My Boss is a Serial Killer

by Christina Harlin

  “Of course.”

  “This is pretty intimate stuff. You have a lot of information here that I wouldn’t think was pertinent, considering your job.”

  “Is that a problem?” Bill asked, his fingers beginning to fret together.

  “You’ve got an outline of her home security measures. And here,” Gus said, gesturing to another page, “is a list of her personality characteristics, and there’s this part about being despondent. Depressed. That sounds like something more from a doctor’s office. Here on this last page, you’ve got a list of her plans for the future.”

  Bill’s breathing sounded rapid to me, and I hurried to jump to his defense. Detective Haglund, cute as he might be, didn’t understand how easy it was to upset my boss’s balance. I said, “Bill takes a great deal of time to get to know his clients, and he’s an excellent note-taker, particularly in a case like Adrienne’s. Since she was a recent widow, he wanted to make sure she was taking care of herself and her possessions. The files are confidential, so anything he writes would never become public knowledge. And then, if we have future dealings with the clients, it’s easier to remember them and what we talked about.”

  I looked defiantly at both of them. “Not all attorneys care enough about their clients to take the time.”

  Bill looked rather embarrassed, but he did seem calmer.

  “Understood,” said Gus Haglund. “Can we mark these for copies?” He handed the notes over gently. Each time he looked at me, he smiled fleetingly and flicked his eyes quickly away, probably fortunate because prolonged gazing would doubtlessly cause me to blush and drool. I wondered if Gus had a pair of handcuffs. Would he be willing to demonstrate interrogation techniques, say, in a private setting with some Barry White music playing? After the pages were marked, Gus passed the notes to Bill and asked him to review them, to see if anything unusual struck him. Bill admitted to having reviewed the notes prior to the meeting. “It’s standard stuff, Detective. Mrs. Maxwell left the majority of her estate to her daughter and son, with additional provisions for her grandchildren.”

  “Mrs. Maxwell had recently lost her husband when she came to you.”

  “Yes, as I said, she was a new widow.”

  “I realize this was a long time ago, but did anything strike you as odd about her behavior? Anything that maybe isn’t in your voluminous notes?”

  Bill took this comment in the good-natured spirit it was given. “Trust the notes for my impressions. What about you, Carol?”

  I came out of a reverie of Barry White’s voice singing “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.”

  “She was depressed, as Bill said,” I said, sincere and pure as the driven snow in both thought and deed. “I remember her behaving like she didn’t expect to live much longer.”

  The men stared at me.

  “Sorry if that sounds like assumptions made after the fact. I do remember thinking that. She wasn’t much older than my own mother and didn’t seem to be sick or anything, but she still talked as if she didn’t think she’d live for more than a few months. I felt sorry for her. I figured it was grief.”

  “She’s right,” Bill said to the detective. “I remember that, too; that Adrienne was very sad, as if she were carrying an invisible weight. Maybe it finally weighed her down too much.”

  *****

  To me, it didn’t seem that we did Gussie much good. My hopeful daydream of being able to provide him with the clue that solved the case deflated like a leaky balloon. I had no recollection of Adrienne’s having lurking grandnephews eager to get their hands on her fortune to pay off gambling debts, nor of thirty-year-old suicide pacts she had made with a secret society, nor of threatening letters hand-delivered to her by an obscure courier service. But all of those things would have been neat. I imagined Gussie being impressed and grateful, asking if I’d ever considered being a detective myself.

  But I did get to haul him over to the copy machine. Bill was the one who suggested it. “Take the detective with you, Carol, so he can make sure he gets everything he wants from the file.”

  That was fine with me. It counted as a second date.

  “If we don’t stop meeting this way, people will talk,” I said to Gus as I set out the file to be dismantled, copied, and reassembled. I caught his expression of pleasant-enough confusion, as if he were bewildered by my behavior. Uh-oh, perhaps I was coming on too strong. Some men didn’t like that. Maybe detectives were too macho—was anybody really macho anymore?—to like for a woman to flirt. My brain made a rush to think of an apology, something to do with the early hour and an antihistamine I’d taken for allergies, but instinct told me just to be honest with this one. I’d had my share of mind-games in relationships, thank you very much stupid ex-husband, and this had given me a sixth sense about good times for cutting to the chase. “You know, I’d stop making all these insinuating remarks if you’d just ask me to lunch.”

  I began loading pieces of Adrienne’s file in the machine. I could make copies and talk at the same time with ease. The copy machine is an excellent place for gossip; all the secretaries here had learned that trick early on. We could talk as much as we wanted while copying, without receiving any dirty looks from the middle-management menace I called Junior Gestapo Brent, because technically we were still working hard. Two or three of us could gather and have lengthy discussions about non-work related topics and maintain the appearance of diligence. Of course there’s always a chance I’d arrive back at my cubicle with fifty extra copies of something that didn’t belong to me, but it was all part of the art of paper wrangling.

  The machine’s chugging filled the silence between me and the man I’d just propositioned.

  I said, “Well, my last name is Frank. Get it? You don’t have to ask me out. Just make up something about it being against the rules for you to see a case witness on the side.”

  “You’re not exactly a witness,” said Gus. Was that a good sign? He added, “You haven’t asked me if I’m single or not.”

  “I’ve been in denial.”

  “Well, I am single at present. I’ve been married three times, though. My wives keep ending up dead.”

  My hands stuttered briefly on the staple I was trying to remove, and I didn’t look up. My thought process at this moment indicated the sorry, lust-stricken shape I was in. I didn’t think, What happened to all those poor women? but Would I end up dead if I just took him to a hotel for a couple hours? Then from the corner of my eye I realized that Gus was grinning.

  “Are you trying to be funny, Detective?”

  “So, Carol My-Last-Name-Is-Frank,” said Gus, giving me a more appraising look. “What would happen if I asked you to lunch?”

  “I would inform you that I’m free every day from twelve to one, and though that’s a very strict time frame it’s best for me to adhere to it. If that’s too rigid, most of the time I have weekends off.”

  “Your boss Bill, he’s kind of anal-retentive, isn’t he?”

  “He’s obsessive-compulsive six ways from Sunday,” I replied without any feelings of betrayal. “In a way, that makes him very easy to work for.”

  “How so?”

  “Predictability is something that a secretary can appreciate.” I tried to find a way to explain this. “There’s a code word for certain types of bosses among clerical people: ‘detail-oriented.’ This is a nice way to say that someone is a nit-picking pain in the ass. A psychotic sadist I used to work for called himself ‘detail-oriented’ which meant that he didn’t feel any qualms about shouting at people for whatever detail he was oriented on at the moment. Bill is detail-oriented, but he’s always detail-oriented in the same way. Figure out the details and everything else is smooth sailing. And he has never shouted at me.”

  “I’ve heard a saying that God is in the details.”

  “The way I heard it is that the devil is in the details,” I countered. “Personally I believe the more important issue is whether Carol My-Last-Name-Is-Frank is in the details. I’m ver
y good at what I do.”

  I handed him a stack of copies from the file of Adrienne Maxwell and said, “It doesn’t have to be lunch, either.”

  *****

  I hadn’t been on many dates since my divorce. Well, let’s be honest. I had been on five dates since my divorce. These had, all five, been nice times spent with nice enough guys, but nothing I wanted to pursue. I had a bad feeling about men for a while there, even lost interest in sex; I had to recover.

  Throwing myself into work was one way to get on with my life, especially since at about the same time I escaped from a bad marriage I had also escaped from the psychotic sadist I worked for and got a good job working for Bill Nestor. But throwing oneself into work is a terrible way to meet guys. At least it is at MBS&K. Same office, day in and day out, working mostly among other women? They’re happy to set you up, if you would like to go out with their husband’s little brother who just got out of prison after a four-year sentence for drug possession, or with their nice friend from church who is still in love with his ex-wife but is willing to take you out if you’ll hear his testimonial about the saving power of Jesus.

  The men at MBS&K were married, attorneys, married attorneys, or unmarried attorneys (Bill) who are unmarried for a reason (obsessive-compulsive six ways from Sunday), or they are Lloyd. Besides, and you know, forgive me if this all gets too Freudian, I had the secretarial tendency of mistakenly equating my boss with a husband and/or child. Honestly I don’t mean that in sexual terms. There wasn’t any of that sort of thing between me and Bill. I only mean that, if you’re a simple sort of woman, and you work for a man who really needs you, not just professionally but emotionally, the whole relationship takes on the feel of a marriage.

  A lot of women have an internal nurturing mechanism that makes us want to take care of people, and yet there are limits to just how much care you wish to give. Bill was a handful. Outside of work, it didn’t seem that taking on another nurturing burden was a good idea. During the past three years whenever I encountered a potentially attractive guy, I would find myself thinking, “Yeah, but with Bill, and all…” as if he were my child and I had to make sure any new stepdaddy would love him as much as I did. It sounds nuts, but be patient with me. I had survived a stupid ex-husband and the psychotic sadist boss, so my quasi-intimate relationship with Bill was actually the best of the three.

  Most of the time Bill’s clients came to us but sometimes he had to go to them, if a client was infirm or hospitalized, for example. More than once, we’d gotten a call from someone about to undergo surgery who decided that he or she didn’t like the set-up of their durable power of attorney or their living will, and we’d embark on a field trip to go make the necessary changes. Bill used to take Suzanne Farkanansia on these excursions but by now he only took me, ha ha. Another point for me in the great office contest of who-does-Bill-like-most, not that I kept track or anything. That would be childish.

  Getting out of the office was nice, and Bill and I always had pleasant conversations on the way. I also liked riding in his fancy-schmancy BMW, which he kept as neat as he kept everything else. No breakfast crumbs or wadded tissues in this baby. It was like riding in a brand new car every time.

  Thursday afternoon we went to a retirement home where a family was signing powers of attorney for an aging father, who freely admitted that he was getting to the point where he could not reliably make decisions for himself, and also he wanted to sign a DNR (a do-not-resuscitate order, that is). This might sound like a somber occasion, but experience had taught me that making these sorts of arrangements can be very pleasant, even happy, if it’s spun the right way. As Bill would have said, “We’re not talking about how you are going to die. We’re talking about how you are going to live.”

  We once tried to draw up these documents for an elderly woman who seemed convinced that a DNR was her family’s permission to murder her, as if as soon as she signed it they’d be free to smother her with a pillow. Poor old thing. Well, of course, we couldn’t force her to sign and there was no convincing her that it wasn’t all a great evil scheme. I remember expressing my sympathy for her family to Bill, and he’d surprised me by replying, “Maybe her family doesn’t deserve to be trusted.”

  That day was different, though, as I said. Bill asked me about Detective Haglund on the drive through the city suburbs, wanting to confirm for himself that I’d managed to get at least the promise of a phone call. He was delighted when I told him that I had a Saturday lunch date.

  “It’s not like you to play matchmaker,” I accused playfully. “Not that I don’t appreciate it.”

  “Detective Haglund seems like a good sort. And you never go out,” said Bill.

  “Just means I have more time to spend at work.”

  “At your age, you shouldn’t spend all your time at work.”

  “What, pray tell, should I be doing, then? I’m not a party girl, Bill. I don’t like bars, and most of the men I meet are so god-awful materialistic.”

  “Are they really?”

  “No kidding,” I said. “They’re obsessed with money, with gadgets, owning things, having all the latest stuff including the right sort of girlfriend. Drives me nuts.”

  “Was your ex like that?”

  “He would have been, if he could have afforded it. But he had an issue with working, in that he didn’t want to. He was in a band and called himself an artist and, in his opinion, artists don’t have to work because it clogs up their creative juices or something.”

  “I can’t picture you with a man like that.”

  Think it was odd that Bill and I were chatting like girlfriends as he drove us to the retirement home? I did, too, the first time it happened, but I realized after a while that Bill was rather like me. He was a life-voyeur who liked to hear about what other people did and why they did it, but wasn’t eager to participate in the actual events.

  In response to his comment I said, “Well, you know a different me than I was when I married him. I wasn’t stupid, but I was more impetuous. It was one of those things where a girl goes for the plunge even though she’s fairly sure it will end badly. I was crazy in love, and it did seem, for a little while there, that he might make a success out of being a musician.”

  “Really? Why didn’t he make it?”

  “Bad luck, maybe, and he wasn’t willing to take criticism constructively, and he tended to give up if things didn’t work out perfectly. Plus, after a couple years he wasn’t interested in being married to me so much as he wanted to be married to my salary.”

  “That’s too bad. And you’re such a catch, too. What an idiot he must have been.”

  I laughed at his odd praise. “God, Bill, you’re making me blush.”

  “I hope you have much better luck with your detective.”

  “Well it’s only a lunch date,” I said, “but if it turns into an engagement, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

  Bill relented, looking abashed but pleased with himself. “When you get him alone and at your mercy, try and find out what the big mystery is with Adrienne’s suicide.”

  “Really? Is that ethical?”

  “Maybe not, but wouldn’t you like to know? Anyway they leak those details to reporters all the time, don’t they?”

  “I only know what I see on TV.”

  “Still, I’d like to know what it was about the drugs that makes them suspicious. And if the witness has given a good description of the mysterious departing figure.”

  I understood Bill’s interest—I felt the same—but I wasn’t planning to undermine the first date with my fantasy boyfriend by making him believe I only wanted case information. “I’ll ask, but only if he brings up the subject,” I said.

  “Sure, of course. Only if he brings it up.”

  At the retirement home we climbed out and walked side by side through the sliding glass doors. This was a nice place, unusually clean, cheerful, and boasting enough staff. It probably cost a fortune to room anyone there. We had been to b
oth types, the nice places and the not-so-nice ones, but regardless of the circumstances Bill always treated the clients with the same care. And not just the clients, but everyone. Sometimes in the halls of these buildings, he would catch the eye of some lonely old soul and stop to talk, and he would do the same with nurses and orderlies, too. It wasn’t entirely about being neighborly; he’d gotten a lot of referral business this way.

  Between greetings in the hall Bill said suddenly, “I’m sorry that your ex-husband treated you so carelessly.”

  I was only a little surprised by this admission. And a little embarrassed, too, I guess. It’s never great fun for people to know how gullible I was—or for how long. I was flip about it. “Not as sorry as I am for putting up with him. I thought that if I worked hard enough, I could fix him and fix my relationship with my ex-boss, too, which was abusive in a whole different way. Turns out I couldn’t fix either one. So you can see I’m a little fed up with men.”

  “Detective Haglund is a much better prospect.”

  “Well, I won’t argue with that.”

  We had reached the client’s room, so we ceased our conversation about the perils of love and got to work. We sounded like a chummy little team, didn’t we? And most of the time we were. But if things were really that simple with Bill, he wouldn’t have gone through close to thirty secretaries before he finally found me.

  Chapter Four

  Way back when I was barely twenty-seven years old, I found myself divorced and unemployed.

  Both of these conditions were of my own choosing. The stupid ex-husband brought up divorce, because he had fallen in love with an Icelandic model. She had come to the United States to star in a music video, and now he was going to follow her back to Reykjavik—or wherever the hell she was from—and being married to me interfered with that plan. But I whole-heartedly agreed that marriage wasn’t doing much for my social life, either. I was more active in producing the condition of unemployment, deciding that I’d better quit my job before I spent the rest of my life in prison for murdering the psychotic sadist who dared call himself my boss.