Walking back up the hall, I glanced up and waved at Liz, and then I ran into Jack again.
“Saw you talking to Liz,” he said. “She celebrating Ted’s demise yet?”
“Of course not,” I snapped.
“Wouldn’t blame her if she did,” he said, falling into step beside me. “The guy made her life miserable, every way he could.”
“Such as?”
“Looking for alternate suspects to get Rob off the hook?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Well, we’re all suspects, if you like, Liz as much as anyone,” he said. “There’s this guy who’s filed suit against Mutant Wizards, claiming we stole his game idea.”
“She mentioned him,” I said. “You think he has any kind of a case?”
“You mean you don’t believe Rob really invented it?”
“Of course I know Rob invented it,” I said. “I had to play it often enough while he was doing it. But it’s not such an outlandish idea that someone else couldn’t have come up with a similar one - and that could be trouble.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Well I don’t know how similar the ideas are - not very, if you ask me. But it’s been keeping Liz pretty busy.”
“How does Ted come into this?”
“You know how Ted was,” Jack said. “Liked to yank everyone’s chain.”
“And just how did he yank Liz’s chain?”
“He went out and bought a copy of the other guy’s software and started playing this whole mind game on her,” Jack said. “For weeks, every time you went in his office, he was playing it; every time they were both in a meeting, he’d drag the conversation around to the other game. What a great game it was, how worried he was that maybe Rob had been subconsciously influenced by it.”
“Not likely,” I said. “Would you be surprised if I said that Rob’s not exactly a rabid computer game player?”
“Actually, I’d be surprised to hear he’d ever played a computer game before he started inventing Lawyers from Hell,” Jack said with a grin.
“And that doesn’t bother you?” I asked. “Knowing that he’s not exactly the expert all the computer magazines make him out to be?”
“I’ll never be a convert to the cult of Rob, like most of the young kids who come to work here,” Jack said. “But no, it doesn’t bother me. In some ways, it’s an advantage, knowing more than the boss does. And to tell you the truth, he does come up with some brilliant ideas, occasionally.”
“Probably by accident,” I said.
“Usually by accident, yes,” Jack agreed.
“Everyone always talks about how great Rob is at thinking outside the box,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t suppose they realize that he hasn’t the foggiest idea where the box is.”
“And I hope he never learns,” Jack said.
“So anyway, what does this have to do with how Ted was getting on Liz’s nerves?” I asked.
“He started pretending that he agreed with the guy who was threatening to sue us,” Jack said. “Walked around shaking his head, saying that he was afraid he’d have to testify for the other side. Stuff like that. Drove her crazy.”
“Crazy enough that she’d want to kill him?”
“Liz?” He glanced up at where Liz was sitting in her crow’s nest. “Not really. No more than any of the rest of us. I mean, who around here didn’t say, ‘I could loll him!’ sometime or other, but I can’t imagine anyone ever really would. Then again, what do I know? Ask some of the shrinks. They’re supposed to know that kind of stuff.”
“Maybe I will,” I said.
“I’d better get back to work,” he said.
“Me, too,” I said, and turned to head back to the reception room. “See you at the pizza thing.”
“Pizza thing?”
I started to turn to give him the scoop on the pizza outing, but just then my pager went off.
“Microwave broken,” I read. “Like hell it is.”
“Frankie always unplugs it to plug in his popcorn popper,” Jack said. “Want me to plug it in again?”
“Thanks, but I need to feed George anyway before I take the switchboard back from Dad.”
When I got to the lunchroom, sure enough, I found the supposedly broken microwave merely unplugged. As I leaned over behind the cabinet to reach the outlet, something fell out of my pocket - actually out of the pocket of the sweater I kept around the office for mornings, like this one, when the air-conditioning was out of control.