Lady Joker, Volume 1 Kaoru Takamura (ereader ebook .TXT) 📖

It was early October when Handa decided to stray from the landfill industrial zone. One Sunday, in the empty lot in front of the housing complex within his designated area, Handa came across a resident, with whom he had a nodding acquaintance, happily swinging a driver. “That must be brand new. How nice,” Handa said, and as he soon grew bored of listening to the guy’s long-winded explanation of the firmness of the shaft and the angle of the loft and whatnot, an idea suddenly flashed in his mind: a pawnshop. The suspect would have gotten rid of the golf club once it had been used as a weapon, but a driver was expensive to begin with, and if the thing had cost him a hundred thousand yen, all the more likely that he would dispose of it not in the garbage but at a pawnshop.

Handa spurred his partner, a police sergeant named Kimura, to join him and, starting from their base in Shinagawa, together they began checking out pawnshops. Handa had no particular expectations; he simply figured it was better than napping on the baseball field. Detectives often went around to pawnshops in search of stolen goods, so he had his fair share of contacts. It started out mostly as a way to kill time, but in mid-October, he almost ran into two detectives from MPD at a pawnshop within the Meguro precinct where he used to work and, after learning that this was in fact where they were focusing their efforts, he grew even more fired up about his rogue mission. He reconsidered every person they had identified so far as owning golf clubs, he paid closer attention on his pawnshop visits, and he decided to select a number of people who either worked at one of the businesses or lived in housing near the crime scene and began to trail them.

Then the following month, he narrowed down his targets even further and shadowed them for two weeks. One was a man who lived in Fuchu and used to go to the driving range every Saturday but around summertime had stopped all of a sudden. One man was a resident of Higashi-Shinagawa Public Housing No. 4 who had quit his job some time after the crime and now worked for a different company. Yet another was a self-employed businessman who replaced his full set of golf clubs shortly after the crime. The names of each of these men were now written in Handa’s pocket notebook.

And today was Saturday, November 17th. They found out that I’ve gone off course, Handa thought to himself again vacantly. He had no memory of whether he had considered the consequences when he decided to go rogue, knowing all along that he would eventually get caught. Most likely he hadn’t thought about anything at all.

The fact that he had been discovered at this point in time clearly meant that somebody had ratted him out, but he had not even processed this yet. There was someone out there who had pulled the rug out from under him before he could outwit anyone. He had been done in. Before a bud could even sprout, his seed had been plucked and trampled underfoot. He had been defeated. He kept all such thoughts at bay—for were he to acknowledge them, he would shatter into a million pieces.

Since the workday had not begun, there were only a handful of people from the white-collar crime and burglary units in CID, and another few from records and forensics. If you were to take away everything colorful in a public school teacher’s lounge—the plastic desktop files and flower vases—and instead run it through a mousy filter and pipe in a hushed and chilled silence, you would be left with the CI office of the precinct police department.

Handa had grown up in company housing for an ironworks in Kamaishi, and when he graduated from university in Tokyo, he did not care where he worked as long as the place saw daylight. He applied to several private companies, but when he learned that all the available positions were technical and would have him working in a factory, he figured he would be better off in the police force so he became an officer. After he signed on, though, he realized that only MPD headquarters in Sakuradamon enjoyed a certain bland brightness, while the other bureaus were so bleak and damp that mushrooms could grow.

A superintendent named Miyoshi sat at the chief’s desk in front of a window with the blinds drawn even though it was morning. Standing next to him was an inspector acting as deputy chief; both had a glassy, dreary look, their eyes like the tightly closed shells of dead clams. When Handa came in, the deputy chief motioned to him like a customer in a restaurant calling over a waiter, and Handa obediently walked over and stood before the desk.

“Starting today, you no longer report to the second-floor Investigation headquarters,” said the deputy chief. “You know why, don’t you?”

Handa thought about this as best he could, and for the time being, decided to go with, “No, I don’t.”

The dead clam thundered, “You idiot!” His bellow reverberated off the steel desks and lockers, rushing over the heads of his colleagues who were holding their breath and pretending not to notice, and bounced up against Handa’s back.

“I know where and what you’ve been up to these past six weeks.” This time Miyoshi spoke. “Would you argue that you’ve haven’t infringed on someone else’s turf, while neglecting your own duties?”

The deputy chief started shouting again, spraying spittle. “This deviancy is inexcusable!”

It wasn’t that he couldn’t explain himself; rather, in the police force, the very act of explaining was unacceptable. Handa knew on a gut level that the police way was to agree with the higher-ups when they told you something was black, and then to agree again when they told you it was white. Each