“Kids like him piss me off. Think they’re God’s gift to the world when they can’t do a damn thing for themselves. I blame the parents. Kids only turn out like that if they’re not raised right. Some parents are so terrified of their children hating them that they don’t discipline them. That’s a surefire way to turn kids into arrogant little shits.”
It was only after Uesugi had come to the end of his rant that he realized he’d overstepped. He cleared his throat. “What’s that fool of a boy done anyway?” he asked.
“I tried asking him about his mother’s way of speaking: you know, who she was formal with, who she was more casual with.”
Uesugi was surprised to discover that Kaga was trying to work out who had called Mineko Mitsui from the pay phone. He couldn’t help being interested. “Oh?”
“Basically, he thought that his mother was the same as most people. If she was talking to someone she knew well, then she would be very relaxed and informal. Conversely, if she was dealing with someone she didn’t know well, she could be very proper and polite.”
“Talk about useless. Hardly worth asking the question, if that’s all the answer you’re going to get.”
“I followed that up by asking him to provide me with a list of everyone Mineko Mitsui spoke to without bothering with all the formalities and niceties — everyone he could think of, at least. He hadn’t seen his mother for two years, so chances are he forgot a lot of people. Still, he did his best and came up with quite a few names. Can you guess who was on his list?” Kaga paused for dramatic effect. “Yosaku Kishida, the accountant.”
“What!” Uesugi’s eyes were like saucers. “You’re kidding me?”
“Apparently, our accountant friend regularly dropped by the Kiyose home. Koki often heard his mother chatting with him in the most casual manner. Of course, given Kishida’s long relationship with her husband, there’s nothing extraordinary about that. Nonetheless, Ms. Mitsui apparently was informal only with people she knew well.”
A groan burst from Uesugi’s lips. “And Kishida just told us that he barely went to the Kiyoses’ house and didn’t know the victim particularly well.”
“Smelling a bit fishy, eh?” Kaga grinned merrily.
Curling his lip, Uesugi looked Kaga in the eye.
“Now I know why you were so eager to come with me. I wonder if that discrepancy is enough to make Kishida a suspect, though? The guy has no motive for killing Mineko Mitsui.”
“Maybe we just haven’t found it yet.”
“Knock it off, will you? If you look at it that way, there will be no end of suspects.” Uesugi turned his back on Kaga and walked off. After a few steps, he paused and spun on his heel. “If you’re desperate to make an arrest, you’d better find another partner. I just do what the higher-ups tell me — no more, no less. My retirement’s just around the corner.”
Kaga merely grinned. Uesugi couldn’t tell whether he’d taken his words to heart.
3
An enormous truck roared past. Beside it, in the outer lane, a red sedan was accelerating fast. An SUV was approaching rapidly from behind.
Out of nowhere, a motorbike appeared. It shot past the SUV and threaded its way between the truck and the red sedan at breakneck speed.
A can of coffee in his hand, Uesugi watched the motorbike until it was out of sight. Then he sighed and took a swig of his drink. He wondered if his body temperature had affected the coffee, making it go from piping hot to lukewarm.
Uesugi was on his way back to the police station after a before-hours visit to a nightclub. Since Yuri Miyamoto used to work as a hostess, it made sense to make inquiries at her old workplace. They needed to pin down the nature of her relationship with Naohiro Kiyose and then, if the relationship was a sexual one, to find out when it had started.
He spoke to several people, all of whom had the same disappointing answer: there was nothing going on between Naohiro Kiyose and Yuri Miyamoto.
“If you saw them together, you’d know what I’m talking about,” declared a grizzled male employee of the club in a black suit. “Yuri was Mr. Kiyose’s favorite girl — no doubt about that — but I don’t think he had designs on her. He enjoyed talking to her. How can I put it? He behaved more like a dad with his daughter.”
Maybe I’m wasting my time here, thought Uesugi. Maybe we’re just overcomplicating things. What if Kiyose had simply decided to offer an office job to his favorite hostess — and that was all there was to it? In that case, Mineko Mitsui would have no grounds to sue Kiyose for damages, and Kiyose would have no motive for murdering her.
Uesugi had just gulped down the dregs of his lukewarm coffee, when he heard a voice to one side of him. “Thought I might find you here.” Kaga was walking toward him.
“How’d you know I’d be here?” Uesugi asked.
“One of your colleagues told me you’d gone to make inquiries in Ginza. He thought you’d probably walk back this way.”
Uesugi crushed the empty can in his fist.
“Some people would do well to keep their stupid mouths shut.”
If his colleague had told Kaga about this place, he’d probably filled Kaga in on the background. Uesugi couldn’t bring himself to look the other detective in the eye.
“What do you want?” asked Uesugi, his eyes averted.
“I want your opinion on something. Will you come to the apartment of the son of the accountant with me?”
“The damn accountant again? You just don’t know when to let things go, do you.”
“It wasn’t about tax returns.”
“What are you going on about now?”
“The reason why Ms. Mitsui called the Kishida Tax Accountancy office. He said she asked him about her tax returns. I don’t think that’s true.”
“What was the call about, then?”
“I’m guessing that she called Kishida to sound him out about the relationship between her ex-husband and Yuri Miyamoto. Was it sexual? When had it started? She may have mentioned something about a tax return, but just as a pretext for the call.”
Uesugi was quiet for a while. Kaga’s theory sounded plausible. The quickest way for Mineko to get the dirt on her ex-husband’s love life was to ask his friends. And if that person was someone she knew, so much the better.
“Why didn’t you mention that when we went to see Kishida?”
“At the time, I thought he knew that Naohiro Kiyose and Yuri Miyamoto were in a relationship and that he was concealing it from us. We now know that’s not the case. There is no special relationship between Mr. Kiyose and Ms. Miyamoto — or nothing romantic, at least. I imagine that you learned the same thing from your inquiries in Ginza, Detective Uesugi?”
Uesugi glared at Kaga.
“How did you find that out?”
“I’ll get to that later. Anyway, given that there was no untoward relationship between Mr. Kiyose and Ms. Miyamoto, then Mr. Kishida had nothing to hide from us. Does that mean Ms. Mitsui didn’t ask him anything substantial on the phone? No matter how you cut it, that just doesn’t seem likely.” Kaga swiveled around and looked Uesugi in the face. “You’ve got to admit that Yosaku Kishida is worth investigating?”
Uesugi snorted contemptuously.
“If you want to do that, then go talk to my captain. He can assign you another partner better suited to the job. The two of you can make your sensational little arrest together.”
“Except that you’re the detective in charge of investigating Kishida. From here we can get to his son’s apartment in fifteen minutes by car.”
“Yes, but—”
Ignoring Uesugi, Kaga raised his hand and hailed a passing taxi. Holding the door open with one hand, he motioned Uesugi in with the other.