“Yes,” Kate said. “Well.”
Had Pramilla Mehta been religious? Kate wondered as she walked Amanda Bonner to the elevator. Would she have said that fate— karma—kept her friend Amanda from being there when she needed her? And what about her death; would a fifteen-year-old girl agree that death was nothing, reincarnation all? Or was that a Buddhist conceit, not a Hindu one?
Assuming, of course, that the hang-up call was from Pramilla. The Mehta phone records would tell, although it would not be a kindness to confirm Amanda’s fears. Maybe she’d just let it go.
JUST AFTER MIDDAY, Kate and Al drove up to talk with Matthew Banderas’s boss, Janice Popper. The software company was in an uninspired strip of businesses just off the freeway, clean and tidily landscaped and working hard to appear both cutting-edge (a modern tangle of sculpture out front) and reassuringly stable (thick carpeting in the entrance foyer). They identified themselves to the receptionist, who picked up the phone and announced their arrival. Popper came out of the back and greeted them, ushering them back to her office with a declaration that Kate had heard dozens of times before in similar circumstances, although she freely admitted that very occasionally it was true.
“I don’t think I can help you much,” Popper told them. “I didn’t really know the man.”
“That’s fine,” Hawkin said, settling into his chair across the desk from her and presenting her with a genial smile. “We just need to be thorough. Let’s see. You’ve only had this job a few months, is that right? Did you work for the company before that, or were you hired from outside?”
“Nine weeks now, and I was headhunted. Brought in from outside. That may have been one of the problems, with Matthew, that is. He applied for this position, although he wasn’t really qualified. His experience was almost exclusively in sales, not general administration.”
Janice Popper was a small, thin woman with a number of nervous habits involving her fingers, which made Kate wonder if she’d recently given up smoking and had to find something to do with her hands. Right now she was tugging irritably at the sleek dark brown hair that fell along her jawline, trying to tuck it behind her ear—without success, as it was about half an inch too short to stay tucked—and adjusting her titanium-framed designer glasses as if they were bothering the bridge of her nose.
“When did you find out about his criminal record?” Al asked her.
“My second week here. I never had a proper handover because the guy who did this job before me had a heart attack and wasn’t up to briefing me, and personnel records were secondary to active contracts and ongoing negotiations. It took me a week or so to get my feet under me, begin to get a handle on the shape of the company. After that I started taking appointments with personnel, people with problems or urgent suggestions, wanting transfers or raises, that kind of thing. Most of them, of course, just wanting a chance to size up the new boss and make an impression. Banderas came in around the middle of that week, maybe Thursday. I always have my secretary give me a file on an appointment so I know something about them—single or five kids, war veteran or university graduate, anything like that. Nothing confidential you know, just background. So I open the file for my ten o’clock or whatever it was and see that Matthew Banderas was on record as a sex offender. I left the door wide open during that appointment, I can tell you.”
“You said you had decided to fire him?” Hawkin asked.
“Not for that,” she quickly said. “I’d have no right to fire him for a past offense, either legally or ethically, no matter how uncomfortable it made me feel. No, he was falling down on his job. The sales numbers just weren’t coming in, and numbers are the bottom line. We work by salary plus commission, and we couldn’t afford to pay somebody who wasn’t bringing it in.”
“But he’d been okay before you came?”
“Not really. He’d been slipping for some months.” She paused, choosing her words. “I ran an analysis on his sales, trying to track it down, thinking I might help him out. I found that almost all of his successful sales contacts were men.” She shook her head. “There’s just too many women in charge of buying to write off that whole side of the market.”
“He alienated women buyers, then?”
“Somehow, yes.”
“Any way of finding out how?”
“I wouldn’t want to ask them directly, if that’s what you’re saying. It’s hardly a great sales technique, to remind buyers that you had a rep who was not only a prick but a rapist to boot, who on top of that managed to get himself murdered.”
“On the other hand,” Kate suggested, “it might clear the air if one of your female sales reps had a few woman-to-woman talks with people who turned Banderas down. Might get across the message that it wasn’t going to happen again.”
Popper sat still for a moment, staring at Kate and thinking. Her right hand came up to tuck the uncooperative lock behind her ear, and she nodded.
“You may be right. We’ll run a trial, and tell you what—if I find anything out about Matthew, I’ll pass it on to you.”
“One other thing,” Hawkin said, interrupting the forward shift in her body’s position that presaged their dismissal. “Who else knew about Banderas’s history?”
“I have no idea. No, really—I don’t,” she insisted. “I would guess that either everybody knew, or nobody. It’s the sort of thing that tends to spread, but I haven’t been here long enough to develop my own network within the company, and I’ve been too damn busy to ask around about him. Why don’t you talk to my secretary—she’s been here forever.”
Both times Popper had said the phrase “my secretary,” she had looked as if she were biting into something unpleasant, leading Kate to suspect that the secretary had been inherited with the job, and that Popper was none too pleased about it. She was probably temporarily dependent on the woman—and the woman’s own “network” of knowledge and contacts—but somehow Kate thought that would not continue for long.
The woman in the outer office was pale, slow-moving, spoke with a trace of Texas in her voice, and was at least a decade older than her thin new boss with the nervous fingers.
“Oh, indeed,” she told them. “Everybody knew. Everybody that mattered, that is. I made sure the new girls all heard, just so they wouldn’t accept rides from Mr. Banderas, if you see what I mean. Not that he ever seemed to look close to home—as far as I know he never gave any of the girls here so much as a glance—but I thought it was good to be careful.”
“Did you tell anyone outside of work?”
“I may have mentioned it to two or three friends,” she replied stiffly, “but I wouldn’t have told them his name.”
“Has anyone ever contacted you, inquiring about Banderas?”
“No.” And, her prim expression added, she would not have told them had they asked.
Hawkin thanked her in his warmest fashion, which made no impression at all on her disapproval. As he and Kate left, he glanced at his watch.
“Too late for lunch?” he asked, sounding hopeful.
“Didn’t you eat?”
“I had a late breakfast. I don’t really eat breakfast at home these days. Jani turns green if she’s around anything but dry cereal and herb tea before noon. Morning sickness—though I don’t know why they call it that, since it lasts most of the day.”
“Let’s go eat, then.”
It was coffee that Al seemed to crave even more than food, since Jani’s hormones had abruptly found the merest whiff of the stuff instantly nauseating. He seized the cup as soon as the waitress had filled it, drank half of it down, and sat back with a sigh of contentment.
“Is Jani okay other than morning sickness?”
“She’s fine. She’s even gaining a little weight, though I don’t know how since she never seems to eat. She went in yesterday and heard the baby’s heartbeat. Said it sounded like a bird’s.”
“I’m glad for you both. For all of you.”
“Jules said to say hi, by the way. So,” he said in an abrupt change of subject, “how do we tie these two bastards together?”
Two men who lived their lives miles apart, both literally and figuratively, brought together by the means of
