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

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  Still, I felt like we were making progress, so I decided to earn part of my SSI salary by spending some time with Neal hashing out product design issues. He had finally cleaned all the booby traps and such out of StatSys, meaning that we could get down to some heavy-duty planning.

  Murray joined in, too. He was so glad to actually have a chance to make real changes to the product that he was almost giddy.

  When I left Neal’s office, I took a detour to the bathroom, and as I walked back to my desk, I saw Jessie sitting with Roberta, showing her something.

  “Oh, Laura,” Roberta said, “there was a call for you about an hour ago, but you weren’t at your desk.”

  “I was in with Neal,” I said. “Did they leave a message?”

  “Somebody named Thaddeous wants you to call back.”

  “Was he at my place?”

  “I don’t know. He left a number.” She picked up a yellow sticky note and read, “555-6789,” then handed me the note.

  Jessie said, “Isn’t that your old work number?”

  How on earth had she remembered that? “It sure is,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t ask any more questions. No such luck.

  “Why would your cousin be at your old office?” Jessie asked.

  I improvised. “You remember I told you he’d been dating somebody up here? It’s the receptionist over there. I don’t know if it’s going to last after he goes back home, but they seem to be getting along pretty well.”

  Jessie nodded, satisfied by this, and turned back to Roberta’s computer.

  If I had had the sense God gave a milk cow, I’d have left it at that, but I had to keep talking. “It’s a shame I wasn’t working here when Thaddeous came up, Roberta, or maybe he’d be dating you instead of Michelle.”

  As soon as I said it, I knew it was a mistake. For once Roberta was paying attention to what I was saying.

  She said, “Michelle? That’s not Michelle Nucci, is it? She works at GBS.”

  I tried to look surprised. “Do you know her?”

  “She’s a friend of a friend of mine. I went out to lunch with her the other week. Just before you came to work here.”

  “No kidding,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “It’s a small world.”

  “Awfully small,” Jessie said, looking vaguely suspicious.

  “That Michelle sure was curious about SSI,” Roberta said. “She asked a lot of questions.”

  I said, “Really? Well, Michelle is a bit of a busybody.” Now both of them were looking at me suspiciously. “I’d better get back to work. See y’all later.”

  I wasn’t quite out of earshot when Jessie said, “What kind of questions did she ask?”

  I was really starting to resent the fact that I didn’t have real walls around my desk to provide the privacy I wanted. I called Thaddeous back, but kept my voice low. “What’s up?”

  “I just wanted to let you know that Vasti called.”

  “During daytime rates?”

  “She called from my house—Mama told her you’d want to know right away.”

  “Know what?”

  “Whoever it was who was asking questions about you and me ain’t no reporter. He did talk to Hank Parker at the Gazette, but he said he was a historian and wanted to see back issues of the paper. It wasn’t until he was gone that Hank noticed he was looking at awfully recent papers for a historian, papers that weren’t but a couple of years old.”

  “Great, he knows all about us.” There isn’t a whole lot of news in Byerly, so Hank had written about our exploits in loving detail.

  “The guy tried to get Junior to talk, too, but you know Junior. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to fool her.”

  “That’s good, anyway.”

  “Anything going on up there?”

  “Actually,” I said, looking around to try to see if anybody was lurking, “it’s not a good time for me to talk.”

  “Is there anything wrong?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You’re not in any kind of danger, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Because if you are—”

  “I’m not,” I said. “If I were, I swear I’d get the heck out of here.”

  “All right,” he said doubtfully. “See you tonight.”

  I spent the next hour on tenterhooks, cursing myself for mentioning Michelle’s name, but finally decided that I was home free. Then Jessie came by my desk. “Laura, have you got a minute?”

  “Well …” I said, looking at my computer screen as if I really hated to tear myself away from what I was doing.

  “It’s important.”

  “Okay.”

  When I followed her back to her office, I was sure that my cover was completely blown and I wasn’t at all reassured when she shut the door behind us. At least she sat down behind her desk, leaving me closer to the door, which meant that if I needed to, I could get to that door before she got to me.

  “Laura,” she said, “how committed are you to SSI?”

  This wasn’t the question I had expected. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “But why are you here?”

  It sounded like she might be on to me, but I wasn’t going to say too much this time. “What are you getting at, Jessie?”

  “What I’m getting at is this: why have you been asking so many questions?” I was trying to think of how I could answer her when she went on. “It’s quite a coincidence that the receptionist at GBS just happened to go to lunch with our receptionist right after you and I had lunch together. And it’s quite a coincidence that you came to work here right after that, even though you’d never been interested in working here before. And since you’ve been here, you’ve asked me lots of questions, especially about how SSI is run. I checked around, and found out that you’ve been talking to other people, too. Now it turns out that your cousin is hanging around your old office. Why would your former boss allow that?”

  She paused, and though I wondered if I should make a break for it, I decided that I’d wait until she made some kind of move. Unless she had a gun, I had a good chance of getting out of that room in a hurry, and as long as she didn’t have a knife, I could probably fight her off.

  “Do you know what the biggest coincidence of all is, Laura?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “The biggest coincidence of all is that these questions started popping up after you talked to Philip and Colleen, and they told you things they shouldn’t have.”

  She had me. The only question I had left was whether she was the murderer herself, or just wanted to protect the murderer.

  Jessie leaned over her desk toward me, and I had to work hard not to flinch. “Tell me the truth, Laura. Is this about the public offering?”

  The question came from so far out of left field that all I could do at first was stare at her. Finally I got out, “About the what?”

  “I’m not naive. Knowing that a stock offering is coming could be worth a lot of money in the right places. GBS isn’t a direct competitor, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that they want to buy us out.”

  “Jessie, my being here has nothing to do with GBS.”

  “Then is it a personal thing? A get-rich-quick scheme? It’s illegal to use insider information for trading.”

  “I’m not interested in stock offerings or insider trading or anything like that.”

  She looked me right in the eye. “I want to believe you, Laura.”

  I met her look straight on. “Then believe me. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “This offering means a lot to SSI. Maybe the difference between staying afloat and going under.”

  “I know it’s important to you, Jessie.”

  “Not just to me. Look at Dee and Dom. They’ll never be able to find a job working together like they do here. And Inez. She’s the first in her family to go to college—if she loses this job, her family is going to tell her that she was crazy not to get a nice secretarial jo
b in the first place. Vincent’s trying to prove himself to his family, too. One of his brothers is a doctor, one’s a lawyer, and one’s in management at a big manufacturing company. Do you think Vincent wants to go work for his brother?”

  I held up a hand to stop her. “Jessie, I know the offering is important to everybody at SSI, and I don’t want to mess it up.”

  Jessie visibly relaxed and took a couple of deep breaths. “I’m sorry to doubt you, Laura. It’s just that so many coincidences coming out … it sounded pretty bad.”

  “I don’t blame you for thinking the worst,” I said, but I wasn’t about to start trying to explain away any of the so-called coincidences. “It did look bad when you put it together like that.”

  “And the questions you’ve been asking?”

  “Hey, I’ve got a lot of years to catch up on. I’m curious.” That wasn’t exactly a lie, even if it wasn’t exactly the truth.

  I could tell she believed me, and now that I had her in a vulnerable position, maybe I could push a little. “But I have to admit that I’ve been hearing some funny things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Philip trying to blackmail people into letting him stay at SSI.”

  She turned pale. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I decided to try and wait her out, the way Detective Salvatore had waited for me the night I’d called him.

  After a minute of my looking at her, she said, “So he was trying to talk people into voting his way. That’s hardly blackmail.”

  “It is if he threatened people.”

  “How could he threaten anybody?”

  “He could threaten to tell secrets. Philip loved knowing secrets, didn’t he?”

  “What kind of secrets?”

  I hesitated. Which of Philip’s secrets would she be most likely to know about? I thought I knew Dee’s and Inez’s already, and I didn’t think Murray or Dom had any. That left Vincent. Though Michelle’s contact was sure Vincent really had graduated from MIT, there had to be something there. So I said, “Secrets about brass rats.”

  “Brass rats?” she stammered.

  I nodded, again waiting for her to speak first.

  She stared at me for the longest time. Finally she said, “He told you, didn’t he?”

  I still didn’t say anything. I was afraid to—I didn’t know who “he” was.

  “Damn him to hell! I trusted him! He said he wouldn’t tell anybody if I voted for him.”

  Okay, “he” had to be Philip, but how had he blackmailed Jessie with Vincent’s secret? “How did he find out?” I asked cautiously, hoping she wouldn’t be able to tell how little I knew.

  “I told him. Years ago, right before graduation. I was so upset about it that I cried on his shoulder. I knew I should have studied more, but so much was going on that last semester, what with me trying to get things started here at SSI. We were planning to open two weeks after graduation. I knew my grades were suffering, but I never thought I’d flunk two classes. One class would have been okay—I’d still have graduated. But not two.”

  Jessie was the one who’d flunked out? True, she had never been a great student, but she had always worked hard. Only from what she was saying, that last semester she’d worked hard at SSI, not at MIT.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” she went on. “My parents never would have paid for another semester, not even just for the one course I needed. I was lucky they’d pay for the four years—they made that plain from the very start. But without a degree, I couldn’t come work at SSI.”

  “Couldn’t you have worked part-time and finished school?” I asked her.

  “They needed somebody full-time. And if I didn’t come then, I wouldn’t have been on the board of directors. They’d have hired somebody else.”

  “Oh, Jessie! Don’t you know how much you mean to everybody? The group would have fallen apart ages ago without you. They’d have waited for you. Or hired you without a degree.”

  But she was shaking her head. “What if they hadn’t? I couldn’t risk being left behind.”

  I remembered a boy I knew in elementary school. He was a little shorter than the other boys, and not quite as good at sports. He lived in fear that they would leave him behind when they went out to play ball or wander through the woods or swim in the lake. I could picture him chasing after them, just as clear as day, calling, “Wait for me! Wait for me!” It was sad to see a child like that—to see a grown woman act that way was heartbreaking.

  Jessie said, “It was Philip’s idea not to tell anybody. He knew that the graduation program was printed up ahead of time, so my name was in it. And my parents hadn’t planned on coming up anyway, so I had a perfect excuse not to attend graduation. Nobody ever knew that I never graduated.”

  “Except for Philip.”

  She nodded.

  “And he threatened to tell people if you didn’t vote for him.”

  She nodded again. “I voted for him the first time, but I wasn’t sure what to do the second time. I had just spoken to Vincent in his office, and Vincent scared me into thinking that SSI was going to go bankrupt if we didn’t fire Philip. Then he went to lunch. I was just sitting at his desk, trying to decide, when Philip came in, closed the door, and asked me how I was going to vote.”

  That explained why Roberta had thought it was Vincent’s brass rat Philip was yelling about.

  “I thought I should be honest, but when I told him I was still making up my mind, he started yelling at me. He said that he’d tell Inez and Vincent, and that they’d fire me. He was going to tell my parents, too. I couldn’t believe he’d do that to me. I couldn’t believe he’d betray me like that.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? I voted for him. I’d have voted for him forever. He was right—nobody else will hire me without a degree.” She looked down at her hands like they didn’t belong to her, and seemed surprised that they were tearing pieces off of her desk blotter. “When you called to tell me Philip was dead, my first thought was that I was safe. I was glad that he was dead.” Fat tears rolled down her face.

  “Jessie?” She didn’t seem to hear me. I went over beside her chair, turned the chair to face me, and took her hands in mine. “Jessie, listen to me. Philip was a son of a bitch! He threatened to take away the thing that’s most important to you. Of course you were glad he was dead, anybody would have been. Don’t you dare spend one second being sorry!”

  “But he was my friend.”

  “He didn’t deserve a friend like you! I don’t know that I do, either. If I had known what I was asking you about, I never would have said a word.” I was starting to realize that there was a limit to what I’d do to find Philip’s killer.

  “I don’t want to lose my job, Laura.”

  “You’re not going to.”

  “You won’t tell Vincent? Or Inez?”

  “Of course not. But I don’t think they’d care. You’ve done a terrific job for SSI, degree or no degree. If they were stupid enough to fire you, you’d get another job in a heartbeat.” She started to say something, but I said, “But I’m not going to tell them. Okay?”

  “You won’t?”

  “No, I won’t. I promise.”

  The tears didn’t stop at first, but then she threw her arms around me, holding onto me as if her boat had just sunk and I was a life preserver. I hugged back and patted her back and stroked her hair for I don’t know how long. Like I told Thaddeous after I got home that night, if she had murdered Philip, I don’t know that I would have done anything about it after that. But I just couldn’t believe that she had.

  Michelle did point out that Jessie could have been lying about the whole thing, but I didn’t believe it for a minute. A call from Michelle to her friend at MIT verified that Jessie had never graduated, and that was good enough for me. Thaddeous and Michelle might not have agreed, but they realized that my mind was made up and knew enough not to argue with me.

  Chapter 31
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br />   After I finished telling them about Jessie, Michelle and Thaddeous wanted to get something to eat, but I wasn’t in the mood to go out. In fact, I explained to them as politely as I could that I really wasn’t in the mood for company. So I sent them off, promising them that I wasn’t depressed or upset, just tired.

  It wasn’t true. I was a little depressed and a lot upset. And I did want company, just not Thaddeous’s or Michelle’s. What I wanted was to have Richard home, but since I couldn’t have that, I was at least going to talk to him.

  Richard must have finally been getting over his jet lag, because he was asleep when I called him, but he woke up quickly enough. As was becoming our pattern, first he made sure that nothing was wrong. Then he told me about the course and the plays he had been seeing. He was excited because he had seen the rarely-performed King John.

  Then I caught him up on the investigation, telling him about the news from Vasti and my conversations with Dee, Murray, and Sheliah, and then describing today’s discovery about Inez and my confrontation with Jessie. I concluded it with, “Richard, I felt so bad when Jessie finally calmed down. I made her go home early. Then I tried to get some work done, but all I could think about was what I had done to Jessie.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for hurting Jessie. Philip did that, not you. And it would have come out someday. ‘In the end, truth will out.’ The Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 2.”

  “But she thought she was safe, and here I come sticking my nose in, asking about brass rats.” I snorted. “What kind of rat does that make me?”

  “Laura! Let’s not forget that you’re trying to find a murderer. If you’ll allow me to return to the Merchant, To do a great right, do a little wrong.’ Act IV, Scene 1.”

  “But I don’t know that it is a little wrong. She crumpled when she thought I knew about her degree, Richard, just crumpled. How do I know how much I’ve hurt her?”

  “From the way you’ve described her dependence on the group and on SSI, she’s got psychological problems that you have nothing to do with. She’s got a family that wouldn’t pay for one extra class or come to her graduation. And she was convinced that her best friends wouldn’t accept her without a degree. You didn’t cause those hurts, Laura—they happened years ago, long before you even knew Jessie.”