CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I didn’t push very much at Cynthia’s theory about being a murder target, mostly because I didn’t think that she believed it very much herself. She was taking a job immediately below where this alleged attempt on her life went down, which is not the behavior of someone who was in fear of being murdered. But I would have been deeply skeptical even before that point, simply from her tone and body language.

Cynthia liked the idea that she was important. She was flattered by the notion—I could tell because she talked about the murder in a vaguely bragging manner. Frankly, I didn’t think she thought the attempt on her life was real at all. I wish I had more specifics about how Joyce had actually been killed, but even I couldn’t find a way to casually ask:

“What kind of poison killed your sister?”

I came back upstairs half expecting Gary to give me the third degree, but I instead ran into Tyler, and by ran into I mean that he was waiting for me at my desk.

“There’s a rumor going around that you just stole all of Cynthia’s possessions,” he said.

“My God, when did all of you become so detail oriented?”

“I credit the healing power of sleep,” said Tyler.

I lowered my voice down to a whisper and said, “I’m trying to keep this on the down low, but Cynthia was downstairs. She didn’t want to come up here and have everyone make a fuss over her.”

“I wouldn’t have made a fuss over her.”

“Well, she also was wary about coming back to the place where her sister was killed.” Although not wary about hanging out downstairs.

“Are you investigating this case?” asked Tyler, too loudly for my tastes.

“Ix-nay on the vestigation-nay.”

“Well, that answers my question,” said Tyler.

“I’m mostly focused on this whistle-blower’s letter,” I said. Also, code theft, which I kept forgetting about.

“Not on the murder,” said Tyler.

“Apparently not,” I told him, thinking of Emily’s weird insistence that I give the Cynthia business the brush-off.

“I can give you details about how Joyce got killed,” said Tyler.

“How did you learn that?” I asked.

“I just got off the phone with Detective Tedin, who asked me some very revealing questions. Also, I’m a murder suspect, so there’s that.”

“What did you learn?”

“But wait, I thought you weren’t interested in this murder?”

“I’m taking an academic interest in it.”

“Well, I’m not giving this information away for free,” said Tyler. He toyed with his wisp of green hair again. If we were playing poker, that would have certainly been his tell. Here it was just telling me what I already knew: Tyler was a bastard.

“Are you trying to shake me down?” I asked.

“I’m not trying to shake you down,” said Tyler. “I am shaking you down.”

“If you want money, you came to the wrong gal.”

“Tell me about Masako.”

“Oh lord,” I said. “Do your own detective work.”

“She’s friends with you. She likes you. Just give me some tips.”

“Just ask her your own questions. Masako is very direct.”

“We had a really good time last night,” Tyler said, and that mixed with the foot business was giving me entirely too much information.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said, assuming that there had to be some kind of funny business, because hanging drunkenly around a church until the police showed up was surely not the good time he was referring to.

“Well I’m not giving you a play-by-play,” said Tyler. “I just want an excuse to text her. Help me come up with some sort of pretext.”

“It’s Masako. You don’t need a pretext. She lives in a world without pretexts.”

“We all live in a world with pretexts.”

“Okay, but Masako is better at ignoring them than most people I know.”

“How about a dinner?” asked Tyler. “Is there a restaurant she likes?”

Again, this was more madness. Low-key madness, like Cynthia in an orange dog-washing shirt, and not Grand Guignol madness, but even so. Bonkersville.

“Just to be clear, you are ransoming information about a murder to learn the name of a restaurant a girl likes.”

“I don’t like your tone,” said Tyler.

I told him the name of a place—the King & I, which despite its somewhat dopey name was actually pretty swank. This whole conversation was incredibly dumb, although I did think that Masako would be flattered by it, somehow. If I was feeling charitable to Tyler at the end of this conversation, perhaps I would tell her about it.

“Joyce died of drug poisoning—and I’m thinking methadone because they asked me a lot about it.”

“Methadone? Like crystal meth, methadone?”

“That’s methamphetamine. Methadone is a painkiller that’s used for heroin addicts.”

“Yikes,” I said. Joyce did not seem like the sort of person that would be partaking of heroin, roller coaster lover or not.

“So the police don’t think this was a suicide or an accident or anything?”

“What do I know?” said Tyler. “But I didn’t get the impression that was the angle they were pursuing.”

“Why were they asking questions of you?” I asked.

“See,” said Tyler. “I think you’re the person who lives in a world without pretext. Not Masako. I think you’re just projecting that.”

“What did the police want from you, Tyler?” I asked again, not particularly wanting to engage in a lot of self-analysis. And by this I mean any self-analysis.

“Well, as it happens, I had a prescription for methadone from a few years ago.”

“That explains why you know so much about it.”

“It’s a painkiller. I was in a car accident. I nearly died. I still have scars,” he said, pausing. “Ask Masako.”

“So the police want to know if you methadoned Joyce into oblivion.” That would make anyone anxious.

“Apparently,” he said.

“You don’t seem too worried about their investigation.”

“That’s because the idea is dumb. I didn’t know Joyce, I barely knew Cynthia, and they only gave me that stuff while I was in the hospital. It’s not like I would smuggle it out of there, save it up, and then use the stash to kill an old woman I didn’t know.”

This was true, but it was an addictive drug. “Maybe they think you took up a meth habit?”

“Please,” said Tyler. “And risk my beautiful teeth?”

Tyler flashed his pearly whites at me, which I would have called a little snaggly, frankly, not his best feature, but were nonetheless all there.

It is at this point that I committed a little industrial espionage, which is a fancier way of saying I stole stuff. Stealing data is not an exciting process. You can tell this because films in which it happens invariably involve an insane amount of props. In Rogue One, people climb up a tower and use some machine that looks like R.O.B. the Robot. In Disclosure, Michael Douglas enters some kind of virtual reality filing cabinet, like Tron if Tron had been really boring.

Anyway, I didn’t have any props, at least none that were related to the theft. It went down like this:

“Hey, Gary,” I said. “Vanetta needs a current copy of the code on a USB drive or something.”

This was a very brazen approach, in that it could have come back to haunt me if Gary had asked Vanetta about it, but I was willing to bet things were chaotic enough that this would never happen. And even if it did, I figured I could lie my way around it. Maybe I wanted to play-test a copy of the game at home to help find bugs. That sounded dumbly plausible.

“I don’t know why she wants it,” I said. “I think it was something that Lawrence was asking about?”

I probably shouldn’t have said that, because it was working against my play-test at home lie. But Gary just said, “Ugh, I’ll get it.”

Then Gary and I got into our laser motorcycles and drove into the Vault of Data. No, just kidding, although if this is somehow ever made into a movie, there will totally be laser cycles. Actually, Gary just copied it onto a USB and handed it to me.

I felt like I should talk to Gary a little bit more, just to wash the taste of this particular illegal activity out of his memories.

“So,” I said, “how about them Blues?” referring to our city’s venerable ice hockey team. This gambit was not so much dumbly plausible as simply dumb, because what the hell do I know about the Blues? I had a roommate in college who was obsessed with them, and from a year of living with her, I had learned nothing except that I wanted a new roommate.

Gary, however, took this more literally, and began to sing, as he had now done several times in our interactions. Gregorian chanting, this time, which I guess were the original Blues.

“Vidi aquam egredientem,” sang Gary.

It’s hard to know how to respond to this, a grown man randomly chanting at you, although I could get behind the sentiment, and it was preferable to discussing ice hockey regardless.

“What’s with you and singing, anyway?” I asked.

Gary regarded this question academically.

“My wife doesn’t much like it when I sing,” said Gary. “So I suppose I try to get it out of my system here.”

“But what if we don’t like it?” I asked.

“I suppose you could complain to Human Resources,” said Gary, who also turned this into something of a song.

“Is there Human Resources?” I asked.

“Not since the drugging incident,” said Gary, who I assumed, erroneously, was making a joke.