How to Succeed in Murder

by Margaret Dumas

  Anthony, who had accompanied his mother, was on roller blades. I realized I had only myself to blame, and it did look like fun as he swooped down the hallway from the kitchen and shot across the living room floor, but his activities weren’t exactly conducive to clear thinking.

  Harry was in the kitchen, having been driven out of his position behind the bar in the library by the arrival of the guest geeks, none of whom had accepted his offer of a flaming rum punch. He was currently stirring something he called “grog” in a large pot on my kitchen stove, on the theory that the ex-navy men in the crowd would find it irresistible.

  “Do you really think this is the time to get them drunk?” I asked.

  “Everyone’s mental machinery needs a little lubrication from time to time, Charley.”

  Harry was lubricated enough for all of us, but then he usually is.

  ***

  The doorbell rang, and I opened the door to find Simon chatting delightedly with a pizza delivery man.

  “Darling, this is Tony. Do you know he stopped off at a mini-mart to pick up some energy drinks for the profs on his way here? Wasn’t that delightful of him?”

  Energy what for the who?

  “Hi.” Tony handed me four boxed pizzas and held up three six-packs, variously labeled Monster, RockStar, and Full Throttle. “That’ll be seventy-two dollars.”

  I looked at Simon.

  “I didn’t order it, darling. I just ran into the man on the way to your door. Where’s Eileen?”

  He moved past me smoothly, and Tony the delivery guy spoke again.

  “The profs ordered it. Said they were working on a wicked juicy bug here.”

  I was beginning to get it. Although the term “wicked juicy bug” initially conjured up a mental image of something icky with thousands of legs, I was willing to bet it had more to do with the Zakdan code and the three guest geeks in my library.

  Sure enough, one of them stuck his head out with perfect timing. “Tony! Dude! Thanks!”

  Geek No. 1 and his cohorts swarmed out, relieved me of the pizzas, took the energy drinks from Tony, and vanished behind the library door again.

  Tony looked after them with stars in his eyes. “They’re so awesome.”

  Uh huh.

  “Are they your professors?” I asked him. He looked vaguely student-ish.

  He gave me one of those looks the young reserve for the hopelessly clueless. “They’re just the three best hackers in the entire world, is all.”

  Of course they were.

  “Give me a minute,” I told him. “I have to go find my purse.”

  On my way to the kitchen for some cash, it occurred to me that this had been an unfortunate choice for Flank’s night off. I could have used him on door duty. It also occurred to me that I really didn’t want to find out how Harry’s grog mixed with Monster cola in the systems of the world’s best hackers.

  Anthony skated past me. “Aunt Charley, you have the coolest house ever!”

  At least I didn’t have to worry about the furniture getting broken.

  “Charley, where do you keep your coconuts?” Harry demanded as I entered the kitchen.

  “In the cabinet right next to my machete,” I told him.

  I opened the drawer near the telephone, pulled out the phone book, turned to M for Money, and took one of the hundred-dollar bills I keep there for just such emergencies.

  “You know, nobody likes a smartass,” my uncle told me.

  “I have to disagree with you there, Harry.” Jack had come in behind me. “Charley, who’s that guy in our front hall?”

  “Tony the pizza man,” I told him. “He’s a big fan of the profs.”

  I left them and went off to pay the guy. I got to the door just as Gordon was coming in, loaded down with a giant tray of something that smelled garlicky and fabulous.

  “Charley, why is there a pizza delivery car in front of your house?”

  I gave Tony the money and sent him on his way. “Because the best hackers in the world ordered some delivered to my library. What’s that?”

  “Enough Fettuccini Ricardo to feed an army. I can’t believe you ordered pizza!”

  “I didn’t!” I protested. “And that smells amazing. Why don’t we take it to the kitchen, and—”

  He went off muttering, and I was about to close the door when I heard my name called from somewhere outside.

  “Charley!”

  “Martha?” What was the Rep’s costume designer doing here? Had Simon called her in for some sort of emergency fashion consultation?

  She made her way up the front path in a swirl of black knitwear, her long loose hair whipped by the wind.

  “I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to get to this, but it’s really the first chance I’ve had. Is this a good time?”

  “For what?”

  She was taking something out of the large black bag she wore crosswise over her chest. “For your ritual purification ceremony, remember?” She produced what looked like a large clump of dried herbs tied together with red string at one end.

  “My what? What’s that?”

  “A sage wand. I’m here to do your smudging!”

  Right. Not here for fashion. Here in her capacity as my friendly neighborhood Wicca. And now that I thought about it, I did remember saying something like “oh, sure” on our clothing expedition when she’d offered to come purify my new house.

  “Um, Martha…”

  “Oh, there are a lot of people here.” She pushed past me and started looking in rooms. “That’s not really…well, never mind. We’ll make the best of it. Do you have a match?”

  “Uh, no, and—”

  “Who needs a light?” Harry boomed from behind me. He held out his ever-present cigar to Martha. “Will this do?”

  “Oh…” She looked a little taken aback, which was nothing compared to how I was feeling. “It’s a bit unorthodox, but in a pinch…”

  She lit the sage, which began putting out a pungent gray smoke. She started waving it all around, looking serious.

  Anthony careened around the corner from the living room and came to a sudden stop. “Aunt Charley, why is there a witch in your house?”

  “A Wicca, dear.” Martha wafted the sage toward him, then asked Harry where the heart of the house was. He led her off to the kitchen. Jack passed them as he came out.

  “Do I want to know?”

  I shrugged.

  Anthony skated up to Jack and grabbed hold of his arm. “Hey Jack, can I go play the pirate game on your computer?”

  “Sure. Ask Mike to come down, okay?”

  The boy zipped to the bottom of the stairs, then clumped his way up.

  “Anthony! Take your skates off on the stairs!” Eileen called from the living room.

  I went back to the still-open front door and looked out.

  “Who are you expecting?” Jack asked.

  “Just Groucho and Harpo and the boys.”

  He closed the door and turned me around to face him.

  “We’ll figure it out, Charley,” he said. “Things are a little crazy, but we’ll figure it out.”

  I looked beyond him down the hall and into the kitchen, where Martha was waving a sage wand over Gordon’s fettuccini, while the cook looked on darkly and Harry attempted to hand him a drink. To my left I could hear Simon and Eileen bickering about the viability of Troy as a killer, and to my right I swear the hackers were having a power belching competition.

  “If you say so, Jack.”

  The doorbell rang. I took a deep breath, turned, and opened it.

  “Hi. Are you Charley? I’m Kevin Allred. Morgan Stokes asked me to stop by with some samples. I’m his interior decorator.”

  Perfect.

  ***

  Harry’s grog turned out to be a surprisingly good accompaniment to Gordon’s fettuccini. And after sufficient quantities of both, following the departure of the decorator and the witch, with the hackers still closeted in the library, the rest of us were finally a
ble to get down to business.

  “Darlings, I don’t think we have a clue.” Simon spoke first, after we’d all taken rather longer than was needed to study the chalkboard chart that Eileen and Brenda had put together.

  “We have plenty of clues,” Eileen corrected him. “We just don’t know how to make sense of them.”

  “And we’re about to be given the bum’s rush out of Zakdan,” I didn’t need to remind them. “Without being any closer to figuring out who killed Clara, Lalit, or Jim, and who planted the ticking time bomb in the Zakdan code.”

  Brenda turned to Mike. “Can you figure out a way to turn it off?” she asked him. “I mean, even if we can’t figure out who put the virus there, can you figure out how to fix it so it doesn’t go off?”

  “We’ve got a team working on that,” he told her. I assumed he referred to the pizza fans in the library. “But isolating the trigger in the current code is one thing, and disarming it in every application that’s ever been deployed on a Zakdan system is something else again.”

  Jack was leaning against the far wall, his arms crossed and a look of concentration on his face. This is the part where I expected him to have the blinding realization that would make everything clear. This is the part where he should look at the chart, smack his forehead, and say, “Why didn’t I see it before?” This is the part where he was supposed to solve everything.

  “Jack?” Harry was watching him. “What do you think?”

  Jack frowned. I held my breath.

  “I think it may be time to call it a night.”

  Okay, not what I had hoped for.

  “Do you think if we had more time…” I suggested.

  “Maybe we should search everyone’s offices,” Simon proposed. “We still have tomorrow, right? So if we just create a series of diversions…” He looked around and apparently picked up on a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

  “That isn’t necessary,” Mike told us. “We’ve already…um…we kind of…”

  I turned to Jack. “You broke into Zakdan and searched everyone’s office?”

  He moved closer to the chalkboard. “Not everyone’s.”

  Oh, well, all right then. He was only guilty of selective breaking and entering. I was just about to launch into something approaching a diatribe when we heard Anthony yelling from the top of the stairs.

  “Jack! Hey, Jack! Can you come help me?”

  Eileen waved Jack away and went out into the hall. “Anthony, don’t yell in the house!” she yelled. “And take off your skates.”

  “But, Mom…”

  “Now.” Her voice held the kind of authority that makes investment bankers quail.

  She came back in and started gathering up their things. People with children, I’d noticed, rarely travel light. “Sorry, everyone, but I think we’d better be going.”

  “I’ll go see what he wanted,” Jack said.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Eileen told him.

  “It’s no bother.” He left, and the rest of us started wrapping things up for the evening.

  It was not a happy group. I was pretty sure everyone else was feeling exactly as frustrated as I was. Nobody likes failure, and I couldn’t tell any more whether Harry’s loud assurances that it would all make sense in the morning were examples of optimism or denial.

  ***

  When everyone had gone I went upstairs to take a long shower. I passed Jack in his office on the way up. He had called out his goodbyes but hadn’t made a reappearance downstairs. He still hadn’t come to the bedroom by the time I toweled off.

  I went to his office. He was still in front of the computer.

  “What’s so fascinating?” I looked at the screen over his shoulder. A group of rowdy pirates was making somebody walk the plank. But every time the tattered sailor got to the end, he popped back to the beginning again.

  “You’re playing the pirate game?” I asked him.

  “Anthony found something,” he said.

  “Treasure?”

  “Better. A bug.” He looked up at me. “And this game was developed with Zakdan tools.”

  I blinked and looked back at the screen. A parrot kept repeating, “Dead men tell no tales. Dead men tell no tales.”

  Maybe not, but from the look on my husband’s face, this game had told him something.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The offices of Zakdan, Inc. were deserted by three o’clock the next afternoon. The entire company had been invited to a memorial service for Jim Stoddard. Whether they’d all actually gone to Trinity Episcopal was a matter of speculation, but they’d certainly cleared out by the appointed time, and that left us with an opportunity. One that I was having a hard time convincing Brenda and Eileen to take advantage of.

  “But Charley,” Eileen reminded me, “Mike and Jack already searched everyone’s offices.”

  “But they don’t know everyone as well as we do,” I argued. “We might be able to notice something they missed.”

  Simon joined us in the conference room, closing the glass door behind him. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I had the same idea. I’ve been up on the fourth floor, and everything interesting is locked up tight.”

  “You actually tried to break into someone’s office?” Eileen’s eyebrows went up.

  “Morgan’s.”

  “He’s not a suspect!” Brenda looked shocked.

  “Why not?” Simon demanded. “I mean, why is it that we’ve never suspected his motives in all of this?”

  “Mainly because he’s the one who asked us to investigate it,” I reminded him.

  “Still.” Simon slouched into a chair. “I have a feeling about him.”

  “Now that’s interesting,” Brenda said. “I was reading another of those business books last night, and the main thesis was that, regardless of how well we delude ourselves into believing we’re all critical thinkers, most of us make up our minds about most of the important things in life in a split-second, gut-instinct flash.” She looked around the room.

  “I read that book a few months ago,” Eileen said. “It certainly explains some things about politics. Do you realize—”

  “Politics aside,” Brenda interrupted. “I want to try something. I’m going to ask each of you a question, and I want you to answer—don’t think, don’t justify, don’t do anything but answer—with the first thing that pops into your head.”

  Why not? Nothing else had worked.

  Brenda stood, and did a good imitation of a cobra about to strike.

  “Eileen, who killed Jim Stoddard?”

  “Bob Adams.” Eileen answered immediately, then gave Brenda an astonished look. “I can’t believe I said that.”

  “But you did,” Brenda answered. “Simon, quick, who wrote the software virus?”

  “Jim Stoddard,” Simon replied. “I know it makes no sense, but if you want my gut reactions—”

  “Charley,” Brenda cut him off to turn to me. “Who killed Clara?”

  “MoM,” I answered. Then my jaw dropped. “But I really don’t think she did, I mean…why would she?”

  Brenda sat down again, looking defeated. “I have no idea. According to the book, that should have given us a really clear indication.”

  “It did that,” Eileen said. “It just gave us all different ones. And probably one of us is right—but which one?”

  We were not a cheery group.

  “Well, I have one clear indication,” I stated. “And it’s that we should pack up our stuff and finish this sham of a presentation at my house over big sloppy martinis.”

  “That seems appropriate,” Simon agreed. “Now, if only we could think of a way to get everybody drunk tomorrow when we deliver the bloody thing as well.”

  I stood as my laptop was shutting down. “Flank, will you go get the car while I run to the restroom? We have a lot to bring home with us tonight, and we parked miles away.”

  Which was a slight exaggeration, but he roused himself from his station in the corner and m
ade a noise that I decided to interpret as “No problem, Charley.”

  I went with him as far as the elevator, then used my card key to get into the ladies room. Reflecting, not for the first time, that perhaps Zakdan took the whole security thing a little too far.

  The room contained three sinks and a vanity, with a door leading to the bathroom stalls beyond. The door was closed. And on the vanity was a book.

  I looked at it for a minute before it clicked into place. A green suede day planner. And every time I’d seen it before, it had been in the possession of its owner, Millicent O’Malley.

  MoM.

  I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. I went on pure gut instinct.

  I took the book and ran.

  ***

  “What in the world are you doing?” Brenda looked at me with wide eyes.

  I’d burst through the door from the hall, gesturing wildly through the glass for the length of the conference room, until I got to the door on the far side.

  “Open your laptops and put them in a line.” I came in and started positioning the computers to shield the back corner of the table from any prying eyes.

  “Why? What are we hiding? And who’s left in the building, anyway?” Eileen asked.

  “MoM.” I held up the book. “And we’re hiding her planner.”

  “Oh, well done, darling!” Simon pushed his laptop over. “Let’s have a look.”

  “I can’t believe you did that!” Brenda reached for it.

  “I know,” I admitted, putting the book on the desk, concealed from any casual observer by the laptops. “I can’t either.”

  We crowded around, in Flank’s usual position. If anyone came through the hall door we’d see them through the glass in plenty of time to hide the book.

  “This is all my fault,” Brenda said. “If I hadn’t asked you all those stupid questions—”

  “Never mind,” I told her. “What’s done is done. We’ll just take a look at it, and when we’re finished, Simon can go put it up in the fourth floor kitchen. She’ll think she left it there.”

  “That’s assuming it doesn’t contain her diary, in which she confesses to being a homicidal maniac,” Simon said. “And why am I the one carrying the incriminating evidence all over the place?”

  “It’s hardly incriminating.” I was leafing through months of neat writing on calendar pages. “At least so far.”