The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  Was this terrible? Is it a terrible mistake? I was inclined to think not, because after all, it wasn’t like Swan was going anywhere. He was tied to a chair in a locked room.

  What could possibly happen to him?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Daniel apparently took much longer than I did to make a statement, because despite starting earlier than me, he was still going. I didn’t think much of this at the time, because I still was processing him as a sort of Lesser Charice. If Charice had to make a statement, it would have taken hours and hours and would probably have involved props, several dramatically smoked cigarettes, and possibly a musical number.

  I called Charice, actually, even though she was at work, because this had been a crazy day, and Charice was still the person I called for crazy.

  “This is Charice. What can I do for you?”

  “Is there any way you can come out here?”

  “Dahlia!” she said, alight with happiness. “Not at all. But tell me it’s going well with Daniel.”

  “Of course it’s going well with Daniel,” I told her, which was sort of glossing over that he was giving a statement to the police, but this wasn’t what would have concerned her anyway. “I love Daniel. Daniel’s great.”

  I knew my roommate entirely too well, because even though I couldn’t see her, I could picture the exact face she was making—this scrunched-up thing she did with her forehead when she was skeptical.

  “That is just the sort of thing you say when you don’t engage. And I don’t want you just to deal with surface Daniel. I want you to deal with deep Daniel.”

  Even setting aside the altogether too-sexual way Charice said “deep Daniel,” I was not sure I wanted to experience deep Daniel under any circumstances. What was wrong with surface Daniel? I said:

  “There’s been a murder here.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful!” Charice said, then instantly backtracked. “I mean, yes, I’m very sad that a man is dead, but this is just the sort of bonding adventure that you two should go on! You’ll be war buddies by the end of it.”

  “How did you know that it was a man?” I asked.

  Charice was elated. “You’re such a natural for detective work.”

  “I appreciate the compliment, but how did you know?”

  “I suppose I’m just being sexist. Women can be corpses too. Feminism!”

  “I would think it’s misandry.”

  But Charice was not interested in this point.

  “You’re getting really good at deductions. How are you liking that online class?”

  So yeah. I had just started this online course that was the first step toward getting licensed as a legitimate private investigator in the state of Missouri. It was fun but slightly surreal.

  “I like it okay. It’s a very strange collection of tea-making old women and bounty hunters.”

  “That sound like fun,” said Charice. “We should invite them over!”

  We should not do that. Emphatically, we should not do that, and besides which I was getting offtrack.

  “Listen, is there seriously no way that you can come out here? I think maybe someone was trying to lure me into a storeroom and kill me.”

  “You know how to tempt me, Dahlia.”

  “Pretty please?”

  “You have Daniel—he can be my emissary. Daniel will protect you.”

  “I don’t need anyone to protect me,” I told her, although in retrospect this would prove to be dramatically untrue. “I need a partner in crime. You’re my right-hand man, Charice.”

  “Dahlia, you’re adorable, but even I have work to do occasionally. How about this: I’ll make an amazing penne when we get home. It has rampion in it.”

  “That penne won’t save me if I’m dead.”

  “Well, then, there will be more for me. Spend time with Daniel. Get to know him. I like this one.”

  “I know Daniel fine.”

  “What’s his favorite song?”

  “‘Colors of the Wind’ from Pocahontas.”

  “That’s not it at all,” said Charice. “Did he tell you that?”

  “I’m just making things up,” I told her.

  Charice sounded pleased and disconcerted all at once.

  “You’re getting much better at lying,” she said. “This class is doing wonders for you.”

  I made my way back downstairs to discover that the tournament had been significantly disrupted by the arrival of the police. We had originally been scheduled next for an eleven fifteen game, but now that had been postponed. Everything had been postponed, apparently, or so the signage told us.

  The fact of this was sort of a comfort to me—this is what is supposed to happen when a person is murdered, but I was also slightly miffed. I had been shot last month at an event not completely unlike this, and they carried on just fine.

  There was a ginger-haired guy with glasses—not the weasel, a different guy—who seemed to be in charge of things, and I asked him what was up.

  “There was an unfortunate incident upstairs,” said the guy. “And so everything is just going to be thrown off schedule for three hours or so. But we will continue,” he added, with a fake-sounding confidence.

  “Do you know who was killed?” I asked him. “Was it one of the players, or just a guest at the hotel?”

  “I never said anything about someone being killed,” said the ginger.

  “No, I realize you didn’t. But do you know who it was? Have you heard anything?”

  But the ginger guy was not putting up with me. He was a handsome guy, actually, with more shoulders than you saw on your average geek, but he had a fastidious manner that made him seem like a Roald Dahl character.

  “You’ll have to ask the police about that yourself. There’s really a lot for me to manage here.”

  I had no intention of asking the police a damned thing, because I knew full well what they would tell me, which involved the various ways I might fuck myself. And this was just Detective Weber. But I was curious—was it a random hotel guest or someone here for the tournament? Because the way I saw it, there were two theories:

  Theory One was that the dead guy was Doctor XXX. Something really was going to “go down” and whatever it was, it went down before he met with me. I didn’t love this theory, not for any deductive reason, but because it involved me in his death somehow.

  Theory Two was that Doctor XXX wanted me to see whatever had happened to Swan. Who knows whatever that was about? Some weird creeper sex thing? This theory hadn’t dawned on me at all while I was dragging his naked body around, but now, with his badonkadonk safely out of sight, seemed not entirely improbable. Hell, maybe whoever had lured him in there was counting on me to bail him out.

  This theory I liked much better, because it meant that I was not indirectly responsible for a man’s death.

  But reasoning-wise, it could go either way. When Daniel showed up, we’d get Swan into some clothes and grill him a little. Hell, we had three hours to spare until our next round. We’d have time to waterboard him, if it came to it.

  But while I was waiting, I thought I could ask around a little.

  And with perfect timing, Mike3000 came up to me. He seemed even larger than the last time I saw him, although maybe he was just puffed-up because he was high on victory.

  “My lady,” he said. “Were you ever able to find your partner?”

  The answer to this question, as Douglas Adams would put it, was both true and not true at the same time. I did not wade into these existential waters with Mike3000, however, and decided to keep things simple and clean.

  “I did. We crushed our first round.”

  “Crushed?”

  “Well, narrowly clawed. Yourself?”

  “I would have said crushed but you’ve already used it.”

  “Congratulations!” I told him. “Listen, I’m trying to find another player,” I told him. “Asian guy, really dapper.”

  “That could be a third of the guys here.” He laug
hed, then reconsidered. “Well, maybe not dapper.”

  “He was here earlier—he had socks that matched his shirt—”

  I was going to describe the shirt, but Mike interrupted, because the socks were apparently enough.

  “Karou Minami.”

  “Who?”

  “Karou Minami. That thing of his with socks is weird. Downright weird.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that was his name. Karou. You know him well?”

  “Not well,” said Mike3000. “I suppose he’s my competition. He’s really excellent. I see him at most events I go to, but we’re not really friends or anything.”

  “Cool,” I said. And I was done with Mike3000, at least for now, because I had gotten a name, which was all I really wanted. Mike3000, however, was not entirely done with me. His face had gotten all schlumpy, with a frowning mouth and sagging eyebrows.

  “Maybe I should haven’t been so judgey about the socks,” said Mike3000. “If you like socks, you like socks. What do I care?”

  “It’s not important,” I told him.

  “It’s a victimless crime, snappy socks,” said Mike.

  “Yeah, I don’t care.” And truly I didn’t. The socks were great. It was a useful detail that made it easy to figure out who this potential Doctor XXX was.

  “No,” said Mike3000. “I’m making Karou seem like he’s weird. My therapist has been telling me that I ‘other’ people too much, and it’s what I’m doing now. It’s just that I asked him about the socks one time, and he talked to me for forty-five minutes about them. I kept waving my keys at him—you know, the international signal for ‘this conversation is over and I really must be going’ but he kept talking.”

  I did not fully understand how I had gotten lured into a discussion about Mike3000’s issues in therapy. Even as I type this up, I’m still not quite sure how that happened.

  “It’s good that you’re being self-aware,” I told him. Although I did not especially think that, actually. I was thinking about waving my keys at him, but I decided that would be too on the nose.

  “He’s a perfectly normal guy. Funny. He can dance pretty well too. He is a child of the universe, no less than the moon and stars. Just keep him off socks.”

  I was not worried about Karou discussing his socks with me. I was not worried about Karou discussing anything with me. If he managed to somehow return from the dead to bring up the topic of socks, I figured he’d earned the right to hold court. Besides which, there were certainly worse things to be haunted about.

  Such as “you killed me.”

  That sort of thing.

  “Thanks for the advice,” I told Mike.

  “Dahlia,” said Daniel from behind me. “Where have you been?”

  I knew it was Daniel because he was back in Australian accent mode. I suppose it could have been Guy Pearce that inexplicably wanted to know my whereabouts. As exhilarating as that thought might have been, let’s be real: It was Daniel.

  “Where have I been? Where have you been?” I said, wheeling around to see him. But he looked tired, and I had to remind myself again that this wasn’t Charice but some other person, who just seemed to complement her in way that I didn’t fully grok. I took it down a notch.

  “Did the police statement wear you out?”

  “It was exhausting,” said Daniel. “I thought it would be interesting, at least. But the experience was terrible. That woman, Weber—she has eyes that look through you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what they do. And you were with them for a while.”

  “I guess I’m not a known quality like you are,” said Daniel. “Anyway, do you want to go out for lunch or something? Everything here is getting time-shifted by a couple of hours, and I really think it would be nice to get some air.”

  This was obviously a fantastic plan; and certainly if I hadn’t a naked man to tend to upstairs, I would have jumped at the opportunity.

  “I’m in,” I told him. “Although, first we’ve got some business we need to take care of upstairs.”

  “What kind of business?” asked Daniel, apparently under the assumption that a murder, a fighting-game tournament, and a mystery client was enough activity for the morning.

  “I don’t want to tell you exactly,” I said. “But it involves wire cutters and deceit.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  I briefed Daniel on the whole Swan situation, who received the information with equal parts of poise and incredulity. Mostly this meant that he seemed very calm and unsurprised by the development, but repeated everything I told him back to me as a question.

  “And he was in his Skivvies and handcuffed to a chair?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you carried him up the stairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still in just Skivvies?”

  “As I said, yes.”

  “Still strapped to the chair?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you did this while I was giving a statement to the police?”

  And so on. But he didn’t bug out his eyes or anything or, for that matter, run screaming. He gave the impression of being a reporter who wanted to get all the improbable details right. And he followed me all the way up to the fifth floor of the Endicott without so much as a raised eyebrow.

  He didn’t even raise an eyebrow when I used Swan’s card key to open the door to find Swan flat on his back, still handcuffed to the chair.

  “Who’s there?” asked Swan. “All I can see is the ceiling.”

  “It’s me again,” I told him. “And I brought that male friend.”

  “Thank God,” Swan said. He was happy to see me, but not happy to see me, if you get my drift. “I fell over.”

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “I was trying to get the handcuffs off,” said Swan. “That’s what happens in the movies. Not the falling over, I mean. The escaping. I ended up just falling over.”

  “This is Daniel,” I told Swan, then whispered to Daniel, “Be bro-y with him. This calls for guy talk.”

  Daniel returned Swan to an upright position, a task he accomplished with an astonishingly small amount of effort.

  “DUDE,” said Daniel, trading in his Aussie accent for some kind of Californian Dell Guy. “What the hell happened to you, bro?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Swan.

  “You meeting some sweet piece of ass on the sly, and she cuff you to this folding chair?”

  “Something like that.” Swan sighed.

  “Bro, we’ve all been there. Me, I’ve had some serious-ass chair-handcuffing problems. It’s all cool. Right, Double D?”

  It took me a moment to realize that I was “Double D.” I really did want to smack Daniel at this point, but I had given him the instructions to be bro-y. I just didn’t mean this bro-y. So I just said:

  “Check yourself.”

  Which did nothing to stop him, or slow him down, and in this way he was Charician again. Which was incredibly irritating and yet also sort of a comfort. I truly wished Charice were here, but maybe palling around with the two of them together wouldn’t be the end of the world.

  “Yeah,” said Swan. “I’m not going to discuss any of this with people who aren’t my friends. Frankly, I’m not sure I want to talk about it with friends.”

  Daniel apparently took this to mean that he should compliment Swan so that he could buddy up to him. However, most of the usual things you would compliment a stranger on were unavailable—clothing, accomplishments, an amusing joke.

  “Cool briefs, dude,” said Daniel, going for the only article of clothing available to him. “What are those, cotton?”

  “I don’t know,” said Swan. “It is made from whatever underwear is made from. Can you guys get me out of these handcuffs?”

  “We’re going to try,” I told him.

  “Daniel, you said you’ve got a Swiss Army knife? You wanna see what you can do?”

  And Daniel went around to Swan’s, again, let
’s say badonkadonk, to see what kind of progress he could make. I was becoming iffy about Daniel bro-ing any info out of Swan, and so I took on the interview for myself.

  “Listen, Swan,” I told him. “I get that this is an embarrassing story you’d rather not remember, but I’m going to have to ask you some really direct questions about how you ended up in that chair.”

  “Why should I talk to you? You’re not the police.”

  “No,” I considered. “But I’m a private detective, and I’m also the woman that saved your sorry ass. And am still saving your ass, unless you’d like us to leave.”

  Swan sighed. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

  I wasn’t sure whether I should tell him about the murder next or wait until the end. Probably for the purposes of interviewing, it was better to wait until everything was over. But it felt sleazy to not mention it to him, and so I led with it.

  “First, I need to tell you why the police were actually around.”

  Swan’s eyes narrowed. He was very interested.

  “There’s no easy way to tell you this,” I said. “But a man was murdered in a storeroom on the same floor as you. I found the body and called the police.”

  Swan looked appropriately shocked, almost even a little pale. This is how normal people react when exposed to a murder.

  “Wow,” he said quietly.

  “You don’t think there’s any chance that whoever cuffed you to that chair”—and I went with gender-neutral language here, because what did I know?—“was also involved with the murder?”

  “It was a girl,” said Swan, noticing my tiptoeing around gender, and apparently being irritated by it. “You can just say ‘girl.’”

  “Hell yeah, it was,” said Daniel, slapping Swan’s ass. Too much, Daniel. Too much.

  “So this girl. Do you think she was involved? Who was she?”

  Swan was getting less and less agreeable the more I interacted with him. Admittedly, he had been having a rough morning, but there was something incredibly resentful and dyspeptic in his storytelling.