Done for the Murder Mystery Contest at the Poirot Cafe Forums. In any case, this is my first attempt at writing a proper mystery - I think the word limit didn't help matters, but hopefully it's not too squished. Enjoy!
Edogawa Conan was sick of murder.
People dropped dead everywhere he went. He was beginning to seriously consider the curse theory Megure-keibu'd come up with, seeing as he couldn't walk down the street anymore without practically tripping over a corpse.
But there were patterns to it. New place? Murder. Important outing? Murder. Potential romance? Murder. Completely inconvenient for everyone involved? Double murder.
And if he could see the patterns, he could beat them.
And therefore by going somewhere where there had already been a murder, on a non-important outing, with no chance of romance, he could have an afternoon off for once.
It was probably too much to hope for.
But the Blue Parrot Billiards Bar was a good place. Yellow lights hung over both the bar and the pool tables, giving the place a warmth opposite that of the pouring rain outside. Both Sonoko and Ran had gotten drinks – nothing alcoholic, but the bartender had put them in fancy, fluted glassware to make the girls giggle – and the two were having a good time. Conan pulled himself up onto tiptoes to see the table as Ran lined up a shot.
Ran was winning; Sonoko hadn't yet figured out that she could bounce shots, and kept sinking the cue ball. Conan tried to work through the math, angles and momentum, as Ran dececided whether to go for the two or the seven.
Seven. She barely missed the side pocket, and it bounced away. Ran bit back a noise of frustration and Sonoko gave a crowing laugh. Sonoko lined up a hit, narrowed her eyes dramatically, called the shot, and...
Sunk the cue ball. Again.
Conan dropped back down, trying to hide his laughter as Sonoko barely refrained from cursing. Ran patted her friend on the back, smiling widely, and Conan turned away to avoid making a sarcastic comment.
He surveyed the other tables as Sonoko proclaimed it wasn't her fault, the ball had moved. The place was busy, considering the rain. Four of the five tables were occupied; the one by the bar was the only one free, bearing a sign that warned players of a slight slope that would be repaired but could, until then, interfere with play.
Ran and Sonoko had taken the table next to it, then next to theirs was a table where a young couple had been playing – a nervous looking man and a woman with more makeup than skin, obviously here on a date. Though the lady was missing at the moment, probably in the restroom. The restroom, in the back corner, was next to a table with three men who'd been drinking – at the moment, one of them was lining up a shot with the eight ball instead of the cue ball, with the other two laughing. A high school couple was next; they'd just gotten in a moment ago. The boy was teaching the girl how to play, with more touching than was probably necessary, and both looked at each other like they were the moon and the stars.
The bar, in the corner by the door, was manned by the same woman he'd met before, Fukui Yuzuki, who was talking enthusiastically with a friend, a woman with hair down almost to her knees. A man with smooth gray hair, round glasses, and a thick mustache was there too, polishing glassware as he kept an eye on the tables. The owner, if he had to guess – he shooed the bartender from behind the bar so she could talk to her friend without leaning over it.
The woman talking to the bartender had come with a friend, who was currently sorting through the umbrellas, trying to find her own in the mess that was the umbrella rack. She found hers – an unremarkable gray thing still wet from the rain – and jogged over to collect her friend.
Behind him, Ran sunk her last ball, and Sonoko groaned with melodramatic frustration. Sonoko started setting the game back up, and Ran excused herself to use the restroom.
Conan watched the room with only half an eye. The bartender was still talking to the woman with very long hair, while the woman with the wet umbrella shot nervous glances to the man waiting for his date. One of the drunks sank three of his opponents balls in a single shot. Sonoko swapped her cue with Ran's to see if it would help.
Then Ran screamed.
The bartender rushed forwards, but not as fast as Sonoko. Conan was on her heels as they skidded on the floor leading into the restroom.
Ran was okay. But there was a body on the floor across from the sinks, dripping blood from a wound on her head. Not breathing, slack against the wall, legs sprawled across the tiles in a way that would be comfortable for no one. He dashed past Ran to check for a pulse – none.
But the corpse was still warm, still fresh – the blood dripping from her head and pooling on the tile hadn't begun to dry around the edges. He checked his watch. Three fourteen in the afternoon.
"Call the police," he said dryly.
Ran nodded as Sonoko helped her back to her feet. Ran had her cell phone in her hand as they headed back through the door. The bartender – Yuzuki-san – was frozen in the doorway with her hand over her mouth, and the rest of the room peered through behind her.
"Asuka!" a man shouted from the back of the crowd. "Asuka!" He shoved his way past Yuzuki-san, and skidded to a stop beside Conan. "Wake up, please!"
"Get back!" Conan near shouted, relying on his voice to make himself seem bigger than his tiny first-grade frame would allow. "She's already dead! This is a murder; stay back before you contaminate the scene!"
The man stared at Conan for a moment before his gaze flickered over to his dead girlfriend. "Asuka is..." A drop of blood plinked into the puddle on the floor, and the man reeled back like he'd been struck, turning green. "Kami, she's dead!"
"Don't throw up on the murder scene!" Conan shouted, and the man stumbled out before retching in a trash can. Conan turned his eyes to Yuzuki-san. "Don't let anyone else in. Tell the owner not to let anyone leave until the police get here."
She nodded faintly, still staring at the body.
Conan turned back to the body. There was no smell of urine, thank goodness. Just a sickly-sweet perfume odor in the air. She came to the bathroom to fix her makeup and reapply her perfume. Which was a blessing; muscles relax upon death, including those in the ureter and bowels, which made murders in bathrooms... messy. This wasn't like that, for once, and he was glad of it, if nothing else but for Ran's sake. If he had any doubt, there was an open container of mascara on the floor, the brush resting at the end of a spun trail of wispy black marks. Sonoko would recognize the brand, and probably be able to identify the perfume, too. But he doubted it mattered.
He took a step back, taking in the whole scene. One of the mirrors had a huge smudge on it, at what would be forehead height for the victim, with a sweep of mascara right below it. So she'd been hit from behind, into the mirror, while re-doing her eye makeup. If she'd seen the attacker, it would have been in the mirror. Conan darted back over to the body. Yeah, hit hard enough to crack the skull, right above the brainstem; death had probably been close to instant. From the damage he could see through the hair, the attack had come in at an angle, tilted upwards and to the right – right handed murderer, then. Unhelpful.
But the damage was from a blunt object, long and narrow and round, smooth enough to leave a single mark rather than a series. One blow, hard, with something almost exactly like...
Like a billiards cue.
Conan looked back to the billiards hall outside. Cues sat in racks all around the hall. Half the gawking crowd still held them in their hands. Even more hung on high display racks as decoration, fancy woods or famous makers, one even studded with gemstones and displayed beneath glass. Every one of them would match the description. Every one was probably covered in fingerprints.
Finding the murder weapon would be a very tedious process.
Conan spent the next few minutes taking pictures on his phone, cataloging every piece of evidence he'd noticed. Mascara, smudge, position of the body. And there was an odd splattering of water, an arc of tiny droplets across the floor that didn't match up to much else. He only stopped when he heard a siren pulling up outside.
Sato-keiji and Takagi-keiji, this time. Good; Takagi was the easiest cop to deal with. Sato started interviewing witnesses as Conan explained the situation. Takagi nodded and took his own measurements and photos. Takagi, as always, agreed with Conan's assessment, then whimpered when he looked around at the walls of billiards cues.
"I'll wait for forensics," he said, and Conan finally left the bathroom.
The witnesses sat in small groups around the room. Ran, along with Sonoko, were with Sato at the moment, going over the details of when and how the body'd been found. On the next bench sat the girl with really long hair, hyperventilating, as her friend glared daggers at the victim's boyfriend. The boyfriend wasn't the next bench – the next bench held the drunks, looking significantly more sober now. The boyfriend sat on the bench after that, sobbing into his hands as Yuzuki-san put a hand to his shoulder. The teenage couple, on the furthest bench, just looked numb.
Everyone was accounted for. He glanced over to the bar to see the owner still standing there, watching the doors for more officers. He looked back Conan's way. Conan met his eyes.
And the man turned dead white.
...What the heck? He wasn't just white, he was shaking! His eyes never moved from Conan, and yet the man looked about to pass out. It was a guilt response if Conan had ever seen one, but...
But the man hadn't been out from behind the counter in the entire time they'd been there. Conan had seen it himself. If he'd left for a moment, Conan would have seen it – and if he'd gone into the women's restroom, someone would've noticed.
Something, Conan decided, was more complex than it looked.
"Mister?" he asked, trotting up to the bar. "Are you okay?"
"I.. I'm fine. Thank you." The man managed to crack a smile, forcing his hands to stop shaking. "It's just... stress. The murder."
Conan nodded, pulling the best first-grader nonthreatening face he could muster. "Maybe you should sit down. It would be bad if you fell."
"I... yes. Thank you." The man stepped around the bar to slump onto one of the high barstools. "You're... Edogawa Conan, correct?"
"Yep!" Conan said brightly. "How'd you know?"
"Ah... Yuzuki-san remembered you." This guy could not lie. The flicker of his eyes as he tried to speak said as much. "From your case here before."
...That could be true, but the body language said it wasn't. Yuzuki-san had hardly noticed little Conan-kun when he'd been here before – she'd been entirely convinced it had been Kogoro that'd solved the case, drunk as he'd been.
"Oh, okay!" Conan nodded quickly, and the man relaxed a little. "What's your name?"
"Konosuke Jii. The owner." Not a lie, but the nervousness made it hard to tell. "You're a detective, aren't you?"
"Yep!" Conan nodded. "My friends and I are the Shonen Tanteidan! We've solved all kinds of cases."
"R-right," Konosuke-san said. "So you'll solve this case for me, won't you?"
"I'll do my best!" Conan nodded again. "So you were behind the bar the whole time, right?"
"All day, yes." The man breathed out and nodded. That wasn't a lie, and Conan knew it. "Since we opened."
"Did you see who all went in and out of the bathroom?" Conan asked.
"I can't say I was paying attention," the man admitted. "But I've already told the police that. And nobody left in the few minutes before the body was discovered."
"Right. Thanks! I'll be sure to solve the mystery for you!" With that, Conan darted off.
Okay. That was suspicious. Hopefully Sato had picked up something useful. Otherwise they'd be here all day, testing cues with luminol.
Sato had apparently finished her interviews, and was now just going over the finer points with Ran. She smiled when Conan walked up. "You ready for an interview, Conan-kun?"
"Yep!" he chirped. "I told Takagi-keiji most of it already."
"Right." She crouched down. "You found the body at..."
He explained. Sato asked the same small questions as Takagi – what did you touch, who else went in, did you pick up or move or change anything – and he answered. It was routine by this point.
Sato was finishing when Officer Tome, the forensics guy, moved through, nodding to the man behind the bar – who was much more relaxed now that Conan's attention was off him – and into the bathroom with Takagi. Conan would have to check later to see what Tome-san found.
In the meantime, Sato was his best bet for information.
"So who was she?" he asked quietly, not quite a detective and not quite a first grader, instead wearing the curious mix of faces that worked best on the cops who trusted him. "The victim, I mean."
"Recent college graduate; had a job with a company run by his," she gestured to the boyfriend, "father. But she wasn't actually his girlfriend."
"Oh?"
"Yeah." He could see it in her face – this was gossip like a soap opera, and she would've been grinning if someone wasn't dead. "The actual girlfriend is Fujimoto Hina, with her friend there." She gestured to the girl with long hair, still on the edge of a panic attack.
The potential motive clicked into place in Conan's head, and he realized why the girl was so scared. But she'd been talking with the bartender ever since she'd arrived – no opportunity, as far as he'd seen.
"He was cheating?"
"Big time." She nodded. "And apparently Asuka – our victim – knew it. She's a college friend of Fujumoto-san and her friend there – Hamasaki Junko."
"Hamasaki-san doesn't seem to like the boyfriend much," Conan observed.
Sato snorted. "Got that right. He's the last one to see the victim alive, on top of the cheating thing. She's convinced it was him."
"Did anyone other than Fujimoto-san have a motive?"
"Oh, sure," Sato said, flipping through her notes. "Apparently Asuka collected blackmail – she had something on everyone. The boyfriend – Oogawa Katsuo – says she promised to tell him something incriminating about Fujimoto-san as soon as the date was over. According to Hamasaki-san, she was probably going to threaten to tell he'd been cheating, which his father really does not approve of. If he found out, it could get Oogawa disinherited." Motive for the boyfriend. "Plus whatever secret she was planning to tell about Fujimoto-san – well, if she needed another motive besides the boyfriend-poaching. Hamasaki-san didn't like the victim either, but I couldn't get an actual motive out of her."
Right. Three suspects, two with definite motive. "What about alibis?"
"That's the hard part," Sato said. "All three of them have alibis. Ran-chan and Sonoko-chan remember Oogawa-san waiting at his table for at least part of the time. Fujimoto-san was talking with the bartender. Both the bartender and the owner remember her. The only one that wandered off was Hamasaki-san, but the teenage couple," she gestured over her shoulder at the pair, "remember her from when they walked in; she was having trouble finding her umbrella. But no one was really paying attention."
"...Right," Conan muttered, thinking. He remembered all three as well. Though he had to admit, he hadn't been paying close attention either... "What about him?" he asked, nodding in the direction of the owner.
"Konosuke-san?" Sato asked, curious. "He'd never met the victim before. He's seen the other three – they play here often. But she was new. In any case, his alibi's solid – he was behind the counter the whole time, and everyone saw him. If nothing else, those three," she gestured to the drunks, "could vouch for the bartenders." Her eyes narrowed. "Why?"
"Just a feeling," Conan said. "Anything else?"
"Nothing important," Sato admitted, before glaring up at the billiards cues decorating the walls. "I wish there was. Finding the weapon is going to take forever."
"Right." Conan nodded. "I'm gonna look around!"
He examined the cues along the walls. Okay. Review. The victim had gone into the restroom, and hadn't been in long enough to worry her boyfriend-not-boyfriend before the body was discovered. Only a few minutes. So even a minute gap in an alibi could make the difference. The women at the bar had been talking, the boyfriend hadn't even started to fidget yet, and the friend had been messing with the umbrella rack. The only problem was no one had been paying any attention.
But then, that was the trick – it had to be someone that no one was paying attention to, because otherwise their absence would have been noted. That didn't bode well for the boyfriend – everyone else had been in pairs or groups. But it was the women's restroom – surely someone would've noticed if a man went in...
He leaned against the out-of-service billiards table, staring up at some of the few decorations that weren't cues. (Mostly photos, a few dated and autographed by magicians, of all things.) He was thinking the boyfriend; the combination of motive and no one paying attention might've given him the best chance. But there wasn't solid proof until they found the weapon.
But some things didn't add up. She would've turned around if she'd seen her boyfriend enter. He wouldn't have had motivation yet, not before she tried to blackmail him. And someone would've remembered him going into the women's restroom.
And nothing explained Konosuke-san's weird behavior.
Conan looked up to him again. He had his hands hidden behind the top of the bar, but they were still shaking, betraying his nervousness. And he was glancing Conan's way, every few seconds – he blanched when Conan caught him at it.
Konosuke-san had met the other three, but not the victim. Could he be sympathetic to one of them? He'd been in the best position to watch the bathroom door, after all. He may have noticed something he wasn't saying.
...Or, he may be telling the truth, and something was weirder than Conan thought it was.
Evidence, then. Right-handed culprit, someone she hadn't turned around to see. So someone she wasn't surprised by. And the splatter of water... could be explained by the bathroom itself. And a wound caused by something long and narrow and exactly the shape of a billiards cue.
It was entirely possible that they were going to have to check every billiards cue in the building.
...Except, wait...
Who would take a billiards cue into a bathroom?
That would've been noticeable, and memorable. He thought back to the bathroom itself – the walls were decorated with posters, not cues. But the shape of the wound – how could it be anything else?
He thought for a moment. What else could it be? The wound was too wide for a selfie stick, too smooth for an umbrella, too well defined to be a hard-sided clutch. A cane – no, nobody had one. A pipe? Too hard to conceal, and nobody had a bag. And nobody was carrying anything obvious.
It had to be a cue. Nobody had paid attention; they'd all admitted it. He had no way of proving otherwise.
He'd tuned out the world while he was thinking, and as he came out of it, he caught the tail end of a conversation between Ran, Sonoko, and Konsuke-san.
"...So I thought, maybe it's the cue!" Sonoko said. "So I switched them – it's too bad this happened, because I probably would've won the next one."
Konosuke-san laughed. "I doubt it would've helped. I check all these pool cues myself. Besides, if you were to switch anything, it should really be the chalk."
The... chalk.
That was it!
Conan shot to his feet, and dashed across the room with a speed that left the others speechless in his wake. He made a quick corner into the bathroom, where Officer Tome and his team were collecting what forensic evidence they could. The older man looked up at his arrival, giving the boy a skeptical look over the tops of his glasses.
"Shouldn't run on a crime scene," he remarked. "What do you need?"
"Is there chalk in the wound?"
"Chalk?" Tome-san blinked. "Let's have another look..." He checked the wound again, quick and professional with an unquestioning air that Conan always appreciated. "No, nothing like that. Why?"
Conan grinned. "It wasn't a billiards cue."
That had everyone looking up. "What?" Takagi looked up from his notes. "How do you know?"
"When you're playing billiards, you put chalk on the tip of the cue, right? And it gets all over your hands!" he started. "So it gets on the handle of the cue too, so if she was killed with a billiards cue..."
"Then there should be chalk in the wound!" Takagi finished for him, brightening. "That's great! I was afraid we'd have to test every cue in here!" He paused. "So... What was it, then?"
"I don't know," Conan said honestly. "Something shaped like a cue."
"Right." Takagi nodded. "Will you tell Sato-san?"
"Sure!" Conan said, and darted back out. Sato was just as glad to hear the deduction as Takagi had been, but she had no ideas about what else it could've been.
"I'll look around," Conan promised, and darted off again.
Conan could feel eyes on him as he searched, checking the tables for loose pieces or any potential weapons. One of the formerly-drunk men complained that he had other things to do today, and Sato assured him that they could all go as soon as the weapon was found. Konosuke-san remarked that he needed to call a friend of his to tell him he'd be late to their meeting – Sato gave him the go-ahead, and the man spent a moment in brief conversation.
"It's fine – no, they haven't found anything. I don't know. Yes, that might be best. I'll see you when I see you, then. Bring something for that young friend of yours."
Sato, meanwhile, was looking over the decorative cues that hung out of easy reach, checking over the handles for any trace of blood. Konosuke-san protested that he would've noticed if someone had taken one of those down, but made no move to stop her until she reached the one under glass – the one studded with emeralds.
"There's no way someone could've taken this one out, right?"
"No, of course not. The case is locked. It's been stolen before."
Good enough for Sato. She moved on, and Conan glanced up from where he was inspecting the underside of one of the tables. The fancy cue looked familiar, actually, like he'd seen it in a case file. He shook his head – it wasn't relevant right now.
He finished his inspection of the table and moved on to the next, the out-of-service one. That table actually seemed... modern, comparatively. It looked automated, he decided. Like it was meant to do something the others weren't. He glanced back at Konosuke-san.
The man had gone pale again, and was stealing rapid glances at Conan out of the corner of his eye.
What was this guy's deal?
Whatever it was, it wasn't hiding a murder weapon in the out-of-service billiards table, since Conan couldn't find anything. He did find what looked to be a button... probably to trigger whatever the table was built to do. He pressed it – nothing happened. It must be broken.
Konosuke-san, for whatever reason, looked enormously relieved.
Okay. Nothing hidden in the tables. Not a cue. Not something hidden in a purse or a pocket. Not a bottle neck or chair leg.
There was something he was missing here.
He'd accounted for the smudge, the mascara. But... He thought back. There had been that strange arc of water.
His eyes turned to the rain outside, then settled on the umbrella rack by the door.
It wasn't an umbrella stem – the wound was too thick. And it wasn't a handle – that would've left the marks of ridges in the wound.
But a wet umbrella, swung as a weapon, would have left that trail of water.
He darted over to investigate.
It took him almost no time, once he'd had the idea. There was one, jammed in at an odd angle to the others, a muted grey that looked an awful lot like the one Hamasaki-san had been carrying when he'd seen her. He pulled it out, careful not to leave fingerprints.
It had a novelty handle. Like the end of a pool cue.
"Sato-keiji!" he called, trying to keep the grin out of his voice. "I think I found it!"
Traces of blood sealed it – this was the murder weapon. Of course, someone recognized it. Hamasaki shot out of her seat, and whirled to look at Oogawa. "That's yours! You killed Asuka-chan?"
"I didn't!" he said, wild-eyed. "I swear!"
Conan grinned. "He didn't," he said. "There's no chalk anywhere on this."
"...What?" the woman asked.
"There's no chalk. He's been playing. His hands are covered in chalk. But you and Fujimoto-san haven't played a game."
"It wasn't Fujimoto-san," said Hamasaki, glowering.
"No, it wasn't." He admitted. "She has an alibi. But your alibi..."
"She was messing with the umbrellas," whispered the girl of the teenage couple. "We saw her when we came in."
Hamasaki-san paled, taking a step away. "Wh-what, you think I killed her?"
"Yep!" Conan chirped.
"That's – that's ridiculous! Why would I... you have no proof!"
"I bet we do," Conan said brightly. "You hit her with the handle of the umbrella. So you had to be holding it by the top. So if there are any fingerprints on the canopy... I bet they're yours."
Hamasaki-san stared at him for a moment, then sunk to her knees.
"I... didn't intend to," she said at last. "When I saw her here with Oogawa-san... I didn't want Fujimoto-san to see them. We were going to leave, but I couldn't find my umbrella – I grabbed the wrong one, and I saw her going into the bathroom... I thought I could talk to her. But she... that woman..." Her hands tightened into fists in her skirt. "She just laughed – she told me about the blackmail, and refused to... refused to leave. She was going to ruin their lives. And I was just... so angry..."
Sato pulled her to her feet. "We'll discuss this at the station."
Sato lead the woman out. Takagi dismissed the rest of the witnesses, and they filed out as well. Conan watched as the body was taken away, and Ran and Sonoko gathered their things.
Everything else had wrapped up.
But he still had no idea why Konosuke-san was acting so suspicious.
The man was still watching him carefully, though with less of a panic now. Conan stepped towards the out-of-service table, and watched the man's jaw tighten. He examined the pictures of magicians on the wall, trying to look casual.
Until he spotted Konosuke-san in the back of one of the pictures, behind a man in a dark suit amid an explosion of doves. The face was familiar, but this one wasn't signed. So Konosuke-san had been a magician's assistant, then?
Magic. That's where he'd seen the bejeweled pool cue before – Kaitou Kid had stolen it once! Konosuke-san had recognized him not as Kogoro's apprentice, but as the Kid killer! But that shouldn't inspire panic, if he were a Kid fan – just dislike. The answer didn't quite fit.
The table. He glanced over to where he'd found the button. Konosuke'd turned white whenever he so much as looked at this thing – if there was an answer to be found, he'd find it here. He hardly noticed the jingle of the bell on the door, or Ran calling him. He switched on his little flashlight and examined around the button. There – a small nub of plastic like a switch. He reached up to touch it.
Then a hand to his shoulder interrupted him. He turned, and his eyes met a familiar grin and eyes as blue as his own, laughing beneath the brim of a baseball cap. A hissing sound and a small cloud of pink smoke. He jerked back.
...And woke up, two hours later, to Ran's scolding about hitting his head. She'd brought him back to the detective agency, and he stared at the ceiling while he tried to think through the fog in his mind.
Kaitou Kid. That... was not what he had thought Konosuke was up to.
He closed his eyes again. Not like he had any proof. He'd have to go back.
Hopefully no one would die the next time.
Hah. Fat chance.
(And elsewhere:
"You have got to work on your poker face, Jii-chan."
"I know. I know. Just help me move the table.")