Strange, but productive. Although, I still felt sad and weird about Charice. She was engaged. Or was about to be engaged. This was a piece of news that I knew I would acclimate to, but I just needed some time. Maybe it was a blessing that I had figured it out ahead of being told, because now I would have time to practice being happy. I imagined Charice telling me, and I tried smiling. I didn’t have a mirror handy, but I felt pretty sure that my smile looked like something that Heath Ledger would have created with a knife.
I still had time.
Focus on Doctor XXX. He maybe wanted to kill you, and that felt like more comfortable waters than engaged Charice, typed Dahlia, in the weirdest fucking sentence ever. And I had never even been to a wedding before. What do you wear? No, wait, Doctor XXX. He was shady, right? And I essentially knew nothing about him. He may or may not be wearing a green hat; he may or may not be alive. He may or may not have ever existed. He may or may not be engaged, like Charice.
No, stay on track, Dahlia. Intel. Find now.
All I really had for the good doctor was Twitch. So, let’s expand on that. I’d streamed some, but I’d never really gotten deeply under the hood with Twitch. I wasn’t exactly sure how it worked with commenters—I knew I could search for streamers, and “follow” them so that Twitch would let me know whenever they came online, but I wasn’t sure if the same was true for the commentariat. I would love if Twitch sent me a message letting me know if Doctor XXX showed up online. In any channel. I’d even watch a little FIFA ’16 if it meant a conversation with this clown.
So I prowled about on my laptop and discovered that sadly, no, this was not how it worked. No alerts, unless he streamed, which seemed unlikely. I followed him, just in case. But it wasn’t a total wash; there was a hubpage for our doctor, and I could see who else he was following. Which was, interestingly, only two people: myself and someone named LadyBlazer.
It made sense that he was following me, since he was able to mysteriously appear whenever I came online. He was getting a notification every time I streamed. But who was LadyBlazer?
I started streaming again.
“Hey, Twitch chat,” I said. “I’m still in the tournament!”
Go fuck yourself, said Twitch chat. Has no one killed you yet?
“Not yet, but there’s still time. Listen, I’m still trying to find information on Doctor XXX.”
He’s just not that into you, said Twitch chat.
“Well, he’s a little into me, because he led me into a room with a corpse in it. He’s potentially sending me into death traps. You have to be a little into someone to arrange a death trap.” This was undoubtedly an unwise thing to say to Twitch chat, or perhaps to anyone, but they took it with their usual nonchalance.
Girl, said Twitch chat. We don’t know where he is. Ain’t nobody got time for that. This is the Internet, we got porn to look at. Hashtag #alttab.
Seriously, I don’t know why I keep giving the Twitch chat people a gay BFF vibe. They are seriously not like that at all.
“I don’t want to cut into your porn time, but I am just the teensiest bit concerned that maybe someone is trying to kill me.”
Back on that again, said Twitch chat.
I was suddenly more empathetic to Chul-Moo and his drug-induced paranoia. It’s not fun sounding paranoid. Although, I didn’t really think that Doctor XXX was trying to kill me, honestly, because I’m probably not that hard to kill. I just think that he was up to something nebulous that I couldn’t figure out. I would have said that, but I actually think it makes me sound more paranoid than the murder. Funny how that works.
“No one has seen him? At all?”
No, said Twitch chat. How many times do we have to tell you no?
“How about this: Does anyone know who LadyBlazer is?”
She’s at the tournament, said Twitch chat. She’s playing with Mike. CREEPY CREEPY CREEPY.
Daniel BAMF’d back in front of me. Okay, he probably wasn’t involved in the murder, but he would have made a great assassin. Ninja skills, this man has. Hollywood, if you need a fake Aussie ninja, here’s your man. If you need a real Aussie ninja, perhaps Geoffrey Rush? I realize that he’s probably too old to play a ninja, but now that I’ve typed it, I really want to see a movie where it happens. But I digress.
I was obviously not in the mood to see Daniel at this point. Engaged Daniel. Fiancé Daniel. Yeesh. I tried my smile at him, which apparently Heath Ledger had hacked up further in the intervening time. Maybe it was getting to Two-Face at this point. But I logged off and dealt with him anyway.
“What happened to your face?” asked Daniel.
“I’m smiling,” I said. “Because I’m so happy.”
“That’s not a smile,” he said, hitting a perfect Paul Hogan. He then beamed with the glorious grin of someone who was walking into the matrimonial future. It was a smile with the force of a Thousand Splendid Suns. I haven’t actually read that book, so I apologize if that reference is inappropriate. But that’s what it felt like.
“That’s a smile,” he said, not willing to let the joke go by. And it was a smile.
“What are you so happy about?” I asked.
“Secret things,” said Daniel.
Secret fiancée things. Ugh. Forget Doctor XXX. This was the mystery I wanted solved.
“Hey, I love secret things,” I said. “You can tell me.”
“I could tell you,” said Daniel. “But then it wouldn’t be a secret.”
Literally, happiness was shooting off Daniel in waves. Like, you couldn’t look directly at him. The happy was too strong. It was going to knock you over.
“Is it related to Charice?” I asked.
“Can’t say,” said Daniel. The waves of happy were crashing into me, like tides of joy against grim rocks. Yikes was Daniel happy.
“I could figure it out,” I told him, which was probably true.
“I suppose you could, but I would think that you’d be more interested in the murder and the guy who tried to lure you to a murder.”
“You might think that.”
“Well,” considered Daniel, “it was a little strange.”
“Strange like meeting a weird-looking guy in a men’s restroom strange?” I asked. “Or strange in a different way?”
“You have been using your detective powers,” said Daniel, with the exact sort of gladness that Charice would have responded to the situation with. “Anyway, you shouldn’t bother with that. You’ll find out soon enough anyway.” And then he winked at me. Not even a real wink, but a Lucille Bluth stage wink.
“Why did bathroom guy think that you have a fiancée?”
Daniel seemed unruffled by the idea that I might have been spying on him, but consider: he was in love with Charice, who was basically impropriety on legs. Apparently he decided the best way to deflect my question was with another one about my case.
“Do you think that the guy wanted you to find Karou’s corpse? Or was Karou hoping to meet you alive?”
This was, of course, an excellent question. I still wasn’t even sure Karou was what we were supposed to find. Maybe I was supposed to find naked Swan. Or, hell, maybe I was just supposed to wander into a closet for laughs. This seemed unlikely, but I’d been shot at before by a woman in a tree costume, so “unlikely” felt like it belonged on the table. Hell, sometimes there was so much “unlikely” on the table that it spilled onto the floor and got mixed up with “the merely improbable.” I really should keep cleaner tables.
“I don’t have a clue,” I told him. And this was true.
“Well, pull yourself together,” said Daniel, “because we’ve got one more round to go.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Our last match of the day was—and forgive me if you could see this coming—also canceled. Statistically, this was really unlikely—we were the only pairing who didn’t play a single match following the murder. Everyone else—even with the quasi collapse of the tournament—played at least two or three rounds more than us
.
I knew this because the redhead who was manning the tournament table appeared ready to explode.
“I cannot believe your opponents are not here,” he said.
“We’re just lucky, I guess,” said Daniel, still oozing happiness out of his pores. “Everyone’s lucky sometimes.”
“They were here earlier,” said the redhead, who was not oozing happiness so much as shooting daggers.
“I’m happy to wait for them,” I told him.
Daniel, apparently insane from the thin air he’s getting up there in his Clouds of Love, was perfectly delighted to advance to day two. I was frankly ready to bail. Day two of this thing would have an audience. There would be crowds. Our games would be projected on a giant screen. I could barely play this game at all, and if it weren’t for the excellent tutorial in Skullgirls, I would have had my ass handed to me by a kindergartner.
“If they’re not here,” said Daniel, “it’s not our problem.”
Mike3000 and Imogen—aka LadyBlazer—crept up behind us. “Don’t tell me that you’re advancing again without playing a match,” said Mike.
“How’d you hear that?” I asked.
“Everyone’s talking about it,” said Imogen. “People are calling you the Cinderella Couple.”
“They’re saying what?” I asked.
“The Cinderella Couple. You know, like you’re enchanted. How are you doing it?” asked Imogen. “You bribing them or something?”
This idea that I have enough money to bribe people to take a dive in a tournament is so innately laughable that I actually pig-snorted at Imogen. Although I maybe should have been concerned, in retrospect, that this was the prevailing wisdom.
“I’m not bribing anybody.”
“And they will have opponents,” said the redhead. “They were here earlier. And I’m sure they’ll show up any second.”
“Hey, Imogen,” I said. “You know a guy on Twitch called Doctor XXX?”
“Nope,” said Imogen, without even thinking about the question. Which I thought was odd, because if you posed a question like that to me, I’d at least take a moment to think about it. But Imogen didn’t even pause.
“He follows you on Twitch,” I explained.
“Yeah? So do about twenty thousand other people.”
“That’s a lot of people,” I said.
Imogen shrugged.
“He’s never messaged you and asked you to go meet him in a storeroom?”
Imogen answered this question with a look. She said nothing at all, but her glance answered the question more effectively than paragraphs of denial ever could.
“No weird messages at all? Nothing?”
More looking. Daniel was also unconcerned about the indirect accusation of bribery because he unhelpfully mused aloud:
“I hope our opponents weren’t murdered.”
“Yes,” I said. “That would be a sticky wicket.”
Anyway, most of this conversation I was just looking at Imogen trying to work out a reasonable way that I could smell her and see if she, by any chance, smelled like the fougère that stunk up Swan’s room. I was never going to come up with a great opening, so I just embraced a lousy one.
“What’s that smell?” I said, invading Imogen’s personal space in a terrible and almost Charician way. “You smell wonderful! What is that?”
Imogen was not prepared for this—either the invasion, or the compliment.
“Uh, what? The hotel shampoo, I guess? I forgot to bring anything.”
Imogen smelled like nothing. By which I mean, actually, nothing. Not perfume, not shampoo, not sweat. Maybe she was a cyborg. Even so, I pushed.
“It’s this wonderful fougère—what is that scent? It’s familiar to me, but I can’t place it. I’m such a perfume nerd.” This was bullshit, but you can’t blame a gal for trying.
Imogen looked a bit stunned. “Oh!” she said. “Could it be the Lion’s Cupboard?”
“That might be it,” I said. “Is that what you’re wearing?”
“It was my boyfriend’s cologne—my ex—but I would wear it now and then back when we dated because—well, never mind why because. I wonder if some of it got in these clothes?”
But she looked very uncertain.
“It’s a great scent,” I told her, hoping that this compliment would redirect her from wondering how the scent could have stayed with her all this time. It must have, because she got out her phone and started fiddling with it. Hopefully she wasn’t googling “cologne half-life.”
Meanwhile, Mike, who had zero interest in this perfume discussion, politely interjected:
“Who were you supposed to play?”
“Jason ‘Trenchet’ Saltz and Jonathan ‘SoggyToast’ North,” answered the redhead.
“Yeah,” said Mike. “They were here.”
“Bribed, probably,” said Imogen, apparently off the topic of the Lion’s Cupboard. I didn’t really appreciate the jab, although I could see she was just playing with me now. Imogen wasn’t creepy really, not at all, but she did have the catlike quality of being someone who played with her food before she ate it. And as far as she was concerned in this tournament, Daniel and me were food.
Then Imogen pulled me aside. I had kind of imagined she was going to give me more perfume intel, but she had something else on her mind, and she spoke in a hushed tone.
“Hey, I just checked my Twitch account to see if that Doctor XXX of yours ever tried sending me a private message—and uh, yeah, he has.”
“Did he ask to meet you in a hotel storeroom?” I asked her, maybe a little too quickly.
“No,” she said. “That’s crazy. No, these are just death threats.”
I had never heard anyone toss off the phrase “just death threats” with such natural nonchalance. Death threats seem like the sort of thing that ought to concern you.
“He sent you death threats? How did you not know about this earlier?”
“Well,” said Imogen, “I have a filter that blocks most of that stuff, and I don’t read messages on Twitch, because why? If anyone worthwhile wants to talk to me, they’ll use email.” She stopped to consider. “And they’re not death threats exactly. It’s more ‘you should have been a blow job and not a baby.’ That sort of thing.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. I looked at Imogen, who remained completely composed through this conversation, maybe even a little bored. “How are you so calm about this?”
“It just comes with the territory. If you want to make it in this scene, you have to be thick-skinned. And you never read the comments.”
It was weird making small talk after that, but we managed it. Imogen actually did have more to say about perfume and cologne, and I instantly regretted my little white lie about being a perfume nerd, because she certainly had the knowledge to call me out, going on about top notes of bergamot and gourmands and other words that I didn’t even know.
By the time the redhead came up to us, I was immensely grateful.
“Well,” he said. “I guess I have no choice but to let you move on to day two.”
“This really is my lucky day,” said Daniel.
Daniel and I headed back to our apartment, Daniel driving through a surprising amount of traffic for that hour in St. Louis, which usually tends to clear out pretty well at night. I suppose I couldn’t say at that point that I was completely uncomfortable around Daniel, because I could ride with him in silence without the need to make dumb small talk. Which is the mark of friendship for me. I guess I did like the guy, even if I had at least somewhat contemplated him being a killer.
But the silence was good.
There was plenty to think about, and not being at the Endicott Hotel gave me breathing time to actually think about and consider it. I watched the city pass—there’s also something deeply disorienting about riding in a car when you’re used to walking and public transit—and tried to categorize my thinking on the day.
We arrived at my apartment to yet another mystery, which
was that Charice was not there. As mysteries go, this wasn’t the Piltdown Man, but it was curious. If it had been someone else, we probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but when Charice is up to something, it’s generally wise to be on the lookout.
“Wasn’t Charice supposed to be here?” I asked Daniel, who was familiar enough with her to be wary.
“Yes,” he said. “She promised me penne.”
Maybe we were friends, Daniel and I, because we shared a look. It was the look right before someone opens a door in a horror movie. Charice was into tomfoolery, and we were the self-aware ingenues that were destined to face down her Jason in the woods.
Daniel, self-starting fellow that he is, took to making his own pasta. And I logged on to Twitch again, because I am a glutton for punishment.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Charice entered the room, and we were shocked. Which was saying something because we expected to be shocked.
Charice was dressed as Balrog. In case you aren’t familiar with who that it is, allow me to briefly sketch it out for you by listing several things that Balrog is (and that Charice isn’t).
Male
Black
Huge
A professional boxer
Evil
I could go on, but if those things don’t concern you, there’s no point in dwelling on the niggling bits. Certainly Charice didn’t.
She did notice that we were looking at her, mouths agog, however, and she asked:
“How’s my look? Too much?”
Daniel did not immediately answer, and I decided to follow suit. Besides which, it wasn’t the right question. The issue wasn’t whether the look was too much, so much as it was wrong. It’s like stabbing someone in the head with an awl, and then asking if the hole was too big. The size of the hole is not the point. It is the placement.
Daniel made an observation.
“Balrog is black,” he said.
“Yes,” said Charice. “I decided not to wear any face paint because it would be culturally inappropriate. Why, do you think I could get away with it?”
The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss Page 12