Erica Benedict peered up at me through her thick lenses, a quizzical look on her face. She wasn’t what I expected. The name Erica Benedict had a glamorous ring to it, like the pseudonym of a famous romance-novel writer or the villainess in a soap opera. She was a UCSC graduate with a 3.8 average as an English major, drove fast enough to have collected a slew of traffic tickets, and had been divorced barely four years. For some reason or other, I expected a high-flying, svelte, racy divorcée. And here was this chubby little nearsighted homunculus.
“You do?” she asked.
I stepped around her and pulled over my visitor’s chair. “Please, sit down.”
She hauled herself up onto the edge of the chair and squeezed back into it, her hips barely making it past the armrests. She fiddled with the purse in her lap, what there was of a lap between the mound of her stomach and the ends of her knees. I sat down in my own chair and studied her for just a second, trying to figure out what to make of her.
This was one I hadn’t expected.
“So how do you know who I am?” she asked.
“I read the book. Reed thanked you in the acknowledgments.”
I didn’t mention that I also knew what her property settlement was from her California divorce, how many points she had on her driver’s license, and oh, yes, that little incident with the Humboldt homegrown out in Oregon in the Eighties. Maybe all that smoke had stunted her growth and given her a monumental case of the munchies.
She shuffled a bit in the chair, as if trying to settle into it and finding it both too small and too hard for her.
“Victoria made him do that,” she said. “I don’t think he would have otherwise.”
“Victoria’s like that,” I said. “She’s very considerate and kind.”
“She is, isn’t she?” Erica Benedict said.
She fidgeted with the purse straps and looked down at the floor. I leaned back, my chair squealing with the motion. Her head jerked up at the noise.
I sat there. When she got ready to say something, I figured she would.
She cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here.”
“Just a bit.” I raised my arm and checked my watch. “Especially with Reed’s funeral in an hour.”
“Are you going?” she asked, looking up at me.
“Haven’t made up my mind. You?”
“Oh, yes. They closed the office after lunch. The whole company will be there.”
“So you have to be.”
“Yes. Certainly. I mean, why wouldn’t I be?”
I shrugged. “You tell me?”
She sighed, unwound the purse straps from her hand, and let the bag slide to the floor. “I would anyway. He wasn’t an editor’s dream of the ideal author, but he didn’t deserve what he got.”
“No, he didn’t. Nobody deserves that. What I can’t figure out is why you’re sitting in the office of the man accused of killing him.”
“I don’t think you killed him,” she said.
“You’re apparently in a small minority. Why don’t you think I killed him?”
Her lips curled as her jaw tensed. “I’ve been reading the papers, talking to people in the office. There’s been lots of talk, speculation. Everybody figures if you did kill him, it was only because Victoria hired you to do it. There was no other reason, was there?”
“No, there wasn’t. And your coworkers’ theories seem to be the morning line with the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department. Not to mention the newspapers.”
“I know Victoria,” Erica insisted. “I can’t believe she would have done this. We worked together back when she still had her job. I only got to edit R.J.’s book because she twisted Trav’s arm.”
“Trav?”
“Travis Webber, my boss at Spearhead. Travis was in charge of almost all of the editorial work. Karl Sykes was the administrator, the number cruncher.”
I had the feeling I should be taking notes, just in case. But I didn’t want to make her nervous. “I’m glad you don’t think I killed Reed,” I said. “And not just for my own hide.” I hesitated a moment, then spoke low and calm, almost matter-of-fact.
“But I still don’t understand why you’re here.”
“I should have gone to the police,” she said. “But I don’t want my name dragged into it. My work at Spearhead is pretty much all I’ve got. I mean, I—well, I live alone and don’t have a lot of friends. And if anyone at the company found out I was even talking to you …”
“Don’t worry. No one’ll ever know you were here.”
“I’m not even sure that what I know or what I think is important.”
“If you told me what you know, maybe we could figure it out.”
Her eyes darted around the room nervously. She couldn’t look at me. “It’s just all so hard, so weird. I’ve never known anyone who was murdered before. It’s still not real. I mean, a few days ago he was in our offices and he and Karl were having this … this screaming match.…”
“Screaming match?” I said, trying to keep my voice in check.
“I was working late. Maybe nine o’clock. I was wading through manuscripts. God, you wouldn’t believe the slush pile since R.J.’s book was published. All these terrible imitations, not even good enough to be cheap knockoffs.”
“Yes, and Karl was in his office at the other end of the hall. Our editorial and management offices are all on the fifth floor. Production’s on three, telemarketing and the mailroom are on two. We rent out some space on one. Anyway, I thought everyone else had gone home and I hear the elevator—”
Now that she’d gotten started, it all gushed out nonstop in a continuous stream of chatter.
“—and I figure it was the cleaning crew, you know. So I don’t think much about it, but they always start at my end of the hall and they didn’t, so I didn’t think anything about it, you know, and just kept on reading. Anyway, I was about to fall asleep over this one particularly bad submission and decided to go make some tea. The break room is down the hall, you see, about halfway between my end of the hall and the executive offices, and I walk down and I notice there’s no cleaning crew anywhere, but I hear these voices, you know, coming from inside the executive suite and they’re, like, yelling, and I recognize Karl’s voice first. He’s … he’s rabid, like I’ve never heard him before. And he’s screaming about the company being ruined and ‘if you think for a second I’m going to let some third-rate hack bring this company down, you’re as crazy as everyone thinks you are’ and all this kind of insanity.”
She stopped to get her breath. Her face was splotchy, flushed red, and her chest heaved under the brown suit jacket.
I scooted forward on my chair an inch or two toward her. “So what happened then?”
“I ducked into the doorway of the break room. The lights were off, there was no one else there. And I could hear them clearly. They must have been in the reception area instead of Karl’s office because it was like they were just on the other side of the door.
“So I hear this other voice and it takes me a second, but I realize it’s R.J. Only it’s not his voice I recognize, it’s his laugh.”
“He was laughing?” I asked.
“Yes, R.J. had a cruel, terrible laugh. I saw him make one of the secretaries cry one day. She didn’t recognize him when he came in, so she asked his name before she’d let him go upstairs. He went off on her, yelled that he was the guy who made it possible for her to get a paycheck every week and that if he wanted to, he could be the guy who stopped it. He laughed when she broke down sobbing. I was going out to lunch, saw the whole thing.
“Anyway, I heard him say that it was all a done deal and there was nothing that anybody could do about it. That between him and Trav, they could vote the stock any way they wanted to.”
“Stock? What stock?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I assume it was stock in the company.”
I rubbed my hand across my chin, the stubble scraping the palm and scratching an itch. What’s that supposed to mean when your palm itches? You’re coming into money, right?
“R.J. owned stock in Spearhead?” I asked, confused. That wasn’t consistent with the information I’d learned in my research, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I mean, there’s no way really to tell. The company’s private. Not traded …”
“Is there an ESOP?”
“Yes, but all the stock in the ESOP and 401(k) plans was Class B stock. Nonvoting, so that couldn’t have been it.”
“Hmmm, so how could R.J. have gotten voting stock in a privately held company?”
“I don’t know,” Erica said. “Maybe it was another company. Anyway, he and Karl went on yelling at each other and about two minutes later there was a big thump, like somebody falling.”
“Falling? You mean one of them hit the other?”
“That’s what I thought for a second, but then they kept yelling and I realized that Karl had probably kicked a chair or something. He’s got a terrible temper.”
“Did you pick up on what they were saying?”
She nodded. “Karl was screaming that he’d built the company out of nothing and that the creditors had tried to take it away and the bankruptcy judge had tried to close them down and he’d not let them. Everybody was out to get him but he’d fix it. He’d show them. Crazy stuff. He’d be damned if he’d let it be taken away now. He was wild, almost out of control.”
“And R.J.?”
“R.J. just laughed again, that low screw-you-you-little-insignificant-bug laugh of his. And Karl screamed at him to get out and R.J. said he would for now, but not to damage any more of the furniture because he—meaning R.J.—was sure going to enjoy it.”
I put my lips together, let out a slow whistle. “So then what happened?”
“I ducked behind the door,” she said. “The lights in the break room were off, like I said, and I just hid in the shadows. There was a clear view of the elevator. R.J. came through the double doors of the executive suite and punched the elevator button, like nothing had happened. He kept kind of giggling to himself, like he was real happy with what had happened.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The question is, what did happen?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” she said. “And I don’t know if any of this is really important. I only know that this was on Thursday night. Forty-eight hours later, R.J. was dead.”
“And you haven’t been to the police with this?”
“With what?” she asked. “That I was sneaking around eavesdropping on the president of the company I worked for? And that I sort of heard two people yelling at each other, but I only got muffled snatches of the conversation and don’t really know what it means? I’m sure the police would handle that as delicately as they handle everything else. Only problem is, I’d be out of a job.”
I looked at my watch. I was already trying to figure out how to pursue this one. I was also wondering if Erica Benedict was even telling me the truth. She seemed a stand-up kind of person, but I’d learned over the last few years not to make any grand assumptions.
“You’re going to miss the funeral,” I said.
She stood up, then leaned over, her back to me, and picked up the purse. The fabric of her skirt stretched tight across the back of her broad hips and I suddenly understood how a woman like that would find herself still in the office at nine o’clock at night I hated myself for thinking that, but lately my self-image has taken a beating anyway.
“I don’t know if any of this means anything,” she said, standing up and turning back to me. “I almost hope it doesn’t.”
“Everything means something,” I said. “It’s just a matter of figuring out what.”
“Are you going to R.J.’s funeral?”
I shook my head. “No, don’t think so. Not a good idea. Besides, I have some other balls in the air right now.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do for the rest of the day. I hate having time off. I really do love my work.”
I smiled at her. “Speaking of your work,” I said. “I’ve read Life’s Little Maintenance Manual a couple of times now. I’ve always wondered—especially since I read your name in the acknowledgments—how one goes about editing a book that has so little in it to begin with. I mean, what’s to edit?”
I realized that sounded insulting, even if I didn’t mean it to be. She grinned, though, and shook her head wearily.
“You should have seen it before I got hold of it,” she said, sighing. Then she turned for the door. “Yes, you should have seen it before I got hold of it.”