The little dog, as if on cue, jumped up on Cully, who caught him and held him cuddled next to his chest.
“OK, Cully, I don’t have any hold on you. Or Bling,” Bertie said reluctantly. “I wish I knew that you had a place to stay.”
“Don’t worry about us, Bert. We’ll be fine. Hey, and thanks.” He awkwardly kissed her on the cheek, put Bling down, fastened his leash on him, and swept up his duffel bag as he left, closing the door softly behind him.
Bertie wandered around the tiny apartment, suddenly bereft. It still smelled like Cully, a spicy scent that was part aftershave and part his own personal smell. It smelled a little of Bling, too. “Better get some Febreeze,” Bertie said out loud.
It had been a strange evening and she wasn’t sure what to do. She went to the cupboard and found a bag of cookies she’d hidden for an emergency that only chocolate cookies with a creamy center could fix.
She opened the bag and discovered that Cully had already been there. The white centers had all been licked clean and the chocolate cookies stuck back together again.
“Oh, Cully,” she said, and started eating the denuded Oreos.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Bertie was late to work the next morning. Her head hurt and all the coffee in the world couldn’t make up for losing most of the night to fretting about … well, almost everything in her life at the moment.
Cully had left at a time when they were both potentially in danger from an unknown whom or what. She didn’t know who was in worse shape. She could go home at night, lock the door and be safe, but if he was out on the street, there wouldn’t be any place for him to hide and …
“Hi, Bert,” Cully said cheerfully, walking past her desk with Bling trotting behind him.
“Hi, Cully,” she said absentmindedly.
“Cully? Cully, wait a minute,” she said, jumping to her feet.
“I can’t talk now, Bert. Lupe down in advertising has a Cheeto with Jesus’ face on it and she wants me to take a picture of it before someone eats it.”
He walked away whistling while Bertie sat at her desk, staring after him with her mouth open.
“Bertie?”
“Yes, Howard?” He’d snuck up on her, startling her enough that she knocked the Little Miss Spy periscope askew, its end sticking out of the fake flower bouquet on her desk. She moved awkwardly to one side, trying to hide it.
“You’re wanted down in Human Resources.”
“HR? Why?”
“You’d better go now, they’re waiting for you.”
Bertie fretted in the elevator, dreading what awaited her. No good ever came from being called to HR. The trolls who toiled there were aware that they were universally hated as company stooges and worked even harder to find ways to stick it to the employees.
She was asked to wait in the outer office of the warren that housed HR while preparations were made for whatever torture they had in store for her. “Oh, the oil isn’t boiling yet? Of course I’ll wait till it’s ready,” she thought. “Just one more stick to sharpen for the bottom of the hole you’re going to push me into? No prob, take your time.”
Finally, an older woman in an expensive suit and even more expensive shoes opened the door to the inner sanctum and invited her in. Bertie followed her down a long hallway, wishing she could give her a quick kick in the ass and then run.
The woman introduced herself as Margaret Schellden. “I’ve been hearing good things about you, Bertie,” she said, smiling.
“Well, thank you,” Bertie said, preparing to go all humble if needed.
“But, unfortunately, we’re not meeting because of that. I’m sorry to tell you that there’s a problem with your behavior that’s been brought to our attention here in HR.”
“A problem?”
“Yes, and I’m afraid it’s fairly serious. Of course you know Howard Schompe, your immediate supervisor. Well, I’m sorry to say that he’s filed a sexual harassment complaint against you.”
Bertie jumped to her feet. “What?”
“Howard Schompe has filed a sexual harassment complaint against you because of your behavior toward him. He says you’re stalking him and that you continually create reasons to look around your computer and stare at him.”
Bertie froze, then decided to take the finesse route. “Wellll, Ms. Schellden, Howard’s perception of the way I act and reality can be two different things. If you’re basing this on Howard –”
Schellden stood up and turned off the office lights, then returned to her desk and hit a button on her computer. On a blank wall, an image of the newsroom appeared. “This is the tape from one of the security cameras in the building,” Schellden said.
The image zoomed into the corner of the room where Bertie sat, her unsuspecting back to the camera. As the tape progressed, she was shown jerking to the side of her desk and peeking around to look at Howard Schompe.
“Oh, well, that proves nothing, maybe I had something to say to him – “
Schellden leaned forward and pushed another button on her computer. The tape sped up and suddenly Bertie was jerking back and forth like a puppet, peeking at Howard, then moving back; peeking at Howard, then moving back.
“Quell embarrassing,” she thought to herself.
The scene changed from her desk to the corridor outside the men’s room. Schellden hit a button and there was Bertie, telling Howard that she often lurked outside the men’s room because it was such a happenin’ place.
The tape continued to show her in the parking lot, looking at Howard around the side of her car.
Schellden shut the show down and turned on the lights again. She faced Bertie, a serious look on her face.
“Well?”
“I happened to be in the same place as Howard, so what?”
Schellden then reached under her desk and pulled out the pink box with Little Miss Spy printed in teal that Bertie had discarded in the garbage can beside her desk a couple of days ago.
“Do I need a lawyer?” Bertie asked.
***
Bertie didn’t need a lawyer. Ms. Schellden said that Howard didn’t want Bertie fired or even suspended. Cynically, Bertie figured it was because he didn’t have anyone else to do the mountains of work he’d been sticking her with.
But Bertie had to take a training course in sexual harassment and her desk would be moved to a corner of the room away from Howard. And she was suspended for the rest of the day.
“Now there’s some good news,” Bertie thought. She had to retrieve her purse from her desk before she could leave and that stroll through the newsroom was assuming the proportions of the final mile. “Dead man walking,” Bertie wanted to announce.
Reporters who usually didn’t have the time to look up from their computers stared as she passed them, then leaned over and whispered to the person in the next cubicle. Bertie’s face flushed red.
She could just imagine the conversations: “Can you believe she’s hot for Howard Schompe? Yes, Howard Schompe, the Gray Ghost. And I thought I was hard up for sex.”
She made it to her desk where a maintenance man was already packing up her computer for her move to the newsroom’s outer limits. The Little Miss Spy periscope had already been untangled from the fake flower bouquet and was sitting on the desk for all to see.
She grabbed her purse and was ready to leave when Howard looked up at her.
“I’m sorry I had to do that, Bertie, but your behavior was becoming intolerable,” he said.
Bertie flushed again. “You monkey-sniffing, pig-humping, marmot-banging, troll farmer,” she thought. His middle-management sanctimony was galling.
She smiled faintly and said, “Love your suspenders, Howard,” before walking out of the newsroom with as much dignity as she could muster.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Bertie banged so hard on her laptop that the small table it rested on wobbled and swayed. Her day off for sexually harassing Howard Schompe and Cully’s absence gave her a chance to catch up
on her notes. She pictured the final story in “Vanity Fair,” one of those articles they pretended was a gritty look at today’s mores but was just a chance to be snotty about famous people.
“‘Murder and environmentalism set against the background of L.A. high society’– yeah, that’s the story I want to write,” she thought.
She’d opened the sliding glass door to her tiny backyard to let in hopes of catching a cool breeze. It was definitely getting toward fall, which in Southern California was also wildfire season as hot, dry Santa Ana winds blew in from the desert. After an abnormally hot summer, the danger was real.
Bertie realized she was daydreaming. “Stop it,” she said out loud. She stood and started pacing.
“OK, here’s what I have,” she said. “I’ve got Buddy Laird, aka the Greasy Bandit, aka Buddy Lard. Maybe Rowley Poke found out about his sideline in grease, threatened to turn him in and Buddy killed him. Buddy drives a Ford truck – but that’s the only part that matches Rowley’s last words, ‘American car.’ And Buddy might want me and Cully dead because we found out about his grease ring.
“I’ve got Howard Schompe, the Lovesick Lothario. Hmm, I’d really love to stick it to Howard, but there’s not much evidence against him other than his suspenders, and I doubt they’d hold up in court. Ha, ha, hold up in court; I made a joke. He is in debt, though. That’s a great motive if he’s really doing the boom-chicka-wa-wa with Irene Poke. And he could’ve shot at me because I’m getting too close to the truth.
“I’ve got Irene Poke, but I don’t want it to be her. She deserves a little happiness if her hubby was poking Annabelle – I mean Khov Johnson. Ha, ha – Poke is as Poke does.
“And there’s Annabelle-I-mean-Khov, who bought poor little Bling just for the doggie fashion show and then dumped him – she’s definitely a bad guy. But could what’s-her-name have committed murder just to get out from under Rowley Poke? Get out from under? Ha, ha, I did it again. And I doubt she knows that I know that she was doing the rumpy-pumpy with Rowley so there wouldn’t be any reason for her to shoot at me.
“And then there’s the Big Johnson, who’s a silly, vain, creepy man who uses dead Christmas turkeys to kill people. Did he find out about Anna-Khov and Rowley? But what does that have to do with me, as far as he’s concerned?”
Bertie stopped pacing and laid down on the sofa to think things over in comfort. She heard a crunching noise and picked up a pillow to find a half-empty bag of potato chips. She suddenly missed Cully and Bling so badly that she could hardly finish the chips. She wondered where they were and what they were doing.
The light had faded when the doorbell rang. Bertie, groggy, staggered to the door and opened it. Buddy Laird was standing there holding a barrel of grease. “Why did you give that dog away? I wanted Bling.” He slammed the barrel down so hard that grease splattered on the door, the stone sidewalk and the side of the house. He turned to leave.
“Wait! Why did you want the dog?” Bertie asked. It seemed important that she know.
“Because I want to call my gang the Bling Ring. DUH!” He stomped away just as Mr. Mudgett rounded the corner.
“You’ll have to clean up this grease,” he said, shaking his finger at her. “And NO SEX. How many times do I have to tell you?” He started to leave, too, but slipped on the grease and fell.
Madison, who was walking by, came running over. “What the hell did you do, Bertie? I told you to stay out of the Rowley Poke murder case. Now this man is dead, too.”
Bertie grabbed his arm and pulled him into the apartment, forcing him to jump over Mr. Mudgett’s dead body.
“Shhh,” she said. “If we’re quiet, we can have sex and he won’t know because he’s dead.” She was dragging him to the bedroom when she woke up.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, and went to bed.
***
Bertie’s new desk faced a bare brick wall on the far side of the newsroom, the most distant point from Howard Schompe’s desk. She thought about adding a poster or two to the wall, but she just didn’t have the emotional energy to care.
Worse than being forced to sit in a corner, her colleagues assumed she wanted Howard Schompe. People stared at her, looking away quickly if she caught them at it. She closed her eyes. “How could anyone think I’m hot for Howard?” she thought. Humiliation was her best friend these days.
And anyone who wasn’t curious about her “romantic” obsession with Howard, was ostracizing her for bringing a week’s worth of boring sexual harassment classes down on their heads. Apparently, the wizards in Human Resources viewed sexual harassment as a plague ready to sweep through the newsroom unless it was stomped out by snore-inducing lectures.
Bertie decided to keep her head down and ride out the worst of the fallout. Over the next few weeks she attended a charity tea party, a charity cocktail party, and a charity cock fight. Her time at the office was spent plowing through the mountain of scut work on her desk. As soon as she cut it down, Howard would dump a new load on top.
In bad times, her mother advised her to hold her head up and pretend she was Jackie Kennedy. She imagined herself in a gown sweeping through the newsroom on her way to Hyannis Port. In reality, she shuffled through the maze of desks, aware of eyes staring at her and with whispers following her. Was it this hard to be Jackie Kennedy?
“Somehow,” she thought, “I think I missed the plane to Camelot.”
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
GARBAGE! GARBAGE! GARBAGE!
Bertie wasn’t very good at keeping a datebook; she kept forgetting to pencil in reminders on the right dates and when she did remember the reminders she forgot to look at them.
But GARBAGE! GARBAGE! GARBAGE! caught her eye when she knocked the book off the kitchen counter where it served as a paperweight for the napkins.
“Now what did I mean by that?” she thought, picking up the book and looking for some kind of hint of what she’d meant by such a cryptic entry. “Did I have a premonition that my life was going to stink on this date?”
She turned the book over, as if there was an explanation on the cover. “Garbage? Tomorrow isn’t garbage day, that’s Tuesday. What the hell?”
The best way to remember was to forget about it so Bertie put the book back down the counter, open to GARBAGE! GARBAGE! GARBAGE! and went back to watching TV. It was Sunday, she had all day to figure it out. She resisted the temptation to email Madison.
She awoke with a start the next morning. “Of course!” she said. “Now I remember: Today’s the meeting at Snarky Park about the Great Garbage Cruise Gala.”
For events this important – important to Dillard Johnson – she was going to be told what to write and how to write it. “Stupid, iggernant, mouth-breather,” she said out loud.
She shoved a toothbrush in her mouth to stop the flood of curses. “This isn’t journalism,” she thought. “It’s an exercise in dictatorship. Dictators control the information in a world where money counts more than a free press.”
The TV was droning on in the background and the words “wildfire alert” broke into her consciousness. With her bra half on, she walked in to the living room where a woman newscaster was smiling her way through a report about a brush fire burning in the hills a few miles north of L.A.
“ … no need to issue a wildfire alert since fire department officials say that they expect to have the blaze under control shortly. Well, Rodney, I guess L.A. dodged the bullet on that one, eh?”
Her co-anchor, whose tanned face looked to be at least 50 percent teeth, said, “You bet, Shanda. Our viewers in that area can keep the ice cubes out of the water beds and in their margharitas.” He smiled and Bertie had to cover her eyes, the light glinting off his teeth was so bright.
“Hey, Rodney, you’re an idiot,” she said to the screen and shut the TV off.
Bertie drove in a vegetative state that got her close to Snarky Park without realizing how she’d gotten there. The events of the last few weeks were taking a toll on her psyche. Sh
e was having trouble sleeping, trouble concentrating. Unfortunately, nothing ever impeded her appetite. “Of course not. Stress like that could be used for good,” she thought.
As she neared the park, an SUV – one of those motorized islands that Californians love – pulled out of a partially hidden driveway in front of her, almost skimming her front bumper before she slammed on the brakes. “Hey, asshole, watch it,” she shouted, her heart pumping erratically at the near-miss. The driver, a woman in her 20s with two small children strapped into car seats and a mountain of luggage almost falling out the back, gave her a small, scared smile and tore off down the road.
“Hey,” she yelled at the disappearing car, “at least set a good example for the mini-meats in the back and gimme a ‘sorry.’”
The encounter jarred her out of her funk and she started noticing other cars heading down the hill toward the interstate. It was more traffic than she’d ever seen on this road.
“I wonder what’s going on,” she said out loud. “Maybe the Romans are feeding the poor to the lions today.”
Bertie pulled into the driveway and up the hill to the mansion, spotting a column of gray smoke rising into the sky from a nearby hilltop. “Ahhh, the brush fire,” she thought. Being directionally challenged, she hadn’t realized it was this close to Snarky Park.
The day had changed in the hour it had taken her to get there. A hot, dry wind was blowing, rustling the flowers in front of the mansion. The sun looked almost brassy, and the sky too blue to be real.
“Santa Ana weather,” she thought. “Good thing they got the fire under control so fast, otherwise it could get ugly out here with all this dry brush.”
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