While I read, Nakahigashi leveled his gaze at me, but not for long.
“Yeah,” he said. “Reina and I set my dad up with an underaged model. We threatened him so I could become president.” He sneered. “He was a regular at the secret club for a long time. But I knew that he’d always evade the charges unless we had airtight proof of a real crime. So we got Reina in with the club. We planned meticulously, and when we were finally ready to put everything into action, we set up my dad with the model through a producer I was friends with. Our plan worked like a charm.”
While he confessed, Ken allowed a little smile to float up on his face. Yamaji, on the other hand, grumpily put a hand to his stubble.
“I mean, a crime’s a crime,” Yamaji said. “But is an underage model really enough to take down a president of a major corporation? It’s really not that big of a deal, right?”
“The scale of the crime doesn’t matter when you’re stirring up a scandal,” Ken said. “All that really matters is how you manipulate the masses. Using their jealousy is especially effective. Such as people in the establishment arrogantly abusing their position of power to sleep with some of the talent an ordinary person only sees on TV. Whenever that happens, your average Joe just eats it up.
“The righteous indignation of the masses is just a cover,” he continued. “The public just wants to vent their spleen—pretty distant from the ‘justice’ they claim—until the scandal starts to lose its flavor. So it doesn’t matter if the crime is minor, as long as who it’s pinned on can’t talk their way out of it. And that was certainly the case with our charge: lewd acts with a minor.
“Not to mention,” Ken added smoothly, “any other important, powerful people who were also part of the secret club would’ve been dragged out into public because of my dad’s case. Another reason he had to give in to our threats so he didn’t make everyone around him go down, too.”
While Ken had been speaking, Dr. Higano had listened carefully, nodding intermittently. He asked, “You must’ve needed a lot of time to prepare. When did you get to know Reina?”
“When she was 18. I remember she was still in college. She researched everything about my family in her hunt for revenge and approached me. She aligned her interests with mine, which was getting to the top of the company, and we joined forces.”
It seemed that Reina had definitely been using Ken and Shota to take revenge for her father.
“Were you aware that Shota was also helping her with her plan?” I asked.
“Reina never said a word about him. My role was just one of support from the sidelines, so I figured she must have had some grunts on the ground. I was surprised to hear she was sleeping with him, but she convinced me that it was necessary to make him her loyal puppet. Logically it made sense—that’s the kind of woman Reina Myoko was.”
“Do you think some kind of syndicate was involved in her murder?”
“No, I don’t. If a syndicate wanted to shut her up, there were faster ways to do it—waiting until my father announced his resignation would be too late. Besides, it’s almost unthinkable that an organization trying to keep someone quiet would draw attention to itself by making her murder look like a Masquerade copy-cat crime.”
I followed his logic completely.
“But if Shota was killed,” he said, “then maybe this syndicate is involved, even if it doesn’t make sense. That’s what I’m starting to think.”
“Shota killed himself,” Yamaji said bluntly.
“Is that so? Then…that means the syndicate isn’t involved? That would be great news for me.”
“I’m sure it would. Everything went as you planned, and you successfully removed your father from the president’s seat. Come to think of it, after that you didn’t need Reina anymore. Were you planning to call off the engagement?”
“Absolutely not. Reina was working with me and thinking about what came next. She helped carry out the plan precisely because she saw the benefits of being the wife of the president. And I’d been impressed by her skills and also wanted her to be my wife.”
“But Reina had something different in mind,” Yamaji said.
He put a lollipop in his mouth and twirled it around. Oh man…That was a sign he was particularly displeased.
Ken had a complicated home environment, and I could imagine him resorting to dirty tactics to take the position he wanted.
However, Yamaji was another matter. He wouldn’t forgive someone for that, no matter what their reasons were.
“Why don’t we talk about something that the Doc and Princess here don’t know about? During the questioning you were clearly hesitant to talk about the whole thing at the café. I thought that was strange, so I had one of my guys look into it. He got to talk to the café’s waiter.”
Though Nakahigashi hadn’t flinched once while confessing to how he trapped his father, now his face suddenly stiffened.
Yamaji continued: “You argued with the victim at Sea’s Ale…but I guess it was more like you just yelling at her. This attracted the waiter’s attention, so he listened in. You were saying that—”
“Wait,” Nakahigashi interrupted. “That’s enough. I’ll tell them myself.” He gritted his teeth for a moment, and tried to arrange his expression to one of nonchalance. “Reina was breaking up with me.”
“Aha. So she had finished using you,” Yamaji noted sarcastically and then stared grimly at Ken.
“I don’t know why she’d do something like that. It was heartless of her to change her mind. She was completely ungrateful as to how much I had helped her accomplish. You could call it a betrayal.”
I never expected someone like Ken to be using the word “heartless.”
“And what about that thing you did?” Yamaji prodded.
Nakahigashi reluctantly nodded. “I was trying to tell her to calm the fuck down. To let her know it wasn’t like she’d accomplished everything on her own. I’d bought her these Jimmy Choo pumps for her birthday. I made her take them off right there in the restaurant and took them from her. I was trying to make her understand that everything we’d gotten, even the things she was wearing, we’d gotten together. She didn’t really respond to that. She just left the shoes behind and left the restaurant.”
“So that’s the empathy you bring to the table as president of a big company?” Yamaji commented.
Ken’s cheek twitched in annoyance. He ignored Yamaji and continued.
“That was a mistake. If I’d known something like this would happen afterward, I never would’ve made her do something that would draw so much attention.”
“You made a grown woman walk home in her bare feet. Obviously it’s easy for you to say that now.”
“The restaurant was in the central part of Odaiba. There were plenty of stores nearby where she could’ve bought other shoes. She didn’t walk home in bare feet…I just wanted her to reconsider. I wanted to marry her.” Ken sounded like he was starting to choke back tears. “I wanted Reina.”
He seemed to be telling the truth. For the first time I thought I could see his feelings for her—attachment, love—welling up in his eyes.
His love for her was warped, but you couldn’t say it didn’t exist. If it didn’t, he wouldn’t have been party to her scheme for so many years.
Click, click click, click.
The sound of Dr. Higano’s cube puzzle spinning began to echo through the now-silent room.
He was spinning the puzzle at an incredible speed. It was almost frightening how quickly it was moving, but a second later he had completed it. His face was blank, so I had absolutely no idea what he was thinking.
Dr. Higano puffed a sigh and said, “Ken took Reina’s pumps, so she had to buy new ones. She bought the new shoes immediately. But they weren’t worn in yet, so she got blisters on her heels. Which is why the skin was peeling off her corpse.”
Come to think of it, Dr. Higano had brought up the blisters of her feet at the first questioning.
But…Was that detail so important that he had to repeat it now?
“Huh?” I asked.
Why was it so important?
As always, Dr. Higano had a calm, collected look on his face. Yet for some reason I could not identify, I was petrified.
But when I looked around the room, no one else seemed to be put off by him.
Am I overthinking it?…Maybe so. I looked at the doctor more closely. He seemed incredibly normal. I didn’t know why I felt so strange.
Some deep-seated fear rising within me had me shaking. But why? I couldn’t stop the trembling.
Koichiro Myoko had kept completely silent through this recital, his face pained.
“Ken,” he started to say. “I know you loved Reina in your own way. I also know that there were things Reina was using you for. My daughter was dishonest at times, that’s just a fact. However—”
Koichiro grabbed Ken by the collar and threw him from the sofa.
“How dare you!” he yelled, and began to pummel him.
Ken was helpless in front of Koichiro’s sudden onslaught. Koichiro pressed him down, sat astride him, and gave him a solid punch in the face. Yamaji rushed to break it up, but before he could, Koichiro opened his eyes wide, seemed to understand what he’d done, and stopped himself. He was breathing heavily, trying hard to calm himself down.
Ken struggled up and coughed. Something small flew out of his mouth—one of his front teeth.
Reina’s father was still in shock at his own actions. Ken looked at him, then covered his eyes and lowered his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t say anything so you wouldn’t suspect me. That was clearly a mistake.”
Koichiro, clearly still emotional, muttered, “No, it wasn’t that…Or do you mean it was Shota?”
“What are you talking about?”
“In any case, if you’d really been thinking about Reina, you should’ve tried to stop her plan for revenge. Even if just for my sake. Obviously I wouldn’t have wanted her to do something so dangerous. Why didn’t you or Shota think about what would’ve made her happy? I think she was testing both of you. She wanted to find someone who really loved her.” He began to cry and then said in a quiet voice, unable to contain his emotions any longer, “If that was her plan, then you all betrayed her.”
Ken was silent and bit his lip.
“So which of you was it?” Koichiro asked.
“Which of us was…what?”
For some reason, Koichiro looked irritated. “Whose kid was she pregnant with?”