I hadn’t really given the matter a lot of thought up to that point, because I hadn’t had time. But when you’re retelling someone else’s story, it either feels true in your mouth, or false. And Swan’s story felt false.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that he’s downplaying his involvement in the sordidness of it. I don’t think some random girl called him out of the blue. I think it was probably his idea.”
“A call girl?” asked Shuler, who looked like he might book Swan.
“Maybe,” I said. “But probably not. Why would a call girl leave the guy cuffed to a chair? It’s not good business.” And I had handled Swan’s wallet. “Plus, he had cash in his wallet. Not a lot but, like, twenty bucks. Why leave the twenty bucks?”
“I love a mystery,” said Shuler.
Daniel, at this point, got a phone call. It was a phone call that he apparently wanted to keep private, because he quickly made an excuse and left our table. I took this to mean that the caller was not Charice, because he was perfectly comfortable having inappropriate conversations with Charice right in front of me.
I didn’t know who it was, which was maybe what led me to the conversation I had with Shuler.
“So,” I said. “You don’t think Daniel would kill anybody, right? I mean, if you had to put the odds down for that?”
Shuler gave me eyebrow.
I procured the flyer for Daniel’s improv group from my purse, and tried to give it to Shuler, who wouldn’t take it.
“Is there vomit on that? Jesus, Dahlia!”
“I found it on the ground in the room where we found Karou. I think maybe Daniel dropped it in the excitement. Or, alternatively, maybe he was in there earlier for some reason.”
“Just put that away,” said Shuler. “I was wondering what that smell was.”
“It’s a clue,” I told him.
“You should give it to the police,” said Shuler. “Other police, not me. But I don’t think it’s a clue.”
“Do we really know Daniel? Can we really trust him?”
Shuler was not having this.
“Let me ask you a question,” he said, softly and carefully. “Would you be suspicious of Daniel if he weren’t getting very involved with your best friend?”
“Who said they’re getting very involved? They’re just involved. Just regular involvement.”
“I think you should give this to the police and not really worry about it anymore. I think the odds of Daniel being involved in the murder are pretty close to nil.”
A tinge of pity had crept into Shuler’s voice, and I was suddenly very uncomfortable.
“Do you think I’m being crazy? I’m not being crazy, am I?”
“I think you ran across a body, and you are understandably on edge. I don’t like the word ‘crazy’ anyway.”
Daniel popped back into our table literally at the speed of teleportation. Like, there should a BAMF noise that accompanied his arrival.
“I love the word ‘crazy,’” said Daniel. “It’s useful both in freestyle rapping and in Scrabble.”
This comment understandably provoked silence, which was not helpful, because I was trying to quietly tuck Daniel’s vomit-covered program back into my purse.
“So, you wanna go see this naked guy?” asked Daniel.
“Let’s call him Swan. It’s objectifying to just keep calling him the naked guy,” I said. “Besides which, someday he will be clothed again, and what will we call him then?”
“I helped him pee,” said Daniel.
“You didn’t have to tell me that,” said Shuler.
“I wanted you to know,” said Daniel.
We drove back to the Endicott in separate cars, but we waited for Shuler in the parking lot so that we could all go up together.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked Shuler.
“As ready as I am for anything.”
When we arrived at room 502, however, it turned out that there was nothing to be ready for. Swan was gone.
“I like the room, at least,” observed Shuler.
I didn’t like this development one bit.
“He’s been murdered,” I blurted out. “Someone broke in here, kidnapped him, and he’s probably been murdered.”
“Dahlia,” said Shuler, “I’m a homicide detective, but even I don’t think that the answer is always murder.”
This was probably a fair point. I looked around the room, and noticed that the chair was still in the room, neatly tucked under a desk. There wasn’t an extra chair in the room, so this was where it had started from in the first place? But regardless, no handcuffs and no Swan. Swan had gotten free—or at least free of the chair.
“There’s a note,” said Daniel.
He picked up a piece of hotel stationery and read:
“Sorry to skip out on you, but I was able to get out after all. Daniel, thanks for all your help. Pls. leave my key card at the front desk.—Swan”
“Thank you, Daniel? What about me? I’m the person who rescued that fucker!”
Daniel looked very pleased with himself. “It’s a bro thing, Dahlia. You wouldn’t understand.”
Shuler, on the other hand, looked contemplative. “I’m weirdly disappointed that my services weren’t called for, actually. I was geared up for an adventure.”
As was I. There’s a moment, sometimes, when events spin away from you that I just love. Often it’s the moment right before the meteorite hits the earth, but there’s something serene and perfect sometimes right at the dawn of the chaos. I assumed that’s what Shuler meant. If so, I agreed with him.
“There’s still sort of a mystery, though,” I said. “Where did he find clothes?”
“This is his hotel room,” said Daniel. “As long as he packed for more than one day, he’d have extra stuff to wear.”
“Yeah, but he wouldn’t bring more than one pair of shoes.”
Shuler and Daniel both seemed to consider this idea.
“Okay, so we’re looking for a barefoot guy,” said Shuler.
“What happened to the handcuffs? Why wouldn’t he leave those behind?”
“You are very good at asking questions,” said Daniel. “I don’t know why. Maybe he wanted a souvenir?”
“He doesn’t want a souvenir,” I told Daniel. “What do you think, Shuler?”
Shuler sat down on the bed, and said, “I think those are both interesting questions, but you should just go downstairs and ask him. He’s probably at the tournament.”
“Is that what you would do?”
“It is,” said Shuler. “That, and keep the key card.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, let’s do it. You coming with us, Anson?”
“We need to get down there anyway,” said Daniel. “Our next match will be coming right up.”
“You’re competing in the tournament?”
“Sort of,” I told him.
“Nah,” said Shuler. “I should probably get out of here. Also, I’ll give you about a half hour before I tell that story to the police, so you’ll want to make sure Swan fesses up before then.”
“On it.”
“And, Dahlia,” said Shuler, just a hair more softly. “You don’t have to wait for a naked guy to get handcuffed to a chair to call me for lunch.” That is what Shuler’s mouth said. His eyebrows said that and added: “I could be the naked guy in the chair.” This is the sort of statement that might offend me in a verbal form but through the veil of eyebrows seemed vaguely acceptable.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Thanks for coming out for lunch.”
“Say hi to Nathan for me,” said Shuler.
“Well, that was weird,” said Daniel as we were heading down the stairs and back toward the lobby.
“Yeah,” I said. “Swan said he didn’t have a roommate, so who came in and let him out?”
“No,” said Daniel. “Well, actually, that was a little weird too. But I meant the sexual tension between you and Shuler.”
“Listen, Daniel, you’re grea
t, but you’ve got to stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Observing my life.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
For some reason, I had expected that it would be easy to find Swan downstairs. He was barefoot, and how hard could it be to find a barefoot man? However, no one confessed to having seen a barefoot man downstairs, which meant that either he had brought a second pair of shoes or hadn’t been downstairs after all.
“Are you regretting leaving Swan alone?” asked Daniel.
This was an unnecessary question. Yes, Daniel, I was. But I appreciate it when awkward questions are not posed to me but simply left unspoken to hang in the air, like, I don’t know, a Japanese hungry ghost. That is how I do things. I did not acknowledge Daniel with a response, but simply set to asking yet another gamer if he had seen a barefoot Asian man, getting the same blank response as before.
It dawned on me, at that moment, that I did not have a lot of vocabulary to describe Swan. It would have been helpful if he had some remarkable signifying characteristic—like a scar or a goiter. Not only did he not have a signifying characteristic, he was pretty ordinary. Black hair, medium length, straight.
I wish I had taken a picture of him. More notes for the next time I drag a naked guy up a stairwell.
“We have a half hour to find Swan before the cops go ape shit.”
“Do you think they’re going to come after you?”
Again, with the horrible questions. If Daniel had been a Harry Potter character, he would have just been running around shouting “Voldemort, Voldemort, Voldemort.” But no matter.
“If he’s gone missing, they’ll certainly give me a ring.”
“You know what would take your mind off that,” said Daniel. “And by ‘that’ I mean your potential imprisonment. Our next match is starting soon! I think we should go do that.”
I really didn’t understand Daniel’s interest in continuing on in the tournament. Did he just not like to lose? I was about to object to him, but he must have anticipated that I didn’t get his reasoning.
“I don’t give up on things,” said Daniel. “I might get beaten down, but I don’t give up.”
This was, probably—along with his implausible knack for accents—another reason that he was going to make it as an actor. I knew the odds, and I wasn’t expecting that Daniel was going to become a superstar or anything. But when your mission statement is “I get beaten down, but I don’t give up,” you’re probably going to eventually succeed somehow. And come to think of it, this sounded an awful lot like a “Continue?” in Street Fighter anyway: Ryu, or possibly Cody.
“I appreciate your point of view,” I told Daniel. “But you’re not the person who lost a murder suspect.”
“Eh. He’s not a murder suspect,” said Daniel.
“He might be,” I told him. “I mean, I don’t think he’s a murderer, for sure. But a suspect? The police have wild ideas sometimes.”
I was just making things up at this point, hoping to impress Daniel. But he was like one of those snapping turtles that wouldn’t let go of a thing until there was a thunderstrike.
“Come on,” said Daniel. “We can lose really quickly, and maybe Swan’s over there anyway. You know he came for the tournament, so it’s a reasonable guess.”
This did not seem like a place you would go without shoes, but unlike Daniel, I give up on things very easily. If I had a spirit animal, it would not be a snapping turtle. A sloth perhaps, or maybe a sturdy goldfish. And so I went along.
We did not lose, as it happened. But won. And we did it very quickly.
“Dahlia Moss? Daniel Simone?” asked the redhead who was trying to run this thing. He looked even more put out than the last time I saw him.
“That’s us,” we told him.
“I’m sorry to tell you that your opponents have gone home.”
“No need to be sorry,” I said, since I didn’t particularly want to play again. “What does that mean for us?”
“It means you advance,” said the redhead.
I wasn’t sure why this was bad news, and started to ask him why this was the case, but I noted the deep scowl lines in his forehead and suddenly remembered my own advice about posing uncomfortable questions. Instead I asked, “Why’d they go home?”
“They heard about the murder upstairs.” The redhead sighed. “Everyone’s heard about it.”
Oh, so we all knew it was a murder now, did we? I wondered how that bit of information had made it around, seeing as it was only an incident earlier.
“I see,” I said. “Are many players missing now?”
I got angry forehead for this, but I wanted to know. “It’s like Outbreak. Half the people here are missing. Just because a man was murdered! It didn’t even happen on this floor!”
I had noticed that the crowd was looking a little thinner, but I had just assumed this was somehow the natural progression of things as players got eliminated from the tournament. I hadn’t thought that people would willingly drop.
“Hooray,” said Daniel. “We win again!”
I did appreciate how untroubled Daniel was by this turn of events. He didn’t guard me very effectively, but he did have an excellent temperament for uncovering corpses and naked men. But I was still aiming to find Swan, and despite the craziness, I hadn’t put the mystery of Doctor XXX completely out of my head.
“You don’t have a guy named Swan signed up for the tournament, by any chance, do you?”
“What’s his last name?”
Great question, redhead dude! Come to think of it, what’s his first name? Probably not Swan. That was probably a nickname. Further notes for the next time I drag a scantily clothed man up a stairwell. In addition to getting his picture and making sure he stays put, I should also learn his given name. Hell, I had even held his wallet. I don’t know if this was an epic fail, but it was certainly at least rare or uncommon.
“I’m not sure,” I told him. “Swan doesn’t ring any bells for you?”
“No,” said the redhead, who, for whatever reason, appeared to just want me to go away.
“How about Doctor XXX?”
“Are you just making up words?”
I would have said something scathing and witty here, except for the fact that I didn’t have anything witty. That’s the problem with being witty; it requires a lot of quick thinking.
Besides which, Tricia, wandering around with Undine in tow, came up to me.
“Hey, Dahlia, were you looking for a barefoot Asian guy?”
“Yeah,” I said, surprised. “Where’d you hear that?”
“It’s a weird thing to go around asking about,” said Tricia. “It’s making the rounds.”
This was spoken by an oddly shaped woman whose hair was so eerily wiglike that it absolutely had to be real. Her hair was askew. Not dashingly asymmetrical, just off. I don’t mean to pick on Tricia, whom I had taken a liking to, but merely want to point out that when she regards you as weird, you’ve kind of accomplished something.
“We are,” I told her, bringing Daniel into this if for no other reason than to keep him from gloating about our success in the tournament. “We are both looking for a barefoot Asian man. Named Swan.”
“You keep yourself very busy,” observed Tricia, eyeing Daniel with an expression I couldn’t quite place. Concern? Lust?
“This is my bodyguard, Daniel,” I told her, because when you’re already branded as being weird, why not go all in?
“G’day, mate,” said Daniel.
If any of this seemed strange to Tricia, she did not comment on it, although baby Undine looked remarkably doubtful.
“The guy you’re looking for is out in the hotel lobby. He’s sitting on the sofa. You can’t miss him.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I did not anticipate the possibility of there being a second barefoot Asian man. Even given the relatively high density of Asian guys at the tournament, it seemed altogether too unlikely that the barefoot Asian in t
he lobby would not be Swan.
And yet, here it was.
It would make a better story if I had gone up to him in confusion and told the stranger: “Swan, you must call the police!” as he stared at me in bafflement. But for once, I was actually not so dumb. I went up to him in the lobby, joining him, in fact, on the sofa, and said: “What the hell?”
That was my conversation opener. “What the hell?”
The fellow raised an eyebrow at me. “Hello?” he offered.
He looked a lot like Swan, at least in the way of Swan being somewhat generic-looking. Like Swan, he had medium-length black straight hair. Similar facial structure, about the same age. His eyebrows were very different, though, and their skin tone wasn’t exactly the same—this guy was the slightest bit ruddier. And when he smiled, I noticed he had a little bit of a snaggletooth. Not a bad-looking fella, but not Swan.
“Seriously,” I told him. “What the fuck?”
Our guy was looking irritated, which was fair. But I was working it out, as I lay back on the hotel sofa, this cream-colored Queen-Anne thing that was miles nicer than the furniture in Swan’s room. Real drop-off between the lobby and the hotel rooms here.
“You must have found Swan,” I said. “You guys friends?”
“Not exactly,” said the fellow, astonished that I made this deduction. “Do you know him?”
“I’m Dahlia Moss. He didn’t mention me to you?”
Daniel, who’d been just sort of hovering around for this conversation—body guarding, I suppose—was happy to have the chance to jump in.
“Or Daniel? Did he mention Daniel?”
“I’m Chul-Moo,” said the guy, I guess feeling that my introduction required his own. “And he didn’t. But I don’t know him well.”
“What happened to your shoes?” I asked him.
Chul-Moo looked down at his bare feet as though he were surprised that they were missing. Then he looked at me uncertainly. I expected that he would say something, but he didn’t.
I was gradually working it out, however. Chul-Moo came in, somehow, and found Swan in distress. He had somehow gotten the handcuffs off, and Swan persuaded him at some point to lend him his own shoes. This was the only possible explanation, right? Probably Chul-Moo was being cagey around me because Swan had given him some other version of the story and was maybe worried that I was the woman who had taken his shoes in the first place.
The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss Page 8
