by Janet Dawson
Before I had a chance to speculate at the meaning of her body language and the shadow of unease emanating from her, she wiped the expression from her face and spoke into the telephone receiver. “I’ll have to call you back.” She hung up the phone and took a deep breath, composing herself.
“Sorry, Patricia, I didn’t mean to interrupt.” Nancy’s face was unreadable, but something in her voice made me look at her sharply, then at the woman in red who stood at the other side of the desk.
“What is it, Nancy?” Patricia Mayhew smiled as she spoke, but her voice held a bit more acid than was necessary.
There was definitely hostility between the two women. Enough so that it was worth looking into. In any office, there’s always someone who is difficult to work with. Was Mayhew the one? I guessed I was about to find out.
Nancy introduced me to Patricia Mayhew, who greeted me coolly, without any of Hank’s questions about my experience. “I would appreciate your getting caught up on the filing,” she said, waving her hand at the papers and folders in her out box. “Martha was somewhat lacking in that quarter.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Nancy said tersely, as she stacked the pile in the crook of her arm. The phone rang, and Patricia Mayhew reached for the receiver with her bloodred talons, a bit too eagerly. We were dismissed.
“What’s her problem?” I asked, as Nancy and I walked back down the hall. Either she didn’t hear me or she wasn’t disposed to answer.
When we’d returned to the room with its row of cubicles, Nancy added the pile she was carrying to the already overflowing wire basket. “Let me show you how to log onto the computer system,” she said, walking to the middle cubicle. “You’ve been given a temporary password that will get you onto the network.”
I sat down at the computer, while Nancy stood to my right, walking me through what I needed to know. The word processing program was one I was familiar with, and it looked as though the legal department had standard templates for letters, memos, and other documents. She explained that all the computers in the legal department were wired to the one laser printer in this room. That was a lot of strain to put on one machine, but Nancy added that she was trying to get authorization to purchase another printer. Budget constraints, of course.
After giving me the user code and department code for the high-tech copy machine, Nancy showed me how to work the phone and voice mail system. Then she glanced at the wire basket full of things to be filed and the letter trays with projects that needed to be completed.
“All of us need to get caught up on the filing,” she said, her voice subdued. “Martha did have a tendency to let it go, and it’s really backed up. But it looks as though there are several things in the priority stack, as well.”
The phone at my workstation began to ring, an insistent electronic whine. “That’s Patricia’s line,” Nancy said. “If the attorneys don’t answer their phones, their lines roll over to yours. If you don’t answer, it goes into their voice mail.”
“Got it.” I picked up the phone in the middle of the third ring and said, “Patricia Mayhew’s office,” in my best secretarial tone. As I tucked the receiver between chin and shoulder and reached for the message pad and the nearest pen, it felt as though I’d never left the legal-secretary world I’d worked in so many years ago. The person on the other end of the line was male, and asked if he could leave a message in Patricia’s voice mail. I had a second of panic, trying to recall Nancy’s quick lesson in how to transfer such a call. Then I saw that my predecessor, the recently departed Martha Bronson, had a crib sheet pinned to the wall of the cubicle, right above the phone. I punched the appropriate series of buttons, then hung up, feeling as though I’d jumped over the first hurdle without clipping the crossbar.
While I was on the phone, Nancy had returned to her own cubicle. I was on my own. I felt as though I’d been at Bates for eight hours, but a glance at my watch told me it was only ten o’clock in the morning. A long time till lunch, and even longer until the end of the day.
I got up and walked to the table, glancing at the filing that had to be done. I hate filing. When I worked as a secretary, I often declared that I’d rather scrub the kitchen floor than file. My attitude hadn’t changed. The piles of paper generated by the average law firm or corporation made me doubt the prospect of the paperless society computers were supposed to give us.
I glanced in the red letter tray and saw a dictation tape and a work request from Hank Irvin labeled “Rush.” I picked it up and headed back toward my cubicle.
Gladys bustled into the room and to her cubicle, humming as she raised her mug to her lips. I looked at it longingly. “Where can I get some coffee?” I asked her, already missing the pot I usually kept going in the back of my office.
“They’ve got it all the time in the cafeteria,” she told me with a grin. “The only reason I drink it is because I’m a caffeine junkie. So keep in mind, it ain’t Peet’s.”
Crankcase oil was more like it, I thought with a grimace, after I found my way to the first-floor cafeteria and took a sip of what was available. If I didn’t need caffeine so badly...
I carried the disposable cup back up the stairs to the place I was already calling Cube City. Martha hadn’t been much of a cubicle housekeeper, either, I decided, as I shoved the clutter to one side and set the container down. I reached for Hank Irvin’s rush job and plugged the cassette into the transcriber. I fit the earpieces into my ears and punched the rewind button. The machine beeped loudly as it finished rewinding. I winced at the noise. Then I depressed the foot pedal.
I hoped Hank wasn’t a mumbler. Fortunately he enunciated clearly when he dictated, but he was forever going back and changing the previous sentence. It took me more than an hour to transcribe the document, which was a supply agreement. In this case, Bates was supplying canned fruit to a well-known grocery chain, to be marketed under that company’s house label. The resulting contract wasn’t that long when I printed it out, but while I was typing it, I had to deal with the constant interruption of the ringing phone, not only the one at my workstation, but those of Gladys and Nancy.
By the time I was finished typing, my stomach was growling. No wonder I was hungry. It was almost noon, a long time since I’d downed some granola in my own kitchen.
I stood up and stretched, surprised at the ache in my lower back and the tightness in my arms and shoulders from sitting and typing. I’d had to adjust the height of the chair as well as the angle of the keyboard drawer, but I still hurt.
Don’t let anyone tell you being a secretary isn’t hard work. You feel it at the end of the day, in your back and shoulders.
I carried the completed document around to Hank Irvin’s office and left it in his in basket. When I got back to my work space, Gladys looked as though she was just leaving.
“So how’s the cafeteria?” I asked her.
“Abysmal, just like the coffee,” Gladys told me as she looped the strap of a leather bag over her shoulder. “You’re better off going out, or bringing your own, like Nancy.”
“Like Nancy what?” Nancy said as she stepped through the door.
“I was just telling Jeri you bring your lunch most of the time. You eat at your desk, even.”
“Not all the time.” Nancy shook her head, with the first hint of a smile I’d seen on her face all day. “Sometimes I go home.”
“You’re close enough to go home for lunch?” I asked.
“Sure. I live in Chinatown. It’s a ten-minute walk from here.”
“Talk about a great commute,” Gladys said. She glanced down at her watch. “Bye, all. I’ve got a lunch date, and I don’t like to keep him waiting.”
When Gladys had gone, I turned to Nancy. “Well, I guess I’ll get something to eat in the cafeteria.”
“Stick with the salad bar,” Nancy said, with the sage voice of someone who’d been eating in the employee cafeteria for years. “It’s safer.”
I retrieved my handbag from the drawer where
I’d stashed it and headed downstairs to the cafeteria, a square room at the rear of the first floor. When I’d come in search of coffee earlier, I hadn’t paid much attention to my surroundings. Now I surveyed the brown and gold linoleum flooring and bright yellow wallpaper, someone’s idea of a way to cheer up the windowless room. Rows of tables, some rectangular and others round and all with brown Formica tops, crowded the room. The chairs were metal framed with brown and yellow vinyl backs and seats, and most were crowded with Bates employees, talking in a hundred conversations as they ate lunch.
The salad bar was set up in the corner to the left of the food line. When I looked it over, I wasn’t sure I agreed with Nancy that it was the safest way to go. I examined the metal tray full of colorless iceberg lettuce and did not feel inspired by that, or the accompanying bins of chopped-up vegetables, shredded cheese, and greasy-looking dressings. I stood for a moment, poised in my indecision, then turned away, holding my empty plastic tray under my arm. The hot entree was meatloaf, never one of my favorites, with mashed potatoes and brown gravy. The green beans that accompanied it looked overcooked. I held the dessert offering, coconut cream pie, in less esteem than the meatloaf.
There was another choice, an assortment of premade sandwiches lined up next to containers of flavored yogurt in a cooler near the beverage dispenser. I opted for peanut butter and jelly, theorizing that it was hard to do anything bad to that combination.
I was wrong. The peanut butter tasted rancid, the jelly was too damn sweet, and the bread was stale. How long had the damn thing been in there? After a couple of bites, I covered the remains with a white paper napkin shroud and conceded that Nancy was probably right about the salad bar.
I went back to the food line and got a container of yogurt, which was Bates Best, of course. As I spooned it out, I examined the people around me. They varied in age, ethnicity, and dress. From what I could see, there wasn’t much variation in the business plumage of the American male. He limited himself to a very narrow section of the color palette. Suits were in dark shades of blue, gray, or brown, with the occasional foray into black, tan, or green. These were usually worn with a white shirt. Sometimes the wearer was so daring as to opt for light blue or even pale yellow. How boring, I thought.
The tie was the only place creativity reigned, and then infrequently. I’d never seen so many dull solid colors and subdued understated stripes. Here and there I saw a bold red or a bright multicolored floral. And I wondered about that guy one table over, with iridescent yellow Tweety Birds marching across an emerald background.
I was so glad I’d never had to wear ties. Hell, I didn’t even like blouses with bows.
I noticed something else about the people around me. Many of them looked unhappy. “Employee morale is in the toilet,” Bette Bates Palmer had told me the previous day. All I had to do to see the evidence was look around me.
I saw Patricia Mayhew walk into the cafeteria, alone, looking preoccupied, almost sad. She carried a ceramic mug bearing the Bates Best logo, which she filled with coffee at the dispenser. Then she turned to leave. Near the cafeteria door, she was intercepted by Hank Irvin. I watched them, itching to know what they were talking about. Business? Or something else? She shook her head, as though responding to a question, then suddenly she smiled. It transformed her face. She was quite pretty, but I hadn’t noticed it until now. Each time I’d seen her that morning, she looked as though she labored under a great strain.
Someone loomed in my field of vision, a tall, skinny man with curly gray hair. His body was thin, all angles, and so was his face. He had a hawk nose and the look of a predator. The expensively tailored black suit fit him perfectly, and the big gold watch on his left wrist had to be a Rolex. He was the first person I’d seen eating lunch here in the cafeteria who looked like one of the executives from the top floor rather than a mid-level manager or an hourly wage slave like me. He regarded me briefly with a pair of chilly gray eyes, then sat down at a chair on the other side of the rectangular table. He’d stuck with the salad bar. Now he poked a fork into his lunch.
I was interested when Hank Irvin sat down beside him. With his blond hair and freckles he had a certain California boy charm that the older man lacked. I would have loved to eavesdrop on their conversation, but that would have been too obvious. Besides, I needed to get out of the building, if only for a few minutes.
I tossed my yogurt container and plastic spoon in a nearby trash basket and headed for the exit. A walk around the block not only cleared my head, it stretched the muscles that had been sitting at the desk most of the morning.
I found a coffeehouse on the Embarcadero near Franklin. Real coffee, I exulted. Espresso, even. Hot damn! I returned to Bates with the biggest latte I could carry.
Fourteen
“YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT THE CAFETERIA BEING AWFUL,” I told Gladys Olivette on Friday morning, as we stood at the state-of-the-art copy machine waiting to make copies.
She laughed. “I warned you. But you didn’t listen. You had to try it yourself.”
The woman who was using the copier swore under her breath as the machine jammed. “Why did they put this thing in?” she asked plaintively, rolling her eyes toward the fluorescent light fixture overhead. “I hate this thing. The other machine was better.”
“Paper clip?” Gladys waggled her pearl pink fingernails at the warning sign.
“Not me,” the woman declared as she opened the front of the machine gingerly, leaning forward to read the numbered instructions on how to clear the paper jam. “I remove all staples and paper clips in my office before ever coming near this piece of junk. I don’t want Ken Pacheco breathing down my neck.” She reached out and, with some hesitation, pulled a lever.
By now Gladys, too, had leaned over to peer at the copier instructions. “You break this thing, and Ken Pacheco will have you whipped down the center of the Embarcadero.”
“Who’s he?” I directed my question to the air between the two women.
“Head of office services. A little tin god made out of paper clips and staples. I think he’s got something on the side with whoever convinced him to buy this copy machine.” Gladys pulled another lever, and both women peered into the innards of the copy machine. “There it is. Grab that sucker and press the clear button.”
The woman tugged the crinkled paper from wherever it had been stuck, and tossed it into a blue recycling bin. Then she shut the front panel and pressed one of the green buttons strewn across the surface.
“Don’t you dare make me punch in my user ID and department code again,” she threatened the copier. “Or I’ll give you a swift kick.”
Fortunately the machine heeded her warning, and all she had to do was press the START button. It rumbled, wheezed, and spewed forth the required copies.
On the way back to our row of cubicles, Gladys turned to me and smiled. “Listen, there’s a great little deli over in Jack London Village. That’s where I’m headed for lunch. You’re welcome to join me if you like.”
“Thanks, I’d love to.”
I would welcome some company and some decent food during the upcoming lunch hour, but that wasn’t the only reason I was happy about the invitation. Based on yesterday’s observation of my new coworkers, Nancy Fong played her hand close to the chest. Gladys Olivette was a talker, with an up-to-date knowledge of all the Bates corporate gossip. And the office scuttlebutt was what I wanted to hear. I needed to find out what was going on here that had Rob Lawter ready to blow the whistle.
The sooner I nailed down a lead, the better. I didn’t want to have to spend an indefinite time pretending to be a temp. After leaving Bates last night, I’d spent another three hours in my own office on Franklin Street, doing things I normally would have done during the working day. I was tired already, and it was only my second day on this undercover job.
I had wisely stopped at the coffeehouse on my way to work this morning. Life’s too short to drink bad coffee, and I was an admitted coffee addict. Now the latt
e was gone. I tossed the empty cup into the trash. Nancy was at the fax machine, sending a document through. My ears pricked as I heard her ask Gladys if she was going to Rob’s funeral.
“Of course I am,” Gladys said. “Martha will be there, too. Who else is going?”
I saw Nancy frown as she turned, and I wondered if it was the mention of the faithless Martha that caused her mouth to turn down. “I am, of course. Alex and Hank are going, too. Patricia said she’ll be out of town this weekend.”
Hearing Martha’s name spurred me to do something about the mess she’d left behind. I headed for the women’s bathroom, returning to my cubicle with some dampened paper towels. I transferred everything on the surface of the desk to one of the empty paper boxes near the printer, then I wiped down the whole surface and started arranging things. Martha had left a three-ring binder that contained a company directory. Another binder held a list of officers with information such as addresses, social security numbers, and dates of birth. She also had left me a folder containing information on office procedures.
As I was organizing my work space, I noticed how spare and utilitarian it was. I needed to bring in something to make it look less like a padded cell. Nancy and Gladys had decorated their cubicles with personal items, such as family photos. One wall of Nancy’s workstation was decorated with snapshots of her three children, two girls and a boy who looked as though they were in their teens. There was also a more formal framed photo showing all the Fongs, including Nancy, the kids, and an attractive man of about fifty. Her calendar was a desk type, spiral bound, one page showing the week, and the opposite page, a photograph of flowers.
Gladys, on the other hand, was a bit more cluttered than Nancy. She had two photos, each showing her and her daughter, a girl of about eight. She was a single mother, I guessed, since I saw no photos of a man. Her pens and pencils were stuck into an oversized mug shaped like a pink pig with wings. On her cubicle wall was a Dilbert calendar and a laminated sign that read, in big block letters, LACK OF PLANNING ON YOUR PART DOES NOT JUSTIFY A CRISIS ON MINE.