Of course, Gus thought I meant Adrienne Maxwell when I said that. He took on an attitude of apologetic teasing, trying to lighten my mood. “I’m really sorry. That’s the hardened-and-bitter cop talking there.”
This guy never stopped surprising me with the same damned trick: he remembered things that I said. Like his killer smile, this talent seemed like a simple thing until he struck with it, sending me reeling. If Bill Nestor hadn’t racked up a considerable amount of devotion in the Carol Frank Book of Loyalties, I would have spilled everything to Gus, right then and there.
“God, what did they do to you at that office today?” Gus asked me pointedly. “No offense, Carol, but you look absolutely wrung out.”
“Yeah, it was a rough one,” I admitted. “But office work is so boring. Don’t let me start blabbing about it.”
“And then I come at you with serial murder. Nice combination. I am sorry.”
“I really am interested,” I insisted. “I do want to know. But what I’m accustomed to are TV killers who like to leave elaborate clues behind, like puzzle games, and the detective has to solve riddles or decipher codes, and then there’s a game of cat-and-mouse and probably some sexy but fairly twisted romance thrown in. Plus I know the victims are paid actors who can invite all their friends over to see them die on DVD. So you see how it’s different.”
“But I like to think of myself as a sexy but fairly twisted romantic,” said Gus. He waited for me to smile, and I couldn’t help myself. Bolstered by that, he went on to assure me. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think the women had really bad deaths. If someone really is coercing them into overdosing, it’s happening in a relatively gentle way—otherwise someone would have cried foul a long time ago. Assuming that another person is involved in the deaths, these circumstances remind me more than anything else of the few cases of assisted suicide that I’ve seen, where the ‘killer’ believes he’s doing the victim a favor.”
A caring killer. Just someone doing a favor. Well, great. Up until now I’d been keeping my suspicions at bay with the belief that Bill Nestor would never harm another human being, but murder as a perceived act of kindness put a whole new spin on things. I laughed, sounding brittle in my own ears. “A favor? And he believes this strongly enough to convince nine women to overdose on pills?”
“Well, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” Gus decided that I was recovered enough that he could eat his dinner. “So tell me, what a TV detective would say about solving this one? I like the line about the game of cat-and-mouse.”
“You’re so sheltered, Gussie. After you mention a game of cat-and-mouse, then you have to ask, dead seriously, ‘But which one of us is the cat?’ and then we fade to black. How are you going to proceed with your investigation?”
In his exuberance, Gus couldn’t help but continue. “Some of the case files are rather old. They’re just suicide files, so they won’t be very big, and the remaining relatives might be hard to find. I don’t know how long it will take. The Hooper case is ten years old, and the Voigt case is nine…”
Hooper and Voigt. My Gus was practically standing on the firm’s doorstep, warrant in hand.
“Oh, God. I’m sorry. I have to go,” I said, scooting abruptly out of our booth.
“What?”
“I forgot something I have to do at work. It’s very important.”
“Really?”
Oh, I almost couldn’t bear leaving him like that. He looked so sweet and confused. I reached out to put my hand on his cheek and said, “Can I call you tomorrow?”
“Did I do something wrong?”
“It’s work,” I tried to assure him, though I didn’t succeed. “Thank you for dinner.”
“Carol!” He tried to rise to come after me.
“Tomorrow!” I called back over my shoulder.
I went back to the office. No Bill. So I went home, my phone in my hand as I drove, and throughout the evening, I repeatedly called Bill’s cell phone and home phone numbers. I left messages until his voice mail was full. I waited up until after one that morning for him to call me back, but he never did.
Chapter Thirteen
Bill was not at work on Tuesday.
My boss Bill was not a guy who just didn’t show up at work. He craved structure too much. Every day since I’d come to work for him, he’d either been at work between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m. or he’d left me a voice mail saying where he was, if we hadn’t already discussed it the day before. I always knew that if he ever did a no-show, it was because he was in trouble. His car had wrecked or his heart had failed or he’d been abducted by aliens. That kind of trouble. Or this kind, the kind we had now. Dead clients and suspicion. And a detective about to discover the things that I already knew.
When an attorney produces estate documents for a client, the attorney’s name is not necessarily anywhere on those documents. In the state of Missouri, and I assume in most other states, the attorney is not required to sign off or register any sort of acknowledgment. Of course an attorney can put his or her name all over these documents if he or she wishes to do so, but it’s not required, and Bill was never nuts about putting his name anywhere it didn’t have to be.
I could have Bill put together a last will and testament for me, and I would get the original document to put in my safe deposit box. Five years down the road, you might be hard-pressed to figure out who had done the work for me, particularly if I were dead and therefore unable to chat about it. And nowhere on my death certificate would it say, “Bill Nestor was this woman’s lawyer” or anything like that. The path to finding out who prepared my will would be a little thornier than that. My family might be able to say, “Oh, sure, we happen to know that Carol used Bill,” or you might find a canceled check that showed I paid MBS&K for Bill’s time. You might find a business card somewhere in my personal effects.
Witness signatures might be another way to discover where a will was created. Wills required two witnesses and a notary public to sign along with you, and at our firm, the witnesses and the notary were typically whoever had the time to hurry into a meeting and sign. The wills of these women were produced so far apart in time that there was no guarantee that the same witness or notary signatures would be used. Turnover at a law firm is frequent. However, when a witness signed a will, he or she included an address, not usually the business address but a home address. An industrious detective would only have to track down the will’s witnesses or notary public to discover where the will had been produced.
The next question became, then, whether the industrious detective, meaning Gus, would think to look at the wills of these women. If he didn’t, he might not discover their connection of sharing an estate lawyer for several days or even weeks. And if he did, it might take him about half an hour.
My roundabout point here is that I didn’t know how much time we had before Gus found us out. I don’t know who would think to find a connection based on who produced someone’s will—I’d never seen that on television. If I were a detective, I might be looking at the beneficiaries but not the mostly unrelated lawyer.
Assuming that all these suicide widows had the same lawyer, that is. Nothing said that Gus’s list of widows matched mine. Yeah, right. Of course it didn’t match mine. He had extras. He had women that I’d missed.
But Bill was not at work when I arrived, and nothing on his calendar indicated that he had a reason to be absent. I gave him some wiggle room. I wasted an hour at my desk, hoping he’d turn up eventually But when he did not, I called his cell phone again and his home phone again, and I was met with the same dead ends I’d encountered the night before. If he was screening his calls, he knew it was me, and he just didn’t want to talk to me. Either that, or he was dead.
Sitting at my desk, I made a plan. First, I would go to Bill’s apartment and see if I could find him. I should have done it the night before, I realized, but I’d been operating under the assumption that unchangeable Bill-Law was still in effect, and t
hat I would surely be seeing him in the morning. So, live and learn. I’d go check there. If he was home and just avoiding me, I’d tell him what Gus knew and that time was of the essence. I would recommend that he and I meet with Gus and decide on the best course of action to clear Bill’s name.
If he was not there, then I supposed I’d better just tell Gus by myself. Then maybe he and I could meet with the Quality Control people here. Maybe Donna, my supervisor, could advise us on the steps we should take. I thought that if we could all just share our information freely and in the spirit of good faith, we could avoid all manner of trouble. I felt in my gut that there had to be, had to be, a reasonable explanation for the suicide widows.
*****
I often wished I had a television job, where I could just stroll out of work whenever the plot required it. On television shows, characters with grunge jobs (meaning those that aren’t the point of the entire program, unlike doctor, lawyer and cop shows) always have some kind of job but you seldom see them do much actual work; TV-show jobs like this are character-defining (He’s a garbage truck driver!) or comedic devices (She’s a sexy housemaid!) or just handy sets (He’s a waiter at the diner where all the characters hang out). Since the characters and, obviously, their bosses, all know how unimportant work actually is to the storyline, they have almost unlimited freedom to chat and meander, come and go at convenient times, and use their place of business for fabulous parties or sexy encounters.
But I worked in a real office under the supervision of Junior Gestapo Brent, who was unfortunately sitting behind Donna’s desk when I hurried over to tell her that I was going to Bill’s place. Junior Gestapo Brent liked to sit at Donna’s desk when she wasn’t using it, because then he could dream about the day he took over.
Seeing his greedy little weasel-face made me stutter. I caught myself and said as frankly as possible (for my last name is, after all, Frank), “Bill is home sick today, and I have to go pick some things up from him. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
“What now?” Brent picked up a pen and clicked it thoughtfully.
If Donna had been there, I would have been more forthcoming. Donna, I trusted. This guy, no. I wouldn’t have told Junior Gestapo Brent anything, not even under torture. I repeated what I had said before, slowing down a little to account for his mental deficiency.
“Bill is sick?” The question expressed his doubt that an attorney would ever become ill. In my experience, attorneys became ill just as much as the next person, but they didn’t believe in staying home sick. They liked to come to the office, infect everyone else, cough loudly and distractingly, moan about how sick they were, and continue to charge the clients for their time.
“Yes.” I summoned patience because a creature like Junior Gestapo Brent could sense how badly I needed something and then proportionally invert how much time it took for me to get it.
“What does he have?”
“I don’t know. But he asked me to come fetch some things from his apartment.”
“What things?”
“Work, I assume. I didn’t ask.”
Clicka, clicka, went the pen. Junior Gestapo Brent asked, “Are you sure this is something that you need to make a trip for?”
“He asked me to come.”
“Maybe I should just call Bill and find out the details.”
Why, that little bastard. Was he actually suggesting that I was lying about it? My boss is home sick, so I’ll take this opportunity to go shopping and say it was a work-related run? Donna wouldn’t do this to me. I had been here almost three years with not a single smudge on my work record, and now this. I could barely keep myself from flinging my purse at him.
Ah, but observe the seasoned secretary at work. Long hours under the tutelage of a psychotic sadist had taught me how to bear up under asinine behavior. I recited Bill’s cell phone number aloud and invited him to yes, please, call Bill and clear up any uncertain details. I was bluffing, of course, but I didn’t think this one had the testicular fortitude to call a bluff.
Junior Gestapo Brent did not call Bill. Of course, he wouldn’t. That would require him to do something besides bully me. He approached this from a different angle. “When will you be back?”
“Ten.” I had no idea if this were true. I didn’t care. In fact I was beginning to wonder why I’d stopped to ask permission in the first place. If I vanished from my desk for three hours, I wasn’t positive anyone would notice, and if they did, I could just say I’d been in the bathroom.
“Weren’t you out a couple days last week?” The Junior Gestapo agent asked me sharply.
I cocked an eyebrow at him. For God’s sake, I was worried about my boss and not in any shape to be the practice dummy for Brent’s employee-interrogation techniques.
“I have to go,” I said, and turned away.
“Carol…” came his voice, as I had known it would. “Carol…”
“Talk to me when I get back.”
*****
For the second time ever, I came to my boss’s apartment, which against all odds looked even uglier in sunny daylight than it had at night. I found a parking place next to his BMW and rode the elevators up to his floor, my hand on my cell phone in case I needed to call an ambulance. I had the half-formed idea in the back of my mind that Bill had done himself harm. Barring that, I hoped urgently that he would be home and let me help. My job, after all, was to make his life a little easier. I’d always been able to do that before.
He was home. When Bill opened his door, he was physically intact. He was dressed for work in his never-changing gray-suit uniform, but he was rumpled and wrinkled, his hair mussed, his face ashen. He looked awful. I would have bet a hundred bucks that he had not changed his clothes since yesterday.
“So you know I’ve been calling?” I asked with irritation. “What, are you not speaking to me now?”
“I thought you didn’t want any contact with me outside of work hours.”
“Don’t be a baby,” I said, “and don’t lie to me anymore.”
“What do you want me to do? You think I’m killing my clients.”
“I was worried about you.” I pushed past him into his stale little set of rooms and flung my purse and keys onto his bare coffee table where they crashed and clunked disconcertingly. I could tell he didn’t like them there and that he itched to clear the table of the clutter. Insolently I sat on his plastic-covered couch. “Sit down, for heaven’s sake,” I told him. “When did I ever accuse you of harming anyone?”
“It’s not a matter of accusations. It’s in the questions you ask me. It’s in your face.”
“I have a strong suspicion that something unsavory is happening, that’s all.”
“And that it’s my doing.”
“And that you’re involved, to the extent that these women all came to you. Yes.”
“Well, at least that’s out in the open.” Bill sat down as I’d requested, finally, but he reached forward and pushed my purse and keys to the floor. I allowed him that. “So why are you here?”
“Because you won’t take my calls. I’ve been trying to reach you since last night.”
“What’s the point? I know what you’re doing.”
“I’m doing my job. Or I would be, if you’d let me. I’m trying to make things easier for you.”
A harsh laugh erupted from Bill, and he began plucking at his shirtsleeves.
“We need to talk to Gus Haglund together. It’s better if he finds out from us what’s happening, rather than finding it out on his own.”
“Pray tell, how is Detective Haglund going to find it out on his own?” From the look on his face, I gathered he already knew what I was going to say.
And I didn’t know how else to approach this now except to be honest. “Including Adrienne Maxwell, Detective Haglund has found nine suicides with identical M.O.’s in Kansas City coroner’s records for the last fifteen years. He’s reopened their case files, or opened a whole new case file, or maybe both, I’m not s
ure. His sergeant has assigned him to investigate them, and they’re not saying the words out loud but they are looking at it like a serial murder case.”
Bill stared at me. Even his hands stopped straightening shirtsleeves. I’d rarely seen him so still. I held his gaze, and after a few moments he said, “You’ve given your list to Detective Haglund.”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t tell him anything that we’ve discussed. Detective Haglund found his own list in the course of investigating the Maxwell case. But…” I bit my lip, unsure of how to say this. “I inadvertently may have given him the idea.”
“Inadvertently.”
“Hey, you told me to grill him about Adrienne Maxwell’s case.”
“No, I did not tell you to ‘grill’ him.”
“God, let’s not bicker over terms. How long do you suppose it would take a smart detective to figure out the connection between them?”
“You should tell me, Carol. You’re the detective expert.”
“Don’t you understand what I’m saying? Detective Haglund is forming a list of suicides. He is investigating them. And I have my own list which I feel obligated to share with him, since my own more-or-less innocent questions are what started this mess, but I didn’t want to share it with him until I talked to you.”
“Why do you have to tell him anything?” asked Bill. “What business is it of yours or mine?”
“That’s a very naïve way to think,” I warned him. “He’ll find the connection.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know that his list matches yours.”
“I know that three of the names do. We’ve got Adrienne Maxwell, and last night he mentioned Alice Hooper and Bonita Voigt.”
“I knew it,” Bill accusingly cried, jerking his eyes away from me as if he could no longer bear my presence. “I knew you went with him last night to talk about this.”
“Yes, but it’s not like you think, damn it!” For a moment I rubbed my forehead. There was no reason not to be calm. I had found Bill. I could make this work. This was no different than getting him ready to appear before a judge in one of his cases. “You and I must go together and show him our list. It will look better that way. We’ll be cooperating.”
My Boss is a Serial Killer Page 17