“He didn’t really specify. I would guess that there’s an implied and/or in there, but this is his theory not mine.”
“If you’re going to kill a man,” said Imogen, still slurping on her straw. “I would think that it would be nice to have a backup. Besides which, this is a partner’s tournament. Killing a man solo seems against the spirit of the thing.”
Yes, she was definitely not taking me seriously. I didn’t blame her. But Mike on the other hand was moving from neutral to gradually troubled.
“Why would we kill Karou?” asked Mike, in a tone that I would describe as concerned academic.
“He thinks that you wanted to get him out of the tournament. So you killed off his teammate.”
Mike shifted in his seat. Rare is the lunch in which you are casually accused of murder.
“Wouldn’t there be easier ways of disqualifying him than murder? We could have slashed his tires. Or a kidnapping? What’s wrong with a kidnapping?”
So far Mike’s and Imogen’s responses had been: (1) it’s troublesome to kill alone, and (2) why not kidnapping? I did not think that they had murdered Karou, but they seemed like excellent criminals.
“This isn’t my theory, you know,” I said.
“So you’ve said. I have a follow-up question,” said Imogen. “Was Chul-Moo high when he suggested this possibility to you?”
Imogen, it seemed, had interacted with Chul-Moo before.
“Like a kite,” I told her.
“You might run this theory by him again, later,” posed Imogen, still calm, still neutral. “And tell him that I was not amused at hearing about it.”
That’s what she said, but she looked profoundly amused. She was smiling now, actually. The suggestion that she might have bludgeoned a man to death seemed to brighten her.
Not looking amused, however, was Mike. He wasn’t angry, exactly, but I could tell that he was thinking about, if not shooting the messenger, at least kicking her shins.
“Why would Chul-Moo even want you to tell us this?”
“He’s afraid you’re going to kill him.”
Mike’s face creased in incomprehension. “But he’s not even in the tournament anymore. Why would we murder him? Just to be symmetrical?”
“No, he’s back in the tournament.”
Mike was still confused and unhappy about the previous matter—vis-à-vis being accused of murder—and did not seem to immediately process the bit about Chul-Moo playing. But Imogen was immediately annoyed.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” said Imogen. “He’s missed, like, three rounds. You can’t skip three rounds!”
“He’s playing tomorrow. That’s what he told me.”
“That’s even more rounds!”
“I guess if your teammate gets killed, you advance to day two,” I said. “It’s like getting all As in college if your roommate commits suicide.”
“People have no respect for rules anymore,” said Imogen, sounding saltier than you’re probably imagining. Although, she returned to her usual placid self before adding: “And that roommate-suicide thing is just an urban legend.”
“Tell that that to my sister’s roommate’s cousin.”
This was a joke, but no one laughed. (I don’t even have a sister!) This could be because my joke wasn’t that funny, but I prefer to think that Imogen and Mike were deep in thought. Imogen was looking very displeased about Chul-Moo still being competition, whereas Mike seemed to struggle with the idea that Chul-Moo would assume that he’d bludgeon his friend in the head. I could start to see where the whole “creepy” idea was coming from with Imogen, though. She was an emotive person, and as she scowled at the idea, you could almost feel black storm clouds around her. These clouds were admittedly more Lucy van Pelt than Son of Sam, but even so.
It was also at this moment that I noticed Imogen’s bracelet. I’m not much of a jewelry gal, but Imogen had on an old-school silver charm bracelet that looked awfully familiar. There was a dog on it. And a top hat. And a car.
They were Monopoly tokens, of course. Just like the wheelbarrow that had been in Swan’s pocket. I tried checking to see if she was missing a wheelbarrow, but her arm was on the bar, and half the bracelet was obscured.
“Who’s his teammate, then?” asked Imogen.
“Swan,” I said. “I, uh, don’t know his last name.”
“Oh, fucking A,” said Imogen. “Of course it’s Swan, like a bad penny. Well, we’ll just have to beat them the old-fashioned way.”
Imogen was chumming it up with Mike as though she expected commiseration over the Swan development. But Mike, looking increasingly devastated, continued to be on an entirely different plane.
“How could Chul-Moo think that I could kill a person?” asked Mike. “I’m, like, the nicest person here.”
I noted that he didn’t say: How could he think that Imogen might kill a person? But regardless, Mike was looking rather sad all of a sudden, and I felt that it was best to get him off the whole suspected-murder topic.
“You never did tell me what you did for a living, Mike.”
“I’m a taxidermist.”
Well, there was your answer.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Astonishingly, we made small talk after the murder accusation. Although, this was mostly Imogen, who could talk about the upcoming weather with a lot of knowledge and enthusiasm. Mike just stared at me, glazed over, and I started feeling a little guilty about the whole exchange. He looked so troubled that I began to wonder if Chul-Moo didn’t really suspect these two at all. Maybe he was just trying to knock Mike off his game.
I didn’t much care for this idea, because it meant that I was a pawn in someone else’s machinations. And not even great machinations. If I was going to be a pawn in someone else’s game, I would at least want it to be a big game. Like a Game of Thrones situation, with shifting seats of power, murderous widows, and psychic wolves. Not for a Smash Brothers knockoff with a $20,000 prize.
After I left, and only after, I remembered the fougère perfume that been stinking up the storeroom I had found Swan in. I should have smelled Imogen. Admittedly, this is a little personal, but once you’ve accused someone of murder, why not just go all in? If I ran into her later, I would give her a sniff.
Daniel was still missing. He had messaged me that he had to go “meet a guy,” which seemed ridiculous.
“Here?” I had asked him. “In the hotel?”
“Sorry,” Daniel had texted. “It’s a thing.”
At the time, I had just taken this all to mean that Daniel had wanted to steer clear of the aftermath of a scene in which I casually accuse a man of murder. This was the sort of thing that was probably not his style. So I did not interrogate him on the point.
However, when I returned to the lobby of the Endicott, I observed that Daniel was indeed meeting with a guy.
I know that Shuler had cautioned me about being unreasonably suspicious of Daniel. And he had very carefully suggested that my suspicion was maybe grounded in some personal reasons that I won’t dwell on. These were fair points, and I cop to them.
But believe me when I describe the guy Daniel was meeting with as “looking like a criminal.” He was middle-aged, maybe in his late forties, and looked like a grubbier Steve Buscemi. Brown hair, tangled and unwashed. Wrinkled clothing. Weird teeth. And he kept scratching himself. All over. Like he had a skin disease.
I had planned on walking over and introducing myself, but the scratching made me nervous, both because it was suspicious and because I didn’t want anything that’s communicable. But I was very curious who this person was, and I couldn’t possibly imagine what he would be doing with Daniel. I mean, I suppose I could imagine, because he looked like the sort of person who you would meet for a drug deal. Not in real life, because drug dealers, in my experience, dress pretty well. But on CBS.
I remained on the other side of the lobby and just watched from a distance. I was not, I want to clarify, spying on Charice’s fella. I wa
s just making casual observations unseen and from a distance.
They were having a conversation, but it was very quiet and not particularly animated, so it was very difficult to guess what was being discussed. After a moment, they both began to look around as if they were concerned about being observed, and so I ducked back around the corner.
Once again, not because I was spying, but because I was observing. I’m gunning to be a detective, right? We are an observing people. And if I wanted to hide behind a corner or a shrub and observe, what was to stop me?
Anyway, they didn’t see me. Although, there was a guy in the hallway who seemed to regard me with great amusement.
“Are you hiding behind this corner?” he asked me.
“No,” I told him, making a sort of pssht noise with my lips that was properly the domain of fourteen-year-old girls. Pssht, what? I don’t have a crush on Billy Tomlinson. What? You’re crazy.
It was no more effective here than it was for me in eighth grade. (And here we take a moment for Billy Tomlinson, wherever you are.)
“Really?” said the guy. “Because you leaped back here like a panther.”
This guy, incidentally, was wearing purple overalls. I assume he was planning on shooting a nineties-style hip-hop video later, because there is really no other explanation for his clothing. I was not taking guff from this clown.
“I suddenly changed rooms is all,” I told the guy, who was way too keenly interested in me.
“Who are you hiding from?” he asked, peeking into the lobby himself.
“I’m not hiding from anyone,” I said, peering out as well. “Oh shit,” I said. “They’re gone!”
Purple Overall Guy thought this was hilarious, but fuck him. I caught a glimpse of what I hoped was Daniel going down a hallway that led away from the gaming area, and so I jolted after him. I was keeping my eyes on two places at once—one eye on Daniel’s departing figure, the other on Purple Overall Guy, who I hoped was not going to follow after me for fun and games. He was laughing his head off, and clearly considering tailing me himself, but thankfully he decided to stay put. Purple Overalls? I mean, honestly. I was able to gain enough ground on Daniel to see him and our CBS Criminal disappear, together, into the men’s room.
Am I wrong in thinking that this was a bit weird and suspicious? Men don’t go to the bathroom together. Women, yes, men, no. I don’t think this difference is so much due to gender difference as much as the state of men’s restrooms, which typically look as though they have recently housed feral rhesus monkeys.
Even so, I didn’t really have a lot of alternatives. I didn’t feel that I could bust in there, because it would be difficult to explain. Besides which, there could be other guys in there. Pooping guys, who might not take kindly to my presence. Even worse, there could be pooping guys who did take kindly to my presence. Also, rhesus monkeys.
So I waited outside.
What was going on in there? I had three possibilities, just off the top of my head.
1. Sex.
This did not seem like a very likely possibility, because Daniel was, to my knowledge, entirely straight and pretty damned into Charice, regardless. And even if Daniel did swing both ways, a subject that I had not, and never will, broach with him, it seemed to me that he could do a lot better than a bathroom tryst with haggard Steve Buscemi. If I were writing Daniel-based fan fiction, which is actually not an unappealing idea, I’d pair him with a Poe or Finn. Or perhaps Poe and Finn. Why limit myself? Maybe I’d even throw in the robot. But quality fellas, and age appropriate. Not Steve Buscemi. Steve Buscemi does not does fit into this picture.
2. Drug deal.
I mean, Daniel’s weed had to come from somewhere. After all, just because one looks like a drug dealer on CBS doesn’t mean that this guy couldn’t actually be a drug dealer. And it would explain why Daniel hadn’t taken that phone call earlier in front of Shuler. You wouldn’t talk to your drug dealer in front of a cop. That’s just lazy.
3. Pooping.
Or peeing, I suppose, but they had been in there for a while. Maybe the guy just came up to Daniel and said, “Hey, buddy, do you know where the gents room is?” and Daniel was like, “Sure, dude, and whoa, that reminds me—I need to release my bowels too, now that I think about it.” This exchange, as I type it, does not exactly have the ring of truth, but it has to be a possibility.
Those were my three theories. I didn’t say they were good theories. But I didn’t get a chance to come up with anything better, because Mr. Buscemi appeared in the doorway of the restroom. I had to repress an impulse to hide, but there was no reason to. This guy had never seen me before, and even if Daniel were to pop out as well, it wasn’t as if I had done anything wrong. I gave him a curt little nod when he noticed me looking at him, which he returned before walking away.
So two options, Dahlia. I could wait for Daniel and ask him what that was all about. Which would seem a little pushy, particularly if it were nothing. I could also wait for Daniel and not ask him about it, which would be much more reasonable, if less emotionally satisfying. I liked these two options about as well as my three theories on what was going on in the bathroom.
So I came up with a third option, which was that I followed Steve Buscemi.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I followed the guy from a distance, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job. No one had really taught me how to tail anyone, but I felt I was doing pretty good for a rookie. Those years of playing Metal Gear Solid really paid off for me.
Also, not to pick on anyone’s infirmities, but now that I was following Mr. Buscemi without any distractions, I observed that he was walking with a limp. A limp! This guy was one facial scar away from being a goon in a Cinemax movie.
He left the hotel and headed toward the parking lot. I have no idea which car he was getting in, but I did observe that there was an El Camino in the lot, and for the sake of poetry, let us assume that was his car. It certainly wouldn’t have been right for this guy to pile into a Chevy Volt.
“Hey, you,” I shouted.
This was wasn’t a great opening, but I didn’t know the guy’s name.
“Yeah?” said the guy. For a second—just a second, I thought that perhaps our guy had an Australian accent—which might have explained why Daniel would want to hang around him—but the more he spoke the more I realized this wasn’t the case. What can I say? When you’ve been listening to an iffy Australian accent all day, everything starts to sound like one.
Anyway, my next question was sort of hard to get out, which was something considering that I had casually accused a man of murder about twenty minutes earlier.
“Were you meeting with a guy in the men’s restroom?”
And the guy gave me exactly the same fourteen-year-old’s pssht that I had employed only a few minutes before.
“No,” he said. Billy Tomlinson? You’re crazy. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
This was, and in fact continues to be, a salient question. But it wasn’t the issue at hand.
“Because it looked like you guys were going in there in secret or something.”
“What are you, his fiancée? You’re a real piece of work.”
“I’m not his fiancée. He doesn’t even have a fiancée.”
“That’s not what I hear. Anyway, if you’re not the fiancée, it’s none of your business. Stop bothering me.”
And I did stop bothering him, because he was right. And, I was a bit tripped up about the fiancée business. It sort of made a lump in my throat. Daniel didn’t have a fiancée, did he? Unless he had some secret family I didn’t know about. But who has time for that? I don’t even have time for my regular family, much less an extra secret one.
Unless he meant Charice, which was where the lump was coming from.
This possibility was very unnerving. More unnerving than Doctor XXX skulking around the Endicott and sending me cryptic messages online. Even more unnerving than poor Karou, who had definitely been killed by some
one, and was a point that I really should not lose sight of. But that was mystery stuff, and while that can definitely impact my real life (case in point: the bullet wound in my left arm), this wasn’t a side project that was drifting into my regular day-to-day. This was the main event.
Had Charice gotten engaged and not told me about it?
I was a little shaken by the time I made it back into the Endicott. I had always been unsettled about Charice’s relationship with Daniel, but the idea that it was developing behind my back really disquieted me.
Okay, I grant that sentence seems a little Single White Female, and that’s not it at all. I had absolutely no intention of killing Charice and wearing her skin as a dress. (Besides which, she wouldn’t fit me. I’d have to kill someone else and sew them together.) But—I don’t know—I’m the sensible one, and Charice is the wacky sidekick. There are rules for this sort of thing. The wacky sidekick can’t get married. We’re talking about a woman that released a poisonous Gila monster in our apartment. She can’t go walking down the aisle! Not unsupervised. She’s like the textbook example of the runaway bride.
Anyway, I was freaking out a little. This was naturally a good time to get on Twitch, because when you’re feeling unmoored, there’s nothing like an angry mob of borderline abusive gamers to talk some sense into you. And I didn’t want real life, at least for a moment. I wanted mystery. I wanted to see whether Doctor XXX had sent me a message. He hadn’t, and so I sent him a message:
Hey Doc:
Let me know if you get this. Meeting you in that storeroom didn’t turn out so well. But I’m guessing you figured that out.
This was a strange message to write, given that I had no idea with whom I was messaging, whether they meant me good or ill (or were just jerking me around), or, honestly, if they were even alive at all. You feel a bit strange sending a snarky note to a dead person.
The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss Page 11
