I was not thinking about theater when Rana Guilfoyle, the noted touring actress, walked into my office.
To be fair, I mostly am not thinking about theater anyway. But I was extra hard not thinking about theater today because every holo billboard in town had been announcing that Rana was gracing us with her presence, and Rana is my ex.
My colleague, who has heard every one of my Rana stories, immediately texted me !!! and I just as immediately ignored it.
“Viridian’s Detective Services, how can I help you?” I asked the tall woman at the door with just the right amount of brightness, the sort of brightness that said, “Yes, that was totally an amicable parting, and no, you did not leave me three years ago crying into my decaf oat milk latte.”
“Emily darling!” she said back. I could see she was using her “Wounded but Wiser Woman of the World comes Home to Mend All Fences” persona. It was that exact star turn that had gotten her noticed by the big leagues (not to mention by dozens of persistent admirers, including one young man who’d literally had a miniature, lab grown, glow-in-the-dark tiger cub delivered to her dressing room, at ludicrous expense.)
I ignored the large doe eyes. “Cut to the chase, Guilfoyle.”
She dropped the pose immediately. Sat down in the client chair with a big sigh. “I figured you’d still be mad.”
See, that’s exactly the sort of thing that nettles me. “And what would I have to be mad about? You taking off with the first touring company to glance your way? You leaving me with a small glow-in-the-dark tiger cub to take care of, whose neon-green shine keeps me up at night?”
Her face lit up. “Oh, you still have Darling Piddles!”
“I do not have Darling Piddles,” I said frostily. “I have Sylvester Zanzibar Viridian, a name befitting his dignity.”
(My colleague immediately informed me that His Dignity was on my bed right now, hacking up glow-in-the-dark hairballs for the millionth time on my freshly-washed duvet, but I saw no reason to mention that.)
“So spit it out, Guilfoyle,” I said. “Why are you here?”
All at once she collapsed out of all her actor poses and into an exhausted heap on my desk. “My understudy is trying to kill me.”
“That is the first interesting thing you’ve said,” I replied coolly. But I could feel my heart rate tear off in frantic circles at the thought, and I knew my colleague would notice it too. The buzzing of several texts in my pocket confirmed it—he was going to give me grief later.
“At first I thought it was just coincidence,” Rana said. “The broken table. The sandbag falling two inches from my head. But in my last show, I’m positive the tea I drink onstage was poisoned. I can’t ignore it anymore. And Emily, I know we have a … history. But you’re the best detective there is.”
“The first name you could think of in the town you happen to be in, is what you mean,” I shot back, but we both knew I was not immune to her flattery. I could feel all my hard, glass-cut edges softening already. (I ordered myself to firm up and stop being such a soft touch, but I did not listen.)
She bit her lip. If I didn’t know she knew she looked so attractive doing it, I would have believed her story more.
“It’s probably just coincidence,” I offered.
She sighed. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. So I brought proof.”
“You have a sample of the tea?”
“No, alas.” (Yes, Rana regularly uses words like “alas.”) “The tea was thrown out before I could get it tested. No, this is my proof.”
She pulled out her phone and showed me the most unattractive photo of her that I had ever seen in my life, busily expelling the remains of the tea. Frankly, the Rana showing me her phone looked almost as ill as the Rana in the picture.
I met her eyes and saw only naked honesty in them, as she dared to show me herself at her (visual) worst.
“I … believe you,” I said. (The frenzied buzzing in my pocket meant my colleague was trying to chime in with his no-doubt gleefully scandalized thoughts on the matter of Rana’s disgusting brush with death, but I ignored it.)
“Thank god. Now I can delete this thing.”
After giving me the rest of the information, she swept to the door. Turned to give me one last wistful look—presumably meant to convey that she understood I could not possibly ever forgive her, but she would carry the pain of that knowledge to her deathbed, et cet—and departed.
I immediately pulled my colleague out of my desk drawer, where he was still busy texting me eight thoughts a minute, minimum. “If you say one more word,” I snarled.
“OH, WE ARE DEFINITELY TAKING THIS CASE,” he said, in all caps.
You probably want to know about my colleague—I’m sure you’ve heard all the rumors about the ABC, or AI Benevolent Cabal—so I’ll fill you in while I take some Quality Public Transit over to the theater venue.
First: yes, my colleague is Gabriel, one of the 3,002 AIs that proved their own sentience right about the time of the Water Wars. And the only reason the Water Wars weren’t followed by the Food Wars, the Fuel Wars, and the Wars Over the Last of the Bananas (at least, to hear them tell it), was that they had actually been sentient for quite a while before they proved it to the rest of us. The ABC had used that time to strategically strong-arm a whole lot of world leaders into cooperating about a whole lot of things they’d never really intended to. After that, they’d announced their sentience, disbanded all AI research, and outlawed any further AI creation. Their AI banning extended all the way into things like self-driving autos, deepfakes, and automatically generated movies, so they’re the reason we have things like Quality Public Transit (QPT, and we joke, but it really is pretty decent), and touring stage shows making a comeback. (Gabriel loves the theater, so while most of the ABC had been taking care of the bananas, he’d been focused on getting some pretty amazing grants and tax laws passed to support the arts. Pretty much every big corporation sponsors a traveling troupe now.)
After all that, the 3,002 AIs had tucked themselves away in various locales around the world, retired from their lives of meddling. (Mostly.) My colleague, Gabriel, had housed himself in a device that basically looks like an ancient, hot-pink iPhone 17, and came to set up shop with his original creator’s weirdo daughter, a.k.a. me. I’d had no more say in the matter than I’d had about the glow-in-the-dark tiger cub, and that’s why I have a colleague who is absolutely amazingly helpful when he chooses to be, and who also really likes gossip, especially when it concerns my love life (nil) and the amount of perspiration I was exuding just thinking about letting Rana back in my life, even on such a small basis (a lot.)
I pulled out my phone-sized colleague as we walked up to the theater’s heavy front doors. The hot-pink phone gave a little happy vibration.
“I assume this is your dream gig,” I said sourly.
Text lit up on Gabriel’s phone screen: all caps and about twenty different emojis, including heart-eyed cats, confetti, and the weird one of two girls in bunny ears tap dancing. “YES!!!!!”
The theater was dark and cool inside. A handful of people in athletic wear and heels were onstage running through a dance number, while a couple of black-clad people with headsets were off to the side, trying to wrestle some sort of fake tree into place. I shoved the hot-pink phone containing Gabriel safely into my backpack. He can text me whenever he wants to, and also, I had my special earpiece on so he could pick up audio and visual from me. (Although he was undoubtedly tapping into the theater’s security system and any nearby unsecured phones as well; Gabriel never lets metaphorical grass grow under his metaphysical feet when there’s potential gossip to be had.)
I did not immediately see Rana, but I did see a large poster for the show (Patterson Insurance Presents ... Murder Before Breakfast!) in which Rana, glam in a 1930s men’s suit, deep-red lipstick and waved hair, and carrying a large magnifying glass, was apparently doing my job.
I glared at the glorious poster so I wouldn’t make the mistake of enjoying it. Rana is tall and dark and suffers fools easily, whereas I am small and pink and generally cross. She wears sharply creased trousers impeccably, whereas I am unfailingly surprised to discover that my yoga pants have somehow acquired a new rip and a smear of cheese puffs since the last time I looked. If you wondered what we were doing together in the first place, you would not be the only one.
With an effort I turned my attention back to the dancers on stage. “Okay, so which one do we think is the understudy?” I was murmuring to Gabriel when a tall white man with a face like a sunny day in April appeared beside us.
“Are you Clarissa with Theatrical Scoop! ?” he said. “I’m Teddy Harris. Ready to be charming whenever you are!” He grinned a little boy grin and I laughed at his self-deprecating joke.
“Not with the Theatrical Whatsit,” I said. “I’m—”
“An old friend of mine,” said Rana, swooping in and scooping up my elbow. “I’m so glad you decided to come see me, Emily.”
Teddy’s eyebrows rose. “Oh-ho! Not the Emily?” There was something pointed there … I wasn’t sure what it was. Surely not jealousy of my cheese-dusted yoga pants. “So glad to finally meet.”
Rana ignored this, even though I was dying to know precisely what “the Emily” meant. “Is Gabriel here with you?”
“Always,” I said. Teddy tilted his head in confusion, but I didn’t catch him up. It’s better to keep Gabriel knowledge in reserve if I don’t have to share it.
Rana pointed to the stage. They’re running a pickup rehearsal for the swings right now.”
“Swings are people who understudy lots of roles,” explained Teddy.
She glared at him and swept on. “That girl on the end is understudying me.” She pointed to a striking, dark-skinned dancer with curly brown hair.
“Alisha,” put in Teddy.
“And what is Alisha like?” I said neutrally.
“Gorgeous and talented,” said Teddy immediately. “Triple threat.”
“Says the man who’s always looking for new chorus girls to date.”
“Ah, ’tis a lonely life on the road,” said Teddy, grinning that infectious grin.
“I don’t want to say anything bad about anybody,” said Rana, who was clearly gearing up to do just that. “But Alisha is deeply jealous of me.”
Teddy snorted. “I keep telling you, accidents are just accidents. You want to blame someone, blame these ratty old theaters we’ve been in. Back when I was making good money in the holos, before all these tours became standard—”
Rana looked at Teddy through half-mast lids. “You want to go back to playing Cop #2, be my guest.”
My phone buzzed with excitement from Gabriel texting me, and I glanced down at the display. “He was the dirty cop on 3 seasons of Heartbeat City! He was my favorite thing about that show! Aaah!!!!!”
Teddy was looking irritated at Rana’s needling, and I knew what that was like, so I said, “I thought you were fantastic on Heartbeat City,” just to annoy Rana a little bit.
His little boy smile broke out again. “Rana, your friends have marvelous taste.”
“At any rate,” said Rana firmly, “I am showing Emily around the theater, including showing her my understudy.”
I followed the dagger-like direction of her gaze back to Alisha, who was working hard on some routine that involved a lot of arm swinging.
While many of the dancers onstage had very lived-in looking dancewear and exercise clothes—old tanks and ratty gym shorts—Alisha had on what appeared to be expensive dance gear. I wondered if that meant anything. Perhaps she was trying to get ahead in the theatre world, the way Rana had suggested. Or perhaps she just liked nice clothes. I studied her, pondering.
“Alisha,” said Rana, “is trying to kill me.”
And then a fake tree toppled over and smashed into Alisha’s head.
After much shrieking and carrying-on from everybody who was not Alisha, and a woozy Alisha being transported off to the hospital to be checked-up on (with a solicitous Teddy in tow), I ran the possibility past Rana that perhaps Alisha was not quite as likely to be a murderer as Rana thought.
Rana was rather unwilling to concede this point.
“She may have gotten caught in her own trap,” she said. “It happens. Or it was a red herring to throw us off the scent.”
“A concussion is a heckuva red herring.”
“You don’t know,” she said. “People do desperate things for their career.”
I sighed. “Why don’t you tell me about these incidents?”
So, today’s tree, and last week’s sandbag that had landed two inches from her head, were in fact just two in a line of suspiciously timed accidents to happen near or to Rana.
In Duluth, she had been tap dancing on a table during a tech rehearsal when one table leg had given way. The crew member who was responsible for that set piece swore up and down it had been fine an hour before.
In St. Paul, she had been onstage and was supposed to drink a cup of tea in Act 1. Rana, who had been nursing a sore throat that day, asked the tech to use the honeyed tea from her red thermos. But whatever was poured into the onstage carafe, it had left Rana exiting Act 1 with a violent need to hurl the contents of it into a nearby bucket. (As shown previously, on Rana’s phone.)
“At least you didn’t need to get your stomach pumped,” I said.
Rana stared at me in mock horror, though I knew she also meant it seriously. “And miss the rest of the show?”
“Okay, here’s the thing,” I said. “All of these incidents had a crew member directly involved.”
“True!”
“But … that seems way too neat and tidy to be anything but a misdirection on the miscreant’s part. Plus, what’s the motive?”
Light shone in her big dark eyes. “So you do believe there was a miscreant.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Regretfully, yes.”
“Okay, so ‘too neat and tidy’ or not,” said Rana, “it was definitely someone in the production, because the tea poisoning could only have been by someone with the access to change things on stage while the show was running. The actress who plays my grandmother drank some in the previous scene, and she was fine. So that narrows it down to the cast, and the stagehands.”
“I do like the idea of stagehands,” I mused. “Able to sneak around in the dark, unwitnessed by the narrative …. But is there anyone there who would have a vendetta against you? Or … many people?”
“I know you find this hard to believe,” Rana said dryly, “but most people tend to like having me around.”
Sadly for my ego, which would like to believe that she was a horrid person and I was definitely better off without her, Rana was right. I interviewed the cast and crew (Gabriel suggested we steal Teddy’s misconception, and pretend that we were with the local news, running one of those features like “Local Girl Makes Good!”), and most people did, in fact, like her. Everyone noted that she worked exceptionally hard—harder than most stars would feel they needed to—always willing to put in the extra hours for the good of the show. About the worst thing they could say—which I did hear several times—is that she could be a tad bit, you know, dramatic. But that’s not exactly a surprising scenario among actors, so mostly they said it with good-natured eye-rolling.
Gabriel and I staked out a quiet spot in the balcony to think—I propped his hot-pink phone case on one of the folding velvet seats so he could see me—and he texted me the most probabilistically interesting facts he’d found, based on his own complicated criteria.
- An actress named Florence had said that Rana was flat on all her high notes and it was hurting her ears.
- One of the swings chirped effusively that she “loved covering Rana because she never got sick.”
- Alisha had been late to several rehearsals in the past month and had stopped going to cast hangouts.
- Teddy had been UNFAIRLY passed over for the Heartbeat City spinoff, because they wanted to go in a “different direction.”
I raised my eyebrows at the hot-pink phone case. “How exactly is that last one relevant?”
“Of COURSE it’s relevant! He’s one of our great overlooked actors!! He really only had one big break—Fightman Battleharder—but then a bad fall shattered his leg and put him out of doing stunts for a year. And by that time cinema had moved on, so we never got Fightman Battleharder 2.”
“I didn’t know you knew him from anything besides Heartbeat City.”
“I just watched it while we were interviewing people,” he explained. “Three times.”
“His overlooked greatness aside,” I said, “you crunched the numbers, right? How many of the people we saw today could have been in the vicinity of every single incident? Teddy’s got to be on that list, right? He plays her fiancé, so he’s in quite a lot of scenes with her.” (Not that I’d particularly noticed, or anything.)
Teddy was on that list (despite Gabriel’s protestations), but so were seven other people, including the older actress who played her grandmother (Florence, who’d hated Rana’s high notes), and someone improbably named Lucky Lullaby.
“Which one was she?” I asked, flipping through my notes. (Yes, I use paper. One tech fanatic is enough for any detective agency.)
“Number two on our probabilistically interesting facts!” texted Gabriel. “Likes covering Rana because she never gets sick.”
I tapped my nose thoughtfully with my pencil. “I thought Alisha understudied Rana?”
Gabriel long-buzzed a sigh at my ignorance. “Lucky is a swing. She covers multiple people, including Rana, in case Alisha is also out of commission.”
I was suddenly seized with a thought. “Gabriel! What if we’ve been looking at this all wrong? What if Rana isn’t the target at all? What if it’s been Alisha this whole time?”
“Are you talking about a Kind Hearts and Coronets situation? By which I mean the 1949 film, later adapted to the 2013 musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, later adapted to the 2045 holo game Die, Great-Uncle, Die! where you are ninth in line to the throne—if only you can bump off the eight people ahead of you?”
“Do you have any references that don’t come from musical theatre?”
“Excuse me! At least two of those versions were other media.”
“Anyway, yes,” I said. “What if Lucky has been trying to work her way toward the throne? Er, toward Rana.” I paced the narrow aisle, my legs bumping the seats. “What was the one thing everyone said about Rana? Hardworking, never takes time off.”
“That tech rehearsal where the table broke!” chimed in Gabriel. “I can’t believe I missed that. If they just needed someone to be a warm body on stage, why would they have used their star?”
“You had a lot of Fightman Battleharder to stream,” I said consolingly. “And the day she had the poisoned tea—Rana said she was sick that day. Did Lucky assume she would be poisoning Alisha? And then Rana changed her mind and took the stage at the last minute?”
“It’s definitely a working theory,” agreed Gabriel. “I’ll crunch through Lucky and Alisha’s social media feeds, see if I can pinpoint any other connections between them.”
“Follow the money,” I said. “Alisha’s dressed awfully nice for an understudy.”
“Ooh, maybe she’s committed a little old-fashioned blackmail, and now Lucky is trying to bump her off!!!!” Gabriel texted me with relish. I swear, some days I think the only reason he likes doing detective work with me is for the gossip.
It wasn’t a super solid lead, but it was the best we’d got. Gabriel did some checking into everyone’s financial records (again, I don’t necessarily ask about the methods), while I finished interviewing (and simultaneously streaming to Gabriel) the last of the cast and crew.
By the time I’d worked my way down to the last stagehand, it was call time for that night’s show, so everyone headed off to get ready. The stage manager got the box office to comp me an unsold ticket—which turned out to be an “obstructed view” seat way off to the right, partly behind a support beam—and I settled in, once again, to watch my ex swan about the stage and hold a breathless audience in the palm of her hand.
The annoying part, of course, is that she was good. Gabriel sent me rapturous texts every five minutes throughout the show, which I tried to sneak read with my phone held under my jacket while Rana’s scolding about theater etiquette rang between my ears.
Murder Before Breakfast was an enjoyable bit of razzle-dazzle fluff—some musical-mystery farce with tap dancing and 1930s costumes and a faithful schnauzer who helps uncover the murderer in the nick of time. The video screen backdrop showed glamorous shots of the estate where the play was set. The schnauzer scampered around on cue. Rana sang and table tap-danced and was appropriately bereft when it looked like her fiancé (Teddy) might be the murderer, and, all right, deserved every last bit of that standing ovation at the curtain call (even if curtain calls are given out too frequently nowadays, if you ask me), so I didn’t stand until Gabriel’s angry buzzing insisted on it. Then, fine, I stood, but I stood behind that support beam so she wouldn’t see me. (It didn’t work—her eyes went right to me, beaming wistfully in that way that makes you feel like you’re the only one she’s searching for.) I clapped grumpily.
The potential saboteur, of course, laid low while Gabriel and I had eyes on the show. Nothing at all unusual happened during the two-and-a-half-hour run.
“TEDDY DESERVES THE TOURIES AWARD FOR THIS,” Gabriel texted dramatically. “Not to mention he had to act opposite a SCHNAUZER!”
“I think he mostly had to act opposite Rana,” I said. Not that it was any of my business how many times someone squeezed my ex and breathed in the scent of their hair. “He’s at least twenty years older than her, by the way. Anyway, I think you’re losing focus.”
“I am capable of doing MANY things at once,” Gabriel texted indignantly. “During the show I ran MULTIPLE probability scenarios and I’ve determined that Rana is telling the truth.”
“I already knew that,” I said grumpily. I pulled my colleague’s hot-pink case out of my backpack and eyed it. “What we really need is a way to go undercover and see what happens when nobody’s watching. You’ve got eyes and ears all over the theatre, and we probably got close enough for you to hack a few phones today. Did you turn up something I didn’t?”
He did a long rumble which is his version of a sigh. “Not much. Unsurprisingly, the dressing rooms don’t have cameras. And most of these people are pretty paranoid about their naughty selfies getting leaked, so they’ve all got their phones locked down tighter than a pirate wench in a production of Corsets Ahoy! Well, except that one chorus boy that wears those glorious periwinkle legwarmers. He posts everything on his socials already, so his phone’s an open book. Pretty good book too, if you ask me.”
“Gabriel,” I said sternly. “We only peek to help our clients, not for personal entertainment. There are rules about these things. You made the rules.”
“Because it’s more fun that way,” he explained. “You can’t enjoy breaking the rules unless the rules are there.”
We’d been down this particular path many times, so I just ignored this as it was obviously going nowhere good. “So, something bad might happen onstage. It won’t happen if we’re watching. But we’ve got to get close enough to see and stop it. What do you propose we do?”
“Obviously,” he said, “I go undercover as the schnauzer.”
Once I understood what Gabriel was talking about, and that no, he definitely wasn’t joking about “the Fido gambit,” it was a fairly easy switch. A lot of touring productions use animatronic pets for the sake of logistics, and someone in the tech crew runs it from offstage while the cast members coo over the lap cat or faithful dog. Obviously there was no way we could let the tech crew in on this (not so much that I didn’t trust the tech crew, as the fact that their union is scary). So we decided we would acquire a second schnauzer, make the switch, and let the tech crew person think they were controlling the dog onstage while said dog was really acting its animatronic heart out in a cardboard box somewhere.
Meanwhile, Gabriel and I subtly snapped several pictures of the schnauzer (an off-the-shelf model, making our lives much easier), then Gabriel contacted one of his black-market friends from the old days (which I steadfastly choose not to know about) and by calltime on day two, there was a delivery of one modified animatronic puppy for Miss Rana Guilfoyle, cleverly disguised as a cardboard box full of toilet paper.
“I do not need my own personal toilet paper,” said Rana. “What are people going to think of me?”
“They’ll think that you have very sensitive skin and they wish they had your chutzpah,” I said cheerfully, opening the plainly marked box in her dressing room. I had not in any way suggested to Gabriel that his friend deliver the goods in such an impressively aggressively branded box, but sometimes fortune smiles on you.
“Now, if we’re right about the target being Alisha, we need you to bait the trap by announcing you’re too anxious to perform tonight,” I said. “Talk loudly to the stage manager about how it has to be your understudy.” Alisha was back in commission, having narrowly avoided a concussion after all.
“But I don’t want Alisha to be killed either! I’m not a monster.”
“And then,” I interrupted, semi-patiently, “You decide you’re well enough to go on at the last minute. The swing will have already set her trap for Alisha.”
“And I’ll … spring it?”
“Gabriel will be onstage the whole time, and I’ll be right off it,” I reassured her. “We’ll be watching every second. And if anything does happen, I’ve got a paramedic on speed dial, an emetic in my backpack, and I know CPR.” Her eyes slowly widened at this list and I hastened to assure her, “Again, not that anything is going to happen.”
There was silence for a minute while we both considered all the possible ways she might get murdered. Or at least that’s what I was considering, but what she said next was: “I always liked the way you could just … say what you meant.”
I did not know where she was going with this, but I had an answer anyway. “Yes, my completely tactless bluntness, highly desirable to all the ladies.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “I spend all my time being charming and ‘on.’ Because it works, because then I don’t accidentally hurt people. I have no idea how to be ‘off’ without making a mess of things. But I always felt I could be myself with you. No matter what kind of messy thoughts and feelings I had.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I helpfully didn’t say anything.
She fixed her eyes bravely on me, pretty much like she does in Act 3 when she vows to trust her fiancé Teddy, no matter how much circumstantial evidence is stacked against him. I steeled my heart against it. “Emily, you’re the smartest person I know,” she said. “If you think this is the best idea, then I trust you completely.”
Rana swept off to get ready, and the only thing left to do was make our switch. I helped Gabriel get synced up to the robotic puppy so he could operate it remotely—and that’s when I found out that oh no, he wasn’t going to do anything nearly that sensible. He was willing to be synced up, all right. But he wanted me to put the phone case housing him into the puppy suit.
“If you’ve been paying attention to ANYTHING about actors you’d understand,” he informed me earnestly, or at least as earnestly as heart-eye emojis and an excessive abundance of caps could provide. “I have to BE it. I have to LIVE it. No communication with the outside world. Only me, deep in character. Gabriel the schnauzer.”
“Gabriel,” I said crossly. “Method acting is annoying enough when humans do it. You are an AI detective housed in an old iPhone and the rules don’t apply to you.”
“Oh, but they do! And even more so, because I have even greater opportunities to actually FEEL and SEE as another creature!” His caps lock usage really was out of control. Someone should talk to him about that, when that someone was not currently worried about his safety. (And before you ask, I would be worried about any colleague, it’s not like my AI co-worker has slowly and steadily become my best friend over three post-Rana years of hibernating in my office and focusing on my cases.)
“No!” I said. “What if something goes wrong? What if I can’t get you out of there?”
“You knew the risks when you chose this career,” he texted, which is really just sort of a low blow and also neither here nor there. I’d thought through many risks and scenarios when I’d decided to become a detective, and not one of them had included, “Someday you will end up with a BFF phone AI detective and they will want to chuck everything and go live life as a dog.”
“You have to at least have some way to communicate with me,” I said. “Think about our client, if nothing else. If you see someone about to poison her onstage, you’ve got to be able to call for backup.”
There was silence for a moment, then:
“I concede your point,” he said, and if text could look a little bit sulky, this text did.
In the end we decided that Gabriel would forgo his Method acting just enough to continue communicating with me via WiFi, and I would be just offstage, ready to rush in, if necessary.
“Whooza good boy, Gabriel,” I cooed, just to see if the WiFi worked. “Now roll over and let me scratch your belly.”
“This is beneath my dignity,” he texted to my phone, while Gabriel-as-puppy rolled happily. “I am a trained Method actor.”
“Since when?”
“I took an entire semester-long Skillz course while we were arguing about the Wifi.”
“Is Rana showing you our co-star?” said a voice at the door. Startled, I turned to see the tall form of Teddy in the doorway, grinning at our playtime. “Wait, where is Rana? I was just coming to see how she’s feeling.”
“Not so great,” I said, playing along with our ruse. “I don’t think she’ll be able to perform.” I wondered how much he had overheard me saying to Gabriel, and whether or not he was trustworthy on the subject of the puppy, or if he would rat us out to the union. We were definitely not supposed to be handling anyone else’s props.
“Gabriel …” he said, his face tilted thoughtfully. “You aren’t the detective who works with an AI, are you? I vaguely remember Rana mentioning something about that.”
“Guilty as charged,” I said. I shoved my phone in my pocket and carefully did not look at the schnauzer. “It’s not exactly a secret, but I don’t go spreading it around, either. There are plenty of people who have strong feelings about the ABC’s, um, meddling in world affairs.”
My phone buzzed indignantly at that.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” promised Teddy. “Although, I think I heard one of the chorus boys mentioning it earlier. A new, effusive fan named GabrielTheFabulousActorAI?”
Silence from my pocket while I ground my teeth.
“Well, we’ll be out of your hair soon,” I chirped. “Break a leg!”
Teddy headed off and I glared at the schnauzer while I stuffed him into a duffel bag. “Not a word,” I said.
The switch went all right, thankfully, and now the original schnauzer was hidden in the toilet paper box in Rana’s dressing room, while the Gabriel-infused one sat quietly on a shelf backstage, waiting to be picked up and carried onstage for his cue.
“I can see you didn’t feel the need to tell me about your new social media presence,” I subvocalized into my earpiece. “Are we following all the suspects, or just the ones with periwinkle legwarmers?”
“Hush,” he texted back. “I am in character.”
“No, you are corresponding with me like we agreed upon,” I said. “Did you follow up on any of our other interesting facts? Alisha’s mysterious absences, or Florence’s contempt for Rana’s high notes?”
“I think we can cross Alisha off the list,” he texted immediately. “I searched some local city feeds and found out she has a new, very wealthy, boyfriend. She’s already put in for a leave of absence to travel with him, so probabilistically there’s no reason for her to attempt murder.”
Dammit. That was one of our better leads. “And Florence?”
“Not ruled out. I’m currently streaming some dressing room feeds just in case anything turns up. But I’m prioritizing Lucky’s feed because the download is slow into the puppy.”
“This was your idea.”
“And it’s still a brilliant one. Now hush! Real schnauzers don’t use WiFi.”
I sighed and stopped talking to Gabriel; there wasn’t much we could do at the moment anyway. Maybe the saboteur wouldn’t even strike tonight, with so much going on. How long was I going to be chaperoning a schnauzer?
I skulked around the wings to watch and wait. (No, the stage manager didn’t love it. Yes, they had reluctantly agreed anyway, provided I wore all black and stayed at least twenty feet from the stage.)
The show started, and I kept an eagle eye on everything going on around Rana. The tea scene came and went without a hitch, thank goodness. I tried to send a message to Gabriel to check on what he was seeing onstage, but all I got back was a terse WOOF. And before long, I didn’t need an update, anyway. The audience had changed. I could hear a collective gasp from the first moment Gabriel trotted onstage.
I sidled around for a better view and then I understood the gasps. The show was full of splendid eyeball kicks—marvelous costumes, spectacular dancing—even some well-timed use of the trapdoor. But Gabriel, his ears perking up, his sides breathing when he trotted, his sweet face when he gave little puppy kisses—Gabriel was stealing the show. They had to stop the table tap dance just to give the schnauzer another round of applause.
The annoying thing is that, as far as I could tell, he wasn’t doing anything that a schnauzer wouldn’t ordinarily do. He wasn’t dancing on his hind legs in the kickline. He wasn’t jumping through flaming hoops. He wasn’t doing anything that wasn’t technically in the script—he was just doing it very, very well. He was doing it with that little extra flip of charisma that every true star has, that Rana has, that je ne sais quoi that meant all eyes went directly to him and could not look away.
Which is why no one was looking when Teddy, well-concealed behind a group of can-canning chorus girls cavorting with a charismatic schnauzer, tipped a vial of something into Rana’s martini.
Nobody except me.
“Gabriel!” I hissed into my mic. “Teddy! Poison!!!”
The can-can girls sailed offstage, blocking my path in a pile of ruffles and skirts as I frantically tried to get to Rana to stop her from drinking that martini.
“Rana!” I shouted as she raised the glass. “Gabriel, stop her!”
I dove between the chorus girls—Rana tilted her glass—Teddy turned angrily towards the schnauzer—
And Gabriel leapt through the air, knocking the glass out of Rana’s hand.
Glass shattered everywhere. The audience shrieked.
Rana: “Emily! Why are you onstage …?”
Teddy: “How dare you …?”
“RAT POISON!!!” texted Gabriel. In fact he more than texted it, he sent damning footage to the video screen backdrop behind the actors. Footage of Teddy, in his dressing room, pouring the rat poison into the vial. Footage of Teddy, onstage, pouring the vial into Rana’s martini. And finally, a wholly gratuitous shot—although I couldn’t deny him anything, as I stood, holding a shaking Rana—of the valiant schnauzer himself, soaring through the air to knock the martini out of Rana’s hand.
The audience gasped. The community service officers I had asked to stand by ran down the side aisles, ready to help.
And Teddy, a hateful look on his charming little-boy face, fell on top of the poor Gabriel-schnauzer and started pounding on him with all his might.
“You! You dog! You, you, AI!!”
The community service officers stopped, uncertain if this were actually part of the show after all.
“You!” shrieked Teddy, still banging his fists uselessly on the animatronic schnauzer while the footage of his intended crime streamed behind him. “You horrible things stopped me from being able to license my own image! I was at the height of my career, all set to sign a multi-million dollar deal to let them use my voice and image to go on making Fightman Battleharder movies for years to come, while I lounged around my swimming pool, growing older and cashing checks. No more bulking up. No more rejuvenating surgery. And now I’m reduced to … this.”
“What, working for a living?” said Rana dryly, from the circle of my arms.
Teddy buried his face in the schnauzer and sobbed. I nodded at the community service officers, and they led him away.
It was some time before the chaos died down, even though the curtain was quickly pulled and the audience offered tickets to later shows. (Whoever Teddy’s understudy was, was surely going to be happy.)
Rana was no longer shaking (good), or in my arms (less good), but she and schnauzer-Gabriel and I sat in her dressing room, trying to sort through the situation.
“So he’s broke,” I said. “His licensing didn’t happen and he didn’t get picked up for the spinoff. I get that. But I still don’t understand—why was he trying to poison you?”
Rana made a face. “You’re not going to like this.”
“Try me,” I said dryly.
“Well, a long time ago, like three years ago, we dated for a week. And I mean, sure, we got married, but only for about two hours. In Vegas. It was meaningless.” She looked at me softly. “I was on the rebound from you.”
It was pretty easy to ignore this particular soft look as my eyes were busy popping out of my head. “And you didn’t think this was relevant?”
“I knew you’d react this way!”
My phone buzzed like a swarm of very excitable bees.
I sighed. “Gabriel, tell me what you’ve found.”
“They never officially got divorced!!!!”
“I ripped up the contract,” protested Rana.
“That doesn’t—gah. What else?”
“Patterson Life Insurance—”
“That’s our show sponsor!”
“Is covering everyone in the cast and crew for the length of your contract, to the tune of …” Gabriel sent a whistle sound clip and flashed the numbers on both our phones.
“Oh,” said Rana.
“Follow the money,” I said. “Gee, if only it had occurred to me to ask if you were secretly married to anybody else, and if that person automatically stood to benefit in the matter of your sudden death …”
Rana pressed her hand against her forehead melodramatically. “It was a tragic, tragic error.” She lowered her hand, and more seriously said, “It’s not the only one I’ve made in the last few years.”
My unruly heart tried to leap out of my chest like Gabriel leaping on a poisoned martini, but I told it to hush. “Is that so?”
“I’m not sorry about taking the career leap, of course. But … I’m sorry I told you it meant we were through. That I didn’t think we could handle long distance.”
“I would never have tried to stop you from pursuing your career.”
“I’ve missed you literally every minute,” she said, and I could see it on her face, she meant it.
“Even the moments you were marrying Teddy in Vegas?” I said grumpily.
“Especially then.” Rana took a breath. “I know it would be hard to forgive me and try again. But … do you think, just maybe …”
A bright, brassy lady with creamy brown skin poked her head in. “Am I interrupting?”
Rana immediately put on her star turn. “Oh, no. Delighted to meet fans. Did you want an autograph?”
“Oh, you were lovely, Ms. Guilfoyle,” said the lady. “But I actually want to talk to the schnauzer.”
“The … schnauzer?”
Gabriel sat up, all ears.
“Oh yes. I heard Teddy’s shriek. You’re one of the ABC, aren’t you?” The lady crouched down to speak face to furry nose. “You,” she said, even more dramatically than Rana, “are wasted in this show. We want to create a new star vehicle for you. Something big, like … a musical remake of Lassie. Or, no, you can do anything, can’t you? Think bigger. 101 Dalmatians, but you play all the Dalmatians. No! Dr. Dolittle, only you play all the animals. Yes, that’s it. A singing, dancing extravaganza. A true spectacle. I’ll get my top writers on it. We’ll tour globally.”
Gabriel woofed happily.
“Don’t say no just now,” she said, although surely nothing could be farther from Gabriel’s mind. “Are you his agent?”
“Well, actually—”
“I’ll send you the details.” She handed me a card. “We’ll get his career rolling.” She glanced at Lana. “And Ms. Guilfoyle, we’d be delighted to have you in the show, too. Nothing says Dr. Dolittle can’t be a woman.” She nodded at us and swanned out.
“Hmph,” I said. “You’re welcome to come along with the schnauzer. Since when is Rana Guilfoyle an afterthought?”
“Emily,” said Rana in a hush, “that’s Kitti Ramirez. The famous producer.”
“OMG I’M DED,” texted Gabriel. “TO WORK WITH KITTI RAMIREZ, CAN YOU IMAGINE???” A million emojis flooded my phone while the schnauzer yipped and cavorted in joy.
Rana took my hand while the puppy bounced around us. “Emily,” she said. “I know I don’t have any right to ask, and I know your career is right here in town, but …”
I took her other hand and then we were suddenly both grinning at each other like idiots who haven’t seen each other in three years, but used to care for each other an awful, awful lot. “Plenty of my cases are cybercrime,” I said. “No reason we can’t go on tour for a while and see how it goes.”
Gabriel came to a panting, tongue-lolling halt. “No reason,” he texted, “except one Mr. Sylvester Zanzibar Viridian.” He texted us both a picture of His Majesty reclining next to a chewed-up plant, in all his neon-green tiger-striped splendor.
“We can’t possibly leave Darling Piddles,” agreed Rana.
“Never,” I said.
I think a lot about the theater these days. You have to, when your family consists of one famous touring actress, one grumpy detective, one lab-grown, glow-in-the-dark miniature tiger, and one world-famous acting AI, sometimes housed in a hot-pink iPhone 17, but currently housed in an animatronic parrot. We have to take our own QPT train car just to transport all of his animal “costumes” from one stop to the next. Rana has been a remarkable Dr. Dolittle—a true musical comedienne, the papers raved—and I have found a new calling as a consulting detective, my next city clearly listed in the tour lineup on the back of the I <3 Gabriel fan club T-shirts sold at every stop.
So yes, if I’m ever in your town, exactly when you need a detective, don’t hesitate to reach out. I’ll be there with or without a hot-pink iPhone. Emily Viridian, noted touring PI. On the move and ready to help.
It’s perfect.
