A Midsummer's Equation

FIFTY-FOUR

It was already past midnight by the time Kusanagi came home to a depressingly muggy apartment. He tossed his jacket on the bed and turned on the air conditioner. Pulling off his necktie, he grabbed a beer out of the fridge and drank, feeling the cool refreshment spread from his throat down through his body all the way out to his fingertips. Breathing out a long sigh, he collapsed onto his low sofa.

He undid a few buttons on the shirt and reached over to pull his jacket off of the bed. Fishing his phone from his jacket pocket, he pulled up the address book until he found the entry for the Hari Cove Resort Hotel.

Yukawa had called Kusanagi to tell him that the Kawahatas were kicking him out because they were going to turn themselves in, and apparently, they had. Kusanagi didn’t hear about it until the evening, when he got a call from Tatara.

“They’re saying it was an accident. The boiler malfunctioned, and then they tried to hide the body, but there are still a lot of things in their story that aren’t adding up.” The alarm in Tatara’s voice was obvious. “They’re supposed to give me a call when they know something, but I’d like to share what we have if it’ll help. How are things going with you?”

Kusanagi told him about meeting with Senba, and Senba having no idea why Tsukahara might’ve been killed.

“Right,” Tatara said. “Well, might as well let Hari PD know.”

“Yes, sir,” Kusanagi replied, still wondering whether he should tell Tatara about the possibility that the Kawahatas had been involved in the Senba case decades before. He had decided not to. All he could do was pray that it didn’t come back to bite him.

Kusanagi called Hari and talked to Detective Motoyama about finding Senba in the hospital. The detective thanked him, but he didn’t sound entirely grateful. The reason why became immediately clear.

“It looks like we’ve finally nailed this one,” Motoyama told him. “We found the guy who helped the Kawahatas move the body—he’s a friend of the daughter. His story checked out, so we’re calling this one a wrap.”

He’d sounded genuinely relieved, a feeling that Kusanagi couldn’t share. Everything he’d seen up until that point indicated that this wasn’t a case they could write off as a simple accident.

He discussed it with Utsumi, and she agreed.

“Sounds like we have to go back to the very beginning,” she had said.

The two of them headed for Ginza to find the restaurant where, thirty years earlier, Shigehiro and Setsuko had first met. They found it, but not before Kusanagi walked enough that his feet were swollen and painful and his shirt was drenched in sweat, sticking to him in all the wrong ways. This might be the key that unlocked the truth about everything—but it felt like failure.

Kusanagi sighed again and called the number for the Hari Cove Resort Hotel. It was a long time before someone picked up, and another minute after he asked the receptionist to connect him to Yukawa before the physicist finally answered the phone.

“It’s me, Kusanagi. Were you asleep?”

“No, I was waiting for you to call. I figured you’d have something to tell me.”

“How are things on your end? It sounds like they’re getting ready to wrap this case up over there.”

“I’d say your assessment is correct. Unless there’s some dramatic change, I doubt the police will take one step further on this case. That is, they can’t. They’re effectively blind.”

“But you can see?”

“All I have is conjecture. You’re the one who has to tell me if I’m right or not. Isn’t that why you called?”

Kusanagi grinned and opened his notebook. “I found the restaurant where Setsuko Kawahata was working. It’s moved since then, but it’s still in business. Same owner, too.”

“And you had a chat with him?” Yukawa asked.

“That I did.”

“About what?”

“The good old days.”

* * *

The restaurant was on a small alley off of the Ginza. To the side of a white wooden lattice door hung a modest sign that read “Haruhi.” The place was practically designed to avoid attracting passersby.

“You must have a lot of regulars,” Kusanagi had asked the owner.

“About seventy to eighty percent, yep,” the owner, a Mr. Tsuguo Ukai, had replied. “And the people they bring with them wind up becoming regulars, and that keeps us gratefully in business.”

Ukai had perfectly white, neatly trimmed hair and looked sprightly for a man in his seventies. He said he still handled all of the buying for the restaurant himself.

When Kusanagi and Utsumi had arrived, it was a little after closing time, and there was still one customer at the bar, finishing his drink and chatting with Ukai while he cleaned up. They had to wait for the customer to leave before they could really start asking questions.

Other than the chairs at the counter, there were only three tables in the place. Kusanagi had guessed the max capacity was somewhere around thirty. Besides himself, the owner employed two cooks and a server.

Ukai had left Hari to become a chef while still in his teens. After working at a few famous places in the city, he had started Haruhi, a Hari cuisine specialty restaurant, at the age of thirty-four. In the beginning, he didn’t hire any help. It was just him and his wife.

“Our old shop was about a block down from here, along Sony Street. Small place—couldn’t fit much more than ten people. But we had some loyal customers, and that let us move up here once we’d saved enough.”

The move had been about twenty years ago.

“So when Setusko worked for you, that was at the old place?”

Ukai nodded. When they’d arrived, the detectives had told him they’d come to talk to him about Setsuko. They said that they were looking into someone else and trying to establish a better picture of their friends and associates.

“Yeah, I think she started working for us about two or three years after we opened. Eventually the work got too much for just the two of us. We started asking around, and one of our regulars said that he knew this nightclub hostess who liked to cook and had just quit her job, so he brought her by. I liked her well enough, but my wife, she loved the girl. Turns out she’d left the nightclub world and had no plans to go back, so she was only too happy to accept our offer. And it was a great deal for us. She was good with her hands and sharp as a tack. Learned recipes quick, too.”

She’d only stayed there three years, though, because she got married—to one of the regulars, no less.

Ukai remembered Shigehiro Kawahata well.

“His family ran an inn down in Hari Cove, as I recall. He was a big-city businessman through and through, but he got a longing for home now and then. That’s why he came. They used to come by together after they got married, too. Had a kid real quick, and they were pretty happy. I wonder what they’re up to these days. They sent me New Year’s cards for at least ten years after they left.”

“Were any of your regulars besides Mr. Kawahata on close terms with Setsuko?” Kusanagi had asked.

“Oh sure, there were a few. She was young, and, well, she used to be a nightclub hostess, so you can imagine she was great with customers. I’m guessing that more than a few of our regulars came here just for her,” Ukai said, his eyes twinkling.

“How about this man? Did you ever see him here?” Kusanagi had asked, showing him the photograph of Senba from around the time of his arrest. “He might’ve been a little younger than in this photo.”

“Oh!” Ukai had said, his eyes going wide. “Of course I remember him. That’s Mr. Senba. He’s the one I just mentioned.”

“Excuse me?”

“The one who introduced Setsuko to us. Yeah, he was a regular, too. Something about his wife being from Hari, I think.”

Kusanagi and Utsumi had exchanged looks.

“Did she know Mr. Senba because he was a customer at the bar where she worked?”

“That’s right. He started his own business and was always out on the town. He would drop by every once in a while with one girl or the other on his arm, getting drinks after work and such. We used to stay open a lot later in those days.”

Kusanagi had shown him the photo of Nobuko Miyake. Ukai had stared at the photo for a while, thinking, before he said, “Isn’t that Nobuko?”

“That’s right,” Kusanagi said.

“Yeah, she was a beauty, though I guess age caught up with her,” he’d said with a nod. “Well, it was thirty years ago I’m thinking about, so she’s probably a grandma by now.”

“The photo’s from about fifteen years ago.”

“Right, right. Nobuko worked at the same bar as Setsuko.” He’d chuckled and shaken his head. “We were all a lot younger then, that’s for sure.”

“But Mr. Senba and Nobuko stopped coming after a while. I always wondered what became of them. You don’t happen to know, do you, Detective?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” Kusanagi had lied. “That’s why we’re out here asking all these questions.”

“Mr. Senba didn’t do anything, did he?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Kusanagi said. “I was wondering, though—do you think Senba and Nobuko ever had a serious relationship?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Ukai had said simply. “The way I saw it, the only one Mr. Senba had a thing for was Setsuko. He came here because his wife was from Hari, but he never brought his wife. I don’t think he wanted her meeting Setsuko, if you know what I mean. Of course, that might just be my imagination running wild.”

Ukai had told him he had some photos from back in the day, so they’d had him show them. The photo right in the middle of the front page of the neatly kept album showed a man sitting in front of a small counter with a woman on either side. The photo was about thirty years old, but the man was clearly Ukai. His build and his hair had hardly changed in the intervening decades.

“That’s Setsuko on the right,” Ukai had said.

She was a young girl, with large eyes and a memorable face. She had sharp features and might’ve looked a little aggressive without her round cheeks and big smile. She was wearing a kimono patterned with autumn leaves.

“She’s beautiful,” Kusanagi had said, and Ukai broke into a grin.

“Wasn’t she? You see why she was so popular. That foliage-print kimono of hers was like her trademark, too. My wife gave that one to her.”

The woman standing on the other side of Ukai in the photograph was a slender beauty, too, though much older than Setsuko.

“That’s her, my wife,” Ukai had explained. “She was three years older than me, and a hard worker. If she wasn’t around, well, Haruhi wouldn’t be here either. I doubt I ever would’ve tried starting a place without her.”

She had passed away the year before from pancreatic cancer.

* * *

Kusanagi finished relating what he’d learned from the old chef at Haruhi, but Yukawa was still silent.

“Hello?” Kusanagi said. “What do you think?”

He heard Yukawa sigh on the other end. “So that’s what it was,” he muttered.

“What’s what it was?”

“I’m sure you’ve realized by this point what interested the retired detective, Tsukahara, about Senba’s case so much. And how the Kawahatas were involved. Given what you just told me, there’s no possible way you couldn’t know.”

“Well, I do have a vague idea.”

There was an awkward silence. Kusanagi imagined he could see Yukawa’s wry grin.

“I can understand,” Yukawa said after a moment, “how you wouldn’t want to make any rash suppositions, given your position in the police department, so allow me to say it on your behalf. Senba was wrongfully accused. He was not the killer, he was covering for someone. How am I doing so far?”

Kusanagi frowned. In truth, he did feel uncomfortable revealing his hand to Yukawa, but at the same time, he knew it was useless to try and obfuscate the facts. Yukawa knew better than anyone else how willing the truly devoted were to assume guilt in order to protect the ones they loved.

“It’s a bit of a stretch, though,” Kusanagi said.

“I don’t think so. Tsukahara continued investigating the case even after Senba confessed. Since it was his arrest, in ordinary circumstances, he wouldn’t want to uncover any unpleasant truths. The deed was done. But Tsukahara wasn’t satisfied. Why? Because Senba was found guilty with the truth only half uncovered, and Tsukahara couldn’t abide by that. That’s why Tsukahara looked for him once Senba got out of prison, and went so far as to put him into a hospital. He hoped to get the truth out of him. I think that was partly because he felt responsible for the wrongful sentencing—even if Senba set himself up.”

Kusanagi gripped his phone in silence. It mirrored his own thoughts exactly.

“Kusanagi?” Yukawa said. “I have a request.”