How to Succeed in Murder (3 page)

Chapter Four

I came home bursting to tell Jack about Brenda’s connection to the murdered woman. But, when I found him in the kitchen surrounded by three cardboard boxes filled with pots, pans, gigantic spoons, and a variety of miscellaneous steel objects that I wouldn’t be able to identify if my life depended on it, I admit I got distracted.

“You just missed Gordon,” he greeted me. “He brought us some equipment.”

I picked up a metal thing with a large handle and a mysterious purpose. “For what? Beating off intruders?”

Jack grinned and started opening cabinets. “That’s a potato ricer.”

I stared at it. “Does it make potatoes or rice?”

“It makes mashed potatoes. You like mashed potatoes, don’t you? Won’t it be nice to have them whenever we want?”

I’ve always had mashed potatoes whenever I want, and I’ve never had to resort to using medieval torture devices. “Why isn’t it called a potato masher?”

Jack plucked another implement out of a box. “This is a potato masher.”

I blinked. “Okay. Never mind. Where did Gordon get all this stuff?”

Jack was opening empty drawers and pantomiming movements from drawer to sink, then from cabinet to stove and back, seeming to find meaning in it all. The kitchen was large and filled with light. The cabinets were painted creamy white, with shiny black marble countertops, and appliances glistening in brushed steel. It was all perfectly lovely and I saw no need to clutter it up with cooking paraphernalia. I hovered by the large center “prep” island to stay out of my husband’s way.

“Some of them are Gordon’s castoffs,” he told me. “Now that he’s got the restaurant, he’s going through everything he’s picked up over the years and weeding out what he doesn’t need anymore.”

“Uh huh.” There was a certain fascination in watching Jack. He always moved quickly, and seemingly effortlessly. I realized his pantomime act was an attempt to figure out the place for each object that would allow him the greatest economy of movement while he worked in the kitchen. “So it was all Gordon’s?”

Jack flashed me a grin. “Maybe some of it was Harry’s.”

“We’re setting up house with my uncle’s purloined kitchenware?”

“Do you mind?”

“Hell no. Why didn’t Gordon raid the liquor cabinet while he was there?”

“I asked him the same question about the wine cellar.” Jack turned, and before I knew it he’d swept me off my feet and plopped me down on the island countertop. He pinned me there, with one hand on either side of me, leaning in close. “How was lunch?”

“Oh!” I pushed him away and remembered why I’d rushed home. “You’ll never believe me! Brenda knew Clara Chen!”

“What?” Jack’s playful mood vanished instantly.

“She went to Berkeley at the same time as Brenda,” I told him. “Clara was taking classes in Computer Science and Business, of course, and Brenda didn’t know many geeks, but they were in a couple of political action groups together and got to be pretty good friends. Assuming it’s the same Clara Chen.”

Jack nodded and moved away to lean on the counter opposite me. “Stokes emailed her bio today. She graduated from Berkeley thirteen years ago.”

Jack’s confirmation that it was really Brenda’s former schoolmate who had died two nights ago was almost unnecessary. From Brenda’s description of the bright, driven young woman she’d known, I’d had little doubt that her Clara had gone on to become a Vice President at Zakdan.

“Brenda said she was a major academic star. Brilliant. She tried to talk Clara into doing grad work in law or the humanities, but Clara was set on a technology track.”

“It paid off for her,” Jack said. “She worked at two other companies before coming to Zakdan. Even in the worst times of the high-tech crash she seems to have been a hot commodity, heavily recruited by other firms.”

“Do you think someone was trying to steal her away from Zakdan?”

“She’d gotten offers, Stokes was sure of that. But she never showed any interest in them. She was already a VP at Zakdan, and Stokes was about to promote her again, to Executive Vice President. He was also going to give her fifty percent of his shares of the company when they got married.”

“I’m guessing that’s a lot of shares.”

“I checked the stock price. As of today, they’d be worth about three hundred and forty million dollars.”

“Yikes. And he was just going to give them to her?”

“He said he wanted them to be full partners in everything they did.”

I thought about the devastated man we’d met just the day before. “How’s he doing?”

Jack paused. “About how you’d expect.”

“Jack.” I had to approach the next topic carefully. “Had he told people about his plans to promote Clara, or about the stock?”

I looked up to find Jack regarding me with an unreadable face. “Why?”

I was utterly nonchalant, picking up a spoon from the box next to me. “I just wondered.”

“You mean you wondered if anyone had a motive for killing her.”

Ah ha! “So you do think she was killed!”

Jack frowned. “Charley, we’re not getting involved.”

“We already are involved.”

“Okay, then we’re not getting more involved. We’re not detectives and we’re not going to—”

“Who did he tell?”

“Charley!”

“Oh, come on, I’m not going to do anything about it. But I know he told you who else knew about the promotion and the stock.” I waited expectantly.

Jack blew his breath out in exasperation. “Then can we drop it?”

“Of course.” I used my most reasonable voice.

“He only told the Chief Technology Officer, Lalit Kumar, and the Executive VP of Engineering, a guy named Jim Stoddard.”

“Lalit Kumar and Jim Stoddard,” I repeated. “What are their stories?”

“They have no stories,” Jack said firmly. “There are no stories, and there are no reasons for us to talk about this. It’s none of our business.”

“Right,” I said. “You’re right. Let’s leave it up to the police.” I removed all expression from my face. “What are you making for dinner?” Something with a side of mashed potatoes, no doubt.

I ignored the way he was looking at me and gave my husband a bright, trustworthy smile. Then I left him to make some calls.

***

“I’m so glad you called!” Brenda was on my doorstep at noon on Monday. “I mean, I was so upset about Clara after we talked on Friday, but I didn’t know what to do with that energy —it was so good to have something constructive to focus on.”

She came into the foyer lugging a satchel bulging with papers, her oversized coat swirling around her shoulders and her long straight hair sliding out of its clip. “I found out so much—” She stopped suddenly and looked around.

“Charley, you don’t have any furniture.”

“I know.” I grabbed my purse from its place on the floor.

“No, but I mean…” She looked through the arched doorway to the large living room, then backtracked across the entrance hall to open the doors to what would eventually be a library and a dining room. “Charley, I knew you hadn’t
decorated
, but I thought you’d have something—there’s not a stick of furniture in here!”

“We have a bed,” I told her.

“But it’s been
weeks
!” She turned around, as if expecting to see a set of leather club chairs materialize. “Where do you live?”

“We have a bed,” I said firmly. “Now come on. We’re going to be late.”

Brenda stopped squinting into empty rooms. “Oh! Right!” She suddenly seemed to notice that I was standing at the door, coat buttoned and bag in hand. “Where are we meeting Eileen?”

“At her office.”

“I thought you hated going to her office.” She stepped outside, and I closed the door behind us.

“I do. But desperate times call for a trip to the financial district.”

***

Brenda spent the trip downtown trying to get at the deep underlying psychological issues that might explain why I hadn’t bought a sofa yet. Which was my own fault—I thought we should wait until we were at Eileen’s office to talk about Clara Chen’s death.

“Finally!” Eileen jumped to her feet as her assistant ushered us into her office. “What took you so long?”

“Don’t ask.” The last thing I needed was for them to tag team me on my supposed ambivalence toward putting down roots. We needed to focus on serious matters. “How much time have we got?”

Eileen checked her slim wristwatch. “My calendar is clear until three. Come on, I’ve set things up at the conference table.”

Eileen’s office was huge, with sleek minimal furniture and acres of uncluttered space. The conference table was positioned in front of a floor-to-ceiling window offering a calculated-to-impress-clients view of the Transamerica pyramid and a bit of the Bay Bridge beyond it. I knew Eileen was important at her firm, but the view spoke volumes about how important.

It was all very nice, but something about the crisp efficiency of everyone we’d passed on the way from the elevators, and the tidy stacks of manila folders on every flat surface, and the general buzz of purposeful dialogue made me feel as though I might break out in some sort of rash. Places of business usually affect me that way.

There were four neat stacks of color-coded folders on the conference table, aligned in perfect symmetry. Brenda plonked her overflowing satchel down in the middle of them. “Okay.” She looked at us.

“Okay,” Eileen said.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Now, what have we been able to find out about Zakdan?”

Chapter Five

Eileen is a financial genius. She has one of those brilliant heads for business that land people on the covers of magazines that are too tedious to even think of reading. So I had every expectation that she’d be able to come up with a detailed analysis of the financial position of Morgan Stokes’ company with one hand tied behind her back.

But I never thought Brenda would turn out to be an investigative mastermind. I’d suggested that she log some internet time over the weekend, reading up on Zakdan, the Chief Technology guy Lalit Kumar, and Jim Stoddard, the other executive that Jack had mentioned—as well as Morgan Stokes himself and anyone else whose name came up along the way. I hadn’t expected her to compile an encyclopedia.

She pulled a three-inch stack of papers, bound with a giant black clip, out of her bottomless satchel. “Do you guys know why it’s called Zakdan?”

I shook my head.

She grinned, stuffing everything but the stack of papers back into her bag and slinging that onto one of the buttery leather chairs that lined both sides of the table. “In the late eighties, two guys from the Computer Science department at Brown started fooling around with an idea for a programming toolkit to help engineers build graphical applications for the PC more easily.” She saw my blank look and waved her hand. “It doesn’t matter what they did. The point is, their names were Zak Bridges and Dan Maceri.”

“Zak and Dan?” Eileen’s eyebrows went up.

Brenda’s grin got wider. “You got it.”

I pulled her pile of papers toward me. “This is all about Zakdan? And you got it all in one weekend? Do you keep a team of hackers working for you in a basement somewhere?”

Her eyes flashed. “This isn’t even half of what I found. Everything is online these days. And—while from a civil-liberties point of view I’m shocked and appalled by the amount of personal information that you can find on just about everyone—a good search engine sure makes investigating someone easy.”

Wow. Duly noting her moral compunction, Eileen and I stared at her. “Do we have to read all this,” I asked, “or are you going to give us the good stuff?”

First she gave us the dull stuff. Apparently Zak and Dan had been awfully successful with their initial set of tools—which as near as I could tell were bits of computer programs—and had bundled them into a hugely popular product.

“I’ve never heard of it,” I said. “How can it be hugely popular?”

Eileen almost refrained from rolling her eyes and suggested that the Zakdan offerings were probably more well-known among people who’d majored in subjects other than English Literature.

Brenda continued.

The next Zakdan goldmine had involved games. They developed another set of tools that made it a lot easier to program computer games. Apparently just about every blood-splattering, engine-revving, demon-hunting game on the market had bits of Zakdan technology at its core.

Then they turned their attention to the emerging needs of web-site developers. Since this was right about the time when everyone and his brother had decided to get a web site, they’d made another fortune. That’s when the two had gone their separate ways, taking their separate millions.

“They got out just before the whole internet bubble burst,” Eileen marveled. “They couldn’t have timed it better if they’d popped the thing themselves.”

“Are you sure they didn’t?” I asked. “It sounds like they were smart enough to.”

“Charley, the high-tech crash was precipitated by a variety of economic and market—”

“Stop!” I held up my hands. “Please—not Internet Economics 101.” I turned to Brenda. “Just tell me what happened to Zakdan next.”

Eileen’s sigh indicated I was turning my back on a priceless learning opportunity, but she nodded to Brenda.

“That’s when Morgan Stokes was named CEO,” she told us. “He had a fairly rough time at first, because the bottom was dropping out of the market and a lot of the most senior people left when the founders took off. But in a way he was lucky, because with every other firm in the business having massive layoffs, he was able to hire in some of the best talent as they became available.”

“Like Clara Chen,” I said.

“Yes.” She paused for a moment, as we remembered the reason we were interested in all of this.

Brenda cleared her throat. “A few of the old guard stayed on. Some of them are still there. But most of the exec staff joined at about that time.”

“And what are they all doing for their millions now?” I asked.

“Moving beyond the PC,” she told me. As if I knew what that meant. “The same ideas they brought to web development, they’re now bringing to platform development for devices.”

I swallowed. “Can we try that again in English?”

“Cell phones. Digital cameras. Digital music players. All the portable devices that people use to communicate and share data.”

“Like my Palm thingy.” At least I’m not totally out of the technogear loop, thanks to a gift from my husband.

She nodded. “Exactly. Zakdan makes a development platform that lets other programmers build applications on a huge variety of devices. And not just toys. They work on handhelds that doctors use for patient data, and major companies use to manage inventory. It’s fascinating, really.”

“Uh huh.” Fascinating in a way that made my brain hurt. I looked at them. “What else have we got?”

“No dirt on my end,” Eileen said regretfully. “I looked into every aspect of their financial outlook over the past four years and there’s nothing. They’re healthy, and seem to be well-run. They got into trouble with the IRS a while ago for using temporary workers in full-time jobs, but a lot of companies do that. You pay the fine and deal with it.” She ran her hands across the color-coded folders. “I have their tax filings, their earnings statements, their annual reports, and transcripts of their analyst calls if you want to go over them.”

Not with a ten-foot pole. “Never mind,” I said. “If you say they’re in good shape, they’re in good shape.”

She shrugged. “As far as I can tell.”

Brenda spoke up. “I couldn’t find anything suspicious about any of the people involved there either.” Disappointment was clear in the little vertical line between her eyes. She pushed her glasses up. “Morgan seems like a great guy. He gives a lot to charity—I mean, not on the scale you do, Charley, but—”

I waved my hand for her to go on.

“He went to Brown, and he’s endowed a scholarship there in the Computer Science department. He bought a beautiful house for his mom outside of Philadelphia, and he’s sending a nephew to college. He seems genuinely nice, and of course we know he’s brilliant. Clara probably would have been happy with him.” She looked up at us. “It’s so sad.”

Eileen reached for Brenda’s printout. “What about anyone else at Zakdan? Could she have made any enemies?”

“I don’t know. We’d need access to their personnel files to know if she’d fired anyone or anything like that. Oh!” Her eyes brightened. “I did get one whiff of scandal. That guy you told me to look up—Jim Stoddard?”

I nodded. “The other executive vice president.”

“Right. He’s had a couple of DUIs in the past few years. That might be something.”

“I’d be happier if he had a meth lab in his attic,” Eileen said. “Or a prostitution ring running out of his garage. Something good and juicy.”

We looked at each other. We had nothing juicy. We had nothing.

***

When Brenda dropped me in front of the house—too depressed at our lack of progress to even come in and talk about my lack of furniture—I saw someone had left a package on the front steps. On closer inspection, it wasn’t a package. It was a stack. A stack of plays. At least fifteen of them.

I struggled to unlock the door and slide them across the threshold while dialing Simon on my cell phone.

“What the hell is this?”

“Hello to you too, darling,” he answered. “What the hell is what?”

The stack toppled over and the manuscripts slid into an untidy pile on my walnut inlaid floor. Or was it maple? I’m sure the realtor had told me, but who could keep track? “This stack of plays that were waiting on my doorstep. Didn’t you leave them?”

“Ah. No, that would have been Chip.”

Oh. Chip. That made sense. Ever since I’d let him start directing plays at the Rep, the workaholic Chip had become even more obsessive than he’d been as our stage manager. He was a great guy, but he really needed to get a life outside the theater.

“That boy needs to get laid,” Simon said.

“I was just thinking something similar myself.”

“Do you know he’s going through our entire slush pile? Been at it ever since closing night. It’s unnatural.”

“What do you mean, our entire slush pile?”

“Just what I said, darling. Everything.”

Ever since our first season, aspiring playwrights had been sending their unsolicited masterpieces for our consideration. Since we only mounted an average of four productions per season—and most of them classics—the odds were not in their favor. We’d rejected hundreds, usually not even giving them a brief glance before tossing them into overflowing boxes in a corner of an office. The slush pile.

Simon was still talking. “…says you said something about wanting to work with new a playwright next season. Throw over the classics for something a bit more—are you listening to me?”

“Of course, sweetie.” As much as I needed to. “So he’s narrowed the slush pile down to this?”

Simon produced a particularly elegant snort. “He’s barely scratched the surface. But he wants us to read these, and meet on Friday and tell him what we think. Mind you, I could tell him—”

“Never mind, Simon,” I cut him off. “We might as well. It doesn’t look like either of us is going to make it out of town for a real vacation, so we might as well get a jump on next season.”

He paused. “I hate it when you’re right.”

“In this case, Chip’s right. Talk to you later.”

I’d re-stacked the manuscripts while talking to Simon, and now I picked them up and looked around the empty entrance hall, thinking that a table of some sort might be a very handy thing near the door.

I decided to take the stack upstairs to the room I planned to use as my office. There were no handy tables there, either, so I dropped the manuscripts in a corner and looked around, hoping a brilliant idea for the perfectly designed home office would magically appear. No such luck.

Leaving, I glanced across the hall to the room Jack had chosen for his own office and froze. When had he had time to buy furniture?

I went in. He’d set up a desk, where a computer was humming away happily. He’d also gotten a very high-tech looking chair. These were angled in front of the window to let the light fall on the desk without getting any glare on the computer screen. A variety of moving boxes were scattered around, mixed in with piles of books and other work-related odds and ends.

Jack’s partner, Mike, had started their company in a rented space down in Palo Alto, but it looked like Jack already had a fully functional satellite branch of MJC on the second floor of our house.

I went to his desk in disbelief. Not only was he set up, it looked like he was working on something. There were papers and files on the desk, pens scattered around, and little notes on little notepapers.

It took me a minute to realize what I was looking at, probably because I was so stunned to be looking at anything at all. But when I did recognize it, there was no way I wasn’t going to read it.

Jack had Clara Chen’s autopsy report.