The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino [75]
“The tenth?” Kusanagi echoed, raising his voice. He and Kishitani exchanged glances. “Are you sure?”
“Quite sure, yes.”
The day Shinji Togashi was murdered.
“Do you remember what time you called her?”
“Well, it was after I’d gone home for the day, so I’d say around one in the morning. She’d called me before midnight, but I was still busy here at the club and in pickup.”
“How long did you talk?”
“Oh, I’d say about half an hour. We usually talk that long.”
“And you called her? Her cell phone?”
“No, actually. I called her at home.”
“Erm, sorry to be so particular about this, but it was one o’clock in the morning, so you mean you called her on the eleventh, not the tenth, correct?”
“That’s right, it would have been the eleventh, wouldn’t it?”
“You mind me asking what sort of message she left on your phone?”
“She only said she wanted to talk to me, so I should call her when I was done at the club.”
“What did she want to talk about?”
“Nothing much, really. She wanted to know the name of this shiatsu massage place I went to for therapy. Lower back pain, you know.”
“Shiatsu? Okay. Had she called you about things like that in the past?”
“Oh, she calls about all sorts of things, none of them terribly important. I think she just wants to talk, you know. That’s why I call her.”
“And always so late at night?”
“I wouldn’t say always, but it’s not unusual. Late nights come with the territory. I suppose mostly we talk on days I have off, but she had called me, so…”
Kusanagi nodded and thanked Sugimura for her time. He tapped Kishitani on the shoulder and the two of them got up to leave. But as he made his way out of the club Kusanagi found he still wasn’t satisfied.
He mulled it over on the way back to Kinshicho Station. The phone call Sugimura had mentioned at the end of their conversation bothered him. Yasuko Hanaoka had been talking on the phone in the middle of the night on the tenth of March. Her home phone. Which meant she had already come back by that point.
A theory had been going around the department that the actual time of the murder was sometime after eleven o’clock on the night of the tenth. This was little more than a theory based on the assumption that Yasuko Hanaoka was the murderer. If Togashi had been killed that late, then Hanaoka could have done it even if her alibi at karaoke held up. Still, nobody gave the theory much credit—even the ones who had suggested it in the first place. If it was true, Hanaoka would’ve had to leave the karaoke bar and go immediately to the scene of the crime in order to get there by midnight. And if she had done the deed then, there would have been no way for her to get back to her house by public transport. Few criminals wanted to leave an obvious trail by taking a taxi. In any case, taxis hardly ever passed by the riverbank where Togashi’s remains had been found.
Then there was a matter of the stolen bicycle. The bicycle had been taken after ten o’clock in the morning. If the bicycle was a plant, that meant that Yasuko had to have gone to Shinozaki Station by that time. If it wasn’t a plant, and Togashi had stolen it himself, then that raised the question: what had Togashi been doing between the time that he stole the bicycle and the time that he met Yasuko near midnight?
Having worked through this line of reasoning early on, Kusanagi hadn’t seen the need to establish an alibi for Yasuko after karaoke on the night of the murder. And even if he had wanted one, he now knew she could provide it: she’d been on the phone with Sonoko Sugimura.
And that was what was bothering him.
“Remember the first time we talked to Yasuko Hanaoka?” Kusanagi asked Kishitani abruptly as they walked.
“Sure. What about it?”
“Do you remember how I asked her about her alibi? Did I ask her where she had been on the tenth?”
“I don’t remember exactly how you asked, if that’s what you mean, but it was something like that, yeah.”
“And what did she say? She went to work