“Oh.” I looked at the tapes in my hands. I felt something like devastation. It seemed like an inappropriate way to react, but I couldn’t help it. My boss, my Bill, the best boss ever, was trying to dupe me with numbers and jargon. Why would he do that, I wondered. Why on earth.
“Statistics are highly sensitive,” said Bill, sensing my disappointment. “You never know what little factor can sneak in there and mess with them. That’s why advertisers find them so easy to manipulate.”
I didn’t know how else to approach this except to be honest. The time for cajoling had passed as soon as Bill decided to lay a big fat lie on me. I asked, “Why are you doing this?” He pretended to not understand my meaning. I said, “Why are you trying to bullshit me?”
My use of a vulgar term made him draw back in surprise. He wasn’t a prude when it came to swearing, but he and I had a good enough relationship that my own swearing habit seldom came up when we were together.
Still he didn’t answer. I pressed him. “Bill, you’ve never done this to me before. If you really know something about this, I wish you’d tell me.”
“Something about what?”
“The suicide widows. Why they come to this firm. Why they die a couple years later.”
“I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why people kill themselves. You can’t make a person kill herself.” He gestured sharply at the spot on his desk where my stacks of research had rested last Friday—even though the papers were no longer there. “This research tells us that, if nothing else, suicide isn’t anybody’s fault and that no one can be blamed for a person—“
“The research,” I interrupted, “says nothing useful about why six women clients of this firm killed themselves. Do you understand why I’m focused on this?”
He harrumphed.
“What did you want me to find, when you sent me out of the office for two days? What information were you really looking for, Bill? Because I didn’t find anything that answered my question. Pre-retirement age widows who are clients of this firm tend to kill themselves. Why?”
He nodded toward the long-gone stack of papers and said, “There’s plenty of information.”
“There’s nothing there,” I reminded him. “It’s all smoke and mirrors. Just like your little speech about statistics. Which I assume was meant to distract me from something.”
“Distract you?”
“Yes. You’re familiar with the term, right? Distraction? Subterfuge? Obfuscation?” From my memory I pulled terms that I’d learned on The X-Files, the ultimate paranoia TV show, except maybe for that old series The Prisoner, but that one didn’t teach me as many words.
I said, “Based on the statistical crap you’re throwing at me, I’m starting to think my two days in the library were nothing but a diversion.”
“Are you insinuating something, Carol? Why don’t you just come out and say it, if you have something to say? If you…” and here he paused, looking wildly around his desk as if he’d lost something, “if you’d like to imply that somehow I have the power to guide a woman to overdose herself to death. Like I have suicide telepathy or something. Maybe that’s what you’d like to say.”
“Can I ask you something strange, Bill? Were you at my house this weekend?”
“Was I what?” He pulled his hands into his lap, almost protectively as if I’d punched him in the stomach. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a simple question. Did you come to my house this past weekend?”
“No. I didn’t. Why would you think that?”
“Because someone was at my house, who hates disorder almost as much as you.”
“No. I wasn’t at your house. As I told you, I was rather busy this weekend.”
“I doubt that Suzanne’s making a pass at you took the entire weekend.”
“What reason would I have to come to your house anyway?” When I didn’t answer his question right away, he folded his arms and glared at me. Bill was not a stupid man. He could make as many leaps of logic as I could. “Well Carol, we have some work to catch up on. If you’re not too nervous around me to work, that is.”
I pressed my lips hard together, turned on my heel and left him. This is really what chaps your hide about working in an office. Regardless of what happens, be it disaster or tragedy or serial killer, everyone is still expected to get their work done.
*****
I tried to type the dictation tapes and couldn’t even concentrate on that. I couldn’t focus on my computer’s monitor. I couldn’t make myself pay attention to the morning’s mail.
What I felt was not comfortable or even familiar; I had reached what I think they called a fork in the road. I had to make a decision, and it wasn’t an easy one, not like would I rather watch The Inspector Lynley Mysteries or Angel, Season 5 this weekend, not like would I rather paint my kitchen orange or green.
No, this was would I rather press the issue of the dead women or not. Bill Nestor was lying to me, but I didn’t know why. In life sometimes it is okay to know that people are lying to you. I’ve been lied to before and known that it was done in an effort to protect me from something far less pleasant; hell, sometimes it is pleasant and preferable to hear lies. Like: “No, honey, I never even notice other women.” Or, “Gosh, Kay, I thought your poem about playing volleyball for God was terrific.” Or, “Of course, the employees here wash their hands before serving my meals.” Even the time I spent in philosophy class learning about the value of veracity didn’t convince me otherwise. Lies have their good side as well as their bad.
I was very upset, and the root of it all was not whether I was being told lies or whether I was involved in some vast evil conspiracy of widow-killing, but whether I was obligated to do anything about it all. I was just a secretary, for crying out loud. If a woman wants to take the world in her hands, she probably does not become a secretary. We secretaries like to do our typing and then go home, leaving the big decisions and the big responsibilities to someone else. I wanted to do that then. My mistake in this whole mess was getting involved. How to become un-involved, at this juncture, was the biggest, most unfathomable question in my mind.
In my distress over the chasm between me and Bill, I forgot completely about Suzanne. So she had quit; I didn’t really care. So she had declared her intentions to Bill—big deal. That was only news to him. Lucille caught my attention by the reception desk as I listlessly wandered off to lunch at my allotted time and said, “Ah can’t believe that Suzanne’s quitting. What happened?”
I dared not utter a word of what I knew to Lucille, or the knowledge would spread throughout the office at goddess-speed. I was noncommittal in my response. “I haven’t talked to her.”
“She’s not even working today.” Lucille looked miffed. “So much for two weeks’ notice, if you don’t even bother to work them.”
I considered the humiliation I might feel in Suzanne’s place and didn’t find it so strange. I wouldn’t want to face Bill Nestor, either, if I’d been the one rejected. Charlene Templeton appeared unexpectedly behind me, and Lucille turned the same question to her. “Do y’all know why Suzanne quit?”
“I only knew she was unhappy,” replied Charlene, who appeared to be genuinely saddened. “I hate that. I just hate it when we lose good people who have been here for so long. It’s a blow to the whole firm.”
I exchanged a glance with Lucille, whose thoughts had apparently gone the same direction as mine. Charlene caught it and asked, “What?”
I admitted, “We, well, I, anyway…I didn’t think you and Suzanne got along very well.”
Charlene stared at me. “Why would you think that?”
Helpless in the face of all this denial I swung back to Lucille, looking for help.
“Well, y’all are always sniping at each other,” answered the brazen Lucille. The term “y’all” softens a lot of the force behind a phrase, and I wished I knew how to use it.
Charlene gave a slow shake of her head. “No, that’s just how Suzanne t
alks. It’s all right. I feel sorry for her. She’s had a hard time. I know she’s unhappy.” Perplexed still by our behavior, Charlene walked past us and went to the elevators. “Are you coming, Carol?”
“Yeah, not just yet.” Once Charlene was gone, I looked back at Lucille and said, “I can’t cope with magnanimous people.”
“Ah think you’d get a different story from Suzanne,” was Lucille’s response to that. Her eyes were glittering. “There’s unhappy, and then there’s just plain catty. We’re shed of her, whatever the reason, and Ah’m not sorry.”
*****
After the longest damned day of my whole stint at MBS&K, during which time dragged so badly that I thought I might have actually died and been consigned to Hell, Bill poked his head out his office door and said, “Carol, can you come in here for a minute?”
I hadn’t seen him since that morning. I took his stack of letters, larger than usual because it contained makeup work from those two days I was out the week before, and one of his favorite pens, and went into his office. Once inside I set the letters on his credenza and said, “If you hurry up and sign those, I can have them out in the mail by 5:00.”
“Just forget the letters for a minute.” He didn’t take the pen from me. He didn’t close the door, either. Leaning on his credenza, he folded his arms over his chest. Not defensively this time, but shyly, like a man who just didn’t know what to do with his hands. “I’m sorry about this morning.”
Pensively I waited.
“I was wrong to speak to you that way. You’ve got to understand. I’ve been very concerned about this situation, and you know that I don’t cope well with things that feel threatening.”
I surveyed his office and saw a perfect line of large paperclips end to end across his desk, and I wondered how many times that day he had placed them, and how long it had taken him to break out of the cycle. He didn’t miss that and tried to laugh it off, shrugging his shoulders. “All right,” he said, “we have a situation. It might help for us to talk about it. Outside the office, even. If you didn’t have any dinner plans, I could—”
Suddenly Lucille’s voice crackled on the overhead saying, “Carol Frank, call the operator please.”
Bill rolled his eyes, moving toward his desk. “I think she likes to hear herself over that intercom,” he said, almost coaxing a smile from me. Pressing the button for his speakerphone, he called the front desk and said, “Carol’s with me, Lucille. What do you need?”
Lucille’s voice over the speakerphone sounded delighted. “Detective Haglund is here to see her.”
Bill’s eyes flashed at me.
“Tell him I’ll be up in a second,” I said, returning my boss’s gaze anxiously. Once we were disconnected from Lucille, I said, “This is unexpected.”
“Did you call him?” Bill asked sharply. “Is he out there with a search warrant? Or maybe a warrant for my arrest?”
I glanced sharply at his office door, which was still wide open to an office that was still relatively full of our coworkers. I fiercely whispered, “Stop it, Bill. I haven’t called anyone.”
“I wondered today how long it would be, before your detective boyfriend heard about our research project.” He shook his head at me, disappointed in a way he’d never been before. His fingers reached for the paperclips again, to move them into a new line, and his body was tense like a bridge cable. “Thank you for your faith and loyalty, Carol. I guess you should go talk to the detective.”
“Bill, you know that I’ve gone out with Gus a few times. Socially. I’m sure that’s all it is.”
“Of course, socially,” said Bill.
“We don’t talk about work,” I said.
“Of course.”
“Bill.” I forced him to look at me in return. “It’s social.”
But the color was gone from his face. My stressing to him that the whole arrangement between Gus and me was extremely social in nature had done nothing, except assure him that I was fully aware of something extremely anti-social going on.
“I’ll go find out what he wants. I’ll tell him we’re still working.”
“No,” snapped Bill. This was the first time he’d ever spoken to me that way. He spat a hard little laugh out at me. “Go on and talk to your detective. By all means, go.”
*****
My Gus was all smiles, all big, placating hand gestures. “I know, I should have called, but I thought I might surprise you.”
“It is a surprise,” I said.
He read my face and looked apologetic. “No, I’ve caught you at a bad time. Look, sorry, I thought I would take you to dinner. You know, like we talked about last week. I have a little something to celebrate, and I want to celebrate it with you.”
“She’s about done for the day,” said Lucille quite loudly. “You can go, can’t you, Carol?”
“It’s okay,” Gus assured me. This was perhaps the first moment we shared that wasn’t completely compatible. “We can do it another night.”
“No, wait.” I caught his arm. “No, I’d like to go. I was just concentrating on a project ,and you surprised me. I didn’t mean to be weird.”
“Stop being so weird, Carol My-Last-Name-is-Frank,” said Gus. He looked very happy. “Finish up whatever you need to finish, and I’ll just wait out here, if that’s okay with the lovely Lucille.”
Of course, it was okay with the lovely Lucille. After giving her that descriptive name, he could have probably slapped me around in front of her without causing any consternation. I parked him in a lobby chair and promised to be back in ten minutes. As I left them, I heard Lucille ask, “Where are y’all going to take Carol to dinner?” She could ask bold and nosy questions because of her accent and the “y’all” thing.
I hurried back to Bill’s office to tell him that it was just a dinner invitation. But Bill was gone.
*****
Gus walked me across the street to a fragrant and atmospheric Italian restaurant that was very popular with my office crowd. This thoughtful gesture kept me near my car. In fact, most everything Gus did that evening was thoughtful, but Bill’s behavior had me preoccupied enough that I, for example, did not notice until the pizza was placed in front of me that Gus had preordered for us. Our food was ready as soon as we were seated in our cozy, red leather booth. I looked up and expressed my gratitude; women like men who think a little bit ahead. I’ll resist the temptation to compare him yet again to my stupid ex-husband, because so far Gus had managed to trump him in nearly every category.
“Here, eat.” Gus served a slice to me, its cheese leaving delectable ropes from pan to spatula to plate. “Hope I remembered the kind you like.”
“Am I on some kind of reality television program?” I asked, picking up a fork. “Because I didn’t know human males could be this terrific.”
“I’m not terrific,” Gus said. He looked flattered, though.
“Oh, honey, if you’re not, then there’s no such thing.” I scalded my mouth on pizza, then whistled and grimaced and gulped iced tea. I didn’t recall if I’d eaten breakfast. Gus was more careful than me, and he seemed to think my gluttony was amusing and my punishment deserved. I smirked at him, then asked, “Okay, so what are we celebrating?”
Gus set down his fork and smiled broadly, cat-swallowing-canary style. “Today,” he announced, “I took eight old suicide cases to Sergeant Paige and asked her to review them. When she was finished, she agreed with me that we should open an investigation, and I have been made the lead detective. It’s my baby.
My whole anxious, unhappy day came whooshing back to me. “Eight? Meaning Adrienne and eight others?”
“That’s right. In the Jackson County coroner’s database, I’ve found eight suicides in the last fifteen years that all match the MO of Adrienne Maxwell’s.”
“That MO being what, exactly?”
“Death by overdose of painkillers and sleeping medication. All of these women lived alone, had been widowed for two to four years, were roughly the same
age, and, this is the big thing, they all decided to off themselves on a Saturday night.”
“Is it…” I hesitated to even say the words. “Is it a serial murder case, Gus?”
His eyes gleamed. “I’m not supposed to use that term. But everybody’s thinking it. This is big for me, Carol. Hell, it’s big for Kansas City. But I’ve got to be careful. None of those eight deaths were considered suspicious at the time because nobody was looking any further than the current death. They were all ruled by the coroner as death by suicide. So what happens if I discover a link between them and it’s something that the coroner’s office or the previous investigators never picked up? You have to be careful not to step on anyone’s toes, if you want to come through something like this looking good.”
“As if you could ever look bad,” I said wistfully.
“Are you sad?” Gus asked with sudden concern.
I felt very sad, it was true. I told him that I was fine. I asked, “What kind of connection are you looking for?”
“It could be anything.” He continued to peer at me. “It could be that they all used the same gardening company or something.”
“How could a gardening company cause a woman to overdose on pills? How could anyone?”
“I guess that’s something I have to discover.”
“Nine women,” I said, staring down at my plate with my appetite gone.
“This is upsetting you. You think I’m being opportunistic?”
“No, of course not.” I tried to smile. My face wouldn’t play along. Gus did something then that almost broke my heart, although I think it was an unconscious gesture. He mimicked my facial expression thoughtfully, as if he’d like to take my misery into himself. Well, that was quite enough of that. I certainly wasn’t going to let this example of terrific male perfection believe that he was hurting me. I told him at least part of the truth when I said, “It’s a shock to hear about real death happening to real people. I’m anesthetized by television detectives, and I never expected to learn about serial murder involving someone I actually know.”
My Boss is a Serial Killer Page 16