Work Text:
"You look deep in thought. Tough case?", asked Kaito. It was late evening and Shinichi was frowning, hard.
"I already solved it. I'm just mulling over the victim's dating history. It's still unclear to me."
Kaito was surprised by that. Shinichi wasn't one to care for romance or who was dating whom, demonstrated by his total lack of interest in gossiping about any celebrities' dating lives he knew. "Does it even matter? If you were able to solve the case without figuring the dating history of the victim out, it must have not been particularly relevant. At least not all of it."
"You are right. But it's not satisfying. My brain won't let it go. It's a puzzle that hasn't been solved and I desperately need it solved before I can go to bed and forget all about it."
"How complicated can it be?"
"Quite frankly, if I didn't know any better, I'd think that the victim was a Greek god. So many people. So many people with similar names. Confusing time-frames. A lot of overlap. Connections everywhere. Dating several people across the same families. Missing information. Likely a whole slew of people and things I'm unaware of." Shinichi violently scratched his hair. "A telenovela protagonist's life pales in comparison to him. IT IS INSANE." How the man wasn't killed decades ago was a mystery.
Kaito's interest was piqued. "And you have to make a mind map of this guy's love life?"
"My mind won't make me rest until I do."
"When you are done, can you tell me about it? By your description, that sounds like quite a life lived." That was an interesting story, for sure, and Kaito needed to know everything about it. (Okay, it might be a little tasteless given that the man died a violent death, but well, it also got to be an interesting story, no?)
"It doesn't have a happy ending, though, and you love those."
"Ah, but this is too intriguing not to know."
Shinichi shook his head. "Fine. I'll tell you everything that I can piece together, but I can't promise that we will get a full picture of it. Your playboy persona has nothing on this guy. Women, men, betrayal, cheating, affairs, sex work – everything is in there." Both him having made a living as a gigolo back in the day, robbing some of the people he slept with in addition to getting paid for it, and him abusing other sex workers. "Many false identities. Some stolen, some forged, but also plenty of aliases in general."
"I can't wait."
"And a fair warning. He lived to 78. There's a lot of material to go through."
"Ugh. I don't quite know about listening to the sexual exploits of an old man." Though, really, he didn't know the man, he could imagine some hot grandpa.
"It's a murdered old man. Real life. Not one of my dad's stories. Take it or leave it."
"I wish your father wrote these types of stories. Maybe I should have a talk with Yukiko. She'd for sure be able to make him write such a story," said Kaito while Shinichi was making faces at the thought of that. Then Kaito asked, "I mean, how come it's relevant to you or the investigation what the man did at 19 or even 39? He was 78!"
"Obviously, it wasn't. As I said, I was able to solve the case without having a firm grasp of his total dating history. He was 78 years old. What he did and how he behaved in his teens and twenties or even any time previously to his 56th birthday was not relevant to the case whatsoever. I mean, in some way it explained his character better and how everything came to be, I guess, but a lot of information that I didn't need to know came out during the investigation. He kept diaries. And pictures. A lot of pictures." Dear god the pictures. Some of them will haunt him forever. He wished he had a magic eraser.
"Now I want to know what happened when he was 56."
"It would be more interesting if you knew his life up to that point. I think it stopped being interesting to me hours ago. Now it's just pathetic." Maybe he lived an interesting life, but that was a horrendous life full of even worse decisions. "Anyway, please leave me to it. My brain will not stop screaming at me."
"Okay, then, just tell me what you want for dinner."
"Anything's fine. Thank you."