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

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  Then Vincent and Inez started their campaign to get Philip away from SSI. And just when he was desperate to save his job, Neal came back. Maybe he was hoping Neal wouldn’t get past the barrier of booby traps he placed or that he wouldn’t recognize his own work. And maybe he had even worse viruses planned in case he did get fired. He must have been worried sick that Neal would recognize his own code. But he died before that could happen.

  Hadn’t he? Or had Neal finally found out what Philip had stolen from him and paid him back by hitting him and leaving him, just like he had his computer?

  Chapter 40

  I should have been happy. Neal being the real author of StatSys had to be the key to both Philip’s and Murray’s deaths. It provided motive and explained the timing. But I didn’t believe it.

  I paced through the apartment, hoping Thaddeous would show up so I could talk to him, but he didn’t. Then I called Michelle at GBS, but she’d left early and I guessed that she was on her way to meet me.

  That left one person I could talk to, and that was Richard. It took him a couple of rings to answer the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hey, there. Did I wake you up?”

  He stifled a yawn. “Yes, but since I was dreaming of you, I don’t mind.”

  “You do say the sweetest things. Even when you’re not quoting.”

  “How goes the investigation? Have you solved it?”

  “Maybe. I’m calling to bounce something off you.”

  “Bounce away.”

  I gave him a rundown of what Thaddeous, Michelle, and I had been up to since we’d last spoken, finishing up with my talk with Colleen. “That seems to clinch it. Philip stole Neal’s code, and when Neal found out, he killed him.”

  “That’s great!” Richard said. “You’ve got all the pieces.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “You don’t sound thrilled.”

  “I’m not. This just doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “It makes sense to me.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while, trying to figure out exactly what it was that bothered me. “Richard, suppose you found out that somebody had stolen a copy of one of your papers and had it published in some journal under his own name. What would your reaction be?”

  “Fury.”

  “What would be the first thing you’d want to do?”

  “To get credit for writing the paper. Assuming it was a good one, of course.”

  “All your papers are brilliant. But my point is that you’d want to prove it was yours. You’d write a letter to the editor and tell him, maybe dig up old drafts, get people to swear that they’d seen you working on it, whatever it took.”

  “Is there something comparable Neal could have done?”

  “I don’t know, but I do know that if his goal was to prove StatSys was really his, killing Philip was the absolute worst thing he could do. His best chance was to get Philip to confess.”

  “Do you think Philip would have confessed?”

  “Never in a million years,” I had to admit.

  “So maybe he confronted Philip, and Philip made it plain that he wouldn’t confess. Then Neal killed him. What else could he have done?”

  “He could have used the hard drive as proof.”

  “If he’d known it was still around.”

  “Okay, then the code itself could have been proof. If I could tell that it wasn’t Philip’s code, then so could anybody else who had samples of his work.”

  “I believe you, but would those arguments be compelling enough to sway a jury? A jury that doesn’t know a bit from a byte?”

  I remembered how long it had taken me to explain the concepts to Thaddeous, and he wasn’t a stupid man. “Maybe not, but if a lawyer could establish what kind of person Philip was and how he wouldn’t let anybody look at the code, there would have been a chance.”

  “A small chance.”

  “A better chance than there is now. With Philip dead, for Neal to say that the code was his would just point to him as Philip’s killer.”

  “But the police think it was an accident.”

  “Detective Salvatore doesn’t. At least, he didn’t act like he did at Philip’s visitation. And you can bet that if a lot of money were involved, they’d take another look at the case.”

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll concede that Philip’s death didn’t do Neal any good financially. There’s always revenge.”

  “I don’t see Neal as the vengeful type.”

  “You said Philip was drunk the night he died. If Neal was with Philip, he probably was, too. ‘One draught above heat makes him a fool, the second mads him, and a third drowns him.’ Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene 5.”

  “But after all these years?”

  “It happened a long time ago, but Neal only found out recently.”

  “True, but still … You remember how I told you that Philip had fooled around on me?”

  “I remember,” he said softly.

  “By the time I found out, I had been broken up with Philip for over a year. I was upset, of course, but I wasn’t nearly so upset as I would have been if I had found out as it was happening. It just didn’t matter to me that much anymore.” That was understating it, but only a little. “Mostly I was relieved to be away from Philip and his lies. Don’t you think Neal would have reacted the same way?”

  “Laura, you’re a civilized person. Is Neal?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. Killing Philip for something he did so long ago just doesn’t feel right.”

  “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

  I waited for an attribution, but when he didn’t give one, guessed, “King Lear?”

  “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.”

  “Richard!”

  “Okay, how about, ‘Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand. Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.’ Titus Andronicus, Act II, Scene 3.”

  “That’s more like it,” I said, but I was still amused, which was almost certainly what he had had in mind. How on earth could he read my moods so accurately from so far away? Then I said, “I have one other objection to Neal as murderer. Why would he kill Murray?”

  “Because Murray figured out StatSys was stolen, just like you did.”

  “Then why kill him? Having somebody else find out would have been the best of all possible worlds. Neal could have acted innocent and said he never noticed. It would have been tough since he’d been working with the code, but I think he’d have been able to carry it off. Maybe he could use his nervous breakdown to claim amnesia.”

  “That’s a little iffy.”

  “True, but Philip’s death could have gone down as an accident without Murray’s coming so soon after. So Neal would be in the clear. He’d get credit for his product, and that would be one more piece of revenge. What did Murray’s death buy him? Nothing.”

  “But don’t you think Philip’s death coming so soon after Neal got back into town is too convenient to be a coincidence?”

  “Coincidences do happen.”

  “I take it that this means you’re going to keep looking for answers.”

  I thought about it. “It does.”

  “Then I’ll remind you to be very, very careful. Don’t forget MacBeth. The first murder was hard for him, but each time after that it got easier and easier. Your man or woman has killed twice already, and after checking up on you and Thaddeous, knows far more than I’m comfortable with.”

  “I’ll be careful.” I heard the front door opening and said, “Thaddeous is here, so I’d better go. Thanks for letting me ramble. I didn’t even ask about what’s been going on with you.”

  “ ‘How like a winter hath my absence been from thee.’ Sonnet 97.“

  “Richard, it is winter.”

  “Could Shakespeare call them or what?”

  “Good night, Richard. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Chapter 41
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br />   Thaddeous arrived then with bags of gifts for the folks back home, but before he could show them to me, I told him what Colleen had told me. “I know it sounds like Neal is guilty,” I said, “but I still feel like we’re missing something.”

  “Are you sure you just don’t want me to hang around Boston a while longer?”

  “Thaddeous! Be serious.”

  “Seriously, then, maybe you don’t want to believe an old friend would be a killer.”

  “Of course I don’t want to believe it,” I said, “but I went into this knowing that the killer was probably an old friend. I just don’t think this sounds like the Neal I know.”

  “He might not be the man you used to know. Don’t forget that nervous breakdown.”

  “Lots of people have nervous breakdowns and don’t murder people afterward. In fact, if he’s been under the care of a psychologist since then, he’s probably as stable as anybody else at SSI.”

  “Well,” he said, “you do have a fair to middling record of being able to judge people. So I’m willing to keep snooping around. What did you have in mind?”

  The awful truth was that I didn’t have anything else in mind, and I wanted a way to avoid telling him. “Maybe Michelle has thought of something. I called the office a while ago and they said she’d left early, so she should be here soon.”

  We got something to drink, and then I admired the presents he’d bought. But after half an hour of looking at Red Sox hats and Celtics shirts and pub towels from the Cheers bar, I started to get nervous. It shouldn’t have taken Michelle that long to get to my apartment.

  “Maybe we should call GBS again,” I said. “I might have misunderstood them.”

  Thaddeous dialed the number at GBS, waited a few minutes, then hung up. “It was a machine. She must be on the way.”

  I nodded but still felt uneasy. Somebody had been investigating me and Thaddeous since Monday. At least, that’s how long it had taken whoever it was to get to our family in Byerly. How much could he have found out since then? He could have been following us, and I hadn’t even thought to watch for a tail.

  If we’d been followed, then he knew Michelle was involved because she’d been with us. By following her back to her house, the killer could have her address, and by following her the next morning, he could have found out that she worked at GBS. As for me, he’d know that I’d gone to Colleen’s house and come back with something in a box. In short, it would have been pretty obvious that we were up to something.

  I looked at the clock again. Michelle wasn’t that late, not really. A delay on the subway could explain away that little bit of time. But the later it got, the harder it was for me to convince myself of that. As for Thaddeous, he looked as worried as I’d ever seen him. I wished I could come up with an excuse to reassure him, and me, too.

  Chapter 42

  The doorbell rang, and I said, “Finally,” and buzzed Michelle up without saying anything over the intercom. But when I opened the door, it wasn’t Michelle I saw coming up the stairs. It was Neal.

  “Hi,” I said, letting him inside and closing the door behind him. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do with a murder suspect, but with Thaddeous there, I didn’t hesitate. “We were expecting somebody else.”

  “Michelle?” he asked.

  I looked at Thaddeous. “How did you know?”

  “Michelle is the reason I’m here. If you two don’t do exactly as I tell you, she’s going to die.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Thaddeous roared. He threw himself at Neal and got both hands around his neck, then pounded his head against the door. At the second or third pound, Neal’s eyes rolled up and he went limp.

  “Thaddeous!” I said, trying to pull my cousin away. “If you kill him, we won’t find out where Michelle is.”

  He let go, and Neal slid down onto the floor.

  Obviously I’d been wrong, I decided. Neal was the murderer. “Do you think he’s hurt bad?”

  “There’s no blood.”

  I wasn’t real sure about how to wake an unconscious man, but I remembered the school nurse breaking an ammonia capsule under Vasti’s nose when she faked a faint once. “Make sure that he hasn’t got a gun,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I found a half-full bottle of ammonia under the kitchen sink.

  “He’s not armed,” Thaddeous said, when I went back to the living room. “This is all I found.” He pointed to a wallet, a bunch of keys, and some change.

  “Let me see if I can wake him up.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we try to find out what he’s done with Michelle.”

  “He’s going to tell us, all right.”

  Later on, when I told Richard about all this, he wondered why I hadn’t been more squeamish, but the fact is, I wasn’t. I didn’t even consider calling the police. I thought about Philip, and Murray, and Michelle, and my only concern was that Thaddeous not get himself into trouble. I opened the bottle of ammonia and waved it under Neal’s nose.

  He came to, coughing and sputtering. His eyes were watering so badly from the ammonia that I tossed a box of tissues into his lap and gave him a minute to pull himself together.

  Then I said, “All right, where is she?”

  He looked up at us looming over him, and I felt a little guilty at how scared he looked. But not guilty enough to back down.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “I didn’t grab her. It was Vincent.”

  “So the two of you are in this together,” I said.

  Neal shook his head, then looked as if he wished he hadn’t. Wincing, he touched the back of his head.

  “That headache is going to be the least of your troubles if you don’t tell us what’s going on,” Thaddeous said, in that quiet way that’s far more threatening than a loud voice.

  “We’re not working together,” Neal said. “I didn’t want it to happen this way. I didn’t mean for Philip to die.”

  I said, “So you just hit him and left him in an alley in the middle of winter because you wanted him to get some rest.”

  He started to shake his head again, then thought better of it. “Philip called me that day, the day he … the day you wouldn’t let him stay. He said he had something he had to tell me. I thought he just wanted to mooch, and I didn’t want him at my place, but I did feel sorry for him, so I was going to get him a hotel room or something. I drove over and picked him up. He wanted to go get a drink so we could talk. We went to a bar near my place, and I bought him a few beers and tried to get him to come to the point.

  “He said he had a plan to bring SSI to its knees, to make Vincent beg him to stay. When I asked him how, he told me that SSI doesn’t have legal title to the core code for StatSys, because it was my code, code I worked on in college.”

  I nodded.

  “You knew?” Neal said.

  “Not all along, just since today. I could tell it wasn’t Philip’s code.”

  Neal went on. “At first I didn’t believe him, but he told me how he programmed my hard drive to crash while he was out of town so he could come back and ‘rescue’ me. He claimed it was just for a joke, but knowing Philip, he’d have done it and held it over my head for the next twenty years.

  “Anyway, Philip just brushed that part off, like it wasn’t important. What he said was important was for us to bring down SSI. He said that if I testified that the code was mine and he testified that he had stolen it, then I could get the title to the code and ruin Vincent’s deal for taking SSI public. First he wanted to take over SSI and throw out Vincent, but then he had a better idea. He wanted us to start our own company, said you’d come in, too. He wanted to come talk to you so we could make plans.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t just trying to frame Laurie Anne?” Thaddeous asked.

  “No! Philip was the one who wanted to come over here, not me. I tried to tell him that Laura wasn’t going to let us in any more than she had him, but he wouldn’t listen. He really thought he was going to be able t
o talk her into it. He said she’d do anything for him.” To me he added, “Laura, you know how Philip was.”

  Thaddeous looked at me, and I shrugged. It sure sounded like something Philip would have done. If Neal was lying, he was doing a good job of it.

  “By that time, Philip was pretty drunk, so I let him keep talking while I got him back out to the car. I figured the best thing would be to go ahead and come see what you thought.” He hesitated. “I guess I was buzzed, too, because Philip was starting to make sense. It was only on the way over that I started to think about what he’d said.” He looked at me. “You know why I left MIT, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “The hard drive crashed while you were working on your dissertation.” Then I realized what he was getting at. I had been so concerned about StatSys that I had forgotten all about Neal’s doctoral dissertation.

  Neal said, “When I couldn’t fix my hard drive and I found out that my backup disks were corrupted, I thought my life was over. I guess I went a little crazy—I kicked my computer over, threw it across the room, really beat it up. I couldn’t face MIT anymore, so I packed up and went back to California.”

  I said, “But the hard drive wasn’t broken, and Philip found it when he got back.”

  “He fixed the crash right away, of course, since he had caused it in the first place. I don’t know if he tried to call me or not—I wouldn’t have been easy to find.”

  “I heard about your breakdown,” I said.

  He looked away for a second, then continued. “At some point, he must have looked at my files. I think I could have forgiven him for the StatSys code. I could have blown that project and still gotten my degree. But not without a dissertation.”

  “So you killed him because of your dissertation?” Thaddeous said, clearly not sure why any paper could be so important. I knew why. Richard and I had already been married while he was finishing his dissertation, and I remembered how crazy it had driven my normally calm husband. And his dissertation had gone relatively smoothly. How would Richard have reacted if he had had to start over?

  Neal said, “I realized that he had kept me from getting my doctorate just as we pulled into the alley to park. I said something about it, but he said that we had more important things to worry about and got out of the car. It was dark and he told me to get a flashlight, ordering me around even after what he’d just told me. I got my flashlight out of the glove compartment, and I thought about how heavy it was. Then I walked up behind him, and … I don’t remember hitting him, but I remember looking down and seeing him on the ground. Then I walked back to the car and drove away.”