How to Succeed in Murder (5 page)

Chapter Eight

I returned in triumph. Simon had dragged me through every inch of the San Francisco Design Center. I’d seen oriental rugs and French provincial buffets and classical revival fainting couches and modern urban settees.

And I’d studied the exterior of the Zakdan building from every possible angle. But my husband didn’t need to know that yet.

“Jack!” I yelled as I came in. “I’ve been shopping!”

“I know.” He appeared at the top of the stairs. “I got your note. Come on up.”

“Jack, I really think I’m getting somewhere. I mean, I looked at a ton of stuff and I really feel like things are coming together.” I bounded up the stairs and grabbed his hand, intending to pull him up the next flight to the bedroom.

“That’s great, Charley.” He pulled me the other direction, and I realized he was heading for his office. “There’s something—”

“Jack—how do you feel about shabby chic? It’s when you buy really expensive stuff that looks like it’s been rotting in a barn for a hundred years, and—”

“Whatever you want, Pumpkin. But first—”

“Or we could go for all clean lines and geometric shapes—think the W hotel—and stay with a neutral palette and dark finishes and uplights…” I’d picked up a lot of lingo on the expedition. “What do you think?”

I stopped him before he got to the door, and leaned against the wall in the most provocative pose I could manage—given that I still wore last year’s quilted Burberry coat and I was carrying the world’s heaviest shopping bag. “Wouldn’t that be sexy?”

His eyes darkened. “I never really thought about it that way.” He moved closer. “But if you say so—”

I nodded. “I say so.” He got within necking range, so I dropped the shopping bag and went for it. I ran my hands up his arms. He smelled good. He smelled like…veal marsala?

“Hi, Charley. Oops!”

I opened my eyes and saw Jack’s partner, Mike, ducking back into Jack’s office. I looked up at my husband, who was doing a poor job of hiding his amusement. “Well.” I straightened the Burberry. “You at least have to give me credit for some improvement. I used to scream when your friends suddenly appeared out of nowhere.”

Gordon suddenly materialized behind Jack and I screamed. But it was just a little one.

“Please excuse me, Charley. I was trying out a few recipes and thought I’d bring something up for you and Jack.” Gordon came as close to looking flustered as I’d ever seen him.

“Would that something be veal marsala?”

His expression cleared. “Are you hungry?”

Suddenly I was famished.

***

The three of them were clearly in the middle of something. There were stacks of folders, half a dozen thick binders, and three laptops in the office. Jack had installed some shelving and unpacked a couple boxes of books, but there was still a lot of stuff scattered around, including the remains of an impromptu picnic. The guys had apparently been sampling Gordon’s menu while spread out on the floor.

Gordon smoothly removed some paperwork from Jack’s desk and set a place for me in front of the one and only chair. I heard him mutter something about “at least one person sitting like a civilized human being” as he went about it, but he had fully recovered his considerable composure.

The three men were roughly the same age—late thirties or so, and when I’d first met him I’d thought Mike looked a lot like Jack. They were both tall, and had similar builds, but after knowing him a few months I had to admit that Jack’s business partner was a geek to his probably-computerized core.

Sadly, although Mike had the raw material of a hunky-brainy type, he apparently had no interest in cultivating the look. Instead, he had the appearance of a man who cut his own hair with dull scissors and dressed without benefit of a mirror.

Gordon, on the other hand, was impeccable. He was slighter than the other two, and his hair was thinning at the crown. He was a study in control, and I had to admit that when I’d first met him I’d cast him in the role of a mild-mannered serial killer. Luckily, I’d been wrong.

Although he clearly had no moral reservations about the murder of baby cows—and smelling the veal dish I put aside mine as well—Gordon had turned out to be surprisingly softhearted. He could even put up with Uncle Harry.

“What are you guys working on?” I asked innocently, taking off my coat and trying not to drool as Gordon composed a plate of baby root vegetables, roasted new potatoes, and veal, then ladled the rich mushroomy sauce over it.

Nobody answered me.

“I’m rethinking the plate.” Gordon placed the meal before me. “I’d been thinking classic white with a one-and-three-quarters-inch rim, but now I’m not sure if it needs a little something more.”

I took a bite. “It needs nothing.”

“Of course, in the restaurant I’ll do a dusting of fresh parsley, and that will add visual interest…” he mused.

I’ll stack my foodie credentials up against any other self-respecting San Franciscan, but I’ve never fallen into the trap of valuing presentation over taste. “It’s amazing,” I assured him. “You’re a genius.”

“He knows he’s a genius,” Mike said. “He just wants to be a successful-restaurant-owning genius.”

“Unlike you,” Gordon replied. “I suppose you want to be a bankrupt computer-security consultant?”

Mike ran his finger around the one-and-three-quarters-inch rim of his plate, then licked it. “Nope, I’m pretty much in it for the money.”

“How’s it going?” I asked. “What are you working on?” Not that I didn’t have my suspicions.

“Zakdan,” Mike said. “It’s fascinating. They’re—”

I was too busy giving my husband an “ah ha!” look to pay attention to what Mike found so fascinating.

Jack interrupted his colleague using his best it’s-no-big-deal voice. “We’re working on the computer glitch that Morgan Stokes first approached Mike about.”

Oh.

Well, still. “Is that all you’re working on?” I enquired suggestively.

Mike was oblivious to my prompts.

“It’s really interesting,” he told me. “They noticed a pattern in the issues being reported to tech support over the last six months or so. At first I didn’t see it—it’s very intricate—but it’s there. There’s something going on with the code and it isn’t random.”

“Tech support?” I looked from Mike to Jack. “Isn’t that the department Clara Chen managed? Only it had a fancier name.” Something about clients.

“Oh.” Mike suddenly looked nervous. “Um—I mean…” He found something worth studying on his empty plate.

“Yes.” Jack was watching me carefully. “Stokes told us it was Clara who first noticed the pattern.”

Again, it took every ounce of self-control to refrain from shouting “Ah ha!”

“But,” Jack continued, “he also told us he was absolutely sure she hadn’t said anything about it to anyone else. So if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking…”

“What? You mean that someone killed Clara Chen because she discovered a conspiracy at Zakdan?”

Jack closed his eyes briefly. “Something like that.”

“Come on, Jack—it’s a motive!” I looked to the other guys for support. Gordon suddenly became fascinated with the flame under his chafing dish and Mike gave his plate even more attention.

“It might be a motive,” Jack said evenly, “
if
it turns out that the glitch in the software was deliberately engineered and not just a bug—which we haven’t established. And it might be a motive,” he continued before I could respond, “
if
the person who engineered it knew that Clara had noticed something.”

“But.” Mike gave me a half-hearted smile. “Since Morgan Stokes is the only one who knew she’d noticed something, he’d be the only one with a motive to kill her.”

“And then only if he’d been the one to engineer the bug,” Gordon concluded. “In which case he’d hardly have hired these two to investigate it.”

“So, Charley.” Jack stood, and something in his body language triggered the other two to start looking around for their jackets. “We still don’t have anything solid to go on.”

I could accept the facts. I nodded in agreement, and said one word.

“Yet.”

***

Jack told Gordon that we—meaning, I assumed, he—would clean up and return his catering paraphernalia to him later. So later that evening my husband and I formed a cozy little picture of domesticity at the kitchen sink.

Jack washed, I talked.

“Simon and I drove past Zakdan today. It’s right down the street from the Design Center.”

“I know. Mike and I went there yesterday.”

“Yesterday? You didn’t say anything about it.” It was actually nice, watching Jack with his sleeves rolled up, flexing his forearms in the sudsy water.

“You didn’t ask.” He reached for a towel. “Which reminds me—what did you do yesterday?”

I swallowed. Not that I wanted to lie to my husband about going behind his back with Eileen and Brenda to look for nefarious goings-on at Zakdan, but… Okay, yes. I did want to lie about that.

“Brenda came over for a while,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie. “And gave me serious grief about the lack of comfy chairs in the living room.” Also completely true. “That’s why she sent Simon over to ambush me today.” Utterly truthful, and a nice segue into a completely different and much safer topic. “Oh! I haven’t shown you what I bought!”

“I assumed it was being delivered,” he said. “Something in modern lines with geometric shapes?”

“That was just an idea. Meet me in the dining room.”

I dashed upstairs and recovered the world’s heaviest shopping bag. Then I went to the dining room to find Jack waiting, leaning against the wall with his arms folded and a gleam in his eye.

“Wait…” I turned my back to him so I could remove my treasure from acres of tissue paper without him seeing it. “I really wasn’t sure—it was between this and a life-size ceramic rooster, but I thought this was just—” I turned around and held it up.

“It’s a…” He furrowed his brow.

“A candlestick.” I brought it closer. “It’s an antique, wrought iron candlestick from France. See the fleur-de-lis?”

“Now that you mention it.”

“It’s going to set the tone for the whole look in here. What do you think?”

He took the candlestick and examined it, his expression unreadable.

“Jack? What do you think?”

He cleared his throat. “Well, it’s clearly superior to any ceramic rooster I’ve ever seen.”

I took it from him and set it on the floor in the center of the room. It was exactly right. “There. It will be just perfect when I find the right table.” I beamed at Jack, then looked back at it. “The dealer said it was really rare to find one this old that wasn’t completely rusted.”

Jack stood behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. “It’s one in a million,” he said. “Just like you.”

Chapter Nine

While Jack finished up in the kitchen, I went upstairs and tried to invent a plausible reason for meeting Brenda late that night. And for doing so alone.

Sometimes it comes in very handy to be involved in the theatre.

***

“There’s this thing tonight,” I told Jack, after finding him back in his office. “It’s sort of an experimental, avant-garde play.”

“Sounds fun.” He tapped a few keys and the screen changed. “When do we leave?”

“It should be amazing,” I said. “Even though it is only a student production put on by some of the kids in one of Brenda’s classes.”

“Oh.”

Did I sense a decline in his interest? Please?

“It’s performed in real time—and real space—around the city,” I went on. “It’s more performance art than traditional theatre…about how the mainstream media has corrupted the true meaning of the feminist movement. One of the characters is a womb, which is played somehow by a talking watermelon.”

If that didn’t do the trick…

“Um, tonight?” He scrunched up his face. “I may need to do some work.”

“Oh,” I said with profound disappointment. “Are you sure you can’t come with us? Some of it is performed in mime…”

At which news Jack firmly but regretfully declined the offer.

Mission accomplished.

***

Brenda picked me up around ten thirty, and we got to the gym a bit before eleven, which is just about the time Clara Chen had gotten there on the last night of her life.

The lobby looked like it belonged in some upscale modern hotel. There were sleek chairs arranged around flat-screen televisions playing all sorts of sporting events. An espresso bar at the far end of the room was just closing. They had all the amenities, apparently, except security.

The girl at the front desk wore a white WorkSpace polo shirt and was perkiness personified. She hit us with a “you can do it” smile as soon as we were in the door.

I didn’t have a membership card, so I’d planned on talking our way in with a story about wanting to look around the place a bit before deciding whether we wanted to join. But Brenda took control of things as we approached the desk.

“I can’t believe you invited me here and then forgot your membership card,” she declared loudly.

I stared at her.

The girl behind the counter spoke up. “Oh, did you forget your card? That’s okay, everybody does it. Lots of people leave them in the locker rooms by accident, and then they don’t even know it until they come back again, and then they’re all like ‘hey, where’s my card?’ and I’m like ‘are you sure you had it with you when you left?’”

She blasted me with a dazzling smile. “Do you have any ID? All we really need is a driver’s license.”

Brenda gave me a “what are you waiting for?” look, so I handed over my license.

The girl, whose nametag read “Tiff,” twirled her ponytail with one hand while she scanned my card with the other.

“There you are.” She studied the computer screen. “Family membership. Gosh, Mrs. Fairfax, your husband comes here all the time, but this looks like your first visit. Is this your first visit? Because all the trainers are gone and you should work with a trainer on your first visit.” Her eyes clouded over at this predicament.

“That’s okay,” I told her. “We just want to grab a quick steam before you close. I don’t really need to be trained for that.”

She beamed; training crisis averted. “Okay! Great! And is this your guest?” She gave Brenda a smile that said WorkSpace loved guests, then turned back to me. “You can bring in a guest twice a month for free, but you’re supposed to use the coupons that we send out with your flyer every month. Are you getting the flyer? Do you have a coupon?”

I vaguely recalled seeing the occasional envelope from the gym in the mail, but I’d never opened one.

“I must have forgotten that too.”

Tiff waved her hand. “Never mind.” She grabbed a card from a stack on the counter and handed it to Brenda. “Just fill this out. It’ll be our little secret.” She winked. “How many towels do you guys want?”

Brenda filled out the guest card, which Tiff tossed into a drawer before we took our towels and followed her directions to the women’s locker room.

There were three women just leaving when we got there. They all seemed to have been in the same Pilates class, and were discussing posture and ab strength as they passed us on their way out. Then we were alone.

“This is really nice,” Brenda murmured.

It was. They clearly went in for the swank spa look at WorkSpace. I could understand why Clara had preferred coming here instead of the generic twenty-four hour place that was just down the street from Zakdan.

The lighting was flattering, and the long vanity contained tidy wicker baskets filled with anything a person might possibly forget to put in her gym bag. The aisles were wide, with gleaming wooden benches down the center and hair-and-makeup stations at the ends.

We turned down an aisle. All the locker doors were slightly ajar. I opened one and put my purse in it.

Brenda had gotten quiet. Both of us knew what we were going to do next, and neither of us wanted to do it.

“Brenda, we don’t have to—”

She shook her head. “No. We’re here. It’s why we came.”

She opened another locker and started peeling off her clothes.

When I was wrapped in a towel and my clothes were all hanging in my locker, I tried to close the door. It refused to shut all the way. I opened it again and realized the bolt on the door was extended, preventing it from closing.

“Did they give us keys?”

“I think…” Brenda produced her guest card and inserted it into a slot at the top of the handle. There was a clicking sound, and the bolt retracted. She closed the door. “Ta da.”

“Oh, it’s like a hotel key,” I realized. I popped my temporary membership card in once to unlock mine, then closed the door and swiped the card again to lock it.

“Hey, how did you know Jack got a family membership here?” I asked as I tried to figure out where to put the membership card. Towels don’t have pockets. “Did he say something?”

“No, but it seemed like the sort of thing he’d do.”

“Why? Does he think I’m fat?” Flattering lighting or no, those walls were covered with mirrors, and—

“Don’t be an idiot,” Brenda scolded. “He thinks you’re perfect. And he—”

But further defense of my husband was cut off by an announcement over the loudspeaker system. It was eleven thirty, and the gym would be closing in half an hour.

I met Brenda’s eyes. It was now or never.

We followed a sign pointing the way to the women’s steam room and dry sauna facilities. Both of us hesitated in front of the steam room.

As soon as I opened the door we were engulfed in the white mist that came spilling out. We went in, and when the door closed behind us I could barely see Brenda through the hot wet fog.

This is where Clara had died. This claustrophobic tiled room with two ledges for seating, and only one door out.

“What’s this?” Brenda’s voice was shaky, but resolute.

She was pointing at a large red button on the wall near the lower seating ledge.

“A panic button?” I guessed. Could Clara have used it to call for help?

Brenda pushed it, and we immediately heard a loud hiss as more steam came pouring out of nozzles in the walls.

“Not a panic button,” Brenda coughed. “Can you breathe in here?”

Not very well. I felt the ledge where Clara had hit her head, trying to keep from seeing the scene in my mind. The edge didn’t feel too sharp to me, but it was undeniably hard.

“How slippery does it seem to you?” I tested my foot on the wet tile floor to get a sense of how easily a person might slip.

Then I looked over to Brenda and realized what a bad idea this had been.

I caught her just as her legs went out from under her, and half-dragged her out of there, apologizing for bringing her along in the first place and telling her we were leaving immediately.

“No,” she said, gasping for air. “We’re staying. We came this far.” She sat on a bench and looked at the door to the steam room. “Just not…not where Clara…”

She took a deep breath.

“Just not in there.”

So after taking a few moments to collect ourselves, we moved to the dry sauna instead. It was just as small and just as hot, but without the steam, and without the feeling that Clara’s ghost was watching us.

We sat on the slatted wooden benches and didn’t say much for a while. At eleven forty-five we heard the second announcement about the gym closing.

Brenda still looked shaky. She needed a distraction, so I blurted out the first thing that popped into my head.

“I bought a candlestick with Simon today.”

She blinked. “A candlestick?”

She seemed less than impressed, but maybe it was just the circumstances. At least she sounded a little more like herself.

“An antique French candlestick,” I elaborated.

As a distraction, that seemed to do the trick.

“That’s it?” she said. “An entire day’s shopping and you bought one lousy candlestick?”

Okay, maybe it did the trick too well.

“It isn’t lousy.” I wrapped the towel tighter. “And I made a lot of progress in figuring out what I want.”

“Charley, I can’t believe you. I mean, I know your fear of commitment is epic—”

“It is not!” I protested. “At least, not once I figure out what I want to commit to—look at the Rep!”

“Well, sure, the Rep. It’s perfect for you. It’s always changing.”

Your friends always know how to hit you with the truth.

“What about Jack?” I countered. “I’d call getting married a commitment.”

“Which is why I had a glimmer of hope that marrying Jack and buying the house might mean you’d grown up, but—”

“Grown up? Since when do you have to buy custom upholstery to be grown up? What is it with you and furniture? Why do you care about—”

“Because I want you to stay!” she yelled.

“I am staying!” I yelled back. Then, “What?”

She clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Brenda, what are you talking about? Where do you think I’m going?”

She exhaled slowly, and took a minute to do her getting-centered thing, before answering.

“Charley, I know you weren’t crazy about the idea of buying a house, and I know you want to go away for your break. I just don’t want you to go off somewhere again and not come back. I want you to stay.”

“Brenda, I—”

But she was on a roll. “I want you and Jack to be happy and live here and raise babies and—”

“Babies!” I suddenly had a hard time getting my breath. “Who said anything about—”

“Okay! Maybe not babies right away. But I want you to have a home. I want you to have roots and be connected here. I know Jack has lived all over the place, and you—”

“Hey, Brenda, just slow down for a minute.” The room was starting to spin. I reached for a washcloth from a stack on the bench and wiped my face before answering her.

“We’re not going anywhere. And even if we did, we wouldn’t come back because of a house full of furniture. We’d come back because of you, and Eileen, and the Rep, and—God help me—even Harry. Okay?”

She sniffed. “Okay.”

Good grief. You just try to do a little simple detecting with someone and all of a sudden your entire life comes under scrutiny.

Brenda spoke up. “I’m sorry for yelling, Charley. I’m just feeling a little fragile. I mean, when I read Clara’s obituary and realized how we’d lost touch… I just don’t want that to happen with you.”

“That’s so not going to happen with me,” I assured her. “Unless you start talking about babies again.”

She didn’t, thank heavens. “Okay. I’ll give you a year or so on that one.”

Definitely time for another change of subject. “What did the obituary say?”

“About what you’d expect. ‘Brilliant, successful’…the funeral is on Saturday.”

“Are you going?”

“Will you come with me?”

“Absolutely.” Funerals are not exactly my thing, but I’d go to support Brenda, and maybe just to check out the crowd and see if anyone looked suspicious or guilty.

“Thank you.” She looked around the room. “What time do you think it is?”

I didn’t have to answer, because Tiff chose that moment to throw open the door.

“Hey, you sillies! Didn’t you hear the announcements? It’s midnight! You’d better get out of here! You wouldn’t want to be locked in all night, would you?”

Thus endeth the stakeout.

***

“Well, that was singularly uninformative.” I buckled my seatbelt as Brenda started the engine of her little Saab. It had started raining, and the car began to fog up almost immediately.

“It wasn’t a complete waste. At least we found out how bad the security is, even if they have added a spot check to make sure everyone’s out at night.” She shivered, either from the freezing rain after the hot sauna, or from the thought of her friend having been killed.

Tiff had told us that the spot check had recently been added to her night shift duties, because someone had had “an accident” a few days ago.

“Charley, do you think the killer had to be a woman?” Brenda switched on the windshield wipers and looked at me.

The same thought had crossed my mind. “Based on where Clara was killed, I suppose I’d assumed so before we went in there,” I told her. “But it was awfully deserted, wasn’t it?”

She nodded. “I looked at the notice board, and the last exercises classes end at ten. So even if people hang out and take showers and saunas and everything, it’s probably just as empty every night at eleven as it was tonight.”

“And the men’s locker room is right next to the women’s. I mean, it probably wouldn’t have been hard for the killer to slip out one door and slip in another after he’d given Clara enough time to get into the sauna. I don’t think Tiff, or whoever was at the front desk that night, can even see around the coffee bar to the locker room doors.”

“The killer might even have asked Clara how long she was usually in there, and if she’s usually alone.” Brenda was getting more excited.

“Especially if he was someone she knew.”

“Do we think he was someone she knew?”