Tokyo Vice (20 page)

Sekiguchi answered the phone, and I started to relate the tale of the tapes when Kimiko, because she was miffed and because she had a bizarre sense of humor, yanked my pants down and began fellating me. This made carrying on a conversation a little hard to concentrate on, and I started talking as fast as I could: “… murders … body … Kimiko … me … you.”

“If that’s true, we have to pull in Arai right away. Good work, Jake. Anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Are you all right? You’re talking real fast.”

“I’m fine. A little tired.”

“Okay, take care of yourself,” he said, then he hung up.

I couldn’t, however, because Kimiko’s ministrations had been keeping me on the edge. Three seconds later I was over that edge. I collapsed on the bed with the phone still in my hand, wanting now to go to sleep, but Kimiko was having none of it.

Honorable me, I knew I owed her. So I turned my beeper off for the first time in months.

•    •    •

At first Sekiguchi didn’t know what to do with the sudden knowledge of the tapes’ existence. If he told Takada, Takada would track down Arai, beat the tapes out of him, and then kill both Arai and Sekine. It was one thing to suspect that Sekine had killed Endo, another to have his admission that he’d done it.

Sekiguchi decided to take the information to Takada’s second in command, whom I’ll just call the Consigliere, who listened to what Sekiguchi had to say and promised to take care of it quietly.

Things at this point started to move quickly.

In no time at all, the Consigliere found Arai, who for some reason became willing to talk. The Consigliere had made no mention of the tapes—didn’t need to—to his boss Takada.

Arai’s revelations changed the entire focus of the investigation: Arai had had no part in the disappearance of the last four victims, but Shima, his driver, had. From Shima, Arai had learned that Sekine had killed Endo and his driver, Wakui, with poison and that Shima had helped bury them. So what Shima knew was enough to bury Sekine.

The police got tired of waiting and arrested Arai on a fraud charge. They didn’t think he’d be of much use, since even if he did confess to killing his wife, proving a ten-year-old murder would be difficult with no body. What they were interested in was what Arai could tell them about Shima. If they could break Shima, Sekine would be easy pickings.

What no one had counted on, especially Sekiguchi, was the Consigliere telling his boss Takada about the existence of the tapes on the day of Arai’s arrest. This prompted Takada to call Shima immediately and tell him simply that either Shima disclose the location of Endo’s body or Shima’s body would be needing burial itself.

Shima was duly shaken, but he was in a real bind. He wanted to tell Takada where Endo’s body was, but there was no body—nothing left to call a body anyway. How could Shima tell a yakuza boss that he’d help cut up and burn the body of his number two man?

Takada, for his part, was speeding justice along, or threatening to, because the wheels were turning so damn slowly. He wanted honor, even in death, for Endo, and he wanted Sekiguchi to have an airtight case to nail the killer.

Takada, speaking to Sekiguchi, promised not to kill Shima. He had bigger fish to fry, as long as Sekine was free and alive. But if he could have time with Shima alone, he’d learn where the body was. Cops were staking out Shima’s place; couldn’t Sekiguchi make them go away?

Sekiguchi couldn’t do that, of course. “We have someone staked out guarding his place most of the time these days.
Most
of the time,” he repeated.

Takada took the hint. When the cop left his watch, Takada and a couple of goons showed up. Shima, looking out the window and seeing what was coming down, bolted out the back and fled to the police station. In tears, he got down on his hands and knees and begged, “If you’re going to watch my house, for God’s sake please do it twenty-four hours a day.”

When the police could not promise him that, Shima took off. No one knew where he went. Not Takada, not Sekiguchi, not the Saitama police. The police had Arai in custody, but once again everything was at a standstill.

Yet once again Sekiguchi’s unusual yakuza information network came through as the Consigliere handed him several audio tapes. The sound quality was terrible, but you could tell it was Arai talking with Sekine and Shima. A lot of things were said in a kind of code, but for a lot of things the meaning was plenty clear.

Shima—in probable reference to the disappearance of Endo—assures Arai that there is no problem. “The body is invisible,” he says. Then he adds, “The body is in Gunma.” Shima makes references to other dead bodies. He tells of driving Kawasaki’s car to Tokyo station, where he abandoned it in the parking lot; he implies he helped transport Kawasaki’s corpse.

There was nothing damning, but there was enough to work with in the interrogation room. Shima was key, but without Shima there would be no questioning, there would be no case. And so began another wait-and-see period. In November, Sekiguchi left the team and returned to the Anti–Organized Crime Division. The unspoken assumption was that Shima had been killed and that, after all this, the case would never be solved.

I was wrong.

It was the yakuza boss Takada who remained dogged in his personal pursuit of justice. In late November he succeeded in tracking down Shima, who had also changed his name and married; Takada passed the word on to Sekiguchi, who in turn reported it to the Saitama police. They nabbed Shima in December, and, when confronted with the existence of the tapes, Shima sang.

His information proved good. Searching the site in Gunma Prefecture that Shima pointed them to, the police found enough of Kawasaki’s teeth to make their case. They had sent a very small crew. No one knew. Not the
Yomiuri
. Not anyone.

On January 5, right after the New Year’s holidays, the Saitama police let Shima out on bail and announced the arrest of Gen Sekine and his wife, Hiroko, for the dismemberment of Akio Kawasaki. Within hours of his arrest, Sekine admitted almost everything. After an agonizing year and, depending upon how you look at it, more than a decade, the Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances case was closed.

Did I get the scoop? Did the
Yomiuri
get the scoop?

Noooooo.

I felt betrayed and angry and broke away from the madhouse at the office to call Sekiguchi.

“Jake, why didn’t you call?”

“Why didn’t I call?”

“You never gave me your home phone number, so I called the Urawa office three times since New Year’s and couldn’t get hold of you. I thought you were overseas.”

“Did you leave a message?”

“Yes, of course.”

I was in shock. Was he lying to me? I felt like a girlfriend who had been cheated on.

I asked around the office if anyone had called for me.

“Oh, yeah, you got a few calls,” one of the newbies volunteered. “I think it was insurance or something. The numbers are here somewhere.” He shuffled through the pile of baby pictures, sports records, and clippings on his desk until he found a piece of paper with a number scribbled on it. It was Sekiguchi’s home phone number.

It was everything I could do to keep from throttling the kid. Caught in my throat was a scream: “You’re the guy! You’re the guy that fucked up a year’s worth of work because you were too damn lazy to call me!” But it stayed in my throat.

I’d
screwed up. If I had gone down to Sekiguchi’s place over the holidays, it would have changed everything. I’d made the fatal mistake that Sekiguchi had warned me about, not dropping in when nothing appeared to be going on, not keeping tabs on open cases. And I’d never given him my home phone number. The fact that he’d called the office at all put him at amazing risk.

So that’s the anticlimactic end to the tale. I had a solid lead on the story. I knew the game plan. Up to that last chess move, I knew all about what was going on with the investigation, and I could have known that they’d found the remains of Kawasaki. I could have had the scoop of the year. I didn’t.

In the end, Sekine and his wife were convicted for the murders of only four people. How many they really murdered is still a mystery.

PART 2
The Working Day

After a brief and relatively boring stint covering local polictics in Saitama, it wasn’t long before the police beat came calling again, this time in Tokyo proper. I was finally hitting the big time. And when it was time for all of us new to the Tokyo shakaibu to be assigned to our prospective beats, I was assigned to Hell. The vice squad.

I was married by now, and Mrs. Sunao Adelstein was not excited by my posting to temptation alley. We’d been married for about three years. It had been a whirlwind romance. I’d met her at an event she was covering as a reporter for Nikkei Publications, and I’d managed to ask her on a date. She was twenty-nine and wanted to be married before she was thirty. After several dates, she laid down the terms: we could go out for three months, but if at the end of those three I wasn’t serious about marriage—sayonora. She was funny, bilingual, and foxy—still is—and it seemed like an excellent business deal. I stated my terms: marriage—okay! but I demanded a three-year ban on producing offspring. She agreed, and we were engaged in record time. We actually got married the day before her thirtieth birthday, on my lunch break at the Urawa City Hall. It was almost nullified the same day because I had written my birthday down according to the traditional Japanese imperial calendar, Showa 44, rather than the Western calendar, 1969. However, a little yelling and screaming made things work out just fine.

She was excited about moving up to Tokyo, and so was I. Out of New Jersey at last. I was back on the police beat in the big city.

Technically, it was the Fourth District of the Metropolitan Police, but in reality it was like being assigned to a combat zone. The Fourth
District contained the Shinjuku police, almost all of Shinjuku Ward, and the notorious Kabukicho. Kabukicho had nothing to do with kabuki, the traditional theater art performed exclusively by men (including the roles of women), but a lot to do with the traditional sex industry.

Kabukicho used to be the largest and most volatile and profitable red-light district in Tokyo. Under Governor Shintaro Ishihara, the TMPD has made a concerted effort to clean it up, leaving it a shadow of its former self. The impetus probably was the horrific fire at the Mei-sei 56 Building in September 2001, which killed forty-four people. The building was owned by Shigeo Segawa, a yakuza-backed flesh merchant also known as the King of Soapland, whose buildings had been cited time and again for safety violations.

It focused attention on what a lawless area Kabukicho had become.
^1*
Something needed to be done. Maybe not a full-scale cleanup but forced compliance with safety regulations would have been enough. Maybe.

I’m not a New Yorker, but I guess you could compare it to the old Times Square versus the new post-Giuliani Times Square.

As far as entertainment districts went, in 1999 nothing beat Kabukicho for pure sleaze. Drugs, prostitution, sexual slavery, rip-off bars, dating clubs, massage parlors, S-and-M parlors, pornography shops and porn producers, high-dollar hostess clubs, low-dollar blow job salons, more than a hundred different yakuza factions, the Chinese mafia, gay prostitute bars, sex clubs, female junior high school students’ soiled uniforms/panties resale shops, and a population of workers more ethnically diverse than anywhere else in Japan. It was like a foreign country in the middle of Tokyo. Of course, I didn’t have any idea of how seedy the place was at that time. All I knew was that I had been assigned to cover it.

I hadn’t been there in years. I wondered if the mysterious tarot machine that had so accurately predicted my future in 1992 was still there. Maybe it was time for an update. I could use some advice. The Fourth District was a heavy burden to carry.

I wasn’t left to do it on my own. Inoue assigned Okimura to cover it as well. Okimura was a 1993 entry, like me, and a lot more savvy about those things than I was. He had been in Yokohama, another hotbed of criminal activity, and been tested and tried on the fields of the police beat. He had married a hostess, one of the most beautiful in Yokohama, alienating at least one senior editor at the Yokohama branch who had been courting the woman at the same time. Okimura had been a kickboxer in college, and he still had that lean and fit look. He had the thousand-yard stare that you see in some Special Forces veterans.

The police beat district reporters were under the command of the TMPD reporters, who were stationed at the headquarters of the TMPD. They commanded; we obeyed. We also were at the mercy of the yu-gun (reserve corps) reporters, who could generally pull us off the beat any time they wanted a warm body. Inoue had given orders that this year, we newbies were going to actually be allowed to cover our beat and not be errand boys for the senior reporters in the
Yomiuri
office on the day shift. It would be an interesting experiment.