Instead, I said:
“You realize that there’s a reporter up there who’s supposed to meet with you.”
Archie sat up suddenly and said: “Good grief, is that today?”
“Yes, it’s today.”
“They didn’t cancel that, after the murder and everything?”
“No,” I told him. I began the “n” of that word feeling exasperated and not a little irritated by this clown, but by the time I hit the “o” I was thinking about covering my ass. Technically, it was probably a secretarial duty of mine to have mentioned this to Archie. He wasn’t at yesterday’s staff meeting. He wasn’t at today’s. Probably I should have brought this up.
“I’ll go up there,” he said. “First help me move the speakers.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I went back upstairs—so much stair climbing at this job—and found that Charice had somehow gotten into the building and was now sitting at my workstation. She was wearing a wedding dress, an improbably lacey one, with sort of a ’70s flower-child vibe, although maybe I was just saying that because there were also wildflowers in her hair. Also, she had white doughnut powder on her hands and face.
I stared at her, agog, and then the phone rang, which she picked up and answered.
“Cahaba Apps, this is Charice, how may I direct your call?”
I could not hear the other end of the line, but after a beat Charice said:
“One moment, please,” and confidently pressed a series of buttons on the phone system before putting the receiver down.
“Am I dreaming this?” I asked. “Is this some sort of nightmare I’m living?”
“Dahlia,” said Charice. “It’s nice to see you too. I love your office. It’s so … dilapidated.”
“I take it that you’re getting married,” I said.
“You really are a pretty good detective,” said Charice, which ought to have been patronizing, given that she was wearing a full goddamn wedding dress and had flowers in her hair, but it somehow wasn’t.
“Why are you in my chair?” I asked.
“We’ve decided to strike now, while the iron is hot.”
“You can’t wait until the weekend?”
“Then the iron would be cold.”
“End of the workday?”
“Are you familiar with irons?” asked Charice.
“I just always assumed that you would have a big wedding.”
“That’s a very reasonable guess,” said Charice. “But I was thinking we could have a tiny impromptu wedding, and then blow all that money on the honeymoon. It feels like that would be more gratifying.”
It was hard to argue with that. It’s always hard to argue with Charice, but especially hard now. For one, I agreed with her, and for another, it’s rarely wise to argue with a woman in a wedding dress. I don’t know that I would call Charice a Bridezilla, but she was at least a Bride-Mothra.
“I can’t leave right now, Charice,” I said.
“We can wait for your lunch,” said Charice. “I want you to be my maid of honor.”
This, despite everything else, made me very happy, and if I had time to think about it, which I didn’t, I probably would have gotten a bit weepy.
“That’s really sweet,” I said.
“And you’re actually my only maid, so it doesn’t really matter how much honor you have.”
“Convenient,” I observed. “I’ll try to get away at lunch,” I said. “But I can’t really promise it.”
“I’ll wait for you. You won’t know I’m here,” said Charice, a woman in a wedding dress.
“On an unrelated note, have you seen a tiny black woman dragging a drunken blond guy?”
“They went in the bathroom.”
I returned to the same bathroom that I had found Joyce in earlier to see Lawrence leaning over the toilet. He wasn’t puking, just leaning over it.
“The lambs have stopped screaming,” said Vanetta, and it took me several seconds to realize that this was a Silence of the Lambs reference and not a screaming lamb problem that I would have to deal with in another room.
“Ha, ha,” I said, going for my second spoken laugh of the day. “I talked Archie down from the brink. He’s going to his office to entertain Ignacio.”
“Where did you get that woman at the desk from?”
What woman? Oh—Charice! “The one in the wedding dress?”
“Was that a wedding dress? I just thought she was wearing a lot of white.” Vanetta looked a bit embarrassed to have missed that particular beat. “I was a little distracted with Lawrence here.”
Lawrence, as if on cue, collapsed a little lower over the toilet.
“But she’s a good secretary,” said Vanetta. “That’s how you should act all the time.”
I was not in the mood to take secretarial pointers from a woman who had made me break up with her boyfriend, and was about to tell her so when Lawrence dry-heaved.
“Unnnngggh,” said Lawrence.
“Apparently you went out with Archie last night,” I said.
Vanetta shot daggers at me, but then relented and said: “I owed him an explanation.”
“Did you tell him everything?”
“You know what,” said Vanetta, standing up suddenly. “Never mind. I’m not discussing this right now. We have too many other problems for me to be worried about this small personal matter. There is a journalist waiting in someone’s office to do a puff piece—where is Ignacio, anyway?”
“I gave him to Tyler,” I said.
“Oh, that’s good. That’s very good. Although, he could probably hear Lawrence yelling from there.”
“Lawrence was yelling?”
“Sort of grunting. Sort of yelling,” said Vanetta. “So, plan B.”
“There’s a plan B?”
“We do Lawrence last now, and you get him sobered up. I’ll check in with Quintrell and Gary to see if they’re ready to meet with Ignacio yet. Also, and I don’t want to be alarmist about this, but I don’t think that Lawrence is drunk. I think that he has been drugged. Possibly by whoever killed Cynthia.”
“Joyce,” I corrected her. You mean whoever killed Joyce.”
“This is not the time to get fussy about names,” said Vanetta.
It struck me that Vanetta was taking the idea of a poisoner running unchecked through Cahaba rather lightly, and I asked her about it. “No,” said Vanetta. “It’s very concerning; it’s just that in this particular moment, it still ranks about third or fourth.”
“Shouldn’t we call the police, then?” I said.
“Nope!” said Vanetta in a tone of voice that was definitely unhinged. “We can solve this ourselves. We’re going to induce vomiting, and Lawrence is going to be absolutely fine, and this interview is going to be great, and the game is going to work perfectly when we show it to Ignacio, and Archie is going to give the appearance of a normal emotionally stable non-man-child, and everything is going to be wrapped up in a perfect beautiful bow BECAUSE I WILL IT INTO EXISTENCE.”
“We don’t know what he’s had,” I said. “We should call poison control.”
“And tell them what? We don’t know what he’s had. Look, induce vomiting. He’s not dying. If he starts dying, call the police, fine. But I know Lawrence. It’s probably just too much of some crazy good-times drug of his. I know him. I know his mother. I know his older sister, who is actually a really lovely person. If he dies, the blood is on my hands, but I’m telling you, Cynthia, that he is not going to die. Not today. Maybe tomorrow, and possibly because I will kill him myself, but not today.”
This was the sort of speech that could either be played behind patriotic music, or alternatively, be spliced up into a dystopian David Lynch film. It could go either way.
I grant you that this is questionable behavior (see what I did there?) but I went along with this plan, in part because I didn’t have a better one of my own.
“How are you going to induce vomiting?” I asked.
“I’v
e been sticking my finger down his throat,” said Vanetta.
That was Vanetta’s exit line, incidentally. She took off, and I looked at the sad and supine form of Lawrence Ussary and mused that I clearly did not have the same level of intimacy that he and Vanetta did, because I was not very keen on sticking my fingers in his throat.
But God, in his infinite wisdom, heard my prayers on this one small and single note, and lo and behold, a miracle was upon us.
Lawrence threw up doughnuts everywhere.
By “everywhere” I mean: the toilet, the floor, and my pants. I should state right up front, that in contrast to my last adventure, I will not be taking off my pants at all but will in fact leave them on me, despite their having vomit stains.
Also, Lawrence was suddenly much more talkative now, which I initially chalked up to the vomiting, but I realized later was because Vanetta was out of the room.
“Not poisoned,” said Lawrence. “M’okay.”
Then Lawrence threw up again. He was actually sticking his own fingers down his throat now, so I guess you could call him a self-starter. He threw up some more, this time getting almost everything in the toilet, although his shirt had looked a lot better this morning.
I had questions, but I wasn’t sure what level of conversation Lawrence was able to maintain. If I had to guess, I would have said “very low,” and so I asked my next question very slowly and very loudly, as though I were dealing with an elderly deaf man. Typing that out, I immediately realize the illogic of it, but let’s face it: When faced with adversity, many of us default to “elderly deaf man.”
“HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU WEREN’T POISONED?” I asked.
“Uunnggh,” said Lawrence. Then he took his finger—still covered in mouthy vomitus—and held it in front of his closed lips, in a librarian’s “shh” gesture.
“ARE YOU SHHING ME?” I asked. “ARE YOU FUCKING SHHING ME?”
“Roofied,” said Lawrence, sounding like death if death were also trying to keep his voice down. “Someone gave me a roofie.”
This was an encouraging response in that (1) I could understand what Lawrence was saying and that (2) it meant that Vanetta was correct and that he wasn’t dying, but it also led to other questions. Most principally, how would Lawrence know he had been roofied?
A note on Lawrence’s speech here—it’s super slurred. I’m not going to type it out that way, but if you like, here are some extra “S”s you can add to the document yourself:
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Go crazy.
Lawrence answered the question. “Because,” said Lawrence slowly and with more stuff coming out of his mouth. “I had some roofies in my desk. I got roofied with my own roofie.”
Aside from the fact that the sentence is ridiculous-looking on the page and almost Smurf-like in its construction, I was shocked and furious. I stood up, left the room, went to my desk, asked Charice for an éclair, took a bite out of it, then went back into the bathroom and hit Lawrence Ussary in the head with the éclair. Hard, although this did more damage to the pastry than his head.
“What the fuck is WRONG WITH YOU? Why would you have roofies? What kind of weird, creepy psychopath are you?”
“I don’t know,” said Lawrence. “A friend of mine asked if I wanted some and I said sure, why not? I didn’t drug a girl or anything.”
Another éclair smack.
“What the fuck kind of answer is that?”
“It just seemed like a fun thing to have,” said Lawrence.
Éclair smack again. They make great weapons, actually. “The hell kind of person does that? I mean, pull yourself together! Do you realize that you could be a father? What kind of father goes around with roofies in his desk because he has a friend?”
Éclair smack.
“What kind of guy even has a roofie-friend? That’s not the kind of friend you should have!”
Lawrence, for his part in this, was taking the pastry beating with relatively good graces, or at least he was until I got to the bit about him being a dad.
“Wait,” he said, suddenly pulling together a lot more clarity than I was comfortable with. “What did you say about me being a dad?”
Oh, bloody hell.
“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t say ‘dad.’ I said ‘cad.’ Rhymes with ‘dad.’”
“You said ‘father,’” said Lawrence, who sounded awfully clearheaded now, although his speech was still slurred, so keep coming with those “S”s.
“Did I?” I said.
Lawrence looked at me, and then he looked at the éclair. Looking at the éclair seemed to focus him somewhat. “Is Vanetta pregnant?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said, “absolutely not.” And I thought I was lying pretty well.
“Oh my God,” said Lawrence. “Vanetta is pregnant. Of course she is. That…” He paused for a very long time. “That explains everything. She’s been so weird lately.”
Then Lawrence started crying. What was it lately with me and crying men? “Oh my God, Vanetta is pregnant with my child, and I’ve screwed her. I’ve totally screwed her.”
“I did not say Vanetta was pregnant,” I said. “I said no such thing.”
But of course I had. I had given away the game. I screwed it up, the same way Cynthia had with Archie.
“Oh no,” I said. “I’m Cynthia. I’m just like Cynthia.”
“Are you just like Cynthia,” asked Lawrence, “or are you Cynthia? I never really quite got your name.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I told him.
“I have to call my sister,” said Lawrence, in what was perhaps the most human sentence I had ever heard him say. But then he stood up, and it was like a Jenga tower was trying to walk out of the room. He was back on the floor very soon, landing unceremoniously in his own puke.
Were this a movie of some kind, and Lawrence unequivocally the villain (although roofie-friend, Jesus Christ!), this is the sort of moment that would be the end of the story. Look, the villain has pathetically fallen in his own vomit, and there’s a wah-wah-wah of horns, and now we check in with the hero and heroine for the denouement and a closing montage of ’80s tunes. But it wasn’t that. Nobody’s story was ending, and Lawrence wasn’t a completely evil villain, just a self-righteous prick who needed to be a lot better than he was. (This is taking him at his word about the roofie. If that turns out to not be true, fuck this whole paragraph. Just get red Magic Marker and write over it with the word “EVIL.”)
Regardless, I didn’t have any time to deal with any of this, because I was having a breakdown of my own. Also, Charice was calling me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Dahlia,” said Charice.
“I’m Cynthia,” I yelled through the closed door, although who knows why at this point. Charice opened the door, and, my God, she was looking resplendent. I don’t know why it didn’t hit me earlier, maybe because she was sitting down. But she was beautiful—utterly beautiful. Speaking of hokey ’80s movies, there’s often this moment where the dad sees the daughter in the wedding dress and suddenly gets choked up. Or sometimes it’s the husband. I can’t recall the maid of honor ever doing it, but it happened now.
“My God,” I said. “You’re getting married.”
And Charice knew what I meant. I felt like it was a nice little moment until Charice said:
“You’re covered in vomit.”
She said it in an amused way, but it still broke the moment, which was probably just as well, because I did not have time for this.
“There are some things happening in there,” I said.
“Bring me a cell phone,” said Lawrence. “Call my sister!”
“Bring him nothing, and call no one,” I said.
“Okay,” said Charice, cheerfully ambivalent. “I hate to bother you, but you’ve got a visitor at the desk.”
There were few phrases that I wanted to hear less than “you’ve got a visitor at the desk” at this moment. Even Frank the UPS guy was not someone I wanted t
o spend a moment with, and he had adorable grandchildren photos. I’m not being ironic there. I walked back to the desk to find Cynthia Shaffer staring at me.
Cynthia, I noted, was not dressed for work—by which I mean dog washing. She looked more the part of the secretary than me, with a mauve top and even a red-ruby brooch that looked oddly familiar.
As I saw her, I felt my face collapse like a soufflé, or a meringue pie that you didn’t do a good job of sealing the edges of. God had brought this woman to me to punish me. This is what I got for going to that church-knitting thing drunk.
“Dahlia,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Why?”
“Masako was telling me that you’re some kind of secret detective.”
I just looked at her.
“Masako told you this?”
“Yes,” said Cynthia.
“Masako Ueda?”
“I don’t know her last name. Tyler’s girlfriend.”
“She told you I was a secret detective.”
“She said you do odd jobs on the side.”
“Yeah,” I said, confused. “That’s true.”
“There’s something I want to hire you for,” said Cynthia. “I’m still trying to find my old Christmas tea.”
What? I didn’t say that, but it hung over the situation.
“Christmas tea,” said Cynthia. “You know, like Celestial Seasonings. I think Lawrence might have stolen it.”
“You want me to find Christmas tea,” I asked. “You can’t just buy more tea.”
“It’s limited edition,” said Cynthia. “Is this enough?”
And then Cynthia put five dollars on my desk. What the holy fuck. Five dollars. Am I Encyclopedia Brown now? But I took the five bucks, because why not? And hell, we’d practically given Lawrence truth serum, so it would be an easy job.
The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss Page 21
