Masako Togawa - The Lady Killer

He dropped his glance back to the documents on his desk as a symbol of dismissal.

During the next week Shinji applied himself to the task that Hatanaka had given him whenever he had a spare moment between his routine cases. Not only was this a big case by his standards: he had another reason of his own for being so interested in it. For on the list of Honda’s conquests, a mere five women, there was one name that he recognized. The name and the personal history fitted. They belonged to a clerk at a lending library whom Shinji had known at school.

This coincidence struck Shinji as being ironic and in a way amusing. But was there not something of destiny in it, too?

Shinji decided to tackle the two most difficult women first, the ones who had refused to say anything to the police. He felt like a child saving the best things on his plate till the end. But after all he could get nothing out of either of those two. In one case, he had gone to a modern apartment block in Meguro; the door had been opened by a woman cradling a baby in her arms. She drove him away fiercely, treating him as if he were a door-to-door salesman or something. It was hardly surprising, he reflected; what married woman was going to endanger her position by talking about an old romance with a convicted murderer?

The third woman on his list was a Miss Kyoko Matsuda, aged nineteen, working in a coffee shop in Shinjuku. He decided to drop in there on the way to the office in Hibiya.

When he got there, he found that the shop was tucked under a bridge that carried the Koshu Kaido expressway over a humbler road. It was a cheap nighttime drinking area, and the neon signs and signboards looked dusty in the strong sunshine of the day. There was a big sign outside the shop: MORNING SERVICE, COFFEE AND TOAST. He went in. As he had expected, it was not crowded at this hour; the only customer was a man immersed in a racing paper.

“Is Miss Kyoko Matsuda in?”

The cashier to whom he had put this question nodded in the direction of a cheap restaurant opposite. “She’s gone to early lunch over there.”

“Can you tell me what kind of clothes she is wearing?”

The woman looked at him suspiciously for a moment, her surprise creasing the heavy makeup she wore even by day. Eventually she shrugged and replied, “She’s in a yellow cardigan.” Shinji thanked her and left the shop.

The restaurant to which he had been directed was long and low; in his fancy, it looked like a stranded eel. Arrayed in the windows of the narrow frontage were wax models of the various dishes served: peas boiled in honey and sweet bean jam, azuki bean soup with rice cake, rice balls, a few Chinese dishes, pork cutlets. He pushed his way in through the low door.

Inside, all the customers were women; there was not a male to be seen. He quickly identified Kyoko Matsuda; she was sitting at a table by the door, her back to him. He took the seat opposite her.

“I apologize for disturbing you,” he said, presenting his name card.

“Quite all right,” she said cheerfully, still plying her chopsticks. Shinji began to feel a glimmer of hope.

Just then a waitress came up and presented him with a menu. He would have to order something; without thinking, he pointed at a dish called tokoroten , a vinegared seaweed jelly flavored with horseradish. Too late he regretted ordering such an eccentric dish; moreover, it was one that women tended to eat more than men. But Kyoko looked up smiling.

“How delicious! I’ll have one, too.” And she pushed her empty plate toward the waitress.

When they were alone, Shinji smiled at her wryly.

“I hear you were a friend of Ichiro Honda.”

“Yes. About a year ago.”

“Did he come to the coffee shop, then?”

“No.” She shook her head and went on. “He was sitting next to me at the cinema. That’s how I met him. He told me he was a second-generation American Japanese, and my aunt lives in San Francisco, so that’s how we got talking. I found him interesting, and we both got the same idea at once—to go out and paint the town red together. We went to a bar I know and drank gin fizzes—lots of them.” She giggled.

“And then?” asked Shinji.

She concentrated on her food for a moment, plunging her chopsticks busily into the bowl.

“And then nothing. He said good night and I went home.”

Shinji cursed the clumsiness of his interrogation. He would have to do better than this. How could he get the answer he wanted questioning her in this way?

The waitress brought over two dishes of tokoroten , and Kyoko attacked hers wolfishly. Shinji followed suit but got too much horseradish in his first mouthful; the pungency assailed his sinuses.

He tried again, deciding to be more blunt.

“You became lovers, of course. So tell me what you think. Was he as abnormal as the papers say?”

She shrugged her shoulders and dilated her nostrils.

“You’re asking me the same thing as that policeman did who came here the other day. Asked if he ever tried to strangle me.”

“And?”

“Of course he didn’t—what do you think he was, a pervert or something? I’ll tell you this, though: he was really passionate—the most passionate man I’ve known,” she added self-importantly.

“Did you take him home with you?”

“Who, me? You must be joking. My apartment block is full of respectable families who like to spy on a working girl.”

“I see. How many times did you meet him altogether, then?”

“Well, maybe ten times or so—I forget.”

Shinji smiled to himself; a likely story, indeed, he thought. Honda never used his women more than once or twice, tiring of them quickly and moving on. The girl was boasting or disguising her injured pride.

Kyoko had finished her tokoroten . “Pay for mine, will you?” she said. “I’ve got to be off—if you want anything else, come and see me in the coffee shop.” And she got up and left without further ceremony.

Not a word of inquiry about Honda. The affair had just been another small incident in her life. Shinji dropped some coins on the counter and left.

Outside, the sun was beating down more fiercely than ever.

On the following day, Shinji visited the two remaining women on his list. First he went to see a chanson singer who worked at a music café on the Ginza. Before setting forth, he rang the establishment and inquired into her exact schedule for stage appearances. It was thus that he made his way down the stairs of the Salon de D at 3 p.m., passing on the way a poster upon which was emblazoned in large letters the name of the woman he had come to see. At the entrance they charged him 150 yen, giving him a ticket good for one drink and telling him that all further drinks would cost him a uniform 150 yen.

He made his way inside. It was pitch dark, only a spotlight playing upon the woman on the stage, who seemed to be whispering rather than singing into the microphone into which she leaned like a lover. Shinji took a seat at the back and watched and listened; this was the woman he had come to see.

Finally the song came to an end, the woman throwing her arms forward theatrically as if to embrace the microphone; the spotlight faded and simultaneously the house lights came on. There were, as he had expected, hardly any other customers around at this time of day. So far, so good. He summoned the white-coated waiter and asked him to present his compliments to Shoko Toda, handing over his business card as he made his request.

A few minutes passed, and then a statuesque woman in a backless black satin dress came over to him, holding his card in her hand as if it were a talisman. She presented herself and, in most formal language, asked how she might be of service to lawyer Shinji.