The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss

by Max Wirestone

  “It’s fine,” Tyler said. “This sort of thing happens every day.”

  Which is not true, particularly, but this is what he said.

  While everyone else was dealing with their feelings, I made a cursory look at Cynthia’s calendar for the day. This was also somewhat snoopy, but the police would probably want to know where Lawrence was, and I probably had that information somewhere. I had initially taken his exit for theater, but he was in fact, marked on the calendar for a lunch meeting with “V,” whoever that was. I also took note that Cynthia had a meeting on the calendar tonight, at the St. Charles First Presbyterian Knitters’ Group, which seemed less immediately relevant but more poignant. Also, a little unprofessional, putting private meetings on the business calendar, although maybe this was Cynthia’s fire wall against having to work late. I took a picture of this with my camera.

  “Just calm down, man,” said Tyler, who looked like he was considering slapping Quintrell, which is what people once did to hysterics in movies. Instead he asked Gary: “Is he always this high-strung?”

  “Only when he hasn’t slept for weeks,” said Gary. I couldn’t tell if Gary was joking or just also on the brink of collapse himself.

  I made a phone call and ordered lemonade and a fruit bouquet. This seems positively ridiculous in retrospect, but this was a group that needed a break. And probably not any more caffeine. I had only just finished with the phone call when the police arrived.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It’s unrealistic to pretend to work when the police are here, much less a corpse and the police, but that’s what we all did.

  The first to arrive were paramedics, who barely spoke to me before heading into the storeroom and trying to revive Ms. Shaffer. It wasn’t long after that that a policewoman came in, who was then followed by a man I later learned was the coroner, and finally detectives. This period of time seems like it should have been more exciting than it was, but no one was very interested in me, and the primary focus was the dead body, which is perhaps as it should be.

  I pretended to type for a while, and then gave it up. I made my way to the back and spoke to Tyler and Quintrell and Gary, who clearly weren’t really working either.

  “Why are there so many people here?” Gary asked. “Is this a normal amount of people?”

  I actually wasn’t sure what a normal amount of people was for a murder investigation and told this to Gary. It didn’t seem out of line to me, however.

  “But there’s a coroner,” said Gary. “Should there be a coroner?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “This is not the sort of thing they teach in secretarial school.” To be clear, I have never actually been to secretarial school.

  “Hey,” said Tyler, “I’m sorry if I was rude earlier. I’m under a lot of stress lately.”

  “Pssht,” I said. “What? Don’t worry about it. No biggie.”

  “I don’t think it’s good that there’s a coroner,” said Gary, who was plainly not listening to us at this point.

  “Listen,” I said to Tyler, “I was actually asking for a friend of mine. She’s just had a breakup, and we were going out for coffee after work. You’re kind of her type, and it’d be super casual, so if it doesn’t work out, it’d be easy.”

  You didn’t have to be a student of body language to tell that Tyler Banks was not interested in my offer. Every pore of his body seemed to say: “What is this secretary talking about?” Even his mouth, which at least was kind enough to translate into:

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  “Sure,” I said. “No big deal. She’s probably not your type—black hair, short, kind of a recovering Goth. Her name’s Masako.”

  The pores on Tyler’s body now said “this is an interesting development” but his mouth wasn’t along for the ride.

  “I’ll let you know if I change my mind,” he said.

  “No sweat,” I said as a policeman came out of the storeroom and toward us. He looked concerned but somber, and I probably could have taken some pointers from him.

  “Which of you found the body?” asked the detective.

  “It was her,” said the guys, in perfect unison, which felt like selling me out, although it was technically true.

  “Is there an office we can use for some privacy?” he asked.

  “Lawrence is still out on lunch,” I told him. “I’m sure he won’t mind if we used his office.”

  This got, I’m not kidding, an audible gasp from the guys, but the detective and I walked into Lawrence’s office. Why not? It was a nice place.

  Detective Tedin was white and balding and seemed to be the sort of person who, if suddenly killed in action, would be proclaimed as being a couple of weeks away from retirement. He looked weary.

  He also did not look as though he were in the mood for an interrogation. Maybe it was just having spent the morning watching the Cahaba guys, who were sleep-deprived to the point of it becoming performance art, but Tedin looked like he had been awakened from a nap. He was probably in his midfifties but seemed like a much older man, with white hair and bags under his eyes. He looked like he should have been shooing college students off his lawn.

  “Your name is?” asked Tedin.

  “Dahlia Moss,” I told him, hoping that this alone wouldn’t get a reaction, given how much I had been dealing with the police as of late. It didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow, which was both good and sort of disappointing. I wasn’t as big a fish as I thought I was.

  “And what do you do here?” asked Tedin.

  “I’m the receptionist—temp receptionist,” I told him. “Ms. Shaffer was dismissed recently, and I’m her replacement until they hire someone full-time.”

  “I see,” said Tedin. “Ms. Shaffer is the body? There’s no ID on her.”

  “I think so, yes. I’d never met her before. I’ve actually only been here a few hours now.”

  Tedin looked pleased and unsurprised by this, and it was nice, for once, to be having such a positive and chaos-free interaction with an officer. This is how police interviews were supposed to go.

  “So you came in around nine this morning?”

  “Eight thirty—I wanted to get here early on my first day.”

  “And you were the first person here?”

  “No,” I told him. “Everyone had spent the night. Except for Lawrence, that is. He seems to come and go as he wants.” In retrospect, I had forgotten about Tyler, who had also come in late, but I didn’t bother amending my statement.

  Now Tedin looked surprised, his white eyebrows going up, but not necessarily irritated at me.

  “Everyone slept here? Why?”

  “I gather that they’re behind deadline for an app the company is developing. It’s crunch time now, and so everyone is working around the clock.”

  “Are there beds here?”

  “Vanetta sleeps on her sofa—Archie too, I’ve gathered—but the programmers just passed out at their workstations.”

  “That’s not good for your back,” said Tedin.

  “Probably not,” I told him. “But you know, desperate times and desperate measures.”

  “If Ms. Shaffer was fired, why was she here?” asked Tedin, coming to the point I had been asking myself.

  “I couldn’t say,” I told him. “Maybe Vanetta would have an idea—or one of the fellas. I literally just started working here hours ago.”

  I could tell Tedin liked this, and I could also tell why. I was a woman who had absolutely nothing to do with this. A suspect who could be cleanly wiped from his list. But if I had been a suspect, did that mean Cynthia had been murdered? Why else would my absolution move an emotional needle?

  “So you get here at eight thirty,” said Tedin. “What do you do?”

  I walked Tedin through my morning, step-by-step. I had never imagined how easy it was to lie to the police, but there’s really nothing to it. I mean, I didn’t outright lie, but I glossed over the business with the whistle-blower’s letter
, which I felt was probably a company secret until anyone told me otherwise. I certainly glossed over my spycraft, such as it was, for Emily Swenson. And when you took out those bits, the morning wasn’t that interesting.

  “No one,” asked Tedin, “to your knowledge, walked into that storeroom until you did at eleven?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s built off the women’s restroom, and it’s not like any of the guys would get near it.”

  “And the only other woman working here is Vanetta Jones?” asked Tedin.

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you go in the restroom earlier and notice anything?”

  “No, and when I went in, the door to the storeroom was firmly closed.”

  “I see. And you were watching the entrance all morning, so Ms. Shaffer couldn’t have entered since you got here.”

  This was not wholly true.

  “I tried keeping my eye on my desk during the staff meeting, but I wasn’t ironclad about it. I suppose it’s hypothetically possible that she entered then, although she would have had to have been sneaky, and a little lucky too.”

  Tedin hmmed. I noticed that his wedding finger had three rings on it—a black ring, a gold ring, and a silver one—all very thin bands, and I wondered what this meant. If he had three wives it would certainly explain his haggard appearance. But he was a decent detective, because he noticed my observation and tucked his hand into his pocket. He also came out with his first gotcha question.

  “Detective Shuler tells me that you’re studying to be a detective.”

  Ah. So he did know who I was. Well played, Mr. Tedin.

  “I’m taking a few online classes in that direction.”

  “He also tells me that you have a way of putting yourself in unwise situations.”

  I wasn’t sure where he was going with this in the slightest.

  “Did he tell you that we’re going skating in Forest Park together this week?”

  I mentioned this to Detective Tedin not to brag about my pseudo-date but to try to get him on my side. It didn’t seem to work.

  “Why are you actually here?” asked Tedin.

  “I’m temping,” I said. “Like I told you.”

  “You’re not here because of any kind of case?” asked Tedin.

  And this was uncomfortable, because it got very close to lying.

  “It can’t be mysteries all the time,” I said. “Besides which, I don’t have a license yet.”

  “So you’re not here for any kind of case,” repeated Tedin, who was not going to let me dodge this question easily.

  “No case,” I said. “I’m not a detective yet.”

  This probably is a straight-up lie, but I’m choosing to interpret that detectives have cases and industrial spies have incidents. Therefore, no case. This sounded thin even in my own head, and so I tried unhinging Tedin from this line of inquiry with a question of my own.

  “You seem awfully investigative. Did something untoward happen here?”

  “We take every death seriously,” said Tedin, looking very uncomfortable. The detective clearly didn’t want me prying, which only made me want to pry that much more.

  “You obviously take this one seriously, seeing as there’s a coroner.”

  “There are a few factors that make Ms. Shaffer’s death look a little more suspicious.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, one of them is that you’re here.”

  Maybe I wasn’t such a small fish after all. “Cynthia died before I even showed up.”

  “We’re checking into that,” said Tedin. I suppose that should have worried me, but I hadn’t killed Cynthia Shaffer, quite transparently. Let him check. I had other things to think about. We spoke a bit more, and then Tedin had me send in Quintrell.

  I made my way back to my desk, and Vanetta came out of her office. She was holding a drink—possibly ginger ale, but I’m going to guess that it was something alcoholic.

  “Did the police finish with you?” she asked. This was an uninflected question, asked without any particular guile or even interest. Perhaps the exhaustion had pushed Vanetta over the edge into mental numbness.

  “They did. They’re with Quintrell now.”

  “That ought to be a fun interview. Buck up, Quintrell,” said Vanetta, toasting her glass in the air.

  “Did they talk to you?” I asked.

  “Not yet. I’m supposed to stay in this room until someone comes for me.”

  “I see,” I said. Did this mean that Vanetta was a suspect? I wasn’t sure what my secretarial duties were when it came to someone being a murder suspect.

  “You can go home now, if you want,” said Vanetta, picking up on my uncertainty.

  “Aren’t we terribly behind? I want to pitch in.”

  “You’re sweet,” said Vanetta with very little emphasis behind the words. “But I think we’re all going home after this. Even me. We’re all rattled and there’s no point in pretending otherwise. If DE doesn’t understand that, they can go to hell.”

  Again, these words were delivered with no emotion whatsoever. It was as if I was communicating with Vanetta via semaphore, or perhaps I was a ghost. Gone was the defiant exhausted spitfire of the morning, and now there was a quiet, exhausted cipher. Exhausted was really the only point of continuity.

  “Have you spoken to Lawrence?” I asked, still glimmering with secretarial energy.

  “No,” said Vanetta. “That’s a good thing to do. I should have thought of that. Why don’t you let him know what’s going on before you go home.”

  Alerting Lawrence of anything, I found, was hard going because he wasn’t answering his phone. It felt wrong to mention murder over voice mail—I felt like I was creating content for some BuzzFeed “10 Tackiest Voice Mails” listicle, but I did the best I could.

  “Lawrence: This is Dahlia—Nu-Cynthia—from Cahaba Apps. There’s been a, uh, incident here and apparently Cynthia Shaffer is dead. She was found in the storeroom. The police have come and are handling it. I’m sure they’ll want to speak with you, and you should get here as soon as possible. Also, the staff is going home when the police are finished with them, so don’t be surprised if no one picks up when you call. You should get here as soon as possible or call the police, or both.”

  Looking over it now, it doesn’t seem all that awful, but even as glib as Lawrence seemed to be, it didn’t feel right to drop so many bombs on him in succession.

  I was nowhere near as overworked as the rest of the Cahaba-ers, but I felt like I could have used a break from the chaos anyway. I drove part of the way home, stopping at La Patisserie Chouquette yet again, to hook up again with pastries and to file a report with Emily Swenson. This was going to be to a double-pastry day.

  I got a bear claw, sat down, and, having found a quiet corner of the shop, called Emily.

  “You’re not calling me from Cahaba, are you?” said Emily. “That would be very indiscreet.”

  “Why, Emily,” I said. “I’m the very picture of discretion.”

  “Naturally,” said Emily. “But why aren’t you at work?”

  “As it happens, the secretary I was replacing was still there,” I told her.

  Emily was silent for a moment and said: “I apologize. That shouldn’t have been possible.”

  “No,” I said. “She wasn’t working. She was dead, in the storeroom.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “We don’t know. The police are there now. But they brought in a coroner, so I think there’s at least an open question as to whether it was natural.”

  “But it wasn’t obviously unnatural.”

  “It wasn’t obviously anything. No one even knows why she’s there.”

  Emily was quiet, and I picked up the slack with a question of my own.

  “So, I’m sure this is completely ridiculous to ask, but you didn’t—by any chance—have Cynthia killed so I would have a job?”

  Emily laughed. “I had no idea you were capable of such narcissism.
”

  “I don’t think you’d be doing it for me.”

  “As much as I enjoy the idea of you thinking of me wielding that kind of power, no. I didn’t have anyone killed so you could do temp work.”

  “So I could spy.”

  “That either. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence.”

  Although, Emily sounded uncertain on this note, and I suddenly didn’t appreciate the power differential between us. Emily had the car and the map, and I was just her passenger. I couldn’t even work the radio.

  “How about you tell me who this client I’m working for is?”

  “I appreciate your investigative powers, Dahlia, but it’s really important that you’re directing them in useful ways. Were you able to put your hands on the code we were after?”

  “No,” I said, somewhat surprised that this was even still on the table. “I got a bit waylaid with the dead woman.”

  “Anything else you can tell me about Cahaba?”

  And so I told my findings to Emily, or at least as much as I knew. For as shocking as the conditions were, Emily didn’t seem shocked by any of it. Not the sleep deprivation, not the whistle-blowing letter, not Lawrence walking out, none of it. I couldn’t tell if she was already very well-informed or if this was just her professional demeanor. It would have been easier to read her if I could have seen her face—on the phone, I had no way to gauge her shock short of her audibly gasping, and Emily wasn’t the gasping type.

  When I finished speaking, Emily simply said:

  “Not bad for four hours.”

  “Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?”

  “We want the code. Although, if you want to find out who wrote that letter,” said Emily, “I certainly wouldn’t interject.”