“Yeah,” I repeated. Which committed to nothing and yet was enough to launch Archie forward.
“And I’m angry that she didn’t tell me. I mean, why not tell me? And I’m embarrassed that I’m angry about it, because I feel like that makes me even more of a dick. I actually googled ‘men’s rights’ last night. That’s fucked up, right?”
“Well,” I said. I was hoping I could just stop there, but Archie seemed unduly focused on me finishing the sentence. Frankly, it did seem a little fucked up, but then the whole situation could be broadly described as jacked. I was trying to find an honest and yet noncommittal answer to further the conversation, and I settled on: “It’s natural that you’d be experiencing a lot of conflicting emotions right now.”
“I just want to do the right thing, but I don’t know what that actually is.”
“It probably doesn’t involve a marriage proposal.”
“Yeah,” said Archie. “I don’t want to marry Vanetta, anyway. I just wanted her to know that I’d take the bullet.”
“Okay,” I said, “if you have this conversation with her, definitely avoid the phrase ‘take the bullet’ to describe your hypothetical wedding.”
Throughout this conversation, Archie had been so emotionally fraught that I had basically forgotten about the pretense of investigating Cahaba for Emily. I had guessed earlier that maybe Archie had written the whistle-blower’s letter on Vanetta’s behalf, and I tried testing those waters.
“Do you want her to keep the baby?” I asked, instantly, belatedly realizing that this was preposterously inappropriate to ask. But Archie wasn’t bothered.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What’s the non-dick answer?”
“Here’s some advice that I will probably never give anyone again, but just this once: Forget about whether you’re being a dick. What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” said Archie, sounding totally lost. “I’m off the map.”
“It’s not rocket science, Archie,” I said.
“I suppose,” he said, thinking, “I just want to keep having lots of sex with different women.”
This answer, if you will, sort of blew me away, because it sounded as though Archie had been headed for some sort of emotional epiphany. The signs were there: searching eyes, contemplative tone, vulnerability. And instead we got this. I could see why he was worried about being a dick.
I tried steering this conversation back toward my investigation, such as it was.
“Are you worried about the baby? I mean, do you think Vanetta is overstressing herself?”
“No,” said Archie. “Why, is that something I should be worried about? Does stress harm unborn children?”
There are women, many of whom were in the knitting circle I attended last night, who could undoubtedly answer this question in a reasonable and marginally informed way. I am emphatically not one of these women.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s see what BuzzFeed has to say about it.”
But then Archie was suddenly resolute.
“I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask Vanetta to work less. I mean, that’s what she loves, and she’s more invested in this game than anyone. I mean, I’m less invested than the rest of the team, and even I don’t want to work less. Asking for her to take it easy is a nonstarter.”
“That’s … a pretty non-dickish answer,” I said. Which was true. And useful too. Archie wasn’t acting. I mean, hell, maybe he had written the whistle-blower’s letter, but he certainly didn’t do it for Vanetta.
“I guess so,” said Archie. “And if she wants to de-stress, I have other ways to help her out with that.”
Ugh.
“Right,” I said. “You two should probably talk. You know, directly, to each other. Not using me as a conduit.”
“No, I’m going to give her some space. But let her know I’d take the bullet for her.”
“I really think you want to find a different euphemism.”
“Maybe,” said Archie. “But this way sounds more honest.”
Our conversation wasn’t terrible, but I think I liked Archie better when he was shirtless and sleeping. Maybe Vanetta and I had this in common. It wasn’t that he was a bad guy, really, it was just that he was not quite what his image conveyed. Then again, maybe no one is. And I had to remind myself that I definitely was not getting him in his best light. Given a week of normal sleep, he was probably a better guy.
I tried to imagine what I would do if Nathan were having my baby somehow, which I grant would involve some kind of weird magic. Suppose he picked up the phone now and said: “Dahlia, I’m pregnant.” Obviously, I would not take the news well, although again, I think the weird magic would be my primary line of inquiry.
Archie dragged his speakers away, and the dog-washing lady yelled at me, which I wasn’t expecting.
“Hey, Upstairs Woman!”
That’s what she called me. Upstairs Woman. I’ve been called much worse. I walked over to her mainly because I didn’t want her yelling Upstairs Woman at me again.
“Yeah?” I said.
“You got a second?” she asked. She was still smoking a cigarette, so she was somehow making it really last or had moved on to cigarette #2. I couldn’t tell you which, but she had a voice that suggested the latter. Actually, her voice suggested that this was cigarette #6 or #7.
“I suppose,” I said, bracing myself for a hard sell about the benefits of professionally done dog washing.
“There’s a woman inside who wants to see you,” she said.
“At Cahaba?” I asked.
Smoking lady, who had on no name tag whatsoever, and whose name remains a mystery, gave me a look that suggested I was an idiot.
“Not upstairs,” she said. Barb said. I’m going to call her Barb, just because it suits her. “At my shop. She’s hiding in the back. Wants to be sub rosa.”
Well, Barb knew a little Latin. The benefits of a liberal arts education.
“There’s a woman waiting for me in your shop?” I repeated dumbly. I guess the airhead act takes a little while to wear off.
“That’s what I said. You got a weird organization upstairs; you realize that, right?” Although Barb seemed to feel that this was admirable, based upon her facial expression, which I would describe as “shooting off waves of warm light,” although I might be thinking of the cigarette smoke.
“It’s a kick,” I said, which it was.
I went into the dog-grooming shop, which smelled remarkably like a dog-grooming shop. I suppose I sort of expected that there would be an effort to cover up the scents of shampoo and wet dog with patchouli or something, but no: it was eau de dog-grooming shop in full effect.
“Hello?” I said. Barb hadn’t even come in with me and just stayed out here smoking.
“Dahlia, it’s me. I’m in the back.”
It was a relief to hear Cynthia Shaffer’s voice. It could have hypothetically been Emily Swenson, which would have been unlikely but also a terrible portent. If Emily Swenson is waiting for you “sub rosa” in a dog-grooming shop, she probably has come to have you erased. So hooray, it was Cynthia.
“Hang on, I’m coming back there,” I said, marveling at the strange directions this case seemed to be taking me. The dog smell only got stronger, which was curious because there were two, completely tiny Pomeranians back here, only one of which was even wet. But it had the smell of a much larger dog.
Cynthia was leaning against the wall, quite far away from the dogs, and there was a black woman with dreads that she had tied up in a bun in the middle of the room. That’s two for two for buns at the dog shop.
“I can’t believe they let you back here,” I said.
“Oh, I’m a regular here,” said Cynthia. “And I’m old pals with Deb.”
Deb. Barb was agonizingly close.
“Anyway,” Cynthia continued, “I wasn’t planning on coming in here, but as soon as I got out of the car, Archie was out setting up sound kind of sound system.”
“He proposed,” I said. “To the hip tune of ‘The Lady in Red.’”
“Yes,” said Cynthia. “I was peering through a curtain.”
“We were all peering through the curtain,” said the woman washing the dog, who, unlike Deb, was wearing her name tag. It read: “Drea.”
“I felt like a spy,” said Cynthia. “A very terrible spy.”
“Terrible like inefficient, or terrible like you’ve ruined people’s lives.”
“Both,” said Cynthia.
“I guess you came back for your things?”
“Yeah,” said Cynthia. “You think maybe you could just go upstairs and grab them for me?”
I considered this. Hypothetically yes, although it would look a little weird to throw all of Cynthia’s things in a garbage bag and then scamper downstairs. If anyone were paying attention at all, I would come off as the secretarial version of the Hamburglar.
“You’re sure you don’t want to just go up there with me?”
“I’m absolutely sure,” said Cynthia. “I didn’t want to go back there when I had just been fired. Now that my sister was killed there, it’s just absolutely somewhere I don’t want to be.”
Right. Murdered sister. I could see where that might be uncomfortable. I didn’t naturally consider it, because I am a terrible empath, but now that it had been pointed out to me, it seemed like a normal human reaction.
“I’m so sorry about your sister,” I said. Because this was a thing you said, and I was sorry, at least in the very superficial sense of having never met her.
“It’s such a shock,” said Cynthia. “It’s so funny, because she’d been having all these problems with her pancreas, and I had been bracing myself for that. And then this happened. Murdered. She was murdered.”
Here’s a question that’s fun to ask anyone: “Do you think that maybe the murderer meant to kill you?” Like, honestly, try in your head to find a way to pose that question now without coming off like a psychopath. If you’ve got anything, you’ve lapped me, because I went into a holding pattern.
“Why was she there, anyway?”
“It’s my fault,” said Cynthia. “It’s all my fault. It’s the same reason I’m hiding downstairs here. I didn’t want to have to deal with everyone. It’s humiliating having been fired. I was so flustered when I walked out of there that I left almost everything behind. I didn’t want to make the walk of shame back there.”
My guess had been right.
“So you asked your sister. Did she know anyone at Cahaba?”
“Not at all!” said Cynthia, on the verge of crying. “It’s so bizarre. We weren’t even that close. It was just weird chance that she called me when I was looking for someone to go pick up my stuff, and Joyce lives in the neighborhood.”
“Did you ask her to come at night?” I asked.
“No,” said Cynthia thoughtfully. “Although come to think of it, she asked me when it would be the quietest. I told her that people were always there, but around dawn most everyone was asleep. Did she come at night?”
“We think so,” I told her, although I don’t know who the “we” were in the situation. The police weren’t informing me of their thinking. “You don’t think anyone would have wanted Joyce dead, do you?”
“No,” said Cynthia. “I can’t imagine why they would. Maybe they were trying to kill me.”
“I guess that’s another good reason not to go upstairs,” I said. I meant this as a joke to lighten the mood, but Cynthia took me quite seriously.
“Exactly,” she said.
“Wait,” said Drea, stepping away from the Pomeranians, “it was your sister that got killed upstairs?”
“My older sister,” said Cynthia. “And I think they maybe meant to kill me.”
God bless Drea, because she actually asked the question I wanted to know the answer to. “Who would want you dead?” Although she posed it in a perhaps overly skeptical way, more “Who would want YOU dead?” But even so, it was a fair sentiment.
“Who knows?” said Cynthia. “That place is a smoldering hellhole.”
“Did you send the whistle-blower’s letter?”
“What whistle-blower’s letter?”
“On Reddit?”
“What’s Reddit?”
“There was a whistle-blower. Online. Someone posted about it and exposed a lot of DE’s wrongdoings.”
“No,” said Cynthia. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Well, you told everyone at your knitting circle.”
“That’s what knitting circles are for. It’s like therapy, but you end up with a pot holder at the end.”
“I’m guess I’m saying it wouldn’t be out of character for you to have posted about it.”
Cynthia was getting annoyed with me.
“Maybe it’s not out of character, but you asked me if I did it, and I told you I didn’t.”
I don’t know why I was pushing her so hard on that point. I suppose I just hadn’t gotten anywhere with the whistle-blower’s letter, and it was the one thing that Emily had consistently been pushing me to investigate. I wasn’t any closer now than when I began.
“All right,” I said. “Forget I brought it up. I’m just trying to imagine a reason someone might want you dead. You didn’t run across any terrible secrets up there. No one embezzling, or…” I felt I should say something else, but I wasn’t sure what my other options were. Embezzling is the only illegal thing I could think to do at a company, which means that although I might be okay as a detective, as a corporate criminal I would be pretty lousy. Or at least unimaginative. “Nothing? No smoking gun.”
“I’m pretty sure that the acupuncturist that Lawrence claims to go to every Wednesday is actually a personal trainer.”
“How is that a smoking gun?”
“I didn’t say it was. But he does lie about it.”
“Why?”
“Knowing Lawrence, he probably just thinks it sounds cooler to have an acupuncturist.”
This was not anywhere close to a smoking gun. It was not smoking; it was absorbing smoke from the air and cleansing it, like a high-end dehumidifier.
“Any other dirt?”
“Quintrell goes into the bathroom to cry sometimes. We call it the Crying Room.”
“Also not that damning. Or even really surprising.”
“Tyler looks at pornography on his iPhone.”
“I’m not exactly bowled over. Although: How did you figure that out?”
“He left out his phone one day, and I started going through it.”
“Anything weird?” I asked. By this, I meant dark or terrible, something that could plausibly be a motive for murder, but Cynthia simply said: “Foot stuff.”
And I felt very badly in the moment, because I now had a mental image of Tyler that I emphatically Did Not Want, and also, this was really none of my business anyway.
“So your theory is that Tyler tried poisoning your sister to keep his iPhone foot fetish a secret? That’s it?”
“No,” said Cynthia. “I don’t even have a theory. I just want my stuff from upstairs back. Especially my collection of holiday teas.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Let’s take a moment, shall we, to consider who might have written the whistle-blower’s letter, which I put here to show that I am, in fact, investigating and not merely putting out fires. This was one of the proverbial diamonds that Emily was after, and even if I didn’t have an answer, I still wanted to be able to show my work.
So, if you’re reading, Emily:
Cynthia—Knew everything; had reason to be grumpy after having been let go. CONS: Says she didn’t do it. Seems like she didn’t do it. Probably didn’t do it.
Cynthia’s Spouse—Dead.
Cynthia’s Sister—Also dead, and didn’t communicate much with Cynthia. Although—maybe?
Quintrell King—Seems too wishy-washy and weirdly loyal. Why whistle-blow on a company you continue to work for so slavishly?
Gloria the El
ectrical Engineer of Booty—Implausible, possibly not even a real person.
Gary—Could be. People who broke into song that much were probably dangerous. Look at Sweeney Todd.
Gary’s wife, whom he called “Honey Badger”—Ditto.
Tyler—Enormously single, save for the recent developments with Masako. Probably too shrewd to mess with DE in this way. Still a possibility.
Archie—Says he didn’t do it; seems like he wouldn’t although, as his Office Depot banner would attest, is capable of big, ill-thought-through gestures.
Archie’s ladyfriends—Possibly?
Vanetta—Unlikely? But not impossible. Maybe it was all a weird, black-market way of advocating for her employees? Investigate.
Lawrence—Fat chance.
Admittedly that’s not much, but still—there were leads, of a kind. When you’re investigating, you shouldn’t let dead ends get you down, because even though they’re depressing, they gradually lead you to the truth, just by cutting off possibilities.
When I got back upstairs, I could see that Vanetta was watching my desk, waiting for me. She was pretending not to be concerned, although not very effectively. I liked having this piece of information as well—Vanetta, for all her many skills and virtues, was not a good actor.
“Oh, you’re back,” she said when I came to the door, actually feigning surprise at me.
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry I was gone for so long.”
“How did he take it?”
“He seemed relieved, honestly.”
“Relieved?” said Vanetta, who did not sound relieved herself but put out. “He sounded relieved?”
“A bit, yes. I think he was just trying to do the right thing. Or at least, show you that he was willing to do the right thing, if you think that the right thing is getting married.”
“What did he tell you?” said Vanetta suspiciously.
“He mentioned the pregnancy to me,” I said, making Vanetta suddenly look less rested again. “Although frankly, I already knew about that.”
“What? How?”
“Cynthia told me about it.”
The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss Page 13