by Lia Matera
“It won’t matter in the end,” he reiterated.
With his cold, blue-eyed stare, he looked, at that moment, almost crazy enough to have killed Piatti, after all.
5
I flew home thinking about the bucket of blood, dented and fishy-smelling, holding the remains of a liter and a half of blood—about two champagne bottles worth. I flew home wondering what kind of statement it makes to drain a third of the blood from a person and leave it in a bucket beside a trail. Leave it to dehydrate and decompose, to get rained on and insect-infested, maybe tipped over, maybe even consumed by animals.
But when I reached my apartment, my consciousness filled with other matters.
Sandy had left me an urgent message to call him. When I did, he told me I was coming to his office right away.
Sander Arkelett, Private Investigation Services, was on a sunless street of warehouses between the bustle of the financial district and the black water commercial corridor of the bay. Sandy was close to his clients and his rent was reasonable, and it would never occur to him to find the neighborhood dreary. He was surprised I felt that way about my south of Market office.
His secretary, Janette, her hair ribboned with thin strands of blue and burgundy, continued a phone conversation as she motioned me into what had once been Sandy’s conference room but had lately become a computer room. The room could no longer do double duty because Sandy’s new “op,” Osmil Pelo, was a cyclone of electronic litter. The once Spartan room—a table, a bit of warehouse view, and not much else—now looked like a teenage nerd’s room. There were wires and cables and computer parts all over the table, along with Osmil’s debris—coke cans, candy wrappers, Wired magazine. Between Osmil—an unkempt whippet who looked about sixteen—and Janette, a cynical twenty-seven year old who’d taken lately to dressing like a biker slut, Sandy’s office was becoming a Generation X stronghold.
And Sandy, a traditional-values, ex-cop pushing fifty, liked it that way. They were smart, was his analysis, and there was no bullshit about them. Not like Reagan-era kids, on the hustle and full of hype.
He was standing beside Osmil’s chair now, staring beetle-browed at one of two computer screens. He said, “Laura, come and look at this.”
Osmil didn’t glance up. His posture was reminiscent of a curled rind. But his face, olive-skinned and large-eyed, was sweet, almost demure in its frame of dark curls. I knew little about him except that he’d set off on a tire raft from Havana to Miami on his thirteenth birthday. A couple of years later, he’d fled the macho exile community for the same reason he’d left Cuba: he was a homosexual. In San Francisco, he’d taken to sneaking into computer labs at State, at USF, at Golden Gate, at Cal Berkeley. It turned out he had a genius for navigating the canals and cybermazes of computer networks. Within months, he was the talk of the net.
Sandy, who hated the increasing amount of time he needed to spend on his computer, heard about the new whiz kid. Uncharacteristically (I thought), he offered the talented but unknown quantity a keyboard jockey job.
If Sandy had ever traveled to Cuba, I’d have suspected a secret relationship—that Osmil was his love child or reminded him of a bittersweet time there.
But Sandy only laughed when I hinted at some hidden motive. “He’s the boy wonder of hackers. Doesn’t everybody want one? Didn’t you see War Games? Revenge of the Nerds? Sneakers?”
The few times I’d spoken with Osmil, he’d seemed skittish and self-protective. I supposed life had given him reason. But he relaxed into a near-meditative trance when his fingers touched the keyboard. Only his eyes retained intensity, as if vacuuming information from the screen.
I walked around behind the two men, squinting at the black letters on the pearl screen. I saw a list with Roman numeral headings, preceded by some text:
I can’t believe I’ve opened this file. But I’ve got to begin documenting this. I started worrying after what happened at SunSource—because something had happened earlier [something with the Precorp case? or was it the Christmas singers? Look up]. It’s too much to be a coincidence. Months ago, I thought I overheard a phrase that might explain it. I’m going to have to bring it up. Before Super Prime starts spraying!!!!!
I. SunSource: Mario Calas appointment with Maryanne 1/14; Calas could have/should have gotten an individual patent; instead his boss took credit, stole the idea; targeted Calas for layoff. But contract governs re the patent—no case; and Calas can’t prove animus behind layoff. 1/24 Maryanne meets with SunSource public info officer at plant—WHY? 1/25 Merc-News headline “Sabotage Closes SunSource.” Hardware Calas invented broke down, costing them hundreds of thousands. Calas not in plant, no access beforehand.
II. Nova Tech: Systematic refusal to advance women employees or acknowledge their contributions to program refinement/tech support. Common knowledge but no documentation, no way to prove; no case. False predictions by fictitious stock broker on Internet causes plunge in value of stock. Undercapitalization may cause closure. Check office Internet bill.
III. Thefts: At Tulliman Gallery, aborting their main show of year; restitution made anonymously afterward. (Consultation with Maryanne three weeks earlier; no case.) At Hilltop Cannery, of machinery needed to can perishables; entire stock perishes; machinery returned. (Maryanne, no case, ten days before.) At Dataphile. Headline today, restitution. Check Maryanne’s calendar.
IV. Super Prime lays off most of quality-control dept.—one by one after harassing and hassling each about trumped-up things. But no direct evidence of illegal motive for firings; no case for rehire, Maryanne warns fired workers not to say it’s so SP can save money using cheap antioxidants (commercial slander). Machine parts spraying next week. If sabotaged, SP loses biggest contract.
“Is this what I think it is?” I wondered. I scrolled back to the beginning of the document.
“It’s one of Jocelyn Kinsley’s file.”
“Where was it?” It read like an accusation. Why would she leave it where prying eyes could see it? “How did you find it?”
Osmil, his inflections still foreign, replied, “They got remote terminal access.”
“That’s what lets you break in in the first place,” Sandy explained. “They’re set up to access their work computers from home or on the road or wherever. Basically, we pretended we were them and sneaked in.”
“Encrypted password—that’s no problem,” Osmil continued. “But stuck in a weird place.”
I glanced at Sandy.
“Meaning Kinsley had a program that took her password and turned it into mumbo-jumbo—encrypted it. So even if you found her password, it would look like nonsense. You’d have to unencrypt it to use it. But Ozzy’s got the same encryption software. A while back, he encrypted the whole dictionary, has it on disk. He matched the encrypted word against everything in his encrypted dictionary—well, up into the Ds, that’s as far as he had to go. Turns out the password was ‘designer.’”
“As in ‘designer crimes.’”
“Bingo. And this”—he waved at the screen—“wasn’t filed anywhere you’d think to look for a memo. It was in a systems folder for some shovelware utilities no one in an office would care much about.”
I shook my head. “Shovelware?”
“Junk,” he explained. “Imagine the top shelf of an attic closet. Imagine boxes of crap that came with the house. One of them is labeled ‘canning jars.’ There’s a box inside one of the jars. There’s an envelope in the box. That’s where this memo was. In an electronic kind of way.”
Osmil all but snorted at Sandy’s kindergarten explanation, but it suited me. Explained that way, I got it.
“Not easy to find.” Sandy patted Osmil’s shoulder as if to say, that’s my kid. “Usually you can retrieve a file by its date of creation—get recent entries no matter where they’re hidden. But in this case Kinsley changed the date on the computer, making the date on the memo m
atch the one on the shovelware.”
“Everybody hides files that way,” Osmil scoffed.
Sandy nodded. “Ozzy looked to see if a modification was made to the system—if the date was changed, then changed back. He found it was, just last Friday, so he started rummaging.”
“And he found a list of crimes involving software designers and artists. In a box in the attic closet.” I was impressed.
“One software designer and one art gallery. It’s hard to say what ‘program refinement/tech support’ is. And what about the cannery? And the paint primer place?” He shook his head, squatting beside Osmil. “‘Designer’ might not refer to the type of client. It might mean the kind of crime, a custom-designed crime. Think what the cases have in common. A guy gets ripped off on a patent idea, but he can’t do anything about it legally. Next thing you know, the machine breaks down. A company treats its women like shit, and it gets sunk by rumors on the Internet. Three other places, we have no details except somebody stole something crucial and returned it later, after the damage was done. And all these places except maybe the last one, Maryanne More had a powwow with an angry employee first.”
“She talks to angry employees for a living, Sandy.”
“Granted. But Kinsley didn’t just list clients who got fired. She hid the list—hid it pretty damn well. She obviously didn’t believe their employers’ bad luck was coincidence.”
“Maybe she thought the clients were committing crimes because More couldn’t help them.”
“Then why question More’s business meetings? Why check the Internet bill? I’d say Kinsley was worried her partner did help the clients … in ways she shouldn’t.”
“Designed crimes for them?” I shook my head.
“Looks to me like a possibility.”
“More could be arrested, disbarred for that. It’s too risky, Sandy.”
“Risky, sure. But a person could charge big bucks for a service like that. Sabotage the son-of-a-bitch who fired you, bankrupt the sleaze who wouldn’t promote you, embarrass the jerk who stole your ideas. No question about the demand.”
“Fired workers don’t have big bucks. They don’t have money to waste on revenge.”
“Revenge is never cost-effective. But it’s a basic human drive. People are going to get it even if they go broke. Even if it’s crazy, and it tears their life apart.” He made a sweeping gesture. “I wouldn’t have this office if that wasn’t true. And who’d need lawyers?”
I felt a sudden rush, a mingling of hatred and glee. “I wish I could hire someone to mess with Steve Sayres.”
Sandy’s brows rose slightly. “Maybe the clients with money were overcharged to subsidize the ones without. I already looked at More’s bank accounts, the ones under her name. There’s plenty of cash there—in four different banks, two checking, one savings, some short-term CD accounts. Over three hundred thousand.”
“That is a lot for a labor lawyer. But for all we know she was born rich.” And yet part of me wanted her to be below-board, wanted there to be a Robin Hood for the working person. “I wonder what it would take to sabotage Steve.”
“Her salary’s only sixty-one a year.” Sandy remained on point. “Senior partner in her own firm—that’s not very damn much.”
“They don’t have any big union clients.” The Teamsters, the Hotel & Restaurant workers, the public employee unions, they were with the cigar-chomping old-boy firms. “Still, they’re supposed to be the hot new labor firm. I’d have thought they were doing a little better.” But maybe they didn’t have to do better. Maybe some of their income was undeclared. “It’s a hell of a concept, Sandy. Custom revenge on your ex-boss.”
“Get that look off your face. You’re an officer of the court, remember?”
“But Sandy?” He was still squatting beside Osmil. I put my hand on his shoulder. I could feel his body warmth like an electric charge. “If someone thought of a perfect way to make Steve eat crow, I’d pay—god, in a minute. You know what it’ll cost me to sue him for slander? And I wouldn’t have to wait years for some ambiguous resolution.”
He cast a surprised glance at my hand, still on his shoulder. “Yeah, well, you could drop the whole thing. Cut your losses now.”
“What were you just saying about revenge being a basic drive?”
He started to respond then seemed to think better of it. “Maryanne More specializes in high tech labor. I’d have thought that was a stronger base, that she’d draw a decent salary.”
“It’s hard staying afloat without the cushion of a big established firm. Or a major client. I don’t know if I can make it without Perry Verhoeven.” I tried to stanch my rage. Sayres had put a hell of a hole in my boat. “I’m not kidding, Sandy. If there really was a designer-crimes employee revenge service, I’d go wait in line this minute.”
“We’ve got, what?” Sandy checked his watch. “Two hours till the close of business. Let’s go see if More’s at work.”
“Wait a minute. This”—I nodded at the computer screen—“doesn’t mean she did anything illegal.”
“True enough. It could all be coincidence. Or Kinsley could have been way off about who was behind it. It might have been a client. Somebody who got canned and latched onto an idea. Kept informed about who was being fired where and for what.” He rose. “Don’t worry—we’ll be doing plenty more research before we go accusing anybody.”
“Then why bother Maryanne More? They probably don’t even have the coroner’s seal off the law office door yet.”
“Nope, it came down this morning. More insisted they get done in there. She’s got hearings she can’t put off, that’s what I heard.” Sandy had friends in Homicide. Sandy had friends anywhere there were cops. “That’s why I think we might find her there. Be interesting to see the office, too.”
“Actually,” Osmil put in shyly, “she’s there right now.”
Sandy, in the act of rising into a tall stretch, paused. “What do you mean?”
“She’s looking through everything.”
Sandy dropped back down to a squat, checking the computer screen. “What do you see?”
“Somebody going through the folders.”
“Could be the cops.”
“No. She’s got passwords.” Osmil spent a while watching. “Unless she’s taking the police for tour. No, wait wait.” He squinted intently at the screen. “Ay! She’s in the attic. In the closet.”
“Whoever it is,” Sandy interjected, “are they going to find the memo?”
“Up to you,” Osmil said cheerfully.
Sandy glanced at me. “Leave it or erase it?”
“You have a copy?”
“Of course.”
“Can the person open the file?”
“Not unless she unencrypted the password.”
“Ha!” Osmil’s laugh began as an explosion and subsided to a titter. “She’s trying to open it, trying passwords. Trying ‘Joss,’ ‘Jocelyn,’ ‘Kinsley,’ ‘Puff’—bet that’s her pet’s name.”
I stared at the screen, seeing words appear beneath a list of file names, a few of them highlighted.
“Guess she’s giving up for now. She’s making a copy onto a diskette. Whoa!” He twisted in his chair to face Sandy. He looked like a happy kid about to dive off the tall board. “She’s burning the file.”
I could tell by Sandy’s expression this was significant. I nudged him. “Tell me.”
“There’s a program,” Sandy said absently, his attention on the screen, “that can bring up a file even after it’s been erased.”
“Unless you write a new file to that exact place on the hard drive.” Osmil spoke with adolescent triumph.
“Usually you erase something by mistake, you can get it back because you haven’t done enough in the meantime to use that exact same spot on the disk. The old file doesn’t show on your menu anym
ore. But it’s still sitting there, under the command, ‘Write over me.’ It’s like taping movies on your VCR. If you’ve got a cupboard full of tapes, your chances of taping over a bit you want are slim, at least initially.”
“But if you want to erase something you’ve taped, you tape over it right away.” I endeavored to prove I followed.
Osmil grinned up at me. As happy as he looked, as intelligent as he was, it seemed a great pity he had no mother to feel proud of him. “You can write over it with random strings, one zero zero one, like that. If you write over it three times not even an electron microscope can pull the old file off the hard drive.”
“That’s called burning a file,” Sandy added. “Well, we know the cops aren’t there. No way they’d be burning anything.” Sandy grinned. “Let’s go check her out.”
To my surprise, Osmil said, “Can I come?”
“Too many cooks.”
Osmil looked bewildered.
“I’ll tell you about the hardware when we get back,” Sandy promised.
He nodded, dark brows dropping a sullen fraction. “Want me to catch her phone bills?” He began tapping the computer keys.
Sandy grinned at me. Subpoenas? Privacy? The laws of the state of California? “I didn’t hear what you just said, Ozzy.” To me, he added, “He’s just going to play a few computer games while we’re gone. No harm in that. I can’t be in here supervising him every minute.”
I turned away, choosing not to show my comprehension. This didn’t involve any case or client of mine. It was none of my business.
Just once I’d like to say that to myself and have it turn out to be true.
6
The last time I visited More & Kinsley, anger at Steve Sayres kept me from noticing the outer office decor. Now I saw that the artwork, which I recalled as too sweet, was simply classic. The walls were hung with Renaissance-style oil paintings, the largest showing a golden-haired pregnant woman beside a man tended vines. Smaller ones depicted women spinning thread or washing marble floors or wet-nursing a wealthy couple’s baby.