My Boss is a Serial Killer

by Christina Harlin

  “I will. Thanks for being a good neighbor.” And I did mean that sincerely. Most of us paid little attention to our neighborhood surroundings. Most of us didn’t have the kind of time that ZZTop guy seemed to have, either. He moseyed back across the road to his house, and I took a moment to walk the perimeter of my own, just to see what any potential spy might have seen.

  In the backyard, my chair painting project was as I recalled having left it, except that the two brushes, stirring stick, screwdriver and hammer had been rearranged. First, like this: stick, brush, brush, screwdriver, hammer. They lay now in a measured row, two inches between them, their bottoms lined perpendicular to the edge of the newspaper. The little can of paint was turned so its label faced forward, and it sat precisely an inch from the tops of the two brushes.

  How organized it looked! I didn’t remember doing that. Had I done that? Heaven knew I did plenty of things in my house, at my job, that I never precisely recalled doing, but this really didn’t look like my handiwork. I was a stacker; I made piles of things. Why would someone wanting to rob my house take the time to reorganize my weekend paint project? No, this looked more like my previous idea of someone checking on my property for me. Some man, the insurance company’s assessor or the meter reader, came back here and saw that I was doing a sloppy, girly, under-sanded job of painting a chair and cleaned it up a little for me. Because, I thought, what potential burglar would stake out my house during a sunny, late Saturday afternoon, when anyone could spot them doing it?

  This looked more like something Bill Nestor would do, I thought. Perhaps he had looked through the research I gave him and decided, as I had in the back of my mind, that it could cause trouble, so he had come over to tell me that. I don’t know why he’d bother to walk around my yard, or why he wouldn’t have called first, but this straightened-up project was precisely what he would have done, assuming the other things had happened, too.

  Or, I thought, maybe he came over here to kill me because, as they say in the spy shows, I “knew too much.” Spared the trouble of killing me because I wasn’t home, he decided to tidy up instead.

  No, I wouldn’t believe it. That is, I believed he would tidy up. I did not believe he would wish me harm or wish anyone else harm.

  Then I saw that my back door was open. Spring air rushed into my kitchen. I did not remember if I had left the door open, but I suppose I could have. Except that I didn’t leave doors open because I don’t like bugs. Bugs are awful, and I didn’t have a man around to kill them for me anymore.

  I made myself be calm. I checked through my house. Nothing was out of place; nothing was missing; nothing was disturbed in any way that I could see. Not like I was an immaculate housekeeper, though. A football team could have charged through there, and their presence would not have been detectable in the aftermath. For a minute I thought about calling Gus, or at least just calling the police, but what would I say? “My back door was open, and somebody might have straightened up my paint supplies for me.” With my luck, they’d just scold me for not sanding my chairs well enough.

  *****

  I don’t have a dark side. I’m not nearly interesting enough. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy having a secret life only hinted at by the barest of clues hovering about me, like if I spent the weekends as a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. I spend most of my spare time watching television. I know television gets a bad reputation for promoting violence and all that, but I believe that in many cases it keeps people at home and out of trouble. But anyway, no secret life for Carol.

  Nevertheless, a lot of people do have secrets. Secretaries have a reputation for gossiping, and we pretend to love knowing what skeletons lurk in the closets of others. Still, honestly, there’s a limit to what you really care to know. For example, it was funny that Terry Bronk got sanctioned by the Federal Court the year before, even though that was supposed to be a secret. When jerks get in trouble for things at which they profess to be awesomely capable, that results in a humorous situation that everyone can enjoy. Everyone except Terry Bronk, I guess, because one didn’t go around mentioning this event unless one was looking to get booted out the door of MBS&K. Okay, so that’s one side of the coin. The other side is knowing something really unhappy or even distasteful about a person you have to see every day, and that’s not fun for anybody. Gossip is an unstoppable force of nature, though.

  Everybody at MBS&K somehow knew about Aven Fisher’s wife. Charlene’s boss Aven, the guy who would only represent women in divorce cases, lost his own wife years before. She drove her car into a concrete embankment, or so the story goes, and apparently the guilt over this tragedy was the reason he was such a staunch supporter of women’s rights in divorce cases. I liked to see the wry side of things, but even I couldn’t find anything funny about that, and I didn’t like knowing it about him. I’m not even sure how I learned this ugly story or when it came up. The sordid tale was simply knowledge that came after an allotted amount of time at MBS&K: after one year, you were eligible for the 401k, and after eighteen months, you knew the story of Aven Fisher’s dead wife.

  Even Charlene, who seemed to have no life outside the office and not even a single vice, had a dirty secret that I wished I didn’t know. She was the food bandit. Charlene was the backbone of the office, yet I knew that every month or so she went into the kitchen and stole three or four lunches out of the fridge. This infuriated people, as you might expect. The thefts caused endless speculation, too, as no one else seemed to have figured out who was doing it. Those who “lost their lunch,” as it were, were different each time. There seemed to be no pattern to who got robbed. The food never turned up in any trash can; the storage containers vanished from the office; and the thefts took place at such varied times of the day that no one had been able to pin them to a specific schedule.

  I figured it out only because I’m such a life-voyeur. On one day of food-thievery, I saw Charlene take a knobby sack into the elevator, saying she was going to her car for something. On another occasion, she seemed to know about the theft before she logically should have known. And finally, my own lunch, which I stored in my Avengers lunch box (a replica, not an original, or I’d never have brought it to work), had never been taken. You may not think that these sparse little tidbits of information would be sufficient to convince me that Charlene was the food bandit, particularly in light of what a straight arrow she was in every other aspect. But I knew I was right; call it women’s intuition or a little bit of sixth sense. A couple weeks before, when she’d joked about Gus Haglund finding our food bandit, I’d almost choked. Sometimes I forgot that my knowledge was my own little dark secret.

  I wished I hadn’t known, but due to friendship blinders, I elected simply to ignore this ugly habit of hers. First off, MBS&K would have fired her for it, if they’d found out. Stealing from your coworkers is grounds for dismissal, even when it’s just a tuna fish sandwich in a baggy. Secondly, I didn’t want to confront her. The only thing worse than knowing the truth was coming out with it to her, embarrassing her into knowing what I knew. I’m not a chicken, but I’m sensitive about the people that I like—and I did like her. That was the third reason. I was attempting to be sympathetic about this weird glitch in the otherwise perfectly functioning system that was Charlene Templeton.

  We all needed our outlets, especially those of us too wrapped up in work to have a real life. If engaging in petty theft once a month kept my friend from going bonkers, I was willing to let it slide. Sure, it was rough on the folks who lost lunches, but I think people rather enjoyed the drama of it all. A disappearance of lunches was really the highlight of the entire week. Given a choice, most everyone would rather continue being outraged by the food bandit than put a name to this villain.

  So what is the point of this essay on dark secrets? Just that anyone can have one, obviously. If that wasn’t the case, then they would not be secrets and they would not be dark. They’d just be things you know about somebody, and it wouldn’t be uncomfortable. Like, hey, some
one I know likes to do crossword puzzles. That’s not disconcerting. Or hey, someone I know has a bunch of pennies in a jar. That’s just peachy. But not, hey, someone I know might have cased my house today, to see how easy it would be to get inside. For some reason. And I did not like knowing that.

  There was no one there any more, though.

  The remainder of the weekend was uneventful. I finished painting the second and third chairs. And Wire in the Blood is a really good show.

  Chapter Twelve

  I got some news on Monday morning. As I came through the front door, Lucille, perpetual font of knowledge, said to me, “Guess who’s quitting.”

  I guessed a few names. You always know the ones who aren’t going to last. They have a look about them, either unhappy or far too happy, and they don’t fit in. I was wrong on all counts.

  “Suzanne Far-kan-sha,” said Lucille, leaving a couple of useless syllables out of the last name. “She turned in her two-week notice this morning.”

  “You’re kidding.” This was a surprise. I thought Suzanne loved it here. She had illusory power; people needed her; and she could boss me around. “Is she moving or something?”

  “From what I hear,” said Lucille, “it is too emotionally distressing for her to work here.” Lucille’s accent made a term like “emotionally distressing” sound rather glamorous. Lucille added, “Sounds like a load of hooey to me.”

  “She got a better job offer,” was my guess.

  Turns out I was wrong. Nobody, not even goddess of gossip Lucille, knew the real reason why Suzanne was leaving except for Bill Nestor, and he actually told me.

  Though I went into his office to discuss our suicide widows, and though my anticipation over these had reached a sort of fever pitch, the first thing he said to me was, “I guess you heard Suzanne is leaving.”

  Fine, we could do this first. You almost couldn’t get Bill to change topics once he started. I said, “I did hear that.”

  “I’m glad she’s going,” he whispered. “I don’t need that kind of trouble.”

  “Trouble?” I closed the door (a lot of our meetings lately had involved closed doors, it seemed) and waited for him to explain. Sometimes Bill seemed to be as big a gossip as any woman in the office. He told me all sorts of details about the other lawyers of the firm, some of which I’d rather not have known, like who was a weekend nudist and who had once been arrested for soliciting a hooker. All of these details, I learned after swearing a sincere oath of secrecy.

  And in fact, the next thing Bill said was, “You can’t tell a soul.”

  “Not a soul,” I said.

  Bill was genuinely upset, I realized. With bewilderment he told me, “For some reason, she thinks we’re an item.”

  “What do you mean?” Questioningly I gestured between us.

  “No, she thinks that she and I—Suzanne and me—are an item. Or rather,” he paused to find the right words, “she thinks we were on our way to being an item. Carol, she came to my apartment this weekend. She showed up Sunday and said she thought it was time we talked.”

  “God, how awkward.”

  “You have no idea. And when you think of the trouble it could cause. Sexual harassment suits. Hostile workplace. I’ve never done anything to lead her on.”

  “I know you haven’t.” In fact, I doubted anyone who really knew Bill would ever suspect him of such a heinous crime as flirtation, and it didn’t help my opinion of Suzanne much. I hadn’t liked her a lot before. Now she sounded delusional.

  “She wanted to have this talk,” Bill said desperately, “about where our relationship was going, and about whether she should look for another job so it would be okay for us to see each other socially. I’ve never done anything to encourage this.”

  I put up my hands, assuring him that I needed no further convincing. “It’s not your fault, Bill. I think Suzanne has been in a lot of strange relationships, and maybe she gets her signals mixed up.”

  “She certainly was mixed up. But I didn’t ask her to quit. I hope she hasn’t told anyone that.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told her that she had misunderstood me. And that I didn’t like her that way.”

  Sounded like junior high. I like you, but I don’t like you like you. Surely this could not all be about my getting assignments that she thought were rightfully hers. Yet it probably was. Women can get accustomed to taking care of a man, be it son, father, boss, husband, brother, or just a friend. If he starts getting his care from someone else, it felt like a slight, whether or not it was. But none of this was something I wanted to explain to Bill. He was too upset by being the object of passion. No need to bring psychology into it. And I definitely didn’t want to suggest that Suzanne’s confrontation had probably been because he’d given me a special assignment last week, and now she thought I was a threat to her love life. That would crush him with embarrassment and make things strained between us. I wouldn’t give Suzanne the satisfaction of messing up my good thing. I certainly didn’t need Bill feeling more uncomfortable around me at a time like this, knowing the touchy subjects I wanted to discuss with him.

  “Well, good riddance to her anyway,” I said, a bit unfairly.

  Bill was happy that I was still on his side. “If you hear any rumors…”

  “I’ll squash the ones I can and let you know about any others. But I don’t think you have to worry. Everyone knows she’s flaky.”

  “Flaky? Well, there’s something off there, anyway. I wish I could stop worrying about it.”

  “Apparently in two weeks she’ll be gone.” To divert his attention, which could be so easily preoccupied with strangeness, I said, “Now, let’s talk about my research from last week.”

  “Yes, we have a little ordinary work to catch up on, but not too much,” he told me, handing me two tapes of dictation. “Two new estate clients this week and a little bit of discovery due on Thursday. These are just some status letters, no rush. Later today is fine.”

  I took the tapes and looked from them to him. Was I being put off? “Okay. Did you have a chance to look at those articles this weekend?”

  Bill straightened his desk as he spoke to me, which was a comical endeavor because it’s quite a trick to straighten a desk that is already about as straight as it can possibly be. To do it, he had to pick things up and replace them exactly where they were before. Sometimes he had to create a little mess in order to clean it, like dropping some paper clips on his desktop, putting them in a line, and then putting them away again. He fiddled and scooted and twitched. I supposed that it was more of his upset over Suzanne’s strange behavior.

  And as he did all this, he answered my question. “Yes, I did. Yes, I looked them over quite carefully. And it seemed for a while that there was something there…something noteworthy.”

  “What?” I pressed. I didn’t know what he had found that was noteworthy. Aside from our list of dead clients, there wasn’t anything in those materials that was even very interesting.

  “The patterns, the statistics. You know I have a undergraduate degree in accounting?”

  I did know it. The degree was on the wall, along with his law degree.

  “I took a good look at the statistics. The mean, the average, of the deaths that you listed. Simple stuff, really. Just the information you found and a few additional mathematical calculations. A sort of word problem. I’m fairly convinced that we have a quirk in the statistical analysis that might draw the eye but doesn’t have statistical significance.”

  I gave my head a shake to show him I didn’t understand what he meant.

  “What’s your favorite food?” he asked.

  “Uh, spaghetti, I guess.”

  “All right, spaghetti. If you went outside today and polled ten people about their favorite foods, they might all say that their favorite food is spaghetti. But you would be mistaken to believe that meant spaghetti was everyone’s favorite food, even though you could technically say that ten out of ten people list
it as their favorite. You found a quirky sample, but not a statistically significant one. Poll another two hundred people, and then you’d start to have some results that have statistical significance.

  “Six women committing suicide is not significant within the entire population of people who commit suicide. It was a quirk that you encountered in this sample, but your data-gathering technique had a bias. You were only looking for women who were dead, to start with.”

  I put up a hand to stop him from yammering on about statistics. “Bill, I wouldn’t look for a sample of suicide victims among living people.”

  “But you see what I mean.”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m sorry; I know it’s complex. The short version is every year in the Kansas City area, well over a thousand people inflict injury on themselves. Some of them end up dead, and some don’t. But six women over ten years in a city of this size? It’s so insignificant as to not even make a spike in the data.”

  I had worked around attorneys long enough to know that their speech was littered with unnecessary hooey. Listen hard to them, and you’ll find that they’d never say in six words what can be said in sixty. Yet Bill had never tried this on me before. Frankly I didn’t care for it. “Bill, the metro area has half a million people in it,” I pointed out. “In the past ten years, at least six widows of late middle age have killed themselves—and they were all our clients.”

  “Yes,” Bill agreed, “which shows an odd quirk in the data that must be a factor that we haven’t yet considered.”

  “What could we have not considered, factor-wise?”

  Bill was remarkably able to glean my question from that mush. “It could be anything, any remote influencing factor. Our location. The socioeconomic status of our clientele. There’s a good chance that, since our clients have usually been recommended by other clients, we’re getting a biased population, because this means most of our client base come from very similar backgrounds and cultures.”