How to Succeed in Murder (10 page)

Chapter Eighteen

My uncle had one condition—that we stop for takeout from Big Nate’s Barbeque on the way down to Hillsborough to see him.

As a consequence, vast quantities of ribs, chicken, and cornbread now waited in a warming oven while Brenda, Simon, and I waited in the game room across the hall from Harry’s office, where Jack was outlining the plan for him.

The game room, aside from the usual equipment such as a pool table and a backgammon board, held a disturbing array of wall-mounted animals and the sort of weaponry that might have been used to bring them to their current sorry state.

Maybe Harry thought the big-game hunter macho thing the décor implied would land him the babes, or maybe he just hadn’t bothered to redecorate since the last in his extensive string of ex-wives had stormed out. In any case, the feeling of being watched by several dozen glass eyes wasn’t really helping our stress level.

“He’ll do it.” Brenda’s voice held confidence. Then she looked at me. “Won’t he?”

“He’s bound to,” Simon replied, amusing himself with a fencing foil he’d taken from its display case. “Harry’s up for anything.” He thrust with the thin blade. “You know that.”

I deeply hoped she knew nothing of the sort. But Simon was right in one sense. Harry never turned down a chance to meddle in things. And infiltrating a major corporation with a bogus team of consultants would constitute meddling on the kind of scale he was known to appreciate.

“Hello, Charley.”

I jumped a good nine inches off the mocha leather chair I’d been perched on. Harry’s voice can do that to me.

He’d entered the room from the door behind me. I turned to find him regarding me with a massive cigar in his mouth and a massive gleam in his eye.

“Jack says you need me.” The cigar got a chomp of satisfaction.

“He’s paraphrasing,” Jack told me, following Harry in and pausing to give me a reassuring peck on the cheek.

Harry made for the bar. “Who’s drinking? Simon, I’ve got an
Añejo
Reserva
tequila here that will set us up for that barbeque just right. Can I twist your arm?”

Simon lost interest in the sword. “Twisting won’t be in the least necessary, Harry.”

“And Brenda?” The cigar was removed to allow for a broad smile. “Can I tempt you?”

Was she blushing? Good God, was she blushing?

“Harry!” My voice produced something closer to a panicked yell than I’d intended, but I went with it. “Would you stop playing bartender for a minute and tell us whether you’ll do it?”

He turned to me with a bottle in hand and a maddeningly amused look on his face. “Do what?”

I sighed. I reached for the bottle, took a glass, and poured myself a shot. I downed it looking at my uncle, shuddered briefly, and spoke. “Will you help us?”

His eyebrows went up. “Sure, Charley. All you had to do was ask.”

Jack took the bottle from me before I did something drastic with it.

“I only have one condition.” Harry lined up four shot glasses on the bar.

“Of course you do.” I added my glass to the line.

“You’ll need protection.”

“Jack and I have already gone over all that. We’ll be perfectly—”

Whatever bland assurances I would have made were cut off by Harry’s completely unreasonable demand.

“You’ll take Flank.”

“
Flank!
” Simon protested before I had a chance to close my mouth. “The man’s a menace! He practically killed me once just for walking into a room with Charley.”

“Well, that is kinda what you look for in a bodyguard.” Harry eyed me. “You’re taking him.”

Flank had been my bodyguard for an unpleasant period when certain people had been trying to sabotage my theatre and kill me along with my husband. He was a handy guy to have around in an emergency. But he was also extremely large and extremely hairy and—unless we planned to enter Zakdan as a team of paleoanthropologists traveling with our own live Neanderthal exhibit—he wasn’t exactly going to blend in.

“Harry, it’s impossible. Jack, tell him it’s impossible.”

Jack didn’t get the chance.

“Impossible or not.” Harry motioned for the tequila from Jack and began to pour. “You’re taking Flank or I’m not going to the board of directors to tell lies for you. It’s your choice.”

“Just what are we supposed to tell people about him? He doesn’t exactly look like a computer programmer.”

Harry grinned as he passed the shot glasses around. “No, I can’t say he does.” He paused before handing me my drink. “Maybe a secretary?”

Flank. A secretary.

We were doomed.

***

“It’s awful. It’s just awful.”

Eileen was referring to the outfit Brenda had on. And I couldn’t disagree. We’d met at Saks the following morning to shop for our undercover wardrobes.

We were not having much success.

“I’m not a suit type of person,” Brenda explained. Faced with the pinstriped evidence, I found it hard to disagree. “I just don’t do tailored well.”

“But the point isn’t to look good.” Eileen spoke as if she were trying to convince herself. “I mean, a lot of women look professional without looking good.”

“Eileen,” I reminded her. “You’re the one who said this was going to be easy.”

“It should be,” she insisted. “It’s not like we’re walking down the red carpet on Oscar night. We’re just going to work. In an office. People do it every day.”

“People, maybe,” Brenda said. “But not Charley. And not me.” She pulled the jacket off with evident relief. “Why can’t I just dress like a teacher?”

Things in the changing room were on the verge of getting ugly when we heard a familiar voice calling from outside in the hallway.

“Hello? Darlings? Where are you?”

“Simon?” I popped my head out the door and peered down the hall. Simon was hovering at the end of the row of dressing rooms, averting his eyes and hollering for us.

“You’re supposed to be shopping.” I couldn’t imagine anything that would prevent Simon from wreaking havoc through Union Square with the shiny new credit card I’d given him.

“There you are. Thank heaven!” He spoke to someone behind him. “Darling, it sounds like we’re just in time!” Then back to me. “We could hear you three arguing all the way from the escalator.”

“Who’s ‘we’? And why are you here?” Eileen pushed me out into the hallway so she could get in on the discussion.

“I’m here because I’m always looking out for you, darlings, with never a thought for myself. And today I’m saving you from a fashion disaster. Look who’s here!”

He vanished from the doorway, and shoved someone else into the dressing room hall. Someone who was rail thin, five foot two on her best day, and draped head to toe in filmy eggplant-colored knitwear.

“Martha!”

I’d never been so happy to see a witch in my life. Particularly since the witch in question was the Rep’s brilliant costume designer, apparently returned home from her vacation to the top ten Wiccan hotspots of Europe.

“Hi, Charley. I got back a few days ago, so when Simon called this morning and told me about your reality theatre project I thought it sounded fun.” She came down the hall to our dressing room, brushing back her hood, or cowl, or whatever it was, to reveal her hair in a long loose braid and her face astonishingly free of the heavy eye makeup I was used to. She looked about fourteen years old. I’d have to remember to ask her if there was a spell for that.

But first, to business. She entered the dressing room and appraised the three of us with a critical eye. “Who’s playing who?”

Clearly Simon hadn’t mentioned the whole covert ops aspect to the costuming challenge. I explained that Brenda was in the human resources role, Eileen was playing the team leader, and I was a project manager. Martha nodded, tilted her head to the side, and considered.

“You,” she said to Brenda, “need to stay loose and unconstructed. If you want people to confide in you, don’t wear shoulder pads. I’m thinking Eileen Fisher with Cole Haan shoes.”

Brenda nodded as if she knew what that meant.

“You.” She pointed at Eileen, gesturing with a twirly finger for her to turn around. “If you’re supposed to be in charge, you should be intimidating. You’re in suits in every scene…slim-fitting trousers with pointed toe boots…spiky heels…and let’s see if we can do some sort of sleek ponytail with all that hair.”

Just what had Simon told Martha she was dressing us for? I didn’t have time to question her, because her attention was now firmly on me.

“And you’re somewhere in the middle. You’re not the boss…you don’t have a lot to spend on clothes…probably a few good pieces that you got on sale…the rest is Gap and Banana…”

I stopped paying attention. I didn’t have to. I was in the hands of a professional.

***

“Well, that’s settled, then.” Simon sat back in his chair with a look of blissful satisfaction.

We were all pretty pleased with ourselves. Once Martha had taken over she’d made quick work of marching us to the proper departments in the proper stores to get the proper costumes.

We’d finished in time for a late lunch, for which she declined to join us, saying something about a prior appointment at the East Bay Vivarium. I didn’t choose to speculate about what she might be browsing for at a reptile specialty store. The rest of us had gone on to meet Simon at the Neiman Marcus Rotunda.

He’d had a successful day as well, and was topping it off with a lobster club sandwich. “I wonder how the meeting at Zakdan went.”

Jack had called Morgan Stokes from Harry’s the night before, and asked him to make arrangements for a board meeting in the afternoon. I looked at my watch and realized my uncle was probably spinning an extensive string of lies somewhere South of Market as we spoke.

“Let’s hope he can sell it,” Eileen said. “I’d hate to have to return everything we just bought.”

Simon choked on a bite of brioche. “You can’t be serious.”

“It won’t come to that,” I assured him. “Harry will sell it.”

There are some things of which I have no doubt.

“Charley.” Simon seemed struck by a thought. “What are we going to do about the Rep while we’re…occupied?”

“What do you mean?” I picked at my seafood Cobb salad.

“Well, these two—” He gestured to Eileen and Brenda with a French fry. “—are on vacations from work, but we still have to get through that pile of plays Chip has lined up for us.”

Damn. I’d completely forgotten about that.

I looked up at the stained-glass dome of the restaurant. It gave me no inspiration.

“We’ll just have to squeeze the reading in where we can,” I told him. “That’s what we’d do if we’d gone on vacation somewhere.” I allowed myself one tiny daydream about the untaken vacation, visualizing myself next to a bronzed and mostly naked Jack lying on a beach somewhere.

In the daydream I wasn’t reading.

“Charley?” Brenda was looking at me funny. “Are you okay?”

I sighed. “As well as can be expected.” I looked at Simon. “Tell Chip to come over on Saturday. We can talk about the next batch then.”

“Speaking of the Rep,” Eileen said. “Should you two be using false names when we go undercover?”

I gave her a blank look.

“You and Simon have been in the paper more than once, for opening nights and things,” she explained. “People might recognize you and wonder why you gave up a life in the theatre to become high-tech consultants.”

Simon and I looked at each other. “Do you think?”

He shrugged. “It’s not as though we’re famous or anything…” He seemed to lose interest in the topic with the arrival of the dessert menus.

“I’m a little more worried about the fact that you and Brenda and I went to Clara’s funeral,” I told Eileen.

She waved her hand dismissively, over both the dessert selections and my concerns. “That’s easy. We weren’t actually introduced to anyone from Zakdan, just seen. It would be perfectly reasonable for us to pay our respects to Morgan’s fiancée if we’d been working on him with the preliminaries of the consultancy job for the past few weeks.”

“I suppose so.” We’d just have to find a way of working that into the conversation somewhere.

“Oh!” Brenda sat up suddenly. “But what about the other night? In the car? Do you think the driver of that truck could have gotten a good look at you?”

That was a frightening thought. I’d assumed that the killer’s attempt on us had mainly been an attempt on Jack, because of his snooping around at Zakdan. But Brenda was right. Even though the driver might not have set out to kill me, he might have gotten a good enough look at my face to recognize me when I came strolling into Zakdan masquerading as a consultant.

But then again… “It was pretty dark and rainy that night, and everything happened awfully fast. And Jack is positive the truck wasn’t trailing us from the house, so the killer wouldn’t have seen me getting into the car.”

Brenda still looked worried. I can’t say I was entirely calm about it all myself.

“Maybe you should go blonde, darling,” Simon suggested. “Or what about a fiery redhead? That might suit you very well.”

“I’ll ask Jack what he thinks.” Except I’d probably omit the fiery redhead suggestion. “But I really don’t think it’s worth worrying about. So don’t worry.”

Good advice. I wished I’d be able to take it.

Chapter Nineteen

There are a number of images that come to mind when I think of “home.” A quiet, book-filled room on a rainy day. Jack building a fire in the hearth. Maybe the aroma of something yummy baking in the oven.

One image that does not come to mind is my uncle, bourbon in hand and cigar in mouth, greeting me at my own front door.

“Charley!” He flung the door open as we trudged up the path carrying our purchases. “It looks like your operation was a success.” He stepped aside as I struggled past him, weighed down with shopping bags. Then he reached around me to take Brenda’s bags from her.

“It wasn’t an operation so much as an expedition, Harry, into the darkest heart of retail.” Simon was unencumbered. He’d left his own undoubtedly enormous assortment of purchases in his car. Eileen followed him in carrying the remains of the things Brenda and I had gotten. Her shopping had been relatively light, since she already owned an assortment of power suits, and her few bags remained in her car.

“Where’s Jack?” I asked Harry. “How did the meeting go?”

“Come on, Charley.” He set the bags down at the bottom of the stairs and took the cigar out to give me a self-satisfied grin. “Have you ever known me to walk into a board meeting and not come out with what I wanted?”

“Not recently,” I admitted.

“So we’re in?” Simon asked. “It’s on? It’s a green light? It’s a go? We’re a—what’s the word?”

“Hysterical,” I answered, patting him on the arm. “Calm down, okay? It’s not like we start tomorrow.”

“No.” Jack appeared at the top of the stairs, Mike and Gordon behind him. “You start Wednesday.”

“Seriously?” I gulped. “That seems awfully soon. I mean, I know we’ve tossed around a few lines and everything, but I really thought we’d have more time to rehearse, I mean…the day after tomorrow? Seriously?”

Simon’s left eyebrow went up. “Now who’s hysterical?”

***

Eventually, aided by a few sample bottles of wine that Gordon had brought from his restaurant, I got a grip. We gathered in the living room, some on Simon’s beach chairs and some sprawled on the floor. Harry paced.

“We’ll be fine.” Simon was suddenly the soul of nonchalance. He gestured to the pile of shopping bags. “At least we’ll be dressed for the parts, and the right costume is half the battle.”

That was one way of looking at it. A shallow way, but it was something.

Jack spoke. “Remember your best option is to avoid discussing your work—instead you’ll try to get the other person to talk. And if you’re completely cornered, try to be evasive.” He looked at me. “That shouldn’t be hard.”

I nodded. “Avoid and evade. Got it.”

“You know…” Harry took a reflective sip of a fairly excellent Cabernet. “In my experience, everyone in every business is always bluffing to some extent or another. It’s like Warren Buffett once told me—‘It’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s been swimming naked.’”

He was enjoying this way too much.

“I’ve always been rather fond of swimming naked,” Simon remarked, to no one’s surprise.

“And we’re not completely naked,” Eileen said. “Mike, have you got the books?”

“Um, right.” Mike had been scribbling something on a piece of paper. The secret to cold fusion, no doubt. “Yeah.” He got to his feet and retrieved a stack of three-ring binders he’d left near the doorway.

I couldn’t believe that in all the fuss over shopping I’d totally forgotten to ask Eileen how her dinner with Mike had gone. Whether, between lessons in technical jargon and servings of lasagna, anything interesting might have developed. I couldn’t really read much into her expression as she watched him. No obvious wanton longings, but you never know.

Mike passed the binders out to Simon, Brenda, and me. “This should help you,” he said. “There are different sections.” Each clearly marked with color-coded tabs. If Mike had organized them, maybe he was perfect for Eileen.

“It’s a Fake Book,” Mike explained. “I thought it might be helpful to use the same concept that musicians do, of a book with just enough of just about any song to get them to the point where they can fake the rest. This book has just enough information to get you started.” He grinned nervously. “After that you fake it.”

Something told me we’d have an easier time faking a chorus of “Swanee River” than bluffing about high-tech business ventures, but whatever.

“There’s a listing of all of Zakdan’s current products, ongoing projects, and key players,” Mike went on.

“And a glossary of terminology you should get familiar with.” Eileen took Brenda’s copy and turned to the relevant section.

I flipped through the thing. “There’s a bibliography.” I looked up. “A bibliography?”

“Oh, uh.” Mike looked a little embarrassed. “They’re just suggestions. Some of the more popular business books from the last few years. Just in case someone refers to one of them, you should know the titles and have a passing familiarity.”

As long as I wasn’t expected to understand them all.

“The last part is a primer on office etiquette,” he offered. “Things like what’s cool and what isn’t on company email and, um…” He blushed. “Sexual harassment sort of stuff. Things you’d know if you worked in offices.”

Okay, brilliant or not, if the man couldn’t utter the word “sexual” in adult mixed company without turning pink, maybe he wasn’t quite what Eileen should be looking for after all.

“Office etiquette?” Simon demanded. “And who the bollocks do you suppose needs that?”

“Certainly not you, sweetie,” I reassured him. “But—” I turned to Harry.“—if you’re still serious about sending Flank in with us, we might need to check into regulations about physical intimidation in the workplace.”

Harry stopped his pacing and leaned against the wall, crossing his arms. “The man can’t help the way he looks, Charley.”

Brenda spoke up. “If we say he’s our secretary, we can probably just keep him close to us, so he won’t…I mean…so he doesn’t…”

“So he doesn’t cause a panic in the break room?” Simon asked. “Something suggestive of gazelles fleeing the watering hole as they sense a frisky bull elephant on approach?”

“Something like that.”

“At least you won’t have to worry about him saying the wrong thing to the wrong person,” Jack offered.

True.

In my experience, Flank’s verbal abilities were limited to a series of unintelligible grunts—unless he was holding a gun, in which case he was perfectly articulate. And since I didn’t anticipate he’d go prowling the corridors of Zakdan with a Walther in his hand, we were probably safe on that score.

Further discussion was interrupted by the doorbell.

“Have we ordered takeout?” Simon brightened.

“We just had lunch,” Eileen scolded him.

“That was hours ago!”

Jack rose to answer the door as Gordon spoke up.

“If you like, you can all come down to the restaurant to sample some of the things I’m thinking of putting on the menu.” A line appeared between his eyebrows. “I still haven’t made the final decisions.”

“Excellent!” Simon beamed. “If you need a discerning palate, look no further. I’m your man.”

“That’s so sweet of you,” Brenda said. “I’ve missed your cooking.”

Harry grunted and shot Gordon a dark look. He still hadn’t forgiven the chef for leaving his position as Harry’s cook and right-hand man. Even if that position had been a cover he’d assumed in order to investigate my family.

Jack came back into the room, followed by an enormous burgundy leather wing chair. The kind of thing you see in old movies of old libraries in old gentlemen’s clubs.

“Great!” Harry clapped his hands once, then rubbed them together. “Now I can finally sit down in this place.”

A grunt came from behind the chair, and I got an awful feeling that I’d figured out who was carrying it.

“Right here by the fireplace,” Harry said, and the chair was dutifully deposited in position. Its bearer straightened to reveal himself.

He looked like the love child of a mob enforcer and a yeti, and he was grinning at me as if he couldn’t be happier.

I did my best to smile back. “Hi, Flank.”

***

“I can’t believe he did that.”

Jack looked at the chair, and I swear I saw his mouth twitch.

“I mean, it’s not normal for a person to bring his own furniture to another person’s house,” I insisted.

“But if we’re talking Harry, are we really talking normal?”

It had started to rain, so Jack and I had decided to stay home when everyone else went off to Gordon’s restaurant. Jack had stuck something from the freezer into the oven for dinner later. Then he’d built our first fire while I’d gone upstairs to grab the duvet off the bed. We were now comfortably curled up on it in front of the crackling logs.

I sighed and turned my back on the chair, choosing not to remember the tremendous enjoyment Harry had taken in occupying it for the later part of the afternoon.

“I should be reading plays,” I said halfheartedly.

“That sounded convincing.” Jack pulled on the duvet to slide me closer to him.

“I’ve got a whole stack to get through. And then there’s Mike’s Fake Book to study.”

“Uh huh.”

Something in the way he looked at me made me suspect I wasn’t going to get much accomplished. And I was okay with that. But I did have something to discuss with him, just because I’d promised the gang.

“Jack, do you think I should be in some sort of disguise?”

His eyebrows went up.

“Brenda is worried that the guy from the truck the other night might recognize me as the person who was in your car with you.”

Jack nodded. “I’m a little worried about that too, but if I really thought he’d recognize you from seeing you in those conditions, I’d lock you in the bedroom and throw away the key before I’d let you set foot in Zakdan.”

That was sweet, in a sort of like-hell-he-would way. But since it didn’t seem to be an issue, I decided not to get all huffy about it.

“What about using a false name? Eileen pointed out that Simon and I are fairly well known in theatrical circles, so she thought maybe…what do you think?”

He seemed to be giving it consideration. “What kind of a name?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I really think just Charley Fairfax is good enough, because anybody who would know me from the theatre would know me as Charley Van Leewen.” I still used my maiden name for most things related to the Rep.

“Still.” He appeared to be thinking it over. “If the killer knows my name it might not be a good idea to show up using Fairfax.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t thought of that. “Okay, I’ll stick with Van Leewen.”

“Maybe you should use a different first name,” Jack suggested.

“Do you think?”

“Something like Hazel or Brunhilda.”

“Gee, thanks.” When I had thought about it, I’d been thinking of something more like Hildy Johnson—the fast-talking investigative reporter Rosalind Russell played in
His Girl Friday
. Or maybe Bunny Watson, after Katharine Hepburn’s character in
Desk Set
. Something suitably business-ish.

Jack interrupted my thoughts with the last suggestion I would have imagined.

“How about Mina?”

I stared at him.

“No?” He watched me. “You don’t like it?”

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it when I was born Hermina Van Leewen, in honor of my grandfather. I didn’t like it that, however much I preferred to be called Mina, all the kids at school persisted in calling me Herman. I’d liked it so little that I’d legally changed it when I was fourteen, right after my parents died. I chose Charley because, if I was going to be called by a guy’s name, it was at least going to be a cute guy’s name.

I blinked. “You know?”

He grinned. “I know everything, remember?”

“How?”

He scooted me closer again. “I have ways.”

Damn right he did. Which were a little unnerving.

“Do I have
any
secrets from you?”

“Do you need any?”

“This isn’t fair,” I said. “You get to know everything about me, and what do I get to know about you?”

He tilted his head, close to mine. “Everything you need to.”

Right. I have a husband on a need-to-know basis.

“My middle name is Pequod.” He looked me in the eye. “Like the ship.”

“Your middle name is George,” I informed him.

His eyes flashed. “See? I can’t lie to you. You know too much about me.” The last statement, while false, was spoken in a low whisper and accompanied by a soft bite to the earlobe, so I didn’t much care about its veracity.

“I do know one thing.”

“Mmmfghbt?” As he was occupied in the general area of my neck, I couldn’t quite make out what he said.

“I know this duvet isn’t thick enough for the kind of thing you have in mind.”

He stopped in mid-nibble. “Then I suggest we go upstairs immediately.” He stood and held out a hand. “And if I should feel the urge to call out a name in the heat of passion…?” he grinned.

“It had better be ‘Charley.’”