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Shinichi Kudo had ideas about his beloved daughter — this Kogoro Mouri had been clear on from the beginning. He’d forgotten exactly when he’d started to look at the boy askance, but it was probably when he first laid eyes on him — Shinichi Kudo may have saved his daughter, but he was such a self-important little shit. There was definitely suffering in his future.
As far as his own daughter’s ideas about Shinichi Kudo — well, it was easy to tell from a glance, and he didn’t want to ask. Everything the father of a teenage daughter could go through, he seemed to have gone through. Setting the strictest curfew, forbidding the two of them being alone together inside. And on the occasions Ran went somewhere with that detective punk, he’d had thoughts of following them. Only to feel that such a great detective oughtn’t stoop so low, and so his stomach would flutter nervously right up until she came home.
But he couldn’t escape the fact that his little girl had grown up, effortlessly and completely. The dumpling who hadn’t even reached the top of the shoe cabinet had become today’s lovely, vivacious young woman. And it was naturally unavoidable that she’d want to do the things that young women do.
Such as expending sweat, blood, and tears to make chocolates for Valentine’s Day and refusing to say who they were for. Such as starting to sound especially coy on phone calls, making him wrinkle his brow behind his newspaper.
Such as crying furtively into her sheets after that detective punk disappeared. Kogoro had been tiptoeing from his bed to the bathroom when he’d heard the sound of his baby girl stifling her sobs, crying like her heart would break. He’d nearly choked on his own fury.
One day that punk would probably manage to coax his daughter away. The notion rankled him. Drinking alone in his office, even the beer soured in his mouth at the thought. He felt like hurling the whole can out the window.
But then he realized — he was Ran’s father, after all. He had the right to say a thing or two about this. So it was decreed right there and then: if that detective punk wanted to associate with his daughter, he’d have to get Kogoro’s permission. And as far as any kind of relationship with even a hint of impurity: completely forbidden, of course.
No ifs, ands, or buts — completely forbidden!
*
When the detective punk came back, Kogoro went to the hospital to visit. He’d watched the kid grow up, after all. But who knew why and wherefore — the boy’s face was unexpectedly guilty as they talked. Kogoro was instantly suspicious. There was definitely something on his mind.
But Kogoro couldn’t make out what the damn problem actually was. His eyes skittered back and forth between Shinichi lying on the hospital bed and Ran beside him.
To the point that his daughter got fed up. “Dad, what are you doing!”
He decided to keep mum about it for now. By hook and by crook he’d convinced Eri to come home, and Ran was about to enter her final year of high school. He went out and bought some good food on that account, to make sure Ran got her nutrients.
But he hadn’t counted on Eri offhandedly raising the topic while they ate. The Kudos were back in town to look after their son, she said, and had invited them to drop by this weekend, maybe stay for dinner too.
Kogoro said yes before he even swallowed; Yusaku Kudo kept a few bottles of fine sake in his liquor cabinet. His chopsticks didn’t stop as he listened to Eri chatter on: Oh, we haven’t gotten together with the Kudos for so long, it’s a shame, what with the kids playing together so much back then. And then the topic turned to the old story of Shinichi dragging around a whole Tanabata bamboo, looking to bring Eri home.
Kogoro felt like pausing to throw out a rare compliment for the brat. But then he spotted his daughter absent-mindedly biting down on her chopsticks, an inexplicable blush growing on her cheeks as she listened. He immediately sensed something rotten. It couldn’t be that something had happened under his very nose…
Could it?
After dinner, Ran retreated to her room to do her homework, and Kogoro sat on the couch with his thoughts racing all over the place. He came up and discarded a hundred ways to ask what he wanted to ask.
At last he went for the direct.
“What do you think of that Shinichi boy?”
Upon hearing this, Eri’s knowing lawyer’s smile appeared. He hated that smile.
Not to worry, she told him. Ran was a girl with her own ideas, and could think things through for herself.
Then she changed the subject at once, starting in on his drinking, his horse racing, his pachinko, his little comforts — but the implications of what she’d said birthed a terrifying thought in his brain: I’m not the last person to find out my daughter has taken up with some boy, am I?
Am I?
“When did you know?” he asked, without thinking.
Eri wrinkled her brow. “Know what?”
He had to say it out loud. “Ran isn’t seeing that Kudo boy, is she?”
He wasn’t expecting Eri to laugh. She rocked back and forth, pealing with it. Then she said to him, self-satisfied like a cat that had got the cream, “Unlike certain great detectives, Ran talks to me.”
The sound of the other shoe dropping was deafening indeed.
*
The next day he woke up early, early enough to startle Ran, who was already awake and fretting over the prospect of starting her third year. She kept asking if he was feeling unwell, or had an important case to solve?
Kogoro watched her disappear out the door with her bookbag. Then he poked his nose out the window. As he thought! There was Shinichi Kudo’s drowsy-eyed figure next to the telephone pole, yawning.
Indolence! He hadn’t changed. Kogoro mentally logged another black mark.
Speaking of walking to school…it had always been Ran who’d gone to get Shinichi, rain or shine. Looked like the boy had finally grown a conscience…No, Kogoro told himself firmly. There was no need to be charitable on account of other people’s sons! Yusaku and Yukiko Kudo had to take responsibility. What kind of parents left their kid behind to go larking about in America?
Eri left for work soon after. Kogoro went downstairs to Poirot for breakfast, feeling jittery. When Azusa brought him a sandwich, asking why he wasn’t eating at home, he said simply that Ran had her final exams today, and he hadn’t wanted to bother her with breakfast.
But Azusa said, “Mm, mmhm,” and then started on unnecessarily about how Ran-chan had been extra-adorable lately. But the door-chime blessedly rang then, and she hustled off, leaving Kogoro to face off with his plate of sandwich.
Now he got why that client had been anxious, the one with the strange unreadable codes left by a high school daughter. Adolescence was just too hard to deal with, just too hard. Seventeen was a perilous age. They should just get rid of it.
But on second thought, sixteen and eighteen were trouble, too. It was no good. Trouble was trouble, but in the end kids grew up, and you had to be around for it.
In the grip of these wildly-running paternal thoughts, Kogoro hadn’t noticed where he was going. When he came to, he found himself at front gate of the Kudo residence by some ridiculous chance. They really liked causing problems for other people, that couple, and they just happened to be hanging things up to dry in the yard. When he wandered past with his head in the clouds, he was hailed immediately.
“Hey, if it isn’t Eri’s man Kogoro!”
Their voices were so light, so carefree, that the sight of their nameplate on the gate made his blood boil.
*
He was ushered inside, led past the pile of still-unpacked luggage, and made to sit down in the grandiose living room. Notions of remodeling his own office assailed him; Kogoro resisted. The office where Eri did her lawyering was decorated in the same way: pompously.
Yukiko brought over the tea, her eyes gleaming with the prospect of gossip. Like your typical middle-aged housewife, Kogoro thought. They had barely exchanged greetings before she cut to the chase like a swordsman striking, her blade true and sharp.
“We’re so thankful that Shin-chan has Ran-chan to watch over him. She really is a good girl~~”
Then Yusaku arrived with the armload of expensive snacks Yukiko had made him get, and Kogoro flapped his hand hurriedly, demurring that he had just eaten, he wasn’t hungry. But right then Yukiko sighed happily, deep in her own world, “What good fortune that Shin-chan has such an adorable girlfriend in Ran-chan, ne…”
Kogoro’s cup of black tea stopped halfway to his mouth as his muscles disobeyed all commands to proceed! and also retreat!. His expression was stiffening to the point where Yusaku Kudo would cotton on to the problem immediately, clever as he was, and then maybe Yukiko would cover her mouth in that abominable way and gasp, “Oh no, didn’t you know?” So he simply swallowed the WHAT? that threatened to hurl itself from between his teeth, and made a show of drinking his hostess’s tea. As calm and cool as you please.
It was pretty good tea. He should have dropped a word or two of praise for Yukiko’s tea-steeping skills, if he’d been any kind of guest. But he forgot. And Yukiko wasn’t a normal hostess anyway. So he sat there, trapped on the Kudos’ cushy couch, listening to Yukiko tell the story of her son’s confession to his daughter, and now that he was clear on what a production that detective brat had put on in London — and that he’d made Ran so mad she’d cried — it left him feeling hopeless. Impotent.
Wait, that time at the restaurant on top of Beika Tower — could it have been…?
While he was thinking these thoughts, the couple next to him had sunk into their own private world. Like a shy schoolgirl, Yukiko was bashfully reminiscing about Yusaku’s proposal to her at the Beika Tower restaurant. Yusaku made a face at Kogoro: Sorry, Yukiko can get like this. Kogoro had no choice but to to pull a thoroughly middle-aged I understand face of his own. Then, with a smile as forced as a broken lock, Kogoro carefully put the fragile teacup back onto the table.
You’re high-schoolers, hey! High-schoolers! he shouted silently in his heart. While Shinichi was entertaining thoughts of marriage, Ran hadn’t even reached her seventeenth birthday! And he himself had been in the parking lot naively waiting for them.
Couldn’t they they do things normal high school students did? What was the point of all this pomp and ceremony? Was Shinichi really that attached to Ran?
Kogoro Mouri valiantly sat for another half an hour, but when he sensed that Yukiko was seconds away from trotting out her son’s childhood videotapes, he had no choice but to get up and leave.
In this life, I’ve already seen enough of your son’s face. Really.
*
School let out at noon on test days. Kogoro counted the minutes until twelve o’clock, then found Sonoko Suzuki’s cellphone number in his address book, and texted her.
Hey Sonoko. Got a question for you…
The time that great fool of a Suzuki adviser had raised hell to get Kaitou KID steal his stuff, Kogoro had exchanged numbers with Sonoko, thinking it would be useful for contacting a comrade-in-arms. That had been a while ago. He never thought this would be the day it came in handy.
Sonoko’s reply was swift. Oh, Ojisan! Ran’s already laid her cards on the table?
Look at that. This again. Why was everyone’s information more complete than his? What cards? What table? And such serious language. Am I really that unreasonable of a father?
Another message arrived, at the terrifying speed of a teenage girl typing. Ran said it was too embarrassing to tell her family, so I thought it’d be a while before you found out. The sight of the emoji at the end was infuriating.
He wrote back, suffering: This thing, the two of them, what do you know about it? Be thorough. He thought about it for a second, then added, If Kaitou KID’s next target doesn’t belong to your family, I’ll find a way to bring you to the scene for sure.
Deal! Sonoko sent back at the speed of light, and then a deluge of pictures appeared, rapid-fire.
He looked closely. The first one seemed to have been taken at Kiyomizu Temple, and his own daughter was in the act of pulling Shinichi Kudo down by the collar and smooching him on the cheek. For a moment Kogoro was flabbergasted into immobility.
No wonder she was too embarrassed to tell her own family! No wonder she’d been overreacting after that trip!
One by one, he looked at all the pictures Sonoko had sent over, and with each one he felt Yukiko’s shadow over his doorstep grow darker, descending to negotiate marriage arrangements with him and Eri. When he got to the last picture, his hands stilled. On the screen was his own unconscious daughter, and, his clothing torn and ragged, covered in ash, a bleeding Shinichi Kudo was carrying her out of a fire.
So that was how the brat got injured.
*
Kogoro Mouri was gazing out the window at the sky and the barbecue place across the street when voices sounded in the corridor outside. The lock opened with a clunk, and Ran and Shinichi came in. When they saw him they hastily let go of each other’s hands. Kogoro pretended he hadn’t seen.
“Dad? Didn’t you have a client today? In Odaiba?”
“…Client canceled. Had something come up.”
Ran put her backpack on the sofa. “I’m going to go out in a bit. You’ll have to go downstairs for dinner, Dad.”
“Didn’t you just finish exams? You still have things to do at school?”
As he spoke, Ran was already shedding her school uniform jacket and hanging it on the coat rack, by all appearances looking like she was going to go to her room and change. “It’s Shinichi. His clothes from before don’t fit anymore, he needs to buy new ones.”
Shinichi, who was still standing cautiously in the doorway, made an innocent, disarming face, yet a guilty flicker passed over it. As soon as the door to Ran’s room closed, Kogoro beckoned to him. “You come here.”
The brat froze stiff for a clear second. But he came over obediently nonetheless, sitting down across the table from him.
Kogoro cleared his throat. “Do you have anything to say to me?”
It looked as if Shinichi was going to say “Nothing” on instinct, and then it looked as if he understood something very quickly. “I…”
Kogoro toughened his expression. “Don’t stutter.”
On the other side of the table, the young man’s bearing was that of someone deciding to leap the Rubicon. His fists slightly clenched, he said, “I’m dating Ran!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Kogoro saw the door to Ran’s room open a crack. But he didn’t say a word, continuing to glare into the eyes opposite him.
“I’m not messing around! I’ll be a dependable boyfriend!”
Of course. That was only as it should be. Kogoro closed his eyes and opened them again, his expression as serious as before.
“…I love your daughter very much. I respect her very much. You have to believe me on this.”
This brat. Halfway through speaking, his voice got quiet. But it still wasn’t enough.
“I won’t let Ran cry on my account again.”
Kogoro Mouri’s mouth softened, then he laughed.
Confronted with the startled gaze of the young man across from him and the apparent embarrassment of his daughter from the crack at her door, Kogoro Mouri waved his hand, as if he were in great spirits. “Go ahead, then. Curfew’s at nine.”
Young folks, the road is still long.
After they disappeared out the door and out of his sight, Kogoro Mouri opened the drawer and fished out a DVD of Yoko Okino, then went to the refrigerator and took out a beverage Ran had bought a few days ago on sale.
Soon he was fast asleep. It had been an ordinary, case-free day, as far as Kogoro was concerned. But when Eri Kisaki came home, she was greeted with a profoundly liquor-sodden husband, at five in the afternoon.