“I met him once or twice. He comes around the office sometimes. He’s at PowerPlus.”
“To see Todd?”
“Yes.”
“Obviously, Ray, too.”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever play golf with them?”
“I can’t remember the last time I played golf.” Simon shook his head, pained. Feet paged through the power-of-attorney forms, slumped in the chair, and said nothing.
Mary continued, “Okay, so when I went through your emails, I saw a lot of email that you wrote on quality issues.”
“I know, it drives them crazy. They roll their eyes. They call me The Mad Emailer. But it’s important to keep the consistency of quality. It affects sales. They seem not to want to acknowledge that, but to me it’s obvious.” Simon frowned. “The interesting thing about cubicle manufacture is that there’s no building code that applies to them if they’re under sixty-seven inches like ours. There’s no inspection like an office building. But for all intents and purposes, a cubicle becomes a wall not subject to code. It’s the industry’s dirty little secret. Now, I pitch the high quality of our units to my accounts. So I monitor it. It drives me nuts when production lets down. My word matters to me.”
“So that’s why you write emails about, like, the weave of the fabric?”
“Yes, the fabric matters, too. It’s cosmetic but it’s what accounts see. We have twelve colors. The accounts choose it carefully. They want to match the rug or the curtains. It’s a thing. When the color dye is inconsistent or the fabric weave looks funky, they’re not happy.”
“And I saw you made a number of other complaints about even the things that are internal, like the metal, the lighting, and the drywall.”
“Right, why are you asking me this?” Simon asked, mystified. “Why does this matter? I mean, you’re trying to figure out who killed Todd, right?”
“I’m coming to that.” Mary was working on a theory, just beginning to cohere. “Whose job is it to make sure that the quality on the production lines is consistent? Is that HR or Operations?”
“Operations. It’s Ray’s job.”
“So you have all these complaints and you write to Todd about them, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you write to Ray directly? Because that’s not the chain of command?”
“Correct. I want to keep Todd in the loop and I know they’re buddies, so I know Todd will talk to Ray.”
Mary took a flyer. “This can’t endear you to Ray, can it? You’re pointing out problems that he’s not noticing or not doing anything about. You’re essentially saying that he’s not doing his job.”
Simon frowned. “It’s not like that in business. Ray doesn’t take it personally.”
“Don’t you think it makes Ray look bad?” Mary thought back to her conversation with Bennie, about business and personal not mixing.
“No, not really. Granted, it would make him look bad if I wrote to his boss, Mike Bashir, but I never did that. I only told my boss. Todd.”
“Did Ray ever say anything to you about you pointing out all these errors?”
“No.”
“Do you think Ray likes you?”
Simon shrugged. “I used to. Before those lies they put in the defamation suit. If he’s going to say I made those statements, he’s no friend of mine.”
“Did you ever write to Ray directly on a quality issue or for another reason?”
Simon thought a minute. “Yes. From time to time, when an issue wasn’t getting addressed.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t remember.” Simon rubbed his face again. “Okay, yes, I do. The fabrication was sloppy on one of my accounts. It was Crowley’s, a wholesaler for medical equipment. The metal frames of the units weren’t plumb. They were out of whack. At first I thought it was the assembly, but it turned out that it was fabrication. I never got another order from that account. I remember I wrote Ray about that and we had some back and forth.”
Mary made a mental note. “Were there other accounts as well, that you remember you wrote to Ray about?”
“Does this matter?”
“It might. Maybe Ray was more angry with you than you know. Maybe he had something to do with Todd’s murder.”
“You think Ray killed Todd?” Simon recoiled, aghast. “He was Todd’s friend. He would never do that.”
“Look at the facts, Simon. Ray is willing to lie for the company, saying that you defamed Todd. And somebody framed you for Todd’s murder or is willing to let you go to jail for it.”
Bennie interjected, “Simon, you should know that I spoke with Ray last night at OpenSpace. He told me he thinks you killed Todd, no question. Ask yourself why he would say that. The answer is, the best defense is a good offense.”
Simon shook his head, nonplussed. “I have nothing against these guys. Nothing. I don’t know why they’re doing this. I don’t know why they would kill Todd.”
Mary touched his arm. “Look, it’s only a working theory at this point, and we have to keep digging. I wish I had emails you’d written to Ray, but we don’t. We only have emails between you and Todd.”
Simon blinked. “I have my emails to Ray.”
“How? They took your laptop.”
“I keep copies of my emails in the cloud.”
“You do?” Mary asked, surprised, and one look at Bennie’s expression told her that she felt the same way. They could have just struck gold—or it could be a dry hole. “You have your emails?”
“Yes, I keep a copy of every email I have ever written or received. I like to keep a record, an archive. Those emails have so much valuable information. Sales, accounts, contacts, and quality issues like the ones we’re talking about. My work email is company property, so I don’t make a thing about it at work. I hardly ever consult it, but I like to know it’s there.”
“So how do we get it out of the cloud?” Mary spun her laptop around to face Simon. “You can access it from any laptop, can’t you? It’s stored in the ether.”
“True, but…” Simon hesitated. “I don’t remember the password. It’s been years since I’ve used it.”
“What are your go-to passwords?” Mary spun the laptop back. “Tell them to me. We can try a few.”
“No, it’s not a normal word like Rachel’s name or our first dog. I use a password generator. It’s nonsensical.”
“Do you have it stored anywhere, like in your phone? I have one of those virtual wallets with my passwords stored.” Mary didn’t add that she had it only because Anthony had made her.
“I take no chances because it’s the company phone. I don’t want them to know about it. I write my passwords down on a sheet of paper at home.”
“Have you even been home since yesterday?”
“No.” Simon raked back his hair. “I’ve been wanting to go home and see what the house looks like if they searched it, but I haven’t had a spare minute. It’s just been too busy to leave here, with everything that’s going on. Also I figured the cops impounded the car.”