DEATH NOTE – 19

Summary:

During a movie shoot with Misa, Matsuda notices that he’s near the Yotsuba Group’s Tokyo office. Today is Friday, and Matsuda knows that the deaths are concentrated around the weekends, so he decides to go investigate. After sneaking past the guard, he makes his way to the elevator and overhears two men talking about a secret meeting today. Seeing that those two headed up to the 19th floor, Matsuda takes the stairwell and eventually comes to the doors of a meeting room. Trying to listen through the door, Matsuda thinks he hears talk about killing and Kira, but then the doors open and he stumbles into the room. Meanwhile, back at base, Watari notifies L of a request for the famous detective Eraldo Coil to find out L’s true identity. The person who made the request is actually Kida Masahiko of the Yotsuba Group. Light’s father thinks that they have to now watch out for Coil, but L reveals that he is actually Coil. With this new lead in Kida, L prepares to mobilize the team to investigate Yotsuba, but he then gets another message from Watari. This time, the old man notifies L that Matsuda has sent out an emergency signal using his belt from inside Yotsuba’s Tokyo office.

For now, Matsuda is managing to stay alive by pretending he’s there to promote Misa, which he has all the credentials for. While Shimura and Hatori take him to a different room, the remaining six discuss what to do about him – they’re not sure who he really is, but the consensus is that they have to kill him. Back at base, L decides to call Matsuda’s cell phone. When Matsuda answers the phone under the watch of the two Yotsuba executives, he finds L on the line pretending to be a friend named Asahi. Through some carefully chosen words that don’t tip off their enemies, L is able to ascertain that Matsuda isn’t with Misa and that he’s in trouble. Matsuda buys more time for himself by calling Misa to get her to come to the Yotsuba building under the pretense that she’ll be hired by the company. Misa is actually already on the phone with Light when Matsuda calls her, and L sees this as an opportunity to save Matsuda. A little while later, Misa arrives at the Yotsuba meeting room and tells everyone that the agency has prepared a special reception. The eight Yotsuba men decide to come along in order to keep an eye on Matsuda, and everything goes according to plan as they get entertained by all the girls in the apartment that L has under surveillance.

While the party is going on, Matsuda sneaks away to the bathroom so that he can call L and tell him about what he overheard earlier concerning Kira. L feels that the best chance for Matsuda to survive all this is to die before he gets killed. As per the plan, Matsuda pretends to be drunk and tries to do a trick on the balcony of the apartment, but falls over the edge. Fortunately, Light’s father and Mogi are on the floor underneath the party and catch Matsuda with an outstretched mattress. By the time the Yotsuba men rush over to the balcony to find out what happened, all they see is a lifeless body lying on the ground in the parking lot. Matsuda’s body is actually being played by Aiber, and Wedy is nearby pretending to be a passerby who heard the sound from the fall and is ready to dial 119 for an ambulance. Misa then suggests that the Yotsuba men leave and promises her agency will take care of it. They follow her advice, and a little later, they see an ambulance arrive to take away the body. Not knowing that L and Light are the paramedics, the Yotsuba eight are relieved that Matsuda is dead.

The next day, after reading about Matsuda’s death in the newspaper, Kida gets a phone call back from Aiber pretending to be Eraldo Coil. As Kida reports to the rest of the Yotsuba group later, Coil wants 2 million dollars in advance and 8 million as payment. Furthermore, even if they decide they don’t want Coil’s services, the detective wants 2 million dollars as hush money. Realizing that Coil must know about what’s going on, Hatori panics and says that he wants out. Laughing at this statement, Higuchi suggests that Hatori will die tomorrow because of it. Ignoring Hatori, the others decide that they want Coil’s help and are willing to pay the fee. Sometime later, Wedy calls L from atop the Yotsuba Tokyo office building and reports that the security level there is horrible. She was able to set up a surveillance system in the meeting room to allow L and company to watch what goes on in there. The first thing Light’s father notices is that there aren’t eight people anymore, there’s only seven.

Preview:

This whole escapade with Matsuda is probably my favorite part out of the entire Yotsuba arc. Not only did Matsuda manage to be useful by confirming Yotsuba’s involvement with Kira, I thought the Matsuda-faking-his-death part was well coordinated. It was fun to watch the entire investigation team work together to pull off such an operation. Still, I was a bit surprised that they condensed all of chapter 43 of the manga into the final two and a half minutes of the episode. It’s not a huge loss because most of it was relatively boring discussion between the Yotsuba group, so like last week, I again see it as an encouraging sign that the series will be able to finish in the alloted number of 37 episodes.
Incidentally, Matsuda’s falling down and being caught by the mattress is the topic of this funny comic.