Tokyo Zangyo

Chapter 2

Chapter 2Detective Hiroshi Shimizu reached for his buzzing cellphone, a victory of habit over fatigue. He flipped his legs over the edge of the bed and listened to explanations and directions, and then orders, from Detective Sakaguchi, head of homicide.

Half listening to Sakaguchi and half-asleep, Hiroshi looked at Ayana’s long black hair draped over her pillow. Hiroshi ran his hand along the curve of her body from her shoulder to her hip, giving her butt a squeeze, soft enough to let her keep sleeping, firm enough to rouse her if she was half-awake. He loved the way she made love sleepy, humming, flushed, opening to it gradually.

She didn’t stir, so better to let her sleep. She’d been working late at the archives every night the past couple of weeks, a massive reshelving project that left her exhausted. For weeks, she’d come home and flung herself on the sofa, skipping kendo practice. Neither of them had cooked for weeks. They’d ordered out or Hiroshi microwaved something.

Hiroshi eased himself up and struggled into some clothes as quietly as he could. In the kitchen, he dug into a bag of chocolate croissants. He stuffed one in his mouth, dropped an apple in his pocket and left the bag out for Ayana, the top rolled tight.

***

When he got out of the taxi across from Tokyo Station, Hiroshi followed the glow of the LED balloon lights that lit up the crime scene. He walked past two coffee shops, both disappointingly closed. Ahead, blocking all traffic, tarps were stretched across the street and sidewalks. He gave up on the coffee and headed toward the lights.

Hiroshi flipped his badge to the officer at the entrance and looked for Sakaguchi. He stood a head taller and much wider than everyone else on the force, so was always easy to find. Sakaguchi signed a form and started to limp toward Hiroshi. As a former sumo wrestler, Sakaguchi had always seemed immune to pain, and to fatigue. He’d grown up in the poor part of Osaka, where work was the backbone of the day and complaints were left unspoken.

“Your leg all right?” Hiroshi asked.

Sakaguchi stood rebalancing himself, letting the weight down slowly on his knee. “Doctor recommends surgery.”

“Take time off,” Hiroshi said.

“I would, but now there’s this.” Sakaguchi leaned over to reset his knee brace.

Hiroshi wondered where he’d found one big enough for his tree trunk of a leg. He knew Sakaguchi could only find clothes and shoes at the one super men’s size shop in Tokyo.

Sakaguchi straightened up to take a clipboard from a young detective, scanned the form and signed it. Sakaguchi’s injury occurred when he stepped wrong chasing a suspect. It compounded the injury that had sidelined him from sumo years ago, but which had led him to take the police exam in Tokyo. This injury, though, looked like it would result only in surgery.

Hiroshi looked at the medical examiners working on the sidewalk. Takamatsu, his senpai and erstwhile mentor, was kneeling over the body and surveying every mangled bit.

The body was a tangle of limbs, one leg crossed backward, the other underneath, one arm flopped to the side and the other, undamaged, angled eerily upward as if pushing to rise from the street. The rest of the body and head was clumped across the sidewalk like wet red clay. Takamatsu was inured to every grisly detail. At every murder scene, Hiroshi looked away, but Takamatsu looked closer. Takamatsu had been a family friend, Hiroshi wasn’t sure of the exact connection, and had been the one to get him the position in homicide in charge of white-collar cases, overseas-related issues, and anything involving English. He was dragged into cases like this one, though, when he couldn’t find a good enough excuse to work from his office.

“Gives you renewed respect for gravity.” Sakaguchi looked up at the top of the building. “The windows don’t open.”

“Who called it in?” Hiroshi squinted against the lights.

“Some tourists from Indonesia.”

“Ruined their vacation.”

Sakaguchi said, “You want to get started on the roof? I’ll send Takamatsu up when he’s done down here.”

Hiroshi headed through the markers next to splattered bits of the body. He didn’t look down until he got to the entrance and hurried inside.

Above the lobby a huge sign announced the name of the company—Senden Central. Long, vertical banners stretched from ceiling to floor with city scenes of New York, London, and Singapore. Slogans cascaded down inside speech bubbles from the toothy smiles of female models: “Now Senden Infinity,” “Going Global,” “From Tokyo to the World,” “Bringing People Together.” The banners curved like bows tied over the well-wrapped image the company had of itself.

On a chair in the corner, a gray-haired security guard sat rubbing his head and staring at the floor. A young officer from the nearby police box held open the elevator door for Hiroshi and reached in to press the button for the roof.

The roof was bathed in LED balloon lights that solarized the bare trees and small shrubs planted in containers. Together with the picnic tables, the roof felt like a small park. Hiroshi pulled his too-thin wool jacket tight and turned up his collar against the cold, wet March wind. He followed the path of small plastic markers to the outer protective fence. It had been cut open and bent back.

His chest tightened with a shot of anxiety.

Growing up in Tokyo, he’d never given a thought to skyscrapers, but during his years studying in Boston he became used to lower architectural vistas. Linda, his Boston girlfriend who came back with him to Tokyo, loved taking photos from high up in Tokyo’s tallest buildings, but all Hiroshi could think about was earthquakes and how to scramble back inside four solid walls close to earth. In the end, Linda scrambled back to Boston, and Hiroshi stayed in Tokyo, a city of walls close—and far—from earth.

“Can’t help but think about it, can you?” Takamatsu asked.

Hiroshi jumped. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“I always think about jumping.” Takamatsu smiled. His Italian leather trench coat looked a lot warmer than the jacket Hiroshi had thrown on. Whatever the weather, Takamatsu dressed with an effortless correctness that covered up the time it took, probably because he spent most of his life dressed right—and dressed well—for investigating outside. He returned to his desk in the detective’s room only when necessary. Hiroshi wore just enough to get from apartment to train, train to office, a place he preferred to crime scenes.

Crime scene specialists were looking at a pair of tatami slippers and discussing the best way to get prints off the fence, if they even could.

Watching them, Takamatsu said, “The fence looks like the kind they use for baseball backstops.”

“Did he cut it open himself?” Hiroshi asked. He stared at the spot where the man had stood, making his last decision, the only one that really mattered.

“Doesn’t seem like something a bucho department head would do himself.” Takamatsu turned to a young woman in the crime scene crew. “No wire cutters anywhere?”

She didn’t know, but hurried off to check.

“Of course there won’t be any wire cutters.” Takamatsu lit a cigarette and straightened his cuffs. “Whoever pushed him took them.”

“Maybe he did it himself?”

“Maybe. Then there’ll be wire cutters.” As Takamatsu stooped down to look at the V, the smell and smoke of his cigarette vanished in the strong breeze. “He set his sandals together neatly. What most suicides do.”

“I wonder why they didn’t have a stronger fence?” Hiroshi shivered in the cold wind.

“It probably takes several suicides to be worth the budget. After one of those pop musicians jumped, every high school in the country put up fencing to stop copycats.”

“A windfall for fence companies.”

“Roof fencing companies. A Tokyo specialty.” Takamatsu took out his portable ashtray and slipped the butt inside.

“How did he even get up here?” Hiroshi pulled his coat tighter and stared at the dawn light falling on the thick trees around the Imperial Palace beyond the glassed-in side of the roof.

Takamatsu said, “The guard said he hadn’t seen anything, but they’re looking at the security video now.”

The young crime scene investigator came hurrying over, shaking her head—no, there were no wire fence cutters in evidence.

“And the guy was a department head?” Hiroshi asked.

“No doubt an asshole like all of them. Or an embezzler. You can’t climb the ladder that high without making enemies…and without being a little corrupt.”

“Aren’t you jumping ahead of things?”

“That’s our job.” Takamatsu smiled. “Sakaguchi got you out of bed to start digging into his finances, and the company’s. That’ll save us interviewing a stream of boring company employees. I’d rather look through all the video footage than talk to even one of them.”

“I’ll remember you said that,” Hiroshi said.

Detectives Osaki and Sugamo stood by the door, their bulky figures casting wide shadows across the rooftop. Hiroshi trusted them about everything. They were the earthquake-proof foundation under every case, resisting every seismic shift. They’d worked in the department longer than he had, working their way up from beat cops just like Sakaguchi had. Hiroshi had been dropped in at the top, but the two detectives never displayed the least envy that Hiroshi could detect. They didn’t have time for it. The crime scene crew, smaller than Osaki and Sugamo by half, reflexively stepped aside as they approached. They were almost as large as Sakaguchi.

“Where’s Ueno?” Hiroshi asked.

Sugamo replied, “We’ve been letting him sleep in. Infection from the gunshot wound still. Late mornings and desk work until it heals.”

Osaki said, “Takamatsu, you were right. It is that guy.”

Takamatsu pulled out another cigarette, cupping his hand to light it in the breeze.

“What guy?” Hiroshi asked.

“What girl,” Takamatsu corrected.

Osaki said, “That girl who worked a hundred hours of overtime in one month.”

Sugamo shrugged. “We’ve had overtime like that.”

“We’re cops,” Takamatsu said. “There’s no overtime.”

Osaki began to explain, “That girl who killed herself after posting on Twitter how she was harassed at work. It went viral and her mother sued the company.”

“And won,” Takamatsu added.

“Well, the boss who drove her to suicide was this guy,” Osaki said.

“Which guy?” Hiroshi looked confused.

Sugamo pointed to the cut-open fence. “It was the exact same spot.”

“Same spot?” Hiroshi asked.

“Where the girl jumped. The one who was overworked and harassed to death. Wasn’t any fencing then. They put that in after.”

They all looked at the spot. Takamatsu pulled out another cigarette. He seemed to be smoking more than usual.

Sakaguchi came out of the door and the crime scene crew flocked to him, pestering him with forms to sign, and pointing at the carts loaded with evidence.

When he finished, Sakaguchi ambled toward Takamatsu and Hiroshi. Hiroshi winced at Sakaguchi’s obvious pain each time his weight fell on his injured knee.

Before he could get to them, he was intercepted by two people, a tall, thin man in a suit and a tall young woman clutching a leather notepad and shivering in the cold. Hiroshi could not see her face well in the shadow of the lights but she kept her gaze fixed on him.

Sakaguchi waved Hiroshi closer and said, “This is the head of Senden’s Human Resources Department, Nakata, and his assistant, Chizu, was it?”

The tall, polite man handed his meishi business card to the detectives with a curt bow.

Hiroshi said, “You’re head of HR? Did you notice anything about the, um, deceased?” Hiroshi realized he didn’t know the dead man’s name.

Nakata gave a tight nod. “Onizuka. He was working as usual, getting ready to move to the London office where he would be in charge.”

Hiroshi asked, “When was he leaving?”

“He was going to take over on April first, the start of the corporate year,” Nakata answered. He wore a well-cut blue suit and was taller than Hiroshi, standing calmly, as if there were no wind sweeping across the rooftop.

Hiroshi said, “For most people, being posted abroad would be a step up in their career.”

Nakata nodded in agreement.

“We’ll need to see his personnel file, and we’d like to talk with the others in his section. Were other employees set to go abroad with him?”

“If you need that information now, we can go inside. Or I can meet you later today or tomorrow if you—”

“Tomorrow...I mean later this afternoon, would be fine,” Hiroshi said, wondering if it was.

“Please set up an appointment with my assistant, Chizu.” He turned to the tall woman shivering in the cold. She stood as still as she could without a coat. She was tall, pretty and aloof. She handed Hiroshi her meishi. Nakata bowed before walking away, and Chizu pivoted and followed.

Hiroshi watched them walk away and looked up at the sky. The sun was just coming up and the sky looked huge without being blocked by imposing buildings, interiorized spaces, and the distracting rush of Tokyo life.

From the roof, it was easy to see the mixed colors of the sunrise—oranges, purples, soft yellows—brushed onto thin clouds. In the distance below, the grey buildings of the city rose up like endless stupas honoring the national religion of economics and the sub-sects of business, transportation, residence and shopping.

Sakaguchi rolled his head and stretched his huge body in resignation. “The chief’s already called and told me he wants this quickly resolved. Senden is one of Japan’s flagship companies.”

Sugamo said, “We’ll get onto the security footage.”

“Cameras all over the building, no doubt,” Osaki said.

Takamatsu looked at Hiroshi. “We need to tell the deceased bucho’s wife and talk with the girl’s mother. One of the two might solve it for us.”

“I’m loaded with cases and I’ve got meetings today with overseas bureaus that can’t be rescheduled,” Hiroshi said.

Sakaguchi dropped his bear paw of a hand on Hiroshi’s shoulder. “Sugamo, you drive Takamatsu and Hiroshi. Maybe you can get Hiroshi back in time for his all-important meetings.”