Where The Bodies Are Buried

by Janet Dawson

  Behind me I heard the doorknob rattle. By the time Patricia came through the door, I was standing by her out box, scooping its contents into my arms.

  “Good morning,” I said cheerily.

  Patricia echoed my greeting, with somewhat less cheer. In fact, her voice was lukewarm as she muttered the words. Blue mood, I thought, to go with the navy blue suit she wore. Her mouth looked tight, and there were dark circles under her eyes, as though she was under a strain. She set her briefcase on the surface of her desk, opened it, and handed me a dictation tape. “I need this by noon,” she said.

  I gave her a can-do smile, but inwardly I groaned. I already had a number of projects, including one left by Hank Irvin on his way to the airport yesterday. Since he’d found out I knew how to use the database program on Bates’s computer system, he wanted to input information on the company’s trademarks. I told him I’d come up with some suggestions and samples during his absence. If that weren’t enough, Nancy had enlisted both Gladys and me to help put together Alex Campbell’s company-wide survey on compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

  It was going to be a busy week.

  I returned to Cube City. Gladys sat at her cluttered desk, sipping coffee as she opened her stack of morning mail. I didn’t see Nancy.

  “And here I thought things would slow down, with Hank out of town.”

  “Dream on.” She made a face. “Alex wants this ADA stuff out by the end of the week.”

  “Patricia just handed me something else,” I said, fingering the dictation tape she’d given me. “She must have dictated it at home. I guess she left early last night, but she didn’t say anything to me.”

  “She should let you and me know about things like that,” Gladys declared as she stood and picked up the mail she was about to deliver. “She always lets Nancy know. Nancy keeps track of where everyone is.”

  That was a useful piece of information, I thought, watching Gladys’s back as she left the room. Since Nancy was conveniently away from her desk, I took a chance and stepped around the partition, into her cubicle. There was a standing file near her telephone, crammed with neatly labeled folders. One of them read “Vacation.” That might be a place to start, but just prowling around Nancy’s desk was risky. My hand moved toward it, then the phone rang, startling me.

  I glanced down, and saw Nancy’s calendar. On it she’d made notes in a tiny cramped hand, detailing absences from the office as well as meetings, not just for herself but for everyone in the legal department.

  I read the first note for tomorrow, Wednesday. “AC, benefits, 9, AC, DV, ED, TR, MU.” I processed this alphabet soup in a matter of seconds. Presumably that meant Alex Campbell had a meeting tomorrow morning at nine, the subject employee benefits. The initials must be the meeting attendees. In addition to Campbell, they included David Vanitzky, Ed Decker, Tonya Russell, and Morris Upton. On the square for today, Tuesday, I saw “AC, SetCon, 10.” So Alex was due to attend a settlement conference this morning. “TX” was written next to “HI” on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, signifying Hank’s trip to Texas.

  I scanned Monday, looking for Patricia’s initials. There it was, a notation for “PM,” for Monday afternoon, accompanied by the words, “dentist, 4.”

  The phone stopped ringing. I stepped away from the desk, just as Nancy stepped from the corridor into the room. She seemed surprised to see me near her cubicle. Her dark eyes inquired why.

  “Your phone was ringing,” I said. “But I didn’t catch it in time.” I hoped my explanation sounded halfway plausible.

  “Don’t worry about that.” She frowned slightly, and her gaze seemed to penetrate me. “You don’t need to answer my phone. It rolls over to voice mail.” As if to confirm her words, the message light on the phone began blinking.

  I wasn’t sure she believed me. I moved back to my desk and put Patricia’s dictation tape into the transcriber. From the corner of my eye I watched Nancy, still standing, glance quickly around her cubicle, as though to gauge whether anything had been disturbed. Then she picked up the phone and punched in the required numbers to retrieve the voice mail message.

  Working at Bates as a temp was something of a double-edged sword. It got me in the door, at least. There was no way I could have obtained such access without the subterfuge.

  But my disguise had its limits. Being too inquisitive would arouse suspicion. The temp had no business snooping around Nancy Fong’s desk. And I had a feeling Nancy was suspicious. Nor did I have any official reason to search Rob’s vacant office. But I intended to do it at the first opportunity. Trouble was, if I drew too much attention to myself, someone might take a closer look at Jeri Howard the temp and find J. Howard Investigations, down on Franklin Street.

  I hit the rewind button and fitted the soft rubber earpieces of the transcriber into my ears. Not that they fit all that well. I knew from experience that by the time I finished the tape, my ears would be hurting.

  Patricia’s reason for leaving early yesterday afternoon had been a dental appointment. Maybe she had, in fact, gone in for her semiannual checkup and teeth cleaning. Maybe her dentist was in San Francisco. But somehow I wasn’t buying it.

  The tape finished rewinding with an earsplitting electronic beep. I winced as I turned down the volume. Then I depressed the foot pedal and began listening as Patricia dictated yet another memo on the FDA’s food-safety proposal, detailing her discussion with Nolan Ward.

  Patricia wasn’t a mumbler, but she had a tendency to dictate a word or a phrase, then change her mind about what she wanted to say, which meant a lot of deleting and retyping for me. Periodically she also stopped talking for long periods of time, as she collected her thoughts or framed what she was going to say next. So I was treated to interludes of music and the sound of traffic outside the room where she’d dictated the tape. Her home, I guessed. The music was jazz, heavy on the saxophone. At one point I heard the distinctive clang of a cable car bell. So Patricia lived in San Francisco.

  Toward the end of the tape, I heard a man’s voice in the background, tantalizing, the words muffled and inaudible, to me anyway. At that point the tape clicked, as though Patricia had hit the stop button. When the tape started again, she dictated a revision of the long paragraph I’d just typed. Had Patricia simply revised what she’d said earlier? Or had the man I’d heard had a hand in the revision? I played the tape again and again, experimenting with the volume, tone, and speed controls on the transcriber. But I still couldn’t make out what the man was saying.

  Finally I gave up. But I moved the now-discarded paragraph to a new document, planning to compare it with the final document.

  I finished transcribing Patricia’s tape before noon. The resulting document was ten pages long. I cleaned up the punctuation and formatting, ran the spell checker, and printed out a copy. I left the pages in the center of Patricia’s desk. Then I went back to Cube City and compared the original paragraph with the revision. It appeared that Patricia had softened the language on her recommendation concerning inspection of produce by Bates buyers. Why? Because the man in the background told her to do so? I wondered if the indistinct voice belonged to Nolan Ward. Patricia had said she was working closely with him on the food-safety project.

  Gladys interrupted my reverie. “Let’s go get something to eat. I’m starved.”

  On the way over to the deli where we’d eaten last week, she informed me that Hank had called to say that he might be delayed in getting back to Oakland. Evidently, he had to make a side trip. I waited until our sandwiches had been delivered to our outside table, then I cast a preliminary fishing line.

  “Did Hank say where he was going?”

  “Something about New Mexico,” Gladys said, wrapping both hands around a turkey on whole wheat.

  “Albuquerque? Santa Fe?”

  “No.” She thought for a moment. “Carlsbad, that was it.”

  I was eating falafel in a pita, with hummus on the side. “It’s in the southeastern
part of the state. My parents and my brother and I went to Carlsbad Caverns one summer, back when I was in high school. The caverns are spectacular. We saw the bats fly out at night, too. That was impressive.”

  “Bats?” Gladys grimaced. “You mean, like vampire bats?”

  “Mexican fruit bats,” I assured her. “Perfectly harmless. They eat lots of insects.”

  Gladys was still making a face, as though she didn’t believe in benign bats. “No, thanks, honey, I’ll pass on the bats. I’m a city girl, born and bred. Anyway, he was complaining about the heat when he phoned. Said this trip to Carlsbad meant he won’t be coming back till Thursday.”

  “Project Rio must be an important deal.”

  “Like I told you,” she said, “it’s probably a new plant.”

  Whatever it was, I wanted more clues about Project Rio. They came in the middle of the afternoon, in a fax. Both Nancy and Gladys were away from their desks when the fax machine buzzed and whirred. It began spitting out pages. I picked up the cover sheet. It was from Hank to Alex Campbell, with a copy to David Vanitzky. It was marked “Confidential,” and the subject was “Project Rio.”

  I quickly read the one-page letter that followed. It sounded as though a hitch had developed regarding the purchase of ten acres of land in El Paso. Hank and Walton, the El Paso attorney, had gone to Carlsbad to meet with the owner, someone named C.J. Mullin.

  I made a copy of the fax for Vanitzky and another for myself. When I left the copy room, I returned to Cube City and hid the extra in the company directory. I delivered the original to Alex, then walked to the west hallway, where Vanitzky and his secretary had offices opposite conference room one. The door to Vanitzky’s inner office was closed, so I handed the fax to Esther Roades. I’d heard her described as a battle-ax and a dragon lady. But the tall, capable-looking white-haired woman reminded me of a math teacher I’d had in the eighth grade.

  Back in Cube City, I sat in my workstation and surreptitiously pored over the fax. The parcel of land in El Paso was on Executive Center Boulevard. Ten acres sounded like a lot of land, but I didn’t know how much land was required for a plant. C. J. Mullin, the owner, had an address on North Shore, in Carlsbad, and an attorney named Pete Sanchez, who had an office on Canal Street in the same city.

  Should I make a quick trip to Texas and New Mexico? Or could I get the information I needed long distance, and by snooping around Hank’s files? Now that I was working this temp job, it wasn’t merely a matter of clearing my calendar and getting on a plane. If I had to go anywhere, it would mean calling in sick, or some other subterfuge.

  At the end of the day I headed for my Franklin Street office. Shortly after I arrived, Ruby Woods opened the door and poked her head in the gap. “I need your time card. If you want to get paid for this job. Which, I might add, is necessary if you want it to look legitimate.”

  I reached in my purse for the Woods Temporaries time card. “I’d have forgotten if Nancy Fong hadn’t reminded me that she needed to sign it.” I handed the card to Ruby, and she pulled off one carbon and returned the slip of paper to me.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “I’ve turned up a couple of things that look interesting. But I need more time.”

  When Ruby had gone, I checked my messages. Cassie had called, so I went down the hall to her law firm. She’d obtained a copy of the class action wrongful termination lawsuit that had been filed against Bates after the first round of layoffs that followed the leveraged buyout. I sat down in the chair opposite her desk and read through it quickly as Cassie told me she’d talked with one of the attorneys on the case, someone she knew from law school at Hastings. The nine named plaintiffs, six women and three men, alleged age or sex discrimination as the reason they were terminated.

  “Some of them sued individually at first,” Cassie said. “Then they were combined into a class. My law school buddy says the plaintiffs have a better than even chance of prevailing, given the current climate in California courts regarding age and sex discrimination claims. He also said discovery is showing a pervasive pattern of preference toward young white men, so it looks like Bates is facing serious damages.”

  “Trouble on all fronts,” I said, standing up and glancing at my watch. “I’ll have to plow through this later in the evening. I’m meeting Eva and the inspector over at my new house in twenty minutes.”

  “Hope everything’s in good repair,” Cassie said. “I’ll talk with you later.”

  Everything at the Chabot Road house was in fairly good shape, Eva and I learned later, including the stove and refrigerator. That was good news. I didn’t want the expense of replacing them. As it was, I’d been shopping around for a washing machine and dryer, since the house had the necessary hookups. The plumbing was old but adequate, and the electrical wiring was up to code. It appeared the only necessary changes would be cosmetic. I was having both the exterior and interior of the house painted and the hardwood floors sanded and polished, an unexpectedly generous house-warming gift from my mother, who owned a restaurant in Monterey.

  After the inspector left, I stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the backyard, hoping to see another hummingbird, as I had before, among the colorful blooms of the abutilon. I didn’t, but there were lots of other birds. And I didn’t know what they were.

  “Surveying your estate?” Eva said, her voice teasing as she came out on the balcony.

  “Contemplating the fact that I don’t know a chickadee from a sparrow. Look at all those birds in that pine tree. I’ll have to get myself a bird book.” I heard a squawk overhead that didn’t sound anything like the birdsong emanating from the tree. Raising my eyes, I saw a flash of green. I laughed. “It’s a parrot. See it, on the telephone wires.”

  “Must have escaped,” Eva said, following the direction I was pointing. “There’s a whole colony of them over on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.”

  “There’s a parrot in Alameda, too. It hangs out with some pigeons near the hospital.” I’d seen that parrot many times, flying around with a flock of pigeons. It made me think of myself, I thought with an inward smile, the exotic private eye who found herself in amongst all the office pigeons.

  “Termite inspection next,” Eva said as we headed for the front door. “Then the appraisal. Your loan’s already in the works. Looks like we could close by the middle of October.”

  “How soon can I get the keys? Since Mom’s paying for the paint and polish, I’d like to make the arrangements.”

  Eva said she’d find out, and we parted company. I wanted to go home, but I hadn’t done any work in my own office. I headed back to Franklin Street and powered up my computer while I listened to the messages on the answering machine.

  The background check I’d started on Charlie Kellerman had borne fruit. The last place he’d held a job was the same place I was working undercover.

  Twenty-three

  WHEN I WALKED INTO CUBE CITY WEDNESDAY MORNING, Nancy Fong wasn’t at her desk. I soon learned the reason why.

  “Nancy called in sick,” Gladys told me as she tackled a pile of mail with a letter opener. “We’ll have to cover for her. As though we didn’t already have enough to do.”

  “What’s wrong? Or did she say?”

  I sat down in the swivel office chair, set my latte on the desk, and looked at the paper that had accumulated overnight. Letters to be answered, documents to revise, and more of both to file.

  “She didn’t have to.” Gladys pulled a memo from an interoffice envelope and whacked the sheet with a date stamp. “She gets these killer migraines that lay her low for a day or so. When she gets one, she says she can’t function at all. I hope she’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, you and I will have to pick up the slack.”

  She thumped the date stamp emphatically on another document, wielding it with obvious irritation at the prospect of doing someone else’s work when she already had more than enough of her own. But as far as I was concerned, Nancy’s absence from the
office gave me the opportunity to do some sleuthing without feeling as though Nancy’s eyes were on my back. Rob’s office was the first place I wanted to go.

  But I had to wait until Alex went into that meeting at nine o’clock. I got busy sorting the papers that had piled up on my desk. Gladys had already opened Alex’s mail and placed it on his desk. I needed an excuse to get into his office, and Patricia provided me with one. In her out basket was a newspaper article clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle and taped onto a plain sheet of paper. I quickly scanned the article. It was about a product recall involving one of Bates’s competitors. A yellow Post-it directed me to make a copy for Alex, so I headed for the copy machine, then to the general counsel’s office.

  Alex wasn’t at his desk. I glanced at my watch as I slipped the article into his in basket. Five minutes to nine, time enough for a quick look around. Evidently Nancy had made all the preparations for the meeting the day before. Five manila folders were arranged on the surface of Alex’s conference table. I read the names on the labels—Alex, Ed Decker, Tonya Russell, Morris Upton of public affairs, and chief financial officer David Vanitzky.

  What were they going to talk about? I reached for the nearest folder, hoping for a peek at the meeting’s agenda or something else that might tell me. There wasn’t an agenda, but I did see two photocopies. One was several pages long, an article from the Chronicle, on California laws concerning exempt and nonexempt employees. The other appeared to be from a magazine, and the subject was payroll fraud.

  I heard a voice from the hall, so I stepped away from the conference table. I was standing near Alex’s out basket, picking up the few files that he’d placed there, when the general counsel walked in. He didn’t look surprised to see me there. That’s one thing I’ve discovered about secretaries. They can be invisible.