Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery (21 page)

“You’re kidding, right?  Joe’s funeral is the perfect opportunity to uncover his accomplices or the murderer! The killer always attends the funeral.”

“He does? What if he’s already dead?” My pet theory was that Cary had somehow offed Joe before the mafia bosses got to him.

“Could be,” she agreed.  “I’ll meet you there.  Give me the address.”

Reluctantly, I complied, but what harm could there be in having her there?  And I hadn’t exactly involved her.  Huntington was still responsible for that little piece of mayhem.

Monique stopped by to make sure I understood my presence at the funeral was required and also to share her happy news. “I bought the sculpture,” she whispered dramatically, her hand over her heart. “It will be delivered next week. Rohit—you remember, the guy who came over to help—kept the sculpture to prepare it.”

“Prepare it?”

“He’s planting moss along the bottom and adding complete landscape details to it! I had to pay extra for the watering system, but he threw in the plants for free. It’s going to be so gorgeous.  I’ll email you a picture of some of the flowers I’ve chosen.  I wanted roses, but Rohit said they’d grow too large and be messy. What do you think?”

Since it would be impolite to point out that the thing was a standing monument to ugly and couldn’t get much worse, I swallowed hard and searched for diplomacy. “The owner of the nursery swears by Rohit’s expertise.  Plant a climbing rosebush nearby, maybe?” And hope it eventually hid the sculpture from view.

“Oooh, that’s a good idea.  I’ll ask him about it.”

“Yay, verily,” I muttered under my breath. “Verily?  Since when do I say verily?”  I stared at my test phone with consternation. “Stupid phone.”

Kovid overheard my remark since he was in my doorway with more code on an SD card. “What’s wrong with your phone?”

“Did you code it to use the word verily?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. There’s an extensive dictionary, and the algorithm can choose from multiple answers.”

“Hmph.” I accepted the SD card from Kovid. “Is there support for Spanish on here?” I asked innocently.

“Of course not.  Marketing is still pushing for it, but there’s no way we can squeeze that in.”

“What about just loading the dictionary? It would be crude—”

He shook his head vehemently. “It would be pointless. We haven’t programmed the phone to respond to even single word translation.”

“How long would it take to just add a raw dictionary translation?  If I said ‘water,’ couldn’t it say ‘agua’?”

“Whose side are you on, anyway? You want to try and test all that?  Even if we shoved that kind of mess into the code, you’d have to do extensive testing.  And we’d be selling it to the customer as almost pure guesswork.  It wouldn’t be a voice assistant, it would be more like a random Google search.  The translation could range from almost correct, to jumbled meaningless words, to a full blown ad.”

Kovid did not appear to be coding anything on the side. “I guess we have to be more clever about the exact phrases we choose to translate,” I said.

He nodded. “The first phrases will be the types of things you see in travel books like ‘Where is the best restaurant?’ or ‘Where is my hotel?’ The idea isn’t just raw words translated. If we drop a dictionary in there, we can hardly market the idea of the translations being part of a personal assistant.”

“I wonder if the translated words would sell if you hid it behind a special door.  Then let early customers test it.”

He rolled his eyes.  “Now you sound like marketing and Cary combined. Customers don’t want a ‘test’ phone! They want a working product.”

“Okay, okay.” I loaded the new code on my three phones, but instead of starting tests, I visited Roscoe.  My plan was to play the same game with him, only butter up his ego because he was the kind of programmer who required that sort of thing or he wouldn’t even agree to talk to a mere plebeian like myself.

Roscoe and Kovid were both smart enough to hack into Lawrence’s email and set up the contact with Clint to pass along a new drop of code.  They didn’t need Lawrence, only his email.

I leaned against the doorway to Roscoe’s cube. “You know how you were telling us about your super efficient code? Could you drop a Spanish to English raw dictionary in the code in a short time?”

He didn’t bother to stop typing. “I can do
anything
I’m paid to do.  But if you want quality, you have to wait.  We’re not robots, we’re engineers.  You want good code, you hire the best and let them do their job.”

Blah, blah, blah. He had barely glanced over at me the whole time he was delivering his speech.  “Well, what if the dictionary was dropped in but hidden?  There are always blogs out there that dissect every electronic gadget released. What if you snuck something in there like that for them to discover?  If it wasn’t a confirmed feature, it wouldn’t have to be perfect, but it could gain some notoriety if the right blogs discovered it and began talking about it.  Then when we officially add the extra glamor of the assistant delivering knowledgeable answers in several languages, it could be a big hit.”

“Or a complete flop.  You’re just Miss Idea, aren’t you?  I guess you haven’t bothered to run this by Lawrence to see if it’s patentable?”

I blinked. “Uhm, well, no.”

He snorted. “Well, it’s not.  Tossing a dictionary in there just plays our hand early.  No way is it patentable.”

I stared at him as he turned back to his computer screen. He wasn’t the type to lift a finger to do any extra work, but if something was patentable, he might hire out to the highest bidder.

As I stomped away, I heard a “hiisst” from another cubicle. I turned around and peered through the opening.

Howard reached up as though to adjust a tie, but he was wearing a blue polo shirt with gray khakis. “He’s right.  Not patentable. If the way to access the Spanish dictionary were clever enough, we could possibly patent that, but you have to have something to bank on, something that is good enough to keep investors interested. If you want to run an idea by Lawrence or myself, it really helps if you have the basic code in place along with a complete diagram of the engineering.”

I sighed. If I had the code in place, maybe I’d sell it upriver and not bother with these people. “Yeah, thanks, I’ll get right on that.”  I didn’t bother to tell him I wasn’t gunning for a patent, but the thought made me curious. “If Borgot gets a patent, does your name go on it automatically as the lawyer filing it?”

He blinked a little owl blink and huffed out a sigh. “Only the
inventors
belong on the patent.” Red crept up his neck. “Just testing the invention doesn’t count either.”

I turned away before he got any angrier, but his comment made me wonder how Lawrence had gotten on a patent. He had one; I remembered seeing it listed when I looked up the executive names. But selling our code upriver—or was it downriver? Either direction wouldn’t help Lawrence or Howard get on a patent.  Maybe Lawrence didn’t want another patent so he now sold his ideas to the highest bidder?

Instead of starting a test, I pounced on Paul, the IT guy, because he foolishly happened to walk by.  “Did you get started in this business as a programmer?”

He hiked up his khaki shorts with one hand and frowned at me. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and possibly not the morning before that. “Yeah, right. Cary already offered me a programming job. I’m not into that stuff. I’m not doing ballet either.  Look, if you people want programmers, drop the hiring freeze and hire some programmers.  I don’t care if they make more money, and there is no job that pays well enough for me to dance around with my co-workers.”

“You got that right,” I nodded my agreement as he stomped off. If his hating the idea of being a programmer was a ruse, he had managed to sound as put off with it as with ballet lessons.

I visited the two other testers in my group and three marketing people. I even asked Heather, Monique’s replacement as the head of marketing, about programming.  She didn’t know what I meant. She just started complaining about her DVD player not recording her shows properly.

It made sense to talk to Lawrence and find out whether he’d ever been a programmer.  His name and address had been on the email that set up the ballet lessons and the phone drop. But what if he was guilty?  Would I be showing my hand by questioning him?  And I bet Monique had access to his email. Howard probably had access to it too. Monique had said she was planning on setting up the team building exercise.  Maybe the two of them were in cahoots to sell and market Borgot code to thieves.

Of course, Monique didn’t sit still long enough to code.  If she needed an alibi for just about anything, including the murders, she could turn in her cell phone records. With all the phone calls she made, there wasn’t any time left over to write code. Larry was out of the office more than in, but there was no telling what he was working on when prying eyes weren’t around.

I passed by his cube twice, but he wasn’t in. Maybe the smart thing to do was to ask Monique if Larry had a programming background. The only problem with that plan was that she was yakking on her cell when I waltzed by.

These questions were a waste of my time.  Even if someone admitted they knew how to code, we still had to prove that same someone was adding to the Borgot code and selling it to Clockworks.

I settled down to work for several hours, but it was very hard to concentrate.  Near the end of the day I made another round of the cubes, inspecting the name tags on each one, trying to figure out who might be adding extra code to the Borgot phones.

I paused near the cube of the one other person who probably had access to most of our email accounts. I stuck my head in.  Kay set up meetings on behalf of several people at the company even though she reported directly to the CEO.

She gave me one of her raised eyebrow sneers and chuckled when I casually asked her if she spoke Spanish or knew how to code. “I should have gotten my degree in programming,” she said agreeably. “Instead, I waitressed my way through college and busted my butt to earn a geology degree.  Yet, here I am.”  She spread her arms wide to indicate her cubicle. Not even the admin for the CEO had an office at Borgot.  Granted, her space was twice the size of mine, and she had somehow managed to have the walls done in a paisley fabric instead of corporate gray, but we were all rats in the same maze, no matter how you decorated it.

“We need all the help we can get with this phone,” I said.  “There’s got to be someone who can help with the code.”

I waited, but she didn’t bite. If she knew of anyone harboring secret skills, she wasn’t sharing.

As I turned to go, she asked, “You leaving for the funeral now?”

I sighed. “Is it four already?”

“Three-fifteen.  Some managers might have mentioned they’d like me to write down names.”  While I processed her hint, she removed her heels and extracted flats from a large tote bag.  She unclipped an amethyst pendant from her silver chain, leaving the subdued silver necklace as her only jewelry. The red shoes had brightened up a dark pantsuit. With the black penny loafers replacing the heels, she was now perfectly dressed in funeral attire.

“Seriously?” I asked. “You’re jotting down roll call?”

She nodded. “No joke.  If there had been any geology job out there that paid, I’d be hunting and cataloging rocks.  Instead I work with people who have their heads full of pebbles, and I get to catalog infractions.”  She picked up her computer tablet and stashed it in a black purse.  The red tote with her heels went under the desk.

I shuffled out. I didn’t care about my name being on a list for missing Joe Black’s funeral.  If I hadn’t told LeAnn I’d be there, I might have skipped just to be contrary.

***

I waited outside the funeral home for as long as possible, but LeAnn was a no-show.  The sedate little building was shaped to resemble a chapel with steps leading up to large double doors. The guy posted at the door was the size of a tank, decked out in a leather vest and motorcycle chaps. Tats circled one arm, crooked teeth poked from beneath his upper lip, and he either forgot to comb his hair or it had recently been on fire, making it impossible to force the stray knotted bits down over the various bald patches.  Maybe he’d been in a fight and someone had pulled clumps out. The gold hoop earring in his right ear looked as though it had been yanked on a number of times because that earlobe was long and distorted, almost double the size of his left ear.  He had not shaved in days, and the speckled stubble was mottled gray and black.  If he were competing for the world’s ugliest dog title he’d lose, but only because at his feet was a bulldog mix of some sort that had obviously won the title.

When I reached the top step he put his hand on the doorknob. “You here for Joe or his ma?” he growled out.

“What?” I stuttered, backing down a step.  While I contemplated running away, LeAnn appeared behind me and grabbed my arm, panting.

“Yes,” she gasped out.

His beady gaze drifted to her.  She met his stare with bravery that had to come from having survived childbirth and the raising of children.  Or insanity.

My feet shuffled, but LeAnn held steady, albeit breathing hard.

“Joe’s side on the left. His ma on the right,” the man holding the doorknob declared.

“It’s divided? Like a wedding?” I sputtered.

LeAnn cocked her head sideways and gave him a respectful nod. It was easy to be respectful when the guy towered over us by two feet and had us by a yard on either side.  He was either carrying a retractable whip or a baton on his hip, and he kept his hand near it, hooked in a pocket.

“Your dog is adorable,” LeAnn said. “Is it okay if I pat her on the head?”

Tank’s eyes lit up, and he showed more crooked teeth than an aging dinosaur. “Harley. She’s more’n happy to say hello.”

LeAnn matched his smile, if not his teeth, and crouched down to greet Harley. “We’re in Wanda’s sewing group,” she said. The dog showed her approval by trying to wag half her butt off. The slobbering growling noises she made were either because LeAnn represented a tasty snack or because Harley was very enthusiastic about being petted.