The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss Page 3

  “Eh. I’ll finish typing up that report,” said Nathan agreeably. Easy come, easy go, Nathan. Or maybe that was the croupier’s jacket talking. As Nathan took off, I could see two of the cubicles behind him. The girl’s station was neat and orderly, lined with philosophy books and bedecked with a bonsai tree. The station next to hers must have been Jonah’s, because it was messy and extravagant and had a poster-sized picture of Jonah shaking hands with the governor of Missouri. The blonde waited until Nathan was out of sight behind a wooden cubicle wall and we heard the rhythmic patter of a remarkably good typist.

  “Do you have a message for Jonah?” she asked in a hushed tone of voice that suggested we were now under a cone of silence. The stubborn part of me wanted to answer in a yell, but it really wasn’t worth the effort.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Do you know him?”

  “Obviously. I’m Jennifer Ebel,” she said. Then, seeing that this declaration brought no reaction, she continued. “I’m in his graduate program. Now, what’s this about you not being Jonah’s concubine?”

  I noticed Jennifer’s earrings now, and I don’t know how they escaped my attention earlier. She was wearing a plain black shirt and pants and had a rather severe haircut, all of which contributed to her “serious student” vibe. But she had on what might have been the silliest pair of earrings I’d ever witnessed. They were Day-Glo pink, asymmetrical—with a large circle and square on one ear, and a jangling triangle on the other. I tried to put them out of my mind, but they kept pulling my attention, like some sort of terrible pink stereogram.

  “These clothes,” I said. “I don’t want Jonah buying me clothes.”

  “Are you Jonah’s girlfriend?” asked Jennifer condescendingly. “Is this a lovers’ quarrel? Because I don’t think it’s appropriate to bring it to work.”

  She oozed brisk, judgmental efficiency, this Jennifer. I suppose she thought I was some sweet thing of Jonah’s who would wilt under the force of her gaze.

  “No,” I said, leaving the cone of silence. “I’m not Jonah’s girlfriend. I’m a private detective he hired. I agree with you that it’s inappropriate for me to be here, but that’s what happens when you buy your detective clothes. I’m not a dress-up doll, Jennifer. And besides which, these clothes are ridiculous. Look at me! I look like a goddamned Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” I was going to add, “as imagined by someone who was color-blind,” but as far as I knew, Jonah was color-blind, and I don’t like picking at people’s infirmities. I told you I wasn’t good at anger.

  Jennifer was not impressed.

  “Jonah bought you those?” she asked, sounding not exactly jealous. Maybe curious. “They’re not so bad. I think they’re sort of interesting.”

  The enormous pink triangle on her left ear wobbled distractingly, reminding me that praise on an outfit from a woman wearing Day-Glo pink earrings should be taken with a grain of salt.

  “Yeah, well, you can tell Jonah that I’m not going to meet Kurt wearing them.”

  Jennifer’s face registered a sudden look of concern.

  “You’re not investigating Kurt? Kurt Campbell?”

  “Investigating” would be a very loose term for my meeting with Kurt Campbell. Mostly I would be reading a prepared speech at him. But I didn’t want to wade into the details.

  “Can you tell me anything about Kurt? I haven’t been told much, aside from he’s quote unquote very charming.”

  Jennifer openly laughed at this—a quick, sharp snort of a laugh that was the kind of thing that could get wine up your nose at dinner parties.

  “Who told you that?”

  Jonah had told me that, but I didn’t feel like telling this to Jennifer.

  “It’s the word on the street,” I told her, improbably keeping a straight face as I got this whopper out.

  “He’s not charming. He’s like a brain-damaged panda in human form.”

  It was my turn to scowl at her.

  “Have fun,” said Jennifer, shuffling me out of the office and closing the door. “I’ll be sure to give Jonah your message: ‘Not a whore, no clothes.’ Thanks for coming by.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I had a lot of reservations about meeting Kurt at this point, but I had taken the money, and so there was no backing out now.

  The “ambush” could not have gone worse. Everything about it was wrong. For starters, I was meeting him in a windmill. Technically, a restaurant shaped like a windmill, but a freaking windmill nonetheless, with giant arms that swung around in the breeze. I was feeling a bit silly about the whole thing and had hoped that the Bevo Mill would be a seedy bar, with a grizzled-looking barkeep who would say something like, “What can I get for you, angel?,” which would help put me into the proper spirit of things. But no, it looked like the sort of place that would inspire a Koji Kondo score. The parking lot would have been well suited for a chicken-collecting mini-game. It did not steel the spirit is what I am saying.

  I told the server that I was there for the Long party, and he guided me to a secluded table where a dapper, brown-haired twentysomething was nervously fidgeting with a menu. Maybe the whole thing was a farce, but it was a farce I had signed up for, and I jumped in with all the gusto I had.

  I thundered onto the scene, yanked the wooden chair out from the table, and straddled it as I sat down.

  “Okay, pal. I’m not the person you were expecting,” I told him.

  “No,” said Kurt. He was a plain-looking guy, but he had these great Neil Gaiman eyes that looked enraptured by my arrival.

  “I was sent here by Jonah Long. I’m a private detective.”

  Kurt’s eyes widened. A-plus eyes on this guy. B-minus face, but ace eyes.

  “I’m not going to pussyfoot around this, Kurt,” I said, feeling that “pussyfoot” was the sort of word that a private detective would use. “I know that you stole the spear from Jonah shortly after he kicked you out of his apartment. That’s a given. It’s where we’re starting from, you understand me? I’m not going to bother with your ‘Oh, I’m innocent!’ speech. I know you did it. The question before us is, what are we going to do about it?”

  I looked at Kurt, who was, indeed, thoroughly disarmed. He just gaped at me, openmouthed. Maybe Jonah was right—maybe this was going to be just as easy as he had suggested. Then Kurt asked me:

  “Are you sure you’re at the right table?”

  I had run through this conversation in my head many times on the way here. There were several responses that Kurt could have made that I had crackerjack answers to. But the question “Are you at the right table?” had never come up.

  “Am I?” I asked this person, whom I now hoped was Kurt.

  “I don’t think you are. You called me Kurt.”

  “Isn’t your name Kurt?”

  “No,” said not-Kurt. “My name is Silas.”

  “Did Kurt send you?” I asked hopefully.

  “I don’t know anyone named Kurt,” said Silas. “So I would say no.” Then Silas had a question of his own.

  “Do I look like Kurt? Or is it that you do not know what he looks like?”

  Well, no, Silas. I didn’t know what he looked like, because his Facebook icon was a picture of him taken from a great distance away, so my notion of his face was somewhat pixelated. I had a very vague description, which, when you get down to it, could have been a lot of people.

  I apologized profusely to Silas, who was delighted and tried to give me his phone number. This is what men want, apparently. Chair-straddling women who threaten them. I took the phone number to be polite, but I don’t plan to see Silas’s lovely eyes again unless I am in the seventh circle of hell.

  I returned to the server and explained that I was from the Long party, and after much futzing we determined that there was no such party. I asked if anyone named Kurt Campbell was there and I was directed to another table, mercifully out of sight from Silas.

  This Kurt did reasonably resemble the other one. Close-cropped brown hair but a rounder face, altho
ugh his eyes did nothing for me.

  Literally, they did nothing. They didn’t even look up when I sat down.

  I didn’t have quite the swagger for this Kurt that I’d had for his predecessor. I plopped down across from him, feeling defeated, and said, “I’m Dahlia Moss.”

  Kurt was texting. He had a cell phone in his lap and was texting. Whatever this missive was, he also found it terribly funny, because he was giggling to himself as he made it. I did not immediately realize that it was a cell phone in his lap, since it was out of sight, and I spent the first few seconds of the conversation with the assumption that he was fiddling with his crotch somehow.

  “I am Dahlia Moss,” I repeated, trying to revive my dignity whilst simultaneously believing that I was being ignored by a boy who was readjusting his junk.

  “Just one second,” said Kurt. And it was at this point that I realized cell phone, because no junk could possibly require this level of repositioning. Also there were buzzing noises.

  I looked at Kurt. He didn’t look like a brain-damaged panda to me, but neither could it be said that he gave the impression of being an Adonis. Or even one of those young people my parents characterize as a “mover and shaker.” He was not fresh-faced and up-and-coming. He was plain-faced, and if he had to be assigned a direction, it would be gently sloping downward.

  Kurt laughed at whatever hilarious response had come back to him and placed his phone on the table, where he continued to look at it in happy anticipation, glancing only occasionally at me.

  “Who are you again?” he asked.

  “Dahlia Moss. I am a private detective.”

  This line had had such great effect on the other folks I’d interacted with—Charice, Jennifer, my old friend Silas—yet it did zilch here. So blank, so distant was Kurt’s response that I repeated the line to make sure he heard it.

  “How interesting,” mumbled Kurt, and he looked at his phone, which had vibrated again. He glanced up at me with a look that seemed to say that he knew it was bad form to be paying more attention to his phone than me, but what are you going to do? The nonverbal apology dealt with, he picked up his phone, read the text, and dissolved into sibilant sniggering.

  “Who are you texting with?”

  “A girl,” said Kurt with a pleased intonation on the word.

  “Can you look at me, please? I have business with you.”

  Kurt put down the phone and looked at me, giving me the sort of expression an eighth-grader might make when you confiscate their DS. “Who are you again? Dahlia something?”

  “Moss. I’m a detective.”

  “Yes,” said Kurt, who already seemed to be thinking of something else. “You keep saying. Should we order now or wait for Jonah?”

  “Jonah’s not coming,” I told him, and I could now see where Jennifer was coming from with her panda description. “He hired me to come here for him.”

  “Then let’s order now.”

  Kurt opened his menu and was visibly smacking his lips as he thumbed through it. I had the impression that he already wasn’t listening to me again, but I was going to keep this conversation on track. “I am here to recover the spear,” I announced.

  “What page is that on?” asked Kurt, turning through the menu.

  “The Spear of Infinite Piercing. It’s an item in the Kingdoms of Zoth.”

  He brightened up at this. “Oh, the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing, you mean?”

  I felt that this was a breakthrough, and that it should logically lead to further conversation. If this were an adventure game, I should have unlocked colorful new options for conversations with Kurt. But it was not an adventure game; it was life—shitty, shitty life. Kurt went back to his menu.

  “I’m here to recover it.”

  “At the Bevo Mill?”

  “From the person who stole it.”

  “Did someone steal it?” asked Kurt. “When did that happen?”

  Actually, I did not know when that happened. Jonah had been very loose with his chronology. And if I believed Tambras, it had potentially been stolen twice. But Jesus, could Kurt really have been that obtuse?

  “You stole it from Jonah. I’m here to recover it from you.”

  Kurt stopped glancing at his menu and looked at me, really looked at me. I had finally broken through. And what was my reward? Sad puppy dog eyes.

  “What? That’s ridiculous. Who told you that?”

  “It’s what Jonah believes. The spear went missing from his account immediately after he kicked you out.”

  “Kicked me out? I moved out on my own. And why would he think that I took it?”

  “Synchronicity?” I ventured.

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Kurt. “And I can’t even use the spear.”

  “What do you mean you can’t use it?”

  “I’m a ninja,” said Kurt, shrugging.

  Kurt did not bother to explain this any further, which I am offended by in retrospect. Why does everyone assume that I’m super geeky? I mean, yes, I am super geeky, but it wasn’t as if I had advertised it at dinner. It wasn’t as if I had come dressed as Trinity or Ms. Pac-Man. Is it like gaydar? Could Kurt just tell?

  At any rate, Kurt’s point was that ninjas can’t wield spears. If his character in Zoth couldn’t use it, why bother stealing it? It was a fair point, but I had a retort.

  “You could still be denying it to Jonah.”

  “If I wanted to rob Jonah, why not take something useful? A different item. Or money? I left my own sofa at his apartment. Why not take the sofa?”

  My initial answer was that it would have been hard to transport, but I held on to the thought. We were both right. It was true that people would do things purely out of spite, but I was starting to feel like that wasn’t the case here. As if to drive the point home, Kurt said:

  “Tell Jonah that he should go to customer service. It’s cool that he has minions and everything, but honestly, just email customer service. They’ll recover it and punish whomever. It’s really not that big a deal.”

  The weirdness of this all was getting to be too much. If it meant going off script, so be it.

  “I spoke to a guild mate who told me that Jonah had stolen the spear.”

  “Jonah did steal the spear,” answered Kurt.

  “From whom?”

  “The guild, I suppose. Usually there’s a lottery for items among the people who need them. But Jonah just snatched it up before we could start the process.”

  A tacky thing to do, I thought, and yet was not very surprised.

  “I see. So do you think that one of his wronged guild mates stole it back?”

  Kurt paused so long that I was worried he had fallen asleep. Eventually, he burbled up an answer.

  “I don’t think so. The item is so rare that there was a server-wide announcement made when he acquired it. Everyone on our server knew that he had it. Probably he was just hacked by a Chinese gold farmer.”

  Again, I pretended not to know what this meant.

  Kurt noticed my fake confusion and answered. “Just google it. Now let’s get some dinner.”

  The rest of the conversation was even more awkward. When we were done discussing the spear, Kurt returned to his texting, and course after interminable course passed in silence. I stumbled out of the Bevo Mill the way that you would leave a wake. It wasn’t that one thing had gone wrong; it was that everything had gone wrong. Sure, I had made a thousand dollars, but the humiliation would stay with me for years to come. I now likened Jonah’s cash to the sort of retainer a contestant would get for going on one of those reality shows where you kill a live pig or starve.

  I trundled my way through the chill night air toward the bus stop. After a debacle such as this, there should be no luxurious cab rides. But I didn’t make it out of the parking lot before a green Scion blocked my path.

  “Hey there, belle fleur!”

  I couldn’t see the driver’s face, but I knew it was Charice. She had pur
chased that Scion because she had read an article about how there are no flat paints in cars anymore, only shimmery ones. This prompted her to find the only flat-colored car in production and buy it new, on the spot. Because she is insane. Also she cycles through money like the evil stepmother in a live-action Disney film, because she makes upwards of $80,000 a year. Just to clarify—not to seem bitter—but Charice majored in dance. I didn’t even know that was a major, aside from at the school in Fame, but regardless it strikes me as the sort of career that should lead to impoverishment. It’s the sort of major that sets parents to shaking their heads and clucking. But no, Charice is in marketing. She’s good at marketing; she has an uncanny talent for talking people into doing unlikely things.

  I got in her car. A ride with Charice was going to be at least as much penance as the bus. Maybe more.

  “You followed me here,” I told her.

  Charice was ecstatic. “How could you tell? You’re getting really good at this detective thing!”

  This was patently not true, but I explained nonetheless.

  “It’s eight o’clock on a Sunday night, and we’re both at a windmill. What are the odds?”

  As deductive reasoning, it was a little weak, but it brooked no further discussion.

  “So I’ve got some ideas about how to get back this spear.”

  Oh, the spear. I really did not want to talk about the spear anymore, but this was my penance, sure enough.

  “How do you know I didn’t get it back already?”

  This was my stab at a dark joke, but a glimmer in Charice’s eye, never a good thing, made me suddenly suspicious.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know, a little while.”

  I looked at Charice, who was trying not to beam. I also observed that there were four bags of trash in the backseat, which was out of character for her. Though she may have been an agent of chaos, she was remarkably tidy.

  A dark, terrible vision ran through my head.

  “Tell me you didn’t.”