How to Succeed in Murder (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

We split up after the meeting, each pursuing our designated target of investigation for the day. I went back to our assigned conference room to check on Flank before tackling mine—Jim Stoddard, vice president of Engineering.

We’d decided to leave Flank out of the introductory meeting on the theory that the less attention we called to him, the better. It turned out that our decision had unexpected side benefits. I was stunned when I saw what the bodyguard had accomplished while we were gone.

All of our laptops were set up and humming away happily on the large conference table. Flank had positioned them facing the glass wall that ran the length of the room, so when we sat at them we’d be able to see the hall and across into the kitchen, and no casual passers-by would be able to glance in at what we were working on.

The conference room was rectangular, with the only door located on a second glass wall which looked out on a row of cubicles. So, given the fact that we were in what amounted to a fish tank, we were pretty well fortified.

Stacks of paper, boxes of assorted pens and pencils, pads of sticky notes, and every other possible office supply we might need were arranged tidily on a cabinet at the far end of the room. Also in the back corner was a high stool, positioned to give Flank a clear view of all approaches to the room.

The floor-to-ceiling white board on the long rear wall had “SFG Team” neatly lettered on it in purple marker, along with each of our names—fake or otherwise—below it.

“Flank, this is great! It looks like an office.”

He mumbled something while handing me a printed sheet of paper. It was a floor plan of the fourth floor executive suites, with everybody’s office labeled. Flank had circled Jim Stoddard’s.

I took the floor plan and searched it, looking not for the circled office, but for Lalit Kumar’s. Jack had gotten Harry’s call about meeting him at Bix while in Kumar’s office, and might have been overheard by someone in an adjoining room. And that someone had tried to run us into the wall of the Broadway Tunnel.

I found Kumar’s office. Troy, the ponytailed guy, shared the rear wall, Bob Adams was on the left, and my afternoon appointment, Jim Stoddard, was on the right.

I handed the paper back to Flank.

It was time to go to work.

***

“What are your plans?”

I’d been seated in Jim’s office for all of five seconds before he started asking questions. Luckily, I’d had a lifetime of evasiveness training.

“We’re just in the evaluation phase now.” A confident smile.

His left eye twitched a little. “What are you evaluating?”

I straightened my jacket. “Zakdan, of course.”

The office was decorated with technical awards and pictures of Jim posing with various clusters of other geeks. Team photos from projects he’d worked on in the past, probably. No family. Was that significant?

He was looking at me narrowly. “What, exactly, do you think you’ll find?”

A killer—but that’s not what I said.

“We want to identify the tipping point,” I said, recalling the name of a book Mike had listed in his bibliography. “We need to concentrate on what’s going to push the needle.”

That didn’t sound quite right, even to me. Did you push the needle or push the envelope? I knew you didn’t thread the needle.

My smile might have faltered a bit. Time for a change of tactic.

“What can you tell me about working at Zakdan?”

He sat back in his chair, putting his hands behind his head, elbows out. It was body language that said he had nothing to hide.

I didn’t believe it for a minute.

***

“How was your day, dear?” Jack kissed me on the cheek.

Simon turned to Eileen. “He said it—you owe me ten dollars.” Then, in response to the look I gave him, “What?”

“I can’t believe you bet on Jack saying that.”

“I can’t believe I’m that predictable,” Jack said.

“Nonsense,” Simon told him. “You just always know your lines.”

We’d rendezvoused at Rose Pistola after work, choosing the North Beach restaurant because it was close to Eileen’s house, so she could pick up her son Anthony on her way there. Harry, Mike, and Jack had been waiting for us at a large table near the back. We’d lost Flank as we passed the massive antipasti bar on the way in.

“Who’s that?” Anthony was staring at the very large bodyguard, who’d seated himself on a very small stool at the bar. “He looks like the bad guy in
Death Squad IV
.”

I looked at Eileen.

“It’s a video game,” she explained. Then she gave her son a menu and told him it wasn’t polite to stare.

“God, I need a drink,” I said. “No wonder everyone who works for a living has a substance abuse problem.”

All the people at the table who worked for a living stared at me.

“Oh, you know what I mean. Let’s get martinis.”

Once we’d gotten our drinks and a bunch of antipasti to share, we got down to business.

“Simon,” Jack kicked things off. “How did it go?”

“Not terribly well, I’m afraid.” Simon nibbled at an olive. “I know I was supposed to spend the day in the company of the charming Mr. Adams, but I never seemed to be able to track him down.” He picked up his glass, his hand shaking visibly.

“Do you think he was avoiding you?” I reached for a morsel of house-cured sturgeon.

“I don’t know.” Simon needed two hands for the drink. “He might have just been busy all day, but—”

“Simon, are you all right?”

Brenda’s expression of concern was prompted by the sloshing of the liquid in Simon’s glass.

“Fine,” he assured her. “Fine, fine, fine. Perfectly fine. I might possibly have overdone the caffeine today. But I’m fine.”

Eileen’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”

“Well, since I couldn’t seem to corner my quarry, I spent most of the day hanging about in the kitchen. I assumed all sorts of people would stop by during the day, and I’d just take the luck of the draw in who I talked to.” He twitched. “Did you know they have an espresso maker in the kitchen?”

“How many did you have?” Brenda asked.

“I lost track at seven.”

“You’re not going to sleep for a week.”

“Did you find anything out?” Jack brought us back to the point.

“Loads.” He sat up and gave us a rapid-fire report. “Software engineers are apparently used to being treated like living gods, and the marketing people find that extremely annoying. The sales force all seem to have belonged to the same fraternity. Oh, and technical writers are far more entertaining than you might think. Every one of them is in a band or an artist’s co-op or working on the Great American Novel of high-tech.”

“Anything else?” Harry rumbled. I don’t think he was interested in novels of high-tech, Great American or otherwise.

“Just that Zakdan seems to suffer from a serious shortage of eligible men.” Simon looked pleased with himself. “I got three phone numbers before—”

“Simon!” Eileen’s reprimand sent the rest of his drink flying.

“What? Aren’t we supposed to be insinuating ourselves into the corporate culture?” He dabbed at the tablecloth.

“Anyway,” Jack said. “You didn’t overhear anything about Clara? Or rumors about Lalit Kumar? Or a software bug?”

“Not a word,” he said. “Not a dicky bird, not a peep, not a—”

“We get the picture,” I stopped him. “Eileen, how about you?”

She shook her head. “Nothing worth discussing, really. I spent most of the afternoon with Troy.” The distaste she heaped on his name gave us a preview of her opinion of the man.

“He certainly doesn’t suffer from low self-esteem. I’m the one who’s undercover, and I’m the one who’s supposed to be bluffing my way through this, but I swear that man spent half the meeting blowing smoke up my skirt.”

“He’s in Marketing,” Mike said, as if no further explanation were required.

“Even so,” Eileen said. “Although…I have to admit that, beyond the vast quantities of bullshit, he did seem pretty bright.”

“But is he bright enough to plot two murders?” Brenda asked.

“Or sabotage the software?” I followed up.

She made a face. “It’s hard to say. If you want, you can listen to the whole conversation. I brought my laptop to the meeting and turned on the microphone function before we started.”

“There’s a microphone function?” I asked. That sounded handy.

She nodded. “It’s mainly for online conferencing, but you can record with it too. I think we should probably try to use it when we can.”

That seemed like a good idea, assuming she could show us how it worked.

“Anyway,” Eileen continued, “Troy’s capabilities aside, I didn’t really get a sense that he had a motive. I mean, his world doesn’t really touch Clara’s and Lalit’s. He made it very clear that he owns the ‘pre-sales’ experience, and anything anybody else does is ‘post-sales,’ and therefore irrelevant. Oh—” she turned to Jack. “Did the Crime Scenes people find any long blond hairs anywhere?”

“Not that I recall. Why?”

“Because all the while we were talking, he kept taking his hair out of that ponytail, smoothing it all back, and putting the ponytail in again. He did it maybe ten times. It must be some sort of nervous habit.”

“What do you think was making him nervous?” Brenda asked.

“Me.” Eileen seemed perfectly comfortable with this answer. “The point is, if he does that when he’s nervous, and he’s the one who followed Clara to the gym…”

“There would probably be blond hairs at the scene,” Jack finished for her. “I’ll take another look at the report.”

We took a pause from the debriefing while our entrees appeared. Chicken under a brick for those of us in the know, pumpkin ravioli for Anthony, and—predictably—terrorized steak for Harry.

When we’d all had our first bites, it was Brenda’s turn.

“I spent the day with Tonya in Human Resources.” She produced a small notebook and referred to it. “We didn’t start out with anything specific. I asked her how employee morale is generally—”

“How is it?” I asked.

“Not good. After a while she started confiding in me about all the recent complaints the employees have been filing about each other.” She glanced around the table. “I know we decided to concentrate on the execs at first, because they were Clara’s immediate colleagues—”

“And because whoever is fiddling with the code must be doing so at a pretty high level not to have been found out,” Mike said.

“Right. But, you guys, there’s a lot of hostility at that company.”

Damn right there was, if the atmosphere in that executive boardroom had been any indication.

“What kind of hostility?” Jack asked.

“Well, everyone seems to know how much everyone else makes,” she told us. “And they get all kinds of complaints about that.”

“That always goes on at big companies,” Eileen said. “What else?”

“Everyone knows everyone else’s business.” She looked up from her notes indignantly. “Do you know you can log on to the email system and see everyone’s calendars?”

“What?” I asked.

She explained. “Everyone has to use the same networked system for their email and calendars, and it’s all public. So if you want to make an appointment with someone you can look at their calendar online and see if they’re busy. And if they don’t mark their appointments as private, you can see what they’re doing and where they’re doing it all day long.”

That had to be the most appalling thing I’d heard so far. “So you could stalk your co-workers through their calendars?”

She nodded. “And people do. And they also complain about why they have to go to so many meetings when so-and-so doesn’t, or why weren’t they invited to a meeting that thus-and-such was. It gets awfully petty.”

“Wow.” I sat back. “I wonder—”

“Whether Clara put her gym plans in her calendar,” Simon finished for me.

“I’ll find out,” Brenda said. “But that’s not the big thing.” She took a breath. “Clara was working with Tonya to fire someone.”

We all stared at her.

“Who?”

“What?”

“How did you find out?”

Brenda shook her head. “I couldn’t get anything more out of Tonya. She just let it slip. I asked her whether anyone had been fired recently, and she said that someone was about to be, but the person who was going to do it was killed.” She put down her fork. “So I asked her if it had been the accidental death I’d read about in the papers, and she said yes.”

Harry thumped the table. “Well, there’s your motive right there. Whoever Clara was going to fire is the killer.”

“What’s happened to that person since Clara’s death?” Eileen asked.

Brenda shook her head. “I’ll keep working on Tonya for the details.” She looked at Jack. “I’ll find out who it was.”

He nodded, then turned to me. “How about Jim Stoddard? Anything interesting there?”

I made a face. After I’d deflected the engineer’s opening questions, I’d spent what were arguably the most mind-numbingly dull three hours of my life.

“Mike might have found it interesting, or you might have, but I was completely lost. Stoddard doesn’t really seem capable of talking about anything other than computer code. Every time I tried to steer him into things like how he liked his job or what he thinks of his colleagues, he kept coming back to these monologues on the system architecture.”

“What did you do?” Mike looked a little worried.

“I tried to seem interested.” I shrugged. “And
that
was acting.”

“So that was it?” Eileen said. “Nothing personal? Nothing off-topic?”

“Oh.” I picked at my bread. “Not unless you want to hear about how he hit on me as I was leaving.”

“Darling, he didn’t!” Simon exclaimed.

“Seriously?” Eileen asked.

“How could he?” Brenda protested. “You’re wearing your ring!”

I looked at Jack, who seemed a lot calmer than my friends.

“How did you play it?”

“Polite but firm.”

“Good.” He nodded. “No reason to alienate him now.” He took a sip of water. “I’ll just kill him later.”

“Whatever,” I agreed.

Harry cleared his throat. “How did Flank do? He was a help, wasn’t he?”

I had to admit it. “He was a help this morning. I don’t know what he did all afternoon.”