Then I wrote: “Les, Saturday morning.”
Les had told me that the last time he saw Lucy was when they fought on Friday night. If this were true, then it made sense that he would call her the next morning, trying to make up. If he had killed her, the message was a cover-up that he knew the police would hear.
But if Les killed Lucy on Friday night, then Sansome was wrong about her being dead only for a day or two. I had a feeling why Sansome thought that, and why he didn’t want to tell me his reason. Lucy’s body had an odor, but not a terribly strong one. That’s why Sansome asked me how long I’d been in the apartment. If she’d been dead for almost a week, I’d have smelled her as soon as I opened the door.
I remembered two coffee cups on the Sunday paper. Someone had been there with Lucy on Sunday morning. Not Les, if his story was to be believed. Maybe the new boyfriend. Lucy went somewhere else, perhaps with him, for the beginning of the week, then ended up back at home, dead, on Wednesday or Thursday.
One thing I could do was check to see where Lucy was on Friday night. Did she go to the House of Usher or was she with Les?
I called the Macabre Factor office, a cavernous former sewing factory south of Market Street. The desks and computers hugged the walls while the center of the room was filled with boxes of Macabre Factor cosmetics waiting to be shipped. Whenever I visited there I wondered anew where the capital was coming from for their advertising campaign. Suleiman had mumbled something about “angel investors” the last time we discussed the budget.
I immediately recognized Moravia’s husky voice reciting the name of the company.
“Hi, it’s Angie at HFB.”
Moravia’s voice turned warm. “Hello, Angie. Did you have a good time at Usher? We never got to say good-bye to you.”
“Oh yes, I’m sorry about that. I started feeling a little ill, so I left early.”
“Eric just couldn’t stop talking about you.”
I felt the blood rush to my cheeks, and suddenly I was off-task. Why hadn’t I thought of asking Suleiman and Moravia for Eric’s number?
“I’d love to get in touch with Eric. Do you happen to have his number?”
“I don’t have any numbers for him. He’s elusive, that one. But if I see him I’ll tell him you want to talk to him.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I rushed to say. “Anyway, the reason I called is…you know Lucy has been missing the last few days?”
“No, no one told us that. We were just told she was unavailable.”
That was the party line, wasn’t it? If Moravia knew otherwise, she wasn’t going to tell me.
“Well, she was found, I found her, she’s dead.”
I heard Moravia suck in her breath. “Oh my God, really! That’s awful. How did she die?”
“I don’t know really. The police are going to do an autopsy.”
“Well, I’m so sorry. Please don’t worry about our deadlines, we know it will take some time to get things sorted out.”
Under the guise of taking over the account I could ask about Lucy and Moravia’s interactions over the past few days without looking like I was just being nosy. One could even argue that it was a valid reason for me to have been listening to Lucy’s voicemail.
“I think it’s better for all of us if we keep things normal and just go on working.” I took a deep, silent breath. “So I was wondering, when you saw Lucy on Friday night at Usher, did you all come to any conclusions about the creative strategy that I should know about? Was Lucy on board for the ‘normal people embracing the vampire lifestyle’ approach?”
There was some static on the line, as if Moravia was moving from one place to another. “That was a social visit, Angie. We’ve known Lucy since before we became clients at HFB. She had been coming to a private party that we have at Usher on Friday nights. Lately she’d been bringing Les Banks.”
“A private party? Isn’t the whole club private?” I asked, remembering the guest list.
“This is just a little more private. Anyway, she wasn’t there last Friday because the party was canceled.”
“Oh, why was that?”
“I can’t really remember. It happens sometimes.”
After we hung up I thought back over Moravia’s message on Lucy’s machine. I remembered the words distinctly.
“I know you were planning to come to the club tomorrow, but I think it might be better if you didn’t…”
That didn’t sound like the party had been canceled, that sounded like Lucy had been uninvited.
Moravia had said that both Les and Lucy had been attending the Friday parties. Les had said he wasn’t “into the vampire stuff,” so one of them was lying. I needed to talk to Les, but of course I didn’t know where to find him.
Theresa opened the door without knocking. Still sniffling a little, she dropped my mail on my desk. I was rifling through it before the door closed behind her. Before Eric I would let my mail pile up unopened for days at a time, since anything important came by fax, phone, text, or email. But now my mail was precious, because it might contain a message from him.
Today’s precious mail consisted of a copy of Adweek, a circular advertising a half-off shoe sale at Nordstrom, and a brochure for a conference on “Making the Perfect Pitch” in Maui. As I was tossing Adweek onto a pile of other unread magazines, a manila envelope fell out. It looked like a normal piece of direct marketing mail, with my name printed on a label, but its lack of return address or postage indicated otherwise. I swooped on it and ripped it open.
Chapter 10
The envelope contained a three-color, trifold brochure. The photo on the front was of a palm-fringed beach lapped by turquoise water. A man lay on his stomach in the sand, being massaged by two beautiful Asian women wearing bikinis. The caption read: “Experience beautiful and exotic Thailand.”
Inside were more pictures of women and men. Women serving food to tables of only men in a bamboo-walled restaurant. Women wearing silk dresses in jewel colors, doing what looked like traditional Thai dances. Another man getting a massage. The inside copy read:
Feel the warmth of Southeast Asia. Our tour operators are trained to offer complete satisfaction. You will experience your heart’s desire if you travel with us. Discreet, imaginative and professional. Special complete package tours from Germany, Japan, Canada and the United States.
The back of the brochure had an address:
Jad Paan Travel Agency
Charoen Rat Road
Bangkok, Thailand
66 (2) 5870541
www.jadpaan.com
I read through the brochure several times, but found no reason why it should have been sent to me. The website had the exact same information as the brochure, only with more pictures of happy people and a soundtrack of tinkling music. I smelled the manila envelope, hoping to find a telltale trace of Eric’s scent, but it just smelled vaguely of cigarettes. Why would Eric send me a travel brochure for Bangkok, anyway? Because he was going to take me away to exotic places, my hopeful heart suggested. He did work in international real estate, my optimism added. But logic had the last word. Nice try, it said. It’s a brochure, not a secret message.
My office door was open, and Kimberley walked in while I was pondering. I hadn’t seen her since the Big Meeting yesterday, when Dick had put me in charge of Tangento. I had been meaning to talk to her about it, but in the chaos it had slipped my mind.
“Angie, you’re here. Are you all right? I heard from Dick that you found Lucy yesterday. That must have been so terrible for you. I’m sorry I wasn’t home to talk to you about it last night.” Her brow was attractively furrowed with concern.
“Thanks, Kimberley. I’m fine, I guess. I went out last night with some friends. To take my mind off things. I couldn’t sleep anyway.”
“I’ll be home tonight, though, if you want some support. Mummy and Daddy are coming home today.”
Support from Kimberley? I thought about what Lakshmi had said, and wondered whether Kimb
erley might actually be happy to have Lucy dead.
“Thanks again, but really, I’m fine.”
“Well, you don’t look fine. I think this has been really hard on you. You should go home and rest.”
Now that she mentioned it, I was developing a mother of a headache over my right eye. There seemed to be an unusual glare this morning. I got up to pull the blinds down, then turned to face my roommate, coworker, and adversary.
“Kimberley, look, we should talk about yesterday, about the meeting and Tangento. I want you to know I had no idea Dick was going to do that.”
Kimberley held up her hand. “Don’t worry, Angie, please, you don’t have to say anything. Especially after what has happened with Lucy, this is no time for animosity. We’re all going to have to help each other to get through this difficult time.”
That would have been a pretty speech if it hadn’t sounded so rehearsed. But I didn’t have the energy to worry about where Kimberley’s magnanimity was coming from.
“I’m glad to know you’re okay with it. And of course we’ll be working together every step of the way.”
Kimberley laid a fluorescent orange file folder on my desk. Only Lucy used fluorescent file folders. “Don’t worry about looking at this right now if you don’t want to, Angie. But this will help you get up to speed on what we’ve been doing with Tangento.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that.” I opened the folder and recognized Lucy’s handwriting. She was the only woman I knew who wrote in block capitals, a very time intensive method, as I’d learned from watching her. I knew a few men who wrote that way, and I had thought it was because they were messing around in third grade and missed cursive class. Lucy probably did it because it made everything she wrote look important. I heard a sniffle, and I looked up with surprise to see Kimberley looking at the same piece of paper, but with wet eyes. Immediately I felt guilty.
“Oh gosh, I’m sorry, Kimberley. Here you’re offering me support and I didn’t even ask about you. I mean, you and I probably spent the most time with Lucy of anybody.”
Except Les.
Kimberley smiled through her tears, the very picture of bravery in adversity.
“I think I’m in shock, like everybody else. It’ll hit us later. A couple of days from now there’ll probably be a line of people at Employee Assistance trying to get counseling. But for now, it’s business as usual. At least we don’t have to deal with telling all the clients.”
This would have been a good time to mention that I’d already spoken to Moravia, but I didn’t.
“I think Dick is calling everyone today, with some help from Human Resources. He’ll get everyone informed, so we won’t have to deal with that part of it when we start getting in touch with clients,” Kimberley continued, her tears forgotten for the moment. “Apparently there’s a whole protocol to be followed when there’s a death in the company. HR has a chapter on it in the handbook.” She took a breath. “Angie, if it’s not too upsetting for you, I just have to ask, do the police have any idea what happened?”
“No, they wouldn’t tell me. I didn’t see anything on her, like gunshots, or…”
Holes in the neck?
“…or wounds.”
Kimberley shuddered and waved her hands as if shooing away flies.
I picked up the Tangento file. “Well, I guess we should get back to work, huh?” Except that my head was hurting so badly now I thought I would have to go home.
“What’s that?” Kimberley pointed at the Thai brochure, which had been uncovered when I picked up the file. “Are you thinking about going to Thailand?”
“Not me. I must have got on somebody’s mailing list.”
She headed for the door. “Do go home if you want to. You should take care of yourself.”
After she left I opened the Tangento file again. There were reports from several focus groups conducted by the research department. Most people had no opinions of Tangento, either positive or negative. This was fairly common with large corporations, especially ones that owned many subsidiaries. It was a matter of not seeing the forest for the trees. They had heard of the companies that Tangento owned, according to the report, and held positive opinions of them.
Proteus was a name everyone in the focus group was familiar with, and not surprisingly, since a pair of sneakers displaying their trademark trident probably sat in half the closets in America. Proteus Titans were in a niche market, competing with sneakers made by hip-hop moguls Clay Russell and Big Head Eddy, bought by teenagers solely for their brand cachet. Most of the men in the focus groups did not admit to knowing the Venus lingerie brand name, but I was willing to bet a lot of them had sneaked a peek at the mail order catalogue. Tangento had a wealth of strong brands under its umbrella, including clothing, food, and personal care products.
Even after two years at HFB, it was still strange to me that a company like Tangento could own so many different subsidiaries. The kings of industry were no longer men who excelled at making or selling things, like Mr. Ford or Mr. Woolworth. No, the CEO of Tangento knew nothing about what made a comfortable bra or solid pair of sneakers, I’d be willing to bet. But he probably knew plenty about the business of business, of keeping the stockholders flush and happy.
No questions had been asked of the focus group regarding environmental or labor problems in other countries. The report concluded that the time was ripe for Tangento to begin a mass marketing campaign to sell a favorable image of the parent company and raise public awareness of the company name. And boost the stock price while you’re at it, read the invisible footnote.
Lucy had written a memo stating that the client was amenable to the idea of a public awareness campaign and was eagerly awaiting our ideas for a tag line. The task had been sent to the creatives for preliminary brainstorming. We were to report back to Tangento next week.
At the end of the file were copies of faxes back and forth between Kimberley, Lucy, and Barry Warner, Tangento’s VP of Marketing. He was based in Houston, but had been working in Tangento’s San Francisco office and had a local number. He picked up after three rings.
“This is Barry Warner.” He had the strongest southern accent I’d heard since George W. Bush left office. His name had three syllables the way he pronounced it.
“Hello, Mr. Warner, this is Angie McCaffrey, from HFB.”
“What can I do for you, Angie? And please, call me Barry.”
My name also had three syllables. Barry’s voice was as warm and sweet as caramel sauce, and I immediately liked him. I wondered if this was just a prejudice, as in all Southerners are gentlemen, people with BBC British accents are intelligent, and anyone with a Jamaican accent smokes pot and listens to reggae.
“Barry, may I ask, has Dick Partridge been in contact with you today?”
“Nope, haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Well, I’m afraid I have to be the first to tell you that Lucy Weston, your account executive…” I wished I’d thought this out before impetuously picking up the phone, “…she passed away.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
I tried again. “It happened very unexpectedly, as you can imagine. We’re trying to pick up the pieces as best we can.”
“Forgive me, Angie, I was just shocked at the news. Lucy was such a sweet girl, we all just loved her over here.”
Sweet girl, I never thought I’d hear that description.
“Thank you, I appreciate that, Barry. I’m calling to let you know that I’ve been assigned to take over for Lucy for the time being. We’re going to do our best to keep things moving smoothly. I know you’re on the verge of a big promo, and it’s an important time for Tangento.”
“Well, Angie, you sound like a doll, and I look forward to having you on the team.” Doll? Sweet girl? The warm feelings Barry’s honey-dripped accent had induced were completely wiped away by his 1960s era word choices.
“I believe I have a meeting with y’all a week from today, is that right?” There was a p
ause while he presumably checked his calendar. “I know a great little sushi bar right near you that serves the damndest unagi you ever tasted.”
Eating fish with a male chauvinist pig was not my idea of heaven, but it was part of the job description. I still had one question to ask, however, and I’d been thinking about the most delicate way to approach it throughout our conversation.
“That sounds great, Barry, I look forward to it, and to meeting you in person. There’s just one other little thing…A colleague brought up the issue of some negative publicity that might be circulating around Europe, something in the Economist, maybe? Is this something y’all are aware of?”
Listen to me, y’alling him. I sounded like Steve, working the neurolinguistic programming.
Barry sighed into the phone. “I’m not aware of that one in particular, sweetheart, but a company as big as ours, we get a story a week like that. It’s like that folk tale, what was the lion’s name, Andrew? Anyway, the lion got a thorn in his paw, right? Well, you just have to ignore that thorn and get on with the business of being the King of the Jungle, you know what I mean?”
Barry and I said our good-byes. I tried rubbing a spot between my thumb and first finger that I’d been told was an acupressure point for headaches, but this pain wasn’t budging. The story he was referring to was Androcles and the Lion. The lion gets a thorn in his paw and is incapacitated by it, until he allows Androcles to help him. Then when the Romans toss Androcles and the lion into the stadium, hoping for a little blood and gore, the big lion refuses to hurt his little human friend.
Barry getting that folk tale wrong was an omen, I could feel it like an old man with a bad knee when a storm’s coming in. Somewhere in Asia, Tangento the Lion was ripping up Androcles. Whether Barry knew it or not, there was a “brouhaha in Asia,” and the story was going to explode if we didn’t find it and defuse it first.
I googled Tangento and got 1,490,000 hits. The first was a Wikipedia article, remarkably evenhanded in tone considering that anyone in cyberspace could have written it. The second was the company’s official site. That was followed by a bunch of obscure legal findings related to the merger of Tangento and Billy Olson, a designer clothing company, some news articles about the merger, and an article about the compensation package of the latest Tangento CEO, Edgar Raider.
Once Bitten Page 9