Back then I’d thought that that would be excellent; now I was in terrible need of a break and at the end of my rope. I mentioned to Sekiguchi that I was taking a week off. “It’s not going to happen,” he laughed. He was right; I was back within four days. A member of the Takada-gumi, a chinpira named Shimizu, had cornered Sekine at his African Kennel shop and slashed him up, and Sekiguchi was in charge of interrogating the suspect. I was having Häagen-Dazs with the girls when the good interrogator got home, took off his shoes, and sat down at the table with us. It was uncanny; it seemed the most natural thing in the world to be sitting there. Sekiguchi asked his wife for coffee. “Does Shimizu think Sekine killed Endo?” I blurted out without hesitation. The kids were there, but they were paying us no attention. “He does. He does. He admitted to taking a box cutter to Sekine’s face but not to anything else. So after we were done writing out his confession and he signed it, I took him aside and said to him, ‘I’m done questioning you and I’m not rewriting your statement, but tell me straight: Did you do this because Takada ordered you to?’ And Shimizu said no.
