Malice (21 page)

Rie Hidaka bit her lip and her eyes flared. I was relieved to see she was more angry than sad. I didn't want her breaking into tears in the café.

“I know I told you this before, Detective Kaga, but I still don't believe my husband stole someone else's work. When he would talk about a new book he was writing, his eyes would get so bright—like a child's. I know he truly enjoyed creating stories.”

I nodded, understanding how she felt. However, I thought it would be inappropriate for me to tell her that I agreed. I think she understood because she stopped talking about it. Instead she asked me why I had wanted to see her.

I pulled some papers out of my jacket pocket and placed them on the table. “I was hoping you could take a look at this.”

“What is it?”

“Osamu Nonoguchi's account of what happened.”

Rie Hidaka frowned, clearly displeased. “I'd rather not. I'm sure it's just a long list of the horrible things my husband did to him. Besides, I've already read what was in the papers.”

“I believe you're talking about the confession Mr. Nonoguchi wrote after he was arrested. This is different. This is a falsified account he wrote after the crime in order to throw the police off his trail.”

This she seemed to understand, though she still looked displeased. “Okay. But how can reading something that isn't true help?”

“I understand your confusion, but I'd really appreciate it if you could just take a look. It's not very long; you'll be able to finish it in no time.”

“You want me to read it here?”

“If you would, yes.”

She shook her head, but said nothing more. She picked up the pages and started to read. Fifteen minutes later, she looked up. “Okay. Now what?”

“Of the events recorded in this account, Mr. Nonoguchi has admitted that the description of his conversation with Kunihiko Hidaka was fabricated. It wasn't as easygoing as he suggests, but a rather heated argument.”

“So it seems.”

“In addition, the description of events when he left your house is different than what really happened. Though you only showed him to the door, he claims in this account that you showed him to the gate.”

“Right, we talked about that before.”

“Is there anything else? Anything that differs from your memory of what happened?”

“Other than the sending off?” She looked confused for a moment, then scanned the account again. She shook her head. “No. I don't see anything.”

“How about something Mr. Nonoguchi did or said on that day that isn't written here? Do you remember anything? Even a slight detail might be helpful. Such as whether or not he went to the bathroom.”

“I don't remember precisely, but, no, I don't think he used the bathroom.”

“Did you see or hear him make any phone calls while he was there?”

“Well, he could've called someone from my husband's office without me knowing.”

To Rie Hidaka, it had been just another ordinary day at the time Nonoguchi dropped in. Of course she wouldn't remember every detail.

I was ready to give up when she suddenly looked up and said, “Actually, there was one thing.”

“Yes?”

“I'm sure this has nothing to do with the case, though.”

“Anything you can tell me might help.”

“Well, that day, when Mr. Nonoguchi was leaving, he gave me a bottle of champagne. He said it was a present.”

“Are you sure it happened that day?”

“Oh, absolutely sure.”

“You say he gave it to you as he was leaving. Do remember the details of the exchange?”

“Well, it was after he came out of the office, just as Ms. Fujio was going in. It was in a paper bag, like it had just come from the store. He said he'd gotten so absorbed in talking to my husband that he'd forgotten to give it to him. He suggested my husband and I might drink it later that night at the hotel.”

“And what did you do with it?”

“Well, I accepted it, of course, and brought it to the hotel. I left it in the hotel refrigerator. I never went back for it after what happened that night. The hotel even called me about it later, and I told them they could do whatever they wanted with it.”

“So you didn't drink it?”

“By myself? No. I put it in there to chill so I could drink it with Kunihiko once he got to the hotel that night.”

“Had Mr. Nonoguchi ever brought alcohol as a gift before?”

“As far as I'm aware, that was the only time. Mr. Nonoguchi doesn't drink.”

“I see.”

In his confession, Nonoguchi had written that he'd brought a bottle of scotch the first time he visited the Hidakas', but of course Rie hadn't been there at that time. I asked if she remembered anything else from the day that she couldn't find in the account. She thought about it long and hard, but ultimately told me that there was nothing else. Then she asked me why I was asking her about all this now.

“There's a lot of paperwork that needs to be done in order to close a case. This kind of fact-checking is just part of that process.”

I don't think she doubted my explanation.

I concluded our interview, once again gave her my condolences, and left. Immediately after leaving the shopping center, I phoned the hotel where the Hidakas were supposed to have spent the night of his death and asked about the champagne. It took a while, but eventually they put me through to the manager who had been on duty at the time.

He spoke to me in the crisp, clear tones of a service-industry professional. “I believe it was a bottle of Dom Pérignon rosé. It was found in the room refrigerator. It's an expensive bottle and was unopened, so I called to inform the guest. She told me we should dispose of it as we saw fit, so I did.”

I asked what he had done with the champagne, and after a bit of hesitation he told me that he'd taken it home. I then asked him whether he had drunk it.

He said that he had, two weeks earlier. He'd already thrown out the bottle. “Should I not have done that?”

“No, it's not a problem at all. Was the champagne good?”

“Oh, very.”

I thanked him and hung up.

Back at home, I watched a copy, which I'd had forensics dupe for me, of the video of Osamu Nonoguchi sneaking into the Hidakas' house. I rewound and watched it several times, but my only reward was having that monotonous scene burned into my retinas over and over.

May 16

At slightly after one in the afternoon I arrived at the Yokoda Real Estate branch in Ikebukuro. The small office had two desks behind a counter with windows facing the street.

Inside, I found Miyako Fujio working alone. She informed me that everyone else was out with clients and she couldn't leave the office, so we sat at the table attached to the front counter and talked there. From the outside, it probably looked as though a shady-looking man had come in, hoping to find a cheap apartment.

I cut straight to the chase. “Are you familiar with the details of Nonoguchi's confession?”

She nodded, her face drawn taut. “I read what was in the papers.”

“What did you think?”

“Well, nothing, except I was very surprised. I had no idea
Forbidden Hunting Grounds
was written by someone else.”

“According to what Nonoguchi told us, Kunihiko Hidaka hadn't been able to talk to you about the novel in detail because it wasn't his work. Does that jibe with your own experience talking to him?”

“Honestly, I can't say. It's true that Mr. Hidaka always brushed me off without getting very deep into specifics, but that hardly proves anything.”

“Does anything you might have discussed with Mr. Hidaka seem odd to you in retrospect?”

“Nothing that I can recall. But it's hard to say. I never imagined Mr. Hidaka wasn't the real author, so there's a good chance I wouldn't have noticed anything out of the ordinary.”

I couldn't blame her for that. “How about anything that makes more sense now that you know Osamu Nonoguchi was the author?”

“Again, it's hard to say. Mr. Nonoguchi also went to the same school as my brother, so it's certainly possible that he wrote that novel. It's not like I knew Mr. Hidaka all that well, for that matter.”

I was on the verge of giving up hope of any new information from Ms. Fujio when she said, “Just, if it's true that Mr. Hidaka didn't write that novel … I don't know, I might have to read it again before I say anymore. You see, I'd been convinced that one of the characters in the book was modeled on Mr. Hidaka himself.”

“How so? Can you describe the character to me?”

“Have you read the book?”

“I haven't, though I did look at an outline. One of the other detectives read it and wrote up a summary for the rest of us.”

“Well, part of the book details the main character's middle-school days. The main character's very violent, pressuring his friends to join in his antics, and attacking anyone who doesn't toe the line. They'd call it bullying, nowadays. Anyway, his favorite victim is a classmate of his, a boy named Hamaoka. I always thought that boy was a stand-in for Mr. Hidaka.”

“Why did you think that student was Mr. Hidaka?”

“Well, the book is written as if it were Hamaoka's own recollections. And since it's really more of a roman à clef than a work of pure fiction, it made sense that the narrator was actually the author—thus, Mr. Hidaka.”

I nodded.

“Also,” Miyako Fujio said, after a moment's hesitation, “it occurred to me that Mr. Hidaka wrote that novel for a specific reason.”

I looked up at her. “What reason is that?”

“In the book, Hamaoka's hatred for the main character is obvious. You can feel it practically emanating from every page. Though it's never said outright in the book, you get the sense that it's this hatred that moves Hamaoka to investigate the eventual death of the man who bullied him in school. If Hamaoka's hatred was the author's hatred, well, it would make sense for Mr. Hidaka to have written his book as a way to get revenge on my brother. That's how I interpreted it, at least.”

I stared at her. The idea of writing a book for revenge hadn't even occurred to me until she'd mentioned it. In fact, our investigative team hadn't paid much attention to
Forbidden Hunting Grounds
at all.

“So Nonoguchi's confession throws off your theory,” I said.

“It does. But really, it doesn't matter whether it was Mr. Hidaka or Mr. Nonoguchi who wrote it. As long as the author was the model for that boy, it's all the same. Just … I've had the image of Hamaoka being Kunihiko Hidaka in my head for so long that it's hard for me to picture someone else in his place. Sort of like when your favorite book gets made into a TV show and the actor doesn't match your image of the character.”

“So does Kunihiko Hidaka match the character of Hamaoka in your mind?”

“I think so … but that might just be because when I first read it, I assumed that character was him.”

I asked her what she would do now that the author of
Forbidden Hunting Grounds
was Osamu Nonoguchi.

She thought for a moment, then said, her voice cold, “I'll wait until I hear the results of Mr. Nonoguchi's trial. Then I'll decide on an appropriate response.”

When I got back to the precinct, the chief of detectives was waiting to speak to me. He called me into his office and wanted to know why I hadn't wrapped up this case and forwarded everything to the prosecutor's office. He wasn't too pleased when I told him I was still investigating the murder of Kunihiko Hidaka. I can hardly blame him for questioning the need to continue sniffing around when the murderer had already confessed in full, provided a compelling motive for his actions, which was backed by sufficient evidence, and even wrote his own confession.

“So, what doesn't fit?” he asked, his irritation plain. “From where I'm sitting, this looks pretty cut-and-dried.”

I had no real basis to deny any of the evidence—the most vital pieces of which I had uncovered myself. Until recently, I, too, had felt that nothing was left to know about the murder of the bestselling author. I'd succeeded in breaking down Nonoguchi's false alibi and uncovering the truth behind his relationship with Hidaka. I was rather proud of what I'd accomplished.

But doubt had crept in around the edges of my assurance. It happened while I was writing up a report after questioning Nonoguchi in his hospital bed. My eyes strayed to his hand, down to his fingertips, and a sudden disturbing thought occurred to me. At the time, I decided to ignore it. It was too far-fetched, too unrealistic.

Yet I was unable to ignore the thought. It proved persistent, refusing eviction from the back corners of my mind. I should mention that, even when I first arrested Nonoguchi, I was apprehensive, afraid that I might have taken a wrong turn. Now that apprehension was becoming even more pointed.

Of course, it's entirely possible that my doubt is a delusion, more indicative of my shortcomings as a detective and a person than of any great undiscovered truth. Yet I'm unwilling to bring closure to this case while that doubt still lingers.

For what must've been the dozenth time, I carefully reread Osamu Nonoguchi's confession. As I did, I asked myself several questions that hadn't previously occurred to me:

1. If Kunihiko Hidaka was using Osamu Nonoguchi's murder attempt to blackmail him into being his ghostwriter, then, what would have happened if Nonoguchi decided to turn himself in and let the chips fall where they may? It would have done considerable damage to Hidaka as well. It might even have ruined his writing career. Why wasn't Hidaka afraid of this? According to Nonoguchi, he didn't turn himself in because he didn't want to involve Hatsumi, but Hidaka couldn't have known with any certainty Nonoguchi would react this way.

2. Why didn't Nonoguchi start to resist Hidaka's blackmail after Hatsumi's death? His account asserts that he'd grown tired of the constant psychological warfare. But, if that was the case, wouldn't that have made turning himself in an even more appealing option?