an Eamon Gold mystery
by
Richard Helms
Richard Helms ('Rick' to his friends), edits and publishes The Back Alley Webzine. His tenth novel (Six Mile Creek) was released by Five Star Mysteries in March, and he has an upcoming story (The Gods For Vengeance Cry) in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. A three-time Shamus Award nominee and the only author ever to win two Derringer Awards in the same year, Helms lives (as he puts it) 'back in the trees' in a small town in North Carolina.
Wally Bean was almost ten years younger than I was.
He was worth about thirty million dollars more.
He had my rapt attention.
“Do you know much about computers, Mr. Gold?” he asked.
“I know how to turn one on,” I said. “I can make it go beep.”
“I own a computer company. Specifically, we write software.”
“I hear there’s a lot of money in that these days.”
“Yes, you could say. Last year my company netted about two hundred million.”
“Dollars?” I asked.
“And change.”
“You can buy a lot of help for just the change,” I noted.
He ignored me.
“We have a problem. Someone has been stealing our code.”
“How does someone do that?”
“That’s the problem. Code writing is a fairly high-tech operation. You’d be surprised how many people don’t even know what it is.”
“Including myself. I failed COBOL in high school.”
He regarded me with something that I took for pity. Apparently I had just flunked my human race test. I checked to make sure my opposable thumbs were still attached.
“Well, we’re way beyond COBOL now,” he said.
His inference was clear. I was not only extinct, I was fossilized.
“There are some people, though, who actually think in code. They live and breathe it. We look for those people. We scour colleges looking for the right candidates and snap them up.”
“We being?”
“My company is called Dynogix. What do you know about it?”
“A little.”
“We’ve been working on a new type of Web browser. I’m sure you know that there are two main brands of browsers out there. We’re working on a third type. It will be thirty percent faster than the competition.”
“And someone is stealing the code for your browser?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“One of our technicians cracked into a sample of a beta version of a new browser being developed by another company. Like I said, these guys live their lives in code. He recognized several specific strings, because he had written them.”
“It’s not possible that someone else just stumbled on the same strings? I heard once that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters…”
“Not in this case,” Wally said, interrupting me. “This was part of our development code, the stuff that actually speeds up the new browser. It’s revolutionary stuff.”
“What was the name of the company developing the other program?”
“SymSystems. Their owner was one of my old coworkers, when I started at IntelliPro.”
“Are any of you Silicon Valley companies just named after a person, or are you all contractions?”
He stared at me for a few moments.
I think he blinked once or twice.
Rebooting, I guess.
He reached into his jacket pocket and slipped a folded piece of paper across my desk. I opened it.
“That’s Jeff Lopiano,” he said.
It was a high-quality graphic of a man in his late twenties, with thinning hair and a cheesy little moustache. His eyes were a watery blue. I could have stirred a highball with his neck.
“This guy owns SymSystems?” I said.
He nodded.
“I’ve included all the information we could put together -- address, license tag numbers, telephone numbers. There’s also some information about SymSystems there.”
“So you think this guy Lopiano’s behind the code theft?”
“We found it in his program.”
“But he didn’t actually write the program, correct?”
“Well, it seems that if it’s his program and our code, he would have had to authorize the theft. I’d like you to find out how he stole it, and close up the leak.”
“Excuse me, but that sounds like an internal security problem. That’s not exactly my line of work. How did you find me, anyway?”
“I was referred to you.”
“Who referred you?”
“Aubrey Innes.”
I nodded, and turned my swivel desk chair to face the window of my office. It was a crisp day in San Francisco, and my window faced Mount Tam across the bay. There were ten or twelve sailboats on the water between the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz.
I wished I were on one of them.
“Aubrey Innes manufactures cell phones,” I said.
“Yes.”
“There’s a big difference between finding out who’s spiriting away cases of cell phones, and who’s stealing what amounts to intellectual property, Mr. Bean.”
“I don’t see your point.”
“Did you tell Aubrey all about your problem?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder why he sent you to me, then.”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s find out,” I said.
I turned the chair back to face Wally Bean and picked up the receiver to my telephone.
Several moments later, I had Aubrey Innes on the line.
“Aubrey, I’m sitting in my office with a fellow you referred to me.”
“Do tell?”
“Wally Bean?”
“Yes, I did,” he said.
“I’m not really certain what he wants, and I was hoping you could help me out a little.”
“Wally has a problem, Eamon,” Aubrey said.
“Code theft,” I said.
“He has a much bigger problem than the simple theft of code.”
“I think you’d better explain that.”
“I can’t, not without betraying a confidence. Let’s just say you’ll find out about it very soon.”
“You’re not being much help, here,” I noted.
“You don’t need my help. It will all become clear within a day or so.”
We exchanged pleasantries for a moment or so, and then I hung up.
“Aubrey says your problem is bigger than code theft,” I told Wally Bean.
“I don’t know what he means.”
“He said I would, in a day or so.”
Wally pulled out a checkbook and a Mont Blanc pen. I liked the pen. I wasn’t crazy about the checkbook.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Writing you a check,” he said, without looking up.
“Don’t do that.”
That made him look up.
“I haven’t decided whether to take your case,” I told him.
“You’re otherwise employed?”
“No. Actually I’m between cases.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“No problem. It’s just the way I am. I take the cases I want to take.”
He continued to stare.
“It’s a me thing.” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
He nodded, and turned back to writing his check.
“I understand a lot more than you think,” he said. “The high-tech data business was built on the backs of rugged individualists. We don’t spend a lot of time worrying about things like vertical lines of communication, or getting permission.”
He tore the check from his wallet and placed it on the desk. I didn’t touch it, but I could see it from where I was sitting.
It was too big to miss.
“That’s a retainer,” he said. “This situation is very important to me. If Aubrey Innes says you’re the guy for the job, I want you on it. Think it over. If you want the job, deposit the check and give me a call. If you don’t want it, tear it up and give me a call so I can find someone else.”
He stood and leaned over my desk to shake my hand.
“I’m betting you cash the check,” he said.
I listened as he walked down the stairs to Jefferson Street.
I looked down at the check on my desk. Then I swiveled back to watch the sailboats on the bay.
* * * * *
I was still watching the sailboats when Heidi Fluhr walked up the steps and into my office. We had a lunch date. She didn’t knock. She doesn’t have to.
Heidi is like the Swedish farmer’s daughter on steroids. She’s six feet of all girl and bunches of it. Sleeping with her is like running a triathlon.
Three times in one night.
She had cut her hair a few weeks before. It fell in short blonde wisps around her perfectly complected face and her cool blue eyes.
We had dated almost a year. It wasn’t serious, but neither was I interested in breaking it off anytime soon. Playing night games with Heidi is like driving a Bugatti Veyron. Afterward, nothing else seems to stack up.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. I picked up the check and placed it in my desk drawer.
“New job?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m thinking it over.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Computer gig. Industrial espionage. James Bond stuff.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Sounds like a headache, on top of a toothache. Where do you want to eat?”
We walked down Jefferson past the Hyde Pier to Fisherman’s Wharf, and took a booth at a place that had iced bins full of shellfish out front. I wasn’t very hungry, so I ordered clam chowder in a sourdough loaf bowl. Heidi ordered half the appetizer menu.
And a salad.
“I finished the dreadnaught last night,” I said, as we sipped our tea.
“Oh,” she said. “That explains why you’re so distant today. Every time you finish an instrument you get the thousand yard stare.”
“Do not,” I said.
But I knew she was right. I build guitars and other stringed instruments as a hobby. Sometimes I think I’d rather do it for a living, but then it wouldn’t be fun anymore.
“What will you build next?” she asked.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Kind of like the job.”
“Yeah. Kind of like the job.”
“Maybe a Selmer Maccaferri,” I said, a couple of minutes later, between bites of the chowder.
“Say again?”
“It’s a jazz guitar from the thirties. The kind that Django Reinhardt played. I have the plans for it at the Montara house. I might make it next.”
“Good for you,” she said.
I looked up.
She smiled.
“Nothing feels quite so satisfying as closure.”
* * * * *
I walked her back to her store. Heidi owns the art gallery just underneath my office. I don’t understand a lot of the stuff she sells, but that’s okay. She doesn’t understand a lot of my work.
It keeps us from getting too involved in each other’s lives.
Heidi went back to work, and I walked up the steps to my office.
There was a man sitting in my waiting room. He seemed nervous, and his watery eyes flitted back and forth as I walked in, as if he believed he had been caught in a burglary and was searching for a window escape.
“Come into my office, Mr. Lopiano,” I said.
He stood as I opened the door to my inner office.
“You know who I am?”
“I’m a detective,” I said. “I know all kinds of things.”
I took my seat behind the desk and he sat in the same seat where Wally Bean had sat that morning.
“Let me guess,” I said, “You have a problem at SymSystems.”
His head bobbed around on his pencil neck like a dashboard chihuahua.
“Amazing,” he said.
“Did Aubrey Innes send you?” I asked.
“Yes. Did he tell you I was coming?”
“No. Educated guess.”
I made a note to slap Aubrey around a little the next time I saw him.
“Want to make a bet?” I said.
“I’m not sure.”
I pulled a twenty from my pocket and slapped it down on my desk.
“That twenty says you’re working on a new Web browser, and someone’s been stealing your code.”
“Aubrey did talk with you.”
“Yes, but not about you.”
I opened my desk drawer and pulled out Wally Bean’s check and a pen. It wasn’t a Mont Blanc, but it wrote just fine. I turned the check over and endorsed it, then stuffed it in my shirt pocket.
“What’s that?” Lopiano asked.
“A decision I just made. Let’s talk about your problem.”
* * * * *
“I’ve come to kick your ass,” I said, as I settled into the leather chair next to Aubrey Innes’ sofa. He was on the sofa. In front of him was a fine sterling tea service. I recalled that Aubrey didn’t drink coffee.
“Tea?” he asked.
“No thanks. What’s the big idea, sending those kids to me?”
“Bean and Lopiano?”
“Yeah.”
“The situation amused me. I thought it would interest you.”
“Did they come to you individually too?”
“They telephoned. I knew both of them when we were grunts at DiaCom. Actually, Jeff Lopiano called me first. Wanted to know what Wally was up to. Like I knew.”
“Why would he call you?”
“You did a good job closing a hole in my distribution system last year. I was impressed. I put the word out, anyone needed an investigator, I could set them up.”
“Not that I can’t use the work…” I said.
“Feeling a little manipulated?”
“No more than your average pretzel.”
“So, what do you think?”
“I should discuss my clients’ business with you?”
“Then you took their cases.”
“I should discuss my clients’ business with you?”
“I see,” Innes said, pouring tea into a Wedgwood china cup.
“Ethics,” I said. “Confidentiality. You understand.”
“Of course. On the other hand, I’m not bound by any such constraints. Do you mind if I think out loud for a moment?”
“Not at all.”
“We have two very bright, but very introverted guys. Despite their obvious physical dissimilarities, they are intellectual and emotional twins, which is to say they are at an intellectual age somewhere around a thousand, and an emotional age of five or six. At one time, they were very close friends.”
“But competitive?”
“Of course. It’s a competitive business. Breakthroughs coming every thirty-seven seconds, you need to stay on top of things. Some of these guys work three, four years without taking a vacation.”
“But there are rewards.”
“It’s not coincidental that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, Eamon.”
“Interesting that they would branch off into individual companies working on the same stuff.”
“You mean, why didn’t they combine their talents? Form a single company and shoot for some kind of synergistic energy?”
“Yeah. That thing you just said.”
“Ah, well….” Innes said, sipping his tea. “Now we enter the realm of gossip.”
“Oh, goody.”
“There was a girl.”
“There always is,” I said.
Heidi and I had spent the night at my house in Montara.
I had converted the living room into a workshop, where I built my instruments. I am a messy luthier. I had spent the afternoon the day before cleaning the shop and sharpening my hand tools, while Heidi trotted across the Pacific Coast Highway to Montara Beach to shed her clothes, read a book, and arouse the marine wildlife.
We had grilled steaks that evening, and had eaten on my deck overlooking the beach. We had drunk a lot of California merlot. The rest of the evening was a fleshy blur.
I awoke around eight-thirty with my mind working on the problem of Wally Bean and Jeff Lopiano. I dressed in jeans and a cutoff sweatshirt, made some coffee, and started puttering around the shop.
While I worked on joining the two halves of a sitka spruce soundboard, I reviewed what Aubrey Innes had told me.
Wally Bean and Jeff Lopiano had been fast buddies at DiaCom, after graduating from Cal Tech. It was their first jobs in the computer industry. Their primary interest was seeing how much more information they could stuff onto a silicon chip, even as they explored how much smaller they could make the chip.
Their secondary interest was Linda Pickett.
According to Aubrey, Jeff Lopiano claimed to have seen her first, as if that counted for anything. Maybe for eggheads like my clients it did.
DiaCom had a “work hard – play hard” philosophy. Its owner, a hoary old veteran of the high tech business (whom, I might add, was younger than I) was a little hyperactive, and expected that his younger talent would keep up with him. Besides putting in sixty-hour weeks, there were lots of company “activities” that involved things like water skiing and hang-gliding. In the evenings, the entire crew tended to congregate at local watering holes to lubricate the next day’s brainworks.
It was at one of those bars that Jeff Lopiano first spotted Linda Pickett. As Aubrey Innes told it, Wally Bean may have seen her one or two seconds later, but in Silicon Valley a second or two might as well be a lifetime.
The door to my bedroom opened. Heidi stumbled out, naked, and plopped down on the sofa that ran the length of the fourth wall of the living room. Not many women can lounge around in the buff and look natural. Heidi looked like she was posing for Titian.
“There’s coffee,” I said.
“Oh, thank God,” she moaned, rising from the couch. She padded into the kitchen.
While she poured, I laid the bookmatched spruce on top of some pipe clamps, ran a bead of wood glue down the joined edges, and then pulled them together with the clamps. In a few hours I would take the joined top plate out and plane it to its final thickness.
Or not.
The nice thing about instrument building was that nobody made me account for my time.
Heidi walked back into the living room and looked at me drowsily over the steam rising from her morning brew.
“What in hell did we do last night?” she asked.
“Pretty much all of it,” I said.
“Uh huh,” she said, nodding. “That explains it. What are you working on?”
“Maccaferri guitar. The kind that Django Rinehardt played.”
“If you say so. You have to work today?”
“I’m planning to meet with a couple of clients around one.”
“It’s just nine now.”
“Yes.”
“I have a shower running.”
“I thought I heard the water.”
“We could get clean.”
“That would be nice.”
“And then we could get dirty again.”
“That would be nicer,” I said, as I set the guitar top aside to dry.
* * * * *
Jeff Lopiano sat nervously across from me, tapping on a small digital device in his hand with a stylus. I sat calmly and watched him. The window behind me was open, and a cool breeze wafted in off the bay.
The door to my office opened, and Wally Bean walked in.
“What’s he doing here?” Lopiano asked.
“What’s he doing here?” Bean asked.
“When you think of it, in the larger sense, what are any of us doing here?” I reflected. “In this case, though, I think you two have some things in common. At the moment, that includes having hired me to investigate each other.”
“That’s a conflict of interest,” Bean protested.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Please, have a seat.”
Bean sat, reluctantly, in the seat next to Lopiano.
“Hey, Wally,” Lopiano said.
“Hi, Jeff.”
“Now, to business,” I said. “Both of you were referred here by Aubrey Innes. Each of you took him into your confidence, and told him essentially the same story. Each of you thinks the other has stolen your work. Follow me so far?”
They both nodded. Intellectual and emotional animated twin bookends.
“Detecting 101 says that this falls under the category of the impossible. A couple of ideas have occurred to me. One says that one or both of you are lying.”
“Now just a minute!” Lopiano protested.
I held up a hand to silence him.
“That was just one idea. Another idea says that both of you are telling the truth, but blaming the wrong person. I could bounce back and forth between you like a ping-pong ball, but that would just waste a lot of time and make me dizzy, so I decided to get you both in the same room and try to hash this out.”
I waited for some kind of response.
When none came, I continued.
“Mr. Bean, when did you first notice that your code had been used by Mr. Lopiano?”
“Stolen, you mean…” Bean said.
“Like hell,” Lopiano argued.
“Can we focus?” I said. “Mr. Bean, when did you discover the same code in both programs?”
“About a week ago. Like I said, one of my engineers obtained a beta test version of SymSystems’ new browser.”
“Where did he get this version?” I asked.
“I didn’t ask.”
“Of course not,” Lopiano chirped. “You didn’t want to be implicated.”
I ignored him.
“What was this engineer’s name?”
“Lionel Stukes.”
I turned to Lopiano.
“And when did you notice your code in Mr. Bean’s software?”
“About a week ago, also,” Lopiano said. “It was brought to my attention by the director of my development crew, Les Crampley.”
I wrote Lionel Stukes and Les Crampley on a legal pad next to my phone.
“How did Crampley obtain it?”
Lopiano mumbled something.
“Come again?” I asked.
“I didn’t ask,” Lopiano said, a little too loud and little too petulantly.
“For people with so much on the line, you guys sure don’t ask many questions,” I said.
Neither of them replied. They just sat there like a couple of school kids called up on the principal’s carpet for smoking in the boys’ room.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to need whatever information you can give me on Stukes and Crampley.”
* * * * *
Lionel Stukes had been dead for about twelve hours when I arrived at his house in Daly City. The front door was festooned with yellow crime tape, and a Pacifica Police detective named Crymes stood on the front walk talking with a uniformed cop.
“Crymes,” I said, as I walked up to him.
“Wait a minute, Gold,” he said, and finished his conversation.
“I hope you dropped by to confess,” he said.
“To what?”
“Making such a mess of the guy owns this place.”
“What happened?”
“Looks like he got into an awful fight. The living room is a wreck, and not just the parts he bled all over. Someone went after him with a blunt object and an agenda. Want to look?”
“Pass. Did he have a roommate or a live-in girlfriend?”
“Not that we can tell. What mail we found was addressed to him. What’s your involvement?”
“He worked for one of my clients. Software engineer. I needed to ask him a couple of questions.”
“I might want to talk with your client,” he said.
“Trust me,” I said. “You don’t.”
“What was he, bangin’ your client’s wife?”
“You wish it were that easy. No, he had acquired some software for my client. I wanted to find out where and how.”
“Industrial espionage case?”
“I’m not sure, yet. Maybe.”
“Keep me posted?”
“Got you on speed dial,” I said, as I headed back to my car.
* * * * *
A car was backing out of Les Crampley’s driveway just as I drove up his street in San Jose. I had a couple of options. I could have blocked his path, jerked him through the keyhole, and beat some answers out of him, but I had generally found that an unproductive approach.
So, I decided to follow him.
I let him get a couple of hundred yards ahead of me, then fell into a loose tail. When we got onto Interstate 280, I let a couple of cars separate us, while I watched his license plate through the windows. Unless he had X-ray vision, he couldn’t know I was back there.
He pulled off at an exit near Redwood City, and I went with him. He drove to an office park, where he parked in a lot outside a squat complex of single story buildings.
I parked one lot over, with a good view of the car.
The door opened, and I realized I hadn’t been following Les Crampley at all. The woman who got out was dressed in black jeans and a black tank top. Her inky hair was cut at indiscriminate lengths on top and back, with a long fringe running down the back of her neck, like a rock musician. Even from a distance I could make out her kohl-rimmed eyes and the glittery accumulata of jewelry punched through the skin of her face, nose, lips, and ears. She wasn’t all that tall, but she was lanky and loose-limbed as she strode from the car to the front door of the building.
I pulled my binoculars out and scanned the front door, where I found a sign that said Core Logic.
I stepped out of the car and walked casually over to the next lot to memorize her license tag. I kept walking, and pulled out my cell phone.
Shirley Jones is a pal who works for the DMV at the San Francisco Civic Center. We have a past, but that was over before I met Heidi.
“This is Gold,” I said.
“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”
“Your boss is hovering?”
“That’s correct sir.”
“I need a license tag traced.” I gave her the number.
“Please hold, sir.”
I suffered through an elevator music rendition of some Andrew Lloyd Webber tune, until she came back on the line.
“Is there lunch in this for me?”
“Not today. I’ll owe you.”
“You already owe me, skinflint.”
“I’m in kind of a hurry, Shirl.”
“The owner’s name is Linda Pickett.”
“Thanks, gotta boogie.”
“Wait a min…”
But I had punched the END button. Linda Pickett had walked out of Core Logic, and was headed back to her car.
I returned to my car and backed it out of the lot just as she hit the stop sign at the highway. I noted which way she turned, and made the same turn when I got there. I could make out her car about a quarter mile ahead, so I hammered down for a mile or so to cut the distance a little, and then throttled back when I had reached at a comfortable gap.
It didn’t take an Einstein to figure out that Linda Pickett was probably the conduit for the beta versions of the software that Les Crampley and Lionel Stukes had received. What I couldn’t figure out was why she was playing both sides against the middle. Somehow, I thought, Core Logic had to fit in to the picture, unless she was also stringing along some poor programmer sap there.
Since Lionel Stukes had been murdered, I also figured that this put Les Crampley either at risk, or directly in the limelight as a suspect. I thumbed Crymes’ number on my cell speed dial.
“Crymes.”
“This is Gold. I’m tailing a chick named Linda Pickett. I saw her leave a house belonging to another guy named Les Crampley about a half hour ago. Crampley found some of his code in a program that your dead guy was writing for a company called SymSystems.”
“Silicon Valley outfit?”
“Yeah. The dead guy, Stukes, worked for Dynogix. I thought you might want to check in on Crampley. If he isn’t dead, I think he might have a lot of explaining to do.”
I gave him Crampley’s address, and signed off. As soon as I hit the END button, I dialed Kevin Krantz at the Business desk of the Chronicle. Kevin and I go back a long way.
“Kevin, this is Eamon Gold.”
“Who do you want me to check on this time?”
“So young. So cynical.”
“Yeah, yeah. What’s up?”
“Company called Core Logic. It’s in Redwood.”
“You on your cell?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
I followed Linda Pickett through San Mateo and Daly City. She was headed back into San Francisco. As long as we were on the freeway, I could lay back a quarter mile or so, keep a few cars between us. If I was lucky, and hadn’t lost my touch, she’d never know I was there.
My cell beeped. I answered it.
“This is Kevin.”
“What did you find?”
“Core Logic. Founded three years ago by Hack German, a former IBM techno-geek.”
“What do they do?”
“What does anyone do down in Silicon Valley? He writes software.”
“What kind of software?”
“In his case, he’s been developing a search engine. He saw how Google and Yahoo had made their founders very rich men, and he wants to slice off a piece of that pie.”
“Search engine,” I said.
“Does that mean something?”
“I don’t know. What do you know about ongoing projects at Dynogix and SymSystems?”
“Not much. I’d have to get back to you.”
“The quicker the better, Kev.”
Linda Pickett pulled off the highway at the Bayshore Expressway, and then took the off ramp at Van Ness. I followed her through SoMa until she hung a left at Bush, and parked in the driveway of a house between Bush and Pine in the Fillmore district.
Just as I pulled over to the curb, my cell phone rang.
“This is Kevin,” he told me when I answered. “There’s a lot of talk about both Dynogix and SymSystems, but it’s all back channel stuff. It seems their legal eagles have been preparing some patent submissions.”
“Browsers,” I said. “I already know about that.”
“No. Well, sort of, but not exactly. What do you know about the Grid, Eamon?”
“You mean like the old Firesign Theater stuff? Grid Willing, that kind of thing?”
“Hardly. The Grid is the next big thing. It’s going to make the World Wide Web look like a rural party line. Super high speed information access, ungodly bandwidth, real high-tech whizbang stuff.”
“So?”
“So, forward-thinking techies are already preparing to get onboard with this Grid thingie. It seems that the patents being sought by Dynogix and SymSystems revolve around super-spiders.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Spiders are part of the browsing software used by search engines to acquire and catalog webpage information. They prowl around the Web in the background, reading pages and links, and indexing what they find. That way, when you type ‘wombats’ into a search engine, all it has to do is find that word in the index, and it lists all the pages containing the word.”
“And these super-spiders will do the same thing on this Grid?”
“Exactly. The first company to patent a Grid-compatible search engine using hyperspeed super-spiders is going to make a buttload of money.”
“Define buttload.”
“Billions, Eamon. If I were a savvy investor, which I am, I’d start buying both Dynogix and SymSystems, just to hedge my bets.”
“What about Core Logic?”
“What about them?”
“You said earlier that they were into search engines also.”
“Yeah. I did, didn’t I? What are you up to, anyway?”
“I’m not sure. I’d hold off buying stock, though, if I were you. Some of the players might get benched.”
I sat in my car, watching the front of the house Linda Pickett had entered, and tried to figure out what was going on. Linda had left Les Crampley’s house and had driven all the way to Redwood City, and then spent a grand total of five minutes inside Core Logic. Then she had driven all the way back to the city. My guess was that she had gone to Core Logic just to drop off something. She really hadn’t been there long enough to get into any lengthy conversations.
I pulled out the cell phone and called Heidi at the art gallery.
“I could use a favor,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Check your phone book. I need to know if there’s a listing for Linda Pickett on Bush Street.”
“Give me a sec… No. I don’t see one. There’s an L. Pickett on Figueroa in San Jose. A lot of women list themselves by their first initials.”
“Yeah. They do. Give me the Figueroa address and phone number.”
She recited them from the phone book, and I wrote them on the pad suspended from the dash of my car. I thanked her, with a promise of more attention later in the evening, and signed off.
My next call was to Kevin Krantz at the paper.
“Got your criss-cross phone directory handy?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“I need a listing for a house on Bush Street.”
I gave him the house number.
“According to the directory, it’s a residence. Fellow named Kerry Clapp. You want the phone number?”
“Sure.”
I sat in the car for a few more minutes, ruminating over what I knew, and what I didn’t. Then I pulled out the cell phone on a hunch, got the number for Core Logic, and had information connect me.
“Core Logic,” a woman answered.
“Kerry Clapp, please?”
“I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Clapp isn’t in today. Can I take a message?”
“Um, I need to speak with someone directly. Is his supervisor available?”
“Certainly sir. I’ll connect you.”
There was a brief interlude, and then someone picked up the phone.
“This is Hack German,” he said. “Can I help you?”
“Actually, I was trying to get in touch with Kerry Clapp,” I said.
“Yes. Kerry’s out today. Is there anything I can do for you, Mr…”
“I don’t know,” I said, evading his probe. “This is a little convoluted. I was hoping Mr. Clapp could put me in touch with Linda Pickett.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end.
“Who is this?” he asked. His voice had taken on a cold, edgy tone.
I punched the END button, and turned off the telephone. Maybe German could star-sixty-nine me and maybe he couldn’t. I didn’t have a voicemail system on my cell, so he couldn’t find me that way. If he tried to call me back, he’d just get an out-of-service message.
Nobody had entered or left the Bush Street house since Linda Pickett had gone inside. I waited about five minutes, just long enough for German to get tired of trying to ring me back, and then I called Crymes.
“Did you find Les Crampley?” I asked.
“Yeah. He was at home.”
“What was his story?”
“About what, Gold? He was safe and sound, not a scratch on him. He also said he’d never heard of a woman named Linda Pickett.”
“He’s lying. I saw her leave his house not two hours ago.”
“You didn’t see him with her, though.”
“No, but…”
“You want to fill me in on what’s going on?”
“I’m still putting it together. I think it involves theft of intellectual property, and an attempt by a company called Core Logic to keep two other companies – Dynogix and SymSystems – from filing a patent application for a computer browsing system they’re both developing.”
“Industrial espionage shit.”
“It has the smell of it.”
“Not the kind of thing that usually leads to murder.”
“According to one of my sources, there are billions of dollars at stake. Makes a hell of a motive.”
“I agree. I need what you’ve got.”
“I’m staking out a house owned by a guy named Kerry Clapp. He works for this Core Logic company. He isn’t at work today. I saw Linda Pickett go inside the house about ten minutes ago. When I called Core Logic, the owner, fellow named Hack German, lost all his warmth when I told him I was looking for Linda Pickett. Linda Pickett was involved in a lust triangle with the owners of Dynogix and SymSystems three or four years ago, which led them to split up and go their separate ways.”
“This Linda Pickett gets around.”
“I think she may be the conduit between your dead guy and Les Crampley. I think she’s been stealing code from both of them and shuttling it back and forth. Probably told them it was coming from Core Logic, since they’re working on the same kind of programs.”
“You’re losing me.”
“The first company to file a patent application for this new kind of search engine will make Microsoft look like a corner Mom and Pop operation. By pitting Dynogix against SymSystems, Core Logic buys time to perfect its product and file first.”
“It still doesn’t explain why Stukes was murdered.”
“I know. Maybe he figured out what was going on.”
The front door of the Bush Street house opened, and two people walked out. One was Linda Pickett. The other was a tall, sinewy man in his thirties. His hair was pulled back in a blond ponytail.
“Looks like my guys are on the move,” I said. “I’ll have to call you back, Crymes.”
“Gold, wait…”
I turned off the phone and dropped my car into gear just as Linda Pickett and her fellow pulled out of the driveway and headed east on Bush, toward Van Ness.
* * * * *
As I had expected, they drove straight to Core Logic. I had a feeling when I saw them that the rangy guy with the ponytail was Clapp. I also was willing to bet that when Hack German couldn’t get me back on the phone he called Clapp, who just happened to be with Linda Pickett, and summoned them to Core Logic for a strategic planning pow-wow.
I parked nearby, in the same lot I had used earlier that day, and watched as Linda Pickett and the guy I thought was Clapp got out of the car and walked inside.
Recalling that at least one person had already been killed, I grabbed my Browning automatic from the glove compartment and stowed it on my belt, underneath my jacket.
I strolled casually into the Core Logic office. Like a lot of Silicon Valley companies, it was little more than a shell housing a cube farm with a few standalone offices for the top brass. There was a girl sitting at the front desk who looked as if she should have been in high school.
“Is Hack in?” I asked.
“I’m sorry. He’s in a meeting.”
She nodded toward on end of the hall, at a closed door next to a warren of cubicles.
“Any idea how long he’s going to be?” I asked. “I’m on kind of a tight schedule.”
“Do you have an appointment, Mr….”
“No. Just blowing through town. Thought I’d look ol’ Hack up, maybe drag him out to bend an elbow and reminisce about the college days.”
“If you’d like to take a seat,” she said, nodding toward the waiting area. Her arms, by all appearances, must have been paralyzed, because she pointed toward everything with her chin. “He should be available shortly.”
“Sure. Just one thing. Do you have a bathroom around here somewhere? I just drove in from the airport, and I had to sit in traffic for a while.”
She directed me back along the hallway toward the cube farm. Perfect.
I walked back along the hall, almost all the way to the closed office door, then turned left toward the bathroom. When I peeked back around the corner, the receptionist had left her desk.
There was an open door across the hall. It appeared to be some kind of small conference room. I walked through the open door and closed it behind me.
A dry erase whiteboard had been installed on the wall next to the closed office the girl had shown me. I picked up one of the drinking glasses from the water station and held it up to the board. It made a terrific sound conductor.
People in the next room seemed agitated.
“Why in hell did you have to kill him?” one person, a male said.
“He’d figured out where the code originated. He was going to rat us out to Bean.”
“I thought you were going to handle Stukes.”
“I did, up to a point,” a female voice said. Must have been Linda Pickett. “When he discovered that the code came from Core Logic instead of SymSystems, he felt betrayed. He called me over specifically to tell me that he was going to turn us in. He’d figured out the entire scheme. He was even going to call Lopiano over at SymSystems.”
“We didn’t have a choice,” the other male voice said. I decided he must be Clapp.
“What about the other one? Crampley?”
“He’s on board,” Linda said. “I offered to let him in on the take once the Core Logic super-spider gets patented and goes into production. I also told him we could keep getting together for sex. I tried it with Stukes, but he apparently had a few more scruples.”
The telephone in the next room buzzed, and I heard someone pick it up.
“Yes, Brenda… Okay, thanks.”
A second later, a connecting door to my right opened, and Clapp dashed into the room. He grabbed me by the collar and started dragging me toward German’s office. I elbowed him stiffly just under the ribs, and heard the air blast out of his lungs just before he fell to his knees.
By that time, though, German was all over me. He was a big guy, maybe six-two, and he worked out. He tried to put me in a full nelson. I quickly dropped and broke his grip, but he kneed me in the kidneys as I went down. A wave of heat and nausea flooded through my torso. I felt a hand snake under my jacket. Before I could stop him, German had my gun.
“Just stay down there!” he ordered. “Who in hell are you?”
I tried to make some words come out, but the pain in my lower back kept me from getting enough air to produce anything more audible than a croak.
At that moment, my cell phone jangled in my jacket pocket.
German jacked me up against the wall, held me there with his forearm against my windpipe, and grabbed the cell phone with his free hand. He held it in front of my eyes.
“Who is it?” he demanded.
I looked at the number.
“A cop. His name is Crymes. Pacifica PD.”
He let it ring. After a few moments, it stopped.
“The cops!” he said to Linda Pickett, who had joined us in the meeting room. “Look what you’ve brought down on our heads, you stupid bitch!”
He went through my pockets, and found my leather card folder.
“He’s a PI,” German said. “Name’s Eamon Gold.”
“Never heard of him,” Clapp said. He had finally gotten his breath back, and was standing next to German.
“What are you doing here, Gold?” German asked. He accented his question with a sharp fist to the short ribs on my right side. I winced, and made a silent promise to clean his clock the first chance I got.
“Working a case,” I said.
“Who hired you?”
“Bean and Lopiano. I’ve already told Crymes, that cop who was on the phone, the entire scheme. I told him that Linda Pickett was feeding Core Logic code to Stukes and Crampley. I know about the super-spider patent application, and how you’re trying to divert Dynogix and SymSystems by making them each think the other is stealing their code, until you can snipe them. Crymes knows everything.”
“Don’t shit me, man. If the cops knew everything, they’d be here already.”
“This is fucked,” Clapp said. “I didn’t sign on for this kind of shitstorm. I’m leaving.”
With his arm still pinned against my windpipe, German swung my Browning around and leveled it at Clapp.
“Nobody leaves!” he said.
“Now you’ve got balls?” Clapp said. “I beat the living shit out of Stukes last night because you didn’t have the guts to stop him.”
“That was different,” German said. “I can’t let you leave until we know how much Gold here has passed on to the cops.”
“Christ!” Clapp said. “We are going down, man.”
“No, we aren’t,” German argued. “Worst case, we have to leave the country. I have millions stashed away in the offshore accounts. We’ll be just fine.”
“What about her?” Clapp said, pointing at Linda. “She’s the connection with Dynogix and SymSystems.”
“Man,” I rasped. “You guys aren’t even good enough to be lousy criminals. What made you think you could get away with this?”
“It was her idea!” Clapp said.
“Shut up!” German said. “Let me think!”
“She came to us,” Clapp said, ignoring him. “She said she had a way to keep Lopiano and Bean off balance long enough for us to get the jump on the super-spider program.”
“I said shut up!” German said, just before I pivoted and sank my teeth into his forearm.
He screamed at the instant pain, and his other hand jerked. I heard the Browning explode in the crowded room, and a little scarlet flower erupted on the front of Clapp’s shirt. He clawed at the hole, as the flower grew into a splotch, and then a cascade. Slowly, he sat down on the floor, unable to take his eyes off the life that flooded out of him one heartbeat at a time.
I rammed my knee up into German’s balls, and took great delight in the way his eyes widened as his mouth formed this silent round circle, just before he dropped the Browning, doubled over, and clutched his arms to his midsection.
Linda Pickett grabbed the Browning as German went down, and had me cold before I could stop her. Her hands trembled as she tried to keep the barrel pointed at my chest. She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were dilated to the point that all I could see were pupils. She was running on pure adrenalin, and any second her fist was going to spasm and park a nine mike round right into my heart.
Just when I thought she was about to go ballistic, she cut to her right and dashed back into German’s office. I heard her run down the hall, and I took off after her.
She ran right into Crymes and a couple of uniformed Redwood City patrol cops as they walked in the front door. They instinctively drew down on her.
“Drop the fucking weapon!” Crymes yelled, using the command voice they teach in the academy.
She froze and dropped the Browning to the floor. I stood behind her, my hands already in the air.
“The others are in the back,” I said. “German killed Clapp, I think.”
Crymes directed the patrolmen to the back, as he started to cuff Linda.
“You must have called from the parking lot,” I said.
“I was going to check Core Logic out based on your call a little while ago. I got here and saw that piece of shit car of yours. Figured you had beat me to the punch. Looks like I missed the party.”
“I overheard them talking about killing Stukes,” I said.
“All in good time, Eamon. Let’s figure out what happened here first.”
* * * * *
“So Clapp killed Lionel Stukes,” I told Heidi over dinner that night at my Montara house. “It seems that Linda Pickett was screwing just about everyone except German, and she must have been top shelf, because these guys would do just about anything for her. She told Clapp that Stukes was going to turn them all in for conspiracy, and Clapp paid Stukes a visit.”
“What happens next?” Heidi asked.
“Linda’s no idiot. As soon as she dropped the gun she started talking deal with Crymes. She’ll give up Hack German for both the conspiracy and for killing Clapp. He’ll get minimal time on the conspiracy, since it’s basically a white-collar beef. He didn’t really mean to kill Clapp, either, so he’ll probably get off with involuntary manslaughter. Linda Pickett will probably get off with probation. Same for Crampley.”
“Hardly seems fair,” she said. “After all two guys are dead over all this.”
“That’s not all. Once they realized that they’d both been royally dicked by Linda Pickett, Lopiano and Bean buried the hatchet. They’re talking merger, and they’re planning to launch their super-spider as a joint venture. Want to hear the best part? The hot shit code that makes the whole thing run really did belong to Core Logic to begin with, for all the good it does German now.”
She finished her wine, and placed the glass back on the table.
“And the silicon kings were very grateful to their savior,” she noted.
“It’s a good thing, too. I lost the Browning. It’s a murder weapon, so the police confiscated it. I’ll never get it back.”
“Yeah, but you do get the consolation prize,” she said.
“What’s that?”
She stood and started unbuttoning her blouse.
“Me,” she said.
It was a fair trade.
END
Copyright © 2010, by Richard Helms