Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008

And he had a mountain of work to complete before the end of the year in order to prepare for next spring’s administrative reforms.

Kaise’s footsteps echoed as he walked across the lobby and climbed the stairs. He showed his visitor’s card at the reception area in front of the locked ward. A muscled young male nurse unlocked the door and pushed open the barred security gate. Kaise continued down the hallway, thinking only of walking. Against the wall was one patient. Then another. Two people sat on the floor. Others stood around, squatted, or were doubled over. All of them wore vacant expressions.

His father was in the recreation room, where he sat cross-legged, unkempt, facing the wall. His eyes, half closed beneath the sleep caked in the corners, were fixed on one point of the tatami. His medicine was working. The medication had increased over the years, robbing his father, one by one, of words, facial expressions, and characteristic habits. Kaise hadn’t seen him for a month, but it might have been simply the drab color of his sweater that made his back seem so shrunken. He looked like a pile of dirt that could crumble away at any minute.

Kaise’s emotions nearly overwhelmed him.

“Old man, I’ve come to see you,” he said gruffly as he sat down beside his father.

He pulled out a bag of rice crackers, cut it open, and held it in front of his father’s expressionless face.

“You like these, don’t you?”

“...”

“You eating your meals all right?”

“...”

Kaise sighed. He hadn’t heard his father’s voice for several years.

His father had been held up as a model beat police officer. He had started as a messenger boy in the department during the chaotic postwar period. His diligence was rewarded, and he was promoted to policeman. Most of his forty years on the force had been spent in local or residential police boxes. Hard-working. Simple. Courteous. Wherever he went he was liked by the citizens he served. But after he reached mandatory retirement age, and his wife died, he began to fall apart.

Kaise gazed at his father’s wrinkled profile.

My old man fell in the line of duty.

He thought that he had noticed the first signs of his father’s illness before his mother died. As mandatory retirement drew near, his father became taciturn and often brooded all day long. Being a police officer was not merely an occupation for his father, it was his life. When he took off his uniform, his life had ceased.

“My goodness.” A nurse with a youthful face and a too-cheerful voice stared at Kaise.

“I’m Kaise. My father is always...”

“So it is you! I thought you looked alike.”

The nametag at her chest read, “Yagi Akane.” This was the young woman who had sent him a postcard saying she was the new nurse assigned to his father. “Please come visit occasionally.” She could have written just that. But she must have thought it sounded too pushy, and had included “I know you must be busy” three times in her gentle note.

“Please stay awhile!” She sounded overjoyed. She slid down onto the tatami on both knees and took his father’s hands, as white as wax, and shook them up and down. “Isn’t it wonderful that your son has come?”

Suddenly, his father uttered, “Yah.” Startled, Kaise looked at his father’s face.

“Yes, that’s right, you’re happy, aren’t you?”

He’s happy? Kaise was perplexed by Akane’s interpretation. He saw no change in his father’s face. Was he really happy?

“Nurse...”

Just when Kaise started to speak, his chest pocket vibrated.

“Crap. They catch me no matter where I am.”

Kaise grabbed his cell phone and turned his back on Akane, who was no longer smiling.

“I’m sorry to bother you on your day off,” a loud voice said into his ear. It was Subsection Chief Ioka from Headquarters, the Police Affairs Section. He was Kaise’s immediate subordinate. “We have a problem. The department chief asks that you come in right away...”

“What’s happened?”

“Well...” Ioka hesitated. “Sorry for the extra trouble, but please could you call back on a land line?”

Kaise felt uneasy. When he stood up, Akane looked as if she was about to cry.

“I’ll be right back,” he said to his father, and he left the recreation room. He was reluctant to use the telephone in the nurses’ station. He retraced his steps back along the hallway, had the male nurse unlock the door, and went to the public phone in the open ward.

He punched the buttons to dial the internal line of the chief of police affairs. Department Chief Kosuga answered immediately.

“It’s Kaise. What’s happened?”

Kosuga hesitated before he answered.

“The police ID notebooks are gone.”

“What?”

“Thirty of them. Thirty officers’ identification documents that were stored together for safekeeping have been stolen.”