My Boss is a Serial Killer

by Christina Harlin

  “What information could he possibly want? He’s already talked to Bill.”

  “If he’s a detective then he knows lawyers, and if he knows lawyers then he knows they don’t ever tell the entire truth. Maybe he’s looking for the truth from you.”

  She had lost me. I grinned at her over-protectiveness, though it was probably for the firm’s sake rather than my own. I whispered, “The truth about what?”

  “Well, that’s just it,” Charlene said. “The truth he’s looking for. We don’t know what that is.”

  “Now Suzanne’s rubbing off on you. I really think it’s just an ordinary date that he was pressured into by an ordinary secretary.”

  Charlene looked no happier about my blithe attitude. “You know it’s not the first time that he’s had a client commit suicide.”

  “Who, Bill?”

  She did some mental arithmetic. “Oh, yes. But it was before your time.”

  “Some other client killed himself?”

  “Another woman, I think. I distinctly remember Bill’s secretary saying something about a suicide.”

  This I could believe. Charlene had an excellent memory for what she was told. She and Lucille were my one-two punch of information. Lucille knew what was happening with everyone right at the moment, and Charlene remembered everything that had happened before. Charlene said, “Usually, attorneys make their secretaries want to commit suicide, but I guess he hasn’t driven you to that yet.”

  “I thought attorneys made secretaries want to commit homicide, not suicide.”

  Charlene grimaced; this was her version of laughter. “Maybe you should talk to your detective about it; if he thinks Bill is driving secretaries and clients insane with boredom, maybe Bill will be arrested for manslaughter and you can take a vacation.”

  If Bill drove others insane, it wasn’t due to boredom, I thought laconically. Regardless, though, this gave me an idea. And I had a long Friday afternoon to get through.

  *****

  Later that afternoon, I put in a new file request to Lloyd. I cornered him between two rows of red-ropes. Red-ropes are standard, legal-length accordion folders that law firms typically use to hold their files, called red-ropes because they are sometimes held closed with a red string. Lloyd saw me coming with a with a pink request slip for yet another file to be excavated from the basement storage, and started complaining before I had a chance to speak.

  “You couldn’t have asked for this at the same time as the other one?” he asked, peering at it with contempt.

  This file request was for the long-buried records of Bonita Voigt, a former client of Bill’s who had committed suicide. Charlene had set me on this path of discovery, but at the time I wasn’t digging in the files because I thought it odd that two of Bill’s clients had killed themselves, but because I thought it might be something interesting to discuss with Gus Haglund, should conversation lag. The field of law is full of interesting stories, but the field of estate law is not. And my backup work at present consisted of the screw deposition. I was not averse to discussing screwing with the detective, but not screws. And not estate planning. I thought it might be amusing to say, “I was looking at another file similar to Adrienne’s, and I noticed…” Well, I didn’t know how to end that sentence yet. I was hoping that in reviewing the file, I would notice something. Something perhaps interesting to a detective who was investigating a suicide. Something that I hadn’t just seen on a television show.

  I used a roundabout way to search Bill’s archived files on the firm’s computer database, looking for the name that Charlene couldn’t recall, and that way produced results more quickly than I ever expected. I searched his old saved letter files for the word “sorry.” Sorry is a bad word for attorneys, who must never imply that they are wrong, mistaken, or regretful of—or about—anything. Laugh though you may, I promise you that the word “sorry” appears so seldom in litigation correspondence that the only place I found it was in letters to bereaved families that said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  Since Bill has been doing estate work for over fifteen years, and since much estate work has to do with the elderly, many of his clients had passed away. I found almost a hundred archived condolence letters. I eliminated the men, and then I searched through the women to find the one who hadn’t died of entirely natural causes. I could do this because of Bill’s closing memos, which often stated the cause of death. Once I had a list of dead women’s names, I just searched their files for a closing memo. As luck would have it, only the second file I searched, Bonita Voigt’s, was the one I wanted.

  The memo, entered some time after the file had actually been closed, simply stated, “Memo to File: Bonita Voigt died August 15, 1998. Unfortunately she took her own life. What a shock for all of us who knew her. She was a very nice woman and always a pleasure to speak to. I had a good conversation with her brother about her funeral services…” Bill went on for a couple paragraphs after that about dates and various conversations that he’d had. It made me want to look at his handwritten notes, which would contain all the details, and the only way to do that was to get Bonita Voigt’s entire file.

  And, as I’ve said, people will do just about anything to amuse themselves at work.

  “Why do you have to have it today?” demanded Lloyd. “A file that’s this old?”

  “Oh, never mind, then,” I said, plucking the request slip back out of his hand. “I’ll go get it myself.”

  “I already locked up storage for the weekend,” he said, “and if this ain’t an emergency, I can’t see the point of opening it all back up again.”

  I grimaced at him, not sure I believed that storage would already be locked when it wasn’t even three yet. “Can’t a clerk just run down and get it?”

  “This is an old file number,” Lloyd said, pointing accusingly at the slip. “That file’s got to be almost ten years old.”

  “Yes, it may be about that old.”

  “Ten years old, that’s going to be pretty far back.”

  What the hell did he mean? Pretty far back in time? Pretty far back in the storage room? Lloyd would go to any trouble and beyond any limits to complain. He was probably disgruntled for both reasons and a couple I hadn’t yet thought of. It would have given me perverse glee to send him on a particularly disagreeable mission, if only I could say that it was really for an urgent matter happening that afternoon. But the age of the file didn’t support that little ruse.

  “Fine,” I said. “Fine, Monday morning, then.”

  “So it’s not an emergency?”

  I didn’t care for how much he enjoyed saying that. “Apparently it’s not,” I said dryly.

  Then I forced myself to forget about Lloyd. Other than my irritation with him, I was surprisingly cool-headed and patient, not anxious in the least about the next day. I had plenty to occupy my attention that evening. I had my little summer project to work on, repainting my kitchen chairs in sunshine orange and green apple, which may not seem offhand like a wise color choice unless you’re a woman who discovered after a long winter that everything she owned was brown. Also I had a disk of Prime Suspect to watch.

  Chapter Five

  Gus picked me up right on time, which was automatically a gold star in Carol’s Little Book of Dating. I cannot stand tardiness. He’d called me briefly the night before to confirm my address and a pickup at 12:30 p.m. He also said there was no need to dress up because we both dressed up all week and jeans and sandals might be nice for a Saturday afternoon. While we spoke, I heard other voices and telephones ringing in the background. Gus was still at work. He kept it short, but he was polite and hinted at a plan in motion. He said, “I can’t wait,” and sounded sincere.

  Gus Haglund in a pair of jeans is a sight to make one grateful to be a woman. As soon as I saw him I was tempted to say, “Just be still, and let me look for a minute,” but I guess that would have been sexist to my big burly date. What I did say was, “I’m really glad I bullied you into this.” />
  As if Gussie could be bullied into anything.

  *****

  He took me to his house to meet his sister.

  On the following Monday, I wasn’t going to start my date-story by saying that. It sounds like the beginning of a worst-date-I-ever-had story, and that’s not the case. Besides, he wore a steel-blue T-shirt that made his eyes look like the treasure-laden depths of the ocean. I was so smitten that I would have agreed to shear sheep with him, had that been his plan.

  We spent the afternoon in Gus’s home where he very efficiently fixed lunch (steaks, salad, and a strawberry shortcake). He was waiting for me to be disgruntled about this arrangement; maybe in the past he had tried this on women who believed that a first date required more elaborate arrangements. But I had no room to complain, since I had demanded he ask me out. And I had no desire to complain, since he was a damn good cook and since I don’t require elaborateness.

  I’m not sure that Gus was consciously testing me. Still, I had the distinct feeling that my reactions to this unusually informal first date were being observed. There was the ghost of an ex-wife involved in all this, I’d bet anything. Either it was important for me to be unlike her or important for me to be just like her, but since I’d never met the woman, I just had to wing it and act like myself.

  Gus’s house was like his car. Mid-sized, not showy. He, like me, obviously spent a good deal time at work and wasn’t a neat-freak. The bathrooms were clean, which was all I really hoped for in a guy. Showing me around before the cooking commenced, he knocked on an upstairs room, and a young woman answered. I thought, momentarily panicked, that this was his wife? Daughter? Girlfriend? No, thank heavens. It was his sister Lyvia. She was not a traditionally pretty young woman; she looked a good deal like Gus, in fact, and thus had that round-faced, puppy-dog appearance that had suckered me right in. It was a little less sexy on a feminine face. But she also had that killer grin, the Haglund family smile, which I thought there should be a warning about: People with heart conditions should not see the Haglund family smile. May cause palpitations and/or pregnancy.

  “I won’t be in your way,” she assured me. “I have a term paper due, and Gus is letting me use his computer. So I’ll be in here all day, all night, and probably through tomorrow and on into Monday morning.”

  “What are you doing a paper on?” I asked, noting with sympathy that the desk behind her was piled high with photocopies and library books.

  “Migraine treatments, ironically.”

  We left her to her torment. Gus explained as he took me back downstairs, “I thought it might make you feel better, knowing there was someone else in the house.”

  “Feel better?” It actually took me a moment to plumb the meaning of his words. “I’m not afraid of you, Gus. Is this a cop thing?”

  “No, not a cop thing.” That made him shy. “No, you just don’t know me well. And about the first thing I ever said to you was that I’d killed three of my wives.”

  “Yes. Well, I sort of assumed you were joking about that.”

  “It is a joke. It’s that Bluebeard story, remember?”

  “The silly new wife finds the basement full of heads. Yes, that’s a good one.” I was directed to sit at the island in his kitchen, and he offered me a glass of wine.

  Gus began to work efficiently in his kitchen. From his refrigerator he gathered steaks, mushrooms, and the simple ingredients for a salad. He refused my offers of help. He chopped vegetables so quickly with the biggest knife I’ve ever seen that I flinched and gasped a couple times. “In college,” he said, the knife rapping like a woodpecker down the cutting board, “I worked in a Chinese restaurant, and they teased me for being too slow.”

  Over the frying pan he said, “I was married, actually, but only once. And she’s still among the living, if you can call Omaha living. I have a son named Doug who lives there with her most of the time. You?”

  I confessed very briefly to one previous marriage and no children. I asked about Doug, which seemed to be the polite thing to do, but Gus wasn’t ready to share Doug with me yet. I was shown a picture of a boy around ten built thick and hard like his father, with a leaner face and green eyes, but the same curly hair and cupid’s bow mouth. I wondered if the boy was blessed with the Haglund family smile,. I learned that Doug was Gus’s on alternate weekends, four weeks out of the summer, and rotating holidays, and that Gus missed the boy in a constant but bearable way. “With my schedule,” he said, “It only makes sense for him to live with his mother.”

  That was all I got of Doug that first time around. That was okay.

  “So tell me about television,” said Gus, to get the topic away from his son.

  “It’s a box, about so big,” I motioned with my hands, “and it shows these things called programs.”

  “You told me that you watch it almost constantly.”

  He remembered something I’d said. Another gold star. Let’s see, that totaled about five stars thus far, and we hadn’t even eaten yet.

  “That’s right, I do,” I said, refusing to be ashamed of my habit, “But I have standards. No reality television, no game shows, no entertainment-based gossip crap.”

  “And no lawyer shows.”

  Ding. Another star.

  “I won’t say it’s a complete boycott, but they have to be very good. But you don’t watch television?”

  “I can’t manage it any more. Now everything that’s on has long story arcs. You have to watch them in order, and you can’t miss an episode or you won’t know what’s happening. My schedule is all over the place. And I can’t stand missing parts of a story.”

  “Dear boy, you don’t have to be a slave to your schedule. I watch TV shows on DVD. I am the master of my own fate.”

  “Back in my youth,” said Gus dreamily, “an episode was an episode, and everything at the end was back to the status quo. The next week, they started fresh as if nothing had ever happened.”

  “I remember those days. What a romantic notion, starting fresh every week.”

  Gus chuckled at me, looking unexpectedly pleased.

  We were eating strawberry shortcake before Lyvia made an appearance. She peered around the corner of the kitchen and said, “Sorry, can I just come through for some tea?”

  Gus motioned her in. He had some whipped topping on his lip that rendered me momentarily speechless, Barry White music floating into my fantasies again, but unfortunately he wiped it off before he said, “Lyvie, do you want some cake?”

  “Hell, yes,” she said.

  “Sit down with us,” I offered sincerely, able to summon coherent thought now that the whipped topping incident had passed. “Take a break. I have been trying to explain to your brother why lawyers are required to bill so much for their time.”

  “He told you about the letter, didn’t he?” asked Lyvia. She sat and helped herself to a double portion of strawberry shortcake. At her age, she could probably do that without immediately gaining twenty pounds. In a fairly good imitation of her brother she said, “That guy charged me two hundred dollars for writing a letter that I could have written myself.”

  I shrugged good-naturedly; Gus had mentioned the complaint he had about a little property dispute and the attorney who had solved it for him. I didn’t mind. People were always asking me to explain the reasons why lawyers cost so much, as if I were invited to top-secret meetings where, through some ancient and dangerous ritual, lawyers chose high numbers to call their hourly billing fees.

  I was curious at the moment about the age difference between these two, Gus was thirty-five and Lyvia was probably only slightly over twenty, so I asked about it.

  “We’re the alpha and omega,” said Lyvia. “Gus is the oldest, I’m the baby, and in between us are Jules and Ty.”

  “Being the only girl and the baby hasn’t spoiled her, though,” said Gus, handing her a napkin.

  “Wait a minute.” I puzzled through their names in my head. “Your brothers are actually Julius and Tiberius, ar
en’t they?”

  Lyvia and Gus exchanged looks. They were rather impressed with me. Maybe I had just earned my own gold star.

  “I, Claudius,” I said, to explain my knowledge of Imperial Roman names. “Everything I know, I learned on television.”

  I was having such a nice time just looking at Gus Haglund and humming Barry White under my breath (“Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe”), that I forgot all about Adrienne Maxwell until Gus asked what it was like working for Bill. Like most others, Gussie assumed that Bill was a handful.

  “Yes, he’s a handful,” I said, “but that’s not always a bad thing. At least, with him, the handful is always the same and he’s not high-maintenance.”

  Gus cocked his head.

  “Code word,” I said. “High-maintenance is the code word for asshole. Bill is a handful, but that’s not the same thing. If a secretary goes to an interview and is told that the attorney is high-maintenance, she’d be wise to run the other way.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve given me a code word. Detail-oriented was the other one.”

  “Legal clerical work is lousy with code words. It’s considered in poor taste to just say what you mean. I suppose down at the KCPD, you guys just say what you mean.”

  “Words that would curl your hair.”

  “Looks like they did,” I said, and nodded toward his head. He ran a hand through the natural wiriness of his hair and I thought, oooo, I want to do that. But the conversation had brought us around to Adrienne Maxwell. “So can you talk about the case?” I asked.

  “Not really. Not much.” Gus wasn’t upset at me for asking. He actually seemed to feel bad that he couldn’t share more.

  “Well, speaking generally, then,” I coaxed. “She seemed at first like a suicide. What made you police change your minds?”