“He hadn’t heard about it.”
“That seems weird. I mean, it was a Zakdan celebration party.”
“A lot seems weird.” Jack tilted my face up to look at me. “How are you holding up?”
I thought about it. I’d been undercover for three days, had almost been killed twice, and now my leading candidate for the killer had become another victim. I closed my eyes and answered from my heart.
“Thank God it’s Friday.”
Chapter Thirty
Someone was yelling my name. I was driving in the fog without any headlights, and the car didn’t seem to be moving. Who was calling my name?
Chip.
I opened my eyes. It was definitely Chip’s yell. I’d heard him calling the cast to attention at the Rep often enough to recognize it. What I didn’t know was why he was shouting my name, and why he was sounding increasingly panicked. Then I got it.
Flank.
I went to the window to find Flank assaulting the Rep’s director on my front lawn. Pages of what were probably agonizingly bad plays were being blown all over the yard, and Chip didn’t look like he had much fight left in him.
I opened the window. “Flank!”
He froze.
“Charley!” Chip shouted. “Call him off!”
I considered saying “down, boy” but since I was beginning to suspect Flank had a sensitive side, I opted for “Hey, Flank, cut it out. That’s Chip—remember him from the theater?”
Flank took a closer look at the smallish wheezing man in his arms. Or, to be more accurate, in his headlock. Then he seemed to remember his manners and he stood Chip upright. I imagine he started mumbling unintelligible apologies, but I didn’t stick around at the window to see how they worked it all out.
I had to call Simon.
***
“If you’re not here in twenty minutes I’ll kill you.”
“Good morning to you too, darling. What time is it? Has there been another murder?” At least he sounded awake.
“No, but Flank almost strangled Chip on my front steps. You remember Chip, don’t you? And how you thought it would be a good idea for him to pick one of the plays for next season?”
“Oh.” He yawned. Then, “Oh!”
“And how you thought we should meet with him on Saturdays to discuss the progress?”
“Um, yes, but…”
“Twenty minutes, Simon,” I threatened.
“But Charley,” he protested, “I’m still in bed.” He lowered his voice. “And I have a guest.”
“When don’t you? But unless it’s Tom Stoppard and he’s written a little something just for us, I really think you’ll have to make your excuses.”
“You are in a mood today, darling. No, it isn’t Tom Stoppard, but Zakdan’s manager of Creative Services who’s currently in my shower. And if you want to talk about creative services—”
“Simon!” I hissed. “Twenty minutes!”
“Oh, all right!”
***
He showed up in an hour, most of which Chip spent in the downstairs bathroom, pulling himself together and applying a few well-placed bandages. I spent it drinking coffee.
Jack was gone, of course. It had been so long since I’d woken up next to him that I was beginning to suspect my husband of going off to a bat cave as soon as I fell asleep each night.
He probably didn’t.
His note, in its usual spot on the kitchen counter, was customarily succinct.
C,
I’ll be at Mike’s. Don’t forget Chip is coming over this morning.
—J
As if.
***
“Where are we, darlings? What have we got?” Simon began the conversation.
“Did you read the plays from last weekend?” Chip, despite still being a little shaken from his Flank-related experiences, remained focused on the job at hand—finding a diamond in the dreck heap of plays we were slogging through.
“I did and I hated them,” Simon answered.
I’d made Chip sit in Harry’s comfortable leather armchair while Simon and I took the beach chairs.
“There was one,” I said. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now that I’m remembering it…maybe it had something.”
“Which one?” Chip pulled out a pen.
“I don’t remember the name, but it had the hostages. You know—the one where the guy goes in to the office and holds everyone at gunpoint for the duration of the second act.”
“Wasn’t it told from the point of view of the copy machine?” Simon wrinkled his brow.
“Right!” Chip began riffling through grass-stained pages. “With blow-ups of paperwork documenting the gunman’s career projected onto the back wall of the set. We begin with the letter that offered him the job…”
“And end, predictably, with his pink slip,” Simon finished. “Right.” He frowned at me. “Darling, it was awful.”
“Was it?” I know I’d thought so at the time. But it was the one that had stuck with me.
“Here it is.” Chip produced a bedraggled manuscript from his pile. “Copy This.”
“Oh, yeah.” It was all coming back to me. “It was terrible, wasn’t it?”
“Well—” Chip began.
“What else have we got?” Simon began sorting through Chip’s stack. “Good Lord, it just goes from bad to worse, doesn’t it?”
I searched my memory for anything remotely interesting, but it seemed like I’d read the plays years ago. I could only really remember one other.
“What about the one where the guy is leading a double life?”
“Oh.” Chip sat up. “He’s a choir director by day, and a cross-dressing German cabaret singer by night. Guten Abend, Sunshine.”
“Darling, we all need to make peace with our inner Marlene,” Simon told him. “But there’s no need to subject an innocent audience to the process. And Charley.” He turned to me. “Just because you’re obsessed with deception and workplace violence these days doesn’t mean our public will be.”
“Well then.” Chip got a little huffy, and I can’t really say I blame him. “If you guys don’t like anything so far, we’ll just have to keep going. I’ve got another set of manuscripts in my car.”
“Great.” I gave it as much enthusiasm as I could possibly project. “And thanks for all your hard work. Now, who’s up for lunch?”
I left them squabbling amicably and went upstairs to get shoes and a raincoat. Simon was probably right. I was obsessed with deception and workplace violence—which is the only possible reason I might have considered either of those plays. What I really needed was to find a script that would tell me who had killed Clara Chen, who had faked Lalit Kumar’s suicide, and whether Jim Stoddard had been murdered by the time the final curtain came down.
I stared into my closet and thought about it. If I were writing that script, how would it turn out? Who would the clues lead to? Who was our red herring, and what slip did the real killer make?
I shook my head. It was a damn shame Jim Stoddard was dead. He’d been perfect for the role.
***
Jack came home that night with takeout Thai food and candles. “I thought we might try eating in the dining room for a change.”
So we put a candle in my fabulous French candlestick and sat cross-legged on the fabulous table—being careful not to scratch it—and it was just like an indoor picnic. It was fabulous.
“One of these days I’ll get around to buying chairs and things.”
He plucked a shrimp out of the Pad Thai. “Don’t rush into anything.”
Jack looks good by candlelight, so I was willing to overlook a little mockery.
“Besides,” he said, “this works. Although I am tempted to make some sort of comment about Professor Plum having done it in the dining room with the candlestick.”
“Resist the temptation.”
He grinned. “Did you and the guys find a new play today?”
Which led to a whole long discussion of
the horror which is the amateur playwright. And that led to a discussion of the plays we had decided to put on for the next season, before Simon had told Chip he could pick the last in the lineup.
It was all very nice, and it felt refreshingly civilized not to be chatting about forensics over dinner. Then I had to ruin the mood.
“Did you and Mike accomplish anything today?”
Jack nodded. “Mike’s gotten a better understanding of the Zakdan bug. Turns out it’s not exactly a bug.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
He started gesturing with a stuffed chicken wing. “It’s more like a virus. When it’s triggered, it sets off a whole series of commands that destroy or corrupt all saved data, then it cripples the software. That’s why it’s so dangerous.”
I swallowed. “How dangerous?”
“Remember the Y2K scare?” he asked. “When everybody thought all the computers in the world would go crazy on the same day?”
“The New Year’s Day thing.” That whole Millennium fever now seemed so quaint. “The killer wants to intentionally set something like that off? So everyone running Zakdan software would crash at the same time?”
“Not just crash,” Jack frowned. “First it would corrupt all the data it could find, then it would bring the systems down. And we’re talking about banks, hospitals, government offices…”
Like our very own police department.
“Then whoever is behind all this would be pretty ticked off at Clara for discovering it,” I reasoned. “Which brings us back to who could have planted it, which brings us back to Jim Stoddard.” Suddenly I lost my appetite.
“Mike is looking into the employment records of every engineer at Zakdan. There might be someone there who had the right skills and has been in the right place at all the right times. But something like this must have taken years.”
Years. Great. It had better not take us that long to figure it all out. I was already beginning to hate the sight of the Zakdan building. And I only had enough outfits to see me through the next week.
“Jack.” I poured some more wine. “Are we sure Jim was killed by the same person who killed Clara? And for that matter, are we sure the same person killed Lalit Kumar?”
“Anything is possible. But for what it’s worth, Mike thinks it’s likely that more than one person would have been involved in sabotaging the Zakdan code to this extent.”
“So there might have been a gang? And now they’re turning on each other?” Great. Just exactly how many maniacs were we dealing with?
Jack put his glass down. “Let’s approach this from a different direction. Not starting with Clara, but starting with Jim. Who would have killed Jim?”
“Well.” I didn’t look at him. “I know of one person who said he was going to kill him.”
“Who?”
I didn’t want to say it, but I had to. Ever since it had popped into my mind I hadn’t been able to shake it.
“You.”
Jack went still. “Do you think I killed him?”
Suddenly I felt like an idiot. But I still wanted Jack to reassure me.
“It’s just that you made a joke about it when we were at Rose Pistola and I told you he’d made a pass at me.”
“It was a joke, Charley,” he said evenly.
I nodded quickly. “Right. I know.”
“And if you think about it, you might realize that I have a pretty good alibi. I was sleeping with you at the time.”
“Sure. Of course.”
But I never knew when he got up in the night. And I wasn’t exactly sure what he’d be capable of if he’d thought I was in danger. And we’d been shot at that night, so maybe he’d been—
“Charley.” Jack was looking at me steadily. I met his eyes.
“I didn’t kill Jim Stoddard.”
Something inside me released. Of course Jack wasn’t a killer. I mean, maybe in his past that he never told me about…but not here and not now. Not Jack.
“Of course not,” I said. “It’s ridiculous. I was just kidding.”
He pushed the food aside and reached for my hand. Then he slid me toward him across the smooth surface of the table.
“You have nothing to worry about, Pumpkin.”
“I know.”
“I’m harmless.”
“I know.”
“Like a kitten.”
I stared at him. “Okay, I draw the line at kitten. You are so not a kitten.”
“A puppy?” he grinned.
“Hardly.”
“A fluffy—”
“Just shut up and kiss me, you lunatic.”
Which he did, driving all but the most incoherent thoughts out of my head.
I located Jack’s ear and whispered in it, “How about you be Professor Plum and I be Miss Scarlet, and we do it in the dining room?”
He looked at me. “With the candlestick?”
“Without the candlestick.”
He grinned. “Deal.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Monday morning. Back to the office.
I’d spent Sunday under the covers, listening to the rain and dragging myself through yet another set of manuscripts. Sooner or later I was going to have to break it to Chip that he probably wasn’t going to discover the next Wendy Wasserstein lurking under a table in a corner of the Rep’s office. But in the meanwhile he wasn’t doing anybody harm. And it gave me an excuse not to obsess about the murders for an entire day.
Then, inevitably, Monday.
Eileen had drawn up a fresh list of interrogation assignments, based on the chart Mike had created Friday night. So we divvied up the work at Arugula, and agreed to focus on everyone’s post-party movements on the night of Jim’s death. Then we headed down the street to Zakdan.
Where the receptionist’s desk was covered with flowers.
“Shit,” Eileen muttered. “I knew it would be bad, but—”
“What’s bad? What’s going on?” And why was she looking so ticked off?
“Typical,” Brenda said.
“Miss McGill? Miss McGill?”
Simon poked me in the arm and I remembered my name. I turned to the receptionist, who’d been calling me. She held out a huge bouquet of blood red roses. “These came for you. Looks like you’ve got a valentine.”
Oh, Valentine’s Day, right. That accounted for the florist shop in the lobby and the expression on Eileen’s face.
“Who are they from?” Simon grabbed the card as we headed for the elevators.
“Who do you think? Eileen, haven’t you gotten over your anti-Valentine’s Day thing yet?”
“At what point in my four divorces would you suppose I’d have gotten over it?” she replied icily.
“It’s a stupid holiday, Charley—I mean Tess.” Brenda looked around to make sure nobody had heard her slip, but since the four of us were alone in the elevator, we were probably safe. “It’s just an excuse for the candy companies and greeting card companies and florists to make you spend too much on meaningless—”
“My God, you two have never been more single,” Simon said. “Personally, I’m wearing red satin boxers today, in honor of the occasion.”
“I think that comes under the heading of ‘too much information,’” I told him.
“Besides, Eileen.” He ignored me. “What about Mike? I thought the two of you were…”
Were they?
“Mike who?” she asked.
Oh. So they probably weren’t. “Mike Mike,” I said. “Jack’s Mike. I was kind of hoping that while you were collaborating with him on our Fake Books…”
She made a snorting noise that completely refuted any romantic leanings toward the man, and got off the elevator.
We followed.
“Hey, Tess,” Simon began, as I swiped my card to get into our little corner of Zakdan.
“Yes, Rex?”
He waved the tiny envelope he’d taken from my flowers. “Why is this card signed ‘Professor Plum’?”
> I was saved from answering him by the sight of Flank on the other side of the door. He’d gone ahead of us from Arugula, presumably to check the conference room for bombs before we got there.
I revised my assumption when I saw the conference room. It was filled with balloons, hundreds of them, red and pink, round and heart shaped. Flank stood in front of the long glass wall with another dozen or so gripped in one hand, and an enormous box of Teuscher champagne truffles in the other.
He thrust both of them at Brenda, grunting something.
“Good God, man,” Simon yelped. “You’re in love with Brenda?”
Flank, for the first time since I’d known him—perhaps for the first time in his life—looked genuinely alarmed.
“Don’t be an idiot,” I told Simon. I knew whose handiwork this was.
“They’re from Harry.”
***
By late afternoon of a day filled with frustrations, I’d been stood up by Bob, listened to hours and hours of Krissy’s increasingly tedious self-loathing, and strained my neck in the lunchroom while trying to eavesdrop on assorted conversations.
The only things I’d learned were that The Simpsons rock and I should look into getting a TiVo.
“Any joy today?” Simon pushed his way through the balloon-filled conference room. “Charley, what did you come up with?”
“A migraine.”
“Eileen? Brenda?”
They both shook their heads.
“What about you? Any interesting scoop?” I asked him.
“Scads.” He pulled up a chair and opened a bottle of water. “What would you like to hear first? Sex scandals, or imminent resignations?”
This sounded promising.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Simon went on. “Morgan Stokes hasn’t got a clue about what’s really going on here.”
“What’s really going on here?” I asked. “I mean, aside from sabotaging the product line and killing the occasional co-worker. Because I think he does know about those.”
“Does he know that Clara had an affair with the conspicuously ponytailed head of Marketing?”
“Troy?” Eileen stared at him.
Brenda sat up indignantly. “She didn’t!”
“She did. Oh, I don’t mean she cheated on Morgan,” he clarified. “But she and Troy had a thing years ago, right after she got hired, and they managed to keep it a secret from just about everyone.”
How to Succeed in Murder Page 21