Strangulation.
This was why Tomoe had been strangled from behind and Mikoko from the front.
“She strangled herself? Is that even possible?”
“It’s actually a fairly common suicide method. Of course, in Mikoko’s case, it wasn’t her arteries that were cut off, it was her windpipe. It’s an extremely agonizing way to go. Your face gets all puffy. It ain’t pretty.”
You had to have some fricking resolve to choose such a death.
In this case, Mikoko Aoii’s resolve…
“So by the bed there was a suicide note. Addressed to me. It had a lot to say. It talked about how she had killed Tomoe, and what she wanted me to do.”
“What she wanted you to do?”
“She didn’t want people to think it was a suicide. She didn’t mind dying, but she didn’t want people to think she was a horrible person and that she had killed Tomoe.”
“I’m not following you. Give it to me straight, man.”
“What I mean is, she asked me to get rid of all the evidence. The neck strap she had stolen from the scene of the murder, and then of course the note itself, as well as the ribbon she used to kill Tomoe that also pointed to her own suicide. And there were some other things as well.”
“Ahh, I get it.” Zerozaki slowly nodded and then looked up at the sky. “Yeah, it’s starting to click. So you did what she asked. Come to think of it, something did seem strange. I noticed it myself. Something about the time was off. You left your place at eleven o’clock and arrived at Aoii’s place within ten minutes, the cops arrived within another ten minutes, and you arrived at the police station within yet another ten minutes, at which point it was exactly twelve o’clock. That leaves thirty minutes extra. So you were doing something during those thirty minutes.”
“Yeah. But obviously I didn’t leave the room, or the security cameras in the hallway would’ve captured me, and obviously I had to report it to the police. So what do you think I did?”
“You said you’d been frisked by the time you exited the building. Then could it be… Oh, man…you ate it?”
Bingo, I nodded.
Anyone could’ve guessed by this point. And this was Hitoshiki Zerozaki, no less.
“You ate it.”
“Yeah. It was delicious,” I joked. “People who do that are traditionally known as stuffers. But that’s not important. At any rate, even I can’t keep down what I can’t digest, so I had to suppress the urge to vomit as I called the police. I was planning to hold it in until I got home, but I couldn’t make it, and I ended up hurling at the police station.”
“You ate the goddamn evidence…” Zerozaki said in awe. “The ribbon, too? Do you realize you ate something that killed two people? That’s insanity, man.”
“Yeah, no doubt. I didn’t think it was sane.”
“But why did you go along with Aoii’s request? You could’ve just ignored it, and you wouldn’t have had to cross such a rickety-ass bridge.”
“Yeah, well, I guess I was brooding over some things myself. You could call it a form of atonement,” I said, breaking eye contact with Zerozaki. “Anyway, that sums up the death of Mikoko Aoii. She killed herself. In reality, the story should have ended there…”
“But the case continued, contrary to expectations.”
“Yup.” I sighed. “That…was a real surprise.”
“What about Atemiya, then? Why did she kill Usami?”
“Well, we can only speculate. I wasn’t involved in that case at all. But I’ve got a theory that seems to hold water. It’s just your regular, everyday murder case. Muimi probably thought something was fishy about Mikoko’s death in the first place. In fact, Mikoko might have told Muimi and only Muimi about killing Tomoe. In any case, let’s posit that Muimi was wise to the fact that Tomoe was murdered by Mikoko, who then killed herself.”
“Okay.”
“What would she do?”
For the sake of someone else. For someone other than herself.
“What could she do for Mikoko? Zerozaki, what would you have done?”
“Nothing. Aoii was already dead.”
Indeed.
Even for someone who was still alive, Zerozaki probably wouldn’t do a thing. Nor would I. It was that simple.
“But Muimi wanted to do something. To avenge Mikoko, and to protect her.”
“By avenge, you mean killing you. Well, I guess you kind of rejected Aoii, after all. Makes sense. Isn’t that exactly what I said? That Aoii had the hots for you?”
“Don’t act like a bigshot about it. Even I realized that.”
“You mean you knew and you were just blowing her off? Man, then you have no right to complain about almost getting killed. But what do you mean Muimi was trying to protect her? How did killing Usami add up to protecting Aoii?”
“It’s just like what I did. Muimi was trying to safeguard Mikoko’s good name. In other words, if a third murder occurred, nobody would suspect that the second victim, Mikoko, was actually the one who killed Tomoe, which is to say, a close friend.”
“Okay, fair enough. But why Usami? She could’ve just killed anybody. She didn’t have to kill a friend.”
“She killed him because he was a friend. If the third victim had been someone completely unrelated to Tomoe and Mikoko, the police might not even consider it a third case. So the most likely candidates to be the next victim were Akiharu Usami and me. And I know what you’re thinking, Zerozaki. Why didn’t she just kill me, then? Indeed. But I don’t live in an antique of an apartment because I think it’s cool. There’s no harder place to kill a person.”
Thin walls, and hallways that creaked just from walking down them─sneaking in, having a scuffle, or killing a person in my apartment building was impossible.
“So Akiharu Usami was the next best thing? Still, even if Aoii was Atemiya’s close friend, wasn’t Usami her friend too? How could she?”
“I doubted it myself. Not to mention that Tomoe was Muimi’s friend as well. I couldn’t see how Muimi could forgive the killer. So I asked her. And this was what she said: It’s purely a matter of priorities. Basically what that means is that for Muimi, the deceased Mikoko was worth more than the living Akiharu, and the culprit, Mikoko, worth more than the victim, Tomoe.”
“That’s terrible. Usami got screwed more than anyone.”
“Maybe so.”
Akiharu had foretold that he would be next and claimed he could die happily. Just how much of the truth had he figured out? This was a mystery to me. In fact, I couldn’t even begin to guess. Was it too romantic to suppose that Akiharu arrived at the truth in its entirety and still let Muimi kill him? If that was the case, then Akiharu Usami was the one admirable person in this whole rigmarole.
Namely, because he accepted all of his friends as they were.
“Say…” Zerozaki halted for a while, in deep thought like a Rodin sculpture, before he uncrossed his arms and looked up at me. “I understand the logic and all, but I’ve got the same doubts I had with Aoii. This is all based on the premise that Atemiya killed him, right? Aoii left behind a suicide note, so that’s one thing. But in Atemiya’s case, you’ve got to pull a Kindaichi process of elimination. You figured it all out from that one phone call, without any evidence. If it wasn’t because Atemiya and you were the only ones left, I don’t know what to think.”
“Do you have some problem with Yokomizo?”
I couldn’t help but sense some hostility in Zerozaki’s references to Kindaichi. Nevertheless, he simply shook his head.
“Nah, not really,” he answered. “But the covers are too scary so I only watch the TV dramas. I don’t really like him or hate him, to be honest.”
“Ah.”
“Is that all it is?”
“No. Think back. Remember what I asked Sasaki?”
“Oh. Whether that ‘x over y’ inscription was there. So? I thought you said that wasn’t important.”
“The meaning is irrelevant. It was nothing more than random symbols at that point. It only meant something in Tomoe’s case. But the fact that the same formula was found at the site of Akiharu’s death suggests something very odd.”
“Why?”
“That ‘x over y’ found at each crime scene was…a secret. It was known to the police only. Sasaki didn’t even mention it at first. The only other people who could’ve known about it were you and me, since we broke into the crime scene, and anyone I happened to ask, ‘What do you suppose x over y means?’”
Namely, Aikawa, Mikoko, and Muimi, just the three of them.