I Was Murdered
Newsletter 2023-10-22
“You’re the one who’s getting murdered.”
Those were the last words I wanted to hear. One of my favorite pastimes is not being killed. I’ve done such a good job at it for the last thirty-eight years. My friend Rocco changed all that. He and I were alone in his garage. I‘d walked in there to grab a can from the beer fridge. Rocco had baited his trap well. It was the last thing I expected. For the previous twelve hours, he hadn’t shown any homicidal intent. If he had, I wouldn’t have unpacked my bags. My wife Lola and I arrived at his and his wife Phoebe’s house shortly before midnight the night before. As soon as we walked in the door, I told Rocco I’d be devastated if, after six hours of driving, I ended up being the dead body for the entire murder mystery dinner. Now, Rocco was delivering that exact news. Then he turned the whole situation around. He said before I died, I had to give a speech. It was on.
It really was a long way to travel to be a corpse. Lola and I made the drive from Indianapolis to Wisconsin with a van full of kids Friday night after work. As per our usual arrangement, Lola drove while I wrote. I planned to switch off with her whenever she got tired, but she stayed behind the wheel the entire way without a single stop. With four children in the car, that was nothing short of a miracle. It should have been a five and a half hour trip, but Chicago added an extra thirty minutes just because it could. The city’s only purpose is to be a giant traffic hazard. There’s no good way to get around it. It sits at a critical juncture where it can ruin road trips to and from half the states in America. If urban planners had even a shred of mercy, they would have built Chicago someplace more convenient, like North Dakota. Despite the traffic, my kids behaved themselves in the van for the most part. All hail the sedating effects of screens. We had seven devices spread between four children, and it still wasn’t quite enough. They didn’t get squirrely until the last half hour, when, instead of simply closing their eyes and going to sleep, they pushed Lola’s patience to the breaking point. We nearly ended up with several other murders this weekend.
The murder mystery dinner party was set to kick off at 6:00 p.m. Saturday night. Phoebe and Lola started getting ready about 4:30. That was the cue for Rocco and I to retreat into the basement to watch football. It doesn’t take long to get ready when your period costume for virtually any decade in the last hundred years is just dress pants and a button-up shirt. Rocco’s basement is peak Wisconsin. It has one bar and four TVs, complete with a mini fridge at the bar and a second mini fridge in the opposite corner of the basement in case you’re too drunk to walk that far. In Wisconsin, it’s against the law to ever be more than arm’s reach from a Busch Light. Rocco and I watched four football games at once while a large percentage of our children played cards on the bar top. Rocco and Phoebe have three kids, two boys and a girl. Their daughter’s age puts her right in the middle of my four. They played together in a big, roving pack all weekend. Rocco and Phoebe’s youngest son occasionally joined them, while their oldest son, a teenager, remained harder to spot than bigfoot. We’ve gone multiple visits in a row while barely catching a glimpse of him. I’m not entirely convinced Rocco and Phoebe still have a first born. I suspect they forgot him at a rest stop ten or fifteen years ago and have been lying about it ever since.
Finally, it was time for Rocco and I to get ready. It took me roughly two minutes to put on my normal dress clothes plus a vest and cap. I also had a pocket watch I couldn’t figure out how to wind up and a pocket square but I didn’t know how to fold. Thankfully, YouTube came to the rescue and showed me the precise steps to turn a square into a somewhat smaller square. I had never looked better in my entire life, but that’s not a high bar. My attractiveness level went from “swamp monster” to “swamp monster who combed his hair.” My self-esteem soared. Then I walked into the hall and saw Rocco. He had the exact same outfit. The night was ruined, and I hadn’t even been murdered yet.
The murder mystery was a cooperative challenge where everyone worked together, except for me. My job was to be dead. In other ways, though, it was every man for himself. The night had an individual award for the best dressed participant. I had every intention of being a very dapper corpse. Instead, Rocco and I canceled each other out, destroying any chance either one of us had for winning. Naturally, we spent the rest of the night insulting each other, but we were never truly in the running. One of the guys chose a female character and showed up in a flapper dress. I agree that he deserved to win, but only because he was the most memorable. Those hairy legs will haunt my dreams.
Everyone else was just as committed to their parts. When I first heard about this party, I thought for sure that half the people would show up in jeans and t-shirts. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Everyone arrived in full 1920s costumes, including props. The cocktail waitress had a serving platter, the mob enforcer had a homemade cardboard tommy gun, and the old-timey cop had an old-timey cop mustache. Inside every thirtysomething are two wolves: one wants to go to bed early, and the other wants to play dress up in the prohibition era. Saturday, the prohibition wolf won out, but his prohibition values didn’t. There were drinks everywhere.
In addition to the bar and two mini fridges in the basement, there was a wine cooler and bar in the living room, the beer fridge in the garage, and an open air fridge known as the great outdoors. That’s why I’ll never install a bar in my house. For all the fancy drinking amenities Rocco had in every corner of his abode, we mostly ended up grabbing Busch Lights from a case on his porch. Aluminum cans might not be period-appropriate, but I wasn’t going to take the time to mix drinks. I didn’t have long to live. I had to make every second count.
My death was preceded by a fancy meal. Phoebe ordered carryout platters of pasta and breadsticks from a chain Italian restaurant that, for some reason, I’ve referenced in three of my last six newsletters. This time, it was fitting since I was dressed like I could be a server there. The carryout was then transferred over to fine China from Rocco’s grandmother’s boyfriend. The boyfriend gave it to Rocco’s grandma when they were dating before she met Rocco’s grandfather. When Rocco’s grandfather married her, he insisted on buying her a new set since guy code says you don’t eat on another man’s China. The set from Rocco’s grandma’s boyfriend went into storage, where it stayed until his grandma died, when it went to Rocco and Phoebe’s garage, where it stayed until it was finally used at a murder mystery dinner party in the Year of Our Lord 2023. Ironically, that’s one more time than the China purchased by Rocco’s grandfather, which was never used at all. The moral of the story is that China is an extremely useful gift and you should continue buying it for people, especially if it’s to assert dominance over other men.
Hours before the dinner party, I personally laid out each place setting with no help from anyone, especially Phoebe. I definitely didn’t watch her do all the work and then jump in at the last second to set out two spoons. Each place setting included cloth napkins expertly folded by Lola and our eleven-year-old, Mae. Mae likes origami, so we asked her to look up how to make napkin swans. It was the wrong kind of cloth, so all the swans came out looking sad and melted. Lola and Mae didn’t want their decorative pieces to look like they opened the Ark of the Covenant. Instead, they pivoted to cloth roses. I should have asked them to fold my pocket square. I might have thought of that if I wasn’t so distracted by my own impending death.
Before dinner, all attendees received envelopes with their character info and objectives. We had to talk to certain people to find out specific information. To extract it, we could use charm, guile, or bribery. Torture wasn’t permitted, which was a serious flaw with the game. I will be leaving a review. For bribes, we had fake money. The money had no cash value, but whoever ended with the most of it at the end of the night won an award, which also had no cash value. There was only pride at stake, which, in tangible terms, was worth at least as much as a second set of China purchased out of spite. As dinner wound down, Rocco signaled to me that everybody had finished swapping bribes. It was time to move on to phase two. I stood up to give my speech.
I talk a lot in these newsletters about how I’m an introvert, and that’s true in certain circumstances. I actively avoid talking to people at work, the gym, the grocery store, or anywhere else that social interaction would keep me where I don’t want to be a second longer than I have to be there. But in other contexts, like when I’m being unproductive and wasting my life, I absolutely want to be the center of attention. Now, at a party hosted by someone else at their house with their friends, I found a way to make it all about me. My character had an ex-wife, an ex-girlfriend, and a current girlfriend who was only using me for my fake money. I had some tea to spill, and spill I did. My ex-wife was the guy in the dress. I started to lay into him, but then I realized he was out of the room getting a beer. I paused until he got back because, as a man of honor, I will always say my fake insults directly to your real face. Ultimately, our marriage fell apart due to a misunderstanding. I thought a marriage was between one husband and one wife, and he thought it was between one wife and the entire neighborhood. I had a few barbs for my ex-girlfriend before moving on to my current one, who just so happened to be my real wife. Before I could unleash my off-the-cuff roast, the lights went out and someone shot me multiple times. Lola definitely did it, even if no court would convict her.
I fell to the floor dramatically. Lola wailed and rushed over to me. She pretended to do CPR, but really she was just stealing my fake money. She’s always on her grind. Fortunately, I didn’t have to stay dead for long. We had one unused character. After an appropriate amount of time as a corpse, I took off my cap and put on a new name tag to assume an entirely new identity. If only it were that easy to reinvent myself in real life. The game then proceeded as before with no additional speeches from me, which was the real tragedy of the evening. At the end, we all filled out ballots to accuse the killer and vote for best dressed and best actor. Only three people got the killer right, and one of them was the killer themselves. On their answer sheet, where they were supposed to explain how they figured it out, they wrote, “Because that’s what my sheet told me.” They also won the awards for best actor and most money. Lola didn’t steal hard enough. I ended the night with zero dollars and no awards, but I did come back from the dead. That should count for something.
Shoutout to Rocco and Phoebe for hosting this event. I was honored to eat on Rocco’s grandma’s boyfriend’s China while making wild accusations at other characters and eventually getting murdered. I’m especially impressed with Rocco since he had to read the sixty-five pages of the rules ahead of time. Before that night, he’d never played anything more complex than Uno. Even the kids had fun. While the adults were upstairs, the kids played their own homemade murder mystery in the basement. It had secret role cards and elaborate rules for how to uncover the murderer, but it quickly devolved into hide and seek death tag. That sounds like a great game. I’ll totally play it with them next time. They just have to let me make a speech first.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.
James
Cute photos!
That sounds like great fun!