When I got to MBS&K on Thursday morning, the atmosphere was much the same. A palpable sense of law enforcement and suspicion was in the air. At every entrance to the building, I saw a couple extra dark blue cars, and there were a surprising number of men lounging around the front doors, by the elevator causeway, and at the garage entrances, pretending to read newspapers unless they were actually in their cobalt blue uniforms. I guess the KCPD thought they’d better cover their butts, in case Bill decided to spend the day at work before slinking back to whatever dark corner that hid him. I’ll admit that scenario was in the realm of possibility: Bill liked his routines.
Stepping off the elevator, I said to Lucille, “Well, I see they’ve got the building staked out.”
Lucille motioned me over, as furtive as I’d ever seen her. “How are you?” she asked.
“I’m very tired.”
“Everybody here is just devastated,” she said. “It’s like working in a graveyard. Listen, ah’m not sure anybody thought you’d be here today.”
“Oh? Well.” I didn’t know what to say to that. Was your boss being wanted for murder adequate grounds for taking a personal-leave day?
“Let me tell Donna you’re here.”
“I could just go to her office.”
She shook her peroxide-blonde head rather sharply. Perplexed, I watched as Lucille paged my supervisor, motioning for me to wait. I hadn’t been expecting kid-gloves treatment. When Donna called Lucille back a moment later, Lucille said, “Carol Frank is here…Ah will…okay. Ah know.”
“Listen,” Lucille began as she turned her attention back to me, “they want you to wait in the conference room.”
“Who does?”
“Donna and Brent.” She had known me too long to be distant. We were buddies. She gave a surreptitious look around and then said, “Charlene says your desk and Bill’s office have almost been taken apart. And ah think Terry Bronk wants to meet with you.”
I felt an inward shriveling. I had known I’d be called upon to talk it through again, but I hadn’t really thought a partner would want to hear it all from me. I still didn’t like Terry Bronk, that frizzy-headed, middle-aged, foul-tempered man. I’d never had to work a day for him in my three years at MBS&K, but I’d heard plenty. I’d learned that Terry frequently made his secretaries cry, swore at paralegals, and threw temper tantrums that would embarrass three-year-olds. He worked his staff until outrageous hours of the night because he put everything off until the very last minute, ensuring time and again that he caused stress levels that registered on the Richter scale. And, although one uttered this office legend at the risk of being fired, I had heard that a year or so before, the big jerk had actually received an ethical sanctioning by the Federal Court on a particularly overblown lawsuit. He was not disbarred, unluckily for us. Do not ask me how a man with such bad habits managed to not only stay out of prison but also make partner, when my sweet boss Bill was not a partner and was being hunted by the cops for supposedly offing nearly enough people to start a baseball team. Fate is often strange and unpredictable.
So now I had to talk to Terry Bronk in the same room as Junior Gestapo Brent. Whee, fun. At least Donna would be there. She could always be relied on to be a friendly face.
“Just try to answer their questions the best you can,” Lucille told me, worry on her brow.
I went to the conference room, as I’d been instructed. I still had my purse, and I hadn’t had any coffee. I wondered how badly my desk must be damaged, if they didn’t even want me to go look at it first.
Not only the evil Terry Bronk, Junior Gestapo Brent and Donna came into the room, but Mr. Miller from Quality Assurance, the comptroller Lily and two members of the executive board. Suddenly I wished I’d worn one of my suits because I felt as if I was entering the most intimidating job interview ever. I tried to assure myself that all was well. First and most importantly, I was wearing my go-to skirt, which was my favorite and had never let me down in a crisis. You can laugh at that, but most women will tell you that wearing a good skirt can make the difference between triumph and tragedy. Anyway, secondly, I was trying to help these people, after all. Lawyers can come across as combative and argumentative even when they don’t intend to, so I just had to remember that we’d all had a hard week and keep my cool.
To my dismay, Junior Gestapo Brent, who had taken a chummy seat at Terry Bronk’s right side, spearheaded the meeting by saying to me, “Carol, to decide how to best proceed in this situation, we have some questions for you to answer.”
“Sure. Fire away.”
“We’d like to know when, exactly, you started investigating the past client records of Bill Nestor.”
My explanation was almost memorized because I had given it so many times the day before. I gave it again.
“And so,” Junior Gestapo Brent summarized, “you made multiple trips to the storage room for files to research a subject that was not actually part of your assigned work duties.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, but not dramatically. This was really typical of the little jerk, to find an infraction in every action. I said, “Mostly I went on my break times and lunch hours.”
“Are secretaries supposed to be in storage at all?” Terry Bronk asked Donna.
Donna said, “There’s no specific rule against it. I don’t think they like to go down there, ordinarily, but if Lloyd was busy…”
“Was Lloyd too busy to go down there?” Bronk asked me.
I thought we were getting rather off-topic, but I answered, “I didn’t bother Lloyd. As Brent has made clear, this was not precisely firm business, and I didn’t want to bother anyone else with it.”
“So you will admit,” said Junior Gestapo Brent, “that you were conducting an investigation on company time without any specific instructions to do so.”
I stared at him. Suddenly I sensed the need to choose my words carefully. “I’ll admit that I wasn’t instructed to do so.”
“And when,” continued Junior Gestapo Brent, checking an item off a neat little list in front of him, “did you start communicating with the Kansas City Police Department about your findings?”
“I think your phrasing is a little off there.” I glanced at the numerous faces surrounding me. “I wasn’t communicating with the police. I was dating a detective. I went out with Gus Haglund three or four times, and during our conversations, I mentioned that I was curious about suicide and retired widows. But I never said—”
Terry Bronk interrupted. “Can we assume by that statement that you were trying to impress the detective that you were dating?”
“What?”
“Were you investigating Bill Nestor in an effort to impress your boyfriend?”
“Wait a second,” I said, taking another glance around the room. The atmosphere in here certainly didn’t feel supportive. I had thought it was just Junior Gestapo Brent’s lousy attitude, but I was getting that bad vibe from every corner. Was it possible that I was actually in trouble? “What kind of meeting is this?”
“This is a meeting I have called,” said Terry Bronk, “to establish what actions you took and what actions we should take in turn.”
“What actions I took?” I looked to Donna, the closest thing to a friendly face. “Is this a disciplinary hearing or something?”
“Does it need to be?” asked Junior Gestapo Brent sharply.
Mr. Miller, the quality-assurance man, stepped into the fray at this point. He was a milquetoast little creep who I’d barely ever spoken to, and in a whining voice he asked, “Ms. Frank, why did you elect to go to the police with your findings rather than your supervisor?”
“What?”
“When you suspected that Mr. Nestor might be having problems of a personal nature, why did you neglect to report this in the proper format and to your immediate supervisor?”
I noticed suddenly that I was shaking, a combination of nerves and anger making me shiver as if under a blast of cold winter air. I laughed. I couldn’t help
it. “What would the proper format have been?”
“Work-related problems are properly reported in written form to your immediate supervisor.”
“Oh, well, I didn’t know it was a work-related problem, per se. What I thought was that my boss had a strange client record. I went and asked him about it, and he gave me a research assignment pertaining to that.” Several pairs of eyebrows shot upward. I asked Mr. Miller, “Does that count as reporting it to my supervisor?”
Miller didn’t answer me. He asked, “When did you question Mr. Nestor about this?”
“I’ve talked to him several times about it. Which one do you mean?”
“I’m referring to the conversation in which you told Mr. Nestor that the police suspected him of murder. When was that?”
“Yesterday,” I began. “But—”
“Job abandonment,” muttered Junior Gestapo Brent.
“What?” I barked at him in disbelief.
“Wasn’t it yesterday, when you fabricated a story to me that Bill was sick and you had to go to his apartment. You said you’d be back by ten but you never came back at all. Doesn’t this qualify as job abandonment?”
My mouth fell open so far that my jaw nearly hit the table.
“We’ll save the job abandonment issue until later,” said Terry Bronk, giving me an evil look. “The matter at hand is why Miss Frank decided to completely subvert the methods of reporting a work-related problem and instead just told it to her boyfriend at the police department.”
There was no question out there, so I didn’t say anything.
He smacked the table, startling everyone except me, and I was already so high-strung I couldn’t have been more alarmed by gunfire. “Did you not,” he demanded, “have self-serving intentions?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you intend to blackmail Bill Nestor with your knowledge?”
“I did not!”
“Did you intend to besmirch the reputation of this law firm in retaliation for some imagined slight you suffered?”
“I did not, assuming I understood what the hell you just asked me.”
“I don’t think this is a good time for you to be a smartass,” Bronk told me coldly.
At this point I recalled that slavery is illegal in the United States, and I didn’t have to put up with this. The imminence of my unemployment seemed suddenly quite liberating. Without Bill Nestor, I wasn’t sure I wanted to work at this dump anyway.
I leaned back in my chair. I stopped shaking abruptly, like a little switch turned off inside me. What were they going to do, kill me? Ha, that I doubted. Contrary to what His Majesty Terry Bronk had just said, it did seem like a good time to be a smartass. I gestured at Mr. Miller, who had an Employee Handbook with him, of all things. “Show me in that book,” I said, “the list of instructions that explains what to do when you suspect you’re working with a serial murderer.”
“Obviously there’s not a specific list of instructions for every scenario,” Junior Gestapo Brent said.
Terry Bronk cut him off. “You’re fully aware that there is a system in place for reporting any issue you have with a fellow employee.”
“What I’m fully aware of,” I said, “is that Bill Nestor has worked here for almost two decades, and apparently, in all that time, no one but me has had the presence of mind to notice that every couple years one of his widowed clientele killed herself.”
Something passed through the room, a wave of discomfort that affected even the ruddy-faced monster Bronk.
“Oh, so that’s it,” I said. “You’re afraid of getting sued by the families of the clients. Do you think they have grounds? Like, hey, someone at MBS&K should have noticed that their firm a bad track record with retired widows, and if they had, my mother might still be alive.”
No one said anything, probably because I was mortifying them all. I had broken one of the unspoken rules, which, coincidentally, has to do with how much stuff needs to remain unspoken.
“And so,” I continued, “if I had gone to my immediate supervisor Donna and told her the work-related ‘problem,’ then MBS&K could have taken credit for discovering this strange phenomenon and made itself look better in the process, thus subverting or at least lessening possible lawsuits.”
This came out nicely. I was glad that I hadn’t stumbled over my logical little argument. In the back of my mind, I was counting up how much money I had in savings and trying to remember where the local office was for filing an unemployment claim. Oh well, it was usually pretty easy for an experienced secretary to find work.
Terry Bronk glared at me hard, but to no avail. I wasn’t afraid of him. Sensing this, he took a business-like tone. “We’re going to go through this again. We have other issues to address before we can fully come to the conclusions of our meeting.”
“Oh, I can hardly wait,” I muttered.
“Brent?” Now Terry looked to the Junior Gestapo agent at his side, and I understood that through a rigorous program of back-stabbing and ass-kissing, Brent had established himself as the teacher’s pet. Donna was too busy doing her actual job to ingratiate herself to Terry Bronk that much, and so in a couple years Junior Gestapo Brent would probably be her boss and tattling on her for something, too. Not my problem. I wasn’t going to be here, anyway, was I?
While I pondered this, Junior Gestapo Brent returned to his checklist of “Things Carol Did Wrong.” He’d been flustered by the little explosion of Bronk’s temper and my smartassed-ness (if that is the word for it?), but there’s nothing like a checklist to get a meeting back on track. His expression returned to contented smugness as he said, “Can you shed any light on why Suzanne Fark-arn-sha quit her job?”
This wasn’t a good time to giggle at this umpteenth screwing of Suzanne’s last name, so I kept a straight face. Strange question. I didn’t know what it had to do with me, but I was surely about to find out. No telling what kinds of affronts were being attributed to me and my evil plot. I shrugged and said, “I heard she was unhappy here. Hard to imagine that.”
“Would you postulate that there was any connection between Suzanne’s resignation and your investigation of Bill Nestor?”
Oh, good Lord. She had turned her resignation in on Monday, hadn’t she? Despite its only being two days before, Monday was all but a blur to me now. On Monday, my life and my job had still been halfway normal. But I did recall Bill’s embarrassed admission that Suzanne had come to his apartment and thrown herself at him. Had that even been the truth? Probably. Just because Bill was on the lam from the police didn’t cause me to doubt his veracity. Still, he’d asked me to keep it quiet, and while I might have been a lot of things, I kept my word to friends. It wasn’t the business of any of these jerks, that’s for sure.
“Carol?” pressed Junior Gestapo Brent, impatiently, because I was not responding.
“Sorry, I don’t know what ‘postulate’ means.”
Junior Gestapo Brent stammered for a moment. “Uh, it means to propose. Er, think about, or maybe a theory you might have.”
“She knows what it means.” Terry Bronk broke in again, thundering, “What did you have to do with Suzanne’s resignation?”
“Hell if I know. Why don’t you ask her?”
“Were you lobbying for Suzanne’s paralegal position?”
“I don’t want to be a paralegal.”
Junior Gestapo Brent found his voice again. He was always at his strongest when finding a way to get somebody in trouble, after all. “Were you accepting special assignments from Bill Nestor that would ordinarily be Suzanne’s job?”
“I went to the library for him; that was all.”
“For what case?” demanded Terry Bronk.
“It wasn’t for a specific case.”
“You were out of the office for two days,” Junior Gestapo Brent reminded me and everyone else. “What non-specific thing can you investigate for two days?”
“Widows and suicide,” I answered, “and whether that’s
normal.”
They stared at me.
“Under my boss’s instructions,” I added. I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of coaxing excuses from me.
Junior Gestapo Brent smiled with cold significance. “And the next Monday, Suzanne just happens to turn in her resignation.”
“And?”
“That’s what we’re asking you.”
“Well, maybe you should ask her. Did she have one of these little meetings too? Can we call her in here right now?”
“This is a private meeting,” Mr. Miller said. He was the confidentiality man.
“Oh, well, I don’t mind,” I said. “Let’s bring her in as a witness to my nefarious deeds.”
“Stop it,” said Terry Bronk. “Don’t try and distract the purpose of the meeting.”
“Which is what, exactly? Can I have one of those little outlines that your Nazi-in-training is holding?”
Donna suddenly snorted into her hand, covering her laughter badly.
“Those kinds of remarks aren’t going to help your case,” Terry Bronk coldly said to me. His shot a filthy look at Donna.
“What case? Am I on trial here? If I were an attorney, and thank God, I’m not, I’d be focusing on the real problems that are facing this firm and not looking for someone to blame them on. And ask Suzanne why she quit, not me. Suzanne doesn’t tell me anything.”
My poor supervisor Donna looked on me with both pity and impatience and said, “Carol, Suzanne’s not even here today.”
“So we’re having this meeting because I’m the one who is here.” I looked to Donna and asked, “What’s the matter, is Suzanne sick?”
“That’s none of your business,” Junior Gestapo Brent said. I supposed I could call him that to his face, now that I’d made the Nazi comment aloud. He looked at his checklist again. “Is it your contention that you were not lobbying to obtain Suzanne’s paralegal position?”
My Boss is a Serial Killer Page 20