The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss Page 5

  Whoever he was, it sounded like he was yelling: “Albert Camus!”

  I realize that sounds nonsensical, but in the moment, that’s what it sounded like. Between the words and the hoarse, petulant tone, it sounded like someone had been extremely frustrated by French nihilism. “Fuck you, Camus! The Stranger is pretentious garbage.” They didn’t yell that, but it seemed possible that it may follow.

  The layout of the second floor was effectively a U shape of hallways. To find the source of the sound, I made my way down the hall, to the main balcony of the foyer, where I couldn’t hear yelling anymore, and back down the right hallway, where I could. This led to a storeroom and doorway similar to one I had seen in the other hall, only whoever was in this door was alive, because they were making a lot of noise.

  “Hello? Can anyone hear me?” came the voice from behind the door. “Is somebody out there?”

  I answered this question by opening the door.

  There was a naked man handcuffed to a folding chair.

  …

  “Hello,” I said.

  …

  “Hi,” said the naked man. Okay, not totally naked. He was wearing tighty-whities—very tighty, from the looks of it—and also socks. But that was it.

  “Listen,” he said. “I know this is weird, but could you get me out of this chair?”

  This seemed to me, all at once, to indeed be very weird and yet also exceedingly normal. Weird: finding a mostly naked guy handcuffed to a chair. Normal: wanting to get out of the chair.

  I suppose I should have found the situation icky, but keep in mind that I had just thrown up on a corpse, and this was way more comfortable than that. Besides which, the guy—another Asian guy, actually—was trying very hard to be friendly and nonchalant. As if this was a normal thing that happened. He was a relatively slight fellow, about my height, but remarkably thin. The situation definitely wasn’t sexually charged—if anything, he looked grateful that someone had found him.

  “What happened?” I asked him, although I could formulate some pretty randy guesses. The air here reeked of perfume, some of kind of tacky fougère.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” said the guy. “Can you get me my pants? They’re over in the corner.”

  And they were. A pair of black jeans. I don’t know how the guy planned to put them on, but they were there.

  “I think you’ll need to get un-handcuffed first, unless you have some sort of phasing powers,” I told him. “Do you have a key somewhere?”

  The guy’s face told me that he didn’t.

  “Listen,” he said. “This is not what you think. Like, I am not that guy.”

  “Really?” I asked. I was going to say, “I don’t know what kind of guy you mean,” but who was I kidding? I knew what he meant.

  “Well,” considered the guy. “Maybe it’s a little bit what you think. I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Just get me out of here.”

  He was about my age, maybe a bit younger, and so I asked:

  “Are you here for the tournament?”

  “I was,” he said with frustration. “But I don’t want to talk about it. Can you just get me out of this chair?”

  I looked at the handcuffs and told him that no, I probably couldn’t. I don’t pick locks. I know there are detectives who specialize in that sort of thing—but honestly, who in this day and age picks locks? Nancy Drew would have plowed right through it, sure, but she also wouldn’t stay in a room with a dude with bulging undershorts. So we’re even.

  “Everything will be fine,” I told him. “The police are on their way here.”

  That was the wrong thing to say, because the fella looked like he was about to go feral. He was literally spasming against the chair. “The police? No! I don’t want the police! I just want out of this goddamned chair.”

  And he actually looked like he was about to cry, honestly. It was hard to not feel empathy for the guy, at least in the moment, because it was a pretty sorry situation. I’m guessing the situation that led him to this point was pretty sketchy, but who knows?

  “They’re on their way already,” I told him.

  “I don’t want the police to see me like this,” said the guy. “And I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  “They’re not coming for you,” I told him. “They’re coming here for a—”

  And I started to say “murder,” but that felt like a lot to pile on a man who had been depantsed and handcuffed to a chair, and so I said:

  “Something unrelated.”

  “You have to get me out of here,” said the fellow.

  “Why?” I asked. What was the guy, wanted?

  “This is humiliating,” he said, and in such a defeated hapless tone that it was hard not to see where he was coming from.

  “I’m sure the police have seen a naked guy in a chair before.”

  And our guy’s whities were rapidly becoming significantly more tighty. Because I am a lady, I pretended not to notice, but it did not require Holmesian skills of observation to figure out what was happening.

  “Should I leave?” I asked.

  “There’s not some dude out there that can help me?” he asked, his voice increasingly shrill and desperate.

  “No,” I told him. I should have gone out to find Daniel, actually, but then there was the murder to contend with, and besides which, I wasn’t sure that Daniel necessarily was in the mood to help a naked guy out, either. It was awfully early in the morning for naked guys.

  The guy took a deep breath.

  “My name’s Swan,” he told me.

  “I’m Dahlia.”

  Transcribing that looks weird, but it felt natural that we should know each other’s names in the circumstances.

  “Dahlia,” said Swan. “I’m just going to beg you right now.”

  “Don’t do that,” I told him. “It makes this seem weird.”

  “This IS weird. I am begging for you to get me out of here.”

  I shouldn’t have, but I laughed. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Grab my pants, get my wallet. There’s a hotel key for a room on the fifth floor.”

  This was an easy enough request, and I did it. I wasn’t sure where he was going with it, but it was easy enough.

  “Done. Now what?”

  “Now I want to you pick me up and carry me to my hotel room.”

  “What?”

  “Pick me up and carry me to my hotel room.”

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  “I am begging you,” sobbed Swan.

  I appreciated Swan’s desperation—because this really was some sort of junior high nightmare situation—but that plan was nuts. Poor word choice. Crazy. Let’s go with crazy. “I can’t lift you!” I said.

  “You look very strong,” said Swan.

  “It’s three flights of stairs!”

  Swan looked at me and said: “I. Am. Begging. You.”

  “How do I know this isn’t some kind of trap?”

  “Are you kidding me?” asked Swan. “I’m handcuffed to a chair. I don’t have pants. What kind of trap could this be?”

  “I don’t know, maybe there are guys in the room waiting for me?”

  “It’s not a trap. Please, Dahlia. I am begging you. If my parents learn about this, they will kill me. You may as well just hit me over the head with a crowbar and leave me for dead.”

  An interesting choice, given what had happened in the other storeroom, but it was the bit with the parents that weakened me.

  And this is how I was talked into transporting a naked man.

  It helped that Swan was a very slight guy, because if he had been bulkier, I don’t think I could have managed. I didn’t so much lift him as drag him, chair and all. When we got to the stairwell, thankfully empty, I dragged him up step-by-step, making a booming echoing sound every freaking step. I kept expecting someone—police possibly?—t
o burst onto the scene, although no one did.

  Amazingly, we made it all the way to Swan’s room—502—without encountering another soul, which was great, because I had no idea how I intended to explain it to an onlooker.

  Swan’s room was nice—if absurdly small—and was pleasantly not filled with anyone waiting to jump me.

  Honestly, he seemed to be shrinking each time I interacted with him. Not, you know, his tumescence—that was still holding steady—but the rest of him was getting smaller.

  “Well,” I said. “Here we are.”

  I draped his pants over him, which seemed not to be doing the job, and so then I went to the bathroom and took out a towel, which I draped over his shame. I accomplished this in the most natural way—by tossing it at him, and something small and tiny fell out of his pants.

  I picked it up, because I am not a slob, and observed that it was a tiny silver wheelbarrow. I really, really wanted to make some kind of “is this a wheelbarrow in your pocket” joke, but I appreciated that this was not the time or place. Still, it was quite a setup. How often do you meet someone with a wheelbarrow in their pocket is what I am saying.

  I carefully put it on the counter, but I suppose it was all the same to Swan, who couldn’t reach anything, anywhere.

  “I don’t imagine this is good for moving a lot of gravel,” I said, which is not as good a line, but had the advantage of not being sexual or humiliating.

  “Ha, ha, ha, no,” said Swan, who looked and sounded incredibly embarrassed. Possibly there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t be embarrassing.

  “I’ve got to head back downstairs and deal with, um, an incident.”

  “Right,” he said, shooting for neutrality. “I understand.”

  “I’m going to leave you now.”

  “I’ll be right here,” said Swan.

  It struck me that Swan was not going to ask for any more help than he already had asked for but didn’t like the idea that I was going to leave him in this room to starve to death.

  “Is someone going to find you here later?” I asked. “Like a roommate or something?”

  “No,” said Swan, who appeared to be trying to summon dignity from some unseen and largely unreachable location. “I am traveling alone.”

  “Do you want me to send some dude up here later with pruning shears or something?”

  This led Swan to squirm slightly, as though I were suggesting some bizarre sexual fantasy, and so I clarified: “for the handcuffs.”

  Swan tried to appear indifferent to this notion, although I could tell he was happy with the idea.

  “If you could find the time for that,” said Swan, as though he had lots of other things he planned to do. “It would be very appreciated.”

  “I’ll get Daniel up here,” I said.

  “Great,” he said.

  It had been such an enormously awkward situation that I couldn’t resist cracking a joke.

  “Hey, Swan,” I told him.

  “Yes, Dahlia,” he said, sighing.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  No joke has ever been laughed at less.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After I left, I thought that I should have offered to turn on the television. I’ll have to remember the idea for the next time I transport a naked guy chained to a chair. You know, for when that comes up again.

  I came back downstairs, and in the intervening time, the police had shown up. This was actually comforting, because I had the idea that nothing bad whatsoever could happen to me if cops were around.

  But of course, then something bad did happen to me.

  The bad thing was a cop.

  “Holy fucking Christ,” said Detective Maddocks. “It’s Dahlia Goddamned Moss.”

  Well, it’s good to be remembered.

  Detective Maddocks was a detective that I had encountered on my last adventure and who had never seemed to care for me very much. By which I mean that he threatened me and regarded me with abject disgust. His partner, on the other hand, the much more appealing Anson Shuler, liked me rather a lot. Arguably too much, although possibly just the right amount. I was still deciding.

  “Detective Maddocks,” I said. “How have you been? The family is well?”

  I had no idea if Detective Maddocks had a family; I had never even noticed if a ring was on his hand. It seemed more likely that he had a brood, or perhaps a wolf pack. But I had no real idea. I was just being snarky, which he loved, because he totally got my sense of humor. Hashtag irony.

  Maddocks stared at me. He had a fantastic craggy face; just the sort of thing you would want for a detective. It would be wrong to have a face like that on a publicist or an event planner.

  “Are you the person that found the body? Tell me that you aren’t.”

  “I did find the body. Also, I had sort of a reaction to it, and I may have, you know, thrown up a tiny amount in there.”

  “I’ve been in there,” said Maddocks.

  “Maybe it was more of a moderate amount.”

  “There are gallons of vomit on the floor.”

  “I was surprised!”

  Maddocks sighed, but I thought possibly—just possibly—there was a glimmer of amusement behind his eyes. It pleased him, I think, that I had a normal reaction to a crime, as opposed to, you know, Hannah Swensening it up in there. He was probably nervous that I had dusted the place for fingerprints.

  “Tell me, at least, that you’re not here on some kind of ridiculous case. I’ll remind you that you aren’t a detective.”

  “I’m actually taking a class to become one,” I told him, with way too much enthusiasm than was appropriate.

  “Oh no,” he said.

  “I mean, online. University of Phoenix. I’ve only just started. But it’s really easy to get certified to be a detective in Missouri.”

  “Just stop talking.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how easy. It’s sort of shocking. Some bureaucrats have really fallen asleep at the wheel.”

  “Tell me you’re not here on a case. Until you’re certified, you can’t take cases, because that would be illegal.”

  “I’m very largely not here on a case,” I told Maddocks.

  “Why are you using weasel words?” asked Maddocks.

  “I’m just being honest,” I told him. “I don’t lie to the police.”

  Maddocks made a face that indicated he had expected plenty of lies from me, which, honestly, was fair. I explained to him about the tip jar, and how “Doctor XXX” had suggested I show up here, after making a donation. I explained about his message asking me to come upstairs, and even about how “something major was going to go down here.” The only thing I left out was the bit about Doctor XXX wanting a detective to be around, because that was just going to lead to a lecture.

  “Where’s Daniel at?” I asked him.

  “Is that the guy you found the victim with?”

  “Yeah, where is he?”

  “Making a statement,” said Maddocks. “I’ll need you to do the same thing. And then we can see if your statements line up.”

  Maddocks had really spooked me the first time I had interacted with him, but there was something markedly less scary about him the second time around. Oh sure, he was vaguely threatening me, but I didn’t have anything to worry about. I wasn’t involved in the death of whoever this guy was. I had almost gotten involved, sure—but I got there too late. For once, I had nothing to hide.

  “Yeah, okay,” I told him. “Are you taking my statement? Is Shuler around?”

  “Why are you asking about Shuler?” asked Maddocks. Did I say he wasn’t scary? I should amend that. He was mostly not scary, because when he didn’t like a question, you could feel it in your bones.

  “Shuler’s my bud,” I said. “Besides which, someone’s going to do it. Why not Shuler?”

  “Shuler is not here today,” said Maddocks. “My partner will take your statement.”

  “I thought Shuler was your partner.�
��

  “No,” said Maddocks, which was perfectly Maddocksian in its lack of explanation. I knew full well that they were partners during my last case, but Maddocks didn’t explain that, or what had happened in the intervening time.

  “Maybe I’ll just call Shuler,” I said.

  “Shuler is not part of this case.”

  I was mostly just trying to get Maddocks’s goat at this point, which is playing a dangerous game, I realize.

  “I understand that. I just meant to say hello. Hi, Shuler, It’s me, Dahlia!”

  And Maddocks looked at me in a way that was, what—ancient? terrifying? sort of paternalistic, but in a sweet Jerry Orbach-y way? All of these at once. He said:

  “Dahlia. You should leave Shuler alone.”

  Which was really unnerving, actually. Not throw-up-oncorpse unnerving, but at least in the neighborhood. What really troubled me about it, and continues to trouble me even now, is that I’m not sure if Maddocks was trying to protect me from Shuler, somehow, or protect Shuler from me. I have a terrible feeling that it’s the latter.

  But I digress.

  Maddocks’s partner du jour was a stout woman in her early forties named Detective Weber. She was closer to Shuler in body type—her body might have been described as jolly in other circumstances—but somehow managed to be Maddocks’s psychic twin. She was not one for small talk, Weber.

  Giving my statement was pretty easy, actually, and I told Weber everything that I’ve told you. I even fessed up to the vomiting, which she was awfully understanding about. Maybe retching when you find a corpse isn’t such an unusual thing, pop culture be damned.

  The only thing that tripped me up was the business with Swan, which I sort of felt like wasn’t my business to tell. Or at least, wasn’t my business to tell right away. Because if I mentioned it the police now, they’d tromp upstairs, and he’d be just as humiliated as before. I’d have to tell them eventually—I got that. But later, after he had put on some clothes. I could tell Shuler. They could get their interview; but let them do it in a way that wasn’t dehumanizing.

  So when Weber asked what I did after Daniel went downstairs, I didn’t lie, precisely. I just explained that I got queasy, which was true, and took a moment in the restroom. Which was true. It just so happened that the restroom in question was on the fifth floor, and the moment was so that I could grab a towel to cover Swan’s tumescence.