The Astonishing Mistakes of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  Anyway, I’m not good at a lot of things, but I can kick, and it is my forceful kicking that I credit with getting me out of that situation alive. Also in this skill set of mine: screaming. Jesus God, did I scream. Sam Spade never screamed as I did—but it wasn’t all just fear. It wasn’t fear at all, honestly—I was just hoping I could get someone else’s attention.

  I was also trying to fake being completely panicked and irrational, which wasn’t that hard because it certainly wasn’t very far from the surface.

  “HELP! HELP!” I screamed while trying to worm my way out from whoever had held me. “I CAN’T SWIM! I CAN’T SWIM!”

  I slipped out of my attacker’s grasp and plummeted toward the dark water below and thought: Dahlia Moss, you have died as you lived. Bullshitting.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I can swim. I’m actually a really excellent swimmer, although I can’t do the butterfly. I don’t even fully understand how that stroke is supposed to work. But I do get the breaststroke, and I did it then, slipping under the water as best I could in case whoever had me had a gun. Probably they didn’t, because you know, they could have just shot my ass. People die from that, right? Ass shot? It probably has a more technical name.

  I don’t recommend diving from a steamboat and swimming underwater after a concussion. I could just imagine the conversation I was going to have with my physician after this. I’m kidding—I can’t afford insurance! What physician!

  Anyway, I’m still not so excellent a swimmer as to feel like this wasn’t a terrifying nightmare. My first thought, even as I swam under the water, ostensibly to safety, was that this was death for me. I mean, wriggling free from a murderer from a porthole on a steamboat and diving into a darkened river is not the sort of thing they teach you on swim team. If you needed me to turn around very quickly at the end of the swimming pool, I was your gal. This was a step beyond. It was more than a step beyond. It was a tower of steps beyond, maybe even the tower in Vertigo where Kim Novak throws herself to the rocks.

  I stayed underwater longer than I needed to, because I was still pretty certain someone was going to shoot me. Even when I came up for air, I didn’t stay above the water long enough to assess, lest I take a bullet in the head. I just kept ducking back under and swimming away from the boat, which seemed like a great idea at time.

  I was grateful for my clothes—Kathy Bates knows how to dress for aquatic adventures (also: Thanks, H&M!)—I was especially grateful I hadn’t gone in for the gray fluffy shirt I had been considering that morning, which would have soaked up water like a sponge. Ah, the things you consider while fleeing for your life.

  I did this for a bit more, and then observed that the Major Redding had gotten quite far away from me, quite quickly. You don’t really appreciate the speed of a boat until you are overboard. I guess on some level—some completely unrealistic level in which I fancy myself a superspy—I had the idea that I would catch up to the boat and surreptitiously board its other side, like a Navy Seal. The ways in which I resemble a Navy Seal obviously being too numerous to mention here. I’m probably more like an actual seal, now that I think about it. But either way, nothing was happening.

  It began to hit me, now that I was running out of “now you will die” adrenaline, the situation had been upgraded from “certain death” to “quite possible death.” The water was cold and I was in the middle of the river—which is two miles wide. I could probably swim to shore, but it wasn’t a sure bet because I was incredibly tired and my head hurt. The Major Redding was drifting off on the horizon, and I decided that I was safe from this imaginary gunman now, and so I just floated there for a second. Maybe I could do this forever, or at least until New Orleans. Probably there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I didn’t have time for metaphors, or even a chance to collect myself, because I observed there were police sirens coming toward me.

  You don’t often see that on the river. Then again, I’m sure my floating there was incredibly illegal, and undoubtedly dangerous. A little zip boat was coming toward me, and sirens were flashing, and I wondered, do they arrest people in the water by telling them to put their hands in the air, because a lot of folks could drown that way.

  But there were no instructions, just the boat drifting slowly toward me, and when I got close, I was stunned to see my least favorite police detective ever.

  “Jesus Christ, Weber. Fish her out of the water.”

  Detective Douglas Maddocks had a face like a craggy mountain, like Mordor, or Rushmore, if everyone on Rushmore had been deeply scowling. Like, it was Nixon four times. Detective Maddocks had never been happy to see me, but he looked particularly unhappy to see me now.

  Detective Weber extended her arms toward me, and it seemed entirely possible that she could pull me out of the water herself. She was a thick woman, Detective Weber—and yet nothing about her was jovial. She was big, with raven-black hair and an abundant midsection. She looked a bit like Dawn French, and so I expected her to be chumming it up with me, but this was not the case.

  “Is this who I think it is?” asked Weber.

  Maddocks just looked disappointed. “Dahlia Moss. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  Oh, how I laughed.

  I felt like Maddocks was hoping for some sort of mental jousting—as if he were my nemesis, which isn’t really the case. He’s a cop, and I generally wish him well. A little pushy, but what the heck. And besides, I already have a nemesis, who’s a bank teller named Clara who gloats whenever I am overdrawn, which is often.

  “I’m sure you know that it’s illegal to swim in the Mississippi,” started Maddocks. “But I’m guessing you’ve got a story for that.”

  “Something like that,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was glad to be alive at this point exactly. I mean, I got on the boat, but this was not the vessel that I dreamed of rescuing me.

  “You wanna tell me this story?”

  “I was struck in the head. I think I might have a concussion. Also, someone was trying to kill me earlier and I dove off the Major Redding to escape.”

  “Is she crazy?” asked Weber. “Do you want me tase her?”

  Weber was joking, I think, and Maddocks said no, although he contemplated the idea for a few seconds longer than he should. I couldn’t blame Weber for wondering if I was crazy. She did find me swimming in the Mississippi in a floral blouse, not the mark of sanity, and my story just seemed like something a crazy person might say.

  Maddocks, however, did not regard me as crazy, but as trouble. I was his Rose Walker, like in Sandman—a dream vortex—except that I was more of a murder vortex, and I wasn’t as cool. I doubt that’s exactly the reference he would make.

  “Why is it,” asked Maddocks, “that you think someone is trying kill you?”

  I repeated myself. Maybe the concussion was making me hard to understand? “Someone hit me in the head, smashed my head against a bathroom sink, left me in a darkened locked room with a corpse, and grabbed my legs as I tried to escape.”

  This was enough to quell skepticism from Maddocks for now, who appeared to be digesting the information I had given him. Concussion or not, I’d been able to think clearly enough that I had a question of my own.

  “If you didn’t come for me,” I said, “why are you guys even here?”

  “We got thirty-seven phone calls from all over the world,” said Weber. “Telling us that someone named Louise was in grave danger.”

  Aw, Twitch chat. Let’s be BFFs forever.

  I did not take this moment to explain to Maddocks that I was Louise Granger, which I will chalk up to the concussion, although this is a lie. It would be more accurate to say that I just didn’t want to go over it with him right now, and besides which, a murderer was on the loose, and I could talk about it with him later, and then blame the concussion. That’s one of the few upsides of a concussion. You can blame anything you want on it, and it’s all vaguely plausible. Play the cards you’re dealt is what I say.

  We pulled u
p to the Major Redding, which I thought had been going rather fast earlier, but now that I was aboard a speedboat seemed rather leisurely. I’m sure if I had any sense I would be reticent to return to the site where someone had tried—not even an hour ago—to kill me. But as we’ve established, I think, I can get a little overly focused on one idea, to my detriment. My goal: Find out who tried to kill me and then knock them off the Major Redding myself. I didn’t want them dead. I didn’t particularly even want them arrested. I wanted them to get what I got.

  We must have made a ridiculous entrance, with police sirens blaring, lights flashing, and of course, I was soaking wet. Not slightly wet, but full-on dripping death, as though I were some sort of horrible Zombie of the Drowned. How could you not look ridiculous? But I could especially tell so because I saw Charice, still in her Balrog garb, staring out at the boat as we pulled up to the Major Redding. She looked impressed, which is rarely a good thing.

  As we pulled up to the boat, Maddocks gave his partner an instruction.

  “Keep an eye on her, Weber.”

  “Is she a suspect?” Detective Weber asked, which I appreciated very much, as it was the question I was about to pose myself.

  “She’s just trouble. Dahlia Moss is a nexus of trouble.”

  I had never heard myself described that way. I had always thought of Charice as being the nexus of trouble. Maybe she had rubbed off on me. Or maybe it had been me all along.

  Maddocks got off the boat and climbed gracefully up a rope ladder to a fullish crowd of gamers. I think there were a lot of cell phone cameras filming this, and we were probably on Periscope somewhere. I waved to the crowd, and Weber gave me a weary look.

  Maddocks was surprisingly spry at going up the ladder, which when you got down to it, was sort of a gym school nightmare. A crowd of people, cameras, a difficult-to-scale ladder, and I’m wet. I could have dreamed this in eighth grade.

  “I thought Shuler was Maddocks’s partner,” I told Weber once Maddocks was out of earshot. “What happened? Was there some sort of dramatic meltdown?”

  “No,” said Weber, who had the same entirely non-elaborative nature that characterized her coworkers.

  “You’re not going to tell me what happened?”

  “You’re the amateur sleuth,” said Weber. “You tell me.”

  The nice thing about being an amateur sleuth, I suppose, as opposed to a professional one, is that I can toss off guesses entirely with abandon, since the expectations of me are so low. Again, this is also the rare upshot of having a head injury.

  I took a look at Weber, who was an uneasy tired-looking woman with a ring on her finger, and I made a stab at the dark.

  “Back from maternity leave,” I told her. “Boy or girl?”

  Detective Weber did not volunteer the gender of her spawn to me, but she looked amused by my guesswork. Instead she asked me, “How is it that you came to know Shuler?”

  In retrospect, the best answer to this question is the same sort of nonresponse she had been giving me, and if I’d had any sense, I’d have answered with something vague like “It’s complicated.”

  But I didn’t have any sense, and I said: “Technically, we first met when a client of mine was murdered.” You know, the typical meet-cute.

  When this got a shocked and not entirely appreciative look from Weber, I naturally took this as opportunity to overshare.

  “I mean, technically not a client because I haven’t been licensed as a detective yet, but I’m working toward it. Although don’t mention that to Maddocks. He doesn’t like the subject.”

  Weber narrowed her eyes at me. “You don’t seem like the detective type.” I started to object to this, saying something like “That’s something coming from you,” but I didn’t because—honestly—she did seem like the detective type. I mean, if you asked a four-year-old to draw a picture of a detective, they probably wouldn’t draw a forty-year-old recently pregnant woman who had the swaggering manliness of Brienne of Tarth, but when you met Weber, there was no arguing with her apparent detectiveness. She had the face for it. She looked like she was going to breathe up clues. She looked like she was doing it now.

  Instead I took a different tack.

  “Shuler doesn’t look like a detective,” I pointed out, which was inarguably true.

  And Weber gave me a face that suggested that possibly Shuler wasn’t much of a detective. I didn’t want to engage on this point, and so I gestured for the rope ladder. Less people were watching now, and it seemed safe to assail it without auguring up pubescent gym class nightmares.

  “Maddocks asked you to stay with me,” she said, stopping me as I reached to climb my way up.

  Ah, Weber, but the amateur sleuth pays attention. “No,” I told her, “he told you that you should keep an eye on me. I’m going to get a damn towel.”

  I could tell that Weber was processing deeply, that or she was stalling, and she had trailed me halfway up the ladder when she asked me:

  “So, are you the girl that Shuler has a crush on?”

  This is not a question that you want to answer on a rope ladder, and I ignored it, I hoped, with great dignity, although great dignity is hard to achieve when you’re dripping wet. Maybe only medium dignity. I got to the top deck with three thoughts: get clothes, ditch this woman, and avoid Charice. Charice was standing right there, beaming at me. “You fell off a steamboat.”

  “I didn’t fall. I was pushed. Someone tried to kill me. Also, Chul-Moo is dead.”

  Charice was the type of person that you could make this sort of statement to without worrying that she was going to be paralyzed with grief. Or even shock. The news seemed to buoy her, as if the hijinks of getting knocked off a steamboat were not enough.

  “Who is Chul-Moo?”

  “Male, Asian, and not completely skulled.”

  “The same dead guy as yesterday?”

  “No,” I said. “This is a different guy.” Although that was an interesting point that I hadn’t considered. These two guys had been killed the same way. And actually, they didn’t look completely different. Had someone killed Karou yesterday by mistake? Kind of a dreadful thought.

  “It’s a small world,” said Charice, which is precisely the sort of kindhearted, generous observation that one wants to hear after a double murder.

  Eschewing sense and reason, I felt the need to explain the situation to Charice more fully. “This was the guy who told me yesterday that he was worried that someone was trying to kill him.” He had even told me who he thought was doing it, and I found myself considering Chul-Moo’s grim assessment of Mike and Imogen a lot more plausibly than I did the day before. Was it Mike who had grabbed my legs? Imogen? Earlier I would have said certainly not, but now I wasn’t so sure.

  “You can avenge his death,” said Charice. “By catching the killer.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll just knock that right out. Er, uh, any news with you?” I asked. I had presumed that Charice would tell me the moment that she had become engaged, but the whole attempted murder thing could plausibly derail the idea.

  “No,” said Charice, with a hint of suspicion in her voice. “Why do you keep asking me that? What do you know?”

  Who’s the amateur detective now? I had to distract Charice with her natural catnip, which is hijinks. But this was easy, because Weber was lumbering her way up the ladder, and this was a natural opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

  “This police lady behind me?” I whispered to Charice.

  “The policewoman, you’re trying to say?”

  Exchanges like this were why I was good at dealing with Twitch chat. My actual friends and relations are as difficult and thorny as strangers on the Internet.

  “I’m sorry, Charice. Policewoman. Detective. Can you distract her?”

  And Charice gave me a Cheshire-cat smile that was so devious and self-satisfied that I was actually concerned for Detective Weber’s well-being.

  “Oh, Dahlia,” she said. “I’ll keep her
so busy that you won’t find her for days.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  If I didn’t know Charice as well as I did, I might be concerned that she planned to murder Weber. It was an ominous-sounding line, to be sure. But presumably she meant that Weber would end up going out clubbing with her, which was precisely the sort of utterly improbable and yet strangely commonplace thing that seemed to happen around my roommate. It was like she was the Scarlet Witch—the old Marvel superhero—but instead of manipulating probability to fight crime, her goals were just to have a really good time. If you think about it that way, the Scarlet Witch is exactly the girl you want to hang out with at the bar. Way more fun than Marrow, anyway, who could take out her bones and throw them. Although I guess it depends on the evening you have planned.

  Anyway, I didn’t stick around to see what sort of tomfoolery was going down there. I’d ask later, probably when Weber invariably joined Charice’s wedding party. I had work to do on the ship.

  My goals were primarily of a vengeful nature, but this was tough, because despite it all, I still didn’t actually have any idea who had done this, which made vengeance challenging. Unless you just want to go kill everyone, like Rambo or some Buffy the Vampire Slayer villain. Which was an idea that had an appeal. I, for one, would love to read a mystery where the detective said: “The killer is one of the twelve people in this room. However, I can’t quite work out which one of you it is, so I just said to hell with it, and I’ve poisoned you all. Let God work it out!”

  Probably this is head-wound talk.

  Still, almost getting killed was an undoubtedly huge development in the case. Like, there had had to be evidence. Possibly I had kicked the murderer—possibly. So if someone had a footprint on their face, that would be a good clue.