stood. “If I keep busy...” she said, but her voice trailed off and she left the thought uncompleted. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Was there something you wanted? I’ll get out of your way if you like.” She leaned over the desk and started to close and stack file folders.
“No, please,” Shoe said. “You don’t have to leave. I’m just looking for Patrick’s appointment book. Is it somewhere in that pile, or did he take it with him when he left?”
“Patrick kept his appointments in his Palm,” she said.
“Pardon me?”
“This is a Palm,” she said, picking up a brushed metal device about the size of a personal cassette player, but slimmer. It had a small screen with a row of tiny buttons below it. “A palmtop computer,” she explained. “I suppose he had it with him when he—when he left.”
“He didn’t have a real appointment book,” Shoe said.
“This is a real appointment book,” she replied with a tolerant smile. “And address book, notepad, to-do list, calculator. You can even...” She paused.
“What?” Shoe asked.
“Do you know where Patrick’s laptop is?”
Shoe looked at the laptop on Patrick’s desk.
“This one’s mine,” she explained. She held up her Palm device. “You can synchronize the information on these things with other computers. That means—”
“I think I understand,” Shoe said, hoping he did.
“But if he took his Palm with him, wouldn’t he have also taken his laptop?”
She shook her head. “The company supplies the laptops.”
“You didn’t find his in his office?” he said.
“No.”
Shoe wondered if it would do any good to get in touch with Sergeant Matthias to see if Patrick had his Palm or his laptop with him when he was killed and, if so, to ask for a printout of the appointment book data. Probably not. The police wouldn’t be keen on sharing information with a potential suspect.
“What’s this about?” Sandra asked.
“I’m conducting an internal investigation into Patrick’s death,” Shoe said.
“I see,” she said.
“You spent a lot of time with him. Is there anything you can think of that might give us an idea why he was killed?”
She shook her head. “Not a thing,” she said. “I wish there were. We may have spent a lot of time together, but we weren’t really friends. Our relationship was strictly business. I know very little about his personal life.”
“Did you know Patrick was planning to leave the company?”
“No, but it didn’t come as any great surprise. He was pretty angry about Mr. Hammond’s refusal to go public.”
“He told me he was looking into a couple of business opportunities,” Shoe said. “Do you know anything about them?”
“No,” she said.
“In the weeks before he left,” Shoe said, “did you notice anything unusual about his mood or behaviour?”
“He did seem distracted,” she replied. “A little preoccupied. But, in retrospect, that makes sense, if he was planning to resign.”
“What were you and he working on?”
“We’d just begun negotiations for the acquisition of the micro-brewery in Port Moody. That’s what I’m working on now. Your report was very helpful, by the way. We had also just wrapped up the sale of a marina property in Delta to a condominium developer. Nothing very exciting.”
“And before that?”
“Let’s see,” she said, brow furrowing. “We spent a couple of months restructuring the Handyman hardware chain. Oh, yes, and we closed down an old rubber gasket manufacturing plant in Surrey. It was one of the first companies Mr. Hammond acquired when he was starting out.”
“Was anyone particularly angry or upset at losing his job?”
“No,” she replied. “We actually hired staff for the hardware chain. As for the gasket plant, everyone there seemed relieved that we’d finally put the place out of its misery. It hadn’t had an order in months.”
“Could you give me their names anyway?” Shoe asked.
“Sure.” She sat down, put on her glasses, and pulled her laptop closer. She spoke as she tapped at the keys and stroked the touchpad. “There were only six people left,” she said. “The manager, who was in his eighties, almost doddering. An office manager/bookkeeper in her sixties who’d been there since the mid-fifties and pretty much ran everything. A secretary/receptionist, also in her sixties. Two lathe operators at least as old. And this guy in shipping and receiving who didn’t have any teeth and kept looking down the front of my blouse.” She tapped the return key. “Not that there’s anything to see,” she said, peering down at her chest. She stood up. “Okay, it’s printing now. You can pick it up in the photocopy room next to your office.” Removing her glasses, she rubbed the furrow between her brows with the tip of her index finger. “There was one thing that was kind of unusual,” she said.
“Unusual how?” Shoe asked.
“Patrick seemed to hit it off with the office manager/bookkeeper, Ramona Ross. He took her to lunch a couple of times, rather long lunches, which wasn’t like Patrick at all, and one day she was pretty tipsy when they came back. Happy tipsy, though. And I think he spoke to her a couple of times after the plant closed.” She looked thoughtful for a moment longer, then said, “Other than that, it’s been business as usual. Oh, he had an argument with Charles Merigold last month.” She shrugged. “But then he and Charles were always arguing about one thing or another. This one was a little louder than usual, though.”
“Do you know what it was about?”
“No.”
“Patrick travelled quite a lot,” Shoe said. “Did you often go with him?”
“Yes,” she said. “But not always.”
“Do you recall anything out of the ordinary happening on any of your trips with him?”
“No. Nothing. He usually left me on my own for a while whenever we were in Montreal, but he had family there, so there’s nothing unusual about that.”
“Were your trips always strictly business?”
“What does that mean?” she said. A pink tinge coloured her throat, whether from anger or embarrassment, Shoe wasn’t certain.
“There were rumours that you and he were having an affair.”
“Of course there were,” she snapped. “There are also rumours that you’re an intelligent
