A Midsummer's Equation

SEVEN

The scene was about two hundred meters south along the coast from the main harbor in Hari Cove. A uniformed officer was standing in front of the seawall, next to a parked police van. Probably forensics, Tsuyoshi Nishiguchi thought. It was still too early in the morning for onlookers.

Nishiguchi stopped his patrol car and waited for his supervising officer and the captain to get out before opening his own door and catching up with them. The uniformed officer greeted them as they arrived.

Captain Motoyama was standing on tiptoes, peering over the seawall at the other side. A frown spread across his round face. “Well, he couldn’t have picked a more inconvenient spot,” he said.

Hashigami walked over to take a look for himself. Hashigami was five years Nishiguchi’s elder, but much taller. “Yeah,” he said, agreeing with the captain. “No kidding.”

Nishiguchi gingerly approached the seawall, fearing the worst. The worst, in this case, was a drowned corpse. He’d seen plenty of them since transferring to his current post, but something about the way they looked got to him every time.

He swallowed and looked down four or five meters to some rocks by the water where a few guys from forensics were already milling around.

The body, a man’s, was lying atop a large boulder, facing upward. He was wearing a bath yukata and a quilted vest over that, except wearing might not have been the right word. It was more like the clothes were wrapped around him. He was a little on the overweight side, but there was none of the distinctive swelling of a drowning victim. Instead, his head had been split open, spilling blackish-red blood over the nearby rocks.

“Hey down there,” Motoyama called out. “How’s it look?”

An older forensics officer looked up, putting a hand to the rim of his glasses in greeting. “Can’t say just yet. He probably fell.”

“You find a wallet or anything?”

“Nope. Some clogs though.”

“You know what inn he was staying at?”

“No. There’s nothing written on either the clogs or the yukata.”

Motoyama turned to the uniformed officer behind them. “Who found the body?”

“A local resident, sir. She rents parasols down at the beach during the summer and was on the way to work. She should be at the beach now, but I have her number if you want to talk to her.”

“No thanks,” Motoyama said, waving his hand dismissively. He pulled out his cell phone, punched buttons with his fat fingers, and put it to his ear. “That you, Chief?” he said. “This is Motoyama. I’m down here at the scene. It’s not a drowning—looks like he fell from the seawall. We think he’s staying at one of the inns around here. Still got his yukata on.” He paused, listening to the chief on the other end of the line. “Right, we’ll pay them a visit,” he said. “The what Rock Inn? Green? Got it.”

Nishiguchi stepped over to the captain and gestured to get his attention.

“Hang on a second, Chief,” Motoyama said, putting a hand over the phone. “Yeah?”

“I know that place. The Green Rock Inn,” Nishiguchi said.

“Right,” Motoyama said, bringing the cell phone back to his ear. “Nishiguchi says he knows the place. Right, I’ll get him on it.”

Motoyama hung up and looked between the other two. “Turns out the inn phoned in a report that one of their guests went missing after he went out for a walk last night. Go check on it.”

“Mind if we take the cruiser?” Hashigami asked.

“It’s walking distance from here,” Nishiguchi said. “Which means it probably was their guest.”

“Right, that settles it,” Motoyama said, looking back over the seawall. “You get a picture yet?” he called down. “Just the face. Nothing too gruesome, if you can. Thanks.”

One of the younger forensics officers climbed up a ladder to the top of the seawall and handed a Polaroid to Motoyama, who held it out to Nishiguchi. “Take this.”

The face in the photo was a little pinkish and expressionless as a mask. He didn’t look too bad from the front. The gaping hole in his skull was on the back of his head, which meant they could show it around without anyone fainting on them.

The Green Rock Inn was less than a kilometer away. The two detectives walked up a winding slope, which got much steeper about halfway along. Hashigami started muttering that they should’ve taken the cruiser.

“So what’s the deal with this inn? You said you know it?” he asked Nishiguchi.

“Yeah. One of my old classmates’ parents run the place.”

“Great, you can do the talking.”

“Sure, but I doubt they’ll remember me. I haven’t seen the family since I graduated high school.”

Nishiguchi remembered the daughter’s name: Narumi Kawahata. Most of the kids in his high school had known each other since middle school, but not her. She had transferred from a school in Tokyo just before high school started.

Narumi was a quiet girl at first, spending most of her time alone. There was a small observation deck near the school where you could look out over the sea, and he spotted her there often. She would just stand and gaze out at the water, seemingly lost in thought. She always got good grades, and Nishiguchi always imagined that she was going to be a writer or something like that.

But eventually, an entirely different side of her came to light. In the summer, she would help out at the inn and work down at the beach. Not at one of the vending stalls or cafeterias, but picking up garbage. The money wasn’t very good; it was practically volunteer work. Nishiguchi worked for some of the beachside stalls, so he saw her quite a lot. He asked her once why she chose that particular job. “What’s the point of having a beautiful ocean if you don’t keep it clean?” she asked, her face tanned a deep brown. “You locals don’t appreciate what you’ve got.”

She wasn’t exactly mad at him, but her comment made it sound like he wasn’t doing his part. It left a bad taste in his mouth.

His reverie was interrupted by their arrival at the Green Rock Inn. They’d both taken off their jackets on the climb up, and the underarms of their dress shirts were stained with sweat.

Nishiguchi slid open the front door and called in. “Hello?” He was greeted by a welcome blast of air-conditioned air.

“Come in,” a woman responded, and the curtain behind the front counter moved. He immediately recognized the woman, who came out wearing a T-shirt and jeans, as Narumi, but he hesitated a moment. He wasn’t used to seeing her as a grown woman.

“Wait, is that you?” Narumi’s eyes went a little wider, and she smiled. “Nishiguchi, right? Long time no see. How’ve you been?” Even her voice sounded grown-up. Which was obvious, given that she would be thirty, like him.

“Hey, I’ve been well, thanks. You look good.”

Narumi smiled, then her eyes went over to Hashigami, and she bowed a little, not entirely sure what to make of him.

“Actually,” Nishiguchi said, “I’m here on work. I’m with the Hari Police Department now.” He showed her his badge.

Narumi blinked. “Police? You?”

“Yeah, I know, it’s funny how things turn out.” Nishiguchi held out his business card to her.

“Wow, a detective,” she said.

“We got a call from your inn this morning saying that one of your guests had gone missing.”

“That’s right. Oh, so that’s why you’re here?”

“Yeah. Actually, this morning a body was found down near the harbor.”

A look of shock came over Narumi’s face.

“He was still wearing a yukata, which is why we thought he might be your missing guest.”

“Wait, I should probably get my parents out here,” Narumi said, disappearing behind the counter.

Hashigami stepped up and gave Nishiguchi a jab in the ribs with his elbow. “She’s not bad. When you said ‘classmate,’ I was thinking a guy.”

“She’s your type, is she?” Nishiguchi asked quietly.

“Oh, she’ll do. Put a little makeup on her and she’ll be a real beauty.”

“If you say so.” Nishiguchi didn’t know about the makeup, but he had to agree that Narumi had grown into an attractive woman.

A short while later she reappeared with her parents, whom she introduced as Shigehiro and Setsuko Kawahata. From the looks on their faces, Nishiguchi could tell that she’d already told them about the body.

Shigehiro had filed the report that morning, so Nishiguchi showed him the photograph first. He took one look and grimaced, then passed the photograph to his wife. She grew a little pale, and put a hand to her mouth. Narumi looked away.

“Well?” Nishiguchi asked.

“That’s him, no doubt about it,” Shigehiro answered. “Was it an accident?”

“We’re not sure yet. It looks like he fell onto some rocks and hit his head.”

Setsuko pulled out the guest book and register, identifying the deceased as Masatsugu Tsukahara, 61, from Saitama Prefecture.

“Around what time did he leave the inn last night?” Nishiguchi asked.

“I’m not really sure,” Shigehiro told him. He explained that he had been out in the back garden with his nephew setting off some fireworks from around eight o’clock the night before. It had been about eight thirty when he realized that their guest hadn’t signed up for breakfast the next morning. He went back to the inn and phoned the man’s room from the front desk, but there was no answer. Thinking he was probably either in the bathroom or down in the bath on the first floor, he went back out and lit a few more fireworks. They finished a little before nine, so he tried calling the man again, but there was still no answer. He went to check the big bath on the first floor, but he wasn’t there either. So, he went up to the man’s room on the fourth floor. There was no answer when he knocked, and the door was unlocked, so he went in and found the man’s things, but their guest himself was nowhere in sight.

Around that time, Setsuko had come back from town, having shown one of their other guests to a local bar.

Narumi explained about Sawamura and about running into their mother in front of the bar.

“Mr. Sawamura said he wanted to say hello to my husband, so he came in, but when he found my husband worrying about his missing guest, he offered to help look,” Setsuko said, continuing the story. “While he and Mr. Sawamura were driving around in the pickup, I took a look around the inn.”

“Of course, in these parts after nine, it’s pretty dark, so unless he was walking on the road or standing someplace out in plain sight, we didn’t have much of a chance of finding him,” Shigehiro added.

Nishiguchi nodded. There were no streetlamps anywhere along the hill up from the station.

Hashigami took his cell phone out of his pocket and stepped outside to phone in a report.

“Still, I never imagined he’d turn up like this,” Shigehiro said, putting a hand on his head. “Where was he found?”

“The seawall right around where the Headland Restaurant used to be,” Nishiguchi said, referring to a place that had closed three years earlier.

“With all the rocks around there, that would be a pretty nasty place to fall,” Shigehiro said.

“I wonder why he was down there in the first place,” Narumi said.

“Out for a walk, most likely. Maybe wanted to see the ocean at night. Or maybe he just wanted to walk off dinner and the drinks.”

“So he climbed up on to the seawall and then fell off?”

“I suppose so.”

Narumi’s eyes went to her old classmate. “Is that what happened?”

Nishiguchi shrugged. “We can’t say for sure. The investigation’s only just started.”

Narumi grunted, unimpressed.

Hashigami returned from outside and whispered, “The bags,” into Nishiguchi’s ear.

“If you don’t mind, we’d like to check Mr. Tsukahara’s belongings. Could you show me to his room?” Nishiguchi asked.

“Happy to,” Setsuko offered.

The two detectives got on the elevator with her. Nishigami pulled on his gloves while they were riding up.

There were eight guest rooms on each floor, each with its own name. Masatsugu Tsukahara had been staying in one called the Rainbow Room. The room was large, with a low table and floor cushions pushed off into one corner and a futon laid out on the tatami mats. There was a strip of hardwood flooring over by the window with a chair and another smaller table.

“Who spread out his futon and when?” Nishiguchi asked.

“It was a little after seven, I think. I came up while Mr. Tsukahara was at dinner. My husband doesn’t do the futons anymore on account of his knee, so when we don’t have any part-time staff around, me and Narumi handle things.”

The futon looked untouched. Tsukahara must have left the room right after coming back from dinner.

His luggage was a single, old traveling bag. Hashigami examined the contents, finding a cell phone. It was a simple one with only a few basic functions, designed for elderly users.

His clothes had been neatly folded and placed in a corner of the room: an open-collar shirt and gray slacks. Nishiguchi fished in the pockets and found his wallet, with a decent amount of cash inside.

He checked the driver’s license. Both the name and the address were the same as in the ledger downstairs. Then he pulled another card from the wallet.

“Uh-oh,” Nishiguchi said.

“What you got?” Hashigami asked.

“A union member’s card. To our union. He’s a cop.”