by Greg Herren
“Ms. Stratton, there were several things you didn’t tell me.” I crossed my legs. “For example, you acted as though you and Iris weren’t close—her fiancé tells me differently.”
“Perhaps Phillip and I have a different definition of close. It’s not like I was going to be a bridesmaid in her wedding or anything. We talked sometimes about personal stuff, or her plans—well, she talked; I mostly listened. That was how she was. She made it very clear to me I was her employee.” She said it with just a bit of venom, and shrugged. “She didn’t tell me everything.” Again the frosty smile. “Whatever Phillip might have told you, Iris liked to keep things pretty close. I don’t really think she confided much in anyone, to tell you the truth. She didn’t have a lot of friends. She was all about the job, you know. She lived and breathed Verlaine Shipping.” She tilted her head to one side. “She could be quite tedious about it.”
“He also told me that you knew everything that goes on in this company.” I wanted to slap the smile off her face. “And I need to know some things.”
“Company business is confidential information.”
“Even when it might have something to do with the reason why Iris—and Joshua—were murdered?” I gave her my own version of a frosty smile. “I’m here as a representative of the New Orleans Police Department. I’ve been deputized to look into Iris’s murder.”
She had the decency to color a little. “I thought Iris was killed by a burglar, and Mr. Verlaine’s death was an accident.”
“The police don’t think so.” I leaned forward in my chair. “And soon enough, they’ll be wanting to know everything that I want to know—and they can force you to tell them things. You know, subpoenas and all that.” I raised my eyebrows. “I could call them and have them take you down to the precinct to answer questions—and you know, it will look pretty odd to your co-workers if the police come in and drag you out. That would make for talk at the water-cooler for days, I would think.”
“Then I should probably wait for them, shouldn’t I?” She regained her composure, smoothing her hair. “I could be fired for telling you anything. Confidentiality, you know. I had to sign a legal document barring me from talking to anyone about what goes on around here.”
“You know, if you tell me what you know,” I smiled at her, “maybe you won’t have to talk to the police officially at all.”
She wanted to tell me everything. I could read it in her body language. She was, as Phillip had said—and Iris herself had told me—a gossip. People like her, once they opened up, wouldn’t shut up until they told you not only everything you wanted to know but also a bunch of stuff that didn’t matter—they just liked to talk to hear themselves talk. And whatever she had to say, it would be colored by her own perceptions and innuendoes. She was the kind of person who made a terrible witness, the kind whose testimony district attorneys hate to build a case around. I sized her up again. Threats wouldn’t work with her—if anything, she’d shut down completely and refuse to answer any questions. No, the way to get her to open up would be to be friendly, make her feel like she was privy to inside information—and that anything she might know could be really important. People who gossip do it, I think, to make themselves feel more important. Phillip had said she came from a family that had gone broke when she was young, but they’d managed to keep her in McGehee. Then she’d had to go to college at UNO, which had to have stung. If she and Iris had been friends when they were young, she also had to resent working for her on some level. I smiled to myself. Play on her bitterness toward Iris. She resented not being asked to be in the wedding—otherwise she wouldn’t have mentioned it It’s a sore spot. I gave her a wide smile. “You could really help me out here, Valerie. You probably knew Iris just as well as anyone, working closely with her every day, right? She wanted to run the company, didn’t she?”
“Oh, that was hardly a secret.” She laughed. “She let everyone around here know that.” She leaned forward. “It was all she ever talked about, you know. And she’d tell anyone who’d listen. Even the lowest clerk in the mailroom knew that. You couldn’t work here and not be aware. She would rant and rave about how unfair it was that her grandfather thought she couldn’t handle the job because she was a woman, that he was positively medieval, someone needed to drag him into the twenty-first century, on and on and on. I could quote her, chapter and verse. It got so whenever she’d go off on it, I just tuned her out, you know? It was boring. I just wanted to tell her to get over herself and do her damned job—public relations isn’t exactly beneath her, which is how she acted. She’d work herself up into quite a frenzy, you know. If he wasn’t her grandfather, she probably would have sued for sexual discrimination or something. But as long as he had control over the will, she couldn’t do anything. He could cut her off without a cent. Hell, he could fire her at will—and she sure as hell didn’t trust him not to do that very thing.”
“Do you think she could have run the company?”
She took a drink out of her coffee mug, and thought for a moment. “Yes, I think she could have. Of course, she could have. She certainly couldn’t have done a worse job than Joshua.” She smothered a laugh. “I could have run the company better than Joshua. A five-year-old probably could have. He didn’t know what he was doing, and anyone could see that.”
“Joshua was screwing up?”
“Calling it screwing up is the understatement of the day.” She leaned back in her chair. “We lost a five-hundred-million-dollar contract last summer when a boat we built for an oil company sank within three days of launching. The verdict was shoddy construction—and you can imagine how well that played with our other customers. Didn’t you see the article? It made the front page of the business section in the paper. Iris was livid, absolutely livid. She couldn’t put a positive spin on that no matter how hard she tried.” She took another drink. “And several of our other customers were threatening to go elsewhere. You can’t lose contracts of that size and stay in business. So, yeah, we were in trouble. A great deal of trouble. Of course the hurricane helped out a lot.” She shrugged. “It was a godsend, in a way. The damage to the yards, the damage to some of the ships—our clients couldn’t very well go elsewhere without looking like complete assholes…and the insurance settlement sure came in handy.”
“So why was he still running things? That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.” I leaned back in my chair. “Percy Verlaine doesn’t strike me as a particularly stupid man—why would he let his grandson run his company into the ground? I don’t follow.”
“Changes were in the air, Mr. MacLeod.” She gave me a superior, knowing smile. “Mr. Percy was not happy. And Darrin didn’t want the responsibility.” She gave a disdainful sniff. “He’s more interested in going to the casinos than doing any work.”
“That left Iris,” I answered. “A magna cum laude graduate of the Harvard Business School. Why wouldn’t he give her a chance?”
“Iris was living in a dream world. Mr. Percy was never going to let her run this company—and she finally realized that when he didn’t fire Mr. Joshua. Rumor was Mr. Percy was thinking about bringing someone else in—a co-president to ride herd on Mr. Joshua. I don’t know how true that was—it was just gossip.” Her smile faded. “The meeting was the Monday before the hurricane. Old Mr. Percy actually came into the office, you know—oxygen tanks and all.”
“Were you in the meeting?”
“I took the minutes, like I always do.” She paused, and then her face hardened into an angry mask. “Yeah, Iris graduated magna cum laude from the Harvard Business School all right—try to get her to shut up about it. Her brothers barely made it through Vanderbilt, and I am sure the Verlaine money had something to do with that. I’m sure the old man had to build a library wing or something to get them their diplomas. She had offers from companies all over the world—and instead she chose to come back here to work for the family business.” She sniffed. “Vice president of public relations? That was her mother’s job. Margot
stepped aside and retired so Iris could have her job. Iris thought it was just a matter of time before her grandfather realized she was the most qualified of them all to run the whole company. At that meeting, she presented her case. And you know what Mr. Percy said?”
“What?”
“A woman couldn’t run this business, and what she really needed to do was think about her wedding, and having babies, because that’s what she was meant to do—like her mother.” She hissed the words at me. “The old pig. Iris was humiliated in front of all the other vice presidents, and then the old man gives Joshua a vote of confidence. I thought Iris was going to kill the old man, she was so angry. And after we came back here and had a drink, she decided that the only way she was ever going to get her due around here was to force the old man to make her president.” She shook her head angrily. “Why anyone would humiliate his own granddaughter like that in front of every executive in the company is beyond me. My grandfather would certainly never treat me that way.”
“How was she going to do that?” I prodded. “How could she force him to do anything?”
“Have you met Lenny Pousson?” One of her plucked eyebrows went up, and she gave me a slight smile.
“Yes.” I nodded. “What does he have to do with anything?”
“He’s been on the company payroll for years, only nobody really knows what he does.” She shrugged. “Iris was certain something was not quite right there, and she started digging around in the old financial records.”
“What did she find?”
“She wouldn’t tell me—but she found something, all right. The Wednesday before the storm she was excited, but all she would tell me was she was onto something, but she needed the final proof, and she knew exactly where to get that.” She got up and refilled her coffee mug. “She went up to Cortez, Mississippi, on Thursday to visit some relative, and Friday afternoon she told me she had everything she needed.”
“But she didn’t tell you what?”
She shook her head. “She wouldn’t tell me—all she would say was on Monday morning everything was going to be different around here.” She shrugged. “But all her files are gone, you know. Before I came back here to work, someone went through and took everything out of her office—even her computer’s hard drive had been wiped clean.” She sat back down. “You know, I’m the acting vice president of public relations—they’re letting me fill in for her. You have no idea how hard it’s been to do my job without any of her records—but I muddle through. The other day, though, we had something come up, and I went to Mr. Joshua to tell him I needed access to one of the old files. He looked at me like I was crazy. He had no idea the files were gone. He didn’t even know her hard drive had been wiped.” She shivered. “It was kind of creepy. I mean, things have been a lot more loose around here since the storm, you know, but I just figured”—she bit her lip—“I just figured, you know, that they did that kind of thing as routine, you know, in case there was sensitive information in her files and computer, you know—a security precaution—although it seemed kind of stupid to me, I mean, how the hell was I supposed to the damned job without access to her files—but he had no idea what I was talking about. And he wasn’t making it up either. He had no idea, no idea at all.” She snorted. “And he’s the president of the company?” She rolled her eyes. “He said he’d find out what happened to her files and then would get back to me.”
I sat up. “When did you have this conversation with him?”
“Three days ago.”
And two days later he was dead.
“He had no idea what happened to her files?”
“He said he didn’t, but he’d find out.” She shrugged. “I was able to solve the problem without them, so in the end it didn’t matter, but how am I supposed to do my job?” She sighed. “Mr. Joshua, though, was very understanding about it, and he kind of promised me Iris’s job.” Her face became radiant. “Me, a vice president! I couldn’t believe it—but then, now that he’s gone, that’s probably not going to happen.” She started drumming her fingers on her desk again. “But it won’t be that easy for them to get rid of me. I know things.” She gave me that smile again.
“You know things.”
“Yes.” She leaned back in her chair. “I will be vice president of public relations. Or they will regret it.”
She knew what Iris knew. There was no doubt in my mind. “Valerie…if you know what Iris discovered, you need to tell me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Iris wasn’t killed by a burglar. And Joshua Verlaine didn’t accidentally fall off that roof either.” I leaned forward. “Think about it, Valerie. You’re not a fool. Iris was determined to force her grandfather to make her president of the company. You know Percy Verlaine. In order to do that, she had to have something big to make him knuckle under to her. She told you the day she died she had everything she needed. And that night she was murdered. Someone came in here and took her files and wiped her hard drive. When you mentioned it to Joshua, he said he’d look for her files—and then he falls off a roof.” I paused for a few beats, watching the color drain out of her face. “Do you think any of that could be coincidence? And if you try to use that same information…” I let my voice trail off.
She sat there quietly for a moment. She bit her lower lip. “The Wednesday afternoon before the storm, she sent me to Office Depot to get her a digital voice recorder. She said she needed it for her trip on Thursday.”
I tried to keep my voice casual. “Do you know what happened to it?” It wasn’t in the inventory of Iris’s purse that was in the police report. Please God, don’t let it have been in her purse that night, don’t let it have fallen into the hands of the thief…
She took a deep breath. “I have it.”
I could barely control my own excitement. “Where is it, Valerie?”
She opened a drawer and pulled out her own purse. “Iris gave it to me that Friday afternoon.” She started rummaging through it. “After she came back from meeting with her grandfather.” She held it in her hand, and stared at it.
“Did you listen to what’s on it?”
She nodded. “I can’t believe…” she whispered, her face pale. “I was going to use it. I was going to make them give me the promotion. How could I have been so stupid?”
I chose not to answer that. “Ms. Stratton, can you hand that to me, please? It’s evidence in a police investigation.” I held out my hand, which was shaking just a little bit. This was it, the evidence I needed.
She handed it to me. “Here. Take it.” She wiped her hands. “I don’t ever want to see that thing again.” Her voice shook. “They would have killed me. I just never thought—”
“Valerie, you didn’t know this was why someone killed Iris—how could you have known? You’re not a psychic, nor are you a cop.” I held it in my hand. It was tiny; it would easily fit in a shirt pocket and be completely unseen. I had one myself, the exact same make and model. I bought it because it was much easier than taking notes. I could simply record my interviews and then download them into my computer and listen to them again later, even have them transcribed word for word. It seemed hot in my hand. “Are you okay?”
Now that the recorder was out of her hands, her color was coming back. “Yeah—yeah, I guess.” She took another swig of her coffee. “I think I’m going to take the rest of the day off, though.”
“So what do you think Lenny Pousson’s job is?” I asked casually, slipping the recorder into my pants pocket.
“We-ell—” she made a production of looking around to ensure no one was listening. “Like I said, no one really knows, and his job description is listed on the books as ‘assistant to Mr. Percy,’ but most people think he’s a thug. Hired muscle. He does the old man’s dirty work for him. No one’s really sure what that means, but rumor has it he was instrumental in breaking the workers’ strike back in the 1980s, when the yard workers went out on strike.” She shuddered. “He kind of gi
ves me the creeps, you know what I mean? He used to always look at me like he was imagining what I looked like naked—and he was that way with Iris too. She couldn’t stand him.” She sighed. “Once she was running things, he was going to be the first change she was going to make. She told me so that Friday morning, you know, before she left to go meet with you.”
That was one thing I still didn’t understand—why had Iris felt the need to hire an outside investigator? She seemed to have been doing quite well on her own.
“Did she tell you why she was hiring me?”
“All she said was she wanted to hire a private eye to find her dad.” She shrugged. “It was weird. You know, in all the time I knew her, she never once talked about her father until that morning. But then, like I said, she liked to keep things close.”
“Yes, apparently she did.” I started to stand up. “Can you think of anything else that might help me out here? Anything else she might have said or done that last week—no matter how unimportant it might seem? You never know when something might be important.”
“No, not really.” She stared at me. “Do you think I’ve been helpful?”
“You never know.” I handed her a business card. “If you think of anything else Iris might have said or done that last week—about Lenny, her grandfather, anything—call me. Anything. It might seem like nothing, but again, you never know.”
“Well—” She looked at my card like it was a poisonous snake, then slipped it into her purse. “All right.” She pulled her purse out of her desk drawer and stood up. “I’ll walk out with you.”
“You listened to the recording,” I said as we walked to the elevator. “What does it say?”
Her eyes got wide. “No. I never heard anything, I never listened to anything, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She gave me a brittle smile. “And if anyone asks me, I never spoke to you.” The elevator doors opened and she stepped in. She held up a hand as I started to walk in. “Do you mind waiting for the next one?”