“But I don’t understand—there was that proposal for a new art style, and the bit with voice acting?”
“That proposal is probably all that’s going to survive. DE loves Archie, so they’re going to keep him. DE does shit like this all the time—look at what happened at Wayward Studios in Austin.”
I hate when knowledgeable people throw out references like that, as though you are also an expert in the field and can reasonably follow along. “Why, look at what happened to William McKinley’s vice president, Garret Hobart! The parallels are countless!” I mean, honestly.
I had never heard of Wayward Studios in Austin, and I did not know what had happened there, though I could at least gather that it was Not Good. But I was still processing DE’s motivations, because I was not used to dealing with a corporate mind, which despite what the Supreme Court tells us, is not like the human mind at all.
“Hang on a sec—we have a visitor tomorrow—why did DE instruct us to impress this goon if we’re about to be sold off?”
“It’s a secret, Dahlia. That’s the reason.”
“Then how did you hear about it?”
“I know a guy who works in their Contract Department—I like to know which way the wind is blowing.”
I was still putting this together.
“So do you think that the murder scared DE off, and now they want to unload the company because of the bad publicity?”
“Dahlia, this has been in the works for weeks,” said Tyler. “I’m just hearing about it now, but it’s been brewing for ages.”
“So why is this relevant?”
“Find out who knew about this, and I’ll bet you find your whistle-blower.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I spent the night dreaming about “Moss & Shuler Investigations” or at least about how good it would look on a door—painted in black, maybe Arial small caps, maybe Helvetica, but something with dignity. It’d be the kind of pane of glass that you’d want to throw a guy through. I don’t want to make too much more of this, because I also had a less relevant dream in which Marilyn Quayle had inexplicably been elected president, except that we were also on a boat somehow, and the boat was also America. So it’s not like the dream was a prophecy, is what I am saying. (Although, if by the time you are reading this Marilyn Quayle has become president, perhaps it was.)
This was my third, count them, third day at Cahaba, and I already felt like I had worked there for thousands of years. I did not particularly want to go in, which is usually the sign that you are now a veteran.
Of course, also weighing on that decision was the fact that I was going to have to deal with Ignacio Granger, Irritating Journalist, and also the fact that apparently the company had been sold down the river. Probably that was going to come out into the open soon, if not from Cahaba, at least from Tyler, who did not strike me as the sort of person who could sit on secrets for a long period of time.
My bag of pastries trick had done the job earlier, and so I decided to redouble my efforts now, swinging by La Patisserie Chouquette for what was undoubtedly an epic haul of baked goods. I wanted a bag of pastries that would cover financial ruin, betrayal, and another murder, should they come up.
And as it turns out, I would need it.
Unsurprisingly, I was not the first person in the office, despite getting in twenty-five minutes early. Gary and Quintrell had both spent the night, again, and it’s hard to get there earlier than people who never leave. I was somewhat, if not terrifically, more surprised to find that Vanetta was there, having also spent the night, and that even Tyler had come in a bit early.
I walked over to Quintrell’s and Gary’s desks, which had at this point merged into a single station of exhaustion and half-eaten pizza, and asked:
“What gives, you guys?” I asked. “The deadline is over. It’s like you have Stockholm syndrome.”
“We have to make this work,” said Quintrell. “It has to be perfect.”
“It has to be functional,” said Gary.
“Is it perfect?” I asked.
“It’s functional,” said Gary. “But yeah, we should have gone home.”
I was feeling a knot in my stomach just looking at these two. They had been working so hard—so very hard—at code that was going to be taken away from them. Or just thrown out. All this time they believed that what they were making would outlast them, and it’s just ephemeral performance art. But they didn’t notice my concern. Why would they? They hadn’t slept.
“Old habits are hard to break,” said Quintrell. “And I think I was beginning to freak out about getting arrested.”
“Just now?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Quintrell. “It sort of hits you slowly.”
Freaking out over getting arrested was not the sort of thing that would hit me slowly. It would hit me suddenly, like a shovel to the face. But Quintrell and I were obviously very different people.
“I’ll tell you when it hit you,” said Gary. “At 2:34 last night. You just started shaking.”
“That was the caffeine,” said Quintrell.
“It was also the caffeine. But it was the arrest, too, because you kept talking about it,” said Gary. “You wouldn’t shut up about it. I mean, I didn’t mind except that you weren’t making a lot of sense.”
“I wish I’d been there,” I said, in a mercenary combination of empathy and a desire for clues. “Why did the police arrest you?”
“They found some pills in my desk and they thought it was methadone.”
“It wasn’t methadone?” I asked.
“Of course it wasn’t methadone,” said Quintrell. “Why would I have methadone?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What was it, then?”
In retrospect, this is an impossibly personal question, but at the time I threw it out there with no regrets.
“Not methadone,” said Quintrell.
“He’s shy,” said Gary. “It must be something embarrassing. What is it, Viagra?”
“No, it’s not Viagra,” said Quintrell, for once actually irritated.
“Propecia?” I guessed.
Quintrell just looked at me. “I’m already bald. Why would I be taking Propecia?”
“What’s the mystery pill that the police thought was methadone?”
“Dulcolax,” said Quintrell.
“What’s that?” I asked, although after I posed the question, I realized that any drug with the word “lax” in it is probably none of my business.
“If you must know, it is a stool softener. I keep them unlabeled in my desk, because I don’t like everyone knowing that I need a stool softener.”
“Is that why you cry in the bathroom?” asked Gary.
“Damn your eyes,” said Quintrell.
Despite having initiated this conversation, I felt it was very important to end it now, before it got any more terrible. Thankfully, I had presents for Gary and Quintrell.
“Coffee,” I said, presenting a gallon’s worth of coffee in a cardboard box, courtesy of La Patisserie Chouquette.
“We have coffee here,” said Quintrell.
“Arguably too much of it,” said Gary.
“But this coffee comes in a box,” I told them. “Which makes it better.”
“I do like the way you bring us things,” said Gary.
“Also, I have doughnuts,” I said. At which point I was literally attacked by Gary and Quintrell. Okay, fine, figuratively attacked. But it was like feeding chum to sharks. The ideal feeding situation would have involved handing them doughnuts through a protective cage.
The frenzy was interrupted by Lawrence Ussary—Lawrence—who was also, apparently, in early.
“Why is everyone here early?” I asked. “Was there a time change I didn’t know about?”
“We are dedicated to our work,” said Lawrence, at which point Gary fake-coughed while simultaneously saying something like “doughnut thief.”
“Why are you back here, Lawrence?” asked Quintrell. “It ma
kes me anxious. You don’t come back here to where normal people work.”
“He’s here for the doughnuts,” said Gary. “He’s here to steal the doughnuts of the proletariat.”
“Not just that,” said Lawrence. “But to partake of some of this cardboard-shaped coffee.” He shook his empty coffee cup in the air.
“Vanetta’s called for a staff meeting at nine,” said Quintrell.
“How fun for you,” said Lawrence.
Lawrence looked as though he had something else to say, or at least, as though he expected one of us to ask him something, but he didn’t say anything, and no one asked. He just kept looking at Quintrell and awkwardly moving his coffee cup. He looked a bit like a beggar. I mean, a really rich and well-dressed beggar, but with the shaky mug he definitely had an “alms for the poor” vibe.
“Well,” he said, when he was done with that bit of acting, “I’m off.”
This whole interaction was weird, but it was early, and so I poured some coffee myself, figuring that with caffeine the world might make more sense. It worked, sort of.
“Quintrell, I think that was your apology from Lawrence,” Gary explained.
“What, that stagecraft?” asked Quintrell.
“I think it was,” said Gary. “Lawrence is a man of great subtlety.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Today’s staff meeting was the most orderly that I’d ever seen it, although admittedly I didn’t have a large sample size. Vanetta looked cheerful and optimistic and was wearing a sort of bronze power suit that said “don’t fuck with me.” Tyler was looking preppy in a Calcutta collar and brown blazer, and even Gary was less schlubby. I think there had been a general effort to dress up for Mr. Granger, and I hoped he appreciated it. This was what it felt like to not be on a sinking ship. It seemed like yesterday’s good news, such as it was, had finally percolated through. The poor saps.
Not present, once again, was Archie. This time his absence went entirely without comment, almost without observation. So much so, in fact, that I took it that there was a natural and mundane reason that he wasn’t around. This turned out to not be the case, but I get ahead of myself.
“Good morning, everyone,” said Vanetta. “I didn’t ask you, but I can see we all dressed up a little. We’re looking good, fellas.”
“I always look good,” said Gary, who, in point of order, did not look good on this or any other occasion I had seen him.
“Mr. Granger should be here in an hour or so, and DE would like for this event to go as smoothly as possible. He’s going to do what is called in the business a puff piece, and while I usually hate this kind of thing, I think it’s the least we can do for our corporate overlords.”
“All praise the Dark Ones,” said Gary, who had clearly already had too much caffeine.
“Dahlia,” said Vanetta. “You’re going to get to play hostess here. Lead Mr. Granger around the office, and make nice.”
“I am the physical embodiment of niceness,” I said, which didn’t even prompt a snarky remark.
“Start at Lawrence’s office,” said Vanetta, “and after a half hour pick him up and escort him to Archie.”
“Does Lawrence know about this?” I asked.
“This was all Lawrence’s idea,” said Vanetta. “He’s awful, but this kind of business-media relationship thing is his bread and butter.”
“It’s good to know you have a reason for keeping him around,” said Gary.
Vanetta did not respond to this remark either. Like I said, it was early.
“Gary and Quintrell, that means you get our visitor at eleven, and then I’ll have him from eleven thirty until whenever he leaves. When you’re not with him, look busy and productive, and when you are with him, seem engaging and act like you are not busy and have all the time in the world.”
“Those are opposite things,” said Gary.
“Ours is a house of lies,” said Vanetta.
“When do I see him?” asked Tyler.
“Let me check my schedule. Ah, yes, that would be never,” said Vanetta.
This irritated Tyler more than I thought it should, because he became positively peevish.
“I’m interesting. I could be profiled.”
“I’m not suggesting that you aren’t interesting,” said Vanetta. “But he didn’t mention wanting to meet with middle management.”
“I used to be a musician, you know,” said Tyler. “PocketApp called my score to CoffeeQuest Two ‘bracing.’”
“Please don’t do CoffeeQuest stories again,” said Gary. “We cannot endure them.”
I was keeping an eye, as best I could, on the desk in case of the—what I perceived to be unlikely—circumstance that someone would show up there. This was fortunate, because someone did show up there, just now, in a green paisley shirt.
“Hang on,” I said to the group, and left to greet the visitor, closing the door behind me, because I am a model of discretion.
“Cynthia Shaver?” said the man in front of me.
“Oh my God,” I told him.
This is probably the wrong response to any journalist visiting you, puff piece or no, but as I was not expecting Ignacio Granger to arrive for another fifty-five minutes, I was somewhat taken aback. I assumed it was Ignacio Granger, because who else would call me Cynthia Shaver, with an odd and distinctly menacing emphasis on the “v,” but I did double-check.
“Are you Mr. Granger? We weren’t expecting you to be here for another hour.”
“At last we meet. And please, call me Ignacio.”
Okay: a lot of simultaneous thoughts here, but I’ll try to turn through them in an orderly way. First and foremost: Did I screw up? I had been so occupied by the mysteries here, with the murders and the corporate espionage, had I actually just screwed up on secretarial stuff? Was he really supposed to be here at nine all along? Or was this jackass just early?
Secondly: I had sort of assumed that with the first name Ignacio, our touring journalist would be Hispanic, but in fact, Mr. Granger looked to be exceedingly Irish. He had short, wavy red hair and peach skin with freckles and was even wearing green. He looked like the leprechaun on a box of Lucky Charms.
Thirdly, I still had to deal with my ridiculous explanation that my name was Cynthia, which was now coming back to haunt me like we were in the final act of a Greek play.
Of these, I asked about question two, because it was the safest territory.
“You don’t look like an Ignacio,” I told him.
Ignacio responded to this in a way that suggested that he had been subjected to this observation hundreds of thousands of times. He wasn’t irritated or bored, but somehow both together in a DQ Blizzard of petulant emotions. I shall call him boritated. He looked so wearied by the inquiry, that detective or not, I felt guilty for pointing it out.
“I was named for the cabbie that delivered my mother to the hospital,” he said. “There was a whole thing, family lore, big story, blah, blah, blah.”
“It sounds fascinating,” I said, despite the fact I could clearly tell that Ignacio did not want to discuss his name. It couldn’t have been clearer if he had been wearing a T-shirt that said: DON’T ASK ME ABOUT MY NAME. But there I was.
“It’s really not,” said Ignacio.
“I find names fascinating,” I said, which was also not true, but I felt like I needed to stall this goon for forty-five minutes, and we had to talk about something.
“The full version of the story isn’t that great. Plus,” said Ignacio, displaying a reporter’s instincts for separating fact from fiction, “I think my family has exaggerated it.”
“Parents lie about names,” I told him. I wanted to tell him the origin of my name, which my mom said came from a dream, where she was walking in a field of dahlias, and which I later learned was bullshit, because she just ripped the name from Knots Landing. I couldn’t tell that story, however, so I made up one for Cynthia.
“My parents claimed that they named me for Cynthia Ozick, th
e poet,” I told them. “But it turned out that I was named after my grandmother’s dog.”
This appeared to be the right thing to say to Ignacio Granger, because he smiled and seemed less odious.
“Could be worse,” he said. “You could be named Fido.”
I feel as though there is undoubtedly some hipster named Fido reading this passage now, and to him, I apologize. These are Ignacio’s words, not mine. Feel free to cross out the phrase “less odious” in the preceding paragraph, and replace it with “more odious” or even “a real jerkface.” Or just improvise, Fido! You are the captain of your own ship.
“Things could always be worse,” I said, probably hollowly, because at the time I was thinking: “This is rock bottom.”
“So your name is really Cynthia Shaver?”
“Yes,” I said, quickly and confidently, because stalling on an easy question like “what is your name?” is not the way to inspire trust.
“You wanna show me an ID that says that?” asked Ignacio.
“No,” I said. “I’m not doing that.”
Then I stood up, confidently strode to Vanetta’s office, and said: “Give me just a second to let everyone know you’re here.” Ignacio wanted to follow behind me, because he is an ass, but I told him to sit down and to wait a damned moment, and that we would be with him in a second. Only I didn’t say “damned.” At least not with my lips. I said it with looks and with gestures.
I reentered the office to find that Tyler was still whining about not getting a special visit from this idiot journalist. It was hard to diagnose the origin of this obsession, given that he alone knew that the company was doomed, but we all have our private quirks. I interrupted his whining, which brought me goodwill from everyone, even Tyler.
“Ignacio Granger is here early,” I said. “Surprise!”
Thankfully the gang wasn’t hit as hard by this news as I had feared might be the case.
“Nothing ever goes as planned,” said Vanetta. “We’ll just have to move up our schedule. Does that work for everyone?”
The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss Page 19
