“Well, fax machines were the new craze, and of course Castleton had one, to get reports directly from the company. Herb remembers he faxed the memo to him.”
“What difference does that make?”
“It’s recorded. There’s a record. See, Castleton Industries is all computerized. The latest state-of-the-art equipment. Very sophisticated. We’re not talking a desktop computer here. Castleton’s got a setup in his office like they got in the Pentagon. You could run an army with it.
“And it’s tied into everything. Including the fax system. When a fax comes through, it’s automatically copied.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m not just a typist. Back in California-when I was supporting the schmuck-I was working as a computer programmer.”
Steve’s eyes widened. “So that’s why you took the job.”
“Of course. See, after I pumped Herb for everything he could give me, I knew what I had to do. I went out and investigated Castleton Industries. I was looking for some way to get a job, to get in.
“I managed to make friends with one of the secretaries there. What she told me wasn’t that promising. The only thing I’d be able to get would be in the typing pool, the girls in the pool wouldn’t have access to anything. It’d be a hell of a long shot. Still, it was better than nothing.”
Kelly lowered her eyes. “Then she told me something else. She’d heard rumors about Milton Castleton. His memoirs, the whole bit. She said he advertised in the New York Times, just like it was a regular job. But when girls answered the ad, well, you know.”
Kelly shook her head. “Well, it was so bizarre I couldn’t believe it. Or I didn’t want to believe it. But I kept watching the Times. Five days later, there it was. Secretary wanted to type memoirs. Castleton’s name wasn’t mentioned, but it gave the address and it was his building.
“Well, I had to think about it, but not too long. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to go to the interview.
“I called the number. Phil Danby answered. I gave him the name Kelly Blaine. I rattled off a list of qualifications. Some I made up, some were actually mine.
“He asked my age. When I told him, he said fine and set up an interview.
“It was at Castleton’s apartment. The morning I went, there were four other women there. Two of them were rather plain. Danby took them first. He was the one conducting the interviews. Castleton was not in evidence. Anyway, we were all sitting in a drawing room. Danby came in, smiled at one of the women, led her off. Was back two minutes later to get the other.
I doubt if he even took them into the office. Just told them in the hallway they weren’t suitable and sent them home. Anyway, they never came back.
“The next person he took was me. He led me to the office-the one where I worked-and explained the situation. It was just like the secretary said. There was a window in the wall with a one-way glass to Castleton’s office, he was eccentric and liked his secretaries to work nude, for which he paid a hundred bucks an hour, and if I had any problem with this there were no hard feelings and he was sorry he’d wasted my time, but did I want to hear more?
“Well, I was willing to listen. And he explained the setup. I would work there in the office at a word processor. I’d be typing up dictation from a microcassette. I would be in a locked room and no one would disturb me. I’d make eight hundred bucks a day.”
Kelly looked up at Steve with pleading eyes. “Well, it’s not the sort of thing I would have done. I mean, what the hell did I want to be in a locked office for. If I could have worked in his office, if there had been an opportunity to be alone, to have access to the files. But to run around naked in front of that dirty old man … well, there was no way I was going to do it.”
She paused. Took a breath. “Except for one thing. The word processor. The first thing I noticed was it didn’t have a printer. I asked him about it, aren’t I supposed to print out what I type? He said, no, that wasn’t necessary. The word processor was hooked up to the main computer in Castleton’s office. Everything I typed would be monitored and printed out there.
“Well, that was the key. The deciding factor. I wasn’t just working a word processor. I was working a computer terminal. I know computers. I would have access.
“I took the job.”
“And the rest of it?”
“What?”
“When you got fired. Thrown out. Was it true?”
“Not entirely.”
“How not entirely?”
“Well, a lot not entirely. He did lock me out in the hall-Phil Danby. I did play tag in the stairwells and find a coat in the basement. All of that was true.”
“But the attempted rape? The sexual advance?”
“Never happened. You met Danby. Can you imagine him trying that? No, what happened was I found it.”
“Found what?”
“The memo. The one Herb wrote. I found it in the computer.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. I knew it was there, I looked for it and I found it.”
“How.”
“Well, the way the whole thing was set up, I couldn’t access their computer. But they could access mine. To monitor my work. And I had a way to tell when they were monitoring. Of course, that meant leaving the document I was working on and playing around with DOS.”
“DOS?”
“Yeah. Disk Operating System. I could get into DOS, tell if I was working solo or if they’d accessed my terminal. If they had, it established a link. The line was open. When they accessed my terminal, I could access theirs.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. But it was risky. Because everything I was doing would be flashing on my screen.”
“And flashing on theirs?”
“No. If they accessed my document, that’s what they’d be seeing. If I exited the document and went into DOS, that wouldn’t show up on their terminal. Unless they knew how to look for it, they wouldn’t find it, and they wouldn’t know how to look.
“But it was on my screen, and even from a distance you could tell the difference. Of course, I couldn’t see through the window, couldn’t tell if anyone was looking through the other side. And I couldn’t turn my monitor away from the window, that would be a dead giveaway. I tried to keep my head in front of the screen, block it the best I could, but even so it was a risk. Besides, if they were looking at the last page of my document, if they stopped to think about it, they could see that nothing new was being typed.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So I had to work fast. Before they caught on, and before they broke the link. Which wasn’t easy. They didn’t keep it open long. It took me half a dozen times before I got in.”
“Into what?”
“Into Fax-log.”
“And?”
“And it wasn’t there.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I found copies of every fax that was sent during the dates in question. Herb’s memo wasn’t there.”
“Maybe he didn’t send it after all.”
“Yes, he did. They erased it. They deleted it from the file. Isn’t that great? That’s ten times more damning than if it had been there. They knew it was important, so they erased it.”
Steve Winslow frowned. “That’s really inverted logic. What you’re looking for isn’t there, so you claim it was destroyed. I thought you said you found it.”
“But I did.” Kelly’s eyes were gleaming. “Don’t you understand? I found the damn thing!”
“What are you talking about? You just said it was erased.”
“Yeah, it was. From the file. But you gotta understand. These computers are very sophisticated. They all have backup systems. Suppose you accidentally delete a file, wipe it out. Well, it’s gone from the main system, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think that was it. But it’s still saved in the automatic backup, and if you know computers and know how to get into it, you can bring it back.”
“And you did?”