How to Succeed in Murder

by Margaret Dumas

  “So it was premeditated,” Simon announced. “Whoever the guest was, she—or he, I suppose—covered his or her tracks from the very beginning.”

  We thought that over as the last of our plates were cleared and a dessert wine was presented for Harry’s inspection.

  “Isn’t there any sort of security system?” I asked Jack. “Closed circuit cameras or something?” I hadn’t noticed any, but I hadn’t been looking for them either.

  He shook his head. “There are cameras, but only in the day care center. The video is fed to screens in all the exercise rooms, so parents can keep an eye on their children during their workout. But that’s all.”

  “People probably don’t want to think they’re being filmed during their workouts,” Simon mused. “Remember when there was all that fuss about Princess Di being photographed at the gym?”

  It was the age-old struggle between privacy and security. I sure as hell wouldn’t want my spandex-clad ass to be broadcast by somebody’s web cam. On the other hand, I would like to think that my potential murderer might be caught on tape, should the occasion arise.

  Brenda suddenly sat up straighter. “But, Jack, this is good news, isn’t it?” she asked. “I mean, this means the case is still open, right? And that the police are going to look for the killer, right?”

  He looked at her. “It’s good news.”

  I caught a whiff of caution in his answer, and suspected that the police probably weren’t going to issue any immediate warrants to question every medium-sized adult who owned gray sweats. But the mood at the table had lifted considerably, so I kept my thoughts to myself.

  The arrival of the desserts was Harry’s signal to take back control of the evening. “All right, then,” he said expansively. “There’s nothing to worry about. The police will figure out who killed your friend.” He patted Brenda on the hand. “They’re already making progress and it’s just a matter of time.” He spoke as someone unaccustomed to contradiction.

  Simon sent me a look full of significance—whether it was in regard to the hand patting or the assurances I didn’t know. But he went along with it, and after indulging in a single sip of the rather amazing Inniskillin icewine, he stepped up manfully and took one for the team.

  “So, Harry. Tell me about your play.”

  ***

  “How are you holding up?” Jack said the instant we were both buckled up in the battered car.

  “You mean aside from the fact that I can’t tell whether we just witnessed my best friend and my uncle on a date?”

  “Aside from that.” He glanced over at me. “Although if you want my opinion—”

  “I really don’t think I do,” I told him. I’d gotten Brenda and Simon alone long enough to tell them about the tunnel incident, but I hadn’t had any extra time to try and extract girlish confidences from Brenda.

  Not that I’d have wanted them, if they involved Harry.

  The rain had let up and the streets were fairly quiet, but Jack kept up a steady rhythm of checking rearview mirrors as he drove. The ones we had left, anyway.

  “Did you tell Inspector Yahata what happened to us tonight?”

  “Of course,” Jack said. “But I’m guessing that truck was stolen, so I doubt there’s much they can do about it.”

  Right. I shifted my position so I could study his face. “What else did you two talk about?”

  He put on an innocent look. “Um, remember the news about Clara Chen not being alone that night?”

  “I do, and that’s a nice try. But I don’t see why Inspector Yahata would interrupt what I’m sure was a very hot date just to tell you they have one vague description from one uncorroborated receptionist.”

  Jack shot me a sideways glance. “And here I was thinking you were distracted by the dessert menu.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “Clara Chen’s gym membership card is missing.”

  My mind flashed to the locker room at WorkSpace. “Missing?”

  “It should have been with her, or around her, or anywhere in the locker room. The membership cards are the electronic keys to the lockers.”

  Since I hadn’t gotten around to mentioning my midnight expedition with Brenda, Jack thought he was telling me something I didn’t know. But I remembered swiping the card through the slot to open the locker.

  Jack went on. “Clara’s locker was locked but the card was gone.”

  “So where is it?” I stared at him. “Or, more importantly, who used it to lock her locker? And why did they need to open it in the first place?”

  Jack nodded grimly. “That’s what Yahata would like to know.”

  Ah ha!

  Chapter Fifteen

  A bleak chilly hillside in Colma, the City of the Dead. Clara Chen was being laid to rest. We were gathered at the top of a steep hill, and the tidy rows of headstones—uniformly sized, shaped, and spaced—stretched away beneath us, reminding me of an empty theater viewed from the balcony.

  I’d never been to a Chinese cemetery before. There were several things I gradually noticed. The fact that all the headstones had small, oval photographs of the deceased on them. The fact that they were real headstones, upright monoliths rather than the flat slabs that had elsewhere been adopted for the convenience of lawnmowers. The fact that they were lettered both in the front, as you’d expect, and in the back. Every back was the same, the family name in English, and over it a Chinese character carved in a circle—presumably also the family name.

  Most of the headstones had matching marble urns on either side, and most of the urns were filled with flowers—real, silk, or plastic. There were smaller urns for incense sticks. And, I realized, there was food.

  Most of the graves had at least a small pile of oranges. Some had more, apples and bananas. Some had pink boxes from bakeries or take-out restaurants, plates of buns arranged into pyramid shapes, or piles of little cakes. Offerings for the dead.

  I wondered if it was always like this, with so many families visiting, children darting around as if they were on a picnic. Or if weekends were the time to pay respects to your ancestors. Or if people made a special effort in the weeks leading up to Chinese New Year.

  I was standing on one side of Brenda, holding her hand. Eileen stood on her other side. Jack was next to me; I could feel his warmth radiating between gusts of damp wind. I was there for Brenda, but I was trying very hard not to be there.

  I looked up at a gray sky filled with gulls. No doubt drawn by the offerings, they would wait until the service was over and the mourners were gone to return to their graveside feasts.

  From high on the hillside, looking over the valley, the view was all greenery and rolling hills. At the bottom of the Chinese cemetery, two white stone temple lions guarded the gates, perpetually snarling across the street at a pair of medieval-looking towers—the castle gates of Cypress Lawn.

  That other cemetery was very different. Old and overgrown and vaguely gothic, with its sculptures of weeping angels, its crypts and family mausoleums. That cemetery was where San Francisco society had been buried for generations. The Spreckles and the Floods and so on.

  People began to move, and I realized the service was over. Jack moved closer and murmured in my ear.

  “Are you all right? You were a million miles away.”

  No, I wasn’t. But I wanted to be. A million miles away from the view, down the hill and across the street, into Cypress Lawn and the ornate monuments to the Spreckles, the Floods. And to that other San Francisco family, the Van Leewens.

  My parents were buried across the street.

  I’d never been to their graves.

  ***

  “This is where Morgan Stokes lives?” Eileen took in the freshly painted Victorian with a touch of skepticism. “I had him figured for a sleek SOMA loft run by a centralized computer system.”

  “This is the address,” Brenda confirmed, referring to the card Stokes had given Jack at the funeral. He’d told us he was having some people
come back to his house after the service, and he’d invited us to join them. “It’s lovely.”

  It was lovely. In a great neighborhood sometimes called Dolores Heights and sometimes called Upper Castro, depending on your realtor, the street where Stokes lived was lined with Victorian-era houses. Some were in better repair than others and most had been converted into flats. His stood out as a testament to what a fortune in renovations could accomplish.

  “Should we wait for Jack?” Brenda looked doubtfully down the street. Jack had dropped us off and gone in search of parking.

  “He’ll be a while,” I guessed. “Let’s get out of the wind.”

  The door was answered by Clara’s sister. Brenda had met her years ago, and the two moved off to talk with some of Clara’s other old friends from her Berkeley days.

  “Should we get something to eat?” Eileen asked. We’d found ourselves in a large living room, and people were milling around with plates of food. “There’s got to be a buffet table somewhere.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I told her.

  “There’s a first.”

  I ignored her. I was busy visualizing each of the guests in gray sweats with hoods. Had someone here been Clara’s mystery guest at the gym on the night she died? And if so, who? I discounted all men with facial hair and everyone who was over- or under-sized. That left a lot of people.

  And I recognized a few. For example, there was a slim guy with a sleek blond ponytail, wearing a black turtleneck with black trousers and scarfing down what looked like an entire platter of marinated shrimp.

  “That’s Troy Patterson,” Eileen said softly, following my gaze. “He’s the vice president of Marketing.”

  Of course. I knew he’d been featured in one of the folders we’d gone over in Eileen’s office.

  “And that’s Millicent O’Malley.” I nodded toward a gaunt gray woman in what I hoped was a fairly subtle manner. “She’s something big in Engineering, isn’t she?”

  At the moment, she was looking disapprovingly at a heaping plate of food being rather messily consumed by the pudgy man she was speaking with.

  “Right. She’s talking to Bob Adams, the head of Quality Assurance.”

  The head of Quality Assurance dripped guacamole on his shirt, to Millicent’s evident disgust.

  “And that’s the Engineering exec.” Eileen shifted my attention to an unhappy looking balding guy deep in conversation on his cell phone in a corner. “Jim Stoddard.”

  I nodded. He was one of the few who knew about the engagement and Clara’s upcoming promotion.

  But I didn’t find the one person I really wanted to. Lalit Kumar. I hadn’t seen him at the grave site either. I knew from Jack that Kumar had missed at least one day of work, and now he was absent from his colleague’s funeral.

  I sincerely hoped he’d caught a nasty cold that night when Brenda and I had followed him around in the rain—the alternative was something far more sinister.

  I was distracted from this worrisome train of thought by a disturbance in another room. Someone was shouting. Eileen and I exchanged looks and followed the sound of the strained voice to a dining room which contained an elaborate buffet and a hysterical young woman.

  “How can you all just eat?” She was sobbing and shaking, her blond hair limp and her eyes sunken and wild. “Clara’s dead and you’re all just acting like this is some party!”

  She took a swipe at the table, sending a plate of finger sandwiches over the edge. Most of the guests backed away, looking either embarrassed or shocked.

  “Who is she?” I asked Eileen.

  “No idea.”

  “You bastards!” she yelled. “None of you gives a damn—”

  “Krissy!”

  A commanding female voice stopped the sobbing young woman in her tracks. Millicent O’Malley crossed the dining room swiftly. “Control yourself,” she ordered. “This is neither the time nor the place.”

  She gave the impression of a no-nonsense schoolteacher who wasn’t about to have her classroom disturbed by raw displays of emotion.

  “But she’s dead!” the girl protested. “She’s—”

  Quickly, before I saw it coming, Millicent raised her hand and slapped the girl across the face. The sharp sound of it seemed to echo in the room, and the silence that followed it was shocked.

  The girl, Krissy, put her hand to her cheek as if she were stunned. She stared at the older woman for a moment, then simply crumpled, falling into her arms and sobbing.

  Millicent made soothing sounds and looked around at the gathered guests apologetically as she led the girl out of the room and down a hallway, presumably to somewhere she could pull herself together.

  “What was that about?” Jack spoke softly from behind me.

  I turned around. “Grieving, I suppose.” I looked up at him. “Or guilt?”

  “Maybe both. Did I miss anything else?”

  Nothing except me sizing up the suspects.

  “Not really. We decided not to wait outside for you.”

  “Very sensible. It’s just started to rain.” He looked around. “This is a nice place.”

  “It’s lovely,” I said automatically. But then I realized it really was. The décor was hip but not off-putting, comfortable but not sloppy, uncluttered but not sterile. “It’s perfect.”

  “Thank you.” Morgan Stokes joined us, having made his way through the thinning crowd of guests after the uncomfortable scene was over. He led us back to the living room, seeming to notice his furnishings for the first time.

  “This was all Clara’s doing. Before we moved in together I was in a huge cold loft with computers everywhere, right down the street from the office.”

  I caught Eileen’s “I told you so” look.

  “Clara decorated this?” I asked.

  “She worked with a decorator,” he said. “But the ideas were all hers.” He hunched his shoulders, and for a moment his youthfulness left him and he looked truly alone.

  “She must have been…” I didn’t know how to finish.

  “She was,” he said quickly. Then he seemed to come to himself again, and he targeted Jack. “We need to talk. Let’s go to my study.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer before turning and walking away. Jack followed him. I looked at Eileen and shrugged, then I followed Jack.

  ***

  “What progress have you made?”

  I slipped into the book-lined room in time to hear Stokes’ question. I was startled by the sharpness of his tone.

  Jack raised his eyebrows mildly. “As we stated in our report, Mike thinks the pattern of the error flags—”

  “I’m not talking about the damn bug,” Stokes interrupted him. “I’m talking about Clara’s murder. What have you learned?”

  “Nothing since we last spoke,” Jack replied evenly.

  Had he told Stokes about Inspector Yahata’s news of the night before? I decided now wasn’t the time to ask, and sat next to Jack on a deep leather sofa in front of the fireplace.

  Stokes didn’t seem to notice I was here. He stared into the fire without moving.

  When he finally spoke, there was desperation in his voice. “Do you believe there’s a connection?”

  “Between Clara’s death and the software bug she’d discovered?” Jack asked.

  “Yes,” Stokes said.

  “Yes.”

  I blinked. I hadn’t expected Jack to give a straight answer. They were rather rare, in my experience.

  Stokes met Jack’s gaze without flinching. “My company is falling apart,” he said. “Someone is trying to ruin it, and that someone killed Clara.”

  They stared at each other some more. Maybe it was a male-bonding thing, but it was getting on my nerves.

  “What do you mean, your company is falling apart?” I asked, breaking the charged silence. “I mean, I know you have this bug, but aside from that, isn’t Zakdan one of the biggest tech companies around?” I was pretty sure I could remember all of Eileen and Brenda�
��s research correctly, and they certainly hadn’t used the phrase “falling apart.”

  Stokes looked surprised. “Yes, for now, but—” He let out a breath, probably at the hopelessness of explaining things to me.

  “But what? You’ve been profitable for the past twelve quarters. You’ve exceeded the analysts’ projections for the past eight. You came through the dot com crash relatively unscathed and you’ve got a healthy bottom line for the foreseeable future.”

  Two pair of eyes stared at me.

  “What? I’ve been talking to Eileen.” And apparently listening more than I’d realized.

  “I’ll bet you have.” Jack’s mouth twitched.

  “Not everything shows up in the financial reports,” Stokes told me. “We have to be looking to the future to see where we’ll be in two years’ time, or five, or ten.” He spread his hands. “That’s forever in this business.”

  “So where will you be?” I asked.

  “That’s the problem.” He frowned. “We don’t know. It’s called a ‘vision thing,’ and right now we don’t have one.”

  He leaned forward. “Last year the board decided to completely reinvent the company. They hired dozens of consultants to try and establish ‘synergy’ with the media. We got product placements in the biggest movies and made sure that our tools were used in the production of the coolest videos. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting to be a pop culture brand name.”

  Which was probably the only reason why I’d heard of them. “And?”

  He sat back again. “And we found out that fame does not equal fortune. There was absolutely no impact to sales of our core product line.”

  Ouch.

  “So what’s this year’s reinvention plan?” I asked him.

  He rolled his eyes, something you don’t see a CEO do every day. “We’re addressing the fallacy of the paperless office.”

  I probably gave him a fairly blank look, because he elaborated. “The biggest paradox in business today is that the more electronic communication increases, the more paper is actually printed and wasted—at tremendous cost. We already make the leading platform for the development of wireless applications, so now we’re working on an enterprise level data mining component with a GUI front end…”