The Year's Best Mystery & Suspense Stories 1990 by Edward D. Hoch

Author:Edward D. Hoch [Hoch, Edward D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SHIZUKO NATSUKI

THE LOVE MOTEL

Writers are often asked where they get the ideas for their stories. I have been in numerous hotel rooms containing refrigerators prestocked with beverages for the guests, but the idea for this story never occurred to me. Obviously it did occur to Shizuko Natsuki, who has been one of Japan’s leading mystery writers for nearly twenty years. Her annual novels have been best sellers and award winners at home, though only a few have appeared in America to date.

The part of Shibuya which is Dogenzaka 2 Chome has been known as a shopping district. But if you go a short way farther along this shopping street, the area around the main branch of the Tokyu Department Store, you can turn off into a maze of narrow, winding alleys, many no more than three meters wide. Clustered on these narrow streets are the love hotels. Large and small, there are more than a hundred of them altogether—probably the largest congregation of love hotels in the city.

Since this is the very heart of Shibuya’s busiest district, land prices are extremely high, and yet the buildings here are not particularly tall. Indeed, most of them are two- or three-story structures jammed tightly together. The reason they are no taller is that most of the buildings are flimsily constructed. On the other hand, by having all the hotels clustered together this way, they bring together throngs of customers, so that the vacancy rate in the hotels is quite low and most of them are busy and prosperous.

Among these hotels is one three-story building built like a castle. The outer wall is faced with white tile and there are three round turrets with bronze-colored roofs. On the whole, it vaguely reproduces the effect of what may have been an Arabian castle presented in a rather traditional and symbolic manner. Because of the height of its turrets and the fact that it has some twenty-three guest rooms, it rather stands out compared to the other hotels.

At 7:15 on a Tuesday evening in April, the house phone rang at the front desk of the Castle Motel. The blinking red light indicated that the call came from Room 305 on the third floor. Since the people in that room had been there more than an hour, the desk clerk supposed they were ready to check out. Putting the phone to his ear, he was assaulted by a man’s voice, shrill to the point of hysteria and abnormally high-pitched.

“Come quickly! Something terrible has happened—something really terrible!”

The desk clerk, a man in his thirties, dropped the phone and rushed from behind the counter. Since this sort of motel is mostly used by people who would not care to be recognized by colleagues, no one would call for help unless there was a serious problem. In the past there had been two occasions when elderly guests had died from their exertions. Another time a young hoodlum had been there with a bar hostess he had picked up. They

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