Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination Page 4

  Four or five blocks away from the old woman's house there stood a high, stone wall enclosing an old Shinto shrine. Fukiya dropped his jackknife and his blood-spattered gloves through a crevice in the wall down into a ditch, then walked on in a leisurely manner to a small park where he frequently went walking. Here he sat on a bench and casually watched several children playing on the swings.

  After spending considerable time in the park, he rose from his seat, yawned and stretched, and then made his way to a nearby police station. Greeting the sergeant at the desk with a perfectly innocent look, he produced his well-filled purse.

  "Officer, I just found this purse on the street. It's full of money, so I thought I'd better turn it in."

  The policeman took the purse, examined its contents, and asked several routine questions. Fukiya, perfectly calm and self-possessed, answered straightforwardly, indicating the place and time he had made his "find." Naturally, all the information he gave was pure fabrication, with one exception: he gave his correct name and address.

  After filling out several forms, the sergeant handed him a receipt. Fukiya pocketed the receipt, and for a moment wondered again if he was acting wisely. From every point of view, however, this was assuredly the safest course to take. Nobody knew that the old lady's money had been reduced by half. Also, it was quite obvious to Fukiya that no one would come to claim the purse. According to Japanese law, all the money in the purse would become his if no one claimed it within one year. Of course, it would be a long time to wait, but what of it? It was just like money in the bank—something he could count on, something to look forward to.

  On the other hand, if he had hidden the money, to await an opportune time to spend it, it would have meant risking his neck every moment of the day. But the way he had chosen eliminated even the remotest danger of detection, even if the old lady had kept a record of the serial numbers of the banknotes.

  While walking home from the police station Fukiya continued to gloat silently over the masterful way he had carried out his crime. "A simple case of sheer genius," he said to himself with a chuckle. "And what a big joke on the police. Imagine! A thief turning in his spoils! Under such circumstances, how could anyone possibly suspect me? Why, not even the Great Buddha himself would ever guess the truth!"

  On the following day, after waking from a sound and untroubled sleep, Fukiya looked at the morning paper, delivered to his bedside by the maid of the boardinghouse. Stifling a yawn, he glanced at the page which carried the human-interest stories. Suddenly he caught sight of a brief item which caused his eyes to open wide. The first part of the story was an account of the discovery of the old woman's body. This was neither surprising nor startling to Fukiya. But the report went on to disclose that his friend Saito had been arrested by the police as the main suspect, having been discovered with a large sum of money on his person.

  Actually, Fukiya thought, this fact too was nothing to become disturbed about. Instead, the development was decidedly advantageous to his own security. As one of Saito's closest friends, however, he also realized that he would have to inquire about him at the police station.

  Fukiya dressed hastily and then called at the police station mentioned in the newspaper story. This turned out to be the very same place where he had reported the "finding" of the purse. "Curse my luck!" he swore to himself when he made this embarrassing discovery. Why hadn't he selected a different police station to report the money to? Well, it was too late now to change things.

  Skilfully, he expressed deep anxiety over the unfortunate plight of his friend. He asked if they would permit him to see Saito and received a polite no. He then tried to make a few inquiries into the circumstances which had led to his friend's arrest, but here again he was refused.

  Fukiya, however, didn't much care, for even without being told he could easily imagine what had happened. On the fateful day, Saito must have returned to the house ahead of the maid. By that time, of course, he himself had already committed his horrible deed and left the house. Then Saito must have found the corpse. Before reporting the crime to the police, however, he must have remembered the money hidden in the pot. If this was the work of a robber, Saito must have figured, the money would surely be gone. Curious to know if his reasoning was correct, he had examined the pot and had found the money there wrapped in oilpaper. And Fukiya could easily imagine what must have happened after that.

  Undoubtedly Saito was tempted to keep the money for himself. This was a natural reaction, although, of course, it was a foolish thing for him to do. Thinking that everybody would believe that the murderer of the old woman, had stolen the money, Saito pocketed the whole amount. And his next move? This, too, was easy to surmise. He had recklessly gone ahead and reported his discovery of the old woman's corpse, with the money still on his person, never suspecting that he would be one of the first to be questioned and searched. What an utter fool!

  But wait, Fukiya reasoned further, Saito would certainly put up a desperate struggle to clear himself of suspicion. Then what? Would his statements possibly incriminate him, Fukiya, in any way? If Saito just kept insisting that the money was his, all might be well. But, then, the fact that the amount was exceptionally large—much too large for a student like Saito to possess—might give the lie to such a statement. The only alternative left for Saito would be to tell the truth—the whole truth. This would lead, by clever cross-examination on the part of the prosecutor, to the revelation that Saito had also told Fukiya where the old lady had hidden her money.

  "Only two days preceding the day of the crime," Fukiya could even hear Saito telling the court, "my friend Fukiya conversed with the victim in the very room in which she was murdered. Knowing that she had that money hidden in the tree pot, could he not have committed the crime? I also wish to remind you, gentlemen of the court, that Fukiya has always been notorious for being financially hard up!"

  Although feeling decidedly uncomfortable after this soliloquy, Fukiya's optimism soon conquered his initial dismay. Emerging from the police station with a perfectly blank look on his face, he returned to his boardinghouse and ate a rather late breakfast. While eating, his original bravado returned, and he even made a point of telling the maid who served him about several aspects of the case.

  Shortly after, he went to school, where he found, both on the campus and in the classrooms, that Saito's arrest as a suspect in the murder case was the main topic of conversation.

  The investigator placed in charge of this sensational case was District Attorney Kasamori, noted not only as a man with excellent legal training, but also well known for valuable accomplishments of his own, especially in the field of psychological research. Whenever he came across a case which could not be unraveled by the standard methods of crime detection, he employed his fund of psychological knowledge with amazing results. With a man of Kasamori's reputation taking in hand the case of the old lady's murder, the public immediately became convinced that the mystery would soon be solved.

  Kasamori too was confident that he could ultimately crack the case, no matter how complex it appeared at this early stage of the investigation. He began with a preliminary check of everything connected with the case, so that by the time it reached a public trial every single phase would be as clear as daylight. As the investigation proceeded, however, he found the case more and more difficult to handle. From the outset, the police kept insisting that no one but Saito could be the guilty party. Kasamori himself admitted the logic of the police theory, for, after all, every person who had been even remotely connected with the murdered old woman had been investigated and cleared of suspicion—every one, that is, except her student lodger, the hapless Saito. Fukiya too had been among those who had been questioned, along with creditors of the old woman, her tenants, and even casual acquaintances, but he had quickly been eliminated.

  In the case of Saito, there was one major point which worked to his great disadvantage. This was that he was extremely weak by nature and, completely terrorized by the ste
rn atmosphere of the court, he was unable to answer even the simplest questions without first stuttering and stammering and showing all the symptoms of a man with a guilty conscience. Furthermore, in his excited state, he often retracted his previous statements, forgot vital details, and then tried to cover up by making other contradictory remarks, all of which tended only to incriminate him further and further. Simultaneously, there was another factor which tortured him and drove him to the verge of insanity. This was the fact that he was guilty of having stolen half of the old woman's money, precisely as Fukiya had theorized.

  The district attorney carefully summed up the evidence, circumstantial as it was, against Saito, and pitied him deeply. It could not be denied that all the odds were against him. But, Kasamori asked himself again and again, had this weak, blubbering fool been capable of committing such a vicious, cold-blooded murder? He doubted it So far Saito had not confessed, and conclusive proof of his guilt was still lacking.

  A month went by, but the preliminary probe had not yet been completed. The district attorney became decidedly annoyed and impatient at the slow pace of the investigation.

  "Curse the slow-grinding wheels of the law!" he exploded to a subordinate one day, while rechecking his documents on the case for what was probably the hundredth time. "At this rate, it'll take us a thousand years to solve the case." He then strode angrily to another desk and picked up a sheaf of routine documents filled out by the captain of the police station in whose jurisdiction the murder of the old lady fell. He looked casually at one of the papers and noticed that a purse containing ninety-five thousand yen in thousand-yen notes had been found at a spot near the old lady's house on the same day of the murder. The finder of the money, he further learned from the report, was a student, Fukiya by name, and a close friend of Saito's, the key murder suspect! For some reason—possibly because of the urgency of other duties—the police captain had failed to submit his report earlier.

  After finishing reading the report, Kasamori's eyes lit up with a strange glow. For a full month now he had felt like a person fumbling in the dark. And then came this information, like a thin ray of light. Could it have any significance, any bearing on the case at hand? He decided to find out without delay.

  Fukiya was quickly summoned, and the district attorney questioned him closely. After a full hour's questioning, however, Kasamori found he was getting nowhere. Asked as to why he had not mentioned the incident of his finding the purse when he had been interrogated previously in connection with the murder, Fukiya maintained calmly that he had not thought the matter to have any bearing on the case.

  This reply, given straightforwardly, sounded most reasonable, for the money believed to have belonged to the old lady had been found in Saito's possession. Naturally, therefore, who could have imagined that the money found on the street was also a part of the old lady's property?

  Nevertheless, Kasamori was deeply puzzled. Was it nothing but a mere coincidence that the very man who was a close friend of Saito's, the leading suspect, the man who, according to Saito's testimony in court, had also known where the old lady had hidden her money, had picked up so large a sum at a spot not far from the place where the murder had been committed? Here, indeed, was a conundrum worthy of the mind of a master sleuth.

  Struggling angrily with the problem, the district attorney cursed the unfortunate fact that the serial numbers of the banknotes had not been recorded by the old woman. Had they been recorded, it would have been a most simple task to verify whether the money found by Fukiya was part of the same loot.

  "If only I could find one single clue," he kept repeating to himself.

  In the days that followed, Kasamori revisited the scene of the crime and talked to the victim's relatives, going over the same ground again and again, but all to no avail. He had to admit that he was up against a wall, with not a single tangible clue to follow up.

  So far as he could see, the only possible way in which he could explain the episode of Fukiya's finding the purse was that the man had stolen half of the old lady's savings, left the remainder in the hiding place, put the stolen money in a purse, and pretended that he had found it on the street. But was it really possible that such a fantastic thing could have been done? The purse, of course, had been subjected to the closest scrutiny and placed under a microscope for even the faintest of possible clues, but all these efforts had proved negative. Also, according to Fukiya's own statement, he had taken a walk on the day of the murder; in fact, he had even admitted that he had passed the old lady's house. Would a man who was guilty be so bold as to make such a dangerous admission? And then, what about the weapon which had been used to stab the old woman? The entire house and garden as well as the surrounding area within a large radius had been searched with a fine-tooth comb, but there was not a trace of it.

  In the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, Kasamori felt that the police were justified in pointing to Saito as the most likely suspect. But then again, the district attorney reasoned, if Saito could be guilty, so could Fukiyal Thus, after an investigation which had stretched out to a full month and a half, the only point which had been established was that there were two possible suspects, but without a shred of concrete evidence to convict either.

  Reaching this impasse, Kasamori decided there was still one other method he could use in his attempt to break the case. This was to subject the two suspects to a psychological test—a method which had been useful in the past.

  When he had first been questioned by the police, two or three days after the murder, Fukiya had learned that the district attorney who had been put in charge of the case was the noted amateur psychologist Kasamori, and the information filled him with panic. Cool and collected as he had been until then, he soon came to dread the very sound of the district attorney's name, especially after he had been summoned a second time and questioned by Kasamori himself. Supposing, just supposing, he were to be subjected to a psychological test. What then? Would he be able to hold his own in the face of such an experiment, the nature of which he knew absolutely nothing about?

  The shock of this possibility was so stunning that he became too uneasy to attend his classes. He remained in his room, on the pretext of illness, and tried desperately to figure out how he could match wits for wits. Of course, there was absolutely no way of anticipating the form of psychological test that Kasamori might employ. Fukiya, therefore, applied all the test methods he could possibly imagine on himself in order to discover the best possible way to circumvent them. Since a psychological test, by nature, was a method applied to reveal all false statements, Fukiya's first thought was that it would be utterly impossible to lie his way out of such a test.

  Fukiya knew there were psychological tests which used lie-detector devices to record physical reactions. He had also heard that there was a simpler method which used a stop watch to measure the time it took a suspect to answer questions. Reflecting upon the many and various psychological methods of crime detection, Fukiya became more and more concerned. Supposing he were caught by a surprise question like "You're the one who killed the old woman, aren't you?" fired at him point-blank? Fukiya felt confident that he would be able to shoot back calmly: "What proof do you have for such a wild supposition?" But if a lie detector were to be used, wouldn't it record his startled state of mind? Wouldn't it be absolutely impossible for a normal human being to prevent such physical reactions?

  Fukiya tried asking himself various hypothetical questions. Strangely, no matter how unexpected his questions were, when they were addressed to himself by himself, he could not imagine that they produced any physical changes within him. Gradually he became convinced that so long as he avoided becoming nervously excited, he would be safe even in the face of the most accurate instrument.

  While conducting these various experiments on himself, Fukiya suddenly became convinced that the effects of a psychological test might be neutralized by training. He became sure that the reaction of a man's nerves to a pointed question
would become less each time the question was repeated. Granting that his reasoning was sound, Fukiya told himself, the best method of neutralization was to become accustomed to the questions. He reasoned that his own questions to himself produced no reaction because he already knew both question and answer before he spoke.

  Fukiya painstakingly began to examine every page of a thick dictionary and to jot down those words which might possibly be used in questions to be thrown at him. For a full week he spent most of his waking hours this way, training his nerves against all possible questions. Then, feeling that his mind had been fairly well fortified in this field, he turned to another. This was the word-association test, which Fukiya knew psychiatrists used widely in examining patients.

  As Fukiya understood it, the patient—or accused—would be told to answer any word given him with the first word that came to his mind, and then the examiner would call off a list of words with absolutely no bearing on the case—"screen," "desk," "ink," "pen," and the like. The significance of the test lay in the fact that the word given in reply would have some mental association with the previously recited word. For example, if the word happened to be "screen," the culprit might come out with such words as "window," "window sill," "paper," or "door." And in the course of the test such incriminating words as "knife," "money," or "purse" would be slipped in so as to befuddle the accused in his association of ideas.

  In Fukiya's case, for instance, if he were not on his guard, he might reply "money" to "dwarf tree," thereby unconsciously admitting that he knew money to have been stolen from the pot of the tree. On the other hand, if he prepared for the ordeal in advance, he could answer with a harmless word like "earthernware" instead of "money." Then, of course, he would be in the clear.