The Contact

The first night, my bed of bark and leaves was painful. Now I can hardly imagine sleeping any other way. I am harder. Stronger. Manlier.

I can hear one of their scouts approaching. I'm not afraid. My haven is camouflaged well. Three days now they've roamed the woods, calling my name. They thought they could frame me up and lock me away, and they want me to slink back to Yamaku to let them do it? I'm glad they framed me. They're starting to think of me as a threat.

The scout passes within two meters of my hiding place. That's right. Just keep walking. He stops at a nearby tree, and sits down beneath it. Damn. That's where I'm meeting my contact. Got to take care of this before he gets here.

I flow out from under my shelter of twigs. The scout is thirty steps away. I have the grace of a tiger. Twenty steps away. I am as silent as dust settling in an old house. Ten steps away. Nobody ever hears me coming until it is too late. The scout turns to look at me. Not because he heard me coming. He was probably going to turn anyway, and it just happened to be right then.

"Butterscotch," says the scout. No, not their scout. My contact.

I give the countersign. "Chupacabra." We both nod. I don't know his name, and I don't ask. Safer that way.

Down to business. "You've probably heard all kinds of lies about me," I say, "but I had nothing to do with Hisao's death. It's a setup! He was killed by women!"

"I agree," says the contact.

I am surprised. I do not surprise easily. The last time I was surprised, the telephone pole that surprised me paid dearly for it. All guys secretly agree with me, but none of them say so out loud for fear of reprisals. The Contact— I mentally promote the description to a proper noun— must be highly placed in the resistance to speak so freely.

"Put your fingers in my mouth," says the Contact. Some sort of resistance initiation ritual, undoubtedly. I stick out my hand and the Contact sucks on it for a few seconds. It feels pretty good.

The Contact nods and strokes his beard, probably. (Instead of merely seeing body language like most people, I infer body language through deductive reasoning. Some people ask me if it really works. To them I say: I'm still alive, aren't I?) "I was hanging around near the mural where the body fell," the Contact explains. "There were flecks of paint on Hisao's back. I ate them. Ethyl acetate based paint, color on the creamy side of Ostrich Eggshell. Hisao was pushed by someone with a fresh coat of nail polish. Your fingers don't taste like nail polish remover. I think you're innocent."

Damn. I'm in the presence of a pro. I rush back to my burrow to grab the case notes I've been scratching into sheets of bark with my sharpened fingernail. I sit down across from the contact and push my notes over to him. He picks them up with his feet and examines them. Damn! This way he doesn't leave fingerprints! I should practice with toe-socks. Are closed-toe shoes part of the conspiracy? How far back does this thing go? Layers upon layers.

"I've compiled everything I know about the people Hisao's been spending time with. Satou, Ibarazaki, that double-headed student council beast… there's only one I can't find anything on. Tezuka? Don't even know what she looks like. You think this Rin Tezuka could have pushed Hisao?"

"I don't even have arms," says the Contact.

"Yes, the government seems awfully eager to keep guns out of the hands of citizens, and I think we all know who's behind that! But let's stay on topic. I'll put Tezuka down as 'probably shady.' What about Hakamichi and Mikado? I overheard Hisao shouting at them the night before the murder."

The Contact strokes his beard badassfully, probably. "People talk. People want to believe anything about Shizune. People say crime of passion. Each man kills the thing he loves, and all that. I hope that's not true. I haven't killed any turtles yet, but I might step on one." He spends the next 30 seconds examining the area for turtles, then stops and stares at me. "You should tell me what you were doing on the roof that night."

"I wasn't even there! How did you know I was there?"

"A girl saw you two going up to the roof together. Hanako Ikezawa."

Satou's friend. No… Satou's conspirator. "What was she doing inside on the night of the festival, huh? Very fishy. We should drag her out here and make her talk."

The Contact shakes his head. "Librarian says she arrived in the library shortly before the festival started. She rushed out not long before the murder. Said she 'had to go do something.' Only path to the roof goes past the library, so she didn't double back. And people say they saw her at your class's booth that night." Yuuko. Beautiful, graceful, deadly Yuuko. Your word means less than nothing to me now. I point out that the librarian's probably in on it, but the Contact just shrugs. "Walk me through your evening." I explain our manly picnic to him. There isn't much to tell— any assassin subtle enough to elude my senses is unlikely to have left much evidence behind. The contact perks up when he hears about the whiskey. "Less than half a bottle of whiskey and you blacked out in the forest? Where did you get it?"

"My mother mailed it to me. Wait, do you think she could have—"

"You didn't get it from your mother. You got it from the mail. Shizune controls the mail." Damn. It's so obvious now. Nothing happens in this school without Shizune's go-ahead.

But the Contact's not done yet. He leaps to his feet, kicks off his flipflops, and starts pacing in circles around the tree. Looks painful, but his muscular jaw doesn't even twitch, probably. "Knock Ibarazaki off the suspects list. She was too busy washing blood out of her clothes to murder anyone. My fault, I'm afraid." That's… that's pretty extreme. I don't know if even I'm willing to go that far. I'll likely have to find out before the end of this war.

"Superficially, you're the one being framed. But the fresh nail polish. It's too sloppy. Who stops to paint their nails in the middle of a festival? The killer wanted people to know it was a murder, but also to realize it wasn't you." He stops pacing to stroke his beard badassfully, probably. The way he does that reminds me of Hisao's majestic beard. No time to get sentimental. "They say it isn't the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. Maybe they've got it backwards. Maybe it's the fall that kills you, it's the whiskey that kills you, it's the stairs you climb to the roof that kill you, it's getting out of your bed that morning that kills you." He resumes pacing, shuffling through my files.

"Lilly Satou was in and out of your class's booth that evening, but they say she stopped by during the fireworks, just as the murder was taking place. Miki Miura saw Hanako around the booth at the same time. That leaves Shizune and Misha, who were fighting with Hisao for some reason… either could have drugged the whiskey. Maybe they hoped it would react badly with his heart, and improvised when they saw their chance slipping away?"

"So the question is Misha, Shizune, or both?"

"The question is Misha, Shizune, or someone who hates Misha and Shizune."

I hold an arm out to stop the Contact. I accidentally punch him in the ribs. He glares at me and rubs his side with his foot. Weird, but also cool? "Yeah, man," I tell him, "Satou totally hates Hakamichi."

The Contact freezes in place. Minutes pass. Is he still blinking? I look away for a second and when I look back I can barely tell him from the tree. Finally, he speaks.

"Lilly Satou murdered Hisao Nakai."

"I thought you said my class could vouch for her? Most of the guys in that class are cowardly beard-lackers, but there are a few I'm sure wouldn't lie for Satou."

The Contact finally unfreezes and resumes blinking. He slumps back against the tree in the same position I found him. "Satou wanted to frame Shizune Hakamichi. I don't know why. I don't know why most people do the things they do."

I nod sagely. "Better men than I have died trying to understand the minds of women."

"She's been waiting for the opportunity for months. Hisao had nothing to do with anything. Just unlucky. The type of person Shizune is, Satou knew she'd pick a fight with someone eventually." The Contact picks up his flipflops with his toes, kicks them into the air, and catches them on his feet.

"When word of the fight reached her, she was ready to move. She knew you were his friend. She's probably the one who sent you the whiskey in the first place. Check the postmark. Bet it's faked."

"The chaos of the festival was the perfect distraction, but it made Hisao hard to keep track of. That's where Hanako comes in. She's been tracking Hisao ever since he befriended Shizune— notice how much time she spends in the library? But Hanako doesn't have what it takes to kill. When she spotted you two heading to the roof, she bolted out of there to find Lilly. Lilly followed you up to the roof. It may have been pitch black up there, but that doesn't matter if you're blind. You and Hisao were drunk, drugged, and helpless. She wiped a bit of nail polish on her hand, pushed Hisao off the roof, and slipped out using the fireworks to hide her presence."

"But the booth—"

"She wasn't there."

"Your sources—"

"Sighted sources like Miki report Hanako at the booth during the fireworks. Blind sources like your class report Lilly there. Neither reports both. Hanako has spent enough time around Lilly to imitate her voice, especially with noisy fireworks interfering. She didn't have to stick around, just make an appearance and disappear. Even if Lilly had an obvious motive, that gives her an alibi. Suspicion falls to the person everyone loves to hate, the one who's had a public falling out with the victim: Lilly's enemy Shizune."

Power struggles within the conspiracy. They are weak and I am strong. Best news in months. I want to give my Contact a manly kiss. I offer a handshake. He just stares at me. Not ready to take the next step in our relationship, I guess. No big deal. "You're gonna need help to bring this conspiracy down. Shizune's probably already pinning it on me… she's ruthless and Satou's subtle as hell. You're gonna need to be, like, both of them combined."

The Contact thinks about this. "You're saying I should speak softly and carry a big stick?"

I start breaking down my shelter and pulling more of my note-bark out of hiding. It's time to move on from here. "I guess. If you don't mind my asking… what's Hisao to you?"

The Contact takes a while to answer that. "Not much. Didn't know him well. But… there are different ways to seek truth. Sometimes art. Sometimes justice." He shoots me a piercingly handsome stare, probably. "Sometimes vigilante justice."

I stick out my hand. "Partners?"

He headbutts it. "Partners."