“I’m not usually here over spring vacation. I’m surprised you found me.”
“Actually, I dropped by your apartment first, but it seemed you were out so I called the school. They said something about a make-up test? You have to give make-up tests during spring break?”
“It’s worse for the students, I assure you. And today wasn’t a make-up test. It was a re-make-up test.”
“You don’t say. Let me guess: you like putting pretty tough questions on your tests.”
“Why do you say that?” Ishigami asked, looking the detective in the eye.
“Just a feeling.”
“They’re not tough, though. I merely take advantage of the blind spots created when students assume too much. And they usually assume too much.”
“Blind spots?”
“For instance, I give them a question that looks like a geometry problem, but is in fact an algebra problem. If all they’ve done is memorize the problem sheets in their books—” Ishigami abruptly stopped talking and sat down across from the detective. “I’m sorry. I’m guessing you didn’t come here to talk about high school mathematics. So, why are you here?”
“Nothing much, really,” Kusanagi said, joining him at the table and pulling out his notepad. “I just wanted to ask you about that night again.”
“By ‘that night,’ you mean…?”
“The tenth of March,” Kusanagi said. “I believe you’re aware that’s when the incident occurred?”
“You mean the body they found by the Arakawa River? That one?”
“Not the Arakawa, the Old Edogawa,” Kusanagi corrected him without missing a beat. “You may remember me and my partner coming to ask you questions about Ms. Hanaoka? Asking if you’d noticed anything peculiar that night?”
“Yes, I remember. And I’m pretty sure I told you I didn’t recall anything out of the ordinary.”
“That’s right, you did. I was just hoping you could try to remember that evening in a little more detail for me.”
“How do you mean? It’s hard to remember something when nothing happened.” Ishigami let himself smile a bit.
“Right, but what I’m looking for—or what I was hoping to find—was something that maybe you didn’t pay particular attention to at the time, but might actually turn out to be a valuable piece of evidence for us. Maybe you can just tell me about that evening in as much detail as possible? Don’t worry if it has nothing to do with any incident.”
“All right. I suppose,” Ishigami said, scratching the back of his neck.
“I know it was a while ago now, so I brought something I thought might help you remember the day.” Kusanagi handed over a chart of Ishigami’s work schedule for the week of March tenth, showing a list of the classes he’d taught along with the school events schedule. He must have procured the information from the office. “Does anything here jog your memory?” the detective asked, smiling.
The moment he looked at the chart, Ishigami understood what the detective was up to. He wasn’t here about Yasuko Hanaoka, he was here to establish Ishigami’s alibi. Though Ishigami couldn’t say for certain why the police were suddenly turning their eyes in his direction, he suspected it had something to do with Manabu Yukawa’s strange behavior.
In any case, if the detective was here for an alibi, he’d better answer him. Ishigami settled himself in his chair and sat up straight. “I went home that night after the judo team finished practice, so it would have been around seven o’clock. I think I told you that before, too.”
“Indeed you did, indeed you did. So, you were in your apartment for the whole time after that?”
“Well, I think I probably was, yes,” Ishigami said, leaving his words purposely vague. He wanted to see how Kusanagi would respond.
“Did no one visit the apartment that night? Or call on the phone?”
Ishigami lifted an eyebrow. “Whose apartment do you mean? Ms. Hanaoka’s?”
“No, your apartment.”
“Mine?”
“I know you must be wondering what this has to do with our investigation. Believe me, we’re not investigating you. We’re simply trying to establish everything that happened in the general vicinity of Yasuko Hanaoka that night. That’s all.”
A pretty frail excuse, Ishigami thought, though he expected that the detective knew he was being obvious and that the man just didn’t care.
“I didn’t see anyone that night. I’m pretty sure nobody called, either. I rarely have visitors.”
“I see.”
“I’m sorry I don’t have more to tell you after you came all this way.”
“No, please, don’t worry about me. I’m sorry for taking your time. Oh, incidentally—” Kusanagi picked up Ishigami’s work schedule. “According to this, you took the morning of the eleventh off, only coming into work that afternoon. Did something happen?”
“You mean the next day? No, nothing happened. I just wasn’t feeling well, so I slept in. Third-quarter classes were almost completely over anyway, so I figured I could get away with it.”
“Did you see a doctor?”
“No, it wasn’t anything so serious. Which is why I ended up going in that afternoon.”
“Just now at the office I asked the assistant there, and he said that you rarely take time off, Mr. Ishigami. Just mornings sometimes. About once a month?”
“It’s how I use my vacation time, yes.”
“Right. The office told me you are often up late working on mathematics, and you take off the following morning, something like that?”
“That sounds like something I would have told the office, yes.”
“And this happens about once a month or so…” Kusanagi’s eyes dropped to the work schedule again. “But you took the morning off on the tenth, too—in other words, the day before. The office said they weren’t much surprised the first time, but when you took two mornings off in a row that got them. This was the first time that happened, was it?”
“I guess it might have been.” Ishigami put a hand to his forehead. He knew he had to answer carefully. “I didn’t have any particular reason for doing it that time, though. Like you said, I was up late the night before the tenth, and went to work in the afternoon. That night, I felt like I had a bit of a fever, and that’s why I was out the next morning as well.”
“But you recovered enough to come in after lunch?”
“That’s right.” Ishigami nodded.
“Right,” Kusanagi echoed, his eyes full of suspicion.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, I was just thinking, if you managed to go to school for the afternoon, you can’t have been too sick that morning. But then again, if they weren’t too sick, most people would have gone to work anyway. Especially if they’d missed their morning classes just the day before.” Kusanagi was openly doubting Ishigami now. He must’ve thought whatever information he might get out of the math teacher would be worth annoying him.
Ishigami smiled wryly, refusing to rise to the bait. “If you say so. I just remember having trouble getting out of bed that morning. But right before lunch I started feeling a lot better, so I decided to go in. Mostly because, as you pointed out, I had just taken the morning off the day before.”
All the while Ishigami talked, Kusanagi was staring him straight in the eye. The detective’s gaze was piercing and fierce—the gaze of someone who truly believed that when a suspect wasn’t telling the truth, it would show in his eyes.
“I see. Well, all that judo must keep you in good shape. Probably only takes you half a day to recover from a fever, eh? Wish I had your constitution. The fellow at the office said he’d never even heard of you calling in sick.”
“That’s hardly true. I catch colds, too, you know.”