Conan: Maybe He Really Was a Good Guy

Tangze's words had been pretty cryptic, with just enough of a punchable quality to them.

But Conan's father, Yusaku Kudo, was a top-tier cryptic speaker himself. He specialized in vague insinuations and never spoke plainly. Conan was well adapted to that style, and his mind quickly came up with several possible interpretations.

"Is it because of your case?" Conan swiftly made the connection, assuming Tangze meant that justice had failed him. He followed up by asking about the case, trying to find some way to talk him back from the edge. "You still haven't told me exactly what happened."

"I was planning to organize it into a document for you. I've been going over the details and thinking about them lately, but if you're interested in hearing it, I can tell you." Tangze thought back seriously for a while before telling Conan the biggest problem first. "There's a lot you'll need to investigate, because I don't know who the plaintiff was, who the witnesses were, or which police officers and judges handled the case. I was the person involved, but you could say I know nothing at all about it."

"...Huh?" Conan was utterly dumbfounded by that single sentence.

Tangze rubbed his chin. "Hard to believe, right? But I really don't know. I can roughly describe what they looked like, but I doubt that'll help much."

Then Tangze told him the entire course of the case.

Conan's brow twitched as he listened. Then he looked down at Tangze's shoes. Tangze was wearing a pair of canvas sneakers today, soft and smooth all over, utterly harmless-looking—yet Tangze had just kicked a metal door several centimeters thick into a dent with them.

"Your fighting style... I couldn't tell what discipline you studied, but you seem quite skilled. Are you sure you only pushed him, and he only scraped his forehead?" he asked tactfully.

With Tangze's strength, kicking a door a meter away was no problem. Kicking a person three or four meters through the air should have been easy...

"Free Fighting." The moment Tangze said it, he noticed something off in Conan's gaze. Conan's eyes shifted from his feet to his hands, seemingly wondering whether that meant his hand strength was even greater than his leg strength. Tangze couldn't help adding, "I hadn't learned Free Fighting back then. Maybe I was a little strong, but I really didn't hurt him. After he fell, he could still get back up, point at me, and curse me..."

Conan reluctantly accepted that answer, then asked, "You haven't been studying Free Fighting for long either? You look pretty good at it."

"Just practical experience." Tangze had long prepared an explanation for that, and he didn't panic in the slightest.

"You... get into fights often?" Conan's train of thought got stuck again.

"Quite the opposite. I used to be a model student." Tangze tapped him on the head. "It feels like you're thinking something very rude... I spent more than two months in detention. If I hadn't learned some techniques, I'd probably have been beaten to death in there."

That was the explanation Tangze had prepared for the Free Fighting skills he had obtained through cheating... It wouldn't fool Tooru Amuro. If Tooru Amuro actually saw Tangze fight a couple of times, he would find it extremely familiar. So Tangze needed to act weak and fragile in front of him.

Fortunately, the one tailing him was Shuichi Akai... There was no way those two would just happen to get together and compare notes, so the chances of Tangze being exposed were very low.

What Conan heard, however, was an even more serious issue. "Were you violently interrogated in detention?"

"No. I guess they wouldn't leave behind such an obvious weakness. It was just a coincidence that every day, some thug or scoundrel was locked in the same cell as me, and then coincidentally got into a conflict with me." A faint phantom pain made Tangze unconsciously stroke his ribs.

The original owner's most serious injury had been a suspected rib cartilage contusion. It had hurt for more than half a month.

Conan held his chin and thought. Maybe Tangze really wasn't lying about knowing nothing about the case. Judging by the procedures and paperwork that had ultimately been presented, aside from being a wrongful conviction, aside from every piece of testimonial and physical evidence being fabricated, it had actually been relatively compliant with due process.

Conan: "..."

Great. The more he heard, the less standing he had to tell Tangze not to become too extreme. That Tangze was still generally a good person was truly thanks to more than a decade of good upbringing.

"Alright, there's no use just talking and thinking about it without evidence. We can consider it once you have a way to investigate. Maybe I'll remember more details by then." Seeing the elementary schooler keep his head down in silence the whole way, Tangze felt that working his brain cells this hard probably wasn't good for his physical development. He patted Conan's shoulder reassuringly. "Come on, go pick out what you want."

"Huh?" Only after snapping out of it did Conan realize Tangze had brought him to a bookstore in the shopping district. He belatedly remembered that Tangze had indeed used taking him out to buy books as an excuse to borrow him from the Mouri family that morning.

"I said I'd come buy books with you. Go take a look." Tangze gently pushed Conan toward the display stand piled with new releases.

The moment Conan looked up, he saw a newly released mystery novel right in front of him. He couldn't resist reaching out and taking one, only to abruptly shake his head after realizing what he had done. "No, no, I don't have money to buy books right now." There was a trace of bitterness in his voice.

After turning into a child, he couldn't carry too much cash on him without making people suspicious. Although he still had savings, he couldn't exactly ask Tangze to take him to the bank just to buy a book...

"It's fine. I'll pay." Tangze, who truly had no shortage of money, waved a hand grandly. He took a hardcover copy of Complete Works of Agatha Christie and Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe from the shelf as well, then handed them to Conan.

Just from the books' thickness and binding, Conan could tell they were expensive. He hurriedly waved his hands. "Forget it, forget it, this really isn't appropriate..."

Then he saw the covers of the two books and remembered their earlier discussion about Murder on the Orient Express. He froze.

"Since we used that excuse to come out, it would be strange if you went home without any books, right? People might think you just made up an excuse to come out and fool around." Tangze glanced indifferently at the price tags and stuffed the books into the little boy's arms. "If anyone asks, say these two are mine and I lent them to you. That'll also make it easier to have an excuse to come out next time."

Books in Japan were expensive. Even royalties of five to fifteen percent could make writers rich, and Tangze seriously suspected that one reason Japanese writers enjoyed such high social status and respect was that it was a high-income profession.

But how expensive could they possibly be? Tangze could make over a million yen in a single night by crafting new masks. A few books were nothing. If he ran short on money, he could go beat up Shadows—oh, no, uphold justice and earn some!

Conan hugged the books tightly in a daze. Lowering his head, he caught the rich scent of fresh ink and felt a little moved.

Ever since the day he had become smaller, he had been acutely aware that he had turned into a child with no rights. Nobody believed what he said, and nobody paid attention to what he did. It had been a long time since he had felt the respect of being treated as an equal friend by a high school student. Tangze had even worried that he would get scolded for going home without books...

And besides... Conan seriously examined the price tags on the three books and hugged them even tighter.

He really had given him so much!

It seemed Conan had overthought things. Tangze had suddenly suffered a major upheaval in his life, so it wasn't strange for him to be in a bad state of mind. Look at him—he had helped solve a murder case and helped search for a missing child. Even if he had some psychological issues, he really was still a good person!