How to Succeed in Murder

by Margaret Dumas

  “I don’t know.” Simon needed two hands for the drink. “He might have just been busy all day, but—”

  “Simon, are you all right?”

  Brenda’s expression of concern was prompted by the sloshing of the liquid in Simon’s glass.

  “Fine,” he assured her. “Fine, fine, fine. Perfectly fine. I might possibly have overdone the caffeine today. But I’m fine.”

  Eileen’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”

  “Well, since I couldn’t seem to corner my quarry, I spent most of the day hanging about in the kitchen. I assumed all sorts of people would stop by during the day, and I’d just take the luck of the draw in who I talked to.” He twitched. “Did you know they have an espresso maker in the kitchen?”

  “How many did you have?” Brenda asked.

  “I lost track at seven.”

  “You’re not going to sleep for a week.”

  “Did you find anything out?” Jack brought us back to the point.

  “Loads.” He sat up and gave us a rapid-fire report. “Software engineers are apparently used to being treated like living gods, and the marketing people find that extremely annoying. The sales force all seem to have belonged to the same fraternity. Oh, and technical writers are far more entertaining than you might think. Every one of them is in a band or an artist’s co-op or working on the Great American Novel of high-tech.”

  “Anything else?” Harry rumbled. I don’t think he was interested in novels of high-tech, Great American or otherwise.

  “Just that Zakdan seems to suffer from a serious shortage of eligible men.” Simon looked pleased with himself. “I got three phone numbers before—”

  “Simon!” Eileen’s reprimand sent the rest of his drink flying.

  “What? Aren’t we supposed to be insinuating ourselves into the corporate culture?” He dabbed at the tablecloth.

  “Anyway,” Jack said. “You didn’t overhear anything about Clara? Or rumors about Lalit Kumar? Or a software bug?”

  “Not a word,” he said. “Not a dicky bird, not a peep, not a—”

  “We get the picture,” I stopped him. “Eileen, how about you?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing worth discussing, really. I spent most of the afternoon with Troy.” The distaste she heaped on his name gave us a preview of her opinion of the man.

  “He certainly doesn’t suffer from low self-esteem. I’m the one who’s undercover, and I’m the one who’s supposed to be bluffing my way through this, but I swear that man spent half the meeting blowing smoke up my skirt.”

  “He’s in Marketing,” Mike said, as if no further explanation were required.

  “Even so,” Eileen said. “Although…I have to admit that, beyond the vast quantities of bullshit, he did seem pretty bright.”

  “But is he bright enough to plot two murders?” Brenda asked.

  “Or sabotage the software?” I followed up.

  She made a face. “It’s hard to say. If you want, you can listen to the whole conversation. I brought my laptop to the meeting and turned on the microphone function before we started.”

  “There’s a microphone function?” I asked. That sounded handy.

  She nodded. “It’s mainly for online conferencing, but you can record with it too. I think we should probably try to use it when we can.”

  That seemed like a good idea, assuming she could show us how it worked.

  “Anyway,” Eileen continued, “Troy’s capabilities aside, I didn’t really get a sense that he had a motive. I mean, his world doesn’t really touch Clara’s and Lalit’s. He made it very clear that he owns the ‘pre-sales’ experience, and anything anybody else does is ‘post-sales,’ and therefore irrelevant. Oh—” she turned to Jack. “Did the Crime Scenes people find any long blond hairs anywhere?”

  “Not that I recall. Why?”

  “Because all the while we were talking, he kept taking his hair out of that ponytail, smoothing it all back, and putting the ponytail in again. He did it maybe ten times. It must be some sort of nervous habit.”

  “What do you think was making him nervous?” Brenda asked.

  “Me.” Eileen seemed perfectly comfortable with this answer. “The point is, if he does that when he’s nervous, and he’s the one who followed Clara to the gym…”

  “There would probably be blond hairs at the scene,” Jack finished for her. “I’ll take another look at the report.”

  We took a pause from the debriefing while our entrees appeared. Chicken under a brick for those of us in the know, pumpkin ravioli for Anthony, and—predictably—terrorized steak for Harry.

  When we’d all had our first bites, it was Brenda’s turn.

  “I spent the day with Tonya in Human Resources.” She produced a small notebook and referred to it. “We didn’t start out with anything specific. I asked her how employee morale is generally—”

  “How is it?” I asked.

  “Not good. After a while she started confiding in me about all the recent complaints the employees have been filing about each other.” She glanced around the table. “I know we decided to concentrate on the execs at first, because they were Clara’s immediate colleagues—”

  “And because whoever is fiddling with the code must be doing so at a pretty high level not to have been found out,” Mike said.

  “Right. But, you guys, there’s a lot of hostility at that company.”

  Damn right there was, if the atmosphere in that executive boardroom had been any indication.

  “What kind of hostility?” Jack asked.

  “Well, everyone seems to know how much everyone else makes,” she told us. “And they get all kinds of complaints about that.”

  “That always goes on at big companies,” Eileen said. “What else?”

  “Everyone knows everyone else’s business.” She looked up from her notes indignantly. “Do you know you can log on to the email system and see everyone’s calendars?”

  “What?” I asked.

  She explained. “Everyone has to use the same networked system for their email and calendars, and it’s all public. So if you want to make an appointment with someone you can look at their calendar online and see if they’re busy. And if they don’t mark their appointments as private, you can see what they’re doing and where they’re doing it all day long.”

  That had to be the most appalling thing I’d heard so far. “So you could stalk your co-workers through their calendars?”

  She nodded. “And people do. And they also complain about why they have to go to so many meetings when so-and-so doesn’t, or why weren’t they invited to a meeting that thus-and-such was. It gets awfully petty.”

  “Wow.” I sat back. “I wonder—”

  “Whether Clara put her gym plans in her calendar,” Simon finished for me.

  “I’ll find out,” Brenda said. “But that’s not the big thing.” She took a breath. “Clara was working with Tonya to fire someone.”

  We all stared at her.

  “Who?”

  “What?”

  “How did you find out?”

  Brenda shook her head. “I couldn’t get anything more out of Tonya. She just let it slip. I asked her whether anyone had been fired recently, and she said that someone was about to be, but the person who was going to do it was killed.” She put down her fork. “So I asked her if it had been the accidental death I’d read about in the papers, and she said yes.”

  Harry thumped the table. “Well, there’s your motive right there. Whoever Clara was going to fire is the killer.”

  “What’s happened to that person since Clara’s death?” Eileen asked.

  Brenda shook her head. “I’ll keep working on Tonya for the details.” She looked at Jack. “I’ll find out who it was.”

  He nodded, then turned to me. “How about Jim Stoddard? Anything interesting there?”

  I made a face. After I’d deflected the engineer’s opening questions, I’d spent what were arguably the most mind-numbing
ly dull three hours of my life.

  “Mike might have found it interesting, or you might have, but I was completely lost. Stoddard doesn’t really seem capable of talking about anything other than computer code. Every time I tried to steer him into things like how he liked his job or what he thinks of his colleagues, he kept coming back to these monologues on the system architecture.”

  “What did you do?” Mike looked a little worried.

  “I tried to seem interested.” I shrugged. “And that was acting.”

  “So that was it?” Eileen said. “Nothing personal? Nothing off-topic?”

  “Oh.” I picked at my bread. “Not unless you want to hear about how he hit on me as I was leaving.”

  “Darling, he didn’t!” Simon exclaimed.

  “Seriously?” Eileen asked.

  “How could he?” Brenda protested. “You’re wearing your ring!”

  I looked at Jack, who seemed a lot calmer than my friends.

  “How did you play it?”

  “Polite but firm.”

  “Good.” He nodded. “No reason to alienate him now.” He took a sip of water. “I’ll just kill him later.”

  “Whatever,” I agreed.

  Harry cleared his throat. “How did Flank do? He was a help, wasn’t he?”

  I had to admit it. “He was a help this morning. I don’t know what he did all afternoon.”

  “I saw him in the copy room,” Simon volunteered.

  “What was he doing there?”

  “As far as I could tell, he seemed to be copying things.” The quantity of alcohol Simon had consumed seemed to have evened out his caffeine buzz. “Heaven knows what he was copying. But he had quite an effect on some of the more skittish employees.”

  I’ll bet he did. I was just surprised I hadn’t heard any screams.

  ***

  By the time Jack let us in the front door, I was ready to fall over. And it was just dawning on me that I’d have to get up and do it all over again the next day.

  I was leaning against Jack, so I felt it when he suddenly tensed.

  “What is it?”

  “Someone’s been in,” he said quietly.

  I looked at the little blinking keypad inside the door. “The alarm is still on,” I whispered. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. Stay here.” He left me outside the door, moving cautiously and keying in the code to disable the alarm.

  Jack moving cautiously has a certain style that I normally enjoy watching. But I’m not normally watching him while standing in the dark in front of my burgled house.

  At least the burglars couldn’t have gotten away with much. We only had a bed and a table. And Harry’s chair. Oh, wouldn’t it be great if they took Harry’s chair—

  Then I thought I heard Jack laughing.

  “Jack?” I took a step inside.

  The lights came on, and I jumped. Jack was standing at the usually closed door to the library. Looking extremely amused.

  “You’ve got to see this.”

  “What? Did someone break in?” I went down the hall.

  “You might say that.”

  “But there’s nothing in the library.”

  “There is now.” He moved aside.

  I peeked around him. In the corner of the room, looking like it had always been there, was a bar. Perfectly matched to the surrounding woodwork, perfectly sized for the space, and fully stocked.

  I stared at it. “Jack?”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Then—”

  “There’s a note.” He handed me a piece of stiff creamy notepaper.

  Charley,

  Everyone needs a drink when they come home from work.

  —Harry

  I looked up at Jack. “How the hell did he—”

  “I have no idea. But I’d like to find out.”

  I was rattled. Seriously rattled. And not because Harry had been able to break into our house, or—more likely—pay someone to break into our house. No, I was rattled because I’d had just that thought about a drink after my first day at Zakdan. And to know that I’d been thinking like Harry…

  I was rattled.

  “What do you want to do?” Jack asked.

  I eyed the thing. “Sweep it for bugs.”

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “Not now.” Since I was standing so conveniently close to him, I ran my hands up his chest. “We need to talk.”

  “I like it when we talk.” He lowered his head toward mine.

  “About Tess McGill.” I poked him in the shoulder.

  At which point he laughed at me, but since he was doing other, nicer things as well, I got over it.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The big substance abuse problem in the workplace isn’t alcohol after all. It’s caffeine. This became glaringly apparent to me as Day Two at Zakdan progressed.

  Jack propelled me out the door with a travel mug of coffee in the morning, and I met the gang at Arugula for cappuccino and strategy, Flank having again staked out the perfect parking spot.

  “Before we get started,” I addressed Eileen. “SFG?”

  I hadn’t remembered to ask her yet where she’d come up with the name for our fake consulting company.

  She grinned. “Don’t you like it?”

  “I should probably know what it stands for—just in case I’m asked.”

  “San Francisco….something,” Simon guessed. “San Francisco what, darling?”

  “San Francisco nothing,” Eileen explained. “It stands for Scoto,” she pointed to herself, “Fairfax,” me, “and Gee,” Brenda.

  “What about me? I don’t even get billing?” Simon blinked.

  “You would have, but SFGB starts to sound like a college radio station.”

  Brenda spoke up. “Shouldn’t we get to work now?”

  Right. Yes. Work.

  ***

  I had two appointments for the day. The gray-haired MoM in the morning, and the disheveled Quality Assurance guy, Bob Adams, in the afternoon.

  But before any of that, I wanted to take a look at the Zakdan calendar system. That thing Brenda had said, about everyone being able to look at everyone else’s calendar, had tickled something in my brain overnight. So after we got to Zakdan and the others went off on their assignments—except for Flank, who stood watch in his corner of our conference room—I settled in and opened my laptop.

  I have a computer at the theatre, and I use email as much as I have to, so I at least knew how to get started. I clicked the icon that looked like a clock, and opened up the email and calendar program.

  It was just that simple. Someone—Jack? Mike?—must have set up the laptop to connect to the Zakdan system. I saw my two appointments on a time grid of the day, and my email Inbox had eight messages. But I didn’t stop to read them. I wasn’t interested in my own data.

  I went hunting around in the menus until I found a command that said “Open Other User’s Calendar.” I clicked it, and a small screen with a list of names appeared. Presumably everyone who worked at Zakdan.

  I scrolled down until I got to the C’s, and there she was. I clicked the name, and after a brief pause I was looking at Clara Chen’s calendar. I paused a moment over the entry for 12:30 that day. Clara would have met with a wedding planner.

  I shook my head, telling myself to hurry up before I was interrupted, and clicked the arrow that would take me back in time. After two weeks I stopped. Most of the meetings were engineering gibberish to me. Bug councils and UI reviews and the like.

  But one appointment was perfectly clear.

  Clara had met with Lalit Kumar on the day before she’d died.

  ***

  Millicent O’Malley—MoM—appeared at the conference room door at exactly ten o’clock. She looked like someone featured in those stark winter paintings of prim New England townsfolk grimly skating on frozen ponds. Today again she wore a turtleneck, this time a loden green, over a long slim black wool skirt. She carried a green suede
day planner notebook. I was a little miffed when I noticed it, because I have a fabulous hot pink Kate Spade day planner, but I hadn’t judged it a sufficiently techie accessory to bring to the office.

  “I thought I was going to speak with the team leader,” MoM said. “Is she gone?” Her dismissive glance around the room indicated that I was a poor second best.

  I glanced around too, for some reason.

  “She had another appointment.” I gave her my most I’m-a-competent-professional smile. “I hope I’ll do.”

  I meant it as a joke, but she seemed to need a minute to consider the question. A flash of annoyance crossed her face, then she embraced the change.

  “WONderful! Let’s get some coffee.” As if she’d been dying to get me alone for days.

  I noticed two things about MoM: First, that she had completely ignored Flank. And that is not easy to do. He is the proverbial elephant in the room. And second, that she was more of a phony than I was. Once she’d decided that I was as close to the top of the SFG org chart as she’d get that morning, I’d suddenly become the most important person in the world to her.

  She made little flourishing gestures as she led the way across the hall to the kitchen, and turned into a tour guide as soon as we got there.

  “You have your choice of beans,” waving her hand toward a line of canisters, each neatly labeled with the provenance and roasting methodology of the coffee beans contained therein. “And here’s the grinder. Honestly.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “You would not believe the amount of money they spent on this equipment. It’s all Italian, and they actually hired baristas to come in and give us training when we got it.”

  Her eyebrows went up two inches, waiting for me to say “You’re kidding.” Then she shook her head as if they—whoever “they” were—were very naughty boys indeed.

  “Now.” She arranged herself at one of the small tables and scooted a chair around for me. “Tell me how I can help you.”

  She’d positioned the chair so my back would be to the door. I scooted it back before I sat down. We were alone in the kitchen, but I didn’t count on it staying that way, and I didn’t want to be overheard.

  I mentally referred to my script. “I’d like you to tell me about your organization. Engineering Services?” I wished I’d brought the laptop with the recorder, or at least a notepad, but she’d swept me across the hall so quickly I hadn’t picked anything up. “What exactly does your group do?”