Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 06 - Death of a Damn Yankee

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  “It never occurred to me to ask him.”

  My first thought was that Marshall had been hiding something from Grace, and that’s why he hadn’t given her his password, but I realized that I hadn’t given my most recent passwords to Richard, either, and I didn’t have anything to hide from him.

  “Missing passwords can be a real bear to work around,” I said, and put my own laptop down on the table next to Marshall’s. “What program is this?”

  “Something called STAT.”

  “Have you called tech support to see if the STAT people can help?”

  “I don’t have their number. Marshall didn’t bring the manual with him.”

  I sighed. “I might be able to help you, but it’s going to take some time, and I may have to get in touch with a specialist back in Boston. How much of a hurry are you in?”

  “I need it yesterday,” she said bluntly. Then, as if remembering what had happened yesterday, she explained, “Marshall had just completed some analyses of performance data for us to use when talking with the union. He intended to print out the latest graphs before he…” Her voice broke. “At any rate, he never got the chance, and I’m meeting with the union tonight.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said as I booted my laptop.

  Grace leaned back in her chair, apparently intending to watch, so I gave Richard a significant look. I’m not fond of having people watching over my shoulder, and besides, I wanted time alone with Marshall’s computer.

  Richard, bless his heart, knew just what to do. “It will be better if you and I find someplace else to wait,” he said. “You know how these computer artistes are—they want their privacy.” Just in case that didn’t convince her, he added, “While we’ve got the chance, I’ve been meaning to ask some questions about your plans for the mill.”

  “I didn’t realize you were interested,” she said.

  “On the contrary. I’m very interested. What I’ve heard so far sounds quite promising, and I wondered if you were planning to invite other investors to join in. I have friends from my undergraduate days at Harvard who are looking to spend some money—we’re all at the age when our trust funds are coming into our hands, and we hate to miss out on lucrative opportunities.”

  I don’t know if it was the glamour of Harvard or the lure of trust funds that did it, but from the look in her eye, Grace would have followed Richard nigh about anywhere after that.

  I kept a frown on my face until I was sure they were gone, then grinned. I couldn’t have planned a better setup if I’d tried. Passwords aren’t nearly as hard to crack as most people think. All it takes it the right piece of software and time. I had the right software on my own hard disk, and with Richard on duty, I should have plenty of time, too.

  Even if the software wouldn’t do the trick, I was sure I could find out what I needed from the company that made STAT. It just so happened that I’d worked at that company briefly, and if worse came to worst, I’d just call a friend there. I knew they’d left a back door that would get me into the program—I’d seen the source code myself.

  The first thing I did was to shut down STAT. Then I quickly looked through the directories on Marshall’s hard disk, grateful that he’d arranged his files in a reasonable way. I had no way of knowing what might be useful, so I pulled out the boxes of diskettes I’d picked up at Kmart and copied every file. Byerly must have entered the computer age if even the Kmart carried diskettes.

  Once that was done, I tucked the diskettes in my pocketbook and got down to business. Cracking a password is a crapshoot—it’s a matter of the system guessing the right configuration of characters. The more characters the program has, the longer it can take, anywhere from two minutes for three characters to two days for eight. Fortunately for me, STAT only allows five-character passwords, and it only took me an hour to find the right one. Actually, Marshall’s laptop did the work while I played solitaire on my own computer. I did keep an eye on the door in case I had to cover up what I was doing quickly, but I found the password before anybody came to check on me.

  A freelance programmer once told me that it’s better for the client to think you’ve been working hard, especially if you haven’t been. So once I was done, I mussed my hair as if I’d been running my fingers through it in frustration, jotted some meaningless notes on a pad of yellow stickies and cluttered up the table with them, and rubbed my eyes to make them look red. Then I walked stiffly to the door to look for Richard and Grace. I didn’t have to fake the stiffness—I always forget to stretch when I’m playing computer games.

  I stuck my head out the door, and in a voice intended to convey triumph mixed with weariness, said, “I think I’ve got it.” Miss Hunsucker jumped up and went into Burt’s office, and came back out a few seconds later, followed by Grace, Burt, and Richard, all three of whom looked mighty relieved.

  “Can I access the files now?” Grace asked.

  “They’re all yours.”

  “Finally,” she said, and brushed by me on her way to the computer.

  I suppose I could have been offended, but I decided to take it as a comment on how badly she needed them rather than a criticism of my ability. Though just for a second, I did consider changing the password and not telling her what the new one was.

  By the time Burt, Richard, and I joined her in the conference room, she was already at the computer, scrolling through a file. “It looks as if it’s all here.”

  “Of course,” I said. “There wasn’t any data lost—only the password was missing.” I handed her the yellow sticky on which I’d written it. “Here it is, but you might want to change it to something you’ll remember.”

  “Can you do that for me? And print the reports?” she asked eagerly.

  It only took a few minutes more to help Grace choose a new password, move the computer to Miss Hunsucker’s desk so I could hook it up to a printer, and show Grace how to print the reports she wanted.

  Then Mr. Walters said, “You see, Miz Saunders, I told you that if it could be done, Laurie Anne would know how to do it.”

  “All in a day’s work,” I said modestly.

  “Well, we sure do appreciate it, don’t we, Miz Saunders?”

  “Hmm?” she said, her nose buried in the first page of a report. “Oh yes, thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I said dryly. Then Richard helped me pack up my own computer.

  Once that was done, Burt said, “We sure don’t want to take up any more of your vacation, so let me walk you out. If you’ll excuse me for a minute, Miz Saunders.”

  She grunted something that might have been appropriate had I been able to understand it.

  The elevator door had just barely closed when Mr. Walters’s smile dropped off. “That woman is going to drive me to distraction. You’d think she already owned the place! Using my conference room and my office as if I wasn’t even there. She’s even got Miss Hunsucker getting her coffee. Laurie Anne, please tell me there’s something incriminating in those files.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to look at them,” I said, “but I will as soon as we get back to Aunt Maggie’s.”

  “I suppose you couldn’t look at them with Grace next door,” he admitted, “but please call me if you find anything.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  Richard said, “It was very clever of you to arrange this chance for Laura to get at Marshall’s computer.”

  “I had to do something,” Burt said. “I’ve got to get that woman out of my mill!”

  “We’re doing our best,” I said defensively, all too aware that Burt wouldn’t appreciate the time we’d been spending on family business. “We’ve only been here a few days.”

  “I don’t mean to complain, but the pressure is getting to me. The union meeting is tonight, and if Grace sells them on the project, I may be out of time.”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Richard said, and Burt had to settle for that.

  Once Richard and I got to the car, he asked, “W
as it really that hard to fix the computer?”

  “Are you implying that cracking a password protection system didn’t require every iota of my skill and experience as a programming professional?”

  “ ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks,’ “ he said, “Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2.”

  “You’re right. I could have done it in my sleep.”

  “Whereas I was trapped in a room with the yuppie from hell, who was trying her best to convince me to give her my money. I’m only glad that I have no money to give, or I might have done it just to get away from her.”

  “I take it that Grace gives a hard sell.”

  “Compared to her, time-share salesmen are laid back.”

  “You poor thing,” I said sympathetically. “How would you like a chance to sit and read once we get back to Aunt Maggie’s?”

  “There are other activities that would tempt me more,” he said with a leer.

  I was tempted myself, but the time pressure was getting to me as much as it was to Burt. “Wouldn’t you rather curl up with a nice report while I snoop through Marshall’s files?”

  “Are you suggesting that I take a closer look at the detective’s report we got last night?”

  “I am.”

  “It probably won’t have much of a plot, but I suppose I could take a look.”

  As we drove, I said, “Other than trying to get her hands on your checkbook, how did Grace act?”

  “You mean, did she act like a woman whose husband had recently been murdered? Or was she acting like a woman who’d recently murdered her husband?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I couldn’t say, Laura. On one hand, I admired her strength—work could be her way of keeping the pain away. But on the other hand, I had to wonder if she weren’t being callous. She never mentioned Marshall other than that once in the conference room. Is that a normal reaction?”

  I thought about it. “One time Aunt Maggie told me that there’s no way to predict the way somebody is going to react to losing somebody. Some people go numb, some break down, and some try to pretend it never happened. People don’t even react to different deaths the same way. Aunt Nora cried for a week when my parents died, but she was much stronger when Paw died. I don’t think it means that she loved Mama more—it just hit her differently.”

  “So despite the TV shows, police can’t really gauge people’s reactions when they tell them about a death.”

  “Actually, Junior says that she does watch people pretty carefully, but only to see if it’s an honest reaction.”

  “You lost me.”

  “Both innocent and guilty people cry all over the place when somebody dies. It can be honest grief, or it can be guilt. And sometimes both innocent and guilty people act as if they don’t care—not everybody who dies is loved. What Junior looks for are phony reactions: a husband acting upset when he’s not, or a wife trying to hide her feelings when she really is upset. If somebody takes the effort to fake it at a time like that, there’s usually a reason.”

  “Then our question should be, was Grace faking it?”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t think she was, but from what you’re saying, that doesn’t tell us anything.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed. Then I tapped the lump of diskettes in my pocketbook. “Maybe the files on here will tell us something.”

  Chapter 25

  I’m not sure what I expected to find in Marshall’s computer files. I didn’t look for a file named “evilplan.doc” which detailed the way in which the Saunders were going to transform Walters Mill into a sweatshop, or a file called “dirt.doc” containing scandalous information about their unsavory history. But Marshall had struck me as the kind of man who did everything using his computer, from setting budgets to writing letters to filling out tax forms. Most of the other computer geeks I knew did, including me. And all that information can tell somebody an awful lot about a person. Unfortunately, either Marshall stored such work on another hard drive, did it by hand, or had somebody else do it for him. There were no personal files at all, not even any games. Had his disk not been nearly full, I’d have wondered if somebody had deleted the files I was hoping for.

  What I did find were files about Marshall’s work: reports and case studies from previous clients, journal articles about reengineering where every other word was a buzzword, and tables of statistics I couldn’t begin to decipher. I perked up when I located a directory of Walters Mill data, but that was no help, either. There were tables that tracked and predicted production, and bullet lists of ideas for improving the situation, but nowhere did I find anything that gave any insight into the man or an idea of who might have wanted to kill him.

  I hated giving up, so I kept on looking through files for most of the afternoon, stopping only when Richard threatened to pull the plug on my laptop.

  “I must be missing something,” I insisted, rubbing my eyes. “I just can’t believe we had this handed to us, and then can’t use it.”

  “You win some, you lose some,” Richard said.

  “That’s real profound,” I groused.

  “If you want something Shakespearean—”

  “No, thanks,” I said quickly. Not that I don’t love the Bard’s words of wisdom, but I wasn’t in the mood. “It’s just discouraging. Cracking Marshall’s password wasn’t all that hard, but I hate that I did the work for nothing. Please tell me you had better luck with the file on the Saunders.”

  But he said, “Sorry, love. There was plenty of information, but nothing helpful. Grace was born in Lowell, by the way, and attended UMass-Lowell.”

  “Not exactly Ivy League, is it? Hank Parker was right about her marrying up.” Then, not wanting to sound like a snob, I added, “At least, that’s how some people would see it.”

  “Of course, we are above such speculations,” Richard said sarcastically. “At any rate, I learned about Marshall’s and Grace’s college careers, and I know what jobs they’ve held since graduation, and I found out all the articles on management that Marshall has published. None of which provides a motive for murder. The only vaguely pertinent thing I found out is that the Saunders have an impressive amount of money, but we knew that already.”

  “Rats! Two dead ends in one day.”

  “There’s still the meeting with the union tonight,” he reminded me.

  “That would be great if I had an excuse to attend it.”

  “You could go with me.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He looked superior. “I mentioned to Grace that I’d be interested in her presentation, and she said I was welcome to come. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you accompanied me.”

  “That’s perfect! Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “I was saving it to cheer you up in case you didn’t find anything in the computer files.”

  “You know you’re brilliant, don’t you?”

  He just smiled, but then said, “There’s only one problem. Linwood.”

  “That’s right—one of us should keep an eye on him tonight. Why don’t you go to the meeting, and I’ll follow Linwood?”

  “No way! After the way he acted yesterday, I’m not about to risk your being alone with him.”

  “I’ll be in the car,” I said. “And if I’m careful, he won’t see me anyway.”

  “He won’t see you because you’re not going to be there. You go to the meeting—I’ll watch Linwood.”

  I might have been able to talk him out of it, but I was uneasy enough about Linwood that I didn’t try. Instead I looked at my watch and decided it was time to get ready for the meeting.

  When my mother was still living, she’d told me never to take a trip without at least one nice outfit, “because you never know if you’ll need it.” I’d taken that advice ever since, so I had a navy blue dress, high heels, and panty hose with me. As I dressed the way I thought a prospective investor should dress, I looked enviously at Richard, who’d pulled on a comfortable black T-
shirt over his jeans and sneakers.

  Suddenly suspicious, I said, “Are you sure you’re not skipping the meeting to keep from having to get dressed up?”

  “I’m crushed that you’d even consider such a thing.”

  I wasn’t convinced.

  Aunt Maggie arrived while we were getting ready, and when I found out that she was also planning to go to the meeting, I asked if I could ride with her to save Richard from having to drop me off.

  Even though we’d made up with Aunt Maggie after last night’s argument, I wasn’t real sure how carefully I should tread, but on the way to the meeting, I asked her how the union was reacting to the idea of Grace Saunders taking over Walters Mill without her husband.

  “Still up in the air,” she said. “Some who were in favor are now against because they don’t want a woman running things—you can guess how well that set with me.”

  I wondered what she’d said to whoever it was who’d dared to make that comment. At the very least, she would have given him the look, a piercing gaze that Southern women learn early on as a way to let their opinions be known. I’ve always thought that the less a woman cusses, the more powerful a look she develops. Aunt Maggie never cusses.

  “Then there are those who went the other way, saying that they’d rather have a woman, especially since it looks like she had the smarts in that family.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I don’t see that it makes much difference. If Grace Saunders wants to try and break the union, she’s going to try it with or without her husband around.”

  The meeting was being held at the Walters’s house, a grandiose structure with enough columns and honeysuckle vines to make Scarlett O’Hara feel right at home. Grace met us at the door with a smile and her firm handshake, but the smile faded when she saw there were only two of us.

  “Isn’t Richard with you?” she asked me.

  “I’m afraid not,” I said. “He had a conference call with his broker scheduled, so he sent me in his place.” I hadn’t warned Aunt Maggie, but she managed to keep a straight face anyway.

  “You’re interested in investments?” Grace asked doubtfully.