Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery

by Maria Schneider

  I rolled my eyes. “Hardly.”

  “She’d have done that herself if necessary,” Mark contributed. “She attacked me even though I had a gun.”

  While that was true, the circumstances had been less dangerous than Mark implied. I do believe Mark was giving Clint a subtle warning that may have been more territorial than protective.

  Clint’s eyebrows raised. “Why do I believe that?” He folded his arms across his broad chest. “Okay, so you aren’t here to bust me up, and you aren’t the UPS package I was expecting. And if you carry a gun, and she’s capable of taking care of herself, how can I help you?”

  Mark held up the Borgot phone minus the SD card. “This little item. Recognize it?”

  Clint met his stare silently.

  “It seems odd that an ex-marine would be giving ballet lessons to a room full of geeks, especially when that same man owns his own karate dojo. Maybe there was more to that job than first met the eye,” Mark said.

  Clint didn’t flinch. “My contracts are private. I don’t share details. I’m afraid you’ll have to find your answers somewhere else.”

  Clint didn’t seem all that upset about us having the phone or the code. “Contracts” implied he was working for someone else. Was it possible he didn’t realize I had switched the phone out? Maybe he was Joe’s replacement, a delivery service. “Did the person you delivered the phone to complain?” I asked.

  His gaze switched to me, but only for a second. He knew the real threat. Well, he thought he did. Mark was right though. I had a tendency to be a wild card.

  “Why would they complain?” Clint asked.

  “Because it was the wrong phone,” I replied.

  Mark gave a tiny grunt of exasperation. Giving up details to the bad guys was probably not the way he normally went about his undercover work.

  “It was the wrong phone?” The question didn’t rate another glance my way, but Clint raised both eyebrows.

  I nodded. “Wrong one. Didn’t you notice?”

  Now his eyes strayed to me and stayed there. “It wasn’t my phone. I had never seen it before and don’t expect to see it again.”

  “How often do you hire out to, erm, teach ballet and deliver stolen contraband? Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to just hire out as a karate instructor?”

  “Too threatening.” He shook his head then as if it occurred to him that he had not intended to answer questions. “You may as well come in.” He stepped back, letting Mark squeeze sideways through the opening. The space was plenty big enough for me.

  The room was Japanese sparse, with a tatami mat covering most of the floor, a futon couch, a wooden-framed chair and a coffee table sporting a bonsai plant in the center. A fountain running over four perfectly round stones sat in an art alcove along one wall, explaining the very slight sound of running water. Clint didn’t look the least bit Japanese, but the décor fit his contained and calm personality.

  “Have a seat,” he invited.

  Mark declined. The two of them stared at each other, still assessing or threatening or whatever guy thing they were doing.

  “Karate would have worked out better at Borgot,” I said.

  “Probably, but the email asked me for the same stunt I had done at Clockworks, so that’s what I did. It’s a long story.”

  To cover up my interest in a company called Clockworks that might have something to do with smartwatches, I plopped down on the futon couch. “Oh, we have time,” I said, cheerfully.

  He sighed. “I could have guessed that.” His drop into the chair across from me was much more graceful and controlled than my own. “Basically, my girlfriend started a yoga business about a year ago after she saw an article that said HP hired a dance troupe for inspiration. She now hires out as a yoga instructor to companies that want unusual team building exercises.”

  “HP? The big computer company hired a dance troupe?”

  “Yeah. Go figure. My wife, Keiko, started offering the yoga inspirational exercises at companies on a lark. I never thought it would take off.” He smiled and shook his head. “The ballet thing was because I lost a bet we made on the topic. It was a one-time thing, but then a couple of weeks ago, an email came in asking if I could do the same routine at Borgot.”

  “You lost a second bet?” Mark took a seat on the edge of the couch next to me.

  “No, I’m not that dumb.” He rubbed his hand across the stubble that was his hair. “But the first job at Clockworks paid twenty thousand dollars even though it was a ballet ad I put up on her website as a joke. A guy I’d never heard of sent me an email two weeks ago telling me he had heard about me from a friend at Clockworks where I did the first ballet demo. I wrote back and said the price had gone up to forty. Idiots said yes. What the hell could I do?” He spread his hands. “My military severance is basically healthcare. I wasn’t in long enough to earn a giant pension. I do okay, but not forty thousand dollars for a morning okay. Who does?”

  “That would convince me to wear tights,” I said, “even ugly ones.”

  Mark’s lips twitched because me wearing tights was not quite the same as an ex-marine wearing tights.

  “Who hired you and who asked you to deliver the phone?”

  He stared at us for a while without answering, but he’d already come this far. “After the damn ballet lessons were set up, the same guy emailed me again. Larry. He asked if I could drop a phone off at Clockworks for our mutual friend.”

  “Lawrence Gifford?” Lawrence was behind the thefts? He was a lawyer, not a coder. Then again, lawyers did have a slimy reputation. Maybe his salary wasn’t enough. He’d know all the rules when it came to selling to two sides of the same fence. Maybe he planned on representing himself if he got caught.

  “That’s the guy. Apparently he used to work at Clockworks and asked his contact there for my info. I didn’t ask too many questions, not with an offer on the table.”

  “The phone delivery didn’t sound fishy to you?” Mark asked.

  Clint shrugged. “Not until you two showed up. How do you figure schlepping a phone to someone is weirder than being asked to teach a two-hour lesson in ballet for forty grand? Larry thought I was buddies with some friend of his at Clockworks. He sent me an email the morning of the lesson asking if I could drop a phone there when I was done. I sure as hell didn’t care one way or the other.”

  Mark sat back. “And you didn’t feel a need to let on that you weren’t close friends with anyone at Clockworks because supposedly that referral had just netted you a lot of money.”

  “That about sums it up.”

  “Once Lawrence handed you a phone, you took the phone to Clockworks?” I prodded.

  He shook his head. “No one gave me the phone. I was setting things up in the break room. People were coming and going. Believe me, I didn’t wear those crazy tights outside of that building. You walk around in something like that, it can get you killed. I was in the bathroom changing into the ballet getup when someone left the phone on my bag.”

  I groaned. “It had to be Lawrence, though, right?” I looked at Mark.

  “A good hacker could borrow his email,” he pointed out.

  Radar had certainly taught us that much. But Lawrence had worked both places. He’d know the players there and maybe he had taken the job with the intent to steal Borgot’s code and sell it back to his old employer.

  Clint pulled out an iPhone and swished a few pages. He held up the email. I read Lawrence’s email for myself.

  “Did you meet the guy at Clockworks at least?” I knew the answer before he started shaking his head. Whoever was adding translation code and working this thing had been very careful not to be seen with the phones and had avoided delivering anything in person.

  “I left it at the front desk at Clockworks,” Clint admitted.

  “And no one contacted you to complain it was the wrong phone?”

  It was Clint’s turn to sit back. “What’s wrong with the phone I delivered, and why is the deliver
y a problem in the first place?”

  I glanced at Mark, but fair was fair. “It’s a prototype from Borgot. No one should be getting one of our phones. When I fell off the beam, I switched out the phone on your workout bag with a different phone. I wondered what you were doing with a prototype when you obviously don’t work for Borgot.”

  “What’s on the phone that is so valuable?”

  “Code that a competitor might want for their own phone,” Mark supplied. He left out the part about how that same phone code might also be helping bring a smartwatch to market.

  The boys played cat and mouse with twenty questions a while longer, but we had our information.

  We finally took our leave after Clint agreed to let us know if Lawrence or anyone from Clockworks or Borgot contacted him again.

  As we exited the building out the back door a brown UPS truck pulled up.

  “Good thing he was expecting a delivery,” I said.

  Mark smiled. “Or we’d have had to make our own luck.”

  Mark looked up Clockworks on his phone.

  “The building will be closed already,” I said, knowing that wasn’t necessarily a deterrent for someone as skilled as Mark. “But it’s a computer company. There could easily be engineers staying late.”

  He nodded. “I’ll need time to scope it before we go in.”

  I was very pleased to hear the “we” in that sentence. “When?”

  “I’ll check the building security features out tomorrow while you’re at work. Late afternoon is usually a good time to visit. People are in a rush to get home, and they aren’t paying attention to anyone who is entering or leaving. If the cameras aren’t actively monitored, I can probably disable them for a short time, but we’ll just be two people with a late appointment. A single guy like me would be more suspicious. With you along, we’ll either look like co-workers or a random couple heading in and then out.”

  “Bonnie and Clyde were hoodlums together,” I said.

  He flashed a grin at me. “We won’t be there to steal anything. We’ll just take a look around. If we need someone to pretend to offer a business deal to obtain more information, we’ll send in Steve.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. Huntington was by far the better choice if a snooty businessman were required.

  Chapter 29

  If you ask me, ballet lessons were lower than the bar should be when it came to work obligations. And once you’d done that much at the behest of a company, surely they should leave you alone, at least for a few days. But this was Borgot, and we had a murderer in our midst and two unscheduled deaths on our tab.

  The email was brief and provided driving directions along with the time of Joe Black’s funeral scheduled for the afternoon.

  “How about I show my dedication to my career and not attend?” I grumbled.

  The last line, “We’ll see everyone there,” left no doubt that our attendance was mandatory.

  I raised my eyes skyward, but instead of lightning, all I got was fluorescent bulbs. “Huntington, I demand a raise.” Even though the part of the case he’d hired me for was probably solved now that Wanda Black had been arrested, surely attending the funeral of someone I didn’t even like was call for a bonus or a permanent raise.

  “I have religious reasons for not attending.” I said it out loud to see how the excuse sounded. Lame. There were very likely some good religious excuses, but being Catholic didn’t provide a single one. Catholics were big on funerals and pomp and everyone knew it.

  I’d have to think of something else or hope for an inland hurricane. I texted Mark and let him know about the funeral. It might mean we’d have to shift the time for checking out Clockworks.

  My cell phone buzzed almost immediately. I was expecting Mark, but it was his mother, LeAnn.

  “Are we still supposed to attend the sewing circle tonight?” she asked.

  I had completely forgotten about sewing. Imagine that. “We probably don’t need to go. Surely that part of the case is resolved now that we know how phones were being used in robberies. And since I’m not likely to win the quilting contest, there’s no point in my showing up again.”

  She laughed. “Not this year, but maybe next.”

  “I have to be at a funeral this afternoon anyway. It’s the one for Joe. It doesn’t start until four. I could leave there early if you think we should still show up to sew.” Sewing beat a funeral. Not by much, but enough.

  “You’re kidding, right? Joe’s funeral is the perfect opportunity to uncover his accomplices or the murderer! The killer always attends the funeral.”

  “He does? What if he’s already dead?” My pet theory was that Cary had somehow offed Joe before the mafia bosses got to him.

  “Could be,” she agreed. “I’ll meet you there. Give me the address.”

  Reluctantly, I complied, but what harm could there be in having her there? And I hadn’t exactly involved her. Huntington was still responsible for that little piece of mayhem.

  Monique stopped by to make sure I understood my presence at the funeral was required and also to share her happy news. “I bought the sculpture,” she whispered dramatically, her hand over her heart. “It will be delivered next week. Rohit—you remember, the guy who came over to help—kept the sculpture to prepare it.”

  “Prepare it?”

  “He’s planting moss along the bottom and adding complete landscape details to it! I had to pay extra for the watering system, but he threw in the plants for free. It’s going to be so gorgeous. I’ll email you a picture of some of the flowers I’ve chosen. I wanted roses, but Rohit said they’d grow too large and be messy. What do you think?”

  Since it would be impolite to point out that the thing was a standing monument to ugly and couldn’t get much worse, I swallowed hard and searched for diplomacy. “The owner of the nursery swears by Rohit’s expertise. Plant a climbing rosebush nearby, maybe?” And hope it eventually hid the sculpture from view.

  “Oooh, that’s a good idea. I’ll ask him about it.”

  “Yay, verily,” I muttered under my breath. “Verily? Since when do I say verily?” I stared at my test phone with consternation. “Stupid phone.”

  Kovid overheard my remark since he was in my doorway with more code on an SD card. “What’s wrong with your phone?”

  “Did you code it to use the word verily?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. There’s an extensive dictionary, and the algorithm can choose from multiple answers.”

  “Hmph.” I accepted the SD card from Kovid. “Is there support for Spanish on here?” I asked innocently.

  “Of course not. Marketing is still pushing for it, but there’s no way we can squeeze that in.”

  “What about just loading the dictionary? It would be crude—”

  He shook his head vehemently. “It would be pointless. We haven’t programmed the phone to respond to even single word translation.”

  “How long would it take to just add a raw dictionary translation? If I said ‘water,’ couldn’t it say ‘agua’?”

  “Whose side are you on, anyway? You want to try and test all that? Even if we shoved that kind of mess into the code, you’d have to do extensive testing. And we’d be selling it to the customer as almost pure guesswork. It wouldn’t be a voice assistant, it would be more like a random Google search. The translation could range from almost correct, to jumbled meaningless words, to a full blown ad.”

  Kovid did not appear to be coding anything on the side. “I guess we have to be more clever about the exact phrases we choose to translate,” I said.

  He nodded. “The first phrases will be the types of things you see in travel books like ‘Where is the best restaurant?’ or ‘Where is my hotel?’ The idea isn’t just raw words translated. If we drop a dictionary in there, we can hardly market the idea of the translations being part of a personal assistant.”

  “I wonder if the translated words would sell if you hid it behind a special door. Then let early customers test it.”r />
  He rolled his eyes. “Now you sound like marketing and Cary combined. Customers don’t want a ‘test’ phone! They want a working product.”

  “Okay, okay.” I loaded the new code on my three phones, but instead of starting tests, I visited Roscoe. My plan was to play the same game with him, only butter up his ego because he was the kind of programmer who required that sort of thing or he wouldn’t even agree to talk to a mere plebeian like myself.

  Roscoe and Kovid were both smart enough to hack into Lawrence’s email and set up the contact with Clint to pass along a new drop of code. They didn’t need Lawrence, only his email.

  I leaned against the doorway to Roscoe’s cube. “You know how you were telling us about your super efficient code? Could you drop a Spanish to English raw dictionary in the code in a short time?”

  He didn’t bother to stop typing. “I can do anything I’m paid to do. But if you want quality, you have to wait. We’re not robots, we’re engineers. You want good code, you hire the best and let them do their job.”

  Blah, blah, blah. He had barely glanced over at me the whole time he was delivering his speech. “Well, what if the dictionary was dropped in but hidden? There are always blogs out there that dissect every electronic gadget released. What if you snuck something in there like that for them to discover? If it wasn’t a confirmed feature, it wouldn’t have to be perfect, but it could gain some notoriety if the right blogs discovered it and began talking about it. Then when we officially add the extra glamor of the assistant delivering knowledgeable answers in several languages, it could be a big hit.”

  “Or a complete flop. You’re just Miss Idea, aren’t you? I guess you haven’t bothered to run this by Lawrence to see if it’s patentable?”

  I blinked. “Uhm, well, no.”

  He snorted. “Well, it’s not. Tossing a dictionary in there just plays our hand early. No way is it patentable.”

  I stared at him as he turned back to his computer screen. He wasn’t the type to lift a finger to do any extra work, but if something was patentable, he might hire out to the highest bidder.