Tokyo Vice (16 page)

“Take a look,” he said grimly. “The dog’s out of the bag.”

Indeed it was. A giant headline read: “Four People in Saitama Missing; Mysterious Dog Breeder Involved.” There was even a chart of the victims—horribly incorrect, but still, there it was. We’d been scooped by the lowest of all media possible: a sports newspaper.
^*

“Call everyone and tell them to get to the Urawa office right away. There’s going to be an emergency meeting in thirty minutes.”

By the time we got to the office, Hara, the bureau chief, was huddled with the head editor, poring over the evening edition of
Asuka
. As
we gathered around, Hara, with his large Buddha-like presence sucking up the air in the room, turned to Yamamoto and said loudly, “I thought we had this thing locked up?”

Yamamoto gulped, then began, “Well, the article isn’t well researched. And
Asuka
is new to this game … no one reads it. It just wanted to make a splash. We should ignore it and keep working on our story.”

“What’s your take on it?” the head editor asked The Cobra.

The Cobra concurred with Yamamoto.

But the editor thought otherwise. “What happens if tomorrow every other newspaper in the country except us follows up on this story? We’ll look like we’ve dropped the ball. How do we know the real competition isn’t ahead of us on this one?”

“I don’t think that’s the case,” Cobra replied demurely.

“You don’t
think
that’s the case? Do you
know
that’s not the case? Are you willing to take the heat for a dropped story?”

Cobra was silent for a while, and I almost felt sorry for him. Then he piped up, “I think writing this up now is premature.”

“Well, the story’s already out there. It’s pretty clear that we need to get on the wagon. Maybe things are moving faster than we like, but we have no choice. It’s time to stop discussing and start writing. The bureau chief for this region is going to be breathing down my neck any second now.”

I was listening to all this, and in a moment of rare bravery as a newbie reporter, I raised my hand, ignoring Yamamoto’s fervent gestures indicating that I should keep my mouth shut. “May I say something?” I said.

“Who asked you?” The editor brushed the air with his hand in the typical Japanese fuck-off sign.

Hara intervened. “Jake, say what’s on your mind.”

“Well,” I began, my voice cracking, “we’ve kind of made a deal with the Saitama police. They’ve been giving us everything in exchange for us sitting on the story. When the time comes for the arrest, they’ll give us the exclusive. That was the deal. If we break that deal, we lose their trust and we break our promise.”

“Good point, Jake,” Hara said, nodding. “But the landscape has changed. There’s already a story out there.”

“It’s in a paper nobody reads, with no credibility, and it’s way wrong. There’s a huge difference between us writing it and them writing it,” I
said, echoing previously stated sentiments. “If we write this story now, we may win the battle, but we’ll lose the war.”

Hara pondered these words for a bit. No one wanted to speak. Hara looked at the article, shifted his weight back and forth. Then he sighed. “I don’t think we can ignore this. I know the police. They’ll be a little upset, but they’ll get over it. Let’s get to work. We need this for the morning edition.”

With that the meeting adjourned. The Cobra cornered me in the hallway, and I thought I was about to get yelled at again. Instead he said, “Thanks for saying that. You understand more about the police beat than I thought. You’re still sloppy, your writing is horrible, and you are undisciplined, but you’ve got some good instincts. You may not be a lost cause.”

“Thanks,” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

“Hey, no problem.”

Yamamoto was in the back of the office. “Adelstein, you’re right,” he said quietly to me while shuffling through pages. “Going ahead with this is a terrible idea. But that’s how it breaks sometimes. From this point, this is going to be the most important story we’re working on, so I’m assigning everyone a victim. Your job is to find out everything there is to know about your victim, how he knew Sekine, when he was last seen alive, what kind of person he was, why he might have been killed, and anything else that will come in useful down the road. That means we need pictures, comments, testimony, everything we can get. You’re the guy covering the Saitama Organized Crime Control Bureau. That means you’re a natural for the yakuza Endo and his driver Wakui. Both have been missing. From tomorrow, your life is Endo’s life.”

That’s how my Year of the Dog began.

Our first article on the Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances appeared on the morning of February 19, running under a four-column headline: “Several Dog Lovers Missing in Saitama from April to August. Trouble over Sales.” The article came out in the morning, and the other papers scrambled to catch up after the article appeared. Everyone now knew that the
Yomiuri
had the lead on this case.

Unfortunately, however, we completely alienated the police by publishing the article, which had to have tipped off Sekine that he was
under investigation. That would make him less likely to show his hand and give him a greater incentive to destroy evidence.

We’d effectively broken our promise, and the police were not forgiving. The chief detective made that clear to The Cobra in no uncertain terms, and Yokozawa, the gentlemanly head of the forensic department, put the
Yomiuri
on his personal shit list. They didn’t care about other newspapers, which were also following up on the story; they cared that we were the first legitimate newspaper to break the not-ready-to-be-known news. In their eyes, we were completely to blame if anything went wrong.

Nonetheless, that same day, I made my first trip down to the town of Konan and began looking for more information on Endo. Konan was a throwback to the sixties. It had one giant Zexel factory, a golf course, a town hall, an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. It had one grocery store and a family restaurant. Other than that, there were lots of empty fields, a little agriculture, and not much to do. It did have a temple devoted to the Buddha of Wisdom (Monju) that was kind of famous. If there was a downtown, I couldn’t find it.

I started making inquiries at the fire department, since I had always found firemen to be more talkative than cops, and this is what I learned. Until he vanished, Endo was the number two man in an organized crime gang known as the Takada-gumi (under a man with the name of Takada). The gang was a third-tier group in the Inagawa crime family. I had expected that people, if they talked at all, would regard Endo with a mixture of dread and awe; but no, everyone spoke well of him. In fact, they seemed worried for his welfare.

A firefighter told me, “Endo’s a great guy. He wasn’t always a yakuza. Used to drive a truck. I actually voted for him in the 1984 mayoral elections. Politicians are all corrupt anyway. You might as well have one you know is corrupt from the start. Maybe he’ll surprise you and do something honest.”

I was taking notes as fast as I could. What kind of crazy town was this where the local yakuza runs for mayor? Apparently, not as crazy as I first thought. Endo had received only 120 votes, losing by a landslide. At the town hall, I got a copy of the photo Endo had submitted as a candidate when he ran for office. He looked tough. He had the dead calm eyes of a potentially explosive yakuza and the punch perm hairstyle that rural yakuza seemed fond of. It looked as if his nose had been broken several times. You’d have to be pretty powerful to kill this guy.

I took a taxi to where Endo had lived. The neighborhood was quiet, and the house was a beautiful semitraditional spread. The gate was open, so I stepped in to look more closely at the mail overflowing his mailbox. I was just getting a peek when someone came up behind me.

It was a little old man, completely bald and so thin his skin seemed translucent. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, even though it was still quite cold. In bright green lettering, in English, the T-shirt said obscene things.

“What are you doing?” he asked nonchalantly.

“I’m looking for Yasunobu Endo. This is his house, isn’t it?”

“It’s his house, but he’s not ever coming home.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because he’s dead,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Kennel chopped him up, ground him into mincemeat, and fed him to the dogs. Everybody in town knows that.”

“Is that so? You wouldn’t happen to have witnessed that happening, would you?”

“Nope. Didn’t see a thing, but I know a thing or two. I know this town, and I know Endo, and I know Kennel.”

“You mean Gen Sekine?”

“I forget Kennel’s real name. Can I ask a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Why are you looking for Endo?”

I stepped back onto the street to continue our conversation. “I’m a newspaper reporter. When people, even yakuza, go missing, it’s news. I want to find out why he went missing.”

“He’s not missing, he’s mincemeat, he’s dog shit now.”

“You keep saying that. If everyone knows Kennel killed him, why haven’t the police arrested him?”

“Because they need evidence, you fool. Knowing something and proving it are two different things. If you are a reporter as you say, you should know that.”

“I’m a young reporter,” I said. “I’m still learning.” I handed him my meishi; he glanced at it and stuffed it into his back pocket.

I kept up my tough line of questioning. “Why would Kennel kill Endo? What was the motive?”

“Oh, that,” the man said as he pulled a pack of Golden Bats from out of his sock and lit up. He took a drag so deep that half the cigarette burned into ash in seconds, held the smoke in, and then exhaled.

“Endo’s a yakuza. Yakuza like scary things, and they like to scare people. So Kennel, he’d sell scary animals to the yakuza. Tigers, lions, things to scare the hell out of normal people. Kennel got his start dealing pets to the yakuza.”

“And why would he kill Endo?”

“Don’t know. Maybe Kennel was born vicious, like a rabid dog. So that’s what he does. He kills people. Endo must have got in his way.”

“And how could he kill a big guy like Endo?”

“Maybe he took a syringe of poison and just jabbed it in Endo’s neck.
Thwock!
I saw him kill a dog that way once. It was a big dog. Long time ago I used to work for Kennel. Not anymore. He’s a bad man. Does bad things. Endo was a yakuza, but for a yakuza not so bad.”

It was two in the afternoon. There wasn’t another person on the street; not a soul except for me and this old geezer. Endo’s house was quiet and dark. Nobody was home. In fact, the place looked abandoned.

The geezer lived three houses down from Endo, and he seemed eager to talk but not in what you’d call a forthcoming way.

“Can you remember the last time you saw Endo alive?”

“Can’t say that I do.”

“Have any idea when he vanished?”

“That I do.”

“You do?”

“Yes, that is so.”

“So what can you tell me?”

“I remember the last time I didn’t see him alive.”

“You saw him dead?”

“You’re not listening to me, reporter boy. I said I remember the last time I didn’t see him alive.”

“Okay, when was that?”

“It was the morning of July 22, last year.”

“You remember the day—why?”

“Because that was the day Endo promised to drive me to the hospital for my heart medicine and the guy never showed up. Endo or that driver of his, Wakui, nice kid, sometimes used to give me a lift to the hospital. I wrote it down on my calendar. When he didn’t show up, I was pissed off. I need my medicine. I was going to give him a piece of my mind the next time I saw him. Don’t make promises you can’t keep, I say. If a man makes a promise, a man’s gotta keep that promise.”

“So you never saw him after that?”

“Nope, but another guy in the Takada-gumi told me that Endo and Kennel were fighting about something. And that’s when I knew that Endo had to be dead. Probably the kid too. A damn shame. I told the police Kennel must’ve whacked them.”

This was good stuff, I was thinking. With this we could narrow down the period when Endo had vanished. I was scribbling notes when the old guy suddenly dropped his cigarette and stepped on it, reopened Endo’s gate, walked to the overflowing mailbox, pulled out everything with his bony hands, and came back to where I stood.

“You wanted this, right?” he asked.

Of course I wanted it. “I can’t take this,” I said. “It’s stolen.”

“Well, you didn’t steal it. Because this mail doesn’t belong to anybody. Dead guys don’t read their mail, and the post office doesn’t reroute the stuff to Hell. So take it. Maybe you’ll find something.” He shoved it into my hands.

“Well,” I said, stuffing the mail into my backpack, “I’ve got to get running. Thanks for everything.”

The old guy stood in the middle of the road and lit another cigarette. I started to get back into the waiting taxi but stopped and asked him, “You know anybody else who might know anything about Endo or when he disappeared?”

“Ask his girlfriend. I can’t remember whether or not she’s still going to high school. If she is, you could catch her there. Name’s Yumi-chan.”

“Yumi-chan?”

“She’s a hottie,” he said.

“Do you need to go to the hospital today?” I asked him.

“Yep.”

“Okay.” I gave him a lift. It seemed like the thing to do.

The homicide division was moving at a glacial pace, the white-collar crimes unit wasn’t happy about getting stuck arresting Sekine for fraud, and it wasn’t until late May that I got bit by the dog case again.

It was at a drunken yomawari with a contact in the Organized Crime Division. The cop was grumbling about some injustice. “Those shitheads took the best fucking cop we have in the division and put him on that dog breeder case. Do they bother to ask me first? ’Course not, not when we really could use him ourselves …”

My antennae went up. “Who’s the cop? A lieutenant or something?”

“No, he’s barely a detective. A real outsider kind of guy. Doesn’t like to take the tests. But he can break a suspect better than anyone on the force. Hah, maybe it’s because he looks just like a yakuza—and not a
chinpira
[yakuza punk] either; looks likes a boss! He lives out in Konan. Hah, probably even went to school with Takada!”