Read Murder in the Marketplace for Free Online Page B

makes me thirsty. I need a drink.”
    “You do, too, Liz.” Bridget handed me a cup. “There’s sangria in the kitchen.”
    “Sangria. Very upscale.” Claudia raised her thick, impressive eyebrows. “When it’s just us writers, you never go to so much trouble.”
    “I didn’t this time,” Bridget retorted. “Emery made it. At the last minute he wanted to invite some people, so he fancied up the refreshments. He also made some guacamole.”
    Claudia began to forge a path through the crowded living room. “I hope he put in enough garlic.”
    I followed her; I was hungry, and guacamole sounded good. Anything sounded good. After her nap that afternoon, Amy had finished off the crackers, both bananas, most of the bread, and the last of a jar of peanut butter. My cupboard was pretty bare.
    The people in the kitchen were a different crowd. Most of them were men, some with ties pulled loose at the neck. They stood in knots, bottles of beer or mineral water clutched in their hands, jabbering as hard as the writers in the living room. One or two of the men had ponytails.
    There was a traffic jam around the kitchen table. While Claudia and I waited, I overheard a man murmur, “Any viable multimedia platform needs a satellite DSP or an ASCI to get decent full-motion video.”
    “No, no,” said the exquisitely dressed woman he spoke to. “The P7 has the raw horsepower to do the computations: The only question is what bus architecture you need to get the data flow rate.”
    Claudia and I looked at each other. She moved majestically through, parting the crowd at its thickest. The huge bowl that held the guacamole was already half empty. I managed to snag a chipful of it. There was plenty of garlic.
    Claudia found a paper plate, shoveled a quantity of guacamole onto it, added a handful of chips, and went in search of the sangria. Her space at the table was immediately filled. I was hemmed in by guys, all busily scooping and munching and still managing to talk about C++ and AutoCAD and look-and-feel, which sounded quite risqué to me but evidently had something to do with software.
    I must have looked bewildered. The twenty-something man next to me finished his beer and grinned. “So, what’s your sine?”
    His friend jabbed him in the ribs. “S-i-n-e,” he spelled. “Not sign as in Aquarius, but sine as in geometry.”
    “Either way, I don’t know.” I smiled feebly. One of them was tall, one was short. Both had shaggy hair and were wearing short-sleeved plaid shirts and chinos. They didn’t have pocket protectors holding lots of mechanical pencils in their shirt pockets—nobody actually wears those any more except the self-consciously hip nerdsters—but their pockets somehow looked naked without them.
    “Do you work for Emery?” The tall one spoke through a mouthful of chips.
    “Sometimes.”
    The short one said, “Do you write code or what?”
    “I’m not in software.”
    “Are you one of the writers?” The tall one grinned eagerly. “Emery said there’d be writers.”
    “Do you like movies?” The short one pushed a little in front. “Forbidden Planet is at the Stanford.”
    I cleared my throat, feeling besieged. “I’m working nights—doing the census.”
    The tall one looked interested. “Online?”
    “No, door-to-door.”
    “You mean, you use a laptop?”
    “You enter the data remotely?”
    I reached for another chip. “No, I ask questions and use a pencil to record the answers.”
    “Pencil?” The tall one stared at me.
    “That’s what’s wrong with this country,” the short one said passionately. “The government is still using pencils!”
    “Say, there are lots of women in there,” the tall one said, looking over the heads of the crowd toward the living room.
    “Young ones?” The short one’s voice was plaintive. They inched away from the table and disappeared.
    I felt I deserved more guacamole, but the bowl was nearly empty. I stretched my arm to reach the bottom of it, and