Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery (20 page)

“I’m not dating Steve,” I replied. “And neither are you.”

He drove in silence for a while. “He keeps hiring you.”

“That is a problem,” I agreed.

Denton wasn’t that large and nothing was terribly far.  The dojo was a few blocks over from Abba’s studio, the one where I had been a member.  Given the fact someone disliked me enough to bury a dead guy in my yard, I should probably still be attending karate practice regularly.

The sign on Clint’s dojo door listed the first afternoon class starting at five. I had taken karate long enough to recognize the validity of the hours.  One morning class for pros, one for beginners who were people like me—not really all that good at karate, but needed a few self-defense moves and the exercise. Evening was a repeat for various levels of expertise.

The front door was locked, but another sign requested, “deliveries in the back.”

We walked around to an alley that was wide enough for a truck, found the door, and rang a bell.

Whoever was upstairs buzzed the door open.

A very short hallway directly in front of us led to a door that probably led to the dojo and the front of the building. We tried the door first, but it was locked so Mark opted for the stairs on our right.  He took them two at a time ahead of me, his sneakers never scuffing enough to make a sound.  The only time I was that quiet was barefoot and on carpet. I exerted an effort to stifle what felt like a clumsy stomp.

Clint opened the door after the first knock.  He was vastly more manly in sweatpants and a tight black t-shirt.  He was shorter than Mark by at least six inches and where Mark had a fluid grace, Clint exhibited more of a stone wall strength.

He assessed Mark quietly, without a smile.

That changed when he noticed me on the landing next to Mark.  His lips quirked sideways into a half grin. “Don’t tell me you’re mad about falling off that beam and dragged your boyfriend here to beat me up.”

I rolled my eyes. “Hardly.”

“She’d have done that herself if necessary,” Mark contributed. “She attacked me even though I had a gun.”

While that was true, the circumstances had been less dangerous than Mark implied. I do believe Mark was giving Clint a subtle warning that may have been more territorial than protective.

Clint’s eyebrows raised. “Why do I believe that?”  He folded his arms across his broad chest. “Okay, so you aren’t here to bust me up, and you aren’t the UPS package I was expecting. And if you carry a gun, and she’s capable of taking care of herself, how can I help you?”

Mark held up the Borgot phone minus the SD card.  “This little item. Recognize it?”

Clint met his stare silently.

“It seems odd that an ex-marine would be giving ballet lessons to a room full of geeks, especially when that same man owns his own karate dojo.  Maybe there was more to that job than first met the eye,”  Mark said.

Clint didn’t flinch. “My contracts are private. I don’t share details. I’m afraid you’ll have to find your answers somewhere else.”

Clint didn’t seem all that upset about us having the phone or the code. “Contracts” implied he was working for someone else.  Was it possible he didn’t realize I had switched the phone out?  Maybe he was Joe’s replacement, a delivery service. “Did the person you delivered the phone to complain?” I asked.

His gaze switched to me, but only for a second.  He knew the real threat.  Well, he thought he did.  Mark was right though.  I had a tendency to be a wild card.

“Why would they complain?” Clint asked.

“Because it was the wrong phone,” I replied.

Mark gave a tiny grunt of exasperation.  Giving up details to the bad guys was probably not the way he normally went about his undercover work.

“It was the wrong phone?” The question didn’t rate another glance my way, but Clint raised both eyebrows.

I nodded. “Wrong one.  Didn’t you notice?”

Now his eyes strayed to me and stayed there. “It wasn’t my phone. I had never seen it before and don’t expect to see it again.”

“How often do you hire out to, erm, teach ballet and deliver stolen contraband? Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to just hire out as a karate instructor?”

“Too threatening.”  He shook his head then as if it occurred to him that he had not intended to answer questions. “You may as well come in.” He stepped back, letting Mark squeeze sideways through the opening. The space was plenty big enough for me.

The room was Japanese sparse, with a tatami mat covering most of the floor, a futon couch, a wooden-framed chair and a coffee table sporting a bonsai plant in the center.  A fountain running over four perfectly round stones sat in an art alcove along one wall, explaining the very slight sound of running water.  Clint didn’t look the least bit Japanese, but the décor fit his contained and calm personality.

“Have a seat,” he invited.

Mark declined. The two of them stared at each other, still assessing or threatening or whatever guy thing they were doing.

“Karate would have worked out better at Borgot,” I said.

“Probably, but the email asked me for the same stunt I had done at Clockworks, so that’s what I did. It’s a long story.”

To cover up my interest in a company called Clockworks that might have something to do with smartwatches, I plopped down on the futon couch. “Oh, we have time,” I said, cheerfully.

He sighed. “I could have guessed that.”  His drop into the chair across from me was much more graceful and controlled than my own. “Basically, my girlfriend started a yoga business about a year ago after she saw an article that said HP hired a dance troupe for inspiration. She now hires out as a yoga instructor to companies that want unusual team building exercises.”

“HP?  The big computer company hired a dance troupe?”

“Yeah. Go figure. My wife, Keiko, started offering the yoga inspirational exercises at companies on a lark. I never thought it would take off.”  He smiled and shook his head.  “The ballet thing was because I lost a bet we made on the topic. It was a one-time thing, but then a couple of weeks ago, an email came in asking if I could do the same routine at Borgot.”

“You lost a second bet?”  Mark took a seat on the edge of the couch next to me.

“No, I’m not that dumb.”  He rubbed his hand across the stubble that was his hair. “But the first job at Clockworks paid twenty thousand dollars even though it was a ballet ad I put up on her website as a joke.  A guy I’d never heard of sent me an email two weeks ago telling me he had heard about me from a friend at Clockworks where I did the first ballet demo. I wrote back and said the price had gone up to forty.  Idiots said yes.  What the hell could I do?”  He spread his hands.  “My military severance is basically healthcare. I wasn’t in long enough to earn a giant pension. I do okay, but not forty thousand dollars for a morning okay.  Who does?”

“That would convince me to wear tights,” I said, “even ugly ones.”

Mark’s lips twitched because me wearing tights was not quite the same as an ex-marine wearing tights.

“Who hired you and who asked you to deliver the phone?”

He stared at us for a while without answering, but he’d already come this far. “After the damn ballet lessons were set up, the same guy emailed me again.  Larry. He asked if I could drop a phone off at Clockworks for our mutual friend.”

“Lawrence Gifford?”  Lawrence was behind the thefts?  He was a lawyer, not a coder. Then again, lawyers did have a slimy reputation. Maybe his salary wasn’t enough. He’d know all the rules when it came to selling to two sides of the same fence.  Maybe he planned on representing himself if he got caught.

“That’s the guy.  Apparently he used to work at Clockworks and asked his contact there for my info.  I didn’t ask too many questions, not with an offer on the table.”

“The phone delivery didn’t sound fishy to you?” Mark asked.

Clint shrugged. “Not until you two showed up. How do you figure schlepping a phone to someone is weirder than being asked to teach a two-hour lesson in ballet for forty grand? Larry thought I was buddies with some friend of his at Clockworks. He sent me an email the morning of the lesson asking if I could drop a phone there when I was done. I sure as hell didn’t care one way or the other.”

Mark sat back. “And you didn’t feel a need to let on that you weren’t close friends with anyone at Clockworks because supposedly that referral had just netted you a lot of money.”

“That about sums it up.”

“Once Lawrence handed you a phone, you took the phone to Clockworks?” I prodded.

He shook his head. “No one gave me the phone. I was setting things up in the break room.  People were coming and going. Believe me, I didn’t wear those crazy tights outside of that building. You walk around in something like that, it can get you killed. I was in the bathroom changing into the ballet getup when someone left the phone on my bag.”

I groaned. “It had to be Lawrence, though, right?”  I looked at Mark.

“A good hacker could borrow his email,” he pointed out.

Radar had certainly taught us that much.  But Lawrence had worked both places.  He’d know the players there and maybe he had taken the job with the intent to steal Borgot’s code and sell it back to his old employer.

Clint pulled out an iPhone and swished a few pages.  He held up the email. I read Lawrence’s email for myself.

“Did you meet the guy at Clockworks at least?” I knew the answer before he started shaking his head.  Whoever was adding translation code and working this thing had been very careful not to be seen with the phones and had avoided delivering anything in person.

“I left it at the front desk at Clockworks,” Clint admitted.

“And no one contacted you to complain it was the wrong phone?”

It was Clint’s turn to sit back. “What’s wrong with the phone I delivered, and why is the delivery a problem in the first place?”

I glanced at Mark, but fair was fair. “It’s a prototype from Borgot.  No one should be getting one of our phones. When I fell off the beam, I switched out the phone on your workout bag with a different phone. I wondered what you were doing with a prototype when you obviously don’t work for Borgot.”

“What’s on the phone that is so valuable?”

“Code that a competitor might want for their own phone,” Mark supplied.  He left out the part about how that same phone code might also be helping bring a smartwatch to market.

The boys played cat and mouse with twenty questions a while longer, but we had our information.

We finally took our leave after Clint agreed to let us know if Lawrence or anyone from Clockworks or Borgot contacted him again.

As we exited the building out the back door a brown UPS truck pulled up.

“Good thing he was expecting a delivery,” I said.

Mark smiled. “Or we’d have had to make our own luck.”

Mark looked up Clockworks on his phone.

“The building will be closed already,” I said, knowing that wasn’t necessarily a deterrent for someone as skilled as Mark. “But it’s a computer company.  There could easily be engineers staying late.”

He nodded. “I’ll need time to scope it before we go in.”

I was very pleased to hear the “we” in that sentence. “When?”

“I’ll check the building security features out tomorrow while you’re at work. Late afternoon is usually a good time to visit. People are in a rush to get home, and they aren’t paying attention to anyone who is entering or leaving.  If the cameras aren’t actively monitored, I can probably disable them for a short time, but we’ll just be two people with a late appointment.  A single guy like me would be more suspicious. With you along, we’ll either look like co-workers or a random couple heading in and then out.”

“Bonnie and Clyde were hoodlums together,” I said.

He flashed a grin at me. “We won’t be there to steal anything. We’ll just take a look around.  If we need someone to pretend to offer a business deal to obtain more information, we’ll send in Steve.”

“Okay,” I agreed.  Huntington was by far the better choice if a snooty businessman were required.

Chapter 29

If you ask me, ballet lessons were lower than the bar should be when it came to work obligations. And once you’d done that much at the behest of a company, surely they should leave you alone, at least for a few days.  But this was Borgot, and we had a murderer in our midst and two unscheduled deaths on our tab.

The email was brief and provided driving directions along with the time of Joe Black’s funeral scheduled for the afternoon.

“How about I show my dedication to my career and
not
attend?” I grumbled. 

The last line, “We’ll see everyone there,” left no doubt that our attendance was mandatory.

I raised my eyes skyward, but instead of lightning, all I got was fluorescent bulbs.  “Huntington, I demand a raise.”  Even though the part of the case he’d hired me for was probably solved now that Wanda Black had been arrested, surely attending the funeral of someone I didn’t even like was call for a bonus or a permanent raise.

“I have religious reasons for not attending.” I said it out loud to see how the excuse sounded.  Lame. There were very likely some good religious excuses, but being Catholic didn’t provide a single one.  Catholics were big on funerals and pomp and everyone knew it.

I’d have to think of something else or hope for an inland hurricane.  I texted Mark and let him know about the funeral. It might mean we’d have to shift the time for checking out Clockworks.

My cell phone buzzed almost immediately. I was expecting Mark, but it was his mother, LeAnn.

“Are we still supposed to attend the sewing circle tonight?” she asked.

I had completely forgotten about sewing.  Imagine that. “We probably don’t need to go. Surely that part of the case is resolved now that we know how phones were being used in robberies. And since I’m not likely to win the quilting contest, there’s no point in my showing up again.”

She laughed. “Not this year, but maybe next.”

“I have to be at a funeral this afternoon anyway. It’s the one for Joe.  It doesn’t start until four.  I could leave there early if you think we should still show up to sew.”  Sewing beat a funeral. Not by much, but enough.