Read Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination for Free Online Page B

everybody would believe that the murderer of the old woman, had stolen the money, Saito pocketed the whole amount. And his next move? This, too, was easy to surmise. He had recklessly gone ahead and reported his discovery of the old woman's corpse, with the money still on his person, never suspecting that he would be one of the first to be questioned and searched. What an utter fool!
    But wait, Fukiya reasoned further, Saito would certainly put up a desperate struggle to clear himself of suspicion. Then what? Would his statements possibly incriminate him, Fukiya, in any way? If Saito just kept insisting that the money was his, all might be well. But, then, the fact that the amount was exceptionally large—much too large for a student like Saito to possess—might give the lie to such a statement. The only alternative left for Saito would be to tell the truth—the whole truth. This would lead, by clever cross-examination on the part of the prosecutor, to the revelation that Saito had also told Fukiya where the old lady had hidden her money.
    "Only two days preceding the day of the crime," Fukiya could even hear Saito telling the court, "my friend Fukiya conversed with the victim in the very room in which she was murdered. Knowing that she had that money hidden in the tree pot, could he not have committed the crime? I also wish to remind you, gentlemen of the court, that Fukiya has always been notorious for being financially hard up!"
    Although feeling decidedly uncomfortable after this soliloquy, Fukiya's optimism soon conquered his initial dismay. Emerging from the police station with a perfectly blank look on his face, he returned to his boardinghouse and ate a rather late breakfast. While eating, his original bravado returned, and he even made a point of telling the maid who served him about several aspects of the case.
    Shortly after, he went to school, where he found, both on the campus and in the classrooms, that Saito's arrest as a suspect in the murder case was the main topic of conversation.
    The investigator placed in charge of this sensational case was District Attorney Kasamori, noted not only as a man with excellent legal training, but also well known for valuable accomplishments of his own, especially in the field of psychological research. Whenever he came across a case which could not be unraveled by the standard methods of crime detection, he employed his fund of psychological knowledge with amazing results. With a man of Kasamori's reputation taking in hand the case of the old lady's murder, the public immediately became convinced that the mystery would soon be solved.
    Kasamori too was confident that he could ultimately crack the case, no matter how complex it appeared at this early stage of the investigation. He began with a preliminary check of everything connected with the case, so that by the time it reached a public trial every single phase would be as clear as daylight. As the investigation proceeded, however, he found the case more and more difficult to handle. From the outset, the police kept insisting that no one but Saito could be the guilty party. Kasamori himself admitted the logic of the police theory, for, after all, every person who had been even remotely connected with the murdered old woman had been investigated and cleared of suspicion—every one, that is, except her student lodger, the hapless Saito. Fukiya too had been among those who had been questioned, along with creditors of the old woman, her tenants, and even casual acquaintances, but he had quickly been eliminated.
    In the case of Saito, there was one major point which worked to his great disadvantage. This was that he was extremely weak by nature and, completely terrorized by the stern atmosphere of the court, he was unable to answer even the simplest questions without first stuttering and stammering and showing all the symptoms of a man with a guilty conscience. Furthermore, in his excited state, he often retracted his previous