paid in the amount she counted on. With the automatic disbursement machine, it was a simple matter to draw the money out.
"A pity about Taro Usami," Yumiko thought. But to make her crime perfect, he must die. When the end-of-year party was a little noisy, taking care to leave no fingerprints, Yumiko set a highball containing potassium cyanide on the table before Usami.
But as the plane swung over Tokyo International Airport, Yumiko murmured, "Stop thinking about the past. The future is ahead of you."
* * *
Inspector Kono was listening to a report by Detective Shibata in an official phone call from Tokyo. Shibata's voice was clearly excited.
"Yumiko Murase's activities since arriving in Tokyo. At a real estate office, she sublet an apartment—two rooms and a dining-kitchen. The building's in Shinjuku Ward, fifteen minutes from the Kabuki-cho entertainment district. She paid deposits and a year's rent, totaling five hundred thousand yen. Next, she negotiated to purchase the management rights and equipment of a nearby coffee shop. Total expenditure was fifteen million yen.
"When she left Sanei, because of outstanding debts, her retirement fund came to only three million yen. Looks as if you're absolutely right. Yumiko Murase is the murderer. The waiting policy has paid off. Still, somehow I feel extra sorry for Taro Usami. I guess he just knew too much about too many people."
"That's real nice," Kono said.
SEICHO MATSUMOTO
The Cooperative
Defendant
Seicho Matsumoto was the first chairman of the Association of Mystery Writers of Japan. He ushered in the second period in the history of the modern Japanese detective story. His novels epitomize the contemporary themes of social problems, with emphasis on realism in the characters and in their motivations. He was the first to establish this social-detective-story genre in Japan, and his books are consistently among the best sellers of the country. He won the Detective Story Writers' Club Prize for his work titled The Face and Other Stories.
The story he gives us now is representative of his technique and thematic outlook. The victim is a merciless moneylender, the accused a young owner of a noodle shop. The crime is murder, the investigator a legal detective. The style is "documentary real-life"—with a surprise twist at the end. . . .
THE case seemed simple. . . .
On an autumn night, a sixty-two-year-old moneylender was clubbed to death in his own home by a twenty-eight-year-old man. The murderer stole a cashbox from the victim's house and fled. The box contained twenty-two promissory notes. Of these notes, the killer stole five, then threw the cashbox into a nearby irrigation pond. The murdered moneylender's house was located in a western part of Tokyo that was beginning to prosper architecturally, but at the time of the killing, the immediate vicinity was still roughly half agricultural fields.
When the young lawyer, Naomi Harajima, received word from his lawyers' association that he had been designated court-assigned counsel for the case, he did not much like the idea and was on the verge of refusing. He already had three private cases on his hands, and they were keeping him occupied.
The president of Harajima's lawyers' association argued that he would very much like him to take the case. It appeared that one other lawyer had already been appointed but had suddenly taken ill. The trial was scheduled for an early date. The court would obviously be embarrassed if no legal representative for the defendant was found.
The president said, "Besides, Harajima—this case is nothing much. Come on, now, man—at least give it the once over. All right?"
Section 3 of Article 7 of the Japanese Constitution makes provision for state-assigned legal counsel in cases where the defendant is too poor or for some other reason unable to procure legal advice (Article 36, Criminal Legal Procedural Code).
Since the state pays, the legal fee is extremely low; busy lawyers usually do not want these cases, though sometimes humane reasons for aiding a defendant enter in. The association attempts to divide these duties among its members on a rotational basis, but any attorney is free to refuse. But something must be done. . . .
Accordingly, cases like this usually find their way into the hands of lawyers who are quite young, or who are not too busy.
Because the fee is small, handling of such cases often becomes less careful than it might otherwise be.
Recently the reputation of the system has improved slightly. But actually, these men, often disinterested or very busy, may do no more than give the case a brief run-through before the trial and meet the defendant for the first time in the courtroom. Things will never be completely remedied until fees for court-assigned counsel are raised.
Harajima was urged to defend Torao Ueki in the case of the murder of Jin Yamagishi, because the work was simple. He finally agreed.
In reading the documents pertaining to the indictment, the records of the criminal investigation, Harajima learned the following things.
Originally, the victim, Jin Yamagishi, had owned a rather large amount of agricultural land. But he had sold this to a realtor. With the money accrued, he built a two-story house and immediately opened a small-scale financing business. This had happened ten years ago. At the time of the murder, Yamagishi lived alone. Childless, his wife had died three years before. Yamagishi rented the second floor of his house to a young primary-school teacher and his wife. The rent was not high, though the old moneylender had a reputation for being greedy. He was impressed because the schoolteacher had a second-dan black belt in judo. In other words, the young man would be a combination tenant and guard.
Any elderly person living alone might want protection. In this case, it was still more important for Yamagishi, since he had made a bad name by charging high interest on the money he lent. Many of his customers were small businessmen trying hard to succeed in a newly developing part of Tokyo. The neighborhood was along one of the private commuter train lines. A good location. But population growth had been slow, and business was not thriving. Some of the people who paid Yamagishi's high rates went bankrupt. There were cases in which older people used their retirement funds to open stores. They put shop and land down as security for loans from Yamagishi. He took everything when they could no longer keep up their payments.
Customers in other districts along the same train line suffered because of Yamagishi's behavior. It was not alone fear of thieves but also the knowledge of the many people who hated him that encouraged the moneylender to install the young judo expert and his wife in the upstairs apartment.
On October 15, the young teacher received word that his mother was close to death. He and his wife left that day for their hometown. The murder took place on October 18, and Yamagishi's body was discovered by a neighbor on the morning of October 19. This person found the front door open (later it was disclosed that all other windows and doors were firmly secured with rain shutters that were locked from within), entered the hallway, and immediately saw Yamagishi stretched out face down in the adjacent room. Fearful, he called out. There was no answer from the inert form.
He reported the matter to the police.
Autopsy revealed the cause of death to be brain concussion and cerebral hemorrhage, caused by a blow on the head. An area about as large as the palm of an adult hand was caved in and flattened at the back of the skull. The wound had been fatal. Yamagishi had tumbled forward and expired in a crawling position. He had apparently been struck from behind and, after falling, had crawled a short distance on hands and knees.
From the contents of the victim's stomach, it was ascertained that he had died about three hours after his last meal. Yamagishi, who cooked for himself, was in the habit of eating dinner around six. This would mean that the murder took place between nine and ten, an assumption that agreed with the autopsy doctor's estimation of lapse of postmortem time.
Nothing in the room was disturbed. In a smaller bedroom next to the one in which the corpse was