‘Well, we think she might have something to do with what happened.’
‘Ridiculous,’ Terasaki snorted, the corners of his mouth curling up into a smile.
‘Is it?’ Sasagaki asked.
‘How could she have anything to do with that?’
‘Mr Terasaki, you say you only “know who she is”, so why go out of your way to protect her?’
‘I ain’t protecting nobody.’
‘A white van’s been spotted several times near Yoshida Heights, along with a man driving it who pays regular visits to Mrs Nishimoto’s apartment. That man is you, isn’t it, Mr Terasaki?’
Terasaki was clearly flustered. He wet his lips and said, ‘She’s a customer, so what?’
‘A customer?’
‘You know, cosmetics, detergent. I bring the things she orders. That’s all.’
‘You know, Terasaki, if you’re lying, we’ll uncover the truth soon enough. We have a witness who says you visit her apartment frequently. I can’t imagine she needs that many cosmetics.’
Terasaki crossed his arms and closed his eyes.
‘Start lying now, Mr Terasaki, and you’ll just have to keep lying. It’s hard to keep it up, you know. And we’ll be watching you every minute of the day. All we have to do is wait until you visit Fumiyo Nishimoto again. So what would you do? Just give up on ever seeing her again? I think that’d be pretty tough on both of you. Look, why don’t you just tell us the truth? You’re in a relationship with Mrs Nishimoto, aren’t you?’
Sasagaki waited patiently for Terasaki to make the next move.
After a long silence, he sighed and opened his eyes. ‘So what’s it to you? I’m single, and she’s a widow.’
‘So you’re confirming the relationship?’
‘Yeah, we’re seeing each other. And not some fling, either. It’s serious,’ Terasaki said.
‘Since when?’
‘I have to tell you all that?’
‘Humour me,’ Sasagaki said with a smile.
‘Since about six months ago,’ Terasaki told him, a reluctant look on his face.
‘What started it?’
‘Nothing special. We saw each other at Kikuya, and got friendly, you know.’
‘Did she ever talk to you about Mr Kirihara?’
‘All I know is he ran the pawnshop she visited.’
‘Had you heard about his visits to her apartment?’
‘Yeah, I heard about that.’
‘And how did that make you feel?’
Terasaki’s eyebrows drew together and he made an unpleasant face. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You didn’t think Mr Kirihara might have had an ulterior motive for seeing her?’
‘What would be the point of thinking that? For one thing, Fumiyo’s not that kind of girl.’
‘And yet she was indebted to Mr Kirihara by the sound of it. He might have even helped her financially. That would make it pretty hard for her to resist if he put the pressure on, wouldn’t you think?’
‘Well, I never heard about it if he did. What are you getting at, anyway?’
‘I’m just trying to imagine a very likely scenario. Here we have a man who’s frequenting the apartment of the woman you’re seeing. Because of her situation she can’t easily brush him off. He’s happy to help her, but he wants more and he lets her know it. I can’t imagine you’d feel too good about that, being her lover.’
‘So what – I lost my cool and killed him? Do I look that stupid?’ Terasaki’s voice echoed loudly in the van.
Sasagaki held up a hand. ‘I’m just imagining a possible scenario, that’s all. I’m sorry if I touched a nerve. Incidentally, do you remember where you were on the twelfth of this month from six to seven in the afternoon? It was a Friday.’
‘What, you want an alibi now?’ Terasaki said, rolling his eyes.
‘Something like that,’ Sasagaki said with a smile. People were quick to mention alibis lately thanks to a popular detective show on TV.
Terasaki took out a small appointment book and flipped back through the pages.
‘Let’s see, on the evening of the twelfth I was in Toyonaka making a delivery.’
‘Around what time was this?’
‘I got to the customer’s house around six.’
Which would give him a perfect alibi, Sasagaki thought. Another miss.
‘And the delivery went smoothly?’
‘Actually, no. I guess there was a bit of a miscommunication,’ Terasaki said, slightly mumbling his words. ‘She was out when I got there. So I just left my business card at the door and went home.’
‘They weren’t expecting you?’
‘I thought I’d told her I was coming on the phone. I guess she didn’t hear me.’
‘So you went home without seeing anyone, is that correct?’
‘Yeah, but I did leave my card.’
Sasagaki nodded, thinking that there were any number of ways he could have got his card there.
Sasagaki took down the address and phone number of the house in Toyonaka and let him go.
Back at the station, Nakatsuka wanted to know if Sasagaki thought he was guilty.
‘Fifty-fifty,’ was Sasagaki’s honest reply. ‘He doesn’t have an alibi and he has a motive. I think, if he were in league with Fumiyo Nishimoto, he could’ve pulled it off pretty smoothly. The thing that bothers me is that, if they were the killers, then they were acting far too nonchalant about it afterwards. Normally you’d expect them to avoid seeing each other until things died down. But they didn’t change a thing. Terasaki was still going to eat lunch at her noodle shop every day. It doesn’t make sense.’
Nakatsuka listened in silence, but his sour frown alone was proof enough of his agreement.
The team launched into a full investigation on the proprietor of Swallowtail Inc. Terasaki lived by himself in an apartment building about a fifteen-minute drive to the south. He’d been married once, but it had ended five years earlier in an amicable divorce.
He was well thought of by his customers. He worked quickly, was happy to take difficult requests, and his prices were low. The small retailers he worked with loved him. None of this, of course, cleared his name of murder. On the contrary, the investigative team was interested in how, by all indications, he seemed to be running a shoestring operation, never rising into wealth through his efforts.
‘I could see him murdering Mr Kirihara because he was putting the moves on Fumiyo, but I can also see him lured in by the one million,’ the detective assigned to look into Terasaki’s financial situation said during a team meeting. Many of the other investigators agreed.
They had already confirmed Terasaki’s lack of an alibi. When they went to the house where he claimed to have left his business card they found that the woman who lived there had been at a relative’s that day and had not come home until eleven at night. She had found Terasaki’s business card under her door, but there was no way of telling when he had left it there. When they asked whether she had been expecting him to come that day, she told them, ‘He said he’d be coming around then, but I don’t think we agreed on that day in particular.’ Then she added, ‘Actually, I remember telling Mr Terasaki on the phone that the twelfth wasn’t good for me.’
This last part was particularly significant. If Terasaki had known she would be out that day, it would have made her house an excellent choice to visit in an attempt to create an alibi.
The prevailing opinion in the investigative team was gradually turning against Terasaki.
However they still lacked any substantial evidence. None of the hairs recovered at the scene of the crime matched Terasaki’s, nor did any of the fingerprints. There were no witnesses. If Fumiyo and Terasaki had been conspirators, they would have had to be in communication on the day of the murder, yet there were no signs of that either. Some of the older detectives thought they should just interrogate him until he confessed, but as it stood, they didn’t even have enough to get a warrant.