The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  “First,” said Swan. “I don’t know who it was. I never saw her face.”

  “How,” I started, trying to get the question out as neutrally as possible, “does that work?”

  “So I checked into the hotel late last night,” said Swan. “I really needed to network, because my partner flaked out, and I didn’t have anyone to play with in the tournament. So I was planning on going out to this restaurant mixer thing to see if I couldn’t find some other singleton to join up with me.”

  “Dude, that SUCKS.”

  “I know, right? Well, anyway, I’m getting ready, and I get this phone call at the hotel room. It’s from a fan of mine—I stream a little, you know.”

  “A female fan,” I guess.

  “Yeah, and, like, super flirty. Actually, not even really flirty. More … dominant? She was more like ‘We are going to have sex tonight. We are going to do the thing.’”

  “Getting some action!” said Daniel.

  “You’ve got to stop doing that,” I told Daniel.

  “I sort of like it, actually,” confessed Swan. “Anyway, not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t get phone calls like that very often. Or, well, ever. I’m the guy at the bar who tries to buy you a drink, but the bartender can’t hear me.”

  “What, dude? Chicks are totally after a piece of this.”

  “Honestly, no,” said Swan. “And so, I don’t know, she was kind of, I don’t know, phone sex-y.”

  “What?! High five, dude!” said Daniel, despite the fact that Swan was still firmly handcuffed to the chair.

  “There may have been phone sex.”

  “That’s awesome, brah,” said Daniel.

  I was getting really irritated with Daniel at this point, but it actually seemed that his dude-bro affect was getting the job done, so I bit my tongue. I’m nothing if not objective oriented.

  “It was awesome,” said Swan, who looked dreamy for a moment. “It was pretty awesome.”

  Normally this is where I would say the word “vomit” aloud, possibly with hand gestures, but Detective Dahlia doesn’t judge. Or she judges later, when she gets home. Also, I had done enough vomiting for the day already. I’d have been lucky to manage a dry heave.

  “How did she get you downstairs?”

  “She, uh, said that she wanted me to blindfold myself and leave my door unlocked. Then she came in here and brought me downstairs. Escorted me, I mean. She escorted me downstairs. To the storeroom. She said she wanted to try something crazy.”

  “Dude,” said Daniel. “Freaky.”

  “I know,” said Swan. “I wasn’t really thinking at that point. I mean, not, clearly. But she walked me down there, handcuffed me to a folding chair in there—which at the time seemed AWESOME—made out with me a little bit, and then left.”

  “She just left?”

  “She just left,” said Swan. “She said she wanted to teach me a lesson.”

  “A lesson for what?” asked Daniel.

  “I don’t know,” said Swan, who sounded troubled now. “She didn’t say. It sounded sexy at the time. I kept thinking that this was some kind of game and that she was going to pop back in there, but she didn’t come back. I kind of thought you were her for a little bit. I mean, right at the beginning.”

  “You were in there all night?” asked Daniel. “Dude.”

  “Did she sound like me?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “You slept in there, bro?” asked Daniel.

  “All night.”

  “You must have to pee,” said Daniel.

  “Like a horse,” said Swan. “I didn’t feel like I could ask Dahlia to help me with that.”

  “You thought right,” I told him.

  “If you can’t get those cuffs off, you’re gonna have to take matters into your own hands.”

  “I got you, bro,” said Daniel, for whom helping another fella pee was apparently no big deal. Well, he was in Equus.

  “How are you coming with those handcuffs?” I asked Daniel.

  “Piece of cake, D,” said Daniel, in a confident and bro-y voice. He then mouthed to me, in a less confident and concerned manner: I can’t fucking open these.

  “You can’t open them, can you?” asked Swan.

  “We’re working on it,” I told Swan.

  “I don’t want to put pressure on you guys. But my bladder is going to explode. I’m in like a Tycho Brahe situation.”

  “Siri,” I said, turning to the Internet. “How do you open handcuffs?”

  Siri suggested a YouTube video, which we all watched. The man in the video suggested using a shiv, a specially purchased tool, or a bobby pin, at which point Swan and Daniel both looked expectantly at me, as though I were some sort of girl detective from the forties.

  “Dudes,” I said, apparently infected by all this bro-talk, “I’m not a fourteen-year-old girl who loves horses.”

  They continued to look at me.

  “I don’t even have long hair.”

  “Well, we’re fucked,” said Swan. “I’m going to stay in this chair for the rest of my life.”

  “Actually,” I told Swan. “Daniel and I were going to go out for lunch, and I was thinking we could invite a guy to join us. Someone who would have just the tools we need.”

  “Please don’t leave again.”

  “I think we’re going to have to.”

  Swan sighed. “Okay. But Daniel. Bro?”

  “Yeah, buddy,” said Daniel.

  “It’s time for you to free the beast.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Daniel was growing on me, even excepting the “Double D” business—although if he ever tried calling me that again, the guy was in for a world of hurt.

  “I’ll say this for you, Dahlia,” he said after exiting room 502, “you’ve certainly opened me up to a lot of new experiences. Beating kindergartners, making statements to the police, handling another man’s junk.”

  “And it’s not even noon.”

  “Where are we headed for lunch? I really need air now.”

  “You’re the guy with the car,” I told him. “You believe his story?”

  “Shouldn’t we believe his story?”

  Oh, trusting Daniel. Admittedly, I didn’t have any smoking gun I could point to, but I didn’t buy it at all. Something felt seriously off.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “It was a little Penthouse-y, wasn’t it? Turn down the dude-bro for a second, and tell me, would anyone ever behave that way?”

  Daniel considered this. “Well, I wouldn’t. Maybe the phone stuff, but I wouldn’t leave my door unlocked and blindfold myself. That’s, I don’t know, very peculiar.”

  “You reverse the genders on that stuff, and it’s straight-up implausible. No lady would do that for a hitherto unseen fella.”

  “Yeah,” considered Daniel. “But the genders weren’t reversed. And it wasn’t me, or some guy that, well, you know, has a certain regular amount of sexual activity.” I don’t know why he was being modest; it wasn’t like the walls at Charice’s were especially thick. “It was a really lonely guy, and maybe he was just dumb. Guys are dumb sometimes, Dahlia.”

  Daniel told me this in a ridiculously confessional tone, as though this notion were going to come as a great shock to me. Whether guys could be dumb was not the point that I was hung up on. Actually, when you got down to it, I didn’t know the point I was hung up on. The story had lots of implausible elements, but so does life, at least part of the time.

  And yet—something about it was snagging on me. I was just about to put away the question when one of the wrong details came jumping out at me.

  “He told me that he was alone in that room all night,” I told Daniel. “But when I found him, the place smelled strongly of perfume.”

  “How long does perfume last?” asked Daniel.

  “On the skin, a while I guess, depending on what it is, but the wake of it in the air? Not eight hours.”

  “You might be onto something,”
said Daniel. “Because come to think of it, he didn’t seem to need to pee that badly.”

  I let Daniel call the shots on where we were headed for lunch, and he picked a sports bar that wasn’t my speed or angle. Hockey sticks on walls, jerseys mounted behind glass, that sort of thing. But, the guy with the car makes the rules. And in retrospect, they grilled a mean mahimahi.

  It was a little hubristic to expect Anson Shuler to show up on such short notice for me, but he also struck me as the sort of guy who would always be there for you when the chips were down. I just had to make clear how down my chips were.

  The conversation went like this.

  “Hello?”

  “Shuler? This is Dahlia. Moss.”

  There was a pause, possibly because I had never called Shuler before, despite him having given me his number, and he was probably running through his Rolodex of potential reasons.

  “Dahlia,” he said. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. And you should call me Anson.”

  “Shuler suits you better,” I told him.

  And this was precisely the sort of vaguely flirty answer that I always seemed to veer toward when dealing with Anson Shuler. It wasn’t the shore I was swimming for; quite the contrary. But it’s where I always seemed to land.

  “Well, if it suits me, I guess I can’t argue,” said Shuler. “What are you calling for?”

  “I’m headed out for lunch, and I was hoping you could join me. Us.”

  “Who is us?” asked Shuler.

  “I’m spending quality time with Charice’s new boyfriend.”

  “The actor? Or is this a newer boyfriend?”

  “The actor. Daniel’s a keeper apparently,” I said, which got a glance from Daniel, who was driving during this conversation.

  “Yeah, okay,” said Shuler, who I was pretty sure was doing the three-second let-me-pretend-to-consider-this shadow play. “I suppose I could join you guys. When are you having lunch?”

  “We’re on our way now.”

  “I enjoy your complete lack of planning. Where are you headed?”

  I gave Shuler the name of the joint. I also took this moment to explain that this was not entirely a social call.

  “There’s also some police-y stuff I want to talk to you about.”

  “Yeah,” said Shuler. “I figured there was something like that in the mix.”

  “Did you hear about the murder at the Endicott Hotel? It just happened.”

  “I did not,” said Shuler.

  “Really?” I was surprised.

  “I’m not Batman, Dahlia. I don’t stand on rooftops and monitor the city on my day off.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry if I’m dragging you into stuff when you’d rather take it easy.”

  “Eh, forget about it,” said Shuler. “But you’re buying the meal.”

  It took a while for Shuler to join us, but you couldn’t blame the guy given the lateness of the situation. I admirably waited for his arrival before having anything other than mozzarella fries, but it seemed to take forever, especially because this was the opportunity that Daniel took to ask me personal questions.

  “So tell me about this Shuler guy,” he said, after a pregnant pause between fry consumption.

  “You met him,” I told Daniel. “Once.”

  “Yeah, but there were ten other people there, and I was sort of making out with Charice.”

  “He’s a police detective and he’ll know how to break handcuffs. That’s all you need to know.”

  “He’s sort of sweet on you, isn’t he?”

  What fresh hell was this? Daniel was asking me about my romantic life? No. Emphatic no. No, with reverb and powerful echo effects. I do not like talking about my feelings, Daniel, as I prefer them to be unknowable and ill considered.

  “Daniel, I don’t know what Charice told you about me, but I don’t really do girl talk.”

  “Why is it girl talk? Guys can’t talk about feelings?”

  I hate actors.

  “Okay, then, I don’t really do people talk.”

  “Come on, Dahlia. Is he sweet on you or not?”

  “I think so,” I told him. Although there was no need for weaselly words here. It was pretty clear that Shuler was interested in me. He was coming to a sports bar on no notice. After my having not spoken to him in two weeks.

  “So,” said Daniel slowly. “Are you sweet on him?”

  “What’s with all this ‘sweet on’ business? Are you my grandmother now?”

  This seemed to amuse Daniel, who then asked, “How about this? Do you see yourself spooning with him?”

  Jesus, I hate actors. Anyway, this question resulted in my choking on a mozzarella fry, which resulted in the waiter coming over. At which point Daniel asked the question a second time, this time raising the ante to “fucking.”

  “I could use some water,” I told the waiter when I was done choking.

  “I’m sure you could,” said the waiter, whom I now regarded as irresponsibly sassy.

  Anyway, before I was able to answer or get water, Anson Shuler himself showed up, waving to us like he was hailing a cab.

  Here’s the thing about Anson Shuler. He doesn’t look like a cop. Even a little. If I had to assign him a profession based solely on appearance, I’d go with Muppeteer. He has close-cropped hair and a cute round face, and he smiles very, very easily. He gives the impression of being someone who might suddenly sing a song, possibly about subtraction or maybe the importance of good citizenship. He also has this perfectly smooth caramel skin—and I know you’re not supposed to describe biracial people with “food” words—but there is something decidedly dessertlike about the guy. He has—just very slightly—a little muffin top, which I feel, very strongly, that someone should pinch.

  Not me necessarily. Just somebody.

  “What are you guys talking about?” asked Shuler.

  I shot a glare at Daniel, who gave me a faux-angelic look that I swear he knicked straight off Charice.

  “Dahlia was telling me that I sound like her grandmother,” said Daniel, eyelids actually fucking fluttering at me.

  “You must have a pretty salty grandmother,” observed Shuler.

  Which was actually true, but not the waters I wanted to wade in right now. Shuler, incidentally, looked like he had started out dressing for a date and changed his mind at the last minute. He was wearing a shiny maroon dress shirt that looked like it should have been doused in cologne and black dress pants that he appeared to have actually poured his body into. And it was topped off by the dirtiest, filthiest trench coat I had ever seen. It was like the trench coat that Columbo had worn, only filthier. This trench coat looked prepared to solve crimes on its own. He was wearing, to summarize, pants that asked: “What are you doing later?” and a jacket that said: “Me? I’ll be eating Cheetos at home alone.” No wonder I didn’t know how I felt about him.

  “Grandmother Moss was a saint,” I told Shuler.

  “So,” said Daniel, spilling the beans all at once, “we found a naked man.”

  “What kind of restaurant is this?” asked Shuler, glancing around.

  “Not here,” said Daniel. “At the Endicott Hotel.”

  “Where there was a murder,” added Shuler. He was admirably unflappable about the matter.

  “Right. And we need your help to de-cuff him.”

  One of the things that is most notable about Anson Shuler was his eyebrows, which were expressive to the point of possibly being independently sentient. He said nothing for a long moment, but his brows told an entire epic, a journey of hope and sadness and loss.

  Finally he spoke.

  “He’s alive, this naked man?”

  “Very much,” I told Shuler.

  “So,” he said. “Who handcuffed him? You guys, or the police?”

  “Neither. He claims it was some kind of sex thing,” said Daniel. “So naturally Dahlia thought of you.”

  “You know,” I said, talking mostly to get the narrative away from Danie
l, “I was planning to wine and dine you a little before we led up to the chained-up naked man,” I told Shuler. At which point the waiter returned, naturally. Given the snatches of conversation he’d heard so far, I couldn’t really blame him for hovering over us.

  “Can I get you something to drink? Some alcohol, I assume?” said the waiter.

  No one got any alcohol, although I strongly wanted some pinot grigio at the moment. It was arguably a little early in the day for booze, but I’d already seen a corpse and a naked dude, and surely that provided an exception. But no one else drank, and so I skipped too. Shuler and Daniel both ordered exactly the same soup and sandwich, apparently untroubled to get the same thing. I put in for the mahimahi, which I felt would make me look worldly and sophisticated at least relative to the rest of the menu.

  Over lunch, we told Shuler the story of the morning. About the stream, and Doctor XXX, and the police, and about poor shirtless, shoeless Swan.

  “I wonder why she left his pants,” mused Shuler, which was a point that I hadn’t considered.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she wanted to humiliate him, but not too much?” Although the suggestion sounded wrong as soon as I said it.

  “So,” said Shuler. “Do you want me to chastise you about having not told this all to the police already, or should we just skip over that part and take it as a given.”

  “We’re telling you,” I told Shuler. “And it’s only an hour later. Honestly, come meet this guy. He’s the saddest person you ever met. You wouldn’t have left him in that room to get discovered by Detective Weber.”

  Shuler looked prepared to argue on this point, until I mentioned Weber’s name, at which point his eyebrows conceded my point.

  “You don’t believe his story, though?” said Shuler. “I can tell that just from your retelling.”

  “Why does no one believe his story?” asked Daniel.

  “Yeah, I don’t buy it. But I don’t think he’s involved with the murder.”

  “What do you think happened?” asked Shuler. I wasn’t sure if he was just making conversation or if he had somehow worked it out and was testing me.