE GALILEO MYSTERIES
The Devotion of Suspect X
Salvation of a Saint
A Midsummer’s Equation
THE KYOICHIRO KAGA MYSTERIES
Malice
Newcomer
Under the Midnight Sun
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR
Keigo Higashino is the bestselling and most widely read novelist in Japan and around Asia, with numerous television and film adaptations of his work appearing in several languages. His work has appeared in over twenty-five languages and sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide. The English translation of The Devotion of Suspect X was a finalist for the Edgar and the Barry Awards. He lives in Tokyo, Japan. You can sign up for email updates here.
Translator Giles Murray was born in the United Kingdom, lives in Tokyo, and has translated various Japanese works of fiction and nonfiction. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Cast of Characters
1. The Girl at the Rice Cracker Shop
2. The Apprentice at the Japanese Restaurant
3. The Daughter-in-Law of the China Shop
4. The Clock Shop’s Dog
5. The Clerk at the Pastry Shop
6. The Friend of the Translator
7. The President of the Cleaning Company
8. The Customer at the Handicrafts Shop
9. The Detective of Nihonbashi
