Bill’s office was a testament to his personal beliefs—a flat, clean, gray tribute to minimalism. Nothing decorated the walls except his diplomas and bar certificates, framed in black and hung with laser precision, one in the center of each of the four walls. Naturally one could look in his desk drawers and find four pencils, sharp, in a line perpendicular to four legal tablets; four red markers with their pocket clips all pointing left; four blue felt-tips beside them but not touching. Of course his books were in rows according to size and color. He kept no plants except one brutally pruned bonsai tree in a bed of virginal white pebbles. He kept his surfaces bare, and when something had to be placed on a surface (his computer, his phone) it was placed with precision up against a corner or flush with an edge. No asymmetry permitted. It was best not to mess with Bill’s stuff.
I could give him files to work on but he didn’t like to keep them overnight in there, for fear that the voluminous paper inside might leak staples and contaminate his stuff. One time he became distraught by a loose staple he found in his carpet, and that weekend he went over the floor himself with a strong magnet to make sure no others were lurking there. It was all right for my desk to be askew and riddled with staples on the loose; I guess he’d been forced to concede control outside his own office door years before. Files were permitted to stay on his desk as long as he was around and could keep an eye on them, but at the end of the day they had to return to my cubicle.
I went to Bill that morning as he perused his email messages at his desk. My job would be to sort them into their own archive files and respond to them. Bill couldn’t type, and he wasn’t comfortable with what he perceived as the complexities of email.
Bill was the most average-looking individual I’d ever known, not in that he was okay-looking, but in that he was nondescript with a face that could vanish from memory within seconds. Much of his vanishing act was caused by how he carried himself, skirting the walls, slumping his shoulders, all but fading into his surroundings. Like me, Bill seemed to have an any-face, open to interpretation if one had the imagination for it. I guess he could have been considered modestly handsome, or totally dorky, or possibly gay, or without any noticeable sex appeal based on the age, sex, and temperament of the person doing the analysis. And I say that with all affection. Once people got to know Bill well, they tended to forget what he looked like physically and focus on his “quirky” personality. But more on that later.
Every day he wore a white dress shirt, a gray suit, a gray tie, and black shoes. His gray hair had thinned on top of his head, but he hadn’t lost it all and wasn’t going to. At forty-six, if he was going to go bald, it would have happened by now. His eyes were soulfully dark and intense, but typically he did not make eye contact with anyone except for clients or me, so not many people realized that.
“Did you get my voice mail message?” I asked as I entered his office, knowing very well that he had. He checked his voice mail religiously. “Here’s Adrienne’s file. The confidentiality issues are in Miller’s hands, so let me know if you’d like me to get him on the phone.”
“Adrienne Maxwell,” murmured Bill, watching the file where I’d left it on his credenza. “I wonder why the police want to talk to me about her?”
“Some dispute as to whether it was suicide, I imagine. It’s probably something to do with her will.”
“Do you think she was killed for her money?” Bill asked me.
“Maybe they do.” I meant the KCPD. “I’ll bet he asks whether there’s been any dispute over the will, if her relatives have ever called or anything.”
“Bet you’re right,” agreed Bill. He knew I was the media-educated professional on murder mysteries. I watched a lot of mystery shows on BBC America. Nobody does the murder mystery like British television, or quite so much of it, and frankly if that’s an indication of how things really are across the ocean, it’s a wonder they have any gentry left standing.
“Did her daughter tell you anything about it?”
“Hmm? Well no, she wasn’t very forthcoming. She’s terribly upset, as you can imagine, and it might be embarrassing to her.” Bill then asked me, “Did you go through the file?”
“No indication of any messages taken since we last saw her,” I said. “The last thing in correspondence is your thanks-for-your-business letter.”
“Still, you never know what they might be looking for.” Bill hadn’t yet taken his eyes from the file, and I wondered if it had just hit him that a client of his was dead. Knowing of a death and fully comprehending it aren’t quite the same things. “I guess I should put in my final notes about her passing, since you’ve got the file out anyway. I’ll dictate something after the detective leaves.”
“Speaking of which, got any letters on here?” I went to his Dictaphone and popped out a tape, replacing it with a clean one and returning the little recorder to its own special place, firmly in the right corner of the OUT box. “You don’t have anything else pending this morning. There’s a board meeting at twelve.”
“Will you be at your desk all morning?”
“Sure will.”
“When will you take lunch?”
“Twelve to one.” I took lunch from twelve to one every day. Bill asked me every day, nevertheless. He liked the ritual, a touchstone in his morning that kept a clock firmly in mind. I used to take lunch when I got hungry, whether that happened at eleven-thirty or one , but that caused Bill a lot of worry. It was better if he always knew where I was. It was a concession to extreme order that I was willing to make because I liked the crazy man. He always remembered my birthday and brought me presents that actually had some relevance to my likes and dislikes. TV shows on DVD, bless him. Last time it had been Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Two—my favorite Buffy season of all.
*****
Detective Haglund showed up at ten to eight and Lucille called me at my desk. “Is he still cute?” I asked her.
“Oh mah, yes.”
“Be right there.” I wondered if Augustus Haglund would seem as attractive today as he had yesterday. Yesterday he’d brought me back from the brink of insanity. Thursday mornings are always easier than Wednesday afternoons. Still, I had primped in hopes that my lecherous thoughts would bear out. I had, in effect, “gussied up for Gussie,” which was a terrible turn of phrase that I promised myself I would never say out loud, unless to Gussie himself after he and I had been married for fifteen years.
I noticed a number of staff people were having an impromptu meeting in the lobby about the condition of our Internet service. “Terrible,” I heard them say, and “so slow” and “won’t download,” which meant that they were having trouble watching sports news over their broadband connections. The purpose of the meeting was to get an eyeful of the detective, who had somehow overnight turned into an office legend. These kinds of things are absorbed through osmosis. Now the women took turns checking out the cop.
Melinda, the bold one, even asked him, “Are you my eight-thirty appointment?”
“I don’t know; are you Bill Nestor?” he asked her.
She admitted with dismay that she was not. Her groupies, Mary and Daphne, looked admiringly at her for being brave enough to speak to the Bobby Lane candidate.
Lucille had taken it upon herself to turn on the charm again. My new friend, Detective Gus Haglund, was leaning over her reception counter, looking with convincing interest at the biography that Lucille was reading.
“Ah think people are so fascinating,” Lucille said. That much was true. I’d never seen her read anything but biographies.
I greeted Detective Haglund and was rewarded with happy warm tingles when he looked at me. I had to refrain from giggling girlishly because I had an audience. “Let me take you to Bill’s office. How about a coffee or something on way?”
We walked together through the corridors, and he asked me how I was doing this morning. “Not bad at all. I’m getting better and better at being a morning person.”
“I’ve mastered the a
rt of being awake at any hour of the day,” said Gus, “but that doesn’t mean I like it. I hate mornings.”
“We have a brew in here that can cure you of that.” The break room’s tower of coffee pots was already working hard that morning, spewing and hissing, creating a vile black potion. “Tastes like tar and cigarettes, but if you put some sugar in, it can make you glad to be alive.”
“For having survived drinking it?” Gus looked skeptically at the coffee pots.
“Yes, exactly.” I served him a cup with two sugars in a black MBS&K mug. “May I, um?” I gestured to his tie, which was a little off-center. “I’m going to straighten this up for you.” I gave the rose-colored knot a little tug. “If your tie isn’t straight, Bill will be distracted when he talks to you.”
“Will he really?”
“This is valuable information I’m passing along.” And, it hadn’t been unpleasant to fiddle with his clothes. One good tug with my finger, and I could have removed that tie altogether. I took him to Bill’s office and let him in formally.
“Bill, this is Detective Haglund,” I said, trying not to beam. “Call me if you need anything. Copies or anything like that.”
Bill, to my astonishment, took one look at my face and at Gus and made an assessment of keen perception that I thought most men incapable of making. “Uh, Detective,” he said, “Would it be all right if my secretary stayed for this meeting? It might save us some time. She’s very good at jostling my memory.”
“Well sure. That would be a smart way to do it.”
Bill gestured toward his conference table and gave me a look that just might have included a wink. When he did things like that, which was almost never, his typically washed-out, unnoticeable face became lively and appealing.
Bill Nestor was the best boss I’d ever had.
Chapter Three
Detective Haglund did what he could to put us at ease, but something about being interviewed by a detective in any capacity unnerved me. I wouldn’t even call it a guilty conscience but rather a wary one. I had imagined myself being interviewed like this before. I watched so many detective shows that it was only natural I dream myself into the plots sometimes. I imagined trying to be helpful and to recall important details, and then I’d realize that I’d be so eager to please the detective that I’d likely start embellishing facts and making things up. I’m so easily caught up in moments that I’d probably confess to murder myself. “I wasn’t in Kansas City that night. I was on an airplane over the Pacific Ocean with two hundred witnesses, and I’ve never met this man before, and I don’t even know how to operate a forklift or where to get that kind of acid, but sure, it’s possible that I killed him.” I was particularly likely, in this case, to say something overly helpful because the detective in question was my new fantasy boyfriend.
Gussie didn’t come at us confrontationally. That’s a good thing, because a confrontational detective might have sent Bill into a fit of ritualistic office-straightening, or worse, as was always the case when Bill became overwhelmed. No, my Gussie was gracious. He said the appropriate thank yous and produced the appropriate documents that told Bill it was acceptable to discuss the client. Attorney/client meetings are privileged, you see, meaning that an attorney is at risk of losing his license to practice if he violates the confidentiality of anything a client has told him, shown him, given him, or even hinted at. Being Bill’s secretary, I was bound under the same oath to keep Adrienne’s privacy. The investigation of her death changed matters enough so that warrants and releases had obviously been issued and our Quality Assurance and Risk Management Department had okayed this interview.
“Mrs. Maxwell’s death is being considered suspicious,” Gus explained. “It initially looked like suicide by drug overdose, but we have a witness who states that an unidentified subject was seen leaving her house on the night of her death. One of Mrs. Maxwell’s neighbors was out looking for his cat and noticed a person leaving her house. He didn’t think anything of it until the following day when he heard about her death. Also there are some questions about the drugs Ms. Maxwell allegedly took in order to end her life.”
“Questions about drugs?” asked Bill.
“At this point, I’d rather not go into detail about that. In combination with the sighting of the unidentified subject, her death definitely warrants further investigation.”
Bill and I exchanged glances. All very interesting, but why was he speaking with us?
Gus said, in answer to our confusion, “As I’m sure you’re aware, Mrs. Maxwell had a fair amount of money and assets. I found out from her daughter that you, Mr. Nestor, drafted her will and other estate documents for her.”
“That’s true,” said Bill. “We did her estate work in 2004. She paid her invoice and took the originals. We haven’t heard much from her since then.”
“No?” Gus jotted notes in his little detective notebook. “How can you be sure about that? Two years is a pretty long time.”
“When a client calls or emails us,” I explained, “I keep a record in the file. With an email, I’d print a copy; with a phone call, I’d log the call on a blue sheet that included the details. Even though this is an old file that is kept in storage, I’d still send copies to our clerks, who would eventually put them in the right file downstairs. But I checked with the file room, and there’s nothing pending for this file number. So there’s no record of any contact in here until her daughter called Bill last week to let us know what happened.”
Bill picked up the rhythm of my explanation. “And this week, I’ll put together a memo including the details of Adrienne’s death and any conversations I had with her family, and we’ll add that to the file as well.”
“Then the file will be closed?” asked Gus.
“Her file is already technically closed,” said Bill. “Once the estate documents are finished, I often don’t see the clients again. There is no further need for me to be involved in their lives, unless there is a problem with the documents or a change in life status. For example, if Adrienne had gotten remarried, she could have come back to me to draft a new will. Or she could have gone to someone else just as easily. She paid her bill, so we no longer had any obligations to each other.”
“So now that she’s died, what happens?”
“In Adrienne’s case? Nothing here. I’m not her executor.”
“You don’t have a reading of the will?”
“It’s not like in the movies, Detective. There may be a reading of the will, or there may just be a family meeting of some sort. But whatever happens, it will be handled by her daughter, who is the executor of Adrienne’s estate. I’m not their family lawyer. I’m just the guy who drafted Adrienne’s estate documents for her to ensure their legality. Now, if one of Adrienne’s relatives decides that the will is unfair or even bogus, attention would turn back to me—and not in a good way. But I do my best to take care of my clients and make sure that their estate documents are as good as can be. Because everybody dies, eventually.”
I was impressed by this pithy little speech, and Gus seemed all right with the answer, too. He asked Bill, “Do you remember your meetings with Mrs. Maxwell?”
“Oh, fairly well,” Bill replied. “But I do a great deal of estate work, and most of the client meetings progress along the same lines. They all begin to feel the same after a while.”
“How do those client meetings usually go, in estate work?”
Bill was at home with this topic. He was a shy man, not a lawyer who wanted to hear himself talk (a favorite pastime of many attorneys) nor not a dramatist primed for court appearances. He was in his element when discussing the rote procedures of producing a will, a power of attorney, or a trust. He didn’t seem shy at all when he answered the detective.
“We discuss what the individual wants over the course of one or more meetings. We draft the documents, review the documents, and make corrections. We have further review and then a swearing in and signing before witnesses and a notary. The client
retains the original documents; we retain copies and then send a bill that, hopefully, is paid. It happens about the same way every time. Some clients come in and change their estate planning every few months, depending on which of their grandchildren they like best at the time. Adrienne was not like that.”
“When you met with Mrs. Maxwell for your initial discussions of her will, did you take any notes?”
Bill almost looked offended by the idea that he wouldn’t have taken notes. He was a copious note-taker. He could give a lecture series on effective note taking. From Adrienne Maxwell’s file I extracted the “Attorney Notes” folder and handed it to my new fantasy boyfriend.
Gus perused the maniacally organized materials and asked, “Any rough draft notes, just initial impressions that you might have jotted down?”
Bill drew himself up indignantly, a faint frown settling on his forehead. “Those are my draft notes.”
Gus glanced from the yellow paper to Bill and then back down again. I knew what they both were thinking. Gus was looking at ruler-straight columns and outline formatting and thinking that only a cyborg would take notes this neatly. Bill, on the other hand, was wondering if there were some way to make his notes neater. Some minutes ticked by as Gus read through the pages. I enjoyed myself by watching his profile out of the corner of my eye as I pretended to gaze out the window.
“She was despondent?” Gus asked, reading something from the first page again.
“Hmm?”
“Here it says that Ms. Maxwell seemed despondent when she came in for her meetings.”
“She had lost her husband quite recently.”
Gus asked, “Mr. Nestor, do you take notes like this on all your clients?”
My Boss is a Serial Killer Page 3
