CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I met Anson Shuler at the parking lot. This was, any way you put it, madness, because I had brought roller skates with me. It was hard to imagine how this was going to go. But there was an upside to all of it, which was that I could maybe learn a little bit about what the police knew regarding Cahaba. It’s a rare disadvantage to not be a murder suspect, but I hated not knowing what the police were thinking. All of my information was second-or thirdhand, and getting just a few choice bits of their reasoning would have been tremendously helpful.

Shuler met me at my car, and I immediately noticed that he hadn’t brought his skateboard, which was the ostensible, if insane, plan for outing. I asked him about it.

“Yeah, well,” said Shuler. “I changed my mind. The universe does not want to see me skateboarding.”

“I was thinking we could listen to Blink-182, and I could use nineties slang, like: What’s the dealio?”

Shuler did not seem persuaded by this, and instead pointed out that I had recently suffered a head wound.

“Should you really be on roller skates after a concussion?” asked Shuler. “Upon reflection, it seems like a terrible idea.”

“So what should we do instead?” I asked.

“Zoo or art museum?” asked Shuler—and thanks to the magic of Forest Park, each of these was just a short walk away. “But I think we should go somewhere, because I’ve got kind of a proposition for you.”

We settled on the art museum, and can I just take a moment to praise the Saint Louis Art Museum, which I think is one of the best museums in the world. Okay, yes, I’ve been to fancier, better endowed places—the MoMA and the Guggenheim—but here’s the kicker about the Saint Louis Art Museum. It’s free.

Typing that out makes me sound like a cheapskate, but once you’ve got an awesome free art museum in your neighborhood, you suddenly realize that visiting every other museum is like going on Supermarket Sweep. You’ve got to stuff as much art into your eyeballs as you can to get your money’s worth. “Dahlia’s going straight for the Lichtensteins—those are worth about two million apiece—and, look, she’s found the bonus prize—a giant inflatable banana!”

The Saint Louis Art Museum is the only place where you could go in, casually walk around for a half hour, look at your favorite painting, leave, and not feel cheated.

But I digress.

It took us a minute to decide what to go look at. They’ve got a Seurat that I generally like, even if it isn’t the absolute showiest of his work, but Shuler was making a case for early American furniture. I had never known anyone who went out of their way to look at Early American Furniture, and I had always sort of assumed that the category was only included for some mandatory purpose I didn’t understand. The results of the powerful American desk lobby, I assumed.

Anyway, we were looking at a red mahogany desk hutch when Shuler dropped his proposition at me.

“So, Dahlia,” said Shuler. “You asked me when we first went out if I liked being a cop. You remember that?”

I did remember that. We had gone out for frozen custard, and I had mostly asked him just to have something to talk about. I also remember that the question had struck him oddly, as if it wasn’t the sort of thing he was used to being asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “What did you tell me—that you were still deciding?”

“Well,” said Shuler. “I think I’ve decided.”

I felt that this would naturally lead to further conversation, as it sounds uncannily like the prelude to the rest of a sentence, but Shuler just continued to look at the desk. Honestly, it was a tiny little desk. People were smaller then.

Finally, after I realized that Shuler wasn’t going to voluntarily continue his thought, I bit:

“So, what’s the verdict?”

“I think I’m out,” said Shuler.

This seemed to me to be a major life revelation—certainly Shuler’s brows suggested so—because they sighed up and down along with the rest of him as he spoke.

“Wow,” I said.

I was feeling better about this outing now, because it was feeling less and less like flirty fun and more like staring into the abyss. Where here, the part of the abyss is played by a tiny desk. Questions began to bubble up, of course, not the least of which was: “Why are you telling me?” but there is a time for questions and a time for silence, and this was the latter.

And he answered one of my questions anyway without it needing to be asked.

“I’m just so tired of it,” he said. “I got into this because I wanted to be one of the good guys. And, also, maybe because I thought it would irritate my parents.”

“Always a good reasoning for major life decisions,” I said.

“I know, right? At the time, it seemed almost noble,” he chuckled. “Now, not so much. I just can’t deal with it anymore.”

What “it” was here, precisely, was something of a mini-mystery, but I’d read enough stories about policing lately that I didn’t want to push too hard. Instead I asked:

“So what are you going to do instead?” I started to add “build desks?” as a snarky rider, to lighten the mood a little, but then thought the better of it. Besides which, maybe that was his plan. Maybe we were here gathering blueprints.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Shuler. “You’re getting certified as a private detective, right? That’s what Maddocks tells me.”

“Slowly,” I said. Although, in truth, it wasn’t a huge amount of coursework. In some states, Mississippi, for example, anyone can be a private detective, if you’ve got the nerve to call yourself one. Missouri was a little harder than that, but not overly so.

“Well, how soon before you’re done?” asked Shuler.

I was suddenly feeling cornered. Although, I don’t know why I should have been anxious. I suppose I just don’t like having my plans pinned down.

“Maybe six months,” I said.

“I was thinking about becoming a private detective myself,” said Shuler.

And it hit me. This was the statement that had augured this meeting, not a romantic interest in me. I could tell that Shuler was anxious about telling me this because of the carefully rehearsed and overly casual way he said it. I appreciated the theater.

“Right,” I said. “So you’re becoming a private detective, and I’m becoming a private detective. And you came here to tell me—”

“This town’s not big enough for the two of us,” said Shuler. And I laughed. Too loudly, because a security guard glared at me.

“Scram, Shuler, University City’s my territory,” I told him, approximating a 1930s gangster voice very badly.

“What I was thinking,” said Shuler, “is that we could maybe go into business together?”

“Moss and Shuler Investigations,” I said. “It’d look good on a door.”

I had fully expected Shuler to say “Shuler and Moss Investigations,” because that is how this patter always goes, but instead he upped the ante:

“I was thinking Shuler and Co.”

“Well,” I said. “Two’s company.”

“What do you think?” asked Shuler.

I thought that I wasn’t ready for discussions for names on the door.

“I’ll take it under advisement.”

I did not, as it happened, ask Anson Shuler any actual useful questions about the case. I had figured I’d get into it with him later, but the business about “Shuler & Moss Investigations” had kind of knocked me out of orbit. All of my follow-up questions were about that. How much money would we need to start such an endeavor? Answer: a fair amount, but we could get a bank loan. Where could we find office space to rent? Would we need office space? And Shuler had answers for all of these. He had me at a disadvantage, because he’d clearly been thinking about this for a very long time. And, I have a business degree, after all. This was a thing that was doable.

The question I didn’t ask, maybe because I didn’t want to know the answer myself, is what he actually gained by teaming up with me. Was this a weird way for him to just spend time with me? No, probably not, because that’s already clearly doable without involving bank loans. But I could easily see the advantage of working with him—ex-cop, with lots of police connections? Who wouldn’t hire him?

But here I am going down the wrong path again.

When I arrived back at my house, I was only somewhat surprised to see Tyler on the floor, eating ramen noodles with Charice.

Let’s start with the ramen. First of all, this was not Maruchan, store-bought 99 cent stuff. This was a dish, made by Charice, that had grilled mushrooms and tofu and actual chopped vegetables. I point this out purely out of bitterness, because there was none left for me.

Next there was Tyler, who had changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants and looked possibly as though he had jogged over here. His green wisp of hair was limp and looked like it had been brutally mauled by the St. Louis humidity.

Finally, there was Charice, who was wearing a lavender vest with white trim that made her look vaguely like an extra on Battlestar Galactica. She was casually futuristic, which is not a bad way to think about Charice in general, honestly.

“Dahlia,” said Charice. “You have a visitor. You know, I remember when weeks would go by without anyone visiting you.”

“Yes,” I said, “those were good times.” Although, they weren’t, truthfully. There was just no reason to tell Tyler that.

“Tyler,” I said, “you come by to dig up more intel on Masako?”

Tyler spat out his soup. “Wait—does your roommate know Masako?”

“I know everybody,” said Charice in what was probably only a partial exaggeration of the truth.

“I didn’t,” said Tyler. “Maybe I should…”

“I’m sorry I brought it up,” I told him. “Why are you here, then?”

“I came to see you,” said Tyler. “I got some big news about Cahaba.”

“What kind of big news?” I asked.

I hadn’t been in communication with Emily yet today, and it would be great if I had something impressive to tell her.

“Let’s just say the lack of a deadline is not a good sign,” said Tyler.

“No,” I told him. “Let’s not ‘just say’ that. Let’s say everything, including the subtext.”

Tyler lowered his voice, although I couldn’t have told you why.

“So, I heard that DE is selling the studio.”

“Is that bad? I mean, no one is overly fond of DE, anyway, right? It could be good for the game.”

“DE is keeping Peppermint Planes. They’re keeping all the intellectual property—it’s just the people they’re getting rid of.”

I took a moment to process this.

“So the code that these people have been working on day and night, month in, month out—it’s all just going to be handed over to someone else to finish?”

“It’s probably going to be tossed altogether,” said Tyler.

“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.”