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

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  “Philip never wanted anyone doing quality assurance in the first place—he said that it wasn’t needed. As if he were perfect. And he said if I was any good as a programmer, I wouldn’t be satisfied being a proofreader.”

  “I swear I think Philip went out of his way to be nasty. Is that what he said when he tried to get you to vote for him?” I was hoping if I made it plain that I knew about Philip’s attempts, Murray wouldn’t question how I had found out, and it worked.

  “Oh no, he was all sweetness and light. A week earlier, I hadn’t been good enough to correct his spelling, but now I was the finest computer professional he’d ever met. He said my talents were being wasted, that he’d make sure I was authorized to hire as big a staff as I wanted. Or if I’d rather, I could move to development and work with him because I was the only one who could keep up with him. As if I’d just forget all the other things he’d said to me over the years.”

  “He didn’t really think you’d swallow that, did he?” I said, but Philip probably had thought Murray would believe him, just like he’d thought I was going to let him stay with me.

  “Who knows what he thought? I just laughed at him. Then he tried to use guilt on me, talking about how long we’d been friends.” He snorted. “I’m Jewish, for God’s sake—my mother can out-guilt Philip any day of the week.”

  I had to laugh.

  Though I’d liked to have talked more, Murray said, “I’m glad we had this meeting, Laura. I’ll get that printout to you ASAP.”

  It was a clear dismissal. So I said, “Good enough. If I have any questions, I’ll get back to you.” He thought I meant questions about the QA log, and I did, but that wasn’t all I meant.

  Chapter 21

  Later that morning, I ended up talking to Sheliah the technical writer about some new product features. Since we were still together when noon came around, I asked her if she had plans for lunch, and we decided to go to a deli and bring back sandwiches.

  As we walked back to work, I was looking forward to spending time with somebody who wasn’t a suspect in Philip’s death. After all, she wasn’t one of the MIT group and hadn’t been on the board of directors, meaning that she wouldn’t have been involved in the voting. But then I realized that I had been assuming that the vote had had something to do with Philip’s murder. I didn’t know that for sure. So I couldn’t cross Sheliah off my list just yet.

  We got back to the office and spread out our food on the break room table. Then, after a quick look around to make sure nobody else was within earshot, I said, “It must have been weird for you, coming into an established group of friends here at SSI.”

  “More so than I had expected it to be,” Sheliah said with a grin. “I’ve worked at small companies before, but never one that was so …”

  “Inbred?”

  She nodded. “Roberta and I are the only ones who weren’t at MIT.”

  “What do you think of the group? From an outsider’s perspective.”

  She hesitated a minute, not meeting my eyes. Then she said, “Look, I know you’ve been friends with these people a long time, and I don’t want to offend you.”

  “It’s nice of you to worry about that, but I wouldn’t have asked if I hadn’t really wanted to know what you think.”

  “Okay, since you asked … I think they’re a bunch of nerds. Inez not so much, and Neal isn’t too bad, but the others … I’ve worked with computer geeks before, but these guys take the cake.”

  I thought about Murray’s thick glasses and Dee and Dom’s indifference to fashion. “I guess they are kind of stereotypical.”

  “You said it. It’s like they never graduated from college. Vincent is so busy trying to act like a boss that he has no clue about what’s really going on, and Dee and Dom haven’t got one whole personality between them. Jessie’s so worried about everybody being happy that she can’t get anything done. Inez is enough on the ball that she could probably make something of the place if she didn’t spend so much time fighting with Vincent. Murray has some good ideas, but when people don’t instantly do what he wants, he whines.”

  She had to stop then to get her breath, and I said, “I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but if they’re that bad, why do you stay?”

  “Well, the recession is supposed to be over, but jobs are still tough to come by. And they’re treating me decently, all things considered. It’s just that I still feel like a new hire, even after a year here.”

  I nodded, remembering how nobody at Philip’s visitation seemed to remember just how long it was she had been working with them.

  “I think you’re already more a part of the company than I am,” she added.

  “Do you think so? I’ve kept up with Jessie, but I haven’t really been around the others that much since college.”

  But Sheliah said, “It’s like you’ve never been gone. It’s the same with Neal, and he got here only a week or two before Philip died.”

  She’d been the one to mention Philip, but I was more than willing to take advantage of it. “What was your take on him? Philip, I mean. I hear he was pretty awful to work with.”

  “Well …” she said, clearly ill at ease.

  I thought I knew why. “You heard that he and I used to date, didn’t you?”

  “Jessie told me.”

  “It’s ancient history. Really. I was just curious about him. Didn’t you ever have the urge to find out how an old boyfriend turned out?”

  She grinned. “Lots of times. I always hope I’ll find out that they’re miserable.”

  Philip certainly had been miserable the last time I saw him alive, and it had gone downhill from there. I was tempted to warn her about getting what she asked for, but instead I said, “Knowing Philip, I don’t think I could ever have worked with him.”

  “It wasn’t an ideal situation to come into,” she admitted. “First off, SSI hadn’t ever had a real technical writer. The programmers documented the pieces they knew, and then Jessie prettied it up and stuck it in a binder. No consistency, no graphics, no index, no actual document design. It was awful. And Philip didn’t think we needed anything better. He was completely against my being hired.”

  “Really?” If Philip had tried to keep Sheliah out or get her fired, that could have been a reason for her to want him dead.

  “They had to have a board meeting about it, but fortunately, everybody else voted for hiring me. Vincent was really set on online documentation and jazzing up the manual, Inez and Murray wanted to cut down on technical support calls, and Dee and Dom thought they had better things to do with their time than write documentation.”

  “What about Jessie? She hates fights.”

  “She hated doing the manuals herself even more, so she went along with the others. Philip was stuck with me.”

  “Getting product information out of him must have been like pulling teeth.”

  “You’re telling me! I don’t think I’d have minded as much if he had told me up front he wasn’t going to help, but what he did was worse. You see, I didn’t find out he’d voted against me for a long time. He was always nice to my face. He’d come to meetings and tell me what a great job I was doing and how much better the manuals were. But he never had time to answer my questions or return review copies. It took me six months to realize that. And he was so slimy. Telling me how nice I looked, and how he bet I had lots of boyfriends.”

  “He harassed you?”

  She looked half-embarrassed, half-angry. “Nothing overt. Just slimy. I told Jessie about it a couple of times, and she kept saying she’d take care of it. But she never did. I’d have been glad to see him leave the company. Not like what happened, of course.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Now I think we’ve got a chance to turn things around at SSI.”

  I couldn’t resist teasing her. “Even with a bunch of nerds?”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have said that. Maybe they’re nerds, but some of the best software design comes from nerds. I’
m really encouraged that we’ve brought you and Neal on board.”

  “I’d have thought that the last thing you’d want to see is another MIT refugee, let alone two of us.”

  “You two are different. Neal is brilliant, one of the best I’ve ever seen.”

  “You know he started college a couple of years early, and even then it showed. His professors had a hard time keeping up with him.”

  “As for you, you’ve worked elsewhere, not just at SSI. So you’ve got new ideas. But SSI will accept you because of your history. The best of both worlds.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Even though I wasn’t planning to stay at SSI, I was glad she thought I’d have been an asset.

  “Now can I ask you a question?” she said.

  “Ask away. I’ve certainly asked you a slew of them.”

  “Why didn’t you come work for SSI with the others?”

  “Because I wanted a real job, for a real company, in the real world,” I said. “I was fairly sure StatSys would be successful, but I knew SSI would be a seat-of-the-pants company for a long time. I wanted stability.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Besides,” I added ruefully, “working with my ex-boyfriend didn’t sound like a good time. You say he was slimy with you—I can’t imagine how he’d have been with me.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “And honestly, the biggest reason is that nobody asked me.” I shrugged. “Things worked out for me better going elsewhere.”

  “It might have done them good if you had come into the company in the beginning.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’ve heard stories about the MIT days, and your name comes up a lot.” She grinned. “I felt like I knew you even before we met. Anyway, it sounds like you were the practical one, the one to bring them all back down to earth. If you had been around, SSI might not be doing so badly now. You might even have been able to keep Philip under control.”

  “I doubt that,” I said with a laugh, “but I appreciate the compliment.” I had never really considered the role I had played in the group, but I thought that Sheliah might have put her finger on it.

  It was nearly time for us to get back to work by then, but there was one more question I wanted to ask. “I hear Philip was trying real hard to keep his job.”

  “He sure was. He even asked me to put in a good word for him. As if I’d have had anything to say about it, or as if I wanted him to stay.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  She looked surprised. “He insulted me when I told him to forget it, but I was used to that. Why? Did he threaten other people?”

  I fudged. “You know he came over to my apartment the day he died.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, he said something then about ‘rattling cages’ and making SSI keep him, but he wouldn’t say anything more. Philip loved to drop hints.”

  “What a loser!” Then, as if remembering his death, she added, “I really do feel sorry about what happened to him.”

  “Me, too,” I said. Though I was starting to wonder why.

  After we cleaned off our table and headed for our desks, I realized that I hadn’t spoken to a soul at SSI who was going to miss Philip. Even those I didn’t suspect of killing him were glad to see him gone. Sheliah had known him a relatively short time, but the nicest thing she could come up with for him was pity. As for me, after all I’d heard about Philip since I’d come to SSI, I was having problems feeling even that much for him. I wasn’t sure if that said something about Philip, or about me.

  Chapter 22

  After about the third time I passed by Dee and Dom’s cube that afternoon, I finally noticed that not only was Dee not there, but her computer screen was dark. Since I hadn’t spoken to Dom yet, I thought this was as good a time as any. So I stuck my head in and said, “Knock, knock.”

  He stayed glued to his screen.

  “Dom? Dom? Hello-oo?”

  There was still no response.

  I stepped inside and lightly touched his shoulder.

  “What?” he snapped, turning around.

  “Sorry. It’s just me. I’d forgotten how engrossed you get in your work.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “I do kind of lose track. That’s why I like sharing a cube with Dee. Otherwise, I’d be here all day long and probably half the night, too.”

  “Where is Dee? She’s not sick, is she?”

  He grinned wider, but now he looked more like a wolf than a sheep. “We didn’t get much sleep last night, so I talked her into taking a sick day so she could get some rest.”

  Remembering how she had been acting with him the previous afternoon, I didn’t think I needed to ask for any details. With Richard out of town, the last thing I needed to hear about was other people’s marital bliss. Instead, I said, “Everybody needs a day off once in a while. So how’s it going? I haven’t had a chance to visit with you.”

  “By all means, come visit.” He pulled Dee’s chair out for me. “Have Vincent and Inez put you to work yet?”

  I nodded. “User interface.”

  He grimaced. “I hate doing that stuff. I know it’s important, but it’s just too fuzzy. Give me the code any day.” He waved at the screen behind him, filled with rows of characters that were nearly incomprehensible to me, despite my years in programming.

  “You can keep that mess. Troubleshooting code makes me crazy. Spending three hours to find out that I’ve left out a comma is too much like work.”

  “Better that than staying up all night trying to figure out which font is the easiest to read. And picking colors! What a pain.”

  “That goes to prove what my grandfather always said. If everybody liked chocolate the best, they wouldn’t bother making all those other flavors.”

  He grinned again. Like Dee, Dom was mostly round: a round face in a round head on top of a round body. He looked a lot like the snowmen I used to draw before I saw a real one, and his grin was pure Pillsbury Doughboy. I hated to spoil the mood, but I did have an ulterior motive for talking to him.

  I said, “At least you’re not like Philip. He refused to believe software needed well-designed screens or field names that made sense. If a user didn’t understand the product, it was the user’s fault, not the product’s.”

  As I’d expected, Dom’s grin melted right off his face. Philip had had that effect on people when he was alive, and it had only gotten worse since he’d died.

  “Philip had a different idea of what a product should be,” Dom said diplomatically.

  “Philip had different ideas about a lot of things.”

  He looked at me curiously. “Was it terrible, having to identify his body?”

  I started to say something noncommittal, but since I was there to pick Dom’s brains, I thought that the least I owed him was an honest answer. “It was pretty bad. I’ve seen dead people before, but not in a body bag. He wasn’t gross, but he was very clearly dead.” I shivered without meaning to.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “It’s okay. I know people have been curious about that, and I think I’d rather they asked outright than tried to be subtle.”

  “Subtlety never was my strong point.”

  “Mine, either.” My next question proved it to me once again. “I still wonder what he was doing back behind my apartment.”

  “I thought he’d gone over there to ask you for a place to stay.”

  “He had, but he went somewhere else before ending up in the alley. Nobody knows where.” I looked at him closely as I asked the next question. “You didn’t see him that evening, did you?”

  “Not me,” he said, and he sounded sincere. “The last time I saw him was here at the office. At least, I guess I saw him that day. I know he was here, but …” He looked at his computer screen. “The Red Sox could have paraded down the hall, and I’m not sure I’d have noticed.”

  “Sometimes losing yourself in work comes in handy. Especially the way it must
have been around here for the past few months.”

  “You mean the attempted coup?”

  “The coup?”

  “That’s what I’ve been calling it. Vincent’s and Inez’s campaign to get rid of Philip.”

  “Did you not approve?” I was already fairly sure that Dom had been one of those to vote for keeping Philip, but confirmation would be nice.

  “At first I didn’t. Philip was with SSI from the beginning, after all. It didn’t seem fair to ask him to change just because Inez and Vincent had new ideas about how to run the place. And I was afraid that once he was gone, those two would really go after each another. If nothing else, Philip kept them distracted. So I voted for him to stay.” I nodded, but before I could ask anything else, he added, “The first time, anyway.”

  “Only the first time? I heard that the vote was the same both times.”

  “The same numbers. I guess somebody who voted against him the first time changed his mind.”

  “I guess so,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. I was sure that Vincent, Inez, and Murray had voted against Philip in that first vote. That meant that one of those three had switched sides. “Why did you change your mind, if you don’t mind my asking?” For some reason, when you offer to back down, people are a lot more likely to answer, even if the question is none of your business.

  Dom said, “Partly because Vincent started talking about the new direction we’d be going in, and the programming sounded like it would be more interesting than what I’d done before. And I was worried about SSI going belly up. I knew Dee and I’d be able to get other jobs, but I’m comfortable here. There’s a lot of garbage going on, but there’s garbage anywhere.”

  “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

  “You bet. So I was thinking about changing my vote, but I wasn’t sure yet. Then Philip came by, and he was pretty convincing, too. He talked about loyalty and how we’d been friends for years. And he said that if Inez and Vincent got rid of him, then they could get rid of me and Dee anytime they wanted. He had some good points, so I told him I’d think about it.