Tangze stroked the cat in his arms and looked at Toshisa Mantani, who was sweating profusely across from him, with a teasing expression.
"Hey, isn't this Mr. Mantani's cat?" Editor Shimaki pushed up his glasses and quickly recognized it. "Nobel, why is he over there...?"
As he spoke, he couldn't help glancing at the pet carrier in Mantani's hand.
This cat named Nobel naturally belonged to Toshisa Mantani, who doted on it immensely.
Whether he left home to write at a hotel or slipped out halfway through writing to kill someone, he never forgot to bring the cat along.
If you said his crime wasn't meticulous, he had a whole disguise planned out. He could even change into a hotel waiter's uniform and mislead the editor waiting outside his door into thinking he had never left the room.
If you said his crime was meticulous... then why bring the cat?
Granted, since his student lived in his old house, the cat often went back and forth between the two places. Sometimes, when he was too busy to care for it, he would ask his student to feed it for a few days. So cat hair appearing here was entirely normal, perhaps making him mentally let down his guard. Still, it was hard to assess just how absurdly careless his crime had been.
What was even more ridiculous was that, because everyone knew how much he loved the cat—including his editor Shimaki—he couldn't possibly take the cat to the hotel and come back claiming it was gone. He could only force himself to tell Shimaki that the cat had fallen asleep, close the carrier, put on the performance of a lifetime, and carry it home.
If Nobel hadn't been discovered, it would have been perfectly normal for it to wander around