CHAPTER FIVE

I woke up at 7:55 in the morning to repeated banging on our front door. Charice wasn’t in her room, having apparently never returned from her tailing of Maddocks and Shuler. If I were a better person, this might have worried me. But I rather liked the idea of the detectives being called away to a pressing crime—pursuing a serial killer through the streets of the city, let’s say—all the while being hounded by an invisible Charice, always at the edge of the shadows. That’s Charice in a nutshell. Great fun as long as she’s hounding someone else.

It was because of my certainty that the noise must have been Charice, however, that I elected to open the door in my nightgown and Ewok slippers.

Instead of Charice I found a redheaded thirtysomething with a death glare. She looked like a movie star—wavy red hair that was fit for a costume ball—but her outfit suggested business. She was wearing some orange-sherbet-colored cashmere jacket thing with a teal top, which I admit is not a color combination one usually associates with crisp efficiency, but it was about the details, the overall effect. And not simply that the cashmere thing appeared to be worth more than my car. This scowling redhead, whoever she was, was Put Together.

“What the fuck does it take to get you to open your door?” she asked.

But she wasn’t all glares—there was an amused tone to her, that much was clear.

“Would you like to come in?” I said, more out of caffeine-less confusion than manners. But the question was silly; she was already in.

“So you’re the detective?” she asked. “Not quite what I expected.”

I nodded, forgetting in the confusion of the morning that Detective Maddocks had asked me to stop saying that.

“Well,” she said, dubiously assessing me. “I suppose Jonah must have had his reasons. Anyway, I’m Emily Swenson,” she said, holding out her hand, which had a lovely silver hoop on it, which, again, was probably valued at more than my car. I should stop saying that, though, because my car is an awfully low bar to clear. “I’m here to make your day,” she said.

I was, at this point, very confused, because Emily had gone into the kitchen and was pouring a glass of orange juice. She was also assessing the contents of our refrigerator, mostly with a series of sighs and a “We eat out a lot, do we?”

I was incredibly confused, but my thought was that at least the apartment was looking good and not gussied up for some arcane theme party. And the place cleans up nice. People are always surprised by Charice’s apartment in its nonparty state. Yes, Charice is as mercurial and eclectic a person as I’ve ever met, but our place is a parade of ecru and beige. Occasionally pops of color appear, but they never seem to stick around. The only permanent bit of frippery is this giant scowling Max Beckmann portrait in the kitchen, which is not a face you want looking at you while you nurse a hangover. The painting is so at odds with the apartment, Charice, and breakfast that I actually asked her about it, and she told me, gravely, “I don’t discuss the Beckmann.” She said it just like you’re imagining, as though she were the heroine in a Daphne du Maurier novel. Probably she was putting me on.

But I digress. My point is that the place wasn’t a post-collegiate hellhole of crusty shag carpet and spilled Dixie cups half filled with cheap beer. It looked good, and a judgment from a stranger about my living standards is the king of things that piss me off. Even though everything was Charice’s, I wanted to reach for a clever retort, or at least a fuck-you, which is sort of like a clever retort, except for the part about being clever. But I was still so sleepy and confused—I was kind of running under a vague assumption that Emily was a reality-television host who was going to rate my refrigerator contents and then challenge a high-class chef to make a meal out of its contents. Is that a show? It could be.

After some bleary-eyed bleating at her, I eventually found the wherewithal to ask: “I’m sorry, why are you here?”

Emily was deep into the refrigerator. “I’m a lawyer for Jonah Long’s parents. Like I said, I’m here to make your day. And possibly breakfast, since you appear to need it.”

I don’t usually let strangers enter my home and make me breakfast, but I was still emerging through the substrata of sleep. Having processed, at least dimly, what was happening, I was now in the vanity layer. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t have answered the door in my slippers and nightgown, but they would have been different slippers and a different nightgown. I closed up as much as I could. And my hair. I had to do something about my hair, which at this hour possessed topography-defying tendrils that suggested I was wearing some sort of fuzzy Cthulhu on my head.

Emily didn’t appear to notice my distress at all but instead seemed dismayed that we had but a single egg, which she set on the counter and sighed at. My refrigerator is best described in terms of stark minimalism, and this too did not seem to please Emily Swenson. “Why don’t you clean yourself up—you look like you’ve had a rough night—and when you come back we’ll have breakfast and talk business.”

It was a good plan. And on the one hand, Emily was actively offering me what I would have proposed myself, were I fully awake. And yet, I could feel myself beginning to bristle at her. This comely woman, with her cashmere charm and apparent cooking skills. I wanted to say, “I have not been drinking; this is simply what I look like in the morning,” but I decided this would not improve my station with her. She’d probably lay me out on the counter and sigh at me in the same way as that lone egg.

I retreated to my room and did the best I could in two minutes. I grabbed jeans and a gray sweater off the floor—wrinkled, but better than my bare flesh—and stuffed my hair into the first hat I could find—a pink Jigglypuff toboggan cap my ex-boyfriend had bought off Etsy for me. I returned to the room to find that Emily had made a perfect little omelet for me.

Emily raised an eyebrow at my attire, but it otherwise escaped comment. “You had fresh dill,” she said. “I wouldn’t have expected that, but there it is.”

I, of course, had nothing to do with the dill at all, but I took the praise anyway. I also ate the omelet, because hey, omelet, and now that I was awake I wasn’t going to kill myself trying to impress a woman who had sort of broken into my home.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” said Emily. “Probably you are starting to wonder if I’m here to sue you somehow. You were hired by Jonah as a detective, and then he’s murdered later. I suppose in some lights, this might be considered a poor performance at detecting.”

I hadn’t wondered that, actually, although now that Emily was spelling it out, it seemed like a thing that I should perhaps have been worried about. I would have done a spit-take, but the omelet was too good and—especially with just the one egg—I didn’t want to waste it.

Instead I said, with food in my mouth, “You’re not here to sue me.”

“Oh?” said Emily, cocking her head. “What makes you say that?”

I swallowed the last of my food. “A hunch,” I said. Which is really the last resort of the cornered detective. Still, it made Emily smile at me, more than the fresh dill even.

“I’m not here to sue you, at least not today. Today,” said Emily, sitting down at our kitchenette bar with me, “I’m here to hire you.”

“Hire me for what?” I said, and I would have done the spit-take now if I had any food left.

“Finish the job. Jonah wanted you to recover something called—I believe it was—the Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing, from the Kingdoms of Zoth. Jonah’s family would like for you to continue in that task. As you may know, Jonah was murdered by a copy of the weapon, and so the family has taken a particular interest in Zoth.”

“The police don’t think that Zoth is related to the crime,” I told her. It perhaps wasn’t the most politic thing I could have said, but it made her smirk at me.

“Now where would you have heard that?” she asked.

“Just from a source,” I said, neglecting to explain that the source was a five-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent sound recorder from the Tamayochi Corporation. But it was a good answer, because I went up three more spices in Emily Swenson’s estimation. I was up to marjoram now.

“I’ve heard that as well,” said Emily. “And I’m inclined to believe—for the moment—that the police are correct in their estimations. But the family would obviously like to play all of the angles. Recovering Jonah’s spear would, at worst, do no harm to the case and fulfill one of Jonah’s last wishes. Which would be a comfort to my clients. And at best, well… it may prove useful. The police are not”—and here I felt there was an unspoken unlike myself—“completely infallible.”

I felt that Emily was gauging my face for some sort of reaction. I wasn’t sure what reaction I was supposed to give, so I just drank orange juice instead. This is probably what Sam Spade did when lawyers broke into his kitchen. Only with bourbon.

Emily continued. “Obviously, the task now is more difficult than simply taking a boy out to dinner. What’s expected of you now is more complicated, and you will be compensated accordingly.”

Emily slid a check facedown across to me on the counter. Either she was a prestidigitator or she had been holding it the whole time. Probably the latter, although the more I knew her, the more skill sets she seemed to have. I turned the check over and promptly fell off the swivel stool I was sitting on. I don’t mean that metaphorically—I fell off my chair. I didn’t land on the floor because, legs—but to perfectly clear: Ass left chair. And why wouldn’t it? The check was for ten thousand dollars.

At first I thought it was a typo. Well, no, at second thought I thought it was a typo—my first thought was AAARRRGGGH!—but I checked both fields and there it was, typed out: ten-thousand-dollars-and-no-cents. At that point I began to babble.

“Listen, Ms. Swenson,” I began.

“It’s breakfast; I’m fine with Emily.”

“Emily, I’m not the person you want for this. You can find someone more qualified, you can find someone more experienced, you can find someone more—”

And she cut me off, Emily Swenson, with the same cucumber-scented efficiency with which she had entered my apartment and cooked me an omelet. “Let me give you a friendly piece of advice, Dahlia. Don’t talk yourself out of a good thing. And besides which, this decision was not made idly. There are three strong reasons you are a good choice for our little job. One, you’re the person Jonah wanted, which is not to be understated. Two, it is eight in the morning and you are wearing what appears to be Star Wars slippers and what I believe is a Pokémon hat. You know your way around the world of geeks, which, as clever as I am, I do not. And three? You’re a complete no one, and if things go badly, the family can throw you to the wolves.”

She shot a smile at me, which suggested that she was joking. And also that she was, on some deeper level, probably not. “Take the ten thousand dollars.”

“Detective Maddocks has made it very clear that I’m not to represent myself as a detective.”

“I don’t recall mentioning detective work,” Emily said with a smile. “I believe I have carefully avoided the phrase.”

“I thought you wanted me to—”

“The family would like to hire you as a funeral planner.”

This was a wild line, even for someone as smooth as Emily Swenson, who had to keep talking lest she break character.

“A funeral planner in Zoth,” she added. “Not the real world. Put something tasteful together in the next few days. And of course, you’d want to meet with all of Jonah’s guild mates, to make sure they were apprised of the situation. And ideally, we’d like to see Jonah’s character respectfully retired with all his possessions.”

“You want to bury the spear with him,” I said, seeing where this was going.

“The family would like that. But no detective work, you see. Just talk to people, plan a service, possibly find the spear if you could.”

I was still processing it all when Emily hit me with the kicker.

“And of course, let us know if you find anything interesting.”

I saw Emily out, and it took another hour and a half to get properly dressed. I may have been in something of a state. All of it was disturbing, but perhaps the most alarming part of it was that people were coming to my door. The apartment was my sanctum sanctorum. Aside from whatever craziness Charice was involved with, I was always safe from the horrors of Saint Louis. No one came looking for me at Charice’s—not my ex-boyfriend, not my old friends, nobody. It was like being hermetically sealed from everyone I wanted to avoid, albeit with a crazy woman. It was a trade I had been happy to make.

Once I had finally put myself together, I gathered up the check the Longs had written me and started to head out the door for the bank. I wasn’t sure what to make of their request, but I wanted to get the check deposited quickly, before they came to their senses.

I opened the door to go out, and there it was: someone violating the sanctum sanctorum a third time.

Nathan Willing, the cute botanist Jennifer had banished from talking to me, was crouched on the floor, blocking my exit.

“I knew that would happen,” said Nathan, standing suddenly. “I was wondering on the way up here what would be the least-opportune moment for you to open your door. Because I knew that’s how it would happen.”

Nathan was wearing a maroon sweater and black skinny jeans. He also had a bright-mustard messenger bag, which certainly suggested that he was not dressed for sneaking or surveillance.

“A strange biologist is huddled in my doorway,” I said to him. “Explain.”

Nathan smiled at me. “Not that strange,” he said cheerfully. “I was leaving you a note.”

Nathan passed me the note, which I glanced at but didn’t bother with other than to observe that Nathan’s handwriting was very tiny and very square.

“Thanks,” I said, “but I’m going out. You want to give me the CliffsNotes version?”

“I wanted to apologize for putting the police on your trail.”

I raised an eyebrow at him and sighed. “Why don’t you come inside?”

Nathan happily entered my apartment. So happily, in fact, that I idly wondered if he’d been crouching out there for a while. He collapsed grandly into the sofa, even though I hadn’t invited him to sit down. There was something familiar about Nathan—not familiar as if I had met him before in disguise—just familiar.

And he was pleasing to look at, Nathan. He had dark brown hair that looked like something you would find on a Lego mini-fig. It was improbably thick—mini-fig thick—with a buoyancy that was either achieved with molten plastic or a lot of hair gel. He had the classic hipster black-rimmed glasses but had eschewed the bearded-youth look in favor of scruffiness. I’m not a fan of scruff, but it suited him, especially when he smiled, which was always. He looked like an adorable cactus is what I am saying.

“Did you get roughed up by the police?” he asked me.

I sat down on an armchair opposite him. Talking to Nathan made me feel prim, although I couldn’t have told you why.

“The police did not rough me up. What do you mean you tipped them off to me?”

“Well,” said Nathan, “the police came by after you left and asked a lot of questions. Jennifer didn’t mention you to them, so it was left to me to rat you out. I felt very guilty.”

Nathan opened his messenger bag and procured a bento box from it. He then opened the bento box and began to eat matchstick carrots and radishes that had been cut into star shapes. When he noticed that I was watching him do all this, he asked: “Carrot?”

“No, thank you,” I said, less offended and more confused. This was the sort of living theater that Charice usually gathered, but now it was mine. “The police did come by,” I said, “but it wasn’t the end of the world, and I’m sure they would have found me eventually. So I appreciate the apology, but really, it’s fine.”

“I couldn’t believe that Jennifer didn’t mention you. It was the most exciting thing that’s happened all week, a private eye coming by to clarify that she’s not a sex worker.”

“A concubine. I used the word ‘concubine.’”

“So you are a sex worker?”

Nathan seemed to be flirting with me, but I wasn’t sure. Flirting was, for me, an ancient language, like Phoenician or Ammonite, the particularities of which have been lost due to lack of usage and also antiquity.

“I never told you I was a private detective,” I said. “Were you eavesdropping on my conversation with Jennifer?”

“Oh, completely,” said Nathan. “I practically have a transcript. As do the police, now, which is why I came by to apologize.”

There were a lot of thoughts going on in my head. One was that Nathan was kind of adorable. Adorable goes a long way with me. And he smelled like cucumbers. I was still smarting from my last guy, though, and I was looking for a way to shuttle him out. Sanctum. Sanctorum.

My other thought, however, was that he probably didn’t know that Jonah was dead. I didn’t want to tell him, but at the same time it felt wrong not to mention it.

“You heard the news about Jonah?” I asked, sounding him out.

“Murdered,” said Nathan, now gnawing on a radish. “By some ornate spear, is what I hear. That’s what you were looking for, weren’t you? Jonah had told me about it.”

This was very anticlimactic.

“You don’t seem very broken up about his death,” I said.

Nathan flashed a look of embarrassment. “I’m the strong, silent type who buries his feelings?”

“You have a messenger bag,” I said.

“I have hidden depths,” said Nathan happily. “And I didn’t know him very well, honestly.”

“Except that you knew about the spear,” I pointed out.

“You are very detective-like,” said Nathan. “But Jonah was always going on about Zoth. He tried to get everyone to play with him. I took a cab with him once after a party, and he tried to get the cabbie to play with him.”

I would have pushed at this more, but the truth of it was that I wasn’t very broken up about Jonah’s death either.

“Oh,” said Nathan, snapping his fingers. “I almost forgot. I’m also supposed to apologize for Jennifer. She’s usually a lot nicer. Quote unquote. I’m supposed to tell you that.”

“Is she usually a lot nicer?” My experience with her had strongly suggested that stern was her default mode.

Nathan considered this. “Well, perhaps ‘a lot’ is overstating it. She’s usually a degree nicer. But that whole sex-worker thing set her off. She was dating Jonah only last week, so a pretty lady dressed in the outfits of Atelier Long is the sort of thing that freaks her out. After you left, she was sharpening dozens upon dozens of pencils. It was good that you got out when you did.”

There were two things in this explanation that had not escaped my attention. One was that he used the word “atelier,” which, between that and his bento box, was rapidly propelling him into the upper echelons of hipster geekery. The second was that he called me a “pretty lady.” I wasn’t going to pursue those things, but I noticed them. The sex-worker line I could let slide.

“Well,” I said, “apologies have been made. Thanks for coming by.”

I got up and Nathan stood quickly, stashing his bento box back into his bag. I was all but physically shuffling him out the room, but he was stalling me. If he were a Pokémon, this would have been where he revealed his super-effective stat reduction on me. He made pouty eyes and scratched at his neck.

This worked surprisingly well.

“Don’t laugh, but I kind of wanted to hang out with a private detective,” he explained. His embarrassment lasted nanoseconds, and he was bright again. “Makes you feel like you’re in on something. You know, put the squeeze on the old up and down. Derrick the gin mill. Hoosegow the bean shooters.”

“You’re just stringing together nonsense words.”

“Maybe,” said Nathan. “But you have to grant that I’ve got the cadence down.”

“Out of my apartment, please.”

Nathan took this well, like a game-show contestant happy with his parting prizes. “You can’t blame a guy for trying. That’s the Willing family motto.”

“Yeah? The Moss family motto is ‘I Never Thought My Life Would Be This Way.’”

This is actually true—it wasn’t a line to get a laugh out of Nathan, although it did. Obviously it’s not ancestral; it’s not written in Latin on our family crest. But it’s gotten a lot of usage.

“I’ll bet there’s a story behind that,” said Nathan.

“Yes, and I’m not going to tell it. Out of my apartment, pretty boy.”

And he jetted out. I hadn’t intended to call Nathan “pretty boy” to his face. This was probably not a good sign.