You Killed Wesley Payne

by Sean Beaudoin

  “Check out the vocab on Cassie.”

  “Just answer the question, crackstar.”

  “The Snouts have a locker room. You know, where they change into their uniforms? I’m thinking a locker room full of lockers in the best-guarded place in town is pretty much the perfect place to stash something for a while.”

  “The key fit?”

  Dalton looked at it. “Nope. I was sure it was going to, but it’s the wrong one. A silver herring. I had to use an ax.”

  “Resourceful.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And it was in Hutch’s?”

  “It was in Hutch’s.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yeah, I need to think about that for a minute.”

  Cassiopeia began to slow down, approaching a crowded intersection. “This just gets weirder and weirder.”

  “Speaking of which, how did you know I was in the Snout Hut in the first place? And where’d you scare up Elisha Cook to spring me?”

  “I saw Estrada load you into the back of a cruiser at Footer’s, but they never checked you into the hospital, so where else would you be? As far as Cook goes, who did you want me to call?” Cassiopeia pretended to pick up a phone, lapsing into Sherry Rev’s voice. “Oh, hi, Cassie! You say he’s got his dumb ass arrested again? Oh, my. Well, I guess I’ll finish baking this cake and then I’ll cruise on by and bail Dalton out. Thanks for calling!”

  “Fair enough,” Dalton said grudgingly.

  Cassiopeia went back to her normal voice. “I was driving around, trying to figure out what I was going to do, since half of the Caskets and most of the Balls got arrested at Footer’s too, and I happened to see ol’ Pinstripe hanging around outside school, even though it was closed. He looked like a hobo trying to decide which windowsill to steal a pie off of. I thought he might, just might, be willing to play Uncle to the Rescue.”

  “You have to grease his palm?”

  “Nope. He agreed right away.”

  Dalton pointed to the sheet lying on the dashboard. “You didn’t grease him, what’s that expense form for?”

  Cassiopeia handed it over, along with a stack of paper-clipped receipts. “Costumes. Makeup. Gas. Singing lessons. I’ve had some serious expenses, boss man.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Okay, boss man.” Cassiopeia took a left off the main road, pulling into the parking lot of Doggie Diner—We Make Wieners You’ll Bark For! She backed in between two trucks, which provided cover while allowing them to watch the road and the parking lot’s entrance at the same time. She left the key half-turned and maxed the A/C.

  “Four hundred dollars for makeup?” he said, thumbing the receipts.

  “Hey, Dalton? You taken a look at me lately? This Bride of Foxxenstein routine isn’t cheap. Besides which, you know my mom doesn’t even let me wear eyeliner. That means I have to wash it all off every time I go home, and then start all over again as soon as I get back in the car.”

  “Okay, okay, but a Jaguar? I mean, are you serious? What’s this thing cost a day to rent?”

  Cassiopeia shook her head. “Think, boss man. Frau Cassiopeia Jones doesn’t drive no Ford Escort. You want me deep cover, you got me deep cover. That means no skimping on the outfits, and maybe a few other perks befitting the leader of a certain very upscale clique.”

  Dalton knew she was right. He folded the expense form and the receipts and stuck them into his wallet. “Well, Estrada sure bought Cook’s bluff. He fell all over himself to let me go. So, yeah, I appreciate you getting him to spring me.”

  “You don’t sound too convinced about it.”

  THE PRIVATE DICK HANDBOOK, RULE #46

  No good Dick ever works alone. But most good Dicks sure as farck wish they did. These days it’s almost impossible to find good help.

  “That’s because if I get any more enthusiastic, you’re gonna ask for a raise.”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  “Don’t even think—”

  Cassiopeia held up a finger to shush him, looking at her watch. She silently counted down from ten, saying “Now!” just as two Snout cruisers and an unmarked shot by. Five seconds later they were followed by Elisha Cook’s Diktatorat LE.

  “Nice call.”

  “Snouts are predictable,” Cassiopeia said. “It’s the first thing you taught me.”

  “The first thing I taught you was how to French kiss.”

  She made a mock shocked face. “Is that what it was? I thought you were doing a tonsil exam.”

  “Hilarious,” Dalton said, pulling out the index cards he’d found in his helmet.

  “Why have you been leaving me those stupid notes? Anyone could have read them. Um, remember protocol? Like how you’re supposed to send IMs? Through the encryption link?”

  Cassiopeia looked at the cards in Dalton’s hand. She flipped through them slowly, reading the big block letters.

  “For one, you should know that’s not my handwriting, syntax, or grammar. I haven’t put anything in your helmet. Not even your head. For another, I haven’t sent any encryption since your ‘Mustang Sally’ routine, and that was because you wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Yeah,” Dalton said. “Because Mole was right there, and I didn’t want to blow your cover. Besides, anything Mole hears, so does every kid at Salt River.”

  “Speaking of your head, exactly what are you doing with the Payne girl? It’s not up to me to tell you about professionalism. Or, um, ethics. But, Dalton, it seems like you’ve let her get way too close.”

  “It’s business. Digging for information. Manipulating scenarios. Believe me, I’m just meeting my client’s needs. Our client’s needs.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Speaking of which, looks like you’ve done a nice job getting under Tarot’s skin. Way under. I mean, burrowed in like a deer tick.”

  Cassiopeia was about to fire back but then stopped herself. “Listen, with all these fake arguments in the hallway, I can barely tell when we’re really arguing anymore.”

  “You’re right. Sorry. What have you got for me?”

  “That microphone, for one thing.” Cassiopeia opened a folder, handing him microphone schematics and electrical specs. “It didn’t just explode on its own. Someone rigged it.”

  Dalton, as always impressed by her thoroughness, looked at the sheets detailing ohms, capacity, and wattage.

  “There’s nothing in a microphone that would make it come apart like that, no matter how hot it got.”

  “A firecracker?” he guessed. “A couple of M-80’s?”

  “Probably. But that’s no kind of prank. If I’d been singing when it went off…”

  Dalton put his hand on her shoulder. They both stared out the window for a while.

  “I found Chuff. Upstairs. Just as you started your set.”

  “And?”

  “And he was in one of the bedrooms.”

  “Did you run the plan by him?”

  “Not really time to.”

  “Why not?”

  “He was on top of Macy.”

  “Oh, my,” Cassiopeia said. This time she put her hand on his shoulder. “Was she complaining?”

  “Not at first. Not until he got a little too rough about it.”

  “Men, I swear. What hole did y’all crawl out of, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure,” Dalton said, not bothering to deny that there was one to crawl out of.

  “Well, don’t blame her just yet. You don’t know what you’d do or say to get that monster off you.”

  Dalton nodded. The urge to beat Chuff with a mallet welled in him like dirty bathwater.

  Cassiopeia tore off her wig. The short black hair underneath glistened with sweat. She grabbed a towel from the floor and used it to swab off about a pound of makeup. Her light brown face was thin and flushed. She was pretty without all the goop, but not the ridiculously exotic swan she’d been a second before. It was a relief to see her plainly. To see her normal features, just anothe
r sharp-eyed girl without her cheekbones accentuated or long lashes batted and framed by a neon wig.

  “Oh my Bob, am I tired of wearing this crap. I don’t know if I can do it anymore.”

  Dalton considered how all he had to do was loosen his tie to be officially decostumed. It was hard to blame her. Especially as she reached into her shirt and slipped a clasp, pulling out an enormous set of tan neoprene breasts. She heaved a sigh of relief, her shirt now four sizes too big. She was an entirely different person. She was, once again, the person he knew. Had known.

  “You won’t have to do it much longer,” Dalton said, wanting to believe it. “Hopefully tonight it’s over. You can return all this stuff, shut down Foxxes.”

  She laughed. “That’s the one thing I don’t want to do.” “That clique has just spun out of control. But in the best possible way. Turns out the girls of Salt River were hungry for an excuse to butch up and practice some karate. This has been an exercise in empowerment and collective feminism. They’re not going to want to give it back now.”

  “They’re not going to want to give you back. Especially those Jennys. You may have to move to Vermont and marry all three of them.”

  “There’s only one Jenny.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jenny. There’s only one. The triplets thing was my idea. She’s like Superman, slips into the splashbox and keeps changing her costume.”

  “No effing way.”

  “Yup,” Cassiopeia said proudly. “Recruited her after the volleyball team disbanded. She was so perfect, I thought, where am I going to find more than one?”

  “Man, you’re good. You really have a future in this business.”

  “Thanks, D.” Cassiopeia slipped off her leather skirt and began pulling on some jeans. Dalton politely turned his head.

  “Oh, it’s like that now, is it?”

  “Like what?”

  “You really are into this Payne girl, aren’t you?”

  Dalton wondered why he and Cassiopeia had ever stopped seeing each other. There was the prom thing, sure, and the constant arguing and mountain-high sarcasm to go along with the river-deep lust. There was the not getting along, and the lengthy silences. But it wasn’t really any of that.

  THE PRIVATE DICK HANDBOOK, RULE #47

  Because no one smart ever sleeps with his partner, that’s why. Did Spade hook up with Archer? Did Barney hook up with Fred? Did Nick hook up with Nora? Let alone Asta? Did the guy in the movie about robot trucks that transformed into truck-bots hook up with the girl in the movie about robot trucks that turned into truck-bots? Okay, bad example.

  “So, are you going to look in the duffel bag, or what?”

  “It’s in there,” Dalton said.

  “Are you sure? I mean, you looked, right?”

  “Nope. But I know.”

  “How do you know? What if it’s, like, softballs and cleats?”

  “I just do.”

  Cassiopeia leaned over and pulled the zipper back, exposing many, many rubber-banded stacks of folding green. “Oh, my.” She ran her hands through the money, lifting the stacks and letting them fall again. She laughed, digging even deeper, and pulled out the gun that was at the bottom. And then pointed it at Dalton.

  Their eyes met and held for a ridiculously long time.

  “Is this the part where you tell me to get out of the car? I mean, is this the part where it dawns on my dumb ass that our partnership is over and Tarot has brainwashed your little brain into thinking you really wanted the cash for yourself all along?”

  Cassiopeia pulled the trigger. A tongue of flame licked out the other end.

  They both laughed. She tossed the gun on his lap.

  “I missed this thing. Didn’t think I’d ever get it back.”

  Cassiopeia reached into her purse. “I’ve got something even better for you.”

  “What?”

  She handed him a piece of computer paper. It said:

  C17H21NO4 (1R,2S)-2-(methylamino)-1-phenylpropan-1-ol

  “Great. What is it?”

  “A formula of some kind. Maybe.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  Cassiopeia licked her thumb. The piece of paper underneath was the sheet music to “The Ballad of Mary Surratt.”

  “I got to thinking about these lyrics after you showed them to Kurt at the practice room. He didn’t want to play the song for Footer’s gig, but I talked him into it.”

  “That was a shocker. But why?”

  “Because, Dalton,” Cassiopeia explained, “if you were a real singer, you’d know that music is nothing but math. Any given song is really just a bunch of notes. But it’s not the notes that are important—it’s the intervals between them.”

  “Intervals?”

  “The distance. Like, the number of steps to get from C to G. Any song is essentially a mathematical pattern, counting the steps. But lyrics can be a pattern too.”

  Dalton smiled, catching on. “Poetry is pentameter. A Plath told me that. And Tarot said his words had been moved around…”

  “… because Wesley moved them.”

  “The suicide note isn’t lyrics, it’s a code! Both songs are codes!”

  “Right. I ran the lyrics through some encryption programs. It just kept being gibberish. Then I did some searches and found a type of encryption the army used back in World War II. It’s been retired because it’s totally basic. You could crack it with an abacus. But guess what it’s called?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Cassiopeia smiled. “Euclidic Geometrical Masking.”

  “No way.”

  “Way. It’s a basic letter substitution pattern. If you put in Kurt’s lyrics, it doesn’t mean anything. If you put in the lyrics as Wesley adjusted them, first ‘Exquisite Lies’ from the suicide note, and then ‘The Ballad of Mary Surratt,’ that formula is what you get.”

  Dalton looked at the paper again.

  C17H21NO4 (1R,2S)-2-(methylamino)-1-phenylpropan-1-ol

  “Did I say you were good? You’re better than good. You’re fantastic.”

  Cassiopeia blushed.

  “So I guess it’s up to me to figure out what it’s for.”

  “Thank Bob. I thought you were going to give me that job too.”

  “No, ma’am. You’ve already more than earned your keep.”

  “Speaking of which,” Cassiopeia said, turning back to the red duffel, “how much of this do you need for Landon’s armor?”

  “Why?”

  “So we know how much is left. For us.”

  Dalton shook his head. “I have to get it all to Inference. And then collect my percentage. I have until midnight tonight to wire whatever I have to Ukraine.”

  “But you’ll still be short. You don’t have to take that money to Inference. Just send it.”

  “I can’t do that. You know I can’t.”

  Cassiopeia threw back her head in frustration. The lead on her pencil broke. “No, I don’t know you can’t.”

  Dalton was fully aware that if he was the excuses guy in the movie with the drunk coed, he was also the excuses guy in the movie where you want the hero to take the money and stop pretending to have a conscience. The bottom line was, at some point over the last year, Dalton had decided that ethics weren’t malleable. They couldn’t be changed to fit different situations. If something was ever wrong, it was always wrong. He planned to put the money from Wesley’s envelope back in the duffel before he turned it over to Inference as well. Because a million cruel-ending noirs had proved that there was no way to take dirty money and make it clean. No way to spend ill-gotten cash without buying the consequences. If he’d earned it, fine, it was back in circulation like anything else. But he hadn’t earned it. Dalton knew if he were sitting in an audience watching the movie of his own life, right this second he’d be throwing popcorn at the screen and yelling, Take the money, fool! What, are you kidding with this probe routine? Grow a sac and TAKE. THE. DAMN. MONEY!

  Lex Cole once said having a consc
ience was the true religion of the born sucker. Having a blanket conscience allowed suckers to live dull, empty lives and not feel guilty about missing out on what they really wanted deep down. He said it was a justification to grow old cowering away from all the things their true natures desired.

  “I know you think you can’t,” Cassiopeia said. “But this is racket money. It’s not like you lifted it from some old lady’s savings account. Landon and his unit need it way more than Inference or Chuff does.”

  “I know.”

  “If you know, King of Contradictions, then why not just do it?”

  “I’m going to tell you something. It’s something I don’t want to say out loud, but I’m going to anyway. And I’m going to because you’ve stuck your neck out so far on this case that I owe it to you.”

  Cassiopeia was about to make a joke about what Dalton owed her, but she changed her mind, nodding solemnly instead.

  “Believe me, I’m tempted to just take this cash. But some part of me knows, just like I knew the money was in the duffel to begin with, that if I use the dirty end of it, if I steal it, Landon is going to get killed. The armor won’t protect him. It’ll do the opposite. He’ll put it on and it will taint him. He’ll wear it and it will mark him.”

  Cassiopeia said nothing.

  “Karma or whatever? Luck? Religion? Who cares what it’s called or what people believe in. I know, in the very center of my stomach, that I have to send him something clean. All the way around. No shortcuts.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I get it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  He was about to lean over and hug her, when he looked at the clock in the dash of the Jaguar, which read 1:56. “Farck! I’m gonna to be late!”

  “For what?”

  “Meeting with Tarot and Chuff.”

  “That’s now? Like, right now?”

  “Yeah, in five minutes. And it’s at the kids’ playground. All the way across town.”

  “No problem.”

  Cassiopeia Jones popped her wig on sideways and gunned the massive engine, nearly sideswiping the enormous plastic dachshund head mounted on a pole outside of Doggie Diner, before roaring off into traffic.