Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon(11)

    I wondered if this were deliberate, like the flaws oriental rug makers always included in their works. Since it wasn’t the sort of thing I could ask without mortally embarrassing her, I’d probably never know.

    And had she broken the curse today? No, I finally spotted the flaw. Poking up out of her collar was a tag, giving the size, fabric content, and manufacturer of her blouse. It was, I noticed, from an inexpensive catalog I sometimes ordered from. On her, the blouse looked chic, sophisticated, and expensive, just as it would in the catalog. On me, clothes from the same source always looked as if I’d chosen them with only a vague idea what size and cut would suit me, and kept mem largely to avoid the trouble of a trip to the post office to return them.

    She and the chief had begun chatting in what I recognized as the polite, small southern-town version of declaring one’s turf and sparring for advantage. I left them to it and took out my cell phone to call Michael.

“Meg!” he exclaimed. “Thank God! Hang on a second.” And then I heard him shout, “Can we take five?”

“Michael, you’re on the set; I’ll call back,” I said.

“No, it’s fine; they need to glue the mermaid queen’s tentacles back on anyway. What’s going on?”

    I gave him the Cliff’s Notes edition of what had happened, as I watched the chief and Liz talking - with the uniformed officer scribbling notes at the chief’s elbow. Apparently, Liz was telling what she’d seen during the day. I saw her pointing up to her perch in the library, gesturing as if describing the mail cart. Then she made a face and1 stuck out her tongue at the chief. Since he only nodded calmly, I deduced she was describing something Ted had done while riding around on the cart, not actually opening hostilities with the local authorities.

“So, anyway,” I said to Michael, “we’ve got the police crawling all over the office looking for I’m not sure what, and a dead body here in the reception room. I’d feel a lot better if they took Ted away before Dad has a chance to barge in and annoy the chief by trying to horn in on his investigation. You know how he is.”

    Michael chuckled. He had, indeed, seen plenty of examples of Dad’s burning desire to get involved in real-life crime. As a sleuth, of course, not an actual perp.

“Just don’t let your dad suck you in,” Michael advised. “Chief Burke is okay. I doubt he’s investigated that many homicides, but he’s a realist. I’m sure if he has any trouble finding the killer, he won’t hesitate to call in the state authorities or the FBI or whoever smalltown police chiefs call when they need backup.”

“No problem,” I said. “All I ever wanted to do was figure out if there’s something fishy going on here, like Rob wanted.”

“You think maybe Ted’s murder just answered that question?”

“Definitely,” I said. “And with luck, the chief will solve it all while he’s wrapping up the murder.”

“And then maybe I can talk you into coming out here for the rest of the shoot,” Michael suggested. Was he a little too blase about this? Easy for him, since he hadn’t seen Ted’s body. Then again, more likely he knew me well enough to realize that the last thing I needed was someone making a fuss about how I was holding up.

“That’s sounding better and better,” I said. “As soon as I’m sure everything’s under control here, I’ll book a flight.”

“Fantastic!” Michael exclaimed, “listen, they’re ready for me - keep me posted on what’s happening and when you’re coming out, okay?”

“Will do,” I said, and signed off.

    While I’d been on the phone, a technician in a lab coat had arrived - a skinny kid so young I’d have mistaken him for an undergraduate. He’d begun doing what I recognized as a forensic examination of the reception area.

“There you are,” the chief said when he saw I was off the phone. “As soon as we get the staff cleared out, I want you to show me around the place.”

    Clearing the staff out wasn’t going quite so smoothly as the chief seemed to expect, partly due to the pressure created by corralling a lot of very young programmers and graphic artists in a confined space with a heavy deadline looming over them. I could hear voices coming from the cube jungle, complaining loudly that they couldn’t possibly leave their desks now or they wouldn’t be ready for this afternoon’s “build.”

    A build, I’d learned in the last two weeks, was an important recurring event in companies that developed software. As far as I could understand, it meant that Jack, as team leader, told everybody to stop messing around with their parts of the program - yes, right now, dammit, not in half an hour - and launched a two-hour semiautomated process that was as temperamental as cooking a souffle. On a good day, the result would be a new, improved version of Lawyers from Hell II, containing all the cool stuff everybody had added since the previous day’s build. All too often, though, the build would be so badly flawed that you couldn’t even get the game started, much less play it - at which point, Jack would convene an all-hands meeting, chew people out, and then send them off to fix everything that was broken in time for an evening build.