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Jailhouse Song – Part 04

The caretaker pointed sharply with both hands. “Here it is. This unit recently became vacant. A small room for the child of his lover, known as the Pony Room.”

It was on the top floor. Victorique and Kazuya stopped to look at it.

The ceiling was low, and the room was cramped like an attic. The triangular window offered a view of the Miracle Garden, the street below, and the distant church steeple. Dust had accumulated, and the only furniture was a broken dresser and a pink couch.

Sunlight fell onto the couch, highlighting the layer of dust. The peeling floral wallpaper fluttered in the breeze. Stains that looked like blood marred the floor. A dusty room around six square meters in size, with no door and a slanted ceiling.

Kazuya was put off by the room’s filth, but Victorique merely gazed around vacantly.

“Ugh. Anyway, let’s clean up,” Kazuya said, trying to stay upbeat. He set down the suitcases and gathered cleaning supplies. “Victorique, don’t sit down yet. Your clothes will get covered in dust. Hey!” he admonished as he briskly dusted the space and polished the floor.

Victorique held her head with one hand, squinting as she tried to push through the hallucinations.

“Oh, I forgot to check something important,” Sparky said. “We still don’t know if this place is usable.”

Kazuya looked up, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Victorique was peering out the triangular window with a grimace.

Sparky brought over a wooden sign and a pen. “This building isn’t meant for residential use. There are no doors, so it’s completely exposed.”

“Do you mean a house isn’t really a home without doors separating it from the outside?” Victorique asked quietly while holding her head.

Sparky turned to Victorique with a gasp. His features clouded, and tears welled up in his charming blue eyes. He shook his head repeatedly, flailing his arms. “Oh, young lady! What a novel and philosophical question! I envy you. Ah! You are a wonderful person! So different from me!” he cried, his voice echoing through the building.

Colorful birds flew out from the nearby trees.

Sparky quickly composed himself, regaining his calm demeanor. “Unfortunately, I’m not equipped to answer such philosophical questions. Either way, regulations state that you must run a business or a shop. Please write the name of your business on the sign and hang it at the entrance. Everyone else has them.”

He pointed with trembling hands. Kazuya and Victorique studied the small rooms below.

The inhabitants were quiet but peculiar. Young people engaged in various inexplicable activities. Indeed, this building didn’t look residential. Each room had a wooden sign with what looked like a shop name. Some were sewing in front of sewing machines, others typed on typewriters, and one man was counting stacks of banknotes.

“A shoemaker, a poet, a banker, and more. Anyway, everyone here does something.”

“What should we do then, Victorique?” Kazuya looked at her.

Victorique was struggling to fight back the hallucinations. Her white-blonde hair fluttered in the breeze blowing from the triangular window, casting a platinum glow over the dusty room. An orange tortoise slowly passed by.

“Hey, Victorique?”

“I don’t want to do anything. Therefore, I will do nothing,” she replied disinterestedly.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Ugh. I swear I won’t work!”

“You said the same thing yesterday.”

“My dream… is to become… a lazy watchdog,” Victorique said.

Sparky, stretching his neck like a giraffe, forced himself into the conversation. “I understand. You plan to squander your remarkable novel and philosophical nature, refusing to engage in productivity in the modern material world. And you’re doing this right in the very heart of New York, where ‘wealth is power’ and ‘greed is good’! What an exhilarating anti-adventure! Ah! Damn it. I’m so envious I feel like all my hair might fall out.” He scratched his head frantically.

Kazuya slowly turned away from him and whispered to Victorique, “But there’s nowhere else we can stay right now.”

“Kujou, you should try some things,” Victorique whispered back.

“Me?”

“You like being busy and running around, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t! You just have some weird idea about me. Besides, I don’t know if I can manage working at the newspaper and doing something here.”

Kazuya crossed his arms. He turned to look at Sparky, who was eagerly listening with his neck stretched.

Kazuya hesitantly asked, “Just for reference purposes, what did the previous tenant do here?”

“Oh, uh, they ran a detective agency,” Sparky said.

“Wait, really? But if they stopped, I guess business wasn’t thriving.”

“Except it was. The police are pretty much useless, the gangs are downright terrifying, and everyone wants a detective if there is one around. They were doing very well. But in this city, anyone who sticks their neck out for justice, be it cops or detectives…”

He pointed at the floor with a grim look. Kazuya had half-wiped a reddish-brown stain with a cloth.

“This guy was beheaded by the Chinese Mafia with a broadsword. It happened just last week.”

Kazuya couldn’t utter a word. He shuddered at the sight of the bloodstain on the floor. Pulling himself together, he asked, “So, what about the tenant before them?”

“They also ran a detective agency. Three former top prosecutors and two former police detectives formed a company. They said they wanted to eventually create a chain of detective agencies. They were talented, so I thought they’d quickly grow and move out.”

“I see. So, are they running a bigger agency somewhere now?”

“No, they’re all dead. The Italian Mafia turned them into Swiss cheese with their banana machine guns.”

Sparky peeled back a bit of the tattered floral wallpaper to reveal multiple bullet holes. Kazuya shuddered and groaned.

“That reminds me,” Sparky went on, “the tenant before them also ran a detective agency. The caretaker at the time told me. Two old men started it. They were successful, but they pissed off the Irish gang. One morning, they were found hanging from here, dead.”

He pointed at the ceiling. There were two sturdy round hooks, likely for hanging lamps.

“Two old men’s bodies, dangling from the ceiling.” Kazuya trembled uncontrollably.

“So anyway, this Pony Room is known to house detective agencies. Even now, clients sometimes drop by. Oh, speaking of which, one came this morning.” Sparky remembered. “She was an elderly lady from a good family in the sticks. I told her there was no detective agency here anymore and that you were moving in today. She kept insisting the new tenant might be a detective too. For some reason, I got the shivers whenever she was nearby. Now that I think about it, she was quite the peculiar lady. She said her old friend’s son was in danger and needed a detective’s help. I told her the next tenant might not be a detective, but she wouldn’t listen. She left in a hurry to find you. She was not the type to budge. Oh, and she left this behind.”

Sparky opened a drawer in the dresser and showed them an old crescent-shaped brooch.

Victorique furrowed her brows. “An elderly lady from the countryside, you say?”

“Whatever we do, we can’t run a detective agency,” Kazuya said, pacing back and forth frantically. “It’s too dangerous. Oh, it’s too dangerous. Way too dangerous.”

“Let me know when you decide,” Sparky said. “I have a special gift for you. Well, then. If you’ll excuse me.” He grabbed a vine and disappeared downstairs, ululating.

Kazuya stopped in his tracks. “How about a sweets shop, Victorique? Huh?” He peered at her face.

Victorique’s silver hair billowed, and her green eyes were sparkling oddly.

“What’s gotten into you?” Kazuya asked.

“Italian Mafia, Irish gang, Chinese Mafia. Is running a detective agency really that dangerous? In that case, I wouldn’t get bored, at least.” Excitement seeped into her voice, and Kazuya didn’t like that. “A bomb flowing down the river of nothingness. I’ll be waiting for it from the bridge.”

“Victorique!” Kazuya snapped. He was serious.

Victorique ignored his outburst. “Kujou, even in this new land, there are unsolved cases waiting for the day they will be solved, teetering on the edge of boredom and nihilism. And if we run a detective agency, they will come to us. Isn’t that as delightful as macarons lining up like little chicks?”

“M-Macarons? More like bullets lining up like chicks to shoot you. No, no, no. We can’t do that.”

“But I am bored!” Victorique roared. “I will die of boredom!”

The walls and palm leaves rustled. Birds took flight.

Victorique lay down on the freshly cleaned floor and rolled over. Kazuya jumped to avoid her. Victorique sat up, glaring at Kazuya with extreme displeasure. Then she turned her back to him and eagerly grabbed the pen. Kazuya peeked nervously.

She wrote “Gray Wolf Detective Agency” on the wooden sign.

“No, you can’t!” Kazuya quickly grabbed the sign and flipped it over. He wrote in larger letters, “Gray Wolf Pastries.”

Irritated, Victorique took it back and added “No Mystery Unsolved” under the detective agency name. Kazuya pulled the sign and wrote “No Confection Impossible”. They kept adding more. Great Detective. Great Chef.

“I said it’s dangerous. You’re out of your mind!”

“Let go. Dying of boredom is more dangerous. I’ve reached my limit!”

“That doesn’t even make any sense!”

“There should be a detective agency here. Ah, look.” A deep voice came from nearby. “There it is!”

Victorique and Kazuya lifted their gazes, still grappling.

A young man in a fine suit and leather shoes, clearly of high status, stood there. He was handsome, but his cold eyes and crooked lips gave him a rather mean-spirited look.

Victorique’s green eyes widened.

Kazuya, realizing the identity of the visitor, said, “Oh, I saw your picture in this morning’s paper. I believe you are William Trayton, the national boxing champion.”