The Saitama Dog
Lover Serial Disappearances, Part Two:
Out of Bed, Yakuza Are Worthless Leeches
After many months on the case, I began thinking back to recruiting day and how the presenter had said a story can take up to a year to build. Back then I’d thought that that would be excellent; now I was in terrible need of a break and at the end of my rope.
I mentioned to Sekiguchi that I was taking a week off.
“It’s not going to happen,” he laughed.
He was right; I was back within four days. A member of the Takada-gumi, a chinpira named Shimizu, had cornered Sekine at his African Kennel shop and slashed him up, and Sekiguchi was in charge of interrogating the suspect.
I was having Häagen-Dazs with the girls when the good interrogator got home, took off his shoes, and sat down at the table with us. It was uncanny; it seemed the most natural thing in the world to be sitting there.
Sekiguchi asked his wife for coffee.
“Does Shimizu think Sekine killed Endo?” I blurted out without hesitation. The kids were there, but they were paying us no attention.
“He does. He does. He admitted to taking a box cutter to Sekine’s face but not to anything else. So after we were done writing out his confession and he signed it, I took him aside and said to him, ‘I’m done questioning you and I’m not rewriting your statement, but tell me straight: Did you do this because Takada ordered you to?’ And Shimizu said no. Completely denied it.”
Sekiguchi continued, “I wanted to hear about this from the man himself, so I went and paid Takada a visit, as I do every so often, sort of to keep things under control. I asked him directly if he’d put that idiot up to it. Takada didn’t bat an eye. ‘If I told the punk to snuff him and he came back without seriously injuring the jerk,’ he said, ‘I would’ve strung him up. Shimizu is a total fuckup. He’s no yakuza. If he was going to do it, he should’ve buried the knife in the dog man’s gut.”
At that point, Sekiguchi decided to give me a little background. “A lot of yakuza don’t even like to call themselves yakuza. Forget about the official word boryokudan [literally, “violent groups”]. They call themselves gokudo. You know that, right?” He wrote the Chinese characters down on a napkin. “Goku means ‘ultimate, the far end, the extreme,’ and do means ‘the path.’ A gokudo goes all the way, he doesn’t hold back, he finishes the job. These young guys today, they don’t deserve to call themselves gokudo. They’re just chinpira, going through the motions of being a man.
“My job is to make sure it looks as if we’re doing everything we can to keep Sekine alive, to make Takada’s boys believe that if something happens to Sekine, the law’s going to come down heavy on them. Crazy, but I do all this so that Takada doesn’t lose face and decide to knock off Sekine himself.”
Sekiguchi was walking a tightrope. Yet in many ways he was holding the entire investigation together. When Endo had first disappeared, everyone whispered that Kennel had done it, but Takada had refused to listen. He couldn’t believe that a civilian, no matter how much out of control, would take out a yakuza. It was unheard of. However, since Sekiguchi had been assigned to the case, Takada, it seems, was slowly rethinking his position. He wasn’t sure why; all he knew was that he wasn’t happy about the way things were beginning to stack up.
Takada would call Sekiguchi off and on and say casually, “I think I’m going to blow some holes in Kennel. This case is a waste of your talents. I’ll put an end to it for you. You’ll be working better cases in no time.” Sekiguchi would then politely ask him to refrain from killing the main suspect. It was kind of a two-man comedy routine after a while.
No one knew how or where Endo had been taken out. But Sekiguchi had been able to trace his last night up to his disappearance. At 9 P.M., after some illegal gambling recreation, Endo had called Yumi-chan. The call was short and to the point: “I’m going to be a little late.”
Sekiguchi had scored one other key piece of information: a local veterinarian had sold Sekine a large amount of strychnine nitrate—so he could put sick animals to sleep.
I had been doing my own looking into Endo’s final hours, and before long I found myself at Sekiguchi’s house every other day, crosschecking information that I’d dug up. This was probably pushing the limits of professional courtesy, but, oddly, Sekiguchi didn’t seem to mind. In the meantime, Mrs. Sekiguchi even started asking me to babysit the girls while she ran errands; I ended up helping them with their English homework.
Sekiguchi eventually tracked down Yumi-chan. She was not in high school but working as a bar hostess, so Yoshihara and I headed over to the bar the next evening. We were greeted by the mama-san, who, after Yoshihara requested Yumi-chan’s company, sat us down at a table.
The place was a typical hostess club: a chandelier, a few sofas for intimate chat, a karaoke machine, a big guy behind the bar. The upholstery was purple velvet, the light in the place so dim that the candles on the tables seemed like spotlights, and the guy behind the bar, who gave me the once-over, had no neck, a short haircut, and a bad suit that was too tight—yakuza alert.
Yumi, on the other hand, was gorgeous. She had a longish face and perky little lips, and she seemed to be a little shorter than me but not by much. I imagined I could see some lace showing from under her miniskirt, but I couldn’t be sure. She sat herself down next to Yoshihara, while her colleague, introduced as Kimiko, squeezed in next to me.
As Yoshihara sipped the whiskey and water that Yumi had poured for him, he quietly explained who we were and why we were there. She was immediately alarmed, and for a second I worried she’d tell the bartender to throw our sorry asses out of the club. But after the initial nervousness she seemed to respond to Yoshihara’s direct approach.
Sighing, she said, “I’ll tell you what I can, but not for free. This is a bar; this is where I work. If you’re a customer, you can ask whatever you want. But I expect you to behave like a good customer. Like the kind that buys a girl a bottle of champagne.”
Yoshihara and I looked at each other. Could we afford this? Besides the issue of not being able to expense it, buying information outright was verboten. This came pretty close to the line.
Impulse intervened. “I think that would be fine,” I said. “But one thing you should know is I’m Jewish, and we have a two-thousand-year tradition of being very cheap. I would hate to dishonor tradition. How about a cheap bottle of champagne?”
Yumi laughed gamely, but she didn’t relent. “You’re in Japan now. Time to learn Japanese tradition.”
We ordered a bottle of good champagne. As the bubbly flowed, so did information. Endo had been a regular at the club and he’d been a real gentleman. He was older, but he’d wined and dined her and bought her lavish gifts, and he had a certain animal magnetism. She’d slept with him out of curiosity, then found out he was good in bed.
The last she’d heard from him was that final phone call. She had no idea who he was going to meet; in fact, she rarely discussed work with him. Now that he was gone, she missed him, but she’d never been in love with him. One bad thing about him was that he was covered in tattoos, and that made his skin cold. “Sometimes it felt like I was sleeping with a snake. Good in summer, not in winter.”
My attention was beginning to wander. Kimiko wasn’t as attractive as Yumi, but she had lovely eyes—penetrating would be the word. She smiled a lot and had wide, shapely hips. She filled my champagne glass and asked me if I wanted a cigarette. I said sure, and she removed a slender cigarette from her pack, put it between her lips, lit it, inhaled, and then gently inserted the cigarette between my lips—eyes on me the whole time. I couldn’t stop looking at her fingernails; they were jet black. Wow.
“Would you like to ask me anything?” she said. “Your friend seems to be asking all the questions.”
“Did you know Endo?” I said agreeably, coming to my senses.
“Oh, I knew Endo. Not as well as Yumi, of course. I like yakuza. They know how to please a woman in bed. Out of bed, yakuza are worthless leeches.”
“Have you dated a lot of yakuza?”
“I was the mistress of a yakuza before I moved here.”
“And why aren’t you his mistress anymore?”
She lit a cigarette for herself. “He died.”
“Natural causes?”
“Definitely natural causes,” she said, then laughed hysterically. “We were fucking when he kicked the bucket.” She wasn’t kidding. They’d been going at it heatedly, and in the middle of the act he’d had a heart attack. She’d managed to push him off her while he was still breathing, but he was dead before the ambulance arrived. Dead at forty-five. He’d been abusive and possessive, convincing her to get a dragon tattoo on her back. He had one himself. It was like branding her, but she didn’t mind. She was eighteen, and she thought she loved him. He was married, of course. Before the ambulance arrived, she had the presence of mind to remove his bank card from his wallet. The next morning she cleaned out his account.
When at age twenty-two she moved to Saitama, she had a tidy little nest egg.
We could afford only so much conversation, and before long Yoshihara made motions that it was time to leave. I thanked Kimiko for her company. Yumi and Kimiko waved good-bye at the door after we settled our bill—30,000 yen (around $300).
Out on the sidewalk, I bid Yoshihara good night, telling him I’d find my own way home. Yoshihara hailed a taxi, and as soon as the car was out of sight, I turned around and immediately reentered the bar and continued my conversation with Kimiko. I’d never known a yakuza woman before, and I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity.
I never made it back to the offices that night.
I suppose it would reflect better upon the man in me if I said I talked her into our spending the night together, but she was in charge all the way. And in bed she was ferocious, aggressive, definitely more experienced than me. In addition to the tattoo of a dragon on her back, she had one of the Kanon Bosatsu (the female Buddha of compassion), which seemed to jump out of her skin when we were having sex.
And so began what I can only describe as a several-months-long three-way affair. Not the three-way you’re thinking of: Kimiko gave me information about the gokudo world, which I then shared with Sekiguchi, who was keeping tabs on the Takada-gumi, about which he fed bits and pieces to me.
On one afternoon, as Kimiko and I were in her apartment having stand-up sex, she endearingly ran her fingernails down my back and asked me if I wanted to know a secret.
“Sure,” I said, “tell me a secret.”
“Guess where Sekine is right now?”
“Working hard at his kennel, I assume.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, give me the scoop.”
“First you have to earn it.”
So I did. And, my part of the bargain fulfilled, she fulfilled hers: “Takada has him. They’re probably interrogating him right now.”
“What the fuck?”
“Oh, they’ll get the truth out of him.”
“How do you know about this?”
“One of Takada’s boys was in the bar last night, bragging about it. He said they were going to get Sekine, cut him up, and feed him to his own dogs. Something about his own medicine.”
“I need your phone.”
“Who are you going to call?”
“Just give me the phone.”
I rang Sekiguchi, who listened, thanked me, didn’t ask questions, and hung up immediately.
I didn’t speak to him again until four days later. In the meantime, thanks to Kimiko, I managed to track down one of Endo’s non-yakuza friends and get more information on Endo. Apparently, he had been blackmailing Sekine and planning to strip him of all his assets—land, house, kennel, everything.
Sekiguchi was happy to see me.
“Jake, thanks for the call the other day. Your information was very good.”
“What happened?”
“About ten minutes after I got off the phone with you, Takada called me, acting coy, trying to surprise me. I didn’t give him a chance. I asked him what the hell he was doing with Sekine—Sekine was supposed to be hands-off. Takada was very impressed that I already knew. He told me, ‘Yeah, I’ve got the motherfucker. I’m going to ask him a few questions, and you’re welcome to sit on the sidelines and listen.’ Tempting offer, but I declined. I told him he better not kill the guy and he had to let me know what he learned.”
“You didn’t rush in to rescue him?”
“No. Takada gave me his word.”
“And you believed him?”
“You have to have faith in people sometimes, Jake. Sometimes you have to trust people who are untrustworthy. By trusting them, you make them trustworthy. I trusted Takada to honor his word when he gave it. If he hadn’t given me his word, I would have called up the Gyoda cops and had them come bail Sekine out. As it was, I decided to leave him with Takada for a while.”
“So what were the results?”
“According to Takada, the poor bastard cried like a baby but insisted he’d never touched Endo. For three hours they put the screws to him, and he didn’t admit a damn thing. Finally, Takada grabbed him by the throat and said, ‘Maybe you whacked Endo, maybe you didn’t. Either way, he’s no longer in this world. I can feel it. The least you owe the man is a prayer for his soul.’ Takada dragged Sekine in front of the small Buddhist shrine in the office. Sekine’s hands shook so bad he broke three sticks of incense before he could get the lighter to light it and stick it into the ash. Takada laughed, said it was quite a show.”
“If he won’t spill his guts to Takada, he’s not going to confess to the police,” I blurted out.
“About that,” said Sekiguchi, “you are wrong. But first, tell me how the hell you found out Takada snatched him?”
“A little bird told me.”
“A little bird?” Sekiguchi looked very serious for a second. Then he cleared his throat. “Look, Jake, we haven’t known each other for too long. I know that as a reporter you don’t give up your sources. I respect that. But now I need to know how you knew—not as reporter to cop but as man to man. It’s important. I won’t tell anyone, you have to trust me, but I need to know.”
I hesitated. Was this a test to see if I would protect my sources no matter what, or did he really mean what he said?
“Why do you need to know?”
“I need to make sure that what I tell you isn’t flowing back to Takada. I don’t think that would happen, but maybe you don’t know who’s talking to who. So tell me.”
“All right. I heard it from Kimiko.”
“Kimiko? From the bar where Yumi works?”
“Yes.”
“And what the hell were you doing with Kimiko on a Friday night?”
“A kind of date?”
Sekiguchi’s mouth dropped open. “You’re doing Kimiko? Jake, you really are an information whore.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“No, no, no. You’re single, it’s okay. But don’t forget she’s a yakuza woman. And she’s got a shabu habit.”
“Speed. Methamphetamine. She’s a junkie. So you’d better be using a skin. You could get hep C or worse.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, be careful.”
“Should I not see her?”
“No, keep seeing her. Keep pumping her for information. Hell, pump her for anything you want. Just tell me what you find out.” He shook his head and offered me a cigarette, which I was happy to take.
I was learning a lot from Sekiguchi, most important that it’s the time you take when it seems unimportant that is the most important time of all. Sekiguchi, whenever he put a yakuza in jail, would always pay a visit to the guy’s family. He’d check up on them periodically, sometimes even buy them groceries or help the wife with house repairs. He would contact the yakuza in the “pig house” (a euphemism for jail, not a typographical error) and let him know how things were going at home. He never made the crime and the criminal a personal thing. He was doing his job, and they were doing theirs.
The payoff for this extra effort was that when the yakuza returned to their lives outside prison, they were predisposed to leak information to Sekiguchi. Whether or not they picked up again with organized crime, they’d always have ties to yakuza and would pass things on to Sekiguchi. Thus he had built himself up a little yakuza information network. I decided I would emulate him to the best of my ability.
In July, Sekiguchi invited me to that wonderful tradition known as a family barbecue. This being Japan, it wasn’t hot dogs and it wasn’t beef, it was fish—small, sweet, fresh river fish known as ayu, skewered, rubbed with salt, grilled over charcoal, and dipped in an amazing green sauce. Delicious! As we sat on his porch drinking Cokes and eating whole fish on a stick, he offered me some more advice: “You have to plant the seeds when the ground is still half frozen to reap the spring harvest. Plant the seeds in spring.”
It was a little unusual for him to speak in metaphors, so I asked him to explain.
“Well, the dog breeder case is hot now, yeah, I know. But you shouldn’t be spending all your time on it. You should be hanging out with some other cops now too. Why? Because they don’t have any good cases. And because they have nothing to work with, they have plenty of time, and they probably wouldn’t mind your company. If you brought them something to work with, they’d love you.
“Visit your sources or your informants when nothing is going on. Then they’ll see you as a friend or a buddy and not a hungry opportunist. Familiarity breeds trust. You came pretty early on this case, before my name got out, so I let you in the door.”
He used his skewer to poke out the eyeball of a fish and offered it to me. I popped it into my mouth. Not bad. The two girls were watching and gave me a standing ovation, clapping wildly. Mrs. Sekiguchi offered me the eyeball from her fish; I politely declined. I’d had my quota for the day.
“Where do you think this case is going?” he asked.
I had no idea.
“The fraud case will fall apart. There are two people who probably know how Sekine killed Endo and Kawasaki, the waste management company president. That’s Ryoji Arai, his so-called business associate, and Shima, Arai’s driver. It’s very simple. We find something to arrest those two for—God knows they’ve done some shady shit in their lives. We bounce them off each other until they cough up the information we want, and then we take down Sekine. If I was in charge, that’s what I’d do. Unfortunately, I’m not in charge.”
“Who is Arai, anyway? What’s his connection to Sekine?”
“You’re going to have to work on that one for yourself, Jake. I could spell it all out for you, but it’d be too easy. Ask around. You’ll find out.”
While I was screwing around with Kimiko and talking with Sekiguchi, the other Yomiuri reporters were doing a stellar job tracking down Sekine’s less-than-stellar history. It seemed as though he’d always been in the orbit of the yakuza; even as a youngster he’d hung around the local gang’s office and ran errands, though he’d never managed to become a full-fledged member.
His life was unremarkable until 1972, when he began dealing in exotic pets. Business boomed. Ups and downs followed; he married another “animal lover” in 1983 and settled down in Kumagaya, in the northern part of Saitama Prefecture. He cut down on expenses by making his own pet food, slaughtering the pigs and cattle himself and grinding up the offal for dog food. The blood that oozed into the streets from the shop upset the neighbors, as did the animal carcasses that were thrown out with the other trash. But Sekine cleaned up his act, and the neighbors learned to live with it.
Back at the office, I compared notes with my colleagues. I found out that Ryoji Arai and Sekine went back ten years or so. Until recently, he’d been the PR guy for the African Kennel, then he and Sekine had had a falling-out—but not before Arai’s wife went missing. Probably Arai killed her, and Sekine helped him get rid of the body.
From a police contact, I learned that Arai was a wanted man, a very wanted man. He had somehow managed to alienate members of the two biggest crime groups in Japan—the Inagawa-kai and the Sumiyoshi-kai—by hurting the dog of a member of the former and by making off with a large amount of money from the latter.
I found out from another source that there was a zetsuenjo out in Arai’s name. When someone leaves the fold of an organized crime group, yakuza send out one of two kinds of letters to associated group members. A hamonjo (meaning “broken gate”) says that the individual is no longer associated with the organization and advises the recipient of the letter not to give him shelter or do business with him. A zetsuenjo, like the one out on Arai, says that the individual has betrayed the organization, is no longer entitled to membership, and is being hunted down; sometimes it also asks for information on the whereabouts of said individual. It can be a “Wanted: Dead or Alive” poster that’s circulated among the organized crime groups. This source allowed me to make a copy.
Armed with my copy of this unique document, I headed back to Sekiguchi’s house. It was six on a hot, humid evening. I was wearing my summer suit, a silk tie, and dress shoes, looking very snazzy. My socks even matched.
As I walked up to the door, it opened on its own. Out came the four members of the Sekiguchi family, all in gray sweatsuits.
“Jake, you’re just in time. Come jog with us.”
“I’m in a suit.”
“So what, you can still run. Come on.”
The kids pulled at my arm. “Come on, Jake. If you want to talk to our father, you have to run. Try and catch us!”
And with that they took off ahead of their parents. I didn’t really have a choice; I started jogging pathetically in my suit, trying to keep pace with Sekiguchi. Within ten minutes, the trail had taken us to the mountains. My only pair of dress shoes was about to become a casualty of duty.
“So,” said Sekiguchi, “find out anything about Arai?”
“Yes,” I panted. “I have his zetsuenjo right here.”
“Show it to me.”
I pulled it out of my pocket and held it up to Sekiguchi, who kept running while he read it.
“Excellent work, Jake. Good to see you doing something on your own. I won’t be around to spoon-feed you forever.”
“I wasn’t counting … on … it.” I was having trouble keeping up with the guy. How could he be smoking two packs a day and still be kicking my ass?
The kids weren’t cutting me any slack either. “Come on, Jake. Don’t be so slow.”
“Okay, let’s pick up the pace,” I said, trying to salvage some pride, and I ran ahead. Sekiguchi caught up with me in three easy strides.
“Out of shape, Jake? I may outlive you, boy.”
“I think you will.”
“So you wanna head back?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
“Okay, meet you back at the house.”
“No way. I’m not giving up if you aren’t.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure,” I said, full of gasping bravado.
“Okay, then, I’ll show mercy,” Sekiguchi said. Calling the troops to him, he announced, “We’re turning around, going back home. And for Jake-kun, we walk: one, two, three, four.”
Briskly, Sekiguchi filled me in as I stuck next to him:
Arai and Sekine were business partners. But Arai was a greedy bastard. He’d sold an expensive dog to the head of one of the Sumiyoshi-kai groups and was supposed to care for it while the boss was traveling. Instead, he’d abandoned the dog and left town with money borrowed from the group to set up a business importing animals for pets. He also allegedly ran off with a couple million yen he’d borrowed from Takada.
When the Sumiyoshi boss returned and found his dog half dead, he was furious. He swore he’d hunt down Arai like a dog himself. Arai got spooked, took off into the boonies, changed his name, found religion, and started painting Buddhist art. A little while before, Arai had reemerged on the scene and seemed to be back working for Sekine. Maybe after years of living like a monk, he was overpowered by the smell of Sekine’s success. Then suddenly Arai was gone, nowhere to be found. He had to know something about the missing people around Sekine.
“So here’s the deal.” Sekiguchi turned to me, starting to get serious. “Nobody hears a word of this, understood? This is just between you and me. Because I kind of fucked this one up.”
“Understood.”
“All right. Arai owed Takada a couple million yen when he split. Everybody thought Arai got offed when he disappeared, but we knew better. When Arai comes on the scene again and then disappears, I go to Takada and I ask him if he knows anything about Arai.
“Takada answers, ‘Bastard better be dead.’
“I tell him, ‘Wrong. It looks like he’s alive and well.’ I was just planting a seed because I had no idea where the fuck Arai was, and I knew that if Takada thought Arai was still alive, he’d find him. The joke is, we find Arai first. He is completely broke; no way he can pay back Takada what he owes. When Takada finds him, he’s dead meat.
“I need Arai for other reasons, so I have to run down to see Takada and get him to pull back, tell him not to lay one finger on the loser.
“This then gets back to the Sumiyoshi-kai group that Arai pissed off, and they decide they’re going to whack that dog-abusing deadbeat son of a bitch before Takada does. So, next thing, I’m trying to calm these guys down. In, like, a week I had to save this piece of shit’s life twice.
“Man, trying to keep these animals under control ain’t funny. I’m getting sick of it. If this investigation into Sekine doesn’t work out, I don’t think there’s much I can do. Can’t keep watch on the yakuza forever, trying to be reasonable with them.”
I was a little puzzled. “Don’t you think that it might be easier for everyone to take a long summer vacation and let Takada and the Sumiyoshi-kai know about it? Wouldn’t that be a solution?”
“Hell, yes, I think about it all the time. Maybe justice would be served. The problem is, we owe this to the families of Sekine’s victims. They would never get closure if we let Arai and Sekine die like that. They need to know the truth.”
• • •
On September 2, I was in a love hotel in Omiya with Kimiko, she was massaging my back, and I was complaining about the lack of momentum in the dog breeder case.
“Well,” she said, pushing her elbow into my shoulders, “why don’t they get the tapes from Arai?”
“What tapes?”
Kimiko explained: Arai had bragged about the tapes to a yakuza buddy who was a regular at her bar and who’d shown up one night in a talkative mood. Arai had said he was safe, they couldn’t touch him, he wasn’t going to wind up like Endo because he had the goods on Sekine, who had basically confessed to the murders on tape. Supposedly Shima, Sekine’s driver, had helped get rid of Endo’s body.
I didn’t know what evidentiary value tapes like these would have, but it sounded pretty important. “I have to tell Sekiguchi about this,” I said, getting up from the bed.
“Right now? You have to tell him right now?”
“Yes, this is important stuff.”
“Suit yourself.”
Sekiguchi answered the phone, and I started to relate the tale of the tapes when Kimiko, because she was miffed and because she had a bizarre sense of humor, yanked my pants down and began fellating me. This made carrying on a conversation a little hard to concentrate on, and I started talking as fast as I could: “… murders … body … Kimiko … me … you.”
“If that’s true, we have to pull in Arai right away. Good work, Jake. Anything else?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Are you all right? You’re talking real fast.”
“I’m fine. A little tired.”
“Okay, take care of yourself,” he said, then he hung up.
I couldn’t, however, because Kimiko’s ministrations had been keeping me on the edge. Three seconds later I was over that edge. I collapsed on the bed with the phone still in my hand, wanting now to go to sleep, but Kimiko was having none of it.
Honorable me, I knew I owed her. So I turned my beeper off for the first time in months.
• • •
At first Sekiguchi didn’t know what to do with the sudden knowledge of the tapes’ existence. If he told Takada, Takada would track down Arai, beat the tapes out of him, and then kill both Arai and Sekine. It was one thing to suspect that Sekine had killed Endo, another to have his admission that he’d done it.
Sekiguchi decided to take the information to Takada’s second in command, whom I’ll just call the Consigliere, who listened to what Sekiguchi had to say and promised to take care of it quietly.
Things at this point started to move quickly.
In no time at all, the Consigliere found Arai, who for some reason became willing to talk. The Consigliere had made no mention of the tapes—didn’t need to—to his boss Takada.
Arai’s revelations changed the entire focus of the investigation: Arai had had no part in the disappearance of the last four victims, but Shima, his driver, had. From Shima, Arai had learned that Sekine had killed Endo and his driver, Wakui, with poison and that Shima had helped bury them. So what Shima knew was enough to bury Sekine.
The police got tired of waiting and arrested Arai on a fraud charge. They didn’t think he’d be of much use, since even if he did confess to killing his wife, proving a ten-year-old murder would be difficult with no body. What they were interested in was what Arai could tell them about Shima. If they could break Shima, Sekine would be easy pickings.
What no one had counted on, especially Sekiguchi, was the Consigliere telling his boss Takada about the existence of the tapes on the day of Arai’s arrest. This prompted Takada to call Shima immediately and tell him simply that either Shima disclose the location of Endo’s body or Shima’s body would be needing burial itself.
Shima was duly shaken, but he was in a real bind. He wanted to tell Takada where Endo’s body was, but there was no body—nothing left to call a body anyway. How could Shima tell a yakuza boss that he’d help cut up and burn the body of his number two man?
Takada, for his part, was speeding justice along, or threatening to, because the wheels were turning so damn slowly. He wanted honor, even in death, for Endo, and he wanted Sekiguchi to have an airtight case to nail the killer.
Takada, speaking to Sekiguchi, promised not to kill Shima. He had bigger fish to fry, as long as Sekine was free and alive. But if he could have time with Shima alone, he’d learn where the body was. Cops were staking out Shima’s place; couldn’t Sekiguchi make them go away?
Sekiguchi couldn’t do that, of course. “We have someone staked out guarding his place most of the time these days. Most of the time,” he repeated.
Takada took the hint. When the cop left his watch, Takada and a couple of goons showed up. Shima, looking out the window and seeing what was coming down, bolted out the back and fled to the police station. In tears, he got down on his hands and knees and begged, “If you’re going to watch my house, for God’s sake please do it twenty-four hours a day.”
When the police could not promise him that, Shima took off. No one knew where he went. Not Takada, not Sekiguchi, not the Saitama police. The police had Arai in custody, but once again everything was at a standstill.
Yet once again Sekiguchi’s unusual yakuza information network came through as the Consigliere handed him several audio tapes. The sound quality was terrible, but you could tell it was Arai talking with Sekine and Shima. A lot of things were said in a kind of code, but for a lot of things the meaning was plenty clear.
Shima—in probable reference to the disappearance of Endo—assures Arai that there is no problem. “The body is invisible,” he says. Then he adds, “The body is in Gunma.” Shima makes references to other dead bodies. He tells of driving Kawasaki’s car to Tokyo station, where he abandoned it in the parking lot; he implies he helped transport Kawasaki’s corpse.
There was nothing damning, but there was enough to work with in the interrogation room. Shima was key, but without Shima there would be no questioning, there would be no case. And so began another wait-and-see period. In November, Sekiguchi left the team and returned to the Anti–Organized Crime Division. The unspoken assumption was that Shima had been killed and that, after all this, the case would never be solved.
I was wrong.
It was the yakuza boss Takada who remained dogged in his personal pursuit of justice. In late November he succeeded in tracking down Shima, who had also changed his name and married; Takada passed the word on to Sekiguchi, who in turn reported it to the Saitama police. They nabbed Shima in December, and, when confronted with the existence of the tapes, Shima sang.
His information proved good. Searching the site in Gunma Prefecture that Shima pointed them to, the police found enough of Kawasaki’s teeth to make their case. They had sent a very small crew. No one knew. Not the Yomiuri. Not anyone.
On January 5, right after the New Year’s holidays, the Saitama police let Shima out on bail and announced the arrest of Gen Sekine and his wife, Hiroko, for the dismemberment of Akio Kawasaki. Within hours of his arrest, Sekine admitted almost everything. After an agonizing year and, depending upon how you look at it, more than a decade, the Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances case was closed.
Did I get the scoop? Did the Yomiuri get the scoop?
Noooooo.
I felt betrayed and angry and broke away from the madhouse at the office to call Sekiguchi.
“Jake, why didn’t you call?”
“Why didn’t I call?”
“You never gave me your home phone number, so I called the Urawa office three times since New Year’s and couldn’t get hold of you. I thought you were overseas.”
“Did you leave a message?”
“Yes, of course.”
I was in shock. Was he lying to me? I felt like a girlfriend who had been cheated on.
I asked around the office if anyone had called for me.
“Oh, yeah, you got a few calls,” one of the newbies volunteered. “I think it was insurance or something. The numbers are here somewhere.” He shuffled through the pile of baby pictures, sports records, and clippings on his desk until he found a piece of paper with a number scribbled on it. It was Sekiguchi’s home phone number.
It was everything I could do to keep from throttling the kid. Caught in my throat was a scream: “You’re the guy! You’re the guy that fucked up a year’s worth of work because you were too damn lazy to call me!” But it stayed in my throat.
I’d screwed up. If I had gone down to Sekiguchi’s place over the holidays, it would have changed everything. I’d made the fatal mistake that Sekiguchi had warned me about, not dropping in when nothing appeared to be going on, not keeping tabs on open cases. And I’d never given him my home phone number. The fact that he’d called the office at all put him at amazing risk.
So that’s the anticlimactic end to the tale. I had a solid lead on the story. I knew the game plan. Up to that last chess move, I knew all about what was going on with the investigation, and I could have known that they’d found the remains of Kawasaki. I could have had the scoop of the year. I didn’t.
In the end, Sekine and his wife were convicted for the murders of only four people. How many they really murdered is still a mystery.