Bright City Deep Shadows

by Graham Storrs

  Kazima wouldn’t know much, I supposed, but she might know something. Besides – and it made me feel grubby just thinking about it – I was going to need money soon. I hadn’t worked for over a week and I was living in a motel. Chelsea had all the money. It wasn’t the traditional wife-and-two-veg model of man the hunter and his domestic slave, but it worked for us. She made the money, she paid the bills. I did bits of part-time work, which I dignified by telling people I worked in the “gig economy”, and that paid for stuff I needed without me having to ask for pocket money. I had my own bank account with a few hundred bucks in it, and that’s what I’d been living on. I’d been avoiding thinking about where I was going to live and how, vaguely hoping that Stacey would let me stay on in the unit until she sold it.

  The office was in a white-painted purpose-built concrete-and-glass building in the trendy suburb of West End. I thought the whole area was characterless and sterile, but Chelsea loved it and wanted us to move there. I parked in the little eight-car parking lot under the building in an empty space marked “Visitor”. The other spaces were all filled, even the one marked “CEO”.

  A concrete staircase led up to the main floor which was completely open plan apart from a single office with Chelsea’s name still on the door and a small meeting room. Everyone stopped work and looked at me when I walked in. I stopped too and stared back at the staring faces. They’d all seen me here before, picking up Chelsea, or joining her for lunch. They’d all been to parties and dinners where I’d been Chelsea’s plus one. They’d all seen me at the funeral.

  I couldn’t move and I had no idea what to say.

  “Luke, hi.” It was Kazima, striding across the floor to rescue me. She shook my hand and said, “Let’s go into the office.” She seemed to understand that I was floundering like a fish on a beach, because she kept eye contact and gently guided me.

  “It was hard coming back here, the next day,” she said, closing the door.

  Her sing-song accent was oddly soothing and I tried to remember her background. The child of Sudanese refugees? Something like that. Chelsea had talked about them all, all the time, yet so little of it had sunk in. “Which one was that?” I’d ask when a name came up I felt I should know, and she’d happily launch into a potted biography, as if I hadn’t asked her ten times already. I loved it that she took such an interest in all these people but to me they were just background figures. My only real interest was always Chelsea.

  “How are you doing?” she asked. There was a little table with comfy chairs around it and we sat there. I looked at Chelsea’s desk. It was smart and new but nothing special. Kazima saw me looking and said, “I haven’t had the heart to clear it, yet. The police took her laptop and some other things. I don’t know why. I should bite the bullet, I know, only...”

  I nodded and we sat in silence for a moment. This was so much harder than I expected.

  “Can I get you a coffee or something?” she asked.

  “I just dropped by to… I don’t know… try and get a few things clear.”

  “Yes, of course.” She sounded pleased, which made me look at her. She wore a serious expression, ready to help.

  Veering away from the questions I wanted most to ask, I said. “I hear you’re the executor of her will. I – I didn’t know she even had one. She was so...” Young. Too young to even think about dying, let alone going and doing it.

  “I think it was the insurance,” Kazima said. “It got her thinking.”

  “Insurance?”

  She looked puzzled, perhaps beginning to understand just how ignorant I was. “When we had our last round of financing, the VC wanted us to insure some of our key personnel – Chelsea, me and Hong, our lead developer.”

  “What, like, life insurance?”

  “Yes. I thought it was a ridiculous expense but it turned out...” She trailed off. I suppose she didn’t want to say that anything about this was a good thing. “Anyway, she called the lawyer and made a will at the same time. It was very simple. There were a couple of gifts to her mother and other people but, basically, everything goes to you. It’s so simple that the probate is trivial.”

  I nodded. “Does that include her car?”

  Again I got the puzzled look. “I’ve been trying to call you for days, Luke. I didn’t want to mention it at the funeral.” She took a breath. “It includes the unit, the car, all her personal belongings – apart from the few that were bequeathed elsewhere – everything in her bank account, her investment portfolio, and this company. You own a sixty-nine point five per cent share of everything you can see.”

  “What? She left me—?” It was the craziest thing I’d heard all day – and that included Reid accusing me of murdering Chelsea. I wanted to get up and get outside fast. I didn’t know how to run the company. I only had a slight understanding of what it even did.

  “I suppose she wanted to make sure you had money. I mean, you could pay yourself a salary, or even sell your share. Although I really hope you don’t do that.”

  “Sell? I can’t sell Chelsea’s company. It would be like...” It would be like selling Chelsea’s remains. Or Chelsea’s baby.

  “Good,” she said. “Look, we need to appoint a new CEO. I’m keeping things turning over but Chelsea is a hard act to follow. We probably need a full-time Sales Manager to cover her role, unless we can find another superwoman like her. Are you any good in that department?”

  “Me?” I stood up and would have stepped back if the chair hadn’t prevented it. “I can’t do any of this. I’m just a—” I stopped not knowing what I was, quite. But I was definitely not a CEO or a Sales Manager, or anything. “I do some gig work – delivering food, copywriting – I don’t run companies.”

  She looked at me as if I’d suddenly burst into song or grown another head. “Okay,” she said, slowly. It made me realise how foolish I must look, panicking at the merest suggestion of taking responsibility for something. I glanced through the office’s glass wall and saw a couple of people staring in at me. They looked away quickly.

  “Jeez! They know, don’t they, that I’m the new owner?” I sat down again. When I left, Kazima would probably have to talk to them, tell them how it went. There were ten people in the company. Each one of them would have been fearful for their jobs and their families ever since they heard about Chelsea’s death. What could Kazima tell them? “Well, he freaked out and acted like a ten-year-old sissy with a wasp in his hair, but I’m sure it will all be just fine.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Maybe I could get that coffee, now?”

  She got up and went out to the little kitchen area. They had a big, expensive cappuccino machine – a present from Chelsea to everyone on the day their sales hit some milestone or other. I had teased her that it was a present to herself, really, and she had grinned and said, “Win, win, right?” I watched Kazima’s back as she moved about, getting cups and grounds, sugar and spoons, working the machine. She was a tall, angular woman about my age. She was solid and she looked strong and competent. She and Chelsea had met at a trade show and hit it off from the start. The company had been Chelsea and two developers at the time and she had brought Kazima in part-time to look after the finances. Eventually, she also took on the role of office manager and worked full time. Now, she was running the place and, I suddenly realised, feeling out of her depth.

  I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. I had felt so sorry for myself since Chelsea died. I’d been completely overwhelmed by grief to the exclusion of everything else. Now I saw how much of my self-pity was self-indulgence. I hadn’t even wondered how the company was getting on, how all those people had been coping with uncertainty. It was just the same as my attitude to the police inquiry. Someone had killed Chelsea – murdered her in cold blood, I now knew – and I hadn’t even wondered why or who. All I had cared about was my own unhappiness. What a despicable, selfish piece of work I really was!

  “I don’t know how you take it,” Kazima said, setting down a tray. “So I br
ought the full kit.”

  I began spooning sugar from a little bowl into a matching cup. This is the service they use for visiting customers, I thought. I was being treated like an outsider, not part of the team.

  “I’ve put together a spreadsheet of Chelsea’s estate for probate purposes. If you give me your email address, I’ll send you a link. It’s all in Google docs.” I thanked her and gave her my address. “Her diaries and notes and everything else are in Google docs, too. It’s what we use here. I could have just given the police a link and a password and they’d have had it all but they insisted on taking her laptop.” I could imagine Reid wanting to carry off something solid and physical, not just a couple of strings of letters and numbers. I took a sip of my coffee. It was the same kind as we had at home. Chelsea’s favourite Arabica roast from the shop in Indooroopilly Mall.

  “Kazima?” She looked straight at me, her face composed. God knows what she was thinking I might say. “If you had someone to handle sales, could you run this place – you know – well? Make a proper go of it?”

  Her brows furrowed and her lips pursed. She nodded slowly. “I believe so. Chelsea and I were pretty much in tune about how things should go and how we should run things. We have a rolling three-year plan that just needs to be executed.” She smiled. “That should be good for about six months I reckon. Do you want to see it?”

  I shook my head. “You’re the new CEO. OK? Get yourself a sales guy. Get yourself whatever you need. I’m going to be no bloody use to you at all, so don’t think you have to run everything past me or any crap like that. You were Chelsea’s friend. She trusted you. So I’m going to trust you too.”

  She took a sip of her coffee and watched me over the rim of the cup.

  “I guess we’re all getting big surprises today,” she said. “Thank you for that.” She put her cup down. “There’s just a couple of conditions before I say yes.”

  And this is why I’m no kind of businessman, I thought. I had fully expected her to just whoop with joy, pump my hand and crack open a bottle of champagne.

  “I want a raise,” she said. “Chelsea paid herself peanuts. My salary is OK but, as CEO, I’ll expect more.”

  I shrugged. “Whatever you think is reasonable. You know the company finances. You know what you can afford to pay yourself.”

  “OK. I want a bigger share of the company.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I want another ten per cent.”

  “How does that work, exactly? Do we just sign something to say your share is bigger?”

  “No, you sign something to say you’re giving me part of your share.”

  “My share?” I’d only known I had any share at all for about fifteen minutes, so it all seemed a bit academic. “How much did you say you want?”

  “Another ten percent. I already have five. It was part of the deal when I joined.”

  “So you’d own fifteen per cent of the company.” She nodded. “And I’d still have...” I’d forgotten how much she’d told me I had.

  “Fifty-nine point five.”

  “Right.” I shrugged again. Then it occurred to me that Chelsea might have expected me to be a little less cavalier about giving away big chunks of her company. “What’s that worth?”

  It was her turn to shrug. “We turned over four million last financial year. This year might end up being double that. We have some pretty cool IP and a great team. The plan is to go for a public offering in three years. It could be worth tens of millions by then, maybe a lot more.”

  “So your fifteen per cent would be...”

  “The kind of incentive that keeps people like me working their socks off night and day to make this company succeed.”

  Just for form’s sake, I said, “Five per cent.” I fully intended to cave if she argued.

  “Seven point five.”

  “Agreed.”

  Her face lit up. Apparently she’d been trying it on. Maybe I should have offered two. She reached out a hand and we shook. Maybe she had taken me for a ride. On the other hand, Chelsea had left me the company knowing exactly how useless I am and she’d left Kazima as the default boss, knowing exactly how hard-headed she was. Maybe she had foreseen exactly the little scene we had just played out.

  “I’ll draw up all the documents and I’ll call you when you can come in and sign them. Just one more thing. I know you want to be hands-off and everything but I want us to meet at least once a month. I’ll report the figures and I’ll go over the plans, legal issues, HR matters and so on. It’s not necessary, I know. I just… I think having to explain myself to someone would be kind of healthy for me. And you’ll get to know the business. I’m not asking you to make any decisions or approve anything – except, you know, implicitly – I just don’t want to feel, I don’t know, untethered.” She made a small hand gesture towards the people outside. “This is kind of huge, you know? We can review it after a year.”

  “No worries,” I said, touched by her show of vulnerability. I could sit through a presentation every month if it helped. “Now I need a couple of things. That link and password to Chelsea’s diary and notes you mentioned. And is there some way I can get some money for, like food and board? I’m flat broke and it’s getting a bit desperate.”

  A few minutes later, I drove out of the car park with a well-stuffed bank account and a promise of a contract with the company for regular payments as a “business advisor” to the CEO. I drove back into town, parked without resenting the parking fee, and ate a very late lunch at a café by the river.

  Chapter Four

  I went to the cemetery and found a bench where I could see Chelsea’s grave. There was no headstone, yet, but I remembered the way there and the fresh earth made it easy to find. I have no religious feelings at all. Life is just life, death is just death, and there is nothing magical about any of it – except in the poetical sense. But I wanted to say thank you to her for looking after me, even after her death. I had a home, now, and a car, and enough money to go on living a simple, frugal life without ever having to worry about working. One day, if Kazima’s IPO ever came off, I’d be quite wealthy. It was weird to think Chelsea’s little company was worth so much, even weirder to think she had been thinking about my welfare, planning for my financial security, even while I was drifting through my life hardly thinking at all.

  It was impossible not to feel bitter and angry about myself. I was a philosopher, for heaven’s sake. My life had been devoted to thinking. Yet I had barely spared a thought for anything that actually mattered. And now, as grateful as I was for Chelsea’s thoughtfulness, I could only think about how miserably unworthy I was of the love of such a woman.

  “I just thought there was so much time,” I told the mound of earth over her body. “No, that’s not true. I didn’t think about how much time there was at all. I thought I could look around, pick a direction, find something I liked and was good at. We both did. We didn’t have to rush to get married, or to have kids. Everything was so relaxed and easy. But now I’m starting to think that was just me, ’cause you were out there hustling. You were building a future, getting things done. And maybe, maybe you were just indulging me, letting me drift along in my little fog of abstractions and self-absorption. I don’t know if I really understand anything anymore.

  “When I saw your office today, it was like seeing it for the first time. It wasn’t just some place you hung out and did boring computer crap, it was like a beachhead in enemy territory that you had fought hard for and won. It was where you were engaged and focused, planning the campaigns that would give you more victories, more territory. I thought you were my partner, my lover, my best friend. And you were. But all the time you were also this warrior woman. And I sort of knew it but I didn’t really appreciate it, didn’t really understand all that you were.”

  My face was wet with tears and I brushed them off angrily. More self pity. More pathetic self-indulgence.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you, for taking me
on – for adopting me, I guess – for loving me and making me feel secure and loved. You always said love was about caring – caring about and caring for. And you were good at both of those things while I… I don’t think I cared for you enough, however much I cared about you. You always said love requires a certain level of competence if you’re going to do it properly. And I thought I knew what you meant but maybe I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t have any real idea how far short I was falling in that department.”

  What the hell was I doing, sitting in a field full of dead bodies, talking to a pile of mud? Mad as a bag of frogs, I told myself. I thought about going home but I didn’t want to sit in that ratty little motel room, or risk going back to the unit and finding Stacey still there. I should call my mum and dad, tell them the news about Chelsea’s will. At least that would stop their endless fretting about my long-term prospects. I could call a friend, guilt-trip them into going to a bar with me. But I just didn’t want to be around people.

  What I wanted, I finally realised, was to start taking control. I wanted to start doing positive, meaningful things. I wanted to get the police off my back. Most of all, I wanted to find out who had killed Chelsea and why.

  It came as a surprise. One minute I’m sitting there full of self-hatred and a vague idea that maybe I might do something to distract myself. The next minute, I’m full of purpose and certainty. The police were obviously idiots. Their only suspect was me, so I knew for a fact they were getting it wrong and wasting their time. I could also see it was either laziness on their part or a failure of imagination. Probably the crime statistics said it was usually the partner who did the murder, so that’s where they were looking. But I’d be starting from a different place. I knew it wasn’t me. That gave me a big advantage and a big head-start.

  It also left me with a big problem. I didn’t have a clue about how to investigate a murder. I didn’t know what questions to ask, who to ask, how to build a case, what evidence I’d need, or… well… anything. But, hell, I’m a bright guy. How hard could it be? I’d just analyse the problem. It’s not like I was trying to understand the nature of consciousness, or solve the problem of free will. I just needed to work out a procedure that would help me get to the answers I needed.