I awoke with a start, surprised it was already 7:00 AM. Stormy stretched luxuriously while Mr. Tuttles gave a big sigh.
Now that was a good night’s sleep, something we all clearly needed.
I rolled out of bed feeling bright eyed, ready to tackle the day. I still needed to get some better food for Stormy, but she seemed okay with a little tuna I had in the cabinet, and I popped some cinnamon rolls out of a can and into the oven. They came out smelling wonderful, cinnamony, steamy and warm, and I was quite pleased with my baking prowess as I frosted them with the icing that came in the can.
Harmony padded into the kitchen in her pajamas and greeted each of the animals with a sufficient amount of ear rubs and chin scratches. “That smells delicious!” she said.
“Good morning! I hope you slept well.” I set a cinnamon roll and cup of coffee in front of her and joined her at the table.
Harmony sat, taking a sip of her coffee, scrolling her phone. She sighed and set her phone down, rubbing her temples.
“What’s up, Sweetie?”
“Did Mom mention to you that she was planning a big trip to Europe for all of us?”
“She did.” Poor Harmony. I’d forgotten about that. I couldn’t even imagine the pain of being excited for a fun trip with your family, and now, with Angie dead, Harmony would have to decide whether or not to go. They’d probably have to give up some deposits if they canceled, but the entire trip would have a dark cloud over it.
She gave a sad smile. “Mom was really excited about it. She said the girls are old enough to really enjoy it, and she’d been planning it for ages. I’ll have to go through and cancel everything now. Luckily she was sending me all of the reservations as she made them.”
“I’m sorry. Let me know if I can help in any way.”
“I appreciate that, but I’ve got it. Just one more thing.”
We settled into a comfortable silence as we each made mental notes of everything we had to do, and I got up to get us each another cinnamon roll. I couldn’t send Harmony’s family to Europe with her mom, but I could improve her mood with a pillow-soft, gooey pastry masquerading as breakfast.
“Kate, I thought of something else last night. Did Mom ever mention her stalker to you?”
I slapped my hand on the table. “Angie’s stalker! I’d completely forgotten about that!”
Harmony nodded. “It was years ago, and I doubt there’s anything there, but I should probably mention it to the police when I go speak to them today.”
“Absolutely! Do you by any chance remember his name?”
“No, but I’m pretty sure we can look it up in her email. She mentioned he emailed her every so often.”
Okay, Kate, how on earth did you forget about the stalker?
I knew why I hadn’t remembered, though. It was years ago, Angie had laughed the whole thing off, and I honestly hadn’t been concerned. If it turned out he was the killer, I was going to be very angry with myself.
#
#
Angie and I stopped at the Rise and Grind for a bit of coffee, Angie sliding her thin body into the tight spot between the wall and the table. The little coffee shop was hopping, and the only table left was the one all the way in back.
Angie’s phone buzzed. She looked at it with a frown, sighed, and set it down.
“Spam?” I asked.
“No, just my stalker.”
“Stalker? Wait! You’ve never told me about any stalkers!”
Angie sat back and took a sip of her coffee. “He’s not scary as much as he is annoying. I’ve told him he has no case, but about every two or three months, he contacts me again with more law precedents that he has looked up and examples of how his idea would have made him millions.”
“What’s going on with him?”
Angie eyes twinkled at the thought of him. “It’s really quite amusing.”
“You’re saying a stalker is amusing?”
“Stalker was the wrong word. It’s just somebody I turned down as a client, and he keeps contacting me to prove to me I was wrong.”
“Go on.” I sipped my hot chai, enjoying its sweet warmth.
“This man, we’ll call him Jimmy, came to me with a really dumb idea.”
“How dumb?”
“He wanted to patent an idea for headrests over urinals.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“When men go to the bathroom and do their thing, this man believes they need a cushion mounted to the wall above them so they can set their foreheads against it while they empty out, if you know what I mean.”
“Is that something men need to do?”
“Apparently. I know nothing about this. Jimmy thought it was something every bar and restaurant in the U.S. would buy and install over their urinals. I told him I thought it was probably not as necessary as he thought, and I also told him I didn’t think it was patentable. It’s a cushion. For the USPTO to issue a patent, the invention must be novel, non-obvious, and useful.”
She took a sip of her coffee, grimacing at its bitterness.
“Ah, that’s so good. Anyway, I took his word that it was useful, and it certainly would not be obvious, but with my years of practicing patent law, I just didn’t think it met the standards of being novel. Remember the blanket with the sleeves?
“The Slanket?”
“That’s the one. Those guys couldn’t get a patent because it just wasn’t novel enough. They could still make the blanket with sleeves, but then another company came in and made cheaper blankets with sleeves and put them out of business. I figured a cushion wasn’t novel enough, and where it gets mounted didn’t make it anything more than a cushion.”
“Okay, I’m following you.”
“He was an odd guy. Kind of the stereotypical engineer that you’d see on a TV sitcom. Short with glasses and kind of hunched over. His attention would stray as I told him about patent law. You could see he was still drawing his cushions in his mind. I explained that an invention had to be novel in order to get a patent, and that I had seen inventions more novel than his be turned down. I told him he didn’t actually need a patent in order to make and sell his product. He started getting really fidgety as I was talking, like he was coming up with counter arguments and was going to explode if he kept them bottled up.
“I told him that if he were to hire me, it would probably cost him around $20 to $30 thousand, and I walked him through the process of drafting, filing, examining, and possibly receiving a patent. Then, I told him of other ways he could get a patent. He could do his own patent application, but he would first have to do his homework and perform a patent search and review to see if his idea was already out there… We went through everything he needed to know.”
“Sounds like you were very professional and thorough.”
“That’s what I thought, too. This happens to me all the time, so it wasn’t my first rodeo. Typically, I explain the costs and complexities, and the client usually just goes away. I never hear from them again.”
“But you heard from Jimmy again?”
“About a year and a half later. There was an email with a photo of one long head cushion over a single, long urinal. I think it was from Australia. Jimmy ranted on and on about how this was his invention, which, actually, it wasn’t, because his invention was smaller, separate cushions over each urinal. But, according to Jimmy, if I had just listened to him, he could be suing these people for patent infringement.”
“But if the cushion was made in Australia, he wouldn’t even have a case.”
“Exactly! There just wasn’t any case here for so many reasons! Jimmy, though, was now on a tear. He was certain I had screwed him because I wouldn’t patent his idea. Obviously, Jimmy could have gone to another patent attorney for a second opinion, or he could have just done it himself. He started putting this on social media. He asked for people to tell him about bars that had urinal head cushions, and he visited all of the ones he heard about. Each one made him more and more angry. And I was the focus of his anger.”
“Are you scared he’ll do something?”
“Honestly, Kate, not in the slightest. This guy can rant and rave all he wants, but I did nothing wrong. While he still emails or texts with photos of what I now call “Jimmy’s World-Wide Urinal Tour,” he’s just not the type to take violent action. It’s not him.”
“He sounds unhinged.”
“Probably. I had plenty of unhinged clients. Nothing ever came of them, and nothing will come of this. A while back, though, I did go online with a service I purchased that takes my name and address off of every site on the internet. So, rest assured, I’m not totally oblivious to practical security measures we should all be taking. I mean, you probably have quite a few disgruntled employees or clients with your name on their lips.”
“Maybe one or two,” I said, “but nobody’s ever made explicit threats against me.” Once again, I was lying. Firing people never endeared them to you, and nobody thought their own work was poor. Go to Glassdoor dot com, and you’d find some nasty things said about me, but I didn’t care. I had the performance appraisals detailed, documented, and signed by every employee that first went on a Performance Improvement Plan and then was fired. Angie, though, had a client that seemed to be after her. That was concerning.
I recalled we both laughed this off at the time, but I also went on the internet the next day to see if I could find a man looking for urinals with head cushions. My search came up empty.
At the time, I put the entire thing out of my mind.
Now I wish I hadn’t.
I logged on to Angie’s email and did a search for “urinal.” Voila! There it was, about two years ago, an email from a Mr. Ivan Sokolov. I searched his name and saw at least ten emails, each one with photos of urinal cushions and all very similar messages: “This place has them too! I’m losing money because of you!”
I picked up my phone and texted Dayna.
Can you look up an Ivan Sokolov?
I just remembered he was an upset client.
Patent issue.
Urinal cushion for the head.
**Urinal cushion for the head, you say?**
I’m not kidding.
**Okay, I’m on it.**