“The name’s Ranpo Edogawa. Don’t you forget it!”
Fukuzawa felt as if he were watching a nightmare play out before his eyes. The boy, who introduced himself as Ranpo Edogawa, was eating red bean porridge on his dime. And it wasn’t just one or two bowls, either.
They’d stopped at an old-fashioned café relatively close to where the murder took place. There were a few other customers present, and they kept glancing in Fukuzawa and Ranpo’s direction. Fukuzawa had to fight against the impulse to go around the shop explaining that thi
s kid just followed him here for some reason. Ranpo had already finished his eighth bowl and was currently digging into his ninth. Fukuzawa was sitting in suspense, but not because he was worried about how much money he had left. He had enough. The problem was—
“Hey!” Fukuzawa just couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Why aren’t you eating the mochi?”
—in each finished bowl of Ranpo’s porridge sat several white mochi, entirely untouched. He was eating only the red beans.
“Because they’re not sweet.”
Not sweet? It’s red bean porridge. The stuff is more mochi than red bean.
If he were simply looking for a sugar rush, then he could have gotten sweet bean jelly, mashed sweet potatoes, or even a sweet bun. “Hear that? Those are the wails of the mochi you left behind” is what Fukuzawa wanted to say, but he held his tongue. There was nothing more meaningless than wagging one’s finger at another’s food preferences. It was hard to watch, but it wasn’t as if Ranpo were committing any crimes. He didn’t want things to get worse by saying anything, either. Just imagining Ranpo peeling off the bread of the sweet bun and eating only the red bean paste inside made him shudder. If Fukuzawa criticized him for being wasteful, the boy would call him a cranky old guy, he was sure.
When the police finally arrived at the crime scene, Fukuzawa and Ranpo explained the situation. It was a rather complicated statement, and having no interest in talking, Ranpo tried to casually leave. Nevertheless, Fukuzawa somehow convinced him to stay and explain what happened in the president’s office. Fukuzawa and Ranpo would have been put in a bizarre position if they made one wrong move, but they ended up being let go almost immediately after telling their side of the story. One of the officers happened to know of Fukuzawa due to his being a well-known martial artist, which fortunately helped them receive the police officers’ complete trust. One condition was that they would still have to come to the station to tell their story again, though.
When the police checked the scene of the crime, they discovered a plastic mold of the assassin’s fingerprints in the secretary’s overcoat pocket. When another squad searched the secretary’s house, they apparently found an instrument used for duplicating fingerprints from samples and another mold in the shape of the assassin’s fingerprints on both hands. All the evidence backed up Ranpo’s claim.
Fukuzawa’s client was finally able to rest in peace thanks to Ranpo, which is why Fukuzawa was indebted to him. In other words, he owed him one. Fukuzawa, though, still couldn’t comprehend how things ended up like this. He mulled it over. Subjectively speaking, all this boy did was disrupt things, but he was objectively solving the case through reasoning. It was an utterly brilliant deduction. He was able to pick out the real criminal after getting only a quick glance of the scene of the crime and people involved. Even then, Fukuzawa still wasn’t able to understand Ranpo’s actions, or put more precisely, he still couldn’t make sense of what had occurred.
What in the world…happened back there?
“Hey, kid.” Fukuzawa spoke up.
“Mmph?”
Ranpo looked back at him with a mouth stuffed with red beans. “Drink your tea,” Fukuzawa wanted to respond, but he held back once again. Ranpo would probably just claim that it wasn’t sweet enough, just like the mochi. Not having tea with sweets was beyond Fukuzawa’s comprehension, but since he believed that it would be rude to talk ill of others’ preferences, he merely said “Okay” and moved on.
Fukuzawa was more interested in what had happened in the office, but he stopped himself from asking “What was that back there?” because he knew he wouldn’t get an answer from the boy like that.
Instead, Fukuzawa reworded his question. “When did you realize the secretary was behind it?”
“From the very beginning,” Ranpo replied, clumsily chasing after the red beans in his porridge with chopsticks. “He was wearing a coat, right? You don’t need a long overcoat to organize documents. In fact, your sleeves would get in the way.”
Fukuzawa nodded. The tool used to create fake fingerprints of the assassin was in the overcoat pocket. He must have needed the large coat pocket to hide something as bulky as that tool.
“Do these sorts of things happen to you often?”
“Sometimes,” Ranpo replied while swallowing down some red beans. “At the workplace, on the side of the street… I used to always stick my nose into stuff that bothered me, but people would just treat me like a nuisance or think I’m weird. After a while, I got tired of it. Sigh. Good grief. The adult world makes my skin crawl.”
Ranpo shook his head and frowned in disgust.
“Do you dislike the adult world?”
“I hate it. It makes absolutely no sense.”
Fukuzawa felt there was something off about Ranpo’s truly appalled expression. It was odd that it “made absolutely no sense” to this boy. Fukuzawa felt the urge to point out that there were also many wonderful things in the world, but he yet again kept it to himself. He didn’t feel as if he had the right to tell such fairy tales.
“Fukuzawa, you dare betray us?”
“Was our oath to the welfare of the nation nothing more than a lie, Fukuzawa? Did your words have no meaning?”
Fukuzawa gave up the sword that day, but he could feel its weight against his hip. He wasn’t going to make excuses saying that it was morally just, but…
Suddenly, he noticed that Ranpo was staring at him. It was as if his clear, deep eyes were peeking into Fukuzawa’s head—as if he had access to the memories hidden in the depths of his brain. Fukuzawa averted his gaze, then said the first thing that came to mind.