Shimoda Chika wiped away her tears and shook her head. "After going downstairs, I drove my boyfriend's car and took Nakacho and Kawakami home before coming back to take pictures—they'd been drinking and couldn't drive."
"Nakacho and Kawakami?" Following her gesture, Inspector Megure looked at the two office workers and questioned them out of habit. "And what was your relationship with the deceased?"
The young man said nervously, "We work for the same company. We happened to have the day off today, so around noon, we came to Section Chief Takai's home and held a small celebration party."
"A celebration party?" Remembering how he had run into the three of them in the corridor, Hattori Heiji could not help but interject. "But the atmosphere when you left didn't look like a celebration. It looked more like some kind of criticism meeting."
The young office worker looked at the corpse on the ground and sighed. "Section Chief Takai was just promoted to manager. We normally got along well, so we came to celebrate for him.
"We had originally planned to drink until late at night, but Section Chief Takai couldn't hold his liquor. He was already completely drunk shortly after nightfall.
"Once he got drunk, he started criticizing Mr. Kawakami and me..."
Beside him, the middle-aged office worker belched and snorted. "That guy said something like, 'If you want to rise through the ranks, you can't care about personal ties. You have to look upward with all your might.' He also said that people without ambition like us would never climb above him, no matter how hard we worked."
Jodie was momentarily speechless. Saying something like that elsewhere, in a place like New York, might not have mattered. But in a place like this...
"Ah, what a pitiful corpse. Maybe he