The rain had at last stopped, and Shinji left without a word. But he had only gone a few paces down the narrow street before the significance of the boy’s words struck home. He rushed back and caught Nobu halfway up the stairs.
“You said ‘mole,’” he panted. “Do you mean that the customer on your birthday had a mole, too?”
“Sure—a big one on the base of his nose.” He looked down the stairs at Shinji and laid his finger down one side of his nose suggestively.
“Are you sure the customer was a man? Could it not possibly have been a woman in disguise?”
The boy blinked in surprise at this peculiar question, but at length replied, “I have no idea—could be. I have lots of oddball customers, but it doesn’t worry me so long as they pay. But if it was a woman, I don’t know what on earth she wanted from me.” He turned his back and vanished up the stairs, his full buttocks twinkling under the tight jeans. Shinji stood there in stupefaction. At last it was all becoming clear.
Three out of the five people with that rare blood group had met someone with a mole on the side of his or her nose. But in every case the circumstances had differed. And, even more significant, those three meetings had occurred on the day of one of the murders or on the day before. Three moles on three noses, all connecting up in one line. It hadn’t occurred to him until he had heard the boy’s last words. But who could she be, this woman with a mole on her nose? What was she after? Question after question poured through his mind.
He hurried away from the shady quarter. On the main street, he looked for a public telephone.
He went into a coffee shop and used the public telephone to call up the old man at his home, but the maid answered and grumbled that he was not back yet. “And he didn’t even say where he was going,” she complained.
Where could he be, all by himself at this time of night? Shinji decided to wait a while for his return home and took a corner seat and ordered a cup of coffee. A few seats away, an avant-garde group of young people who seemed to be led by a young woman wearing white lipstick were striking extravagant poses and putting white tablets into their beer. Shinji ignored them. Getting his memo book out of his pocket instead, he began to write down his conclusions from his research to date:
1. First murder. (November 5)
Kimiko Tsuda.
Nothing discovered relating to this day.
2. Second murder. (December 19)
Fusako Aikawa.
On this day Seiji Tanikawa of the film-processing company first visited the Turkish bath at the behest of a woman with a mole on her nose.
3. Third murder. (January 15)
Mitsuko Kosugi.
Nobuya Mikami (of the gay bar) was called on the phone and went out to a customer he had never met before. This customer, described as a man of short stature with a muffled voice, also had a mole on the nose.
4. Event unknown. (January 14)
???????No murder case has been reported for this day. On this day, the cosmetics salesman sold fake jewelry to a woman with whom he went to an inn at Sendagaya. This lady, who had the appearance of being a married woman, was smartly dressed in a kimono and also had a mole on her nose.
Common points concerning the person who appeared before the three witnesses are as follows:
1. A fairly distinctive mole at the right side of the base of the nose.
2. Only one appearance in each case before disappearing.
3. Only approached men with blood of the AB Rh-negative group.
Shinji reread what he had written and contemplated. Although the gay boy had said that he had met a man, there was enough about his description to suggest that it could have been a woman in disguise. Above all, there was the mole.
So it was fair to assume that in all three cases, the person had been the same.
And it was highly likely that it was the same person who had telephoned the blood banks inquiring about the rare blood group.
So what lay behind this mysterious person’s actions?
Why did she meet people with AB Rh-negative blood on the day of the murder, or the day before?
Suppose all three men had told the truth, and she had collected blood from none of them, what was her purpose behind these meetings?
She had always effected contact through sex.
So…
Perhaps her target was the semen, and not the blood, of the men! This seemed to Shinji to make sense.
A murderess… gathering secretions from the bodies of men… leaving them in the bodies of her victims… how morbid! If he were a psychopathologist, he might be able to explain the distortion of the criminal’s mind, but as a lawyer he had no theories. His mind was horrified at the thought of this woman who gathered the sperm of men with clammy hands and then bent over the bodies of the women whom she had strangled. Could it really have been a woman, and not a man in disguise, who had entrapped Ichiro Honda?
He looked again at the list. There was no appearance noted on the first occasion, the murder of Kimiko Tsuda. Did he, or she, visit someone with this obscure blood group on that day, too? he wondered. If so, it had to be either the day laborer Oba or else Yamazaki, the medical intern. Which of them had lied to him?
By process of elimination, the day laborer seemed the most unlikely, particularly if the criminal was a woman. And then in his mind’s eye he was again sitting in the Bluebird coffee shop, facing the pale face of Yamazaki. What had the man said in response to his questions about blood? “Blood is an old-fashioned topic.” What had he meant? And then Shinji suddenly realized.
Had Yamazaki not spoken of an interview with a third-rate magazine… on the topic of artificial insemination? Was not this a hint? Had the woman with the mole also approached Yamazaki? What had transpired to link him, his blood group, the woman with the mole, and the case of Ichiro Honda?
Perhaps the sentencing of Honda to death had given him a guilty conscience; perhaps this was why he had remained silent about… about what? About the giving of his sperm. Shinji felt sure that it was Yamazaki who could fill in the blank space in his notebook. He would visit him again at the hospital tomorrow.
He stirred his lukewarm coffee. One question remained in his mind. The cosmetics salesman had met the woman with the mole on the fourteenth of January. If he wasn’t lying, and if the woman had not taken sperm from him, then what had she taken? The only possible answer would be blood.
When he was lying insensible on the bed, she had taken his blood.
That was it; that made sense. So the old man’s theory that the criminal had taken blood from these men was correct! And his harvest today had been a woman with a mole on the base of her nose.
Suddenly he felt weary. He called the old man’s home again, but still he was not back. He paid and left.
In the street, he suddenly thought of his empty apartment where no one was awaiting him. And by contrast, he thought of the plump, white hands of Yasue, the girl in the Turkish bath, and of the slim nape at the back of the neck of Michiko Ono as she had walked ahead of him in the damp-smelling library.
He shook his head to clear it of such thoughts and walked heavily toward the station.
THE BLACK STAIN
The waiting room near to the entrance of the hospital was crowded with outpatients with bandages on them and with mothers soothing fretful children. It was just after 9 a.m.—opening time. Shinji sat on a hard wooden bench waiting to see intern Yamazaki. A little girl with short, bobbed hair sitting next to him had just wiped her caramel-covered hands all over his trousers; the child’s mother had said, “Don’t do that!” absently, her eyes looking away at something else.