Free The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook by Nury Vittachi Page B

Jimmy, suddenly unemployed and needing someone sympathetic to talk to.
    Joyce did the rest of her share of work at The Players that afternoon in a daze, looking at the clock every two minutes, since Jimmy had agreed to meet her after work. She spent most of the time doing a lo shu chart for the owner of the club and the general manager.
    But she was bursting to talk about any aspect of Jimmy Wegner with anyone. She was intrigued to find that Wong had sneaked out for an hour during the mid-afternoon to visit the personal trainer’s previous workplace.
    ‘We both like DVDs. Isn’t that amazing? By the way, do the people at that club want him back? He needs a job.’
    ‘They don’t want him back I think.’
    Joyce was surprised when her boss explained that Wegner had apparently committed precisely the same mistake twice— misread a list of clear instructions from a medical database. The question that was implicit in Wong’s view of events was clear: Was Jimmy Wegner incompetent or was he just pretending to be?
    Joyce found neither view acceptable. ‘Okay, so he’s a bit stupid- ish , but he’s not that stupid. I mean, if the doctor tells you to make a guy walk at three kilometres an hour for four minutes, you wouldn’t make him sprint at 15 kilometres an hour for twenty-five minutes, would you? I mean, he’s a fitness guy. He knows all this stuff. We talked about this. He did exactly what it said on his instructions.’
    Wong was sceptical. ‘If he knows this, why he keeps killing his client?’
    Joyce had a straightforward answer to this: ‘The doctors’ database has a page for each old person, with a list of mild exercises. But there’s also an individual bulletin that the doctor writes sometimes. Anyway, this bulletin told him that the person needed a circulation boost and a super-heavy workout and a high-speed run or something. Jimmy did as he was told. It turned out to be too much for the person. But when Jimmy looked back at the website, the bulletin had gone and just the usual exercises were left.’
    The geomancer shook his head. ‘Impossible. Numbers is in health club computer. How will doctor get in? Will he sneak into health club and change the computer?’
    She slowly shook her head. ‘You really don’t understand the Internet, do you, CF?’ She pulled her chair over to where he was sitting. She placed a white sheet of paper on his table and started drawing a diagram.
    ‘This is the doctors’ computer in the doctors’ office.’
    ‘In office of EDOC.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Executive Doctors on Call.’
    ‘Whatever. Yeah. In the doctors’ office. It has all the medical results in it. It is called a database. That’s because all the data—that means numbers and stuff—is in it. That’s the base where the data is kept. Now over here’—she drew separate rectangles on the other end of the sheet of paper —‘are the health club’s computers. When they switch their computers on, they read what’s in the database at the doctors’ place. If the doctors add a bulletin here in their database, it would be read on the computers at the health club. It would be really easy to get someone at the gym to do whatever you wanted him to do. Jimmy says they sent him the wrong instructions. They added a note to his client’s section telling him to double the weights and increase the speeds and so on. And then, after the guy died, they deleted that bit completely.’
    Wong was not interested.
    Joyce knew she had failed to convince her boss that her new friend had been grievously wronged, and was left in a state of frustration. How could anyone believe that someone with a face like Jimmy’s was capable of wrongdoing? Just look at him! That chin could never lie.
    As the working day drew to a close, the geomancer received a call from Dominique Alegre’s mother-in-law, the elderly feng shui fan, and soon found himself on his way to a paying assignment for the evening. His Perth trip could after all prove to