CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The longer I worked at Cahaba, the less certain I became that they actually needed a secretary. Certainly, they did not need a receptionist, because no one visited, and there was no one to receive. A UPS guy named Frank came by and dropped off a few packages, but that was it. Of course, this could be one of those jobs that had a high tide and a low tide, and I just happened to be catching it at low tide. Or, maybe it was like my brother, Alden, was fond of saying: that most jobs are two hours of work spread out over an eight-hour period, although this is typically spoken by someone who has not done a lot in the service industry.

Productive things I did in the next hour:

responded to email, which seemed to be the bulk of my job

made coffee

signed for some packages from Frank the UPS guy

spoke to several reporters for various local news outlets, whereupon I found many delightful and interesting ways of saying “no comment at this time”

ordered sandwiches for lunch for the staff, as per Vanetta’s orders

spoke with Ignacio Granger on the phone

sent Emily the stolen code, only when things were very quiet

Of these, the only points of detective-y interest were the latter two, although I really liked Frank.

Let’s start with the stolen code. I emailed to it Emily—or at least an email account that was distantly connected to her, and a few minutes later she had texted me an emoji of a martini glass.

Industrial espionage is nothing like I imagined it.

A few minutes after that I got a phone call on the Cahaba main line.

“Dahlia?”

It was Emily’s voice, which surprised me. It wasn’t a flunky or an underling, but her. I was especially surprised because she had warned me not to call her from work, but I supposed she could speak freely, even if I couldn’t.

“Hello, madam,” I said, indicating that I wasn’t going to say her name. “What can I do for you?”

“Did you get my martini?” Emily asked. “I thought you would like it.”

“Yes,” I said. “I would love to hear about your deal on toner and other useful office supplies.”

“And you’re being secretive,” said Emily. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’m calling from a burner phone.”

I cut straight to the chase.

“So am I done here?” I asked. “I mean, with this discussion of discounts on office supplies.”

“The client will need to review the code, which could take an uncertain period of time, depending on what’s happening with it. No more than a couple of days. We think it makes sense to leave you where you are for now.”

This was about what I had expected, which was why I hadn’t been exactly racing to get the code out to her. If I thought it was going to magically transport me out of here, I think I would have kicked it up a notch. But even spies can’t escape bureaucracy.

“Sounds great,” I said. “If you want to send a free toner sample, we’d be happy to try it.”

The conversation with Ignacio went like this:

“Is this the secretary I spoke with yesterday?”

“I am, I think,” I said, wondering if anyone else had picked up the phone after I had left. “Did you call in the morning, yesterday? Who is this?”

“This is Ignacio Granger. You spoke very highly of my Sonic the Hedgehog listicle.”

Right. You could tell that Ignacio was a writer, because he held on to his slights.

“You can’t argue with hits,” I parroted back at him. “Should I put you through to Vanetta again?”

“Actually I wanted to speak with you,” said Ignacio.

This could not possibly be a good thing.

“Why would you want that?” I said. God, I hoped that Ignacio hadn’t found out who I was, because I did not want to explain why an amateur geek detective was working at a dying development company in the midst of a corruption scandal and murder. I knew I hadn’t given him my real name—what did I call myself when I spoke to him yesterday?

“Well,” said Ignacio. “For one, I think it’s very surprising that you’re still answering the phone, since you were murdered yesterday. That’s a level of dedication you don’t see a lot of in this industry.”

Right. Cynthia Shaffer. I had told Ignacio that I was Cynthia Shaffer.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, maybe this is a Five People You Meet in Heaven Situation?”

“You’re confusing your Mitch Albom,” said Ignacio. “I think you mean the First Phone Call from Heaven.”

I did not, as a point of order, want to discuss the literature of Mitch Albom with Ignacio, which was an oeuvre for which I had gleaned details from the back covers of books that I had picked up, read, and put back down. However, this was preferable to discussing my identity, and so I went on.

“Yes,” I said. “I love Albom. His sentences are like lush grapes, ripe with meaning.”

“How are you alive?” asked Ignacio, coming straight to the point. I originally wouldn’t have been revealing Cahaba’s private business (and the police’s business) to inquiring journalists, but my first priority was covering my ass.

“It wasn’t me that was killed. It was Cynthia’s sister, Joyce. There was a bit of confusion about that.”

“I thought you were Cynthia. Why are you talking about yourself in the third person?”

I was not willing to pretend to be Cynthia Shaffer on the phone. This was the sort of lie that led you into a terrible elaborate web of deceit. And while men of God might suggest that any lie necessarily led into a terrible web of deceit, I am firmly of the opinion that the well-placed lie can maneuver away from these webs and get you out of parking tickets to boot.

“Me?” I said. “No! I’m not Cynthia Shaffer.”

“I’m quite sure that was the name you told me yesterday,” said Ignacio.

I briefly considered the virtues of pretending to have not been the person on the phone yesterday, which were pretty bleak given my Sonic the Hedgehog blathering. Clearly that wasn’t going to work.

“No, no, I’m not Cynthia Shaffer,” I said. “She doesn’t work here anymore. I’m Cynthia Shaver.”

“I’m sorry?” said Ignacio, who sounded about as believing of this statement as you’re imagining.

“Shaver. With a ‘V.’ It’s a remarkable coincidence.”

“I should think so,” said Ignacio.

“Yes,” I said. “Everyone commented on it relentlessly.”

“I’ve never met a Shaver before,” said Ignacio, with a journalist’s instinct for bullshit. “What’s the origin of that name?”

God bless Washington University, and the benefits of a broad education.

“Germanic. Comes from schaffaere—means like a steward. A manager. Which is ironic, I guess, given that I’m a secretary.”

This momentarily silenced Ignacio Granger, because I lied like a pro. I wasn’t even one hundred percent sure I was right about that, but I did know a little German and it was confidently delivered.

“That’s interesting,” he finally said. “We can discuss it when I’m there tomorrow.”

I wasn’t sure if I was moving inexorably into a web of lies, but certainly I wasn’t moving away from them. At best, I was traveling parallel to the web of lies.

“Sure,” I said. “I’d love that.” Let’s see, all I would need to do was convince everyone else in the office to back up my story, and also, probably, have Charice make me a fake ID with the name Cynthia Shaver on it. This would be a great project, since I had nothing else to do. “Should I put you through to Vanetta now?”

“Not just yet,” said Ignacio. “I wanted to ask you what you thought about the new whistle-blower’s letter.”

“As I told you, I can’t comment on that.”

“That was for the previous letter,” said Ignacio. “This is for the new letter. The one about the murder?”

It was my turn to be silent now, and Ignacio relished it.

“What second letter?”

“Not aware of it yet, are you?”

“I’m not,” I said. “Do you have a link?”

“Sure,” said Ignacio. “I can email it to you. It can be my little present to you, so you can seem like a good secretary for Vanetta. And then you can pay me back with information later.”

“Just send me the link,” I told him, and the conversation was done.

“That’s cshaver@cahaba.com?” asked Ignacio, who was bound and determined to call my bluff.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll look it up myself.”

It was not hard to find.

DE Employee Murdered—Nothing Changes

In my previous post, I had said that DE was eating its employees alive. It’s hard to imagine that we could end up in a worse position, but here we are.

Two days ago, a woman thought to be a DE employee was murdered—straight up murdered—on-site at their offices. Police came, coroners arrived, autopsies were apparently done. While this poor woman’s body was rotting away in the break room, staff were expected to stay and program. Even as the police arrived, even as the situation became increasingly and apparently wrong—stay and work, because the company demanded it.

But I am writing you, not because of the company’s tremendous indifference to the death of one of its employees. I’m not writing you because of the murder investigation, about which I frankly do not know a whit.

I’m writing because, we are not one day later, and everyone is all back at work.

I know there are deadlines. This is a deadline-driven industry. But one of our colleagues was murdered, and the police investigation is still ongoing, and no one is in the right frame of mind to work.

It is beyond madness that we are back in the office. It is corporate irresponsibility. Yet, we are all afraid for our jobs, and so here we are.

These are not acceptable work conditions. Something must be done.

DE must be stopped.

A concerned spouse

I’m not actually sure how Ignacio Granger would ever come up with the idea that Vanetta would be pleased with me for bringing her this letter. As if I were a cat presenting its kill to its adoring owner. To imagine that Vanetta would regard this letter with anything other than a combination of abject horror and thrown chairs would be a fundamental misread of the situation.

Emily Swenson, on the other hand. She would be delighted.

Being the servant of two masters, I decided to first focus on the one who wouldn’t throw furniture at me. I copied the link and pasted the contents of the letter into an email—a private email—to Emily. It was tempting to analyze the letter or provide commentary—because there were certainly peculiar things about it (most notably the letter writer’s insistence on referring to Joyce as “the employee,” which was obfuscating and untrue), but I figured I’d have time for that later.

I just wrote:

Emily:

Look what just showed up on the Internet. Looks like the DE writer is definitely from Cahaba. More to come later.

Dahlia

I then walked into Vanetta’s office, who visibly braced herself as though she were expecting bad news. Probably she was just getting used to it.

“What’s wrong?” said Vanetta. “Something terrible has happened, hasn’t it? It’s all over your face.”

As a side note, I can’t tell you how much I wish I had a face that didn’t naturally broadcast things like: “Something Terrible Has Happened” or “I Just Had Sex.” It seems so fundamentally unfair that every thought in my head has to be visible to onlookers. This is a serious disadvantage as a detective, although it would serve me well if I ever were on reality TV.

“Not the best,” I said, trying to break it to her gently.

“It’s Morgan Freeman, isn’t it? Did he turn us down?”

I was stunned by this question, mostly because I had momentarily forgotten about Morgan Freeman, and my mind was trying to piece together his connection to the business at hand.

“He’s dead,” said Vanetta, filling in the silence. “My God, Morgan Freeman is dead.”

That this would be Vanetta’s first guess as to “what terrible thing has happened” is perhaps indicative of how deeply she was entrenched in her own drama.

“Morgan Freeman is not dead,” I said, which was true as far as I knew. “This has nothing to do with Morgan Freeman.”

I handed Vanetta a printout of the second whistle-blower’s letter, which she read. I could tell she was reading it because her face fell off her head and landed on the floor.

“Dear God,” said Vanetta’s face from the floor. “If only we could have had Ignacio in here last week.”

“He called earlier,” I said. “He’s very excited about coming in.”

“I’ll bet he is.”

Vanetta scooped up her face, which was clearly very agitated, and smooshed it back on her skull. All things considered, it could have been worse.

“Who did this?” she asked.

This question, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, made me happy. Because my two masters were in a weird and probably elusive alignment. Vanetta and Emily wanted exactly the same thing, at least in this limited moment, and I was savvy enough to recognize that this was the industrial espionage equivalent of a solar eclipse. Planets had aligned, and it was magical, and it would probably not last very long.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Someone who works here, obviously. I mean, assuming no one else was murdered at another DE subsidiary.”

“I don’t know why they don’t just come out and say Cahaba,” said Vanetta, shaking her head at the letter. “The last one was at least circumspect; this one just comes and tells you exactly where it’s from.”

“Maybe they wrote it in a hurry,” I said.

Vanetta was quiet for a moment and appeared to consider this.

“When, exactly, was this sent?” Vanetta asked.

I could see her thinking, which was perhaps easy because I was thinking too. Plus, she didn’t have one of those faces that was well suited to hiding her thoughts either. We could be on reality TV together.

“It was posted at 10:43,” I said, and I was surely making the mental calculations she was. What were we all doing at 10:43?

“When did the staff meeting finish?” she asked.

“Well before that—maybe around 10:30?”

“Does the rest of the staff know about this yet?”

Again, a well-placed question. Vanetta was not playing around.

“Certainly no one has mentioned it to me,” I told her. “And I haven’t told anyone but you.”

“Go around, and find out what everyone has been working on this morning. I want you to literally see the work that they’ve created.”

“Should we have a staff meeting, and everyone can do a show-and-tell of their work?”

Vanetta looked impressed by this idea, and I could see her mulling it over.

“No,” she said. “Why don’t you just go around and make discreet inquiries? You seem good at reading people. No one should be concerned unless they’ve done something wrong.”

While I’d like to pretend that I didn’t preen at Vanetta’s compliment of my people-reading skills, especially since it meant, in one sense, that she was on to me, I positively did a shoulder shimmy at the approbation.

“On it, boss,” I said. “I’ll see what I can learn. Although,” I added, just thinking of it, “this almost certainly means that Archie wasn’t involved.”

“Hooray,” said Vanetta with no enthusiasm.