The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Page 12

  “What’s your update, Charice?”

  “While you have been uselessly playing Kingdoms of Zoth, I have been out cashing favors.”

  For Charice to say that was ominous. Almost everyone seemed to owe her, somehow, and who knows what strange circumstances would occur from a cached favor?

  “What sort of favors?” I asked her.

  “Photography.”

  Well, it could be worse. I crumpled the plastic bag with my hand, a gesture that I felt more than adequately expressed my desire for Charice to get on with it.

  “As of this moment, I have a rotating squadron of members from the WashU photography club monitoring entrance and egress from Jonah’s apartment.”

  Not exactly what I was expecting, but I continued to let the crumpling do my talking.

  “For Jonah’s funeral on Thursday, I will also have photographers on hand taking photos of all attendees. Am I not Very Helpful?”

  I had to admit, this didn’t seem like a hindrance, which, when dealing with Charice, was often as close to helpful as one would expect to get. But I had to confess that I didn’t fully understand her plan.

  “Do we expect that the person who stole the spear will go to the funeral or Jonah’s apartment?”

  “The killer always returns to the scene of the crime,” Charice told me with more vehemence than I would have expected from her.

  “Who’s talking about a killer? I just want a spear thief.”

  “You’ll find both. Besides which, this information can only help you. You should be thanking me.”

  And she was right. I should have been. That’s the thing with Charice—she’s all hot and cold. One minute you’re sick to death of her, and the next she’s cashing in personal favors in a slightly misbegotten effort to help you out. I hadn’t learned much about the case today, but the interview with Beth had taught me one thing: I wasn’t so bad. And if I had value, there was no reason to be snippy with Charice. It was sort of paradoxical, but now that I wasn’t an unemployed mooch, I could afford to be generous to Charice. Well, not financially generous. But I didn’t have to be so damned bitter all the time.

  “You’re right,” I told her. “It’s cool, and while it’s maybe a long shot, who knows? Maybe it will give us the clue we need to break this case wide open.” The “break this case wide open” was pure schlock, I know, but I’d lived with Charice long enough to know the kinds of things she liked to hear.

  She grinned cheerfully and said, “Fantastic. One last little tidbit—you can’t go to the apartment tonight.”

  “I need to go to the apartment tonight; I need to get on Zoth to look for suspects.” And to pick a funeral site—it was dull relative to the rest of this, but the funeral wasn’t going to plan itself.

  “Nope, sorry. There’s going to be a production of Godspell in our common room.”

  “I’ll just sneak in my room before it starts.”

  “We’ll be using your room for storage.”

  I sighed.

  “I suppose this was one of the favors you had to grant in order to get the photographers?”

  Charice looked visibly surprised by this question, then contorted her face into an obvious visage of guile. “Yes, Dahlia. That’s how it happened.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I followed Charice back to the apartment, taking advantage of her working vehicle. I wanted to get some things if I was going to be out for a while. I also made an impetuous and undoubtedly unwise phone call to Nathan.

  “Hi there, Detective,” he said.

  “So Charice is kicking me out for the evening.”

  “Did you have a fight?”

  “No, there’s a musical theater occurrence that’s taking place here—don’t ask a follow-up question, please.”

  “Done.”

  “I was wondering if perhaps I could come over to your place tonight. I know it’s a little forward, but I actually just need a computer so that I can play Zoth.”

  “I see,” said Nathan, who sounded a little disappointed. Or perhaps it was distracted.

  “I mean, I’d like to see you as well, obviously. But I need to finish interviewing suspects.”

  “No, that’s no problem. I can set you up.”

  “Well, it’s not going to be quite as easy as that. The game takes hours to download, so you’re going to need to start work on that ASAP.”

  And Nathan was back to his usual amiable self. Whatever had troubled him there had been just a momentary blip.

  “I can’t wait,” he said. “I’ll pick you up in a couple of hours.”

  I was entirely too excited by this, and not just because I might be dating someone who had a car. A car! Excited because I was getting a little googly-eyed, which I am known to do. I am moderately ashamed to admit that I spent the next few minutes searching for information about Nathan on the Internet, which is the modern equivalent of repeatedly writing your new name after you marry the boy you like.

  I was not cyberstalking Nathan. The line between checking out someone on the Internet and straight up cyberstalking them sits at the twenty-minute mark. Five, ten minutes of checking them out? Awesome. You’re being a conscientious person and a good date, as you will have excellent conversation starters in hand. Thirty-five, forty-five minutes? You are a psychopath. I realize that’s not a wide berth between the two, but them’s the rules.

  I can state these rules, because I’ve not only drifted into psychopath territory, I planted a small garden there, with perennials and a nice bed of marigolds to keep away bugs. Point in case: Todd Hudsell. Todd was a guy I had met through some board-gaming thing, and we were but a brief possibility—he gave me coffee beans, and I gave him wax. But he was weird, and dressed well, and he really seemed to like me. Things probably would never have worked out—he was way too old for me and actually even had an ex-wife, which I don’t even know how to address. But let’s not kid ourselves, our chances bombed not because Todd was a few years past dream-date age but because I had googled the hell out of him. I practically doxxed the man.

  I was so armed with details about Todd that I could have had our date without him. Probably that would have gone better. We went to this Ethiopian place and he kept telling me things about himself that I had already learned. Todd—cute, well-buttocksed Todd—was boring me to tears. The date was like watching an episode of Game of Thrones right after you read the novel. Fine for somebody, I suppose, but not for me.

  It was my own fault—part of the joy of dating is the slow reveal of information. Like stripping. Just to clarify (hi, Mom!), I’ve never stripped, but were I to strip, I would try to do it in a slow, revealing, and hopefully seductive way. It wouldn’t be Bam! Nakedness! before the waitress had even seated us. And this doesn’t fit in with the stripper metaphor, but in case you do cyberstalk: Never tell the other person information about themselves that they don’t already know. It doesn’t end well. Such as, just for example, that their ex-wife remarried last weekend and apparently neglected to mention it. Ethiopian food just isn’t going to smooth that one over.

  I dredge up Todd for no reason other than to say that I did not want to Todd Nathan. I liked Nathan. I was even willing to admit to Google that I liked Nathan, even though that meant that when I checked in at the Mary Sue later there might be cute pictures of Nathan in the sidebar. Cookies.

  So: I gave Nathan exactly nineteen minutes of Internet searching. I used an egg timer, because as we’ve established, I can get carried away. Not Charice carried away, which I would assume involves some combination of kidnapping and elopement, just Dahlia levels of crazy. This mostly involves going just a bit too far while repeating in an even and convincing tone of voice that it’s not big deal and that Charice would do much worse. This is an important and often neglected aspect of the Bert and Ernie relationship. Bert can, upon occasion, go absolutely apeshit crazy and do whatever he wants because really, what’s Ernie going to say?

  I started with Twitter, where Nathan’s profile was a surpri
singly unflattering photograph. This made me like him more, but he already had an unreasonable head start on that point. And then I burrowed in.

  Twitter is quite a repository of information for the patient. It’s all there if you think about it; nothing ever goes away. Your whole life, right in plain sight.

  I was reading old tweets from Nathan Willing, nineteen whole minutes of them. I wasn’t trying to bore in on Nathan’s personal details so much as checking out for warning signs. Gay, womanizer, crazy, alcoholic. The basic food groups of bad relationships.

  And I did find a warning sign, although it wasn’t one the basics. Sixteen minutes in, I found a picture, posted directly to Twitter, of a JPEG invitation for a party at Nathan’s. What alarmed me wasn’t the theme (Vice Presidents) or the font choice (Curlz MT) but the address: 97 Euclid. It’s a memorable address because ninety-seven was how old my grandpa was when he died and Euclid was the name of his mistress. He claimed nurse, but I think mistress. Euclid didn’t seem to know the first thing about medicine. I mean, yes, she was also in her nineties and perhaps a little senile, but you should still know that a syringe doesn’t go in your mouth. But I digress. The point is: This address, for whatever reasons, had caught in the craw of my memory. And it caught there earlier, when I was looking at the box of clothes that Jonah Long had sent me. This was his address.

  Forget gay, forget womanizer. Forget the ironic hipster–y party choices. I had a brand-new problem with Nathan Willing.

  He lived in the same building as Jonah Long. He was a fucking suspect.

  I went out for a walk. I spent a good quarter mile brooding over what to do with Operation Nathan—like, seriously, was he trying to lure me to his lair now?—when I got a call from Emily Swenson.

  I didn’t immediately answer but just looked at the phone in the sort of slow, creeping horror that Lovecraft likes to write about. I felt certain that this call represented Emily taking back all this misspent money.

  It did not.

  Instead, Emily spoke to me in a cool, almost collegial tone. This shouldn’t have brightened me, but it did—Emily Swenson was like your cool older sister who you wanted to impress.

  “Dahlia,” she said, “if you have a moment, you might want to swing by Jonah’s old apartment. I have something I’d like to share with you.”

  “Oh,” I said, still a little stunned. “What is it?”

  “I believe you might call it a clue.”

  “As it happens,” I said, thinking of Nathan’s pretty little head, “I was heading over there anyway.”

  I can’t say that I visited Jonah’s apartment with completely maximal speed—I could have headed back home and broken out my jalopy. But I decided that the risk of my car breaking down was not worth the advantage of the fifteen minutes’ walking that it would gain me. Plus, if I ran into a shuttle, I could pretend to be a med student and take it down toward the West Campus. These are the kinds of tricks that poverty teaches you.

  Jonah’s place was over on Euclid, in a neighborhood that was half chichi, and half student slums. The place looked modest from the outside, an old brownstone with keyhole windows and a roof that looked like it could use a little attention, but after I buzzed myself in I could see the appeal. It was cool-looking—not swank, exactly, but cool. The lobby had a black-and-white-checked floor, and the furniture seemed like it had been cobbled together from flea markets across the ages.

  The security around here was minimal—when I say I buzzed myself in, I mean just that. I pressed a button at the door, and it buzzed and opened. Chalk one up for the police’s break-in theory.

  Then again, cool and hipster-y though the place might have been, was this really a place I would go trolling around looking for an apartment to rob? Only if I wanted a wicker sculpture of a moose wearing a fedora, and that hardly seemed worth killing for.

  When I arrived at the door, I didn’t even have to knock. Emily Swenson simply opened it as I got near, probably with one of her preternatural skills. It was unfair how some people seem to have preternatural skills, and I couldn’t even scrounge up regular ones. If I had taken too long to get here, though, Emily didn’t register it.

  It took me a second to adjust to the apartment’s smell, which, it had to be noted, was oppressively guy-like. And not guy in a sexy way, but more in the way of spilled beer and mismanaged laundry. The place looked like you would expect it to, bachelor-pad furniture and serious first-apartment vibe. The only thing that might tip you off that this was a rich kid slumming was the artwork, which wasn’t your typical M. C. Escher posters, but actual artwork. I wasn’t so gauche as to check, but I think there may have been a genuine Jacob Lawrence.

  “Dahlia,” Emily said. “I was just expecting you to show up. What do you make of this?”

  “This” was a brown cardboard box that looked like it held IKEA furniture. It was not especially interesting. More interesting was Emily, who had changed clothes since I had seen her last—knitted pink top, lime green coat, white pants—and despite unusual clothing choices, she seemed as intimidating as ever. Let’s face it: She dressed like an ice-cream parlor. A nice ice-cream parlor, one that sold Italian ice, but it was nonetheless unnerving to be in the presence of someone who considered Dolores Umbridge as fashion inspiration.

  “It’s a box?” I said.

  “Open it,” she said.

  As I looked down at the box, it was clear that it had already been opened—it had plastic binding that had been cut—and that someone, presumably Emily, had closed it back up. Why would she do this? She wanted to see my reaction to what was inside? It was just a guess, but the idea made me open the box that much more slowly. When Charice wanted to see your facial reaction when you opened a package, it would be dramatic indeed. Could a corpse fit in there? The box was as tall as a refrigerator but only about a fourth as deep and wide, so probably not, at least not without some folding.

  I pulled open its hinge, and there, only partially obscured by Styrofoam peanuts, was the gaudiest thing I had ever seen. There should be a word for something that is so sublimely gaudy that it somehow manages to end up just sublime. Even seeing only part of it left you in a kind of kitschy awe.

  It was a spear, sure. But the handle was long and gold, and it had ornate carvings that spiraled along its side. There were also wisps of ruby? garnet? red glass? that spiraled along the handle in the opposing direction, although nothing that obviously matched the gem I had found in Kurt’s car. Still, there were about a thousand places a gem could fit on it, and I’d want to spend a little time with it before I’d know for sure. The blade itself was sharp and shining, surrounded by a halo of pink opalescent glass at its midpoint, connected to the handle of the spear by a silver framework. Sharp enough to do the job.

  “How did this get here?” I asked, genuinely dumbfounded.

  “A courier delivered it, to this address. I’d been having an intern check Jonah’s mail, but he thought I should look at this directly.”

  At the risk of coming off as completely callous, I should admit that I hadn’t really deeply considered Jonah’s murder. Not in an emotional sense. But holding the weapon in my hands made me realize: This was real for someone. I’d always thought of the notion of a Zoth player committing the crime as an outside chance, but with a garnet-handled spear in my hand, it seemed like a dim possibility and more like a sort of karma. But sensation faded, thankfully, as soon as I put the weapon down.

  “Is it the spear that killed Jonah? But—”

  “No,” said Emily. “It is a copy of the spear that killed Jonah. Or, more probably, yet another copy of the spear you’re looking for.”

  I don’t know what it was about Emily that made me want to impress her. While it was true that I had spent the past thirteen months in a blurry nightmare of job interviews, I had managed them without being overly concerned with any one person’s impression of me. Perhaps that was why I still hadn’t gotten a job. But here I was—I wanted to awe Emily. She reminded me, inexplicably, o
f my older brother, Alden, shlubby, geeky, effervescent Alden—who, on the face of it, had nothing in common with her. I would try setting the two of them up, if it weren’t for the whole thing about Alden already being attached. And gay.

  But I didn’t want to ask another dumb question. I started to look for the address on the outside of the box, hoping that would give me some kind of clue, but Emily was there with an envelope.

  “This mean anything to you?”

  I opened the envelope, which had a note in it, printed in thirty-six-point Helvetica. “THIS LEVEL LIFE TOO HAS ITS SUMMIT.”

  “Did you already eat the fortune cookie this came in?”

  Emily sighed but didn’t look disappointed. “It didn’t mean anything to me either. For a very brief moment I had wondered if it was some kind of threat.”

  I told her it sounded less like a threat and more like a rejected Fiona Apple album.

  “It was the way it was addressed that made me consider it,” said Emily, showing me the shipping label.

  It was addressed to DISFIGUREMENT.

  “Oh,” I said. “This is not Jonah’s,” I told her. “It’s for Kurt. ‘Disfigurement’ is his name in-game.”

  “The ex-roommate?” And now Emily looked pleased, which was a good feeling.

  “Yes,” I said. “It must have been ordered before he was kicked out. But why would he…” And I dissolved into silence. If mental gears turning made a sound, Jonah’s place would have sounded like a sweatshop. Emily was the first to break it.

  “That’s the boy you met for dinner.”

  One of them, I thought, setting Silas and his lovely eyes aside. I still had that paste gem in my pocket—I had been walking around with it for days, partly for luck, partly because I thought that Charice might steal it. I fished it out of my pocket and held it to the spear.

  “And what do you have with you?”

  “A gemstone,” I said. “I found it in Kurt’s car. Don’t ask.” I would have been feeling much more clever about the whole thing except for the fact that the more I looked at it, the clearer it was that my gem had nothing to do with the spear. Kurt’s gem was penny ante, cheap-looking even from a distance. The spear was probably just made with colored glass, but it had panache, and not a part of it looked cheap.