Bill granted me a laugh; he was usually amused by my ex-husband bashing. “It’s why I never got married,” he’d said once, after hearing one of my many backhanded comments, “so no woman could ever dislike me so much.”
“Actually, I was trying to see it from their point of view,” was what he said now. “Maybe they felt there was nothing left of value in their lives.”
“Their children? Grandchildren?”
“Oh, children. There’s that.”
“Hobbies? Travel? Charity work? Mentoring?” I gazed at the list. “It’s hard for me to understand why anyone in fairly good health with a fair amount of money would just chuck it.”
“Well, Carol…” We’d entered into territory that Bill wasn’t expecting. He thought I’d come to discuss a statistical anomaly. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing. I just wondered if you think this is typical behavior for widows. I’ve never heard of it before, but I’m just a secretary.”
Bill sat back and thought for a while, perusing his memory. He mused, “A great number of my clients die. It’s just the nature of my work. Some of them are bound to be suicides.”
“That’s true.”
“You say you only found these six?”
“That’s all I found. I guess there could be more. My search methods weren’t completely scientific. Plus, the firm only keeps records for ten years. After that, Lloyd says they go to microfiche at some off-site storage facility. Although that’s not a precise system, either. I found papers in that storage room that date back to the Kennedy administration. But I haven’t checked anything earlier than 1995. I was also limited by how much stuff had been saved on our firm’s database. Those records aren’t perfect.”
Bill looked unconvinced that my list meant anything. “I almost always speak to the family, once I hear of a death, and sometimes they said suicide, but it never seemed more prevalent than when they’d say cancer or heart disease. Still, a list like this makes it look pervasive, doesn’t it?”
I shrugged.
“I’ll do a little checking,” said Bill.
I was surprised.
“Well, it is rather interesting. And if it turns out that Kansas City has an unreasonably high suicide rate among widows, we can publish a paper and the phenomenon will be named after us. The Frank-Nestor Syndrome.”
“Yeah, what a great namesake,” I said.
“Have you mentioned this to your detective?”
For a moment I was so pleased at having Gus called “my” detective that I couldn’t think to answer. “Hmm? No. No, I felt silly bringing it up to him. This is probably something that the police already know about, and I don’t want to sound like a dork.’”
“The police should have caught on by now, especially if there’s some unusual suicide pact among retired widows.” He continued, warming to the topic. “However, this could be a very interesting little statistical glitch.”
“What could be causing it?”
“No idea. But if you’re willing, we can make a little project finding out about it.”
This could go a couple of different directions. Sometimes when a boss mentions a “little project” he means that you’re about to get a buttload of work pushed off on you because no one else wants to do it. But Bill had never done that to me before. He was actually remarkably willing to do his own grunge work.
“How’d you like to spend a couple days outside the office?” he asked me. “I was thinking, if you wouldn’t mind, you could head over to KU’s medical library, maybe UMKC, and do some research for us.”
“Research on what?”
“Actually I’d like to hear your ideas on the subject. National suicide rates? Common methodology? Insurance company studies on who kills themselves and how? This would be a sort of fishing expedition.”
“There are probably actuary tables available for review,” I said. “I could even find out if anyone else has picked up on this pattern.”
“Good idea.” Bill seemed excited by this. “Are you willing?”
“It sounds like it might be fun,” I said. Former English majors may be one of the few breeds who think that spending a day doing research might be “fun”, but I continued, uncertainly, “What about the regular work, though?”
“There’s nothing going on here that I can’t handle. I’ll probably spend most of the day on the phone anyway, and I have a couple meetings. Was there something else you were assigned to do?”
“I have this big screw deposition summary for Suzanne.”
“Don’t worry about that. I don’t know why she pushes that nonsense off on you anyway. I’ll tell Suzanne that you’re out working on a special project for me, and that’s all she needs to know about it.”
“Well, okay then. I’ll see what information I can dig up.”
To my surprise, Bill handed two twenty-dollar bills across his desk to me. “For copies,” he said, “And to buy yourself some lunch.”
“You don’t have to do that. The firm has an account—”
“No, don’t charge the firm,” he interrupted. “This is not a firm project. This is our project. Which leads me to my next request. Which I feel a little uncomfortable asking you.”
Bill had never managed to alarm me before, and he didn’t manage it now. I knew him well enough not to expect anything shady or filthy to come out of his mouth. “Let’s keep this between us, all right?” he asked, turning a bit pink in the cheeks. “And here’s why I’d like that. If it turns out that we’re actually onto something concrete that hasn’t been picked up on by anyone else, I think we might be able to publish our findings.”
“Publish them where?”
“I think that would depend on what we discover. However, you realize that we work with a lot of people who like to take credit for work they didn’t do or to jam up the works with red tape and bureaucracy. The easiest way to get anything done around here is to just do it first and then ask permission later.”
“Never a truer word was spoken,” I agreed dryly, remembering a number of occasions when a painfully easy request had been turned into a committee meeting. Most of the clerical staff knew this truth, but I hadn’t realized any attorneys knew it, too. I thought they loved bureaucracy.
“If this turns out to be significant,” Bill said, “I want the two of us to get the credit for it. Carol Frank and Bill Nestor, and your name comes first not because of the alphabet but because you’re the one who figured it out.”
“Cut it out,” I said, but I was flattered. Getting credit for being clever isn’t something that happens a lot in my line of work. “So when do you want me to go?”
“Right away. Whenever you’re ready.” He waved me off, cheerfully. “Take today, take tomorrow. If you could report to me tomorrow afternoon with any findings, that would give me the weekend to review them. Why don’t we plan on meeting tomorrow at two?”
“Sure, Bill.” I was thinking of all the ways that this could work for my benefit. If I did a really quick, efficient job today, I could have most of Friday off.
That’s probably what Bill had in mind, too. If I hadn’t busy thinking of ways to blow off work, I might have thought about how strange it was that he was willing to go almost two entire days without a secretary. This was a man who freaked out if anything changed, who always wanted to know where I was, and who couldn’t wipe his nose without a confirmation letter.
No, I was definitely thinking about an early evening. Sleeping in on a Friday. Having lunch in a restaurant while I reviewed my notes, looking like someone important.
*****
I was tempted to flaunt my special assignment a little, because heck, they don’t even let the paralegals out into the sunlight more than a couple times a month. But I had promised to be discreet. The only people who got to know were my supervisor Donna, who was really too busy to ask questions, and Suzanne, who automatically saw this as a major invasion of her domain.
Suzanne considered herself to be some kind of Uber-P
aralegal, with dominion over all creation. She was the paralegal that Bill used most often because, as I mentioned, he trusted her about as much as he could trust someone (with me being the exception, ha ha). She was also allowed to bring work to me when she became so bogged down in her own super-powered adventures that she could not be bothered to do something so banal as type. That’s how I got stuck with that stupid screw deposition in the first place.
When I first was hired at MBS&K, Suzanne and I got along well, because she assumed I wouldn’t last long working for Bill or I’d become one of those quivering messes that a really neurotic attorney can make of a secretary. She did not understand that I’d just come from the worst boss in the world, and that I was so glad to be with Bill, who was at least nice to me, that I didn’t mind anything. As Bill and I became increasingly compatible, Suzanne became decreasingly nice to me until we lived in a state of virtual tolerance that barely concealed our irritation.
I tried to take into account that Suzanne lived with a lot of pain. She had a strange personal history, and at age 39 she had already lost two husbands. And I don’t mean divorce, I mean they had both died. The first had died of spinal meningitis, and a few years later she married a man who soon afterward was killed in a car accident. So I tried to be patient with her, figuring that if she acted a little stressed out, it was nothing personal toward me. But after a while, I came to feel that everybody has pain in life, and it’s not a free ticket to be a bitch. Then I stopped feeling so sorry for her. In my darker moments I wondered if she had driven her husbands to seek permanent ways to escape her, but that’s mean-spirited. I would never have said something like that to her face.
She was a fairly attractive woman—well, she might have been gorgeous, except for the constant scowl on her face. As my mother liked to say, “You’d be a very pretty girl, if only you’d smile.” Suzanne was very tall, with a boyish figure that looked terrific in clothes, a big fun-looking puff of naturally curly brown hair, and a truly awful pair of tortoiseshell bifocals that went out of style twenty years ago. To accompany her strange history with husbands, she also had a strange history of names. She was then Suzanne Farkanansia, the name she picked up from her most recent dead spouse, which no one could pronounce, much less spell. It was something like Far-Kan-Ann-Sha, but even Suzanne didn’t say it the same way two days in a row. Before that, she was the very unfortunately named Suzanne Cunk, and I think her maiden name was Wedetzsmiller. In total then, her name was Suzanne Wedetzsmiller Cunk Farkanansia, a series of words that will get your movie an R-rating if you say them too fast.
Personally I thought she had romantic feelings toward Bill, an absolutely asexual creature who had never married and never expressed interest in sex of any sort that I knew of. Maybe Suzanne chose him as an object of affection because he was so safe. And maybe it’s also why she responded so sourly to the good relationship I had with him. Romantic jealousy, of all things. Women can build up powerful fantasies about the men they want, and Suzanne had been at the firm for almost as long as Bill. She’d even disposed of a husband—I mean, lost a husband, geez, what an awful thing to say—during the time she’d worked here.
I could see the scenario in my mind. Suzanne worked with Bill for a few years, got to know and trust him, but married someone else whom she lost to that accident. And this was husband number two, so she had a bad track record in the husband department. In the aftermath of her grief, she refocused her energy on safe, reliable Bill and possibly saw him as husband number three, until along came this new secretarial bimbo Carol Frank. Thinking that Bill and I shared some romantic bond was utterly preposterous, but if Suzanne was looking for an excuse for why Bill wasn’t offering her dinner-and-a-movie, I suppose I was as good as the next.
I heard Suzanne in Bill’s office, whining when he told her that I’d be postponing the screw deposition a little longer because he was sending me out for an assignment.
“I’ve been waiting on that screw deposition for a week and a half,” she tattled.
“If it’s that important,” Bill told her, patient as ever, “maybe you should send it to the word processing department or make some time to do it yourself. I’m sure they’d approve the overtime for that client.”
This wasn’t what Suzanne wanted to hear, of course. She didn’t want anyone but me to do her mind-numbing grunge work because that ensured that I knew my place. It was her tremulous iota of power over me.
Suzanne sighed as if the weight of the entire world bore down upon her. Did they know that I could hear them clearly? I’m not sure. Most of us tend to think our conversations are more private than they really are. Truth is, in an office, there is no real privacy. Suzanne said, “No, I don’t trust word processing to do a good job, and I’m just too busy. If it’s important, Bill, maybe I should go to the library for you. I am your paralegal.”
“That’s all right. I want Carol on this.”
She tried to argue again, under the guise of doing it for the good of the firm, but Bill interrupted her, thanked her, and invited her to leave. He was polite about it, and I hugged myself with guilty pleasure. Suzanne drove me nuts with her high-and-mighty and mostly imaginary power. She harrumphed by my desk as I was gathering my things, saying, “Listen, that place is very complex. If you have trouble, you should call me. I can walk you through it.”
“Thanks, Suzanne. I think I remember how to use a library.”
Her eyes glittered behind those big tortoiseshell glasses. “What case are you researching, anyway?”
“Sorry, I can’t really say.” I was all sincerity on the outside, and on the inside I was feeling the joyous smugness that one can really only feel in a hollow victory. Women are so weird sometimes, and I am no exception.
“Oh, it’s a secret mission.” Sourly she appraised me. “You’re just Bill’s little go-to girl, aren’t you?”
That was an insulting thing to say, even for office workers who don’t like each other. Her words weren’t the problem so much as the tone in which she said them, which implied that I was Bill’s little sex slave in addition to being his little go-to girl. For heaven’s sake, there’s a code of conduct to be followed among staff. You can’t say things like that to someone you have to look at every day. I raised my eyebrows to her in surprise, honestly perplexed as to how to respond. She, too, seemed to realize that she’d stepped over a boundary.
She backpedaled by becoming extremely polite. “Let me take this deposition off your hands.” She took the tome from the corner of my desk. “Since you’re busy doing other things. I’m sure word processing can take care of it just fine. They’re so good at completing grunge work.”
*****
KU had a nice medical library. Nice, I mean, in its quiet, cheery orange atmosphere, bright skylighted staircases, and numerous comfortable chairs. I assumed it was also nicely appointed with medical literature—but how the hell would I know? Seems like a bad idea for a medical library to be half-stocked with quack materials but, hey, budgets have to be cut somewhere.
Just as a side note, a medical library’s copy room is a fun place for a secretary to be, because the medical students jam the machines and descend into mad idiotic ravings. It’s a sweet feeling to be able to approach them and fix their problem with a few impressive tweaks of the green release levers inside the cogworks. I appreciate the fact that a brain surgeon can be flummoxed by a copy machine. Copy machines bow before my skills. I reason that they contain a fourth and possibly a fifth dimension in their depths; all you have to do is reach in and grab. I have dug paper out of places it was never meant to be.
But libraries are treacherous too, if you go there with a vague idea of what you want to research but no specifics. Bill said to look up things that pertained to my discovery. I was there for four hours before I realized that I wasn’t even sure what my discovery was.
I left the library at three and went home early. I had a big stack of copies that I could pretend I was going to review, although I wasn’t going
to do any such thing. I still had Nowhere Man to watch, and when that was done, Season Three of MI-5. Season Two had ended on a cliffhanger for which I couldn’t imagine a resolution; I was anxious to see the tricks they employed to explain it all.
Spending the day doing something I was not accustomed to doing had tired me. My brain felt drained from processing information, none of which seemed valuable. I shouldn’t have gone to the library in the first place, not without a good notion of what I wanted. I found many articles about physician-assisted suicide and the great debate surrounding it, and many articles about the importance of early diagnosis of elderly depression as a way to circumvent the rising elderly suicide rates. But nothing about these bare, dirty facts of mine: I had a list of names, of similar women who had killed themselves, and is that normal?
Medical researchers don’t like to say what is normal. They like to deal with statistics, which don’t say what is “normal” but what is “average.” And they didn’t talk about what I wanted to know.
Maybe I should ask Gus, I thought. Or maybe I should just talk to Bill first. I hated to go back to Bill with this voluminous amount of paper that told us nothing valuable. That’s pretty “normal” for legal research, but this was a special project, specially assigned by him and specially given to me. I hated that thought that Suzanne Farkanansia might have done a better job.
Chapter Ten
“You’ve been busy!” said a tremendously impressed Bill. He was no dummy, but he too could be fooled by large stacks of paper. Large stacks of paper, of course, always look more productive than little stacks. I had about five hundred pages of copies to sit before him on Friday afternoon. He went through the articles, read titles, and made happy noises and murmurs of interest. It was all baloney. I gave him what I’d copied yesterday, not wishing him to think that I’d been slacking at the library, but only six pages told me anything that seemed relevant. At the local library that dealt in novels and magazines—not the medical library, not the law library, not the Institute of Nuclear Physics, I had managed to find a Surgeon General’s information article about suicide in the elderly.
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