Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 04 - Country Comes to Town

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  “It gets worse. Last week Muriel showed up at the office wearing a maternity dress. Vinnie hadn’t even told us they were expecting.”

  “Did Inez notice?”

  Jessie nodded. “And we had a staff meeting scheduled for that afternoon.”

  “It must have been awful.”

  She looked a little embarrassed. “It would have been, but I told Inez I had my period and asked if we could reschedule so I could go home. I thought it would help if everybody had a little time to cool off.”

  That was just like Jessie. Always doing her part to keep the group together, despite itself.

  She went on. “About the only thing they’ve agreed on during the past year was that Philip had to go.”

  “Was he really that bad?”

  “You don’t know the half of it. You remember how Philip always liked being in charge?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Well, he hasn’t gotten any better. I mean, hadn’t. He refused to make any changes to StatSys.”

  “You mean he didn’t make updates?”

  “Not substantial ones. It’s great code, we all know that, but it’s seven years old. You know how outdated code gets in seven years.”

  My own company’s product rarely goes nine months without an update, and we roll out a complete new version every year and a half. That’s in addition to bug fixes and changes required by changing technology.

  “Why didn’t he want to change it?” I asked.

  “All he’d say was, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ We’ve been losing customers like crazy. They wanted better graphics, a more user-friendly front end—all the buzz words. Do you know how hard StatSys was getting to sell? Another six months and we wouldn’t have been able to give it away.”

  “I’m surprised you lasted this long,” I said. I’d lost track of the computer companies who’d gone under by not keeping up.

  “The only way we’ve kept going is by Dee and Dom putting together add-on packages. Philip didn’t argue with those, as long as we didn’t touch the core code. That way, we could put out new versions occasionally. But the add-ons are super kludgy because they have to work with the core code. We were spending more time working around the core than we were developing new facilities. It was driving us all crazy.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Philip?”

  “We did, over and over again. We showed him sales figures, industry forecasts, everything we could think of.”

  “He wouldn’t listen?”

  “He’d listen, but he wouldn’t do anything other than play games and create viruses. He said sales was Vincent’s and Inez’s department. It was awful, Laura. We were scared for our jobs. If SSI goes down, it takes all of us with it.”

  “I’m sure y’all could find other jobs,” I said, knowing that it wasn’t much consolation.

  “Maybe,” Jessie said, “but it wouldn’t be the same.”

  For Jessie, losing SSI would have been like losing a member of her family. Maybe worse, because she had only her parents, and from what I remembered from dorm room conversations, they weren’t exactly warm people.

  An inner voice told me that this made an awfully good motive for murder. Could Jessie have killed to keep her “family” together? I tried to push the thought away because I didn’t want to think of my old friend as a murderer, but I knew that if Philip was murdered, the murderer probably was an old friend.

  “Anyway,” Jessie said, “about a month ago, Vincent and Inez said flat out that we were going to have to fire him.”

  “But Philip was one of the founders. How do you fire a founder?”

  “That’s the problem—we couldn’t. Not without a majority vote, anyway.”

  “A majority vote from whom?”

  “From the board of directors. All of us founders were directors. We vote on all the big decisions.”

  I couldn’t imagine a worse way for SSI to make business decisions than to have the seven of them arguing over them. “You voted on whether or not to fire Philip with him sitting there?”

  “Of course not. But Vincent conducted a couple of straw polls just to see if we could get him out. We couldn’t.”

  “Who was holding out?”

  She suddenly looked more interested in her salad. “It was a secret ballot.”

  I knew what that meant. Jessie herself must have been one of the holdouts. She was loyal to a fault—at least, to the group. Once somebody was no longer with the group, the loyalty disappeared. I knew that from personal experience.

  When Philip and I had broken up, the group had sided with him. To tell the truth, he could be a lot of fun. There were lots of fights, but life was never boring around Philip. Still, I had considered Jessie a close friend, and it hurt when I realized that she was more interested in preserving what was left of the group than in being with me. But that was long in the past, and I knew I shouldn’t be moping about it now.

  Jessie went on. “It was three for keeping him and three for firing him. Philip’s own vote would have been the tiebreaker, so there was nothing we could do.”

  “But Philip knew you were trying to fire him. He told me so.”

  “He found out in the middle of the vote. Vincent had spoken to all of us except Philip, and after giving us some time to think it over, sent our receptionist around to collect our ballots. Philip saw her going from desk to desk and wanted to know what she was doing. She wouldn’t tell him, but she was in Murray’s office when Philip caught her, and Murray couldn’t resist telling Philip what was going on.”

  “Murray never was very tactful.”

  “Murray was sure that Philip was going to lose the vote, so he didn’t see any reason not to rub it in. But when Vincent counted the ballots, he found out it was a tie.”

  “Did Philip know?”

  “Of course. He barged into Vincent’s office and demanded to know the results. Then the two of them had a terrible fight.”

  “I can imagine.” I thought about the last time I broke up with Philip. Actually, we’d been broken up for a month and a half, but he thought that we’d be getting back together. Only I wasn’t about to take him back, and I told him so.

  At first he wouldn’t believe me, or maybe he couldn’t believe me. It was like it had never occurred to him that anybody would dump him. He kept apologizing for whatever it was we’d fought about, saying, “I’m sorry, it won’t happen again,” over and over again, like I was just trying to make sure that he was really sincere.

  When he finally figured out that I was serious, he got angry, really angry. Not violent, thank goodness, but awfully ugly. He must have heard about my being with Richard, because he started saying horrible things about him, and then he started in on me. That’s when I slammed the door on him, but I could hear him ranting for endless minutes longer, screaming at my closed door and cursing his way down the hall.

  That was just me, and I’d have been fooling myself to think I was that important to him. SSI was his life. I knew just how he must have reacted when he found out that they wanted to get rid of him.

  “They decided to hold another vote the next week, so Vincent spent the whole week trying to convince everybody to vote to fire Philip,” Jessie said. “He said the company wouldn’t survive the year if we didn’t. At the same time, Philip was trying to convince everybody to vote to keep him. It was awful.”

  I nodded. Weighing loyalty against the good of the company, friendship against the loss of a job—it wasn’t a choice I’d want to make. “What happened when you voted again?”

  “It was weird, Laura. I saw Philip and Vincent the morning before the vote, and both of them were sure that they were going to win. Not just being cocky, but completely convinced. But when they counted the ballots, the vote hadn’t changed. Three to three.”

  “And Philip’s vote made it four to three. So he won.”

  “Yes and no. Knowing that three of us wanted to fire him was nearly as bad as all of us wanting to. He was so mad. He walke
d out of the office and didn’t come back for the rest of the week.” She added sadly, “It was the quietest few days we’d had at SSI in a long time.”

  “What happens to SSI with Philip gone?”

  “We should be able to pull through,” Jessie said, looking more cheerful. “Vincent had an idea a while ago that would help us raise capital so we could put money into development and get back into the market.”

  “You mean going public?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking surprised. “It’s supposed to be a secret. How did you know?”

  “Colleen said something about it at the wake. Since she and Philip were still legally married, his share of SSI passes to her.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Vincent about that. We hadn’t thought about her having control of Philip’s share. At least she won’t be able to vote. Anyway, Vinnie wants to go public, and the rest of us agreed that it was a good idea. Except for Philip, of course. He said he didn’t want stockholders telling him what to do.”

  “That sounds like Philip.”

  “We haven’t voted on it yet. I think Vincent was afraid he’d run into the same deadlock if we did, so he’s been trying to make doubly sure that he had support first.”

  I nodded, thinking that this gave Vincent a particularly powerful motive for murder. With Philip out of the way, Vincent could go ahead with his plans.

  “Plus,” Jessie said, “Vincent was worried about what Philip would do if we voted for the public offering despite him.”

  “What could he do?”

  “Sabotage. We were sure that he’d do something to the system, even with us watching. You know how sneaky he was. Vincent was sure that he had viruses set to destroy the code, maybe only needed a key command to blow it all up.”

  “You’re right,” I said. When it came down to it, destruction was what Philip had been best at.

  “We’re supposed to vote soon, and with Philip gone, I think it will pass. Vincent and Inez are definitely for it, and I know Dee and Dom are ready to get down to some serious development. They’re tired of doing trivial programming while the technology keeps changing. And Murray is hoping that we’ll get enough money coming in that he can get a real QA staff instead of having to do it all himself.”

  “What about you?”

  “Oh, I’ll vote for it. Anything to keep us all together.”

  The word “anything” sounded ominous, considering how things had turned out. “What about Philip and Colleen splitting up? When did that happen?”

  “I didn’t even know they were having problems,” Jessie said. “I guess Philip didn’t want to admit there was anything wrong. The first I heard was when she threw him out of the house.”

  “And now she inherits everything from him,” I said, not being very subtle.

  “It can’t be much. It’s not like there’ve been a lot of profits from SSI lately. Plus, they bought that house in Cambridge and it’s been expensive fixing it up the way Philip wanted.”

  “At least there’s his life insurance,” I said. “SSI does provide life insurance for its employees, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, but Colleen doesn’t get any of it. We directors named the company as beneficiary in our policies. Vincent’s brother the lawyer recommended it.”

  I nodded, mentally taking Colleen off of my list of suspects. Maybe Philip had money or property I didn’t know about, but I didn’t think so. He’d been as poor as Job’s turkey when were dating.

  “I guess she gets the house, anyway.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Jessie said. “They owe an awful lot on it. I thought Philip was biting off more than he could chew with that place, but you know how Philip was.”

  “He and Colleen were still in an apartment that last time I saw them. You remember, at your party a few years ago. I hadn’t spoken to either of them since then. Which is why I was so surprised when he ended up at my apartment that day. Jessie, why didn’t Philip stay with one of the group?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “He wanted to. Well, not with Vincent or Inez or Murray, of course—he was barely on speaking terms with them. He did call Dee and Dom, but they turned him down. Then he called me, but I’ve got three cats and he’s allergic. He wanted me to board them, but with all the cat dander in the apartment, that wouldn’t have helped. Then he called Neal, but he wasn’t home. That’s when he called me to get your number and address.” She looked uncomfortable. “I thought he was just going to call you.”

  “It’s not your fault he showed up,” I said. Though I wished she hadn’t given him my address, it was way too late to worry about it. “Colleen said she and Philip had been having problems for a while.”

  “Well, she didn’t talk to us.” Jessie’s tone of voice made it plain that she considered this a personal affront. “When we started SSI, we thought she’d come and work with us, but she said she wasn’t interested. After a while, we never saw her. She didn’t even come to company parties anymore. Philip said she didn’t have time for us.”

  “People do grow apart,” I said. And miscommunication messes up lots of friendships, especially when the one doing the communicating is Philip.

  Jessie sniffed. “She never was a real part of the group, anyway. Not like you were.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment, or a complaint that I had grown away, too. “I appreciate the thought, Jessie, but I just didn’t feel comfortable hanging around anymore. Not with Philip there, and especially not with the way he treated Richard.” The rest of the group had been fairly cool to Richard, too.

  She reached over and patted my arm. “We should never have let Philip get away with that, Laura. You were as much our friend as he was. It must have been lonely for you.”

  Part of me wanted to tell her that it had been very lonely, or would have been without Richard, but it was too late for her to apologize now. And part of me wanted to tell her that it hadn’t bothered me a bit, that I had been glad to get away from them. But what I said was, “It was a long time ago. We were younger, which my Aunt Maggie says is another way of saying that we were stupider.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that now. We’d love to see more of you. Richard, too. Maybe you could come work at SSI.” Before I responded to that, she added, “Things would have been different if you had come to work with us at the beginning. You always brought out the best in Philip.”

  Great! Now SSI’s problems were my fault because I hadn’t been there. “I was never invited to join SSI,” I pointed out.

  “You could have if you’d wanted to,” she said airily, though it certainly hadn’t felt that way to me at the time.

  Admittedly, I hadn’t wanted to work at SSI, and from the way things had turned out, it was clear that I had made the right decision, but it had bothered me at the time. And later, as we said our goodbyes, I realized that it still bothered me.

  Chapter 11

  I told the whole story to Thaddeous over takeout pizza that night, explaining the background he didn’t know.

  When I was done, he said, “It seems like we’ve got lots of reasons for murder.”

  “We? The night before last, it was just me.“

  “You didn’t think I was going to let you do this by your lonesome, did you? Richard would pin my hide to the wall, right next to his sword.”

  “Could be,” I admitted. “Anyway, I’m glad for the help.” I wasn’t sure how much help he could be, so far away from his home territory, but then again, I wasn’t sure how much I’d be able to do, either.

  “Good enough.” Then he hesitated. “I was thinking. We don’t need to tell my mama about this, do we? Not right away, anyway. I don’t want her worrying about me.”

  “Great. When she finds out, she’s going to want my hide.”

  He just smiled and went on. “Like I said, everybody at that office had reason to want Philip out of the way. Especially Vincent—he sounds right ambitious to me. And Jessie might be more caught up in this company than she ought to be.”

>   “I think so, too, but since she all but admitted to voting to keep Philip, why would she kill him? Come to think of it, who else was voting to keep Philip? From what Jessie was saying, they all wanted him gone. Maybe she’d vote for him to keep from breaking up the group, but what about the others?”

  “They’re your friends—you tell me.”

  “Well, Vincent and Inez were the ones behind getting rid of Philip in the first place, so surely they voted against him. And with the way Murray told Philip about the vote, he must have voted against him, too.

  “Philip called Dee and Dom when he needed a place to stay, so he must have thought they had voted for him, but why would they have? Programming was always the most important thing to those two. Voting for Philip would mean that they couldn’t do the kind of work they wanted to do.”

  “So what you’re saying is that nobody wanted him there, but somebody was voting to keep him.”

  “Three somebodies. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Could Philip have stuffed the ballot box?”

  “I don’t think so. He didn’t know about the first ballot in time, and I feel sure Vinnie would have kept him from fiddling with the second one.”

  “Do you suppose Jessie knows who voted what?”

  “She might, but I don’t think she’d tell me even if she did. Her first loyalty is to the group, and SSI.” That meant I couldn’t use my best source of information.

  I sighed. I was like a fish out of water up here. In Byerly I knew almost everybody, and if I had to get to anybody I didn’t know, somebody in my family could help me out. I had friends in Boston, but they were too scattered. “It’s a shame I’m not like Michelle,” I said.

  “Why is that?”

  Was it my imagination, or had Thaddeous’s ears pricked up when I said her name? “It’s just that she’s real good at talking to people. She can get information out of you without your hardly noticing it. And she’s got connections all over Boston, like your mama does in Byerly. Come to think of it, I wonder if she knows anybody at SSI.”

  “Mama?”

  “No, Michelle. If she knows the receptionist over there, it sure could help. It was the receptionist who collected the ballots. Don’t you think she’d have kept track of how everybody voted? And if the receptionist knows, Michelle can get it out of her.”