Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 04 - Country Comes to Town

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  Inez sat behind her desk and motioned me toward a guest chair. “Look, Laura, I don’t want you to think that I’m not glad you’re here. I think you’ll be a great asset. It’s just that Vinnie should have consulted me before hiring you. I don’t even know what it is you’re supposed to be doing.”

  “From what he said at the interview, I think I’m supposed to work with Neal. Neal is going to concentrate on the code and let me work on the user interface.”

  “Okay, that makes sense. I was afraid he wanted you to work on something stupid.” She looked at my expression and laughed. “You must be wondering what you’ve let yourself in for.”

  “It had crossed my mind,” I admitted. “I’ve never started a job by telling the chief operating officer what I’ll be doing.”

  “Well, SSI isn’t like other companies. Vinnie refuses to stay off my turf, and that makes it hard for the rest of us. Mother of God, how did I ever put up with him when we were dating?”

  It sounded like a good time for girl talk. “I know what you mean. I can’t figure out how I put up with Philip for over two years.”

  “I never did understand that,” she said. “He was so full of life and noise, and you were so quiet.”

  “I wasn’t that quiet,” I said, stung by her description, probably because it was too accurate.

  “You know what I mean. Compared to Philip.”

  “Compared to Philip, you were quiet.”

  “You’re right. If he had just grown up to be the man he started out to become, it would have been very different around here. As it was …” She shrugged.

  “Is it true that y’all were trying to fire him?” I said.

  “How did you hear that?”

  I looked toward Vincent’s office, which was bound to give her the wrong impression, and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t say.” It wasn’t quite a lie, but it was darned close.

  Inez looked disgusted. “Some people should learn to keep their mouths shut. Yes, we did want to fire him, and he was fighting us every step of the way.”

  This next part was iffy, but I tried it anyway. “Is it true that he tried to blackmail people?”

  She looked startled. “Vincent told you that?”

  Instead of answering, I just looked uncomfortable.

  “Okay, don’t say. I suppose you could call it blackmail. Philip threatened to tell people that he and I had slept together.” She held up one hand. “Not while the two of you were together, that I swear. And before he was with Colleen. Never do I touch another woman’s man.”

  An interesting distinction, considering the period she was talking about. “But weren’t you and Vincent still …?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “It was just the once—I was drunk. Besides, what difference does it make now? Philip thought I wouldn’t want Vinnie to know, but I don’t care one way or the other. Why should I?” Then she lowered her voice. “Did Vinnie tell you what Philip had on him?”

  “Actually, it wasn’t Vincent who told me,” I said, improvising quickly. “It was Philip. And he didn’t give me any details.”

  She looked disappointed.

  I changed the subject a little. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when Philip showed up at my door. He didn’t try that on you, did he?”

  “He knew better. The last time I saw him was when he left here that day.”

  “I wonder if he went to anybody else’s apartment that day. You live in Boston, don’t you?”

  “Off Newbury Street. Not all of us have rich families to buy us houses in Lexington, like Vinnie does. Why do you ask?”

  “You know Philip died behind my apartment, don’t you? After I wouldn’t let him stay with me, he went somewhere else and then came back. I figured that since your place was so close, he might have gone to see you.”

  “He knew better,” she repeated. “When he threatened me, I told him I’d send my cousins after him if he ever bothered me again. You have to be tough with a man like that. No offense, Laura, but that was always your problem with Philip. You were never tough enough.”

  I really didn’t appreciate her telling me why my relationship with Philip had failed, certainly not after all this time. Which is why I got nasty and said, “Is that what happened with you and Vinnie?”

  I regretted it immediately. Inez didn’t say anything at first, but the temperature in the room went down several degrees. Finally she said, “That was totally different. Vinnie was the one who needed to be strong, not me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. Everybody knows it was Vincent’s loss.”

  She thawed a little. “Just remember that you can’t trust Vinnie, not at all.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said, which was true enough. At this point, I didn’t trust anybody at SSI.

  “Good. If you have any problems, you come to me.”

  “I will. Thanks, Inez.”

  Her phone rang then. “This is Inez. Yes, Laura’s in here, Vinnie.”

  I hid a grin. Vincent’s office was next door, but he’d called rather than come within range of Inez.

  She went on. “A great welcome you gave our new employee. Did Muriel keep you up late last night?” I don’t know what he said, but she smiled and it wasn’t a very nice smile. “No? Better luck next time. Those headaches can’t last forever … sure, I’ll send her in. ‘Bye, Vinnie.”

  She hung up the phone. “Vinnie wants to talk to you. But remember what I said—don’t trust him.”

  I nodded. Paw once told me that hate wasn’t all that far from love, so that if the loving went away, hate was real quick to slip in. I guess he wouldn’t have been surprised by the way Inez and Vincent were acting.

  Either Vincent hadn’t been all that upset by Inez’s remarks, or he had pulled himself together quickly. As soon as I tapped at his open door, he came toward me with his hands outstretched. “Laura, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I meant to get here early to get things ready for you, and somehow I overslept.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I know this past week has been rough on you, what with Philip’s funeral and all.”

  “That’s no excuse for not making you feel welcome. Let me show you where you’ll be sitting. At least I had enough sense to have Roberta get your desk ready yesterday afternoon.”

  I would have wondered why Roberta hadn’t shown me to my cubicle when I’d come in if I hadn’t already figured out that she wasn’t exactly a ball of fire. And she had put the necessities at my desk: a stapler, pads, pens, and yellow sticky notes.

  “I think you’ll be happy with your workstation,” Vinnie said, patting the top of the PC.

  “Looks great.” It was a nice system—better, in fact, than the one at my real job. And the cubicle was bigger, too.

  “What do you want me to do first?” I asked. “Do you still want me to concentrate on the user interface?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How far has Neal gotten on the design specifications?”

  He hesitated. “Not too far, I gather. Since Philip’s … accident, he’s mostly been trying to get into the code.”

  “Password protection? Surely somebody here had the password.”

  “If it were just a password, it would be no problem. Unfortunately, Philip left us other gifts.”

  “Viruses?” I guessed. There were lots of ways to destroy code and data with bombs and viruses. They can even be set to go off later, making sure that backups are corrupted, too.

  “Philip had a unique sense of humor.”

  And he had been very territorial. That made me think of something else. This cubicle was the only vacant one I saw. “Vincent, this wasn’t Philip’s desk, was it?”

  Vincent hesitated a minute, which answered my question for me. “Well, yes. Is that going to be a problem?”

  “I guess not. If Philip is going to haunt anyplace, it’s more likely to be the alley behind my apartment than it is this cube.”

  Vincent ga
ve a half-chuckle, meaning that he wasn’t really amused but didn’t want to say so.

  “And,” I went on, looking right at Vincent, “if Philip had any unfinished business on this earth, I imagine it would be more blackmail.”

  Vincent’s face went blank. “How did you hear about that?”

  “Something he said that afternoon at my apartment.”

  Now he stiffened. “Oh?”

  “Nothing specific, just threats about rattling cages.”

  He relaxed visibly. “Well, Philip wasn’t one to admit defeat. And he was getting desperate.” He checked his watch, either a Rolex or an excellent imitation. “Go ahead and get comfortable. When you want to get started, talk to Neal so you two coordinate efforts. And if you have any questions or problems, come straight to me. All right?” He was gone before I could answer.

  I almost hoped that I did have a problem so I could see who jumped first to solve it: Inez or Vincent.

  It didn’t take me too long to settle in. I played around with my computer enough to see that the software I’d be likely to need had already been installed and arranged my desk to suit me. Then I was ready to talk to Neal.

  Neal’s desk was down the hall in a corner, so two of his walls were real ones rather than cube walls, and he had a window. I tapped on one of the walls, and he said, “Come in.”

  Like many programmers I know, Neal kept his work space dark. There was a little light coming from the window, and a string of tiny white lights outlined a three-foot-tall potted tree, but the overhead lights were switched off and the main source of illumination was the glow of his computer screen.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Good morning,” he said, with the most genuine smile I had received all day. “Have a seat. Vinnie—I mean, Vincent, said you were starting today.”

  I sat in a chair next to the desk. “It’s hard to get used to calling him that, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “I try, but I keep blowing it. It’s been weird, being with him again. With all the MIT group. It’s just like before, only …”

  “Only different,” I finished for him. “I know what you mean. Didn’t it feel strange, coming back to Boston? Or were you already in the area?”

  “No, I was in California. Mountain View.”

  “And you left that for this,” I said, waving at the window. It was gray and cold, a typical Massachusetts February day, and unlikely to get much better until April.

  Neal grinned. “I got tired of wearing shorts all the time. It was either come back here, or throw out all my sweaters.”

  “I know what you mean. If I ever went back to North Carolina I’d have to throw out a lot of clothes, too. What kind of work were you doing out there?”

  “This and that,” he said. “Keeping my hand in.”

  I remembered what Jessie had said about his having had a nervous breakdown, and inwardly fussed at myself for asking. “How did they find you?”

  “On the Internet. Someone had heard there was an opening here and posted messages asking if anybody knew anything about the company. He mentioned Vincent’s name, and I thought I’d get in touch. We spoke over the phone, he asked me to come for an interview, and here I am.” Then his expression turned serious. “Vincent told me there was a strong possibility that Philip would be leaving the company, but he didn’t tell me that he was trying to push him out. Or that I was here to replace him. I didn’t find out about any of that until I got here.”

  “That was a dirty trick,” I said. “Would you have come back here if you had known?”

  “I’m not sure, Laura, I’m really not. On one hand, Philip used to be my roommate and I felt bad about getting his job. But on the other hand, somebody would have taken the job if I hadn’t. And I guess I was smug about them wanting me. I was never asked when SSI was formed. I heard about it from some people at MIT and let it be known indirectly that I was interested, even after what happened with my dissertation, but Philip never called. So maybe I took the job out of spite.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “You never were a spiteful guy.”

  “And you always did say the nicest things.”

  “Thank you. Tell me, did Vincent talk to Inez about hiring you?”

  “Did they pull that on you, too? ‘He should have consulted me,’ ” he said, in an exaggerated imitation of Inez’s accent. Then he did a good version of Vincent saying, “ ‘If you have any problems, come straight to me.’ ”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Those two are something, aren’t they? Has it been rough working for them?”

  “Not really. Even though they don’t agree on how the company should be run, most of the time they do agree on how StatSys should work. Vinnie doesn’t get into the guts of the product, actually. As long as it looks good, he’s happy.”

  “I guess that’s good,” I said doubtfully.

  “Don’t worry—Murray pays attention to the guts.”

  “I bet he does. I saw a T-shirt the other day that reminded me of him. It said, ‘Does anal retentive have a hyphen?’ ”

  We both laughed at that.

  Then I said, “Vincent wants me to work with you, but he didn’t tell me what you’ve done so far.”

  Neal grimaced. “I haven’t done much of anything. I was just getting started on some product design when Philip …” He hesitated for a second. “Before I went any further with that, Vincent asked me to decompile StatSys so I can check out the code.”

  “Decompile? That must have taken forever. Why didn’t you just look at the source code?”

  He looked exasperated. “We can’t find it. Philip was the only one who had a copy because he wouldn’t let anybody work on it but him.”

  “Jessie told me he’d been pretty territorial.”

  “Paranoid is more like it. He hid the code so well that I’ve given up trying to track it down. He had a password-protected directory that was supposed to contain the source code, but when I finally got into it, it was all garbage text. I don’t know if I set off some sort of booby trap or what, but I have gone through every bit and byte on his hard drive and every disk in this office—there’s no source code to be found.”

  “Are you kidding me? Why on earth would he do that? Just to be a pain?”

  “Who knows? I finally decompiled the code, and ever since then, all I’ve done is try to make sure the system is clean. Booby traps, viruses—you name it, it’s in there. There were a couple of loops that could have tied up the CPU for a day or more. Philip would have put up barbed wire if he could have. I want to make sure everything is clean before I go any further.”

  “I don’t blame you. Do you want to talk about what we need in an interface? That way I can do prototype design while you finish up with this.”

  We got down to technical issues for a while. Neal had no problems with the way Vincent had suggested we divide up the work. In fact, he preferred it that way. A lot of programmers I know are like that—they like the nuts and bolts of software but don’t like to worry with how it will be used. I’m just the opposite. Nuts and bolts are fine, but if nobody can use the result, it’s a waste of time, as far as I’m concerned. I must take after my Aunt Maggie—I’ve heard her say the same thing when talking about high heels.

  The planning part of a project is always fun to me, and I got so involved in our conversation that I almost forgot what I was really there for. It wasn’t until we had been talking for well over an hour and Neal mentioned something about Philip’s original design that I suddenly remembered that I was talking with a man who might very well be a killer. I found it hard to keep my mind on product design after that, so I told Neal that I’d had as much as I could take for my first morning.

  Okay, I told myself as I sat down in front of my PC, now I was ready to get back to my real reason for being at SSI. So where did I start?

  Chapter 18

  That’s the question I kept asking myself as I formatted screens for the rest of the morning. Oh, I knew what it was I wante
d to find out—I just didn’t think I could get away with asking. So, Dee, how did Philip rattle your cage? Was it a reason to kill him? How about you, Dom? Murray? Philip may have acted like the south end of a northbound horse, but even he wouldn’t have been obnoxious enough to ask something like that straight out.

  Finally it was lunchtime. In the cube across from me, I heard Dee say, “Dom, are you hungry?”

  He shook his head without looking up from his screen.

  Maybe I could handle this one-on-one. “Dee, are you going out for lunch?” I asked.

  She looked at the back of her husband’s head. “I guess so.”

  “Want some company?”

  She shrugged, which I took as a yes. “Great!” I said with false heartiness. “You can show me the good places to eat.” I grabbed my pocketbook and coat.

  We didn’t talk much on the way to the restaurant, but not from lack of trying. It’s just that every time I attempted to start a conversation, Dee grunted or nodded and that was it. Maybe it was the cold wind, or the number of people we had to thread our way through. Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk.

  To Dee’s credit, she did find us a good place to eat. It wasn’t much to look at, just one of the dozens of pizza and sub shops in Cambridge, but my cheese steak sub was one of the best I’d ever had.

  I was glad the food was good because the conversation still wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Dee never had been much of a conversationalist. She and Dom had always seemed to split duties between them, and he was the talker.

  Even though I was trying to eat slowly, I was halfway through my sub when I finally said something that got a little bit of a rise out of her. I looked out the window at the back of the neon sign that read PIZZA • GRINDERS and said, “You know, for the longest time when I got up here, I wondered what a pizza grinder was. I finally asked Philip, and he laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d every heard. I think it was Jessie who finally explained that the signs meant they had pizza and grinders.” I never did get an explanation for why it was everybody called the sandwiches steak subs, no matter what the signs said. “Then he made fun of me about it for I don’t know how long afterward. Just like my cousin Linwood.”