A Midsummer's Equation

TWENTY-FIVE

Nishiguchi parted ways with Isobe and made it back to the Hari police station just after eight o’clock in the evening to find it bustling with activity. Apparently, whatever strings needed to be pulled to set up a special investigative task force had been pulled, and everyone with a free hand had been deputized. Officers were carrying computers and office supplies into the main conference room.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned to see Hashigami with a gloomy look on his face.

“Stand around like you don’t have anything to do and someone’s going to put you to work, Nishiguchi. You haven’t eaten yet, have you? Let’s go.”

“You sure we shouldn’t stay and lend a hand?”

“There’ll be plenty of time for that once the prefectural guys get here. Let’s live a little while we can.”

Hashigami walked out of the police station without waiting for an answer, so Nishiguchi followed. They went to a small place near the station and Nishiguchi ordered the yakiniku dinner set, fuel for the long slog ahead.

“Well, this case has gone from a simple accident to a full-blown disaster,” Hashigami grumbled. “That director from Tokyo threw us a curveball. The prefectural guys can’t stop dropping comments about how we screwed up the initial investigation. I mean, who would look at that and say it was something other than an accident? You can bet we’d get in trouble if we called for an autopsy on every single one of our cases.” He stabbed at his baked fish with his chopsticks.

“Where did they send you today?” Nishiguchi asked.

“East Hari. I spent the whole day walking around with Shizuoka Prefecture detectives, showing them around.”

“Up at that summer colony? Marine Hills, was it?”

“We went there too, but we spent most of our time doing questioning at a different development, where Senba’s wife’s family lived—the place is a parking lot now.”

“Senba’s wife was from East Hari?”

“Apparently so,” Hashigami said, setting down his chopsticks and pulling his notebook from the jacket he’d draped over the chair next to him. “According to the files we got from Tokyo, Senba was originally from Toyohashi City, down in Aichi. He came up to Tokyo when he got a job, and married a girl from the same company when he was thirty.”

Hashigami opened his notebook and showed Nishiguchi a page that read, “Etsuko, maiden name: Hino.”

“Wait, so his wife already had her family house in East Hari, but they bought a summer home there too?”

“Not quite. By the time they got married, her old house had already been taken down. She only lived in East Hari through high school. After that they moved to Yokohama. Right after she got married, they lived in Tokyo. When Senba turned thirty-five, he quit his job and started his own company doing electrical repairs. They were living in Meguro Ward at the time. Business went well, and at the age of forty-six, he bought the summer place in Marine Hills. I guess his wife always dreamed of living in a place where she could see the same ocean she looked out on as a child, so he bought it for her—that’s what he told the detectives after his arrest.” Hashigami put down his notebook and picked up his chopsticks.

“Huh. He doesn’t sound like such a bad guy, except for the murdering part,” Nishiguchi commented between bites.

“Well, things took a turn for the worse, obviously. He might’ve been flush enough with cash at one point to buy a summer home, but with a small business, one misstep can ruin everything. Turns out they’d gone out on a limb on a new project, and it became an albatross around their neck. Pretty soon they were drowning in debt and had to file for bankruptcy. He got to keep the house in Meguro and the summer home down here, but then his wife got sick. Cancer.”

Nishiguchi frowned. “You weren’t kidding about that turn for the worse.”

“Some guys just run out of luck,” Hashigami said, picking at his stew. “They sold the place in Meguro to pay the medical bills, and moved to East Hari. So his wife’s dream came true, though not quite in the way they’d hoped, and it didn’t last long. She died right after they moved down here, and then it was just him.”

“Not the easiest place to live by yourself,” Nishiguchi said, remembering the abandoned summer home.

“No, it’s not,” Hashigami agreed. “He stuck it out for a while, though. Until things got bad. So he headed back up to Tokyo and started doing work for other electricians. That’s right around when he got arrested.”

Nishiguchi nodded. “I read the file.”

“I guess he was broke, and lonely, and things just kind of fell apart. Not that it makes what he did any better, but I feel some sympathy for the guy.”

Nishiguchi’s chopsticks stopped in midair. “You think Tsukahara sympathized with Senba, too?”

Hashigami mulled it over for a moment, then said, “Why not? He was the arresting detective, so he was probably the one who wrote that report about Senba buying the place in Marine Hills. He might have thrown that detail in there to make things go a little easier for the guy in court.”

“Hmm. You suppose it’s possible Senba didn’t bear Tsukahara much of a grudge?”

“Could be,” Hashigami agreed. “There were still a few people left that knew his wife’s family in East Hari, and they told us that after Senba and his wife moved to Marine Hills, they came over to pay her old neighbors a visit every now and then. They all seem to think Senba was the nicest guy you could know. More than a few of them wondered why he did it, if there wasn’t some bigger reason for the murder. Come to think of it, I could see how that curiosity might’ve brought Tsukahara back to visit.”

“So Hidetoshi Senba and the current case are…?”

Hashigami shook his head. “Entirely unrelated. The prefectural guys lost interest pretty quick, too. Guess we were barking up the wrong tree.”