How to Succeed in Murder Page 3

  I was choking on my salad. “It was in the paper?”

  “Don’t tell me you know her?” Eileen asked.

  “Darling, have you stumbled across another body?” Animation sparked Simon’s features for the first time in days.

  “Charley, you didn’t!” Brenda scolded. As if it would have been my fault.

  “I didn’t,” I agreed. “But I did have lunch with her boyfriend yesterday.”

  That added some drama to the conversation. I quickly told them about meeting Morgan Stokes the day before and what he’d had to say about the death of his intended.

  “Are you going to investigate?” Simon had rediscovered the use of his spinal column and was perched on the edge of his seat. “What does Jack think?”

  “He didn’t tell Morgan, but he does think there’s something funny about the whole accidental-slip scenario.”

  “Funny how?” Eileen demanded.

  “Was she killed?” Brenda asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But Jack belongs to the same gym and he says the tiles on the steam room floor—at least on the men’s side—are non-skid. And,” I raised my eyebrows significantly, “the bench thing you sit on hasn’t got any sharp edges.”

  “So she was murdered!” Simon said, delighted. “Darling, what are we going to do first? Should we—”

  “Hold on a minute.” I cut him off. “Jack hasn’t even looked into it yet. Who knows? It could be —”

  “It could be fun!” Simon insisted. “You’re the one who got to do all the shooting and everything the last time—I want in on the action!”

  “It isn’t a game, Simon,” Brenda said. “A woman is dead. Have a little…” She saw the vague puzzlement in his eyes and gave up.

  “She was going to marry Morgan Stokes?” Eileen asked. “What did he tell you about her? What was her name?”

  “Clara,” I told her. “Clara Chen.”

  Brenda froze, her fork halfway to her mouth. “Clara Chen?” The color drained from her face. “Was she our age? Did she go to Berkeley?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably. Morgan’s in his mid-thirties so she was probably… Sweetie, what is it?”

  “I think I knew her,” Brenda said, dazed. “I knew her at Berkeley.”

  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?”<
br />
  “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 fir
st, 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.”