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

time he uttered such token “yeses” he lost another shred of dignity. Of course he was pretty used to this by now, but lately Handa had the feeling that a new and unfamiliar identity was forming within him.

Handa succeeded in controlling his immediate fury by passively observing this other self, head hung low as a shower of reprimands rained down.

“Don’t do it again,” Superintendent Miyoshi said tersely.

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry,” said Handa, bowing once.

“From today on, you’ll be in charge of a different case, under the command of Inspector Takahashi.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’ll be all.”

Handa bowed once more. Superintendent Miyoshi stood up and left the room to attend the investigation meeting. Handa watched him go, picturing the word “subservient” on his back, dangling like a worn-out doormat. Miyoshi was nothing more than a figurehead at these meetings, sitting with the department chief in the top-brass seats in front of the blackboard, keeping quiet and sitting still before the head of the first unit of Violent Crime who had deigned to be there from MPD.

As soon as Miyoshi was gone, Inspector Takahashi from the White Collar Crime Unit, to whom Handa was reporting as of today, called out to him.

“Handa. Wait for me downstairs. I’ll be right there.”

“What’s the case, sir?”

“Defamation and obstruction of business.”

The charges didn’t register with him. All Handa could think as he bowed and left the room was, So that’s it for me as a violent-crime detective.

But once he was out in the hallway, his innate obstinacy kicked in, and he couldn’t stop wondering why he had strayed from his assigned territory. When the pawnshop idea occurred to him that day, it had merely been the stimulus. He knew that for a long time now, something inside him was ready to burst.

Shortly after the start of the investigation, headquarters had presumed that the suspect had walked into and out of the park where the crime had taken place. This was because there was nowhere to park a car in the surrounding alleys. If the suspect either lived or worked near the scene, there was a certain distance he could have walked. Say that distance could be covered in at most five minutes, and there were a limited number of residences and businesses within the designated area. At the very least, that line of thinking made it clear early on that there would be no suspicious persons in the eastern section assigned to Handa. Even just hypothetically, it was not impossible that the suspect might have occasionally gone to the large park on the landfill to take practice swings, but what it came down to was that the entire district to the east of the crime scene, including the landfill, had always been outside the scope of the investigation, and Handa’s team, assigned to investigate that very area, had been ignored from the onset.

His team never had anything to report at the morning and evening meetings, and as soon as Handa started to speak, “We, uh—” the head of the seventh unit from MPD who led the meeting would often interrupt with, “Next,” and move on. Another time, Handa had run into a sergeant from the same seventh unit at the entrance to the police department, and who knew what the guy was thinking as he muttered in disgust, “You guys get an afternoon nap, don’t you?” The truth was, Handa had just inadvertently let out a yawn.

It was all because of those futile weeks. Handa concluded as much for now, but there was no guarantee that those fruitless days would not lead to still more fruitless years. More than any immediate remorse, Handa was conscious of the muck that was spreading around his feet and seized by a sense of powerlessness—that by just standing there he would sink even further. This is worse than usual, he thought. Even the usual daydream that would come to him at a time like this seemed dead and gone.

Just as Handa had started to descend the stairs, he saw the investigators who had come out from the meeting room on the second-floor landing. As usual, the meeting must have ended in a matter of minutes. The investigators were just about to disperse down the stairs, paired off to their respective assigned districts. Among them, Handa saw his colleague Kimura, who had been his partner up until yesterday.

Taking care not to run into the group, Handa stopped partway down the stairs and waited for them to leave. Standing there, he caught sight of one of the men about to descend from the landing below, and Handa knew it was fate that he could also see the white sneakers on the man’s feet.

He felt as though something had suddenly bubbled up inside him with a force that he himself could not contain—Handa stormed down the stairs, running a few steps past the second-floor landing, and reached out a hand. He grabbed the shoulder of the assistant Police Inspector Goda or whatever his name was, shouting, “Hey!” as the man turned around.

“Hey, you. You were looking at me before. What was that about? Why were you staring at me?”

The assistant police inspector, who looked to be around thirty or so, set his narrow, reptilian eyes, which brimmed with iciness, on Handa’s face. Then, as if the words being spoken to him had finally reached his ears, he brushed aside Handa’s hand and said simply, “I heard a sound.”

The shard of glass that had pierced his shoe. The tiny sound it had made as he threw it away. This was just the sort of inexplicable discrepancy that Handa found bewildering, and it made him dizzy, as if he had been struck twice just to drive home the point. He now lost the conviction that this assistant police inspector had actually been looking at him, yet without knowing what he was doing, he was swept along by physiological excitement that was amplified in the blink of an eye.

“So what? Why were you looking at me?”

His arm and cry