The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  “Who the hell are you?” he said. “Why are you listening at Vanetta’s door?”

  “I’m the new receptionist, Dahlia,” I told him. “Some call me Nu-Cynthia. Who are you?”

  “I’m Tyler Banks. I work here.”

  Quintrell hadn’t mentioned Tyler, but it wasn’t as if we had gone through an employee audit. Who was this guy?

  “You certainly look much better rested than your compatriots.”

  I thought this was a good, Human Resources–approved compliment. “You look well rested” = good. “You sure know how to fill out those pants” = bad. See, I am employable. I know things.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, smiling as he brushed the snake hair aside. “I’m from the main office. I’m not part of this clown car.”

  Tyler struck me as a little smug and a little vain, but I couldn’t help but like anyone who would describe this operation as a clown car.

  “I’ve temped lots of places,” I said, exaggerating a bit, “but this has been the weirdest first hour of work ever. Did you know everyone sleeps here?”

  “This place is a Dumpster fire,” said Tyler. He was mixing metaphors, unless the clown car had gotten trapped inside this Dumpster and was now being consumed by flame, but it was hard to quibble with the overall picture.

  “I’ve seen. What do you do?”

  “I put out Dumpster fires,” said Tyler.

  I looked at Tyler differently now, because he was management. He didn’t dress like management, particularly, but this was not an industry that did overly value suits. My toile scarf meant nothing here.

  “I see,” I said. “Do they know you’re here? Vanetta and Lawrence, I mean? How long have you been around?”

  “This is my second week in this office,” said Tyler. “Usually I’m in Austin.”

  Yes, Tyler looked like someone who was usually in Austin. He looked like he should be diving from a stage at SXSW. I felt a sort of kinship with him—prickly Medusa or not—because I realized that we were on the same team. We were both here to report to Digital Endeavors. He was on the up-and-up, and I was on the sly. Although it was weird, I suddenly thought, that DE should want this redundancy. Did they not trust Tyler? Maybe they thought he was sabotaging the project. Or maybe he was the guy who had sent the whistle-blower’s letter.

  Or, and this thought suddenly seemed salient—maybe I was wrong about who my client was. It struck me that it might be good to befriend Tyler Banks, to get a sense of what DE management was like. I gave it my best shot.

  “You doing anything later?” I asked.

  “No,” said Tyler, who walked away. Befriending accomplished!

  I didn’t have much time to celebrate this victory, however, because Lawrence ran out of Vanetta’s office, and a chair sailed through the air after him, just missing his head.

  Lawrence actually made a “woo-woo-woo-woo-woo!” noise, the sound Curly from the Stooges makes when he is performing comedy high jinks. There was a spring in his step, as though he thought this was all very funny.

  “Tyler, Cynthia,” said Lawrence.

  “Everything under control back there?” asked Tyler.

  “Very much.” Lawrence smiled. He honestly was insufferable. “Vanetta and I were just celebrating by throwing around some furniture.”

  Vanetta appeared in the doorway and looked less like a Stooge and more like an Avenging Angel. All will burn before Vanetta!

  “Did you just throw a chair at Lawrence?” asked Tyler incredulously.

  “Did you know about the new platform?” asked Vanetta.

  “Wait, what new platform?”

  “Oh,” said Vanetta. “I see. Digitial Endeavors isn’t keeping you in the loop either.”

  “What new platform?”

  “When he tells you, you’re going to throw that chair at him yourself.”

  But Lawrence was hightailing it out of this conversation, inching ever closer to the door. By the time Tyler seemed ready to approach him, he was already past me and at the doorway leading downstairs.

  “Must run, everyone,” Lawrence said merrily. “I’ve got another meeting.”

  “Someone tackle him,” said Vanetta.

  But he was gone. I’m not sure I would have been up for tackling him in any event.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The next hour or so was oddly productive. Programmers programmed, Tyler and Vanetta were in a meeting, Lawrence was away, which seemed to be for the best, and I further familiarized myself with the phone system. I felt 90 percent certain that I could transfer a call without sending someone into oblivion, which was good enough for temp work.

  I was productive too. Given that my ultimate goal was to nick some code for Emily, I was hoping there would be a shared server that I could glean it from. There was, but I didn’t have access to it. I asked a few casual, secretarily appropriate questions about the server to Quintrell, which was progress.

  I also continued working on Operation Befriend Tyler Banks, which meant gathering intel. In my quiet moments of downtime I looked for Tyler on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, even LinkedIn. I was able to get the basics of him pretty quickly. Former creative, recently involved in a breakup, terribly lonely in St. Louis—I even found his OkCupid dating profile, which was a mess.

  What inspired me were the pictures of his ex—a raven-haired pseudo-Goth named Suzanne. Suzanne wasn’t Asian, but something about her reminded me of my friend Masako. They were broadly similar—same body type, hair color, and with a Goth-y edge.

  Maybe I could set them up. That could be an entry point. Something to try later.

  The phone rang again, and this time, it was for me.

  “Stop what you’re doing,” said Charice. “And sit down.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” I said, not bothering with “This is Cahaba Apps” because I knew the voice. “And I’m already sitting down.”

  “Well, pretend to sit down, because I want the moment to increase the drama,” said Charice.

  My roommate, Charice, who was made of Drama, who was essentially a Drama Elemental, emphatically did not need a moment to increase the drama. If anything, she could have used a moment to bring it down a notch.

  “You’ll manage, I’m sure. Hey, can I transfer you to a sleepy programmer?”

  “Is this part of your industrial spying business?”

  I had not told Charice about my industrial spying gig. I don’t know how she had put that together—probably she had found the napkins. But that’s Charice for you—she seems flighty but she’s got the mind of a brilliant tactician. I’ve learned to be especially wary whenever she goes out of her way to seem disinterested.

  “Ixnay on the—” I wanted to say industrial spy-nay, but there was a high chance that my coworkers spoke pig latin. “Mysterious business,” I said instead, like a goon, because nothing quells suspicion like someone hastily saying “ixnay on the … mysterious business.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Charice. “Fine. Are you sitting down?”

  “So can I transfer you to a sleepy programmer? You can call me back after.”

  “No,” said Charice. “I’m getting married.”

  She paused after this proclamation, I’m sure expecting me to be awe induced. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t even raised-eyebrow induced.

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re engaged. That’s what engaged people do. It’s the natural evolution.”

  “No,” said Charice. “I’m getting married today. Over lunch. Do you want to be a witness?”

  Okay, now I was surprised. Perhaps not awe induced, but this wasn’t how I had planned my day.

  “Wait, what? I thought you wanted a wedding with doves and a tower of cheesecake.”

  “I’ve decided to scale back on the wedding and scale up on the honeymoon.”

  A lavish honeymoon was very Charician. If she had the money, she’d go to the moon.

  “But what about the tower of cheesecake? You promised me there would be a tower of cheesecake. That’s why
I’m going.”

  “How about a tower of pancakes? We could go to IHOP after.”

  “What does Daniel think about this?” I asked, although I realized the stupidity of the question as soon as it escaped my lips. Daniel was in love with Charice and would have been fine with whatever she wanted, up to and including pancakes. Why wouldn’t he be? Charice was, if nothing else, fun. Hell, I’d go on a honeymoon with her.

  “Do you have a priest?”

  “We don’t need a priest,” said Charice. “We’re just going to city hall.”

  “Just hang on,” I said. “Can you get married tomorrow? You can do it over lunch tomorrow.”

  “I want to strike while the iron is hot!”

  “The iron will be hot tomorrow,” I told her.

  Vanetta came out of her office—Tyler was still in there—and looked at me with irritation.

  “That doesn’t sound business related.”

  It was a fair cop.

  “I gotta run,” I told Charice, hanging up the phone. Then, to explain to Vanetta, “I’m sorry, that was my roommate. She was calling to let me know that she’s getting married. Today, over lunch.”

  I had described Vanetta as being somewhat catlike, but now she gave me a look that was Eeyore-esque.

  “The world marches on outside these walls,” said Vanetta.

  I suppose it did, although marching wasn’t exactly the way I’d describe it. Marching requires precision and organization. From my experience, the world tends to shamble. It’s less a drum corps and more an explosion of toddlers and drunks. But I didn’t address this point with Vanetta and simply said:

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Toner,” said Vanetta. “Can you bring me some toner?”

  “Sure,” I said as she returned to her office. “I’d love to.”

  I had made an inventory of Cynthia Prime’s desk and had not seen anything like toner, so I headed back to the staff room with the candy-cane coffee. I did a quick search of the place, but turned up nothing. Then, deciding that I didn’t want to spend too long rummaging, lest Vanetta get rowdy, I decided to ask Quintrell for help.

  “Hey, Jason,” I said, “where’s the supply room?”

  Quintrell, who was sleeping again, popped up like some sort of Whac-A-Mole. “I’m working! I’m awake!”

  “Relax. Where’s the supply closet?”

  “Oh,” said Quintrell. “It adjoins the women’s restroom. Over by Lawrence’s office.”

  A word on the architectural choices of Cahaba Apps. It was a very odd space, and had obviously been repurposed from an apartment, which had maybe in turn been reappropriated from something else. There were odd corners and nooks, and it was probably an architect’s nightmare. To be perfectly clear: There are no secret passages in this book. But it was an oddly designed space, and it seemed as though a secret passage would not be out of the question.

  Regardless, I made my way over to the ladies’ room, which, point in case, inexplicably had a shower in it as well as a small white wooden door. I opened the door, and, illogically, there was a supply closet. Toner, Xerox paper, office supplies galore, the mother lode of coffee and tea, all stacked up in utilitarian metal shelving.

  Also next to the utilitarian shelving: a dead woman, facedown on the floor.

  That was somewhat illogical too.

  Here’s something that did not happen: I did not panic. Corpses and I are getting to be, if not friendly, at least casual. I have Facebook friends that I’d be more upset at seeing than your average dead body. I don’t know if this means I’m getting to be a better detective or if I need to purge more friends from Facebook, but both are a good bet.

  Something else that did not immediately happen: I did not call the police.

  Obviously, I was going to call the police. Obviously. But I took a moment to assess the situation:

  First, I should make clear that what this person was not. She was not:

  stabbed to death

  bludgeoned

  burned

  shot

  killed in an imaginative way, such as left in a cage with a hungry crocodile, or something preposterous like those convoluted-ass killings in the movie Se7en.

  She was just dead. She was cold to the touch, and rigor mortis had set in, and it seemed to me that she had just, somehow, passed away. Here’s a thing that’s worth remembering: People just die sometimes. Sometimes it wasn’t the colonel in the library with a candlestick. Sometimes it was just Mr. Boddy alone in his study, maybe with a nice glass of gin, and his number was up.

  Now, let’s consider things that this person was:

  at least in her late sixties

  obese

  frumpily dressed, with a penchant for florals.

  I debated including that third point here, because I don’t want to imply that floral print will shorten your life span. Nor do I mean to go around commenting on the sartorial choices of the dead—although I’m sure it’s a fashion blog somewhere—but I want to point out these elements because it led me to the realization as to who this was.

  This was Cynthia Prime.

  Right? She’d left a floral scarf on her desk, a diet beverage. And with a name like Cynthia she was probably born in the sixties, statistically speaking. How many other frumpily dressed overweight sixty-year-old women would be in the supply closet?

  Now, let’s return to her weight—this lady was hefty. Again, I’m not pointing this out to be judgmental, just to say that Cynthia Shaffer was of an age and shape that if you found her dead, your first thought probably wouldn’t have been: How on earth could this have happened?

  That’s not to say it wasn’t disquieting as hell. Also, I wanted to double-check this was Cynthia. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this was a cleaning woman, or, who knows? An assassin. Probably Cynthia, but it would be wise to double-check.

  I stopped at Quintrell King’s desk to ask:

  “Did Cynthia like to wear floral blouses, kind of grandmotherly?”

  “Sometimes,” said Quintrell.

  “Sixtyish, looks a bit like Conchata Ferrell?” I could have said seventyish, honestly, but I wanted to lean toward the more flattering age.

  “I don’t know who that is, but I guess the age is around.”

  “It seems that Cynthia is dead,” I told him.

  “Long live Cynthia!” he shouted.

  “No, I mean, I think she’s actually dead. Someone is, anyway, in the storeroom. I didn’t search her pockets, but I’m pretty sure it was her.”

  Quintrell looked as though, quite suddenly, he was going to have a mental breakdown. And I realized that this was not the correct person to burden with the death of Figurehead Secretary who had kept this place afloat.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’m kidding! Just get back to work.”

  “Wait, there’s a dead person in the storeroom?”

  “Well, yes. I’m calling the police. But maybe it isn’t Cynthia. Maybe a homeless person wandered in there and died.”

  “Maybe a homeless person in a floral blouse who looks like Conchata Ferrell wandered into our office and died?!”

  “You know,” I said, “never mind. Just get some rest.”

  I needed more baked goods. That was the problem. I never should have let Vanetta sneak away with my bag of them. A whole bag! But without the curiosity-deadening power of doughnuts, there was no bringing Quintrell down.

  “Cynthia’s dead, everyone!” he was shouting now, and Gary came over.

  “What?”

  “Nu-Cynthia says that Old Cynthia is dead in the storeroom!”

  “What?” said Gary. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “She’s dead! Old Cynthia is dead!”

  Gary was taking this news with a healthy bit of skepticism, which, given Quintrell’s bleary-eyed state, was sensible.

  “I don’t think we should call her Old Cynthia. It seems ageist. I liked Cynthia Prime,” said Gary.

  “Well, we can call her Dead Cynthia now!”
>
  I did not want to stick around for this conversation and tried to call 911, only to realize that I needed to dial something to get to an outside line.

  “Goddamn these phones,” I said, altogether too loudly.

  Vanetta Jones appeared at the doorway amid clouds of brimstone.

  “Why are you cursing out here?” asked Vanetta. “I can hear you cursing. If anyone is going to curse around here, it’s me.”

  “I’m trying to call the police,” I told her.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Cynthia Shaffer is in the storeroom,” I told her, glossing over the not-Cynthia-Shaffer possibility. “Something has happened to her. She’s dead.”

  Vanetta Jones did not crumple into a ball, nor did she gasp or clutch at imaginary pearls. She sighed, turned around, and walked back toward her office. At the doorway she said:

  “I’ll call the police.”

  Vanetta returned into her office calmly. It wasn’t that she didn’t look alarmed about Cynthia’s death so much as she gave the impression of having had a week in which this was not the worst part of it. Of course Cynthia is dead; naturally that would happen this week. I didn’t know what my report to Emily was going to be, but I couldn’t help but feel bad for Vanetta Jones, even if she wasn’t traditionally warm.

  Forgive me if this next bit makes me seem craven, but it struck me that the police, when they arrived, were not necessarily going to approve of me doing a lot of industrial spying for Emily Swenson and her mystery client, and so I took the liberty of doing what I could, while I could. I started copying files and dragging them into my private Gmail account. This was surely illegal, but if anyone was bothered by it, I could always say that I was worried that the police might confiscate Cynthia’s machine, and I was trying to protect information. However, the staff was in so much disarray that it probably wasn’t a worry.

  Lawrence was still out at his meeting, which I suspected involved martinis. Archie had holed up in Vanetta’s office, Quintrell was hyperventilating, and Gary and Tyler were trying to calm him down. Tyler, in particular, seemed ill-suited to the task of telling someone everything was going to be fine. He was someone who had developed a skill set that was focused on telling people that they were going to be downsized. There ought to be an overlap in these skills, now that I think about it, because surely someone had hyperventilated after being let go, but Tyler seemed almost as out of sorts as Quintrell. There was a wildness to him that was a little off.