I called Herbert Poole as soon as I reached the office next morning and told him what Tim had recommended.
“The hard drive? I ought to have thought of that.”
“Do you know anything about computers, Herbert?” Somehow I didn’t feel equal to the task ahead, not alone, anyway.
“I sure do,” he said. “I have had quite a bit of experience with them. I’ve already run through two computers and I’m putting a lot of mileage on the third.”
“Then if you don’t mind—”
“Absolutely not, Nick. I’ll be right there.”
Poole was a man of his word, as I would expect a Virginian to be. (”When you say that, smile.”) He was beginning to become a familiar figure around the office, so the receptionist did not bother to notify me that he was here, but must have waved him on through, because the next thing I knew he was knocking softly on my door. I led him immediately down the hall to Parker’s office.
At the computer terminal, he sat down, flexed his fingers as though he was about to play a Chopin étude, and while I stood looking over his shoulder, he booted the operating system. The screen lit up, and we saw four sectors on the screen—INFORMATION, YOUR SOFTWARE, MICROSOFT WORKS, and IBM DOS. He moved the cursor to YOUR SOFTWARE and clicked the mouse. We saw the following menu on the screen:
1. WORDPERFECT 5.1
2. UTILITIES
3. LOTUS 1-2-3
4. ACT
5. JEOPARDY
6. MOVIE MASTER
SELECTION:_____
“I believe this is what we want,” said Poole, and typed in the number 4. The screen told us it was loading for a few seconds, and this appeared:
Below that on the left was a box with eight compartments and a flashing cursor.
“This is where it gets tricky,” said Poole. “We need Parker’s personal password to get into the program.”
I clucked my tongue against my teeth. I hadn’t counted on this particular roadblock; I supposed Poole had. “How do we find that?”
“Guesswork is all we can go on,” he said. “He’s not likely to have written it down. Most people use something easy to remember. Like the month of their birth or their astrological sign. Their own name, maybe. Why don’t we start with that?”
He went to work on the keyboard and the box, and promptly typed in PARKER. No go. FOXCROFT brought the same results.
“Let’s try words that can be formed from the letters of his name,” said Poole. And he ran through PARK, PEAK, REAP, RAKE, and PERK, without hitting the jackpot. Then he typed FOX, COOP, FOOT, FORT, and TOX, to no avail.
“Do you suppose you can find out the month of Parker’s birth?” asked Poole.
“Just a phone call away,” I said, and buzzed Hannah. I told her what we wanted, and to get Parker’s file from personnel. While we were waiting, Poole explained to me what the ACT software was—a way of keeping a database of all one’s contacts, with the necessary information about them. Would Parker need such a database? I wondered. Conceivably, Poole told me.
The phone rang. It was Hannah.
“April eighteenth,” she reported.
Poole tried APRIL and APRIL18. Nothing. Then ARIES. Still no luck.
“We haven’t thought of one other possibility,” said Poole. “Did the man have a middle name?”
As it turned out when we posed the question to Hannah, Parker, like many another WASP, had not one but two middle names: Henry and Edgar.
Poole put HENRY in the frustrating little box first, and we struck out again.
But when he typed EDGAR—success! We got this:
| FILE | EDIT | LOOK | UP | VIEW | REPORTS |
| CONTACT____________ | Address___________ |
| Name_________________ | City______________ |
| Title__________________ | State_____________ |
| Phone________________ | Zip_______________ |
LAST CONTACT____________
CALL_____________________
STATUS___________________
USER DEFINED:
NOTES:
“What do we do now?” I asked.
Poole moved the cursor to FILE and clicked it. A “pull down” window appeared in the upper right-hand part of the screen, with this list:
OPEN
NEW
DELETE
EXIT
“We go to OPEN,” said Poole.
He did so, and another window appeared just below the first one.
_____AUTHORS
_____PUBLISHING HOUSES
_____AGENTS
_____PERSONAL
Now we were off and running. We went to AUTHORS first.
“See if you can find ‘Michaelson, Alexander,’ “ I said. He was not on the list.
“PERSONAL?” Poole suggested. I nodded.
And that was where we hit pay dirt—emphasis on dirt. For PERSONAL was nothing more nor less than the amorous history, “the sexual conquests” if you will, of the late Parker Foxcroft. Disgusting. As a man about town, I’ve certainly enjoyed my sexual encounters—though I never thought of them as conquests, just various successes—but to write them down, and in a database at that, I find utterly disgusting.
“How many names are there in this database?” I asked.
“One hundred fifty,” said Poole.
I considered this figure. Not enough to get Parker into the Guinness Book of Records, by far, but a substantial achievement for one not yet forty. I remembered, however, that there are star basketball players who number their so-called victories in the thousands—though it seems to me that unless they can recall the names of every bed partner and the precise details of each gratification, the numbers are inconsequential.
“It’s possible, of course, that Parker kept other records,” I said.
“Of course,” said Poole.
It might have been squeamishness on my part, but I just didn’t want to confront the data on one Susan Markham, who was most assuredly in Parker’s files, so I asked Poole if he would mind combing through the files by himself, paying particular attention to anyone who might have even the faintest connection with Parker’s murder.
“One file I’d like to read myself,” I said. “Would you print out whatever Parker entered on Claire Bunter?”
“Glad to.”
And I left him to explore the libidinous exploits of Parker Foxcroft.