Dee grunted. “That sounds like Philip.”
Except for ordering, that was more words than she had said at one time since we left the office, so I wasn’t about to let it go. “I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but he did have a mean streak, didn’t he?”
“You’re telling me,” Dee said.
“Oh?” I said, hoping she’d elaborate. After a minute, it was clear that she wasn’t planning to. “What did he do to you?”
“Don’t you remember ‘Tweedledee and Tweedledum’?”
I nodded. “That was pretty mean.” I didn’t want to admit that I had laughed myself when he said it the first time. Okay, I had her talking about Philip. Now all I had to do was bring up the subject of blackmail in a way that wouldn’t get her back up. “He wasn’t exactly trustworthy, either. One time I told him something in confidence and he told people,” I said, trying to dredge up an example. Fortunately, Philip had supplied all kinds of bad examples.
I said, “Two girls I knew were applying for a job in the chemistry lab. One of them got it, and Philip was there when she told me. She made me promise not to tell anybody, because she wanted to break it to the other girl herself. But Philip got to the second girl first, and I don’t know what he told her, but the second girl never spoke to the first girl again. And they’d been friends since high school.”
“Philip never could stand to see anybody else happy.”
This time Dee’s voice sounded downright nasty. “It’s probably none of my business, but you say that like he did something really awful to you.”
She didn’t answer at first, just looked at me without blinking for the longest time. I tried not to look away, but I realized that Dee had awfully cold eyes. Finally she said, “He told you, didn’t he?”
“Told me what?”
“About us.”
I hadn’t known that Dee and Philip had an us, but I thought she might say more if I acted like I knew more than I did. So I said, “You mean the time you and he …?”
Dee took a fierce bite out of her sub. “I should have known he’d tell you. He swore that he’d never tell anyone else, that it was just between us. I don’t know why I believed him. You two must have had a good laugh over it, too. Poor ignorant Dee, not knowing what to do, and Philip having to teach her.”
Was she talking about what I thought she was talking about? “Dee, I wouldn’t have laughed about a thing like that. And I don’t think he told anybody else.”
“You’re probably right, because then he wouldn’t have been able to play with me. Saying things to Dom that went right over his head, and then winking.”
“What a rotten thing to do.” Philip and I had been intimate, but he’d never tried to hold it over me like that. Of course, I told Richard all about my relationship with Philip. From what Dee was saying, she hadn’t been so honest with her husband. “Dom doesn’t know?”
“Of course not. Dom and I were already engaged when it happened.”
I tried not to let anything show on my face.
Dee went on. “Dom wanted to wait until after the wedding, but I was afraid I wouldn’t know how to … I should never have spoken to Philip about it, but it was late one night and I’d been drinking, and Philip offered to show me some things. We didn’t mean to go that far, but it just happened.”
Knowing Philip, he certainly had meant to go that far. Getting Dee drunk and then talking her out of her virginity right before her wedding night was just the kind of thing he’d have enjoyed. And hadn’t Inez said she’d been drunk the time she’d slept with Philip? How many women had he used that trick on?
I felt sick to my stomach, both because of what Philip had done and because of how I had tricked Dee out of the information. I still had a good piece of my steak sub left, but I wadded up the wax paper around it. I wasn’t hungry anymore.
Maybe it had spoiled my appetite, but the subject seemed to make Dee hungrier, and she took another big bite. “Teasing me all these years was bad enough, but that bastard threatened to ruin my marriage.”
“What?”
“He threatened to tell Dom all about it if I didn’t vote to keep him at SSI.”
“That son of a bitch! What did you do?”
“I told him I’d do it. The funny thing was that I had voted for him the first time anyway, and probably would have the second time. I wanted to change things at SSI, but not by kicking people out. But after Philip threatened me, I had to vote for him. I couldn’t risk him going to Dom.”
“What would Dom have done?”
“He’d have left me. At least, I think he would have.” She looked away. “Maybe he wouldn’t have cared, things being like they are.”
“Are you two having problems?” I asked, honestly concerned this time.
“Maybe we’ve just been together too long. He doesn’t talk to me anymore—maybe we don’t have anything to talk about. We don’t even have sex, not that I can blame him for that.” She looked down at herself with a look of pure disgust, then looked at me with those cold eyes again. “I suppose you and Philip had a big laugh over me, over how fat I am and how I looked in bed.”
Okay, I’d found out what I needed to know and had made Dee feel bad in the process. I couldn’t turn around and be honest now, because that would just humiliate her further. The only way I was going to be able to repair some of the damage was to lie. Like Paw always told me, a white lie never hurt nobody.
“To tell the truth,” I said, though the truth was the last thing I had on my mind, “that’s not how it was at all. You see, I was pretty inexperienced myself before I dated Philip.” Which was a fancy way of saying that I had never gone further than one French kiss with a boy in Byerly. “He implied that you were substantially more skilled that first time than I ever was.” If I was going to lie, I might as well make it a whopper. “Imply, hell, Philip said flat out that you were one of the best he was ever with.”
She put down her sub. “Get out of here.”
“Really,” I insisted. “He didn’t get into details, but he said—well, I don’t want to sound ugly, but he said you were a great lay.”
Dee didn’t look like she minded my putting it that way. In fact, she almost smiled.
I went on. “I was so jealous I nearly turned green. Then I wanted to ask you if you had any advice, but I was too embarrassed. I mean, who wants to admit that her boyfriend still fantasizes about another woman?”
For a second, I was afraid that I had laid it on too thick with that last part, but Dee didn’t seem to think so. She kind of stared into the distance, as if remembering that night with Philip. Then she kind of shook herself. “He never told me that.”
“Of course not,” I said quickly. “Philip never told people the truth to their face. But that sure explains why he kept teasing you about it. With things going sour with him and Colleen, maybe he was hoping to rekindle the old flame.”
“You’re full of shit,” she said, but she sounded almost affectionate. “I’ve got to get back to the office.”
Nothing more was said, but I noticed something when we got to SSI. Dom was still glued to his terminal, but Dee came around behind him and gave him a great big hug and whispered something in his ear. Dom didn’t react at first but then turned to look at her. And I swear she fluttered her lashes at him.
Chapter 19
I got back to work on StatSys, but I gave only part of my attention to it. The rest I used to try to figure out ways to approach the other folks at SSI. The upshot was that I didn’t get anything done for SSI or for myself.
Neither Vincent nor Inez had told me what my official hours were to be, but by five-thirty, I was ready to get out of there. Nobody questioned me as I headed for the door, so I figured it was okay to leave. I was standing at the elevator when Murray came by.
“Hello, Laura,” he said. “Are you leaving early, too?”
I guess that meant I was supposed to work later. “I think I’ve enjoyed myself as much as I can stand for one day.�
�
Richard usually grins when I say that, and he’s heard it I don’t know how many times before. Murray just nodded.
“Do you think we could meet tomorrow?” he said. “I hear you and Neal were discussing plans for the next release, and I want to give you my feedback.”
I bristled, which was silly. Why should I be possessive about a project I wasn’t even planning on completing? It’s just that Murray always rubbed me the wrong way. I made myself say, “That would be fine. It’s always good to get input.” And Murray just loved giving input.
“Great. You’re not taking the elevator, are you?”
Since the down button was lit and I was standing there, I thought it was pretty obvious that I was. “Why?”
“I always take the stairs for exercise,” he said virtuously. “We desk jockeys can’t be too careful.” He started for the door to the stairs.
I thought about going with him, both because I probably could use the exercise and because it would be a way to talk to him privately, but then I remembered Richard asking me to be careful. I just couldn’t imagine that accompanying a suspect down six lonely flights of stairs would be considered being careful. So I said, “See you tomorrow,” and headed home via elevator and subway.
I was feeling pretty full of myself because of what I’d found out, and when I found Thaddeous waiting at my apartment, I started to tell him about it. But he stopped me in midstream. “You may as well hold your horses. Michelle’s going to want to hear it, too.”
“You asked Michelle over?” I asked, a little put out by his inviting somebody to my apartment.
“Not exactly. She kind of invited herself. I hope you don’t mind.”
Now I was just amused. “No, it’s no problem. I’m glad y’all are getting along so well.”
He didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was working real hard at not grinning. I went into the bedroom to change clothes and to give him a chance to grin without my seeing it. I don’t know who he thought he was fooling, but if he wanted to pretend that I couldn’t figure out what was going on, that was all right with me.
When Michelle got there, we decided we could talk while we ate, but we couldn’t agree on a restaurant. So we went to the food court at the Prudential Center, picked three different places to get dinner, and found a table isolated enough that I felt comfortable telling them what had happened that day.
“That’s incredible!” Michelle said. “In just one day, you found not one but two women who wanted to kill Philip. Which one did it?”
I said, “To tell you the truth, I can’t see that either of them would have.”
“Are you crazy? Philip sleeps with two women and then threatens to expose them, and you don’t think either one would have killed him for it? Thaddeous, tell her she’s crazy.”
“It does seem like they’ve got good motives,” Thaddeous said. “Especially that Inez. I could tell when I met her that she was a hot-blooded woman.”
“She’s got a temper, that’s for sure,” I admitted. “And I can see her breaking a few dishes, but not hitting somebody like that.”
Michelle said, “Didn’t you say it wasn’t the blow to the head that killed Philip? Maybe Inez didn’t mean to kill him. Suppose Philip goes to Inez’s apartment after he leaves you and they get to drinking. Later on they go back to your place.”
“Why?” I wanted to know.
“I don’t know why. Just say that they did. And Inez gets mad at Philip and hits him. She doesn’t realize how badly he’s hurt, so she leaves him there, thinking that he’s going to wake up in a few minutes. The next day she finds out he’s dead. There’s no point in her coming forward, so she just keeps quiet. Couldn’t it have happened that way?”
“It could have, but I don’t think it did. I just can’t see that Philip threatening to tell about a one-night stand would make her want to hit him. Why would she care if people knew now? She didn’t sound like she was all that mad at Philip. Annoyed, maybe, but not hit-him-upside-the-head mad. And she told me about it without a whole lot of prodding, which doesn’t make sense for a secret worth killing over. Blackmail works only if the victim cares about the secret coming out.”
Thaddeous said, “Maybe she didn’t care, but that doesn’t mean that she didn’t get mad about him threatening her. From what you’ve said, once you get on her bad side, you stay there. Look at how she’s held a grudge against Vincent.”
“If Vincent had been the one to show up dead, she’d be my first suspect,” I said, “but I still can’t see her killing Philip.”
“Okay, then it wasn’t Inez. It must have been Dee. She had an excellent motive.” Michelle looked directly at Thaddeous. “You can bet that if anybody tried to come between me and my man, I’d do something drastic.”
“She looks like she’s strong enough to have done it,” Thaddeous said.
“She probably is,” I agreed, “but why would she? She voted for Philip, just like he wanted her to. So he didn’t need to expose her and she didn’t need to kill him.”
Thaddeous said, “The thing is, a blackmailer doesn’t usually stop after he’s found himself a victim. Philip could have held that over her for the rest of her life. This way, she doesn’t have to worry about it coming out later.”
“But like I said about Inez, if Dee had been willing to kill to protect her secret, she wouldn’t have told me so quickly,” I said. “Of course, she thought I already knew.”
“Oh, my God! She’s going to come after you next!” Michelle said.
“Michelle! She’s not coming after me.” At least, I didn’t think she was. “Besides, I just thought of another reason why she couldn’t been the murderer—Dom. They go everywhere together. How could she have snuck away from him long enough to kill Philip?”
Thaddeous asked, “Mightn’t he be in on it, too?”
“Only if she told him about that night with Philip herself, meaning that she’d have no motive. Unless she made up some other reason to make Dom want to kill Philip, and I don’t think she’s that kind of sneaky.”
“It’s got to be one of them,” Michelle said, clearly exasperated with me.
Before I could say anything, Thaddeous came to my rescue. “Not necessarily. We’ve got to take our time and look at all the suspects before we go making up our minds. Maybe it was one of them, but maybe it was somebody else altogether.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said reluctantly.
I nodded. Even though my gut feeling was that neither Inez nor Dee had killed Philip, both of them were still in the running. So was everybody else at SSI. That meant I was going to have to spend at least one more day sharing an office with a killer.
Chapter 20
Though Murray had said something about us meeting the next day, I wasn’t expecting to find a note on my desk the first thing in the morning that said, “Ten o’clock okay? My office.—Murray.” Since I had no plans for the morning, I decided I might as well get it over with, both for Murray’s reasons and my own. So at ten o’clock, I took my coffee cup and a pad and tapped at Murray’s office door.
“Come in.”
Since the job of a quality assurance person is to oversee all the details in a product, from spelling to calculating numbers to formatting, I always expect them to carry this attention to detail over to other realms. So it’s always a shock when I find a QA person in a messy office, even though every one I’ve ever met has had stacks of printouts and disks all over everywhere. Murray was no exception.
Murray was typing furiously at his keyboard.
“Is this a bad time?” I asked.
“No, I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Five minutes passed, then five more, and he was still working hard.
I said, “I can come back later.”
“Almost done.”
And, in fact, it was only two minutes later when he finished up and turned to me. “Shall we get started?”
Since I had been ready to get started for fifteen minutes,
I thought it was a silly question. I said, “Neal and I didn’t come up with anything definite yesterday, but I have some notes about what we have in mind.”
“Actually,” Murray said, “I’d like to go over the QA log first.” He scrambled around in the tallest stack on his desk and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers. “I understand you’ll be addressing user interface issues, so I thought we’d limit this meeting to those.”
“Fine,” I said. So much for the informal discussion I’d thought we were going to have.
For the next thirty minutes, Murray read out items from his voluminous log, detailing each suggestion or correction. Admittedly, some of the items needed a little clarification, but with most of them, I could just as easily read them myself.
After a while, I was having a tough time keeping my eyes open. “Look, Murray, wouldn’t it be easier if you just gave me a printout of the log and let me take a look at it? If I have any questions, I’ll get back to you.”
He looked doubtful. “You’re sure you’ll get the changes into the next release?”
“Murray! Do you think I’m going to ignore you?”
“Philip always did.”
Finally, a topic that interested me. “Really?” I said.
“Look at these dates,” he said, shoving a page at me. “I first logged these errors almost three years ago, and Philip never corrected them.”
He sounded very indignant, and I didn’t blame him. Sometimes QA suggests things that are tricky to do or that wouldn’t be a good idea, but some of those items wouldn’t have taken two minutes to fix.
“That’s crazy,” I said.
He relaxed a little. “That’s what I said, but nobody listens to me.”
“Well, I’m listening.” I felt bad being so emphatic when I wasn’t planning on staying at SSI any longer than I had to, but I thought he needed to hear it. And I promised myself that I would take care of some of the errors while I was there. “I can’t believe Philip treated you so badly.”
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