Killer Move

I bent to look over her shoulder. An e-mail from me was open on her computer screen, with a joke. It was a mildly funny joke, assuming you were prepared to overlook the fact that it was markedly off-color and somewhat racist, too.

The only thing was that I hadn’t sent it.

Not to her, or any of the other people on the list.

CHAPTER NINE

I had a late lunch of an egg salad sandwich, sitting in the shade outside the grocery store a few doors down from the office. It’s something I do once a week, a little ritual—they make it with a little dill and a touch of Dijon mustard, and it’s very good—but either the bread was a bit stale today or I just wasn’t in the mood.

Karren had received the e-mail, too. So had a couple of private contacts and a few nonwork friends. Only one person on the list had responded, expressing surprise that I’d forwarded something that had nothing to do with realty, as I never normally did that kind of thing.

Well, right. True statement.

I’d stayed at my desk for a while, looking like I was taking care of business. I quickly established that the e-mail was not in my SENT MAIL folder, nor had it been filed. I’m very organized about keeping everything I receive and send. Big or small, even if it’s merely a “Great meeting!” or (god forbid) an “LOL!” everything gets given a sensible home. In realty you never know when you might wish or need to demonstrate exactly what was said, to whom, and when. In reality, too, I guess.

The original e-mail was nowhere to be found. Setting that aside, there was the question of who’d sent it out in my name. Clearly not Janine. That left, of course, Karren. But when Karren had walked into the office five minutes after me, and found the e-mail, I’d seen her frown. She read it again, then looked at me.

“Well, it’s technically comedic,” she said. “Ha and, I guess, ha.”

“Forwarded it by accident,” I said. Janine had popped out of the office, thankfully.

“You can do that?”

“If you’re dumb,” I said, going into a prepared spiel. “Meant to pass on a property listing, evidently selected that so-called joke by mistake.”

She nodded. “Figures. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d send to the world on purpose.”

“Well, right.”

“You’re normally far too worried about what people might think of you.”

She turned back to her work, leaving me smarting. If I’d been entertaining suspicions about Karren sending the e-mail from my computer—laughing an evil laugh as she hit SEND—they were dispelled there and then. I had no doubt she was smart and bold, but it would have taken big balls indeed to wrap an unspoken denial in such a blatant diss.

When Karren went to the bathroom twenty minutes later I darted over to Janine’s machine. The e-mail was still sitting there in her in-box, together with about seventeen million others. I forwarded the joke back to my own address, taking care to remove the evidence from her SENT MAIL folder when I was done.

Back at my own machine I established that the original e-mail had been sent at 9:33 that morning—when I’d been standing self-righteously in line at the post office waiting to mail a package back to Amazon, thus tying two small, inexplicable things together in a knot.

A book I had not ordered.

An e-mail I hadn’t sent.

I’d made no sense of either by the time I drifted out to lunch. As I was sitting outside the deli, fingers drumming on the hot metal of the table, I saw Tony Thompson emerge from the reception block. He noticed me and started to head over.

My stomach did a little flip. Tony’s address had been on the distribution list of the e-mail. As he walked down the ramp toward me, I took a slow, deep breath.

“Funny e-mail, Bill,” he said, before I could even get started. “Laughed my head off. You got more like that, send ’em right along. Marie and I are going to have a talk about the matter we discussed, by the way. Probably tonight.”

I shut my mouth, smiled, and didn’t say a thing.

“No way of telling,” the geek said. “Bottom line is it could have been anyone in the world.”

“That’s it? That’s your professional opinion? How much you get paid for this level of insight?”

I was sitting with him outside the ice cream place at the Circle. It was coming up on seven in the evening but still warm, and getting heavier.

He took a lick of his chocolate sugar cone. “A lot less than you, dude. Plus, no commission. Not to mention I spend all day sorting out shit where the root cause exists between the computer and the chair facing it. By which I mean, you know, the user.”

“I got the joke. I’m laughing inside.”