Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📕

A shard of glass had pierced the worn-down rubber sole of his shoe. Handa stared at it for two seconds—his first thought was that it would cost him ten thousand yen to buy a new pair of shoes. Then he saw the bloodstain at the toe of his sock and smirked. Plus another five hundred. He gave himself a little self-diagnosis: desperation has made me quite generous lately. He seriously considered taking this opportunity to buy himself a pair from Gucci or Bally as, still standing on one foot, he tried to dislodge the deeply embedded glass with his fingertip.

While he stood there, he heard light footsteps coming up the stairs and a voice say, “Excuse me,” in passing. Handa lifted only his gaze and saw stark white sneakers on a man’s feet running up the stairs.

It was the young assistant police inspector assigned to Investigation Headquarters from Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. His name was Goda or something like that. In contrast with his unobtrusive suit and trench coat, the man’s obviously lightweight and comfortable-looking white sneakers were so bright they made Handa blink. He was at a momentary loss—loafers from Gucci or Bally suddenly paled in comparison. Did wearing sneakers with a suit mean that the guy was simply tasteless, or that he had tremendous self-confidence? I don’t like it either way, Handa thought as a shiver ran down his spine.

Tossing aside the glass shard he had finally managed to remove and putting back on his shoe, Handa stood on both feet again. The action caused him to look up, and he realized that the sneaker guy who had just run up the stairs was standing on the second-floor landing, looking down at him. As if momentarily lost in a void, the man’s colorless eyes focused above Handa’s head for a second or so, rebuffing Handa’s scrutiny. Then, just as abruptly as he had stopped to linger, the man disappeared.

The incident was fleeting, and Handa ascended the rest of the stairs, unable to make sense of it. In such slivers of time when the rhythm of his day was disrupted, Handa always liked to indulge in a certain daydream. Were he not to, the sliver would rupture into a deep fissure, which could transform into a torrent of anger that might destroy him. To keep this from happening, he had subconsciously equipped himself with this self-defense mechanism, a reverie that always involved him catching the Investigation top brass off guard by beating them to the punch.

In the dream, he raises his hand slowly at an investigation meeting. Confronting the wannabe-bureaucrat showoffs from MPD with definitive evidence, he says, “The prime suspect is So-and-So.” Just as the room is thrown into tumult, the top brass start whispering among themselves in a state of confusion. He’d probably piss himself from such pleasure, such giddy satisfaction that particular moment would give him.

He shuddered at the mere thought, it was so dark and obscure, but Handa convinced himself of this final twist in his horrible diversion by telling himself that every last one of the forty thousand cops at the MPD lived in a constant state of gloom, always on the verge of dying in a fit of indignation.

Handa played out such innocuous daydreams several times a day, but now, as he briefly gave himself over to his habitual fantasy, a dull agitation began to whirl inside his head. The sensation felt exactly like a washing machine full of dirty laundry, lumbering through a cycle with its heavy load. Yet for the past two weeks or so, since the start of the month, his daydream no longer seemed so groundless. He had been trailing a number of possible suspects on his own, without permission from Investigation Headquarters. He had no physical evidence yet, but if even one of his hunches proved correct, the day when he might pull the rug out from under those MPD bastards was not just a distant dream.

Handa pondered this as, at ten minutes to eight, he reached the door of the meeting room located on the second floor of headquarters, but before he could open it, a colleague from the Criminal Investigation Division came up behind him and said, “Chief wants you upstairs.”

It didn’t amount to a foreboding, but Handa felt his irritability mounting. The wound from the shard of glass in his right foot suddenly began to throb. On his way up the stairs to the third floor, he removed his shoe again and looked at his right big toe. He touched it and confirmed that his black sock was slick with blood. As he was fumbling along, a certain thought slowly occurred to him, flickering behind his brow. Right, must be about my extracurricular investigations. But then immediately, instead of the panic of being driven to the edge of a cliff, the usual daydream came surging in as if to compensate.

Today marked the hundredth day since, at the height of summer, the corpse of a man with his head beaten in had been found in the bushes of a park behind a school in Higashi-Shinagawa. The victim was a senile seventy-six-year-old who liked to wander, a resident of a special care nursing home located just inside Minami-Shinagawa, about one kilometer from the crime scene. Around ten in the morning on August tenth, children who had come to play in the park found his corpse. After receiving the call, Handa—as an officer in CID—had run to the scene from the Shinagawa Police Department, which was not far away. The body had already been there for about half a day in the August heat, and showed significant livor mortis.

The neighborhood around the crime scene was dense with businesses and long-standing residences, creating a labyrinth of one-way alleys. The streets were practically deserted at night so there were no eyewitnesses; they were unable to recover any helpful footprints from the pavement where the corpse was found, nor a weapon. There were no signs of struggle on the victim’s