How to Succeed in Murder

by Margaret Dumas

  “Well,” she frowned. “First I should make it clear that I don’t like the name Engineering Services. We are not handmaidens to the engineers.” She verbally underscored the word “not.”

  “Okay…”

  “I’ve only recently taken this position. Before the last company reorganization I oversaw all of Client Education—that comprises both Client Instruction and Client Knowledge.”

  I only understood one thing out of that sentence: MoM had been Clara Chen’s boss.

  “Client Knowledge,” I said. “Isn’t that Krissy’s group now?”

  “Yes.” She wrapped her hands around her mug. “For now.”

  “Oh, you don’t think she’ll get the official promotion?”

  “Krissy is a sweet girl.” She gave me a sidelong glance. “But really.”

  Uh huh. Now the gloves were off. “What about the last person in that job? Didn’t I hear something about…”

  “Yes.” She set her coffee down. “There was a tragic accident. We’re all still in shock.”

  “How awful,” I said. “Did you know her well?”

  “I hired her.” She gave me a tight, brave smile. “But I don’t imagine that interests you. What do you need to know for your report?”

  I needed to know who killed Clara, who faked Lalit’s suicide, and who was planting bugs in the Zakdan code. But those were not the sort of questions best asked directly.

  “I know Client Knowledge is what other companies call Tech Support,” I told her. “But what’s Client Instruction?”

  “It’s our Technical Publications department.”

  “The technical writers.” I knew from the Fake Book that they wrote the user manuals. And, according to Simon, they had a wide variety of extracurricular interests.

  “That’s right,” she said encouragingly. She may as well have patted my head.

  “But now you run Engineering Services. How did that happen?” Had she had a falling out with Clara? Is that why she didn’t want to talk about her?

  She delivered a great sigh and turned into a martyr before my eyes. “Well, the web team was in trouble, and there was a new initiative that they just…” She gave me a stoic my-fate-is-to-take-care-of-those-less-competent look. “They needed me.”

  Right. The train wreck of a plan that Morgan Stokes had told us about. Something about cataloguing information? A paperless office—that was it. Doomed to failure, but that was beside the point.

  “So Engineering Services is the web team.” Now I was getting it. Maybe she hadn’t had a falling out with Clara after all. Maybe she’d used her as a stepping-stone to get ahead.

  “Oh, no,” she protested. “No, I’m not involved with the web team anymore.” The look on her face said she wouldn’t want to touch that icky web stuff with a ten foot pole. “No.” She straightened her spine. “Now it’s Engineering Services that…well, I don’t want to be indiscreet, but…” She shook her head, implying untold layers of corruption and mismanagement in Engineering Services.

  “Thank goodness they have you to help out,” I told her.

  ***

  “She sounds like a piece of work,” Eileen said.

  We’d all gone to lunch at Eliza’s, a hole-in-the-wall Chinese fusion place on Potrero Hill, figuring a quick comparison of the morning’s findings might be better accomplished away from the office. Flank had ditched us to pick up a pizza from Goat Hill. He was devouring it in the front seat of the little green bug, parked illegally outside Eliza’s.

  I’d been trying to capture my overall impression of MoM.

  “Let’s just say she’s not my new best friend.”

  Brenda toyed with her Basil Chicken. “Well, pathologically condescending or not, the question is…”

  “Could she be a murderer?” I finished.

  They looked at me.

  “It didn’t feel like she was hiding a murder,” I said. “It felt like she was covering insecurities of a breadth and scope I don’t even want to think about, but…” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Eileen nodded and turned to Simon. “How did your talk with Krissy go?”

  He took the last Crab Rangoon from the plate of appetizers we’d been sharing. “I hate to sound as catty as your friend MoM, darling, but my assessment is that Krissy is about as clever as a box of lint.”

  I expected Brenda to scold him, but she just leaned forward. “Really?”

  He held up his hands in helplessness. “Try as I might, I couldn’t get her to say anything remotely interesting. She walked me through the entire tedious Client Thingy operation as if someone had pulled the string in her back.” He gave me a dark look. “Completely over-rehearsed, if you know what I mean.”

  “Does that make her stupid?” Eileen asked thoughtfully. “Or is she sticking to some script in order to avoid making a slip about Clara?”

  “Did you ask her about Clara?” I asked.

  “Mmmm.” He nodded, his mouth full of Mango Beef.

  “And?” Brenda demanded.

  He swallowed. “She just said it was tragic and they were all still in shock.”

  “That’s almost exactly what MoM said!” I nearly lost a prawn in my excitement. “Could they be in on it together?”

  “Either that or it was tragic and they’re all still in shock,” Eileen said.

  Okay, fine.

  “But you have to admit that so far Krissy has the strongest motive,” Brenda said. “After all, she gets Clara’s job.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Depending on how much MoM has to say about it.”

  “Well,” Simon said brightly. “If MoM is murdered next, we’ll have our answer, won’t we?”

  We stared at him.

  “What?” He blinked.

  I turned to Eileen. “How did it go with Jim Stoddard? Did you have any better luck with him than I did yesterday?”

  She made a face. “Not really. But you’re not the only one he hit on.”

  “Oh, my God,” Brenda said. “Would you believe Troy from Marketing hit on me too?”

  “That place is a hotbed of sexual frustration,” Simon mused. He looked at his watch. “When do we go back?”

  We ignored him.

  “Okay, but before the romantic overture, did you get anything useful out of Jim?”

  Eileen shook her head. “It was the same as with you. He just wanted to talk about how brilliantly architected the software was and how much he liked my shoes.”

  They were very pointy shoes with very spiky heels. Did that say something about the Engineering VP?

  Eileen looked at Brenda. “What was Troy’s technique with you?”

  She made a face. “He did the hair thing you told us about. Taking the ponytail out and putting it in again. I wonder if it’s his way of preening? Like a male bird, sort of putting himself on display?”

  The only thing I could say to that was “yuk,” so I kept quiet.

  “Anyway,” Brenda went on, “I thought we decided yesterday that he doesn’t have a motive. Is anyone going to talk to him this afternoon?”

  “No.” Eileen consulted her small electronic organizer. “I’m with MoM—I can’t wait for that,” she grimaced. “And you, Charley, are with Bob from Quality Assurance.”

  The bearded couch potato. I’d already written him off as a suspect because he couldn’t have been the one at the gym with Clara, and I thought he was too chubby to have been the one dashing across the street in the rain to get in Lalit’s car.

  “Simon, you’re with Jim.”

  “I wonder if he’ll proposition me?” He wiggled his eyebrows. “Or if I should—”

  “And Brenda, you’re in Human Resources with Tonya again. See if you can get her to crack about who Clara was going to fire. I still think that’s our best bet.”

  She looked up. “Are we ready?”

  I wished people would stop asking that.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Bob Adams. Vice president of Quality Assurance for the past two years, havin
g risen through the ranks of code testers. Graduated from Brown—had everyone at Zakdan? Unmarried.

  And not in his office when he was supposed to be.

  I stepped inside the door. The entire wall along the corridor was glass, so I didn’t think it was a good idea to actively snoop, but I did want to listen.

  Lalit Kumar’s office was next door, and there were two people in it. I’d seen them when I’d passed it on the way to Bob’s. A man and a woman, who were apparently cleaning out the dead executive’s personal items. Were they police? They seemed to be dressed a little more conservatively than most of the Zakdan crowd.

  They were speaking quietly, but I could still hear the murmur of their voices, and I could tell one from the other. I was reasonably sure that if someone—say, Jack—had been speaking in a normal tone of voice into a cell phone, he could easily have been heard by whoever was in the adjoining rooms.

  Of course, anyone could have been in those rooms. But they belonged to Bob, Jim Stoddard, and Troy Patterson.

  The three men who were now my lead suspects.

  ***

  I thought standing in an empty office might draw unwanted attention, so I decided to wander around the fourth floor executive offices, figuring Bob would probably show up eventually, and that I might learn something incriminating somewhere else in the meanwhile.

  Since there seemed to be an espresso machine every ten feet or so, it wasn’t hard to find gathering places. I went into the nearest break room, already occupied by two guys I hadn’t met.

  They both looked to be in their mid-thirties, shaggy-haired tee-shirt-and-cargo-pants types, which I recognized by then as the uniform of the software professional.

  They were in the middle of an intense discussion, which left them oblivious to my presence. It wasn’t difficult to eavesdrop as I made a cup of tea.

  “Come, on—you can’t be serious!”

  “I’m totally serious. And I’m right, and you just won’t admit it.”

  “But it’s wrong! It’s just wrong on so many levels I can’t even begin to catalogue how wrong it is!”

  What was wrong? Had I stumbled into a confession about someone planting bugs in the Zakdan software?

  “Dude, just hear me out—”

  “I’m not listening. You’re insane, or you’re high. And I hope for your sake you’re high, because—”

  “I am not high, and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is a perfectly legitimate rock anthem.”

  Damn. Not a confession.

  “It is not! How can you even say that? ‘Born to Run’ is a rock anthem. ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is a rock anthem. Hell, ‘Bohemian’ fucking ‘Rhapsody’ is a fucking rock anthem—”

  The other guy shook his head violently. “No, no, no. Listen, it takes three things to be a rock anthem. One: it has to be a voice of its own time—”

  A late arrival brought the highly intellectual debate to a screeching halt.

  “What’s going on, guys?”

  I jumped, not having noticed Bob Adams at the door.

  “Hi, Bob,” said the advocate for Nirvana.

  “Hi, Bob,” echoed the classic rock holdout.

  “What are you guys talking about? Music?” He smiled too eagerly.

  It was almost painful to watch. He was making such a strained attempt to show he was one of the guys, and the guys were so very clearly not interested.

  “Yeah, something like that.” Looking at the floor.

  “Well, we’d better get back to work.” With a brief, tight smile.

  They began shuffling toward the door.

  “Yeah, hey—any time you want to check out my CD collection, just come on by my office. I’ve got some killer stuff.”

  They’d moved past him, so he probably didn’t see the look they exchanged. But I did, and I gathered they were not going to check out his killer stuff any time soon.

  “Okay, see ya!” He turned to me, his overly bright grin still in place. “Great guys, huh? Oh! Sorry! I should have introduced you!”

  I waved my hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

  But he was worried. I couldn’t tell if it was about his social faux pas, or the fact that I’d just seen him snubbed by the cool kids, or something else. But I got a definite whiff of something. And it didn’t smell like teen spirit.

  It smelled like desperation.

  ***

  “Why? What’s he hiding?” Eileen quizzed me.

  We’d gathered back in the conference room after our afternoon interviews. Brenda, Eileen, Simon and I were at the table, Eileen typing our notes into her laptop. She planned on emailing them to Jack when she’d compiled them.

  Flank walked the perimeter of the two glass walls—one the length of the room and the other, with the door, the width. This was his way of discouraging people from lingering outside or looking in.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But he’s all bluster and no core, if you know what I mean.”

  Brenda nodded. “I see that a lot at school. It’s usually someone who wants desperately to be perceived differently from how he sees himself.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Simon asked.

  I thought about the hour or so I’d spent with the Quality exec. “All through our conversation, Bob kept up this sort of double-edged attitude. I mean, he wanted me to see him as one of the guys. He mentioned several times that he couldn’t believe he was a VP, because he still thinks of himself as a tester. But at the same time, it seemed really important to him that I walk away from the meeting believing that he’s brilliant and a natural executive.”

  “So, if he’s putting modest and brilliant up as his false front, does that mean he’s really ambitious and stupid?” Simon enquired.

  “Ambitious and stupid is a dangerous combination,” Eileen observed. I’m not sure if she included that in the notes. “Anything else? Did he say anything concrete?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing incriminating. He has this annoying habit of looking at you like he knows much more than he’s telling you, but I wouldn’t bet he actually does.”

  “What does he do when you press him on something?” Brenda asked.

  “Just gets increasingly enigmatic. Which, come to think of it, did have the effect of getting me to change the topic…”

  “But nothing concrete?” Eileen reiterated.

  I sighed. “No.”

  Simon had already told us he hadn’t been able to get anything from Jim Stoddard that we hadn’t. And he seemed just slightly miffed that he hadn’t gotten propositioned, but he chalked it up to the engineer’s narrow-mindedness.

  “How did you get along with MoM?” I asked Eileen.

  She made a face. “I’ve already written up my notes, so you can look over the details with Jack and Mike later. The short version,” she told us, “is that I think she’s a corporate snake, but I don’t know if she’s capable of murder.”

  “Why not?” Simon asked.

  “She seems…opportunistic,” Eileen said thoughtfully. “Apparently, she’s latched on to every new initiative to hit Zakdan in the last five years. But she’s savvy—she can smell failure early, so she distances herself from doomed projects and gets out before they take her down with them. She’d make a good stock trader, but I don’t know if plotting and planning are her strengths, and you need that to get away with murder, don’t you?”

  “I think the idea of us being here is that the killer won’t get away with it,” I reminded her.

  “True.” She paused and frowned. “But what about this—MoM isn’t technical. For all her flitting around the highest ranks of the company, she has no programming experience and has never worked directly with the code. So if we believe Clara was killed because she discovered something about the bug planted in the software, and Lalit was killed because she told him about it—” which had become our working theory once I’d told them about Clara’s meeting with Lalit on the day before her death “—I don’t think MoM could be behind it.”

  “
Great,” I said. “So we have a couple cases of borderline personality disorder, but no valid suspects yet. Unless…” I turned to Brenda. “Did you get any good dirt in Human Resources?”

  Brenda gave me a worried look. “I’m not sure I should tell you.”

  That sounded promising.

  “Of course you should. What did Tonya tell you? Do you know who Clara was going to fire?”

  “Yes.” She still looked doubtful. “But I don’t think we should leap to the conclusion that that person is the killer.”

  “Who was it?” Eileen demanded.

  “Come on, Brenda,” Simon encouraged. “Tell us.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay, but seriously, let’s not go rushing off—”

  “Fine, fine, fine.” I waved her concern away. “Who is it?”

  I could tell she didn’t like it, but she told us.

  “Krissy.”

  We all took a while to recover from the news. None of us had the impression that Clara’s replacement was a brain trust, but we hadn’t pegged her to be the one walking the corporate plank.

  “Why?” Eileen recovered first. “What were the charges against Krissy?”

  “It seems to boil down to incompetence,” Brenda told us. “Clara thought that Krissy had been promoted beyond her abilities, so she tried to give her extra training, but Krissy’s attitude about that wasn’t good. So Clara put her on a written improvement plan, and unless she lived up to the terms of it, she was on her way out.”

  “What were the terms?” Eileen had become sharply attentive.

  Brenda shook her head. “Tonya put up a brick wall again. I could tell she didn’t want to tell me as much as she had, but she had to talk to someone. It seemed like it was killing her that she knew Clara had been so close to firing Krissy, and now it looks like she’ll get Clara’s job.”

  “Doesn’t Morgan know about this?” Simon asked. “Wouldn’t Clara have told him?”

  “Tonya didn’t think so,” Brenda told us. “She said Clara wanted to keep it strictly between her and Krissy and HR.”