How to Succeed in Murder (9 page)

Stokes wound down. “Oh. Right. I guess the point is, it isn’t going well. We’re pouring millions into it, and there’s no end in sight. The board still loves the idea, because they like statements that begin with ‘If we can solve this problem…’”

“And end with ‘the stock will go through the roof’?” I guessed.

“Ignoring the fact that ‘if’ is the key component to the equation,” Jack finished.

Stokes shrugged. “Anyway, that’s where we are now.”

There was a glum silence.

“Gosh,” I said, which caused Jack to look at me suspiciously. “It sounds like your board of directors would listen to any corporate snake oil salesman who came along.”

“Not just any,” Stokes corrected wryly. “They’d have to be expensive.”

I nodded. “But, getting back to the point of this discussion…” Jack’s eyes narrowed, but I decided not to notice. “If the software bug and Clara’s death are connected, and we can figure out who planted the bug, we’ll have found Clara’s killer, right?”

Jack opened his mouth, and I realized that pausing rhetorically might not have been my smartest move. I rushed on. “So probably the best way to find out who planted the bug is for someone to go undercover at Zakdan and…” I tried to remember how Simon had phrased it. “Infiltrate!”

“Charley—” Jack said.

“Are you serious?” Stokes asked. “You could do that?” He looked from me to Jack and back again.

“Morgan—” Jack began.

“We could,” I said.

And then I held my breath.

Chapter Sixteen

The mood in the car was not sunny.

Eileen had taken one look at Jack’s face when we’d emerged from Stokes’ study and told us she was taking a cab home. That left me with one grieving best friend and one simmering husband—not the best guest list for a little light conversation.

Brenda, speaking from the back seat, was the one to break the crushing silence. “What’s the matter with you two?”

“Nothing.” We said it at the same time, and apparently neither of us was believable.

“O…kay,” Brenda said. “You know, you guys, I can take a cab if—”

“Jack,” I interrupted her. “It’s a good idea. Morgan Stokes thinks it’s a good idea, and even you have to admit it’s a good idea.”

He didn’t answer.

Brenda, after waiting a few beats, asked, “What’s a good idea?”

I turned around to face her. “Going undercover at Zakdan.”

Her eyes widened. “Seriously? Jack, you’re going under cover?”

“Not him,” I corrected. “He’s already been to the company with Mike and met a bunch of people. He can’t do it.”

“Then—”

“Me.” I waited for her enthusiastic response.

It took a little too long, and when it came it wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. “
You?
”

“Yes, me. Why not? It’s the only way we can get the real scoop on what’s going on.” I didn’t wait for her reply. “Clara might have had real enemies at Zakdan. She might have figured out some sort of huge conspiracy, and following that up is the best way to find out who killed her.”

Brenda blinked a couple of times and looked like she was thinking it over. I turned my attention back to my silent husband. “You know it’s a good idea.”

He shot me a quick glance. “I never said it wasn’t.”

Before I could whoop with victory, he continued. “It might make sense for
someone
to go undercover, but that someone isn’t you. You wouldn’t last five minutes.”

“I would so!” Not my most intellectually refined argument, but the one that came out first.

“Charley, you’ve never set foot in an office and you know nothing about business.”

“So what? Eileen can tell me everything I need to get by. And whatever she doesn’t know, Mike does. And besides,” I rushed on before he could answer, “I don’t actually have to do any real
work
, not if I pretend to be a consultant. Morgan just told us they’ve got consultants parading around the place left and right, so nobody will think anything of it.”

I kept going, not giving him a chance to reply. “I’ll just hang out and collect the gossip. I may know nothing about business, but I could write a book on gossip. And I’m an amateur compared to Simon.”

“Simon?” Brenda and Jack asked as one.

Damn.

“Well, it was kind of his idea,” I admitted. “He called it ‘reality theatre.’”

“Good God,” Jack replied.

“That figures,” Brenda said.

“Which doesn’t make it any less—”

“Charley, you don’t have the slightest idea how to gather intelligence,” Jack insisted. “You may be able to get people talking, but you don’t have the skills to analyze what you learn, or—”

“Which is what I have you for,” I told him. “We’ll do a…a debriefing every night after work, so you can tell us what to follow up on the next day.” Where I’d come up with the word “debriefing” was a mystery, but I was pretty sure it was the right concept.

“It’s not that easy,” he insisted.

“It can’t be that hard,” I countered.

“But it can be that dangerous.” Jack’s tone took on a note of finality. “If Clara Chen was murdered because of something she’d found out, that means there’s a murderer at Zakdan. And if our little escapade on our way to dinner last night was any indication, they’re not afraid to kill again. So if you think I’m going to let you go poking around where—”

“Let me? You’re not going to
let
me—”

“Stop the car!” Brenda shouted. “Now!”

There’s something to be said for marrying a man who’s been trained to follow orders. Jack pulled into an illegal space immediately. We were at the tiny Alta Plaza park, deserted in the rain.

As soon as the car came to a halt, Brenda jumped out and ran out onto the grass. When she stopped she doubled over, wrapping her arms around herself. Then she looked up at the sky and screamed. It was a sound that came from her depths, and I’d never heard it before.

“Brenda!” I jumped out and tore through the rain toward her. She held up her hands as I got near.

“Wait,” she gasped.

I hung back, and Jack came up behind me. Brenda took a few deep breaths, wiped the rain off her face, and finally looked at us.

“Jack Fairfax, you know damn well that Clara Chen didn’t slip and fall in that steam room. She was killed. Now, Charley and Simon and I may not know the first thing about going undercover—”

“You?” I interrupted. “Nobody said you—”

She gave me a look that shut me up. Then she faced Jack again. “But whatever we don’t know about it, you do. And between you and Mike you can get us in there and get us out again safely. Don’t even think about denying it.”

I don’t know what he thought about, but he didn’t deny it.

“If you’re half the man I think you are, you’ll do everything in your power to find out who killed Clara and why. And that includes using Charley and Simon and me to get information. So let’s stop arguing and get out of the rain and figure out how we’re going to do this.”

She waited a moment, holding Jack’s gaze as the rain dripped down her face. Then she walked past us to the car and got in.

I looked from her to Jack and back again, pushing the wet hair out of my eyes. I’d known her half my life, but I’d never seen Brenda lose it before. It was pretty damn effective.

We were going undercover.

Chapter Seventeen

When I woke up the next morning I reached for Jack. He wasn’t there, so I reached for the phone.

I’d barely begun explaining the plan to Eileen when she interrupted me.

“I’m in. When do we start?”

***

My second phone call took even less effort.

“Yes!” Simon yelled, once he’d woken up enough to understand my call. “Darling, I never doubted you’d come to your senses and realize how brilliant I am. When do we start?”

It seemed to be the question of the day.

For the answer, I went looking for my husband.

***

“Jack, we can’t go on like this.”

I’d found him downstairs at the desk in his office. He looked up from the computer screen when he answered me.

“That’s a dramatic way to begin a conversation.”

“I’m not being dramatic.” At least, not any more than usual. I perched on the desk and faced him. I was still wearing the champagne silk and lace concoction that I’d slept in, so I hoped the perch was effective.

“Okay.” He leaned back in his chair. “How, exactly, can’t we go on?”

“With you all angry about me going undercover.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. “I’m not angry about that.”

Oh. “Well, then—”

“Would you like to know what I am angry about?”

This conversation was not going the way I’d planned. Something about the tone of his voice. “Um—”

“How about the fact that you discussed this scheme with Simon, in apparently quite a bit of detail, and never even mentioned it to me?”

“Oh, well—”

“Or how about the fact that you and Eileen have compiled some sort of financial dossier on Zakdan, and you didn’t bother telling me about that, either?”

“Ah, well, that was really Brenda—”

“Or maybe the fact that I’ve told you everything Yahata has told me, and everything Mike has found out, and you’ve been running around with the Scooby gang getting into God knows what and keeping it all a secret from me?”

Damn.

He was right. And he didn’t know the half of it—the camping-out-in-the-gym and following-Lalit-Kumar-all-over-town half of it.

I stared at him while I tried to frame something like an apology or explanation. “Jack—”

“Just promise me that all stops now.” The look he gave me would have melted all my resistance, if I’d had any.

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay.” He slid me toward him on the desk, and I thought we were about to seal the deal with a little passionate something. But he was just trying to get at the notebook I’d sat on. He flipped it open and grabbed a pen.

“Let’s plan this thing.”

***

Simon showed up two hours later with Eileen, her son Anthony, and six folding beach chairs in assorted lollipop colors.

“They were on sale at Pottery Barn,” he explained. “I simply can’t take another meeting on your bed.”

Jack took three from Simon’s arms. “You have no idea how much I appreciate this,” he said meaningfully. The two men headed for the living room.

“Aunt Charley, this place is
cool!
” Anthony, with the speed and enthusiasm only ten-year-old boys seem to possess, went tearing from one empty room to another. “Mom, why didn’t you tell me to bring my roller blades?”

Eileen looked at me. “If you won’t put a few throw rugs down, you have to expect this kind of reaction.”

I shrugged. “Next time have him bring his skates.” Actually, that sounded kind of fun.

Jack joined us in the hallway and addressed Anthony. “If your mom doesn’t mind, I have a new computer game upstairs in my office. It’s giving me some trouble, and I seem to remember someone telling me how good you are at computer games.” His voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “It’s about pirates.”

Anthony glanced up at Eileen expectantly, and I realized with a shock how much he was starting to look like her. He’d lost his little-boy roundness and was suddenly tall for his age, and as thin and angular as his mother. It was hard to tell if he had her wavy dark hair, as his was cut so short he looked like a junior Marine recruit, but the eyes were Eileen’s dark liquid and his lashes were an absolute crime.

“Go ahead,” Eileen told him. “But don’t touch anything else in Jack’s office.”

“I promise.” He sprinted up the stairs.

“Maybe we can make an exception for my secret stash of chocolate chip cookies and soda pop,” Jack said, following him.

“Within reason,” Eileen called after them.

As soon as Jack was out of earshot she turned to me. “He’s great with kids.”

I did not like the suggestive glint in her eye. “How about a little less with that kind of talk and a little more with the covert strategy planning?”

She grinned. “I’m just saying…”

“What are you saying, darling, and what have we got to drink?” Simon joined us, having arranged the canvas chairs into a colorful circle in the center of the living room.

The doorbell rang. “That’ll be Brenda.” I turned away, grateful for a change of topic.

I opened the door to find her partially obscured behind two large brown sacks. “I brought bagels,” she announced. “What have I missed?”

***

The bagels—enough to feed an entire squad of undercover operatives, and accompanied by a scallion cream cheese spread that she’d made herself—were surprisingly effective brain food. Jack brewed some coffee, I poured some juice, and we settled into the beach chairs to strategize.

“Eileen should be the team leader,” Jack said. “She’ll be the only one who talks business to anyone outside the group.”

“That makes sense,” Simon agreed. “Since she’s the only one of us with the vaguest notion of how to talk business.”

She was also the only one of us who’d brought a laptop, possibly because she was the only one of us—aside from Jack—who owned one. She’d popped it open and was taking notes in between neat nibbles of poppyseed bagel.

“I’ve sent an email to work telling them I’m taking some time off,” she told us. “Jack, how long do you think we’ll be at Zakdan?”

He frowned. “I’d say between one and two weeks. You’ll need to dig up whatever you can quickly, before anyone there might expect to start seeing results from your ‘consulting.’”

“Got it. Two weeks.” She typed a note for herself. “Brenda, can you get that kind of time off?”

“No problem,” she responded. “They’re so glad I volunteered to lead the spring student trip that they’d say yes to anything right now.”

“Great.”

Jack continued. “Eileen, Mike wants to give you a crash course on the kind of technical jargon you should know. He had someplace to be today, but he’s available tonight if you two want to get together. Is that okay?”

“If he doesn’t mind lasagna with Anthony and me, it’s okay.”

I looked at my husband in amazement. I’d been trying to throw Eileen and his geeky partner together for months, and he’d just casually arranged it as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

He caught me looking at him. “What?”

“Not a thing,” I said. “What’s my assignment?”

“You’ll be the program manager.”

“Great! What does that mean?”

“You won’t ever talk about the work that the group is supposedly doing. You’ll just mutter things about schedules and budgets.”

I nodded, relieved. I could mutter with the best of them.

“If anyone presses for specifics, just tell them the information is on a ‘need to know’ basis.”

“Right! What does that mean?”

“It means they should leave you alone.”

“Excellent!” This would be a breeze.

“Simon.” Jack turned to him. “You’re a visionary.”

“Thank you, Jack. You know, I’ve always thought I had a certain knack—oh!” He seemed to suddenly remember the topic at hand. “Oh, you mean on the team—right, naturally, of course.” He smiled and blinked a few times. “Sorry. I’m a what?”

Jack refrained from sighing. “A visionary. A big-picture guy.”

“Right. So if anybody asks me questions, I say…”

“Tell them they have to take the thousand-foot view,” Eileen suggested. “Or maybe just look like you’re considering whatever they’re talking about and say you’ll need to ‘tee that up’ for discussion.”

“I’m sorry?” Simon looked clueless.

“It’s a golf metaphor,” Jack explained. “And it’s good.” He turned to Eileen. “Can you supply them with more of that kind of thing?”

“Please, it’s all I hear all day.” She set the laptop aside and scrunched forward in her chair. “Let’s see…if anyone asks you about anything like project goals, just say we need to ‘push the envelope.’ Or you could say we need to focus on the one thing that will ‘move the needle.’ And if anyone asks you something in a meeting and you don’t have an answer, tell them you want to ‘take it off line.’”

“Oh, I’ve heard that one,” Brenda said. “In faculty meetings.”

“And there are lots of sports things,” Eileen went on. “Team members should ‘play their positions,’ and instead of looking into an issue, you ‘go deep.’”

“It’s no wonder, given the male-dominated, patriarchal nature of American business, that sports phrases would be popular,” Brenda said.

“Um, sweetie.” I waved at her. “Unless you’re going undercover as a Women’s Studies professor, maybe that’s the sort of thought you should keep to yourself.”

She looked startled. “Oh, right. Habit.” She turned to Jack. “So what is my cover?”

He grinned. “You’ll be a human resources representative, specializing in change management. Basically, you’re a sympathetic ear for people who are being affected by the proposed changes. You’re someone they can confide in about their fears.”

“What proposed changes?” I asked him. “I thought we were just faking it.”

“That’s the beauty of the thing,” Jack explained. “As long as you don’t define the plan, everyone will assume they’re being affected, so they’ll all need a sympathetic ear.”

“Which makes Brenda Grand Central Station for rumors and backstabbing,” I guessed.

“Cool!” She beamed.

“Hang on a minute, Jack,” Simon spoke up. “Do you mean to say that we’re really going to go in there with one person who vaguely knows what she’s doing and three completely bullshit pieces of fluff?”

“Welcome to consulting. Makes you want to start your own firm, doesn’t it?”

“Bloody right it does. How much are we charging for this?”

“Lots,” Jack told him. “Otherwise they won’t think you’re worth anything.”

Simon sat back in his chair. “I’m in the wrong line of work.”

“Okay.” I stood and stretched. “Now that that’s all figured out, we should talk about costumes. Eileen, you’re taken care of, but the rest of us don’t have anything even remotely businesslike in our closets.”

“Too bad Martha’s still out of town,” Simon said.

Martha, the costume designer for the Rep, had come out of the broom closet a few months ago, announcing herself as a proud practitioner of Wicca. She’d gone off to Stonehenge on some sort of pilgrimage as soon as the costumes for the last play of the season were complete, and nobody had heard from her since.

“It is a shame,” I agreed. “She’d have known just what to wear.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Eileen said. “It isn’t complicated. Let’s just head to Union Square tomorrow, and somewhere between Banana Republic and Brooks Brothers, we’ll come up with something.”

“You’re a genius,” I told her. “And before you say anything, I’m picking up the tab for this shopping expedition, and I don’t want any arguments.”

I looked at Brenda, who had a policy of refusing my attempts at generosity except on her birthday or Christmas, but it was Simon who spoke.

“I wouldn’t think of arguing the point.”

Brenda made a face and nodded. “It’s in a good cause, and I can always donate the clothes to charity when we’re done.”

Simon looked appalled.

“Now that we’ve got that important subject taken care of,” Jack said dryly, “could we talk over one more tiny detail—like coming up with a pretext for getting you all into Zakdan in the first place?”

I gave him a blank look. “What do you mean?”

He sighed. “So far we’ve figured out what you’ll do when you get in. But we need some sort of scenario that Morgan Stokes can take to the board of directors. He has to convince them you’re selling something they want, and we haven’t figured out what that is yet.”

In the silence that followed we heard faint buccaneer noises from the office upstairs where Anthony was playing the computer pirate game.

Eileen spoke. “You’re right, Jack. Even if it’s nonsense and we don’t do a damn thing once we’re there, we have to have a reason to be let in the door.”

“I don’t suppose Morgan could just tell the board what he’s up to?” I suggested.

Jack shook his head. “Until we know who’s behind all of this, we don’t know how high up it might go.”

Again, silence.

“Um.” Brenda looked startled that she’d made a sound.

“Do you have an idea?” Jack asked.

“No.” She hesitated. “I mean…I have a thought, but it’s not about what to do, it’s about who could help.”

We were listening.

“I mean,” she continued. “We know someone who could help. Someone who could approach the board as a huge investor, and then insist that his team of experts do an in-house assessment before he’ll commit. Someone who has that kind of money, and clout.” She looked at me. “And someone who can bullshit better than the rest of us put together.”

Ugh. She was right. I hated to admit it, but she was right.

“Harry.”