He was more forthcoming than I had anticipated. “Sounds like a tough place to work.”
“It is. Everybody had problems with Jeff. Jack Steele couldn’t stand him. Neither could Alejandro Sanchez. Gopal Patel barely spoke to him. Hell, his own security guy hated him. Even his pal, Drew Pitt, got tired of it. We put up with it for one reason: money. Everybody was going to make millions—and in Jeff’s case, maybe billions. Bottom line: nobody was going to jeopardize the IPO.”
“Other than your fiancée, the women at the party didn’t have a financial interest in the IPO.”
“You want to try to blame this on the other women? They aren’t hookers, Mr. Daley. They’re some of the most talented entrepreneurs in the Valley.”
“Why did they go to a make-out party at King’s house?”
“Because that’s how you make contacts in the Valley.”
“It’s demeaning.”
“It’s the Valley.”
“King was my client’s only source of support. Why would she have killed him?”
“Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he threatened to dump her. Or maybe he said something offensive to her—it wouldn’t have been out of character.” He glanced at his watch. “I gotta run. I’m supposed to meet somebody.”
* * *
Pete picked at a gluten-free blueberry muffin. “These things have no taste.”
I took a sip of my second cup of coffee. “How did you find Moore?”
“It wasn’t hard.”
“Where did he go?”
“Maybe he’s looking for a new job.”
“Seriously?”
“The company is in play. So are the employees. Maybe he’s hedging his bets if the IPO doesn’t happen.”
“His fiancée would never let him leave.”
“Unless she thinks the IPO is cratering. Moore would be worth a lot to one of Y5K’s competitors.”
“He’s probably subject to an iron-clad non-compete and non-disclosure agreement.”
“Grow up, Mick. People down here change jobs more often than I change socks. By the time the lawsuits are resolved, Moore will be working someplace else.”
True enough. “What did you think of him?”
“He was more honest than I thought. And he wasn’t shy about throwing everybody else on the management team under the bus.”
“You think he spiked the heroin?”
“And risk giving up millions and destroying the IPO that’s going to make his fiancée’s career?” He pushed back his chair.
“Where you going?” I asked.
“To find the tech guy, Alejandro Sanchez.”
40
“HE BARELY KNEW HOW TO TURN ON
HIS COMPUTER”
I glanced at my watch. One-thirty a.m. “You think he’s going to show?”
“Be patient,” Pete said. “My sources tell me that he comes in at this time every night.”
More accurately, every morning. “This place makes Big John’s saloon look like the Top of the Mark.”
Pete sipped his coffee. “I took Big John to Tony’s funeral. Tony left instructions for his family not to change a thing.”
They had honored his wishes. Antonio’s Nut House was the last dive bar in Palo Alto. Antonio “Tony” Montooth had opened his saloon six decades earlier, and it was among the last places in Silicon Valley where tech titans, blue collar workers, and Stanford students gathered to watch sports, drink beer, and eat burritos, pizza, and burgers. The ceiling tiles were emblazoned with ads that Tony had sold for five bucks a pop to the proprietors of long-closed neighborhood businesses. A handful of bras hung from the ceiling—the history of which had been lost to posterity. Customers with early-morning munchies helped themselves to peanuts from a box inside a cage enclosing a stuffed gorilla sporting a Cheshire cat grin and sunglasses. Mark Zuckerberg used to be a regular. The guy sitting next to him at the bar could have been a plumber who had just fixed a toilet at Facebook.
My lungs filled with the aroma of the peanut shells as Pete and I sat at a wobbly table beneath a faded sign reading, “I gave up drinking, smoking, and sex. It was the worst fifteen minutes of my life.”
Pete glanced over my shoulder. “Here we go, Mick.”
I tried to appear nonchalant as Alejandro Sanchez walked by us, took a seat by himself at the bar, pulled out his iPhone, and began texting. With his shoulder-length hair, t-shirt bearing the image of a heavy-metal band, and faded camouflage pants, he could have passed for a member of a grunge band. Without a word, the bartender handed him a beer.
Pete’s mouth turned up. “Let’s go make a new friend. Follow my lead.”
As always.
We walked over to the bar, where we took the stools next to Sanchez. Pete ordered beers for us, then he turned to Sanchez and extended a hand. “Pete Daley.”
“Alejandro Sanchez.”
My brother flashed a friendly smile that would have made Big John proud. “Let me buy you that beer.”
Sanchez’s eyes toggled between his iPhone and Pete. He was somewhere north of thirty, a lanky six-three, with a pasty complexion with bags extending halfway down his cheeks. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I’d like to.” Pete’s phony smile broadened. “Y5K, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I saw you on CNBC.”
Sanchez sat up taller. “That was a few months ago.”
“I’m in security. You developed some software that might be useful in my line of work.”
He was now looking at Pete. “We have.”
Pete corrected him. “According to the guy on CNBC, you have.”
Sanchez feigned modesty. “I guess.”
Pete gestured at me. “This is my brother, Mike.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Same here.”
Pete spoke up again. “You’re here late.”
“Busy.”
“I trust that the IPO is still on?”
“Yes.”
Pete cocked his head to the side. “Is there any doubt?”
“I’m not allowed to talk about it.”
“You come in every night?”
“I live around the corner. This is the only place that stays open late.”
Somewhere up there in that great heavenly dive bar, Antonio is smiling.
Pete was still going. “Helluva thing about Jeff King. How long did you know him?”
“Couple years.”
“Good guy?”
“Complicated guy.” He took a draw of his Bud. “He was good at identifying technology trends, but he couldn’t write code. He barely knew how to turn on his computer.”
“You wrote the Y5K program?”
“Most of it.”
“So the guy on CNBC was right: you’re the genius.”
“I won’t disagree with you.” There was more than a hint of bitterness in his voice.
Pete wanted to keep him talking. “Seems unfair that King got all the credit.”
“Maybe a little.”
“Did he acknowledge your value to the company?”
“I get paid reasonably well, but he wasn’t big on positive reinforcement.”
“Was he difficult to work with?”
“For.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nobody worked ‘with’ Jeff. We all worked ‘for’ him. Either you made him look good, or you found another job.”
We exchanged stilted small talk for a few minutes. At two a.m., the bartender announced last call. I bought another round. Then I decided to play it straight. I handed him a card. “I’m representing Lexy Low.”
He tensed. “The company’s lawyers told us not to talk to anybody.”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions. I can’t imagine that you have anything to hide.”
“I don’t.”
“It’ll be easier to do this over a beer than in court.”
He fingered his mug. “You probably know more about what happened than I do.”
That much could be true.
He took a gulp of beer. “Jeff threw a party for some of us who were working on the IPO. Christina Chu invited some women. We ate burritos, drank beer, and smoked some weed. Some people may have been doing other stuff. It broke up early.”
“Did you see my client?”
“Might have. I don’t even know what she looks like.”
“Did you know that Mr. King and my client met on a sugar daddy site?”
“No, but it didn’t surprise me. Except for Chloe, I never saw him with the same woman more than once.”
I glanced at Pete, who took the cue.
“Alejandro, did you notice anything out of the ordinary that night?”
“No.”
“Did you see our client go upstairs?”
“No.”
“Did you go upstairs?”
“I don’t remember. I might have.”
Yes, you did.
Pete kept his tone even. “You’d been to other parties at King’s house?”
“A few.”
“Did you ever see anybody doing drugs?”
“Could have been.”
“Did King provide the stuff?”
“I never asked.”
I spoke up again. “The D.A. thinks our client provided the heroin. Do you think he would have taken drugs provided by a woman he met online?”
“Jeff did some reckless stuff.”
“Was anybody angry at him?”
“He treated everybody like crap, including me. He was worse to Jack, Gopal, and Tristan.”
“Is there anybody else who can tell us more about King?”
“Drew Pitt. He and Jeff were friends since they were kids.”
The “Guy from Rye.” “I understand that he works for the company.”
He laughed. “He’s more of a consultant.”
Right. “What exactly does he do?”
“Nobody knows.”
* * *
“Sanchez didn’t say much,” I observed.
Pete’s eyes gleamed. “Enough for us to know that he’s bitter, and he’ll be a nervous witness. It doesn’t guaranty an acquittal, but you can use it to your advantage.”
We were sitting at a table under the battered awning outside the Nut House at two-fifteen a.m. A red light from a Budweiser sign in the window reflected in Pete’s eyes.
“Did you find out where Moore went after he ditched us?” I asked.
“He met with a guy from another startup. Seems he’s already looking for a new job in case the IPO craters.”
“That won’t sit well with his colleagues at Y5K or his fiancée.”
“All’s fair in Silicon Valley.” He zipped up his bomber jacket. “Go home and get some rest, Mick.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find the ‘Guy from Rye.’”
41
THE “GUY FROM RYE”
“You sure it’s Pitt?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Pete looked out the picture window and pointed at the Olympic-size pool at the Bay Club in Redwood Shores, a ten-minute drive up 101 from Palo Alto. “He’s swimming.”
It had taken Pete four days to track down the elusive “Guy from Rye.” At nine p.m. on Wednesday, January twenty-third, we were nursing coffees in the café in the high-end health club wedged between the101 Freeway and the bay. Like its cousin at the foot of Telegraph Hill, it was a place where attractive people worked out, were seen, and made connections. Pete had slipped a hundred bucks to the kid at the front desk, and two guest passes had materialized. As a longtime member of the Embarcadero Y, the Bay Club was a little too upscale for my taste.
I looked at Pete, who was watching the Warriors’ post-game show. “What’s the plan?”
“We wait.” He used his index finger to gesture. “The pool is there. The locker room is there. The door is there. The only way from Point A to Point B to Point C is walking past us.”
We sat for fifteen minutes in the otherwise empty cafe. Silicon Valley has an early-to-bed, early-to-rise culture. Pete watched TV and checked his texts. I watched Pitt and checked my e-mails.
At ten o’clock, Pitt emerged from the pool and headed into the locker room. Twenty minutes later, he trudged through the café, a Nike bag in his hand, an iPhone pressed to his ear. He went to the fridge and took one of those ten-dollar-a-bottle detox juices that taste terrible.
Pete put his phone on the table. “We’re on, Mick.”
As Pitt approached us, I gave him a friendly wave. “Hi, Drew.”
“Uh, hi.”
He was late forties, stocky, tanned. His slick hair was jet black—with help from a bottle. Perspiration soaked through a lime polo shirt and khaki pants—not an especially flattering look.
I extended a hand. “Mike Daley. This is my brother, Pete.”
“Uh, yeah.” He ended his call and took a seat. “El Camino Software? Sprockets?”
“Afraid not, Drew. I work for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. Pete works security. I’m representing Lexy Low. We’d like to ask you a few questions about Jeff King.”
“I gave my statement to the police.”
“I know.” That’s true. “I’ve read it.” That’s false.
“Then you know that I didn’t see or hear anything that night.”
“That’s what we understand.”
His voice filled with relief. “There’s nothing else I can tell you.”
Sure there is. “We’re just trying to confirm what happened.”
“My lawyer said that I shouldn’t talk to anybody other than the cops.”
That’s good advice. “He also probably told you that we can send you a subpoena if your name appears on our witness list, which, by the way, it does.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. “He didn’t.”
“If you can confirm a few items, we won’t need to bother you again.”
He waited a beat. “Okay.”
I’m glad—because it’s a lie. “What time did you arrive at King’s house?”
“Around nine-twenty.”
“Were you by yourself?”
“No, I was with Tristan Moore.”
“We talked to him. Nice guy.”
“Right.”
His tone suggested that he and Moore weren’t pals. “He told us that people were eating burritos and doing smack.”
“The part about the burritos is true. I don’t know anything about the rest of it.”
I asked him who was there.
He rattled off the names that we already knew: King, Steele, Patel, Chu, Moore, Sanchez, Ben-Shalom, and, of course, Lexy. “There was a parking valet and a guy who delivered the food.”
“I understand that there were also some other women.”
“They were friends of Christina’s.”
“Did any of the women go home with the men?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you know that Mr. King had met my client through an app called Mature Relations?”
“Yes. Jeff had an unhappy marriage. He didn’t have time to go to bars or meet women at health clubs.”
“You knew that they got together for sex?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“And to consume heroin?”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
Of course not. “We understand that Mr. King always provided the heroin.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You really think a billionaire took heroin that somebody bought on the street?”
“He made some bad decisions.”
“Was anybody at the party behaving unusually?”
“No. It broke up early and everybody went home.”
“Except our client.”
“Right.”
“We understand that Mr. King always left the heroin in the bathroom upstairs.”
“Your client brought the heroin.”
“Did you go upstairs?”
“Yes. And if you’re suggesting that I pla
nted it, this conversation is over.”
“I’m not suggesting anything.” Well, maybe.
Pete finally made his presence felt. “What do you do at Y5K?”
He grinned. “I make sure that our software does what it’s supposed to do.”
“Mr. Moore told us that you rarely come to the office.”
“I work remotely.”
“Are you compensated well?”
“Reasonably.”
“You think you deserve more?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“Did you ever bring it up with Mr. King?”
“I did. Unfortunately, he passed away before he could take it up with the board.”
“I understand that Y5K is a tough place to work.”
“Working for a startup is demanding. For every Y5K, there are a thousand companies that fail within the first six months.”
“I understand that Jeff wasn’t always an easy guy to work for.”
“He never asked anybody to do anything that he wouldn’t have done himself.”
“We’ve been told that many people at the company didn’t like him.”
“Jack Steele thought he talked too much and treated our employees poorly. Alejandro Sanchez resented the fact that Jeff got credit for code that Alejandro wrote. Tristan didn’t think he got enough credit for building our customer base. Gopal got tired of smoothing things over with the investors.”
“Sounds like he lacked judgment and self-control.”
“I think they were jealous of Jeff’s success. I could name a hundred other successful CEOs who had similar issues.”
“Do you think anybody was angry enough that they might have been tempted to slip him a hot shot of heroin?”
He picked up his gym bag. “I could give you a thousand reasons why everybody had reason to be pissed off at Jeff. But nobody would have put the IPO at risk.”
* * *
Big John placed a pint of Guinness down in front of me. “You don’t look happy, Mikey.”
Dunleavy’s was quiet at midnight. “Long day, Big John.”
He gave Pete a mug of Folger’s. “You got this figured out, Petey?”
“Not yet.”
My uncle turned back to me. “Anything useful from the ‘Guy from Rye’?”
Higher Law Boxset, Volume 3 Page 69
