CHAPTER TEN

I briefed Daniel on the whole Swan situation, who received the information with equal parts of poise and incredulity. Mostly this meant that he seemed very calm and unsurprised by the development, but repeated everything I told him back to me as a question.

“And he was in his Skivvies and handcuffed to a chair?”

“Yes.”

“And you carried him up the stairs?”

“Yes.”

“Still in just Skivvies?”

“As I said, yes.”

“Still strapped to the chair?”

“That’s right.”

“And you did this while I was giving a statement to the police?”

And so on. But he didn’t bug out his eyes or anything or, for that matter, run screaming. He gave the impression of being a reporter who wanted to get all the improbable details right. And he followed me all the way up to the fifth floor of the Endicott without so much as a raised eyebrow.

He didn’t even raise an eyebrow when I used Swan’s card key to open the door to find Swan flat on his back, still handcuffed to the chair.

“Who’s there?” asked Swan. “All I can see is the ceiling.”

“It’s me again,” I told him. “And I brought that male friend.”

“Thank God,” Swan said. He was happy to see me, but not happy to see me, if you get my drift. “I fell over.”

“What happened?” I asked him.

“I was trying to get the handcuffs off,” said Swan. “That’s what happens in the movies. Not the falling over, I mean. The escaping. I ended up just falling over.”

“This is Daniel,” I told Swan, then whispered to Daniel, “Be bro-y with him. This calls for guy talk.”

Daniel returned Swan to an upright position, a task he accomplished with an astonishingly small amount of effort.

“DUDE,” said Daniel, trading in his Aussie accent for some kind of Californian Dell Guy. “What the hell happened to you, bro?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Swan.

“You meeting some sweet piece of ass on the sly, and she cuff you to this folding chair?”

“Something like that.” Swan sighed.

“Bro, we’ve all been there. Me, I’ve had some serious-ass chair-handcuffing problems. It’s all cool. Right, Double D?”

It took me a moment to realize that I was “Double D.” I really did want to smack Daniel at this point, but I had given him the instructions to be bro-y. I just didn’t mean this bro-y. So I just said:

“Check yourself.”

Which did nothing to stop him, or slow him down, and in this way he was Charician again. Which was incredibly irritating and yet also sort of a comfort. I truly wished Charice were here, but maybe palling around with the two of them together wouldn’t be the end of the world.

“Yeah,” said Swan. “I’m not going to discuss any of this with people who aren’t my friends. Frankly, I’m not sure I want to talk about it with friends.”

Daniel apparently took this to mean that he should compliment Swan so that he could buddy up to him. However, most of the usual things you would compliment a stranger on were unavailable—clothing, accomplishments, an amusing joke.

“Cool briefs, dude,” said Daniel, going for the only article of clothing available to him. “What are those, cotton?”

“I don’t know,” said Swan. “It is made from whatever underwear is made from. Can you guys get me out of these handcuffs?”

“We’re going to try,” I told him.

“Daniel, you said you’ve got a Swiss Army knife? You wanna see what you can do?”

And Daniel went around to Swan’s, again, let’s say badonkadonk, to see what kind of progress he could make. I was becoming iffy about Daniel bro-ing any info out of Swan, and so I took on the interview for myself.

“Listen, Swan,” I told him. “I get that this is an embarrassing story you’d rather not remember, but I’m going to have to ask you some really direct questions about how you ended up in that chair.”

“Why should I talk to you? You’re not the police.”

“No,” I considered. “But I’m a private detective, and I’m also the woman that saved your sorry ass. And am still saving your ass, unless you’d like us to leave.”

Swan sighed. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

I wasn’t sure whether I should tell him about the murder next or wait until the end. Probably for the purposes of interviewing, it was better to wait until everything was over. But it felt sleazy to not mention it to him, and so I led with it.

“First, I need to tell you why the police were actually around.”

Swan’s eyes narrowed. He was very interested.

“There’s no easy way to tell you this,” I said. “But a man was murdered in a storeroom on the same floor as you. I found the body and called the police.”

Swan looked appropriately shocked, almost even a little pale. This is how normal people react when exposed to a murder.

“Wow,” he said quietly.

“You don’t think there’s any chance that whoever cuffed you to that chair”—and I went with gender-neutral language here, because what did I know?—“was also involved with the murder?”

“It was a girl,” said Swan, noticing my tiptoeing around gender, and apparently being irritated by it. “You can just say ‘girl.’”

“Hell yeah, it was,” said Daniel, slapping Swan’s ass. Too much, Daniel. Too much.

“So this girl. Do you think she was involved? Who was she?”

Swan was getting less and less agreeable the more I interacted with him. Admittedly, he had been having a rough morning, but there was something incredibly resentful and dyspeptic in his storytelling.

“First,” said Swan. “I don’t know who it was. I never saw her face.”

“How,” I started, trying to get the question out as neutrally as possible, “does that work?”

“So I checked into the hotel late last night,” said Swan. “I really needed to network, because my partner flaked out, and I didn’t have anyone to play with in the tournament. So I was planning on going out to this restaurant mixer thing to see if I couldn’t find some other singleton to join up with me.”

“Dude, that SUCKS.”

“I know, right? Well, anyway, I’m getting ready, and I get this phone call at the hotel room. It’s from a fan of mine—I stream a little, you know.”

“A female fan,” I guess.

“Yeah, and, like, super flirty. Actually, not even really flirty. More … dominant? She was more like ‘We are going to have sex tonight. We are going to do the thing.’”

“Getting some action!” said Daniel.

“You’ve got to stop doing that,” I told Daniel.

“I sort of like it, actually,” confessed Swan. “Anyway, not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t get phone calls like that very often. Or, well, ever. I’m the guy at the bar who tries to buy you a drink, but the bartender can’t hear me.”

“What, dude? Chicks are totally after a piece of this.”

“Honestly, no,” said Swan. “And so, I don’t know, she was kind of, I don’t know, phone sex-y.”

“What?! High five, dude!” said Daniel, despite the fact that Swan was still firmly handcuffed to the chair.

“There may have been phone sex.”

“That’s awesome, brah,” said Daniel.

I was getting really irritated with Daniel at this point, but it actually seemed that his dude-bro affect was getting the job done, so I bit my tongue. I’m nothing if not objective oriented.

“It was awesome,” said Swan, who looked dreamy for a moment. “It was pretty awesome.”

Normally this is where I would say the word “vomit” aloud, possibly with hand gestures, but Detective Dahlia doesn’t judge. Or she judges later, when she gets home. Also, I had done enough vomiting for the day already. I’d have been lucky to manage a dry heave.

“How did she get you downstairs?”

“She, uh, said that she wanted me to blindfold myself and leave my door unlocked. Then she came in here and brought me downstairs. Escorted me, I mean. She escorted me downstairs. To the storeroom. She said she wanted to try something crazy.”

“Dude,” said Daniel. “Freaky.”

“I know,” said Swan. “I wasn’t really thinking at that point. I mean, not, clearly. But she walked me down there, handcuffed me to a folding chair in there—which at the time seemed AWESOME—made out with me a little bit, and then left.”

“She just left?”

“She just left,” said Swan. “She said she wanted to teach me a lesson.”

“A lesson for what?” asked Daniel.

“I don’t know,” said Swan, who sounded troubled now. “She didn’t say. It sounded sexy at the time. I kept thinking that this was some kind of game and that she was going to pop back in there, but she didn’t come back. I kind of thought you were her for a little bit. I mean, right at the beginning.”

“You were in there all night?” asked Daniel. “Dude.”

“Did she sound like me?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“You slept in there, bro?” asked Daniel.

“All night.”

“You must have to pee,” said Daniel.

“Like a horse,” said Swan. “I didn’t feel like I could ask Dahlia to help me with that.”

“You thought right,” I told him.

“If you can’t get those cuffs off, you’re gonna have to take matters into your own hands.”

“I got you, bro,” said Daniel, for whom helping another fella pee was apparently no big deal. Well, he was in Equus.

“How are you coming with those handcuffs?” I asked Daniel.

“Piece of cake, D,” said Daniel, in a confident and bro-y voice. He then mouthed to me, in a less confident and concerned manner: I can’t fucking open these.

“You can’t open them, can you?” asked Swan.

“We’re working on it,” I told Swan.

“I don’t want to put pressure on you guys. But my bladder is going to explode. I’m in like a Tycho Brahe situation.”

“Siri,” I said, turning to the Internet. “How do you open handcuffs?”

Siri suggested a YouTube video, which we all watched. The man in the video suggested using a shiv, a specially purchased tool, or a bobby pin, at which point Swan and Daniel both looked expectantly at me, as though I were some sort of girl detective from the forties.

“Dudes,” I said, apparently infected by all this bro-talk, “I’m not a fourteen-year-old girl who loves horses.”

They continued to look at me.

“I don’t even have long hair.”

“Well, we’re fucked,” said Swan. “I’m going to stay in this chair for the rest of my life.”

“Actually,” I told Swan. “Daniel and I were going to go out for lunch, and I was thinking we could invite a guy to join us. Someone who would have just the tools we need.”

“Please don’t leave again.”

“I think we’re going to have to.”

Swan sighed. “Okay. But Daniel. Bro?”

“Yeah, buddy,” said Daniel.

“It’s time for you to free the beast.”