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

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  “We’re on the way.”

  I got to the snack bar first, got soup and a sandwich, and found us a table. When I saw them coming, I couldn’t help but notice that they made an awfully cute couple.

  Now stop that, I told myself. I was getting to be as bad as my cousin Vasti. These were two adults, and they were certainly capable of arranging their own affairs. Just because Michelle was interested in Thaddeous, that didn’t mean he was interested in her. It’s just that I could tell that he was interested by the way he opened the door for her, escorted her to the table, helped her off with her coat, and held her chair for her. Not that Thaddeous isn’t always a gentleman, but he never has that look in his eye when he holds a chair for his mama.

  “So? What did you find out?” Michelle asked. “Vincent offered me a job.”

  “Don’t you dare leave GBS!”

  “I’m not going to leave,” I said, “but after the money he offered me, I am thinking about asking for a raise.”

  “It’s blood money,” Michelle said. “He feels bad about killing Philip right behind your apartment.”

  “Silly me, I thought he might be interested in my programming skills.”

  “Oh, Laura, everyone knows you’re a dynamite programmer. I just don’t trust this Vincent character.”

  “I’m not sure I trust him myself,” I admitted, “but that doesn’t mean he killed Philip.”

  “What else happened?” Thaddeous said.

  “That’s about it,” I said. “Vincent confirmed a lot of what Jessie told me, but he didn’t tell me anything new. There is one thing I might have figured out. Remember how Roberta said she had heard Philip and Vincent talking about a rat?”

  “They don’t have rats in that building, do they?” Michelle asked.

  “Not live ones, but they’ve got plenty of brass rats.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  I held out my hand with my MIT class ring. “See my ring? That critter on it is called a brass rat.”

  They inspected the carving on the ring.

  “It doesn’t look like a rat to me,” Thaddeous said. “More like a beaver.”

  “It is a beaver,” Michelle said. “Look at the tail.”

  “You’re right, it’s a beaver. But everybody at MIT calls it a brass rat.”

  “How come?” Thaddeous wanted to know.

  “Why are North Carolinians Tar Heels? Why is Boston the Hub?”

  Both of them started to answer at once, defending their native state or city, but I managed to talk over them. “People just call it that. I don’t know why.”

  “So you’re saying that Vincent and Philip were arguing over a ring?” Thaddeous said, looking doubtful.

  Michelle asked, “You think Philip stole Vincent’s ring, or maybe Vincent stole Philip’s?”

  “Detective Salvatore said that Philip was wearing his class ring when they found his body, and Vincent still has his, too. But I bet that class ring is involved somehow.” I had to admit that it didn’t sound like a whole lot from the morning’s work, but it was all I had. “So how did you end up on this side of town?” I asked Thaddeous.

  He said, “As a matter of fact, I found out something myself this morning, and wanted to tell you.”

  “He’s such a good detective,” Michelle said, as proudly as if she had taught him herself.

  Thaddeous just grinned, and said, “I saw that neighbor of yours this morning, the one who told us about the police finding Philip’s body.”

  “John?”

  Thaddeous nodded. “He was having trouble with his car, so I went out to try to give him a hand. Only it turned out he has a problem with his starter, and I couldn’t help him with that. So he called Triple A and asked me in for a cup of coffee while he waited.”

  “Really?” Richard and I had been living a floor above John for four years without ever having seen the inside of his apartment. Of course, we had never tried to help him with a dead car, either.

  “Anyway, we got to talking about Philip. The police questioned John about him, too. They asked when he had last been in the alley, and it turns out he went back there that night to take his trash to the dumpster just after it started snowing. He’s sure Philip’s body wasn’t there then.”

  “We already knew he wasn’t there all night,” I said. “There wasn’t that much snow on him.”

  Thaddeous said, “The thing was, Salvatore wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t with you that evening. He talked to John after he talked to us and asked him if he’d seen Philip visiting you before.”

  “I hadn’t seen Philip in ages,” I said indignantly. “He’d never been in my apartment before that day.”

  “Calm down,” Thaddeous said. “That’s just what John told him. At least, he told him he’d never seen him around. Salvatore even asked if John had heard anything from your apartment the day Philip died.”

  “Had he?” I asked, wondering just what John had been hearing from above us for the past four years.

  “He heard some of the argument with Philip, but he also heard the door slam when Philip left. And he didn’t hear him come back.”

  “Good,” I said. “That proves that Philip went somewhere else after he left my place. And hopefully the police don’t suspect me.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Thaddeous said. “I told John I sure appreciated him speaking up for you like that. Folks back home are always saying that Yankees don’t look after their neighbors, but that’s just not so.”

  “Of course we do,” Michelle said.

  As for me, I was feeling guilty. I wasn’t even sure of John’s last name, and I had never paid attention to his comings and goings. Richard and I were going to have to get to know him.

  Thaddeous said, “I got a chance to return the favor a little while later. Triple A came, and I went back to your place. When I went outside again, somebody had gone into your building and pulled out a couple of folding chairs that belonged to John. He’d left them leaned against the wall outside his door, and now they were sitting in the street.”

  “In the street?” I said.

  “Yep. Smack dab in the middle of the place where John’s car had been parked. Kids, I guess. So I picked them up and put them back were they belonged.”

  Michelle and I looked at each other. I had seen John carefully shovel out that parking space after the snowstorm, and thought about explaining to Thaddeous that it was customary for Bostonians to claim their parking places by placing lawn furniture or sawhorses in them. But I didn’t want to make him feel bad. So I just said, “That was nice of you.”

  Michelle said, “I want to know why Philip was behind your apartment like that.” Then her eyes got big. “Maybe he was a peeping Tom. Or maybe he was stalking you. You read about that in the papers all the time. He could have been waiting for you to come out so he could grab you.”

  It was a nicely creepy theory, but I had to shake my head. “I don’t think so, Michelle. If he wanted to grab me, he’d have had a much better shot at it from the front of the apartment. I almost never go back in the alley, and he’d have no reason to think that I did.”

  “Then he was watching you through the rear window so he’d know when you went out and came back.”

  “My apartment has only one window on that side, and it’s in the bathroom.” Before she could do anything with that, I added, “It’s six inches wide, and way up high in the shower. Besides which, it’s translucent glass, not clear, so about all he’d see is the shadow of the very top of my head. I don’t think that’d be enough for even the most dedicated stalker. And that’s if he could figure out which window was mine, which would be tough, considering he never saw anything of my apartment other than the living room.” Whatever reason Philip had had for returning to my apartment, it hadn’t been to leer at me from a distance.

  Thaddeous said, “I saw some cars parked there when we were back there with Detective Salvatore.”

  “Philip didn’t have a car,” I said.


  “But whoever he was with might have had one,” Thaddeous said.

  “Maybe, but why would they be coming back to see me?”

  “Maybe they weren’t. Maybe the other person only brought Philip back there so he or she could kill him, and then leave the body there to frame you. Come to think of it, do we know Philip died back there?”

  “Detective Salvatore didn’t say anything different,” I said.

  “I’m not nearly so interested in why he was back there as I am in where he went before that and who he was with,” Michelle said. “And I’d like to know where those SSI people were that afternoon.”

  “You and me both,” I said. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t very well ask Vincent about that.”

  “Can you talk to Jessie again?” Thaddeous asked.

  “I think she’d get suspicious. If she thought I suspected one of them of murder, she’d clam up in a heartbeat.”

  “Assuming that she’s not the murderer herself,” Michelle pointed out.

  “She’s the one who told Philip where I live,” I said, “meaning that she knew he was going to be there.” She’d said she thought he was just going to call me, but if that was so, why had she given him my address?

  Michelle said, “So she picked him up outside your door, and then brought him back later to kill him. It all fits.”

  “Mightn’t she have killed him to protect her friends? Either from the blackmail or from losing their jobs?” Thaddeous said. “Or maybe he was blackmailing her, too.”

  “It’s possible, but at this point, anything is possible. We just don’t know enough. What we need is a reliable inside source at SSI. Only we can’t enlist anybody because they’re all suspects. Unless …” I thought about it for a minute. “Maybe I should take that job.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” Michelle said.

  “I wouldn’t really quit, but I could take some time off and tell Vincent that I’ve quit. How would he know the difference? He’s already offered me the job, so he’d have no reason to check my references.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to be spending so much time with a bunch of murder suspects,” Thaddeous said. “If anything was to happen to you, Richard would have my hide. If Mama didn’t beat him to it. For all we know, those folks were all in it together.”

  Now, that was a really creepy notion, but I didn’t believe it. “Thaddeous, as much of a pain as Philip was, it still took the group months to decide to try and fire him. It would have taken them years to agree to kill him. And nobody’s going to try anything in broad daylight, in the middle of an office.”

  Thaddeous quit objecting, and Michelle and I concocted ways to deal with our boss and contingency plans in case Vincent called about me. To keep from messing up my insurance, I’d claim that I was covered through Richard’s job. I was a little fuzzy about duplicate tax forms, but Michelle was fairly sure that I wouldn’t get into trouble as long as Uncle Sam got his share. Like I told Thaddeous, trying to find a killer didn’t scare me nearly as much as messing with the IRS.

  As soon as Michelle and I got to the office after lunch, I went in to talk to my boss. He wasn’t too difficult about my taking time off, especially when I used Thaddeous’s visit as an excuse and the fact that I had just finished a big project as justification. I promised that I’d be gone no longer than two weeks, and that I’d work at home if anything urgent came up. Under the circumstances, I decided not to ask for a raise right then.

  My message light was blinking when I got back to my desk. Jessie had left voice mail, wanting to know if it was true that I was coming to work for SSI. I called her back and told her that I was seriously considering it, but I wanted to talk to Richard before I decided for sure. She was delighted by the idea.

  At first, that made me think that she couldn’t have killed Philip. If she had, the last one she’d want around would be the person she’d tried to frame. Then I started thinking like Michelle, wondering if maybe Jessie didn’t just want a better opportunity to get at me. Between trying to sort that idea out and keeping my voice low to make sure nobody suspected I was taking anything but a normal vacation, I got off the phone quickly.

  Actually, I hadn’t just been stalling with Jessie. I did want to talk to Richard. So after dinner that night, I left Thaddeous alone with the TV and went into the bedroom to call him. With the time difference, my seven o’clock phone call was going to wake him up at midnight, but I didn’t think he’d mind too much. It turned out he wasn’t in bed yet because he had just returned from a performance of King Lear that he had enjoyed even more than the Hamlet.

  Once he finished telling me why, and I allowed as how I would have liked to have seen it myself, he said, “How goes the investigation? Got the miscreant under lock and key?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Lots of suspects, a few motives, but no conclusions. I do have some ideas about where to go next.” I told him about my plan to infiltrate SSI. “What do you think? Will it work?”

  “It might,” he said, “but I’m not sure exactly what it is you’ll be looking for.”

  “I’m not exactly sure myself. It’s just that I’m sure that SSI is the key to what happened to Philip, or rather, somebody at SSI is. This just seems like the best way to be around them all enough to figure out who it was.”

  “If the murderer is at SSI, won’t he or she think it suspicious if you go to work there?”

  “I don’t see why. None of them knows about the kinds of things we’ve done in Byerly.”

  “Not even Jessie?”

  “Nope, I never told her about it. We really haven’t told that many people up here. Michelle knows, but that’s only because Michelle can get anything out of anybody.”

  “Then maybe Michelle should go undercover. Not,” he added quickly, “to impugn your deductive abilities.”

  “I did think about that, but they need a programmer, not a receptionist. Besides, there’s a certain snobbishness in computer companies. Programmers usually don’t hang around with administrative personnel. Or maybe it’s vice versa.” My own friendship with Michelle was unusual. “Either way, I think it’ll be easier for me to talk to the folks at SSI than it would be for Michelle. Plus, Thaddeous would have a conniption if I suggested putting her in danger.”

  “So the budding romance is beginning to bloom.”

  “Maybe not blooming yet, but something’s going on.”

  “Now, tell me why it is Thaddeous would keep Michelle away from SSI, but I shouldn’t keep you away from there?”

  “Because I’ll be very careful. Besides, I’ve known these people for years.”

  “Hadn’t Philip known them even longer?”

  It was an uncomfortable question, but he had a point. “Yes.”

  “And you still think one of them killed him?”

  “Yes. Though I’d love to be proved wrong.”

  “Well, until you are proved wrong, don’t forget that somebody there might be a killer. No clandestine meetings in dark offices, no after-work outings except in public, no eating gifts of food unless they’re factory sealed, no accepting ticking packages—the usual precautions.”

  “I promise.”

  We moved on to other matters, but not for very long. As eager as Vincent had been, I was pretty sure that he’d want me to start at SSI as soon as possible, probably before the end of the week. That meant that I had a busy day ahead to take care of loose ends at GBS so I could go to SSI with a clear conscience, and I needed a good night’s sleep.

  I called Vincent before I left for work the next morning and gave him the good news. I knew he wouldn’t ask why I hadn’t given two weeks’ notice. One benefit of working for computer companies is that they frequently don’t expect or even want a person to work out his notice. Since a system can easily be damaged by a disgruntled employee, and since people who quit tend to be disgruntled, it’s safer to pay out the notice and let the person leave.

  Vincent was gratifyingly enthusiastic and wanted me to start imme
diately, but I talked him into waiting until the next day. I wanted a little time before walking into the lion’s den.

  Chapter 17

  I was at SSI bright and early Thursday morning, only to find that nobody was at the front desk. “Hello?” I called out.

  A bleary-eyed Roberta came in from the back. “Can I help you?”

  “Hi. I’m Laura Fleming.”

  There was no hint of recognition in her face.

  “I’m supposed to start working here today.”

  “I forgot. Vincent hasn’t come in yet.” She looked around as if hoping somebody had posted instructions. “I guess you can wait for him up here.”

  “All right,” I said, not the least bit impressed. Not only would Michelle have recognized me immediately and known that I’d be starting work, she’d also have taken me to my desk and shown me around.

  Roberta didn’t bother to try to make conversation with me, just worked on something at her PC. She didn’t even offer me coffee.

  After about ten minutes, Inez came in and went to Roberta’s desk. “Any messages?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good morning, Inez,” I said.

  Inez turned and saw me. “So you are coming to work here.”

  Not exactly a warm welcome. “I thought so. Did you and Vincent not discuss it?”

  “Vinnie deigned to send me a memo. I take it that he isn’t here yet.”

  I shook my head, and realized that she was the only one at SSI who still used the name “Vinnie.” I didn’t think it was because it was a pet name.

  She said, “Typical. Why don’t you come on into my office? I need to talk to you anyway. You want some coffee?”

  I followed her to the break room to get coffee, then back to her office. I was tickled when I noticed that Inez’s office was the exact same size as Vincent’s, with the same furniture. The difference was that she only had one window, not two, and I just knew that it had started a fight.

  I couldn’t help but think of my Aunt Nellie’s three daughters. They were triplets, and when they were children, if one of them got more or less of anything than the others, you’d have thought the world was coming to an end. I wondered if Vincent and Inez had measured each other’s offices to ensure that the dimensions were the same.