My Boss is a Serial Killer

by Christina Harlin

  “At first there was just the coroner and the crime scene investigators. When they turned up a couple of odd details, the case was turned over to our department, and my supervisor, Sergeant Jackie Paige, handed it over to me.”

  “And the odd details? The witness who saw the unsub, and something about the drugs?”

  “You know Clarissa, right? Adrienne Maxwell’s daughter?”

  “I know of her.”

  “Well, Adrienne died from an overdose of combined over-the-counter medications. Stuff she could have easily bought on her own. But Clarissa said Adrienne didn’t use medications. She believed in herbal remedies only. Other than that, I can’t say more.”

  “Probably better that you don’t,” I admitted. “Where I work, information is passed by osmosis. If you told me, whether or not I said a word, it would be known for three cubicles in each direction before Monday lunchtime.”

  Gus laughed at my joke. By this point he had so many gold stars that we could film an episode of Star Trek in the starry final frontier he’d created in my mind. Carol’s Little Book of Dating had never seen such a triumphant performance.

  Gus told me, “I’ve got to be careful what I say. I got reamed a couple years ago for speaking out of turn. I’m not anxious to go through that ordeal again.”

  “Understood. I’m sorry. It’s just that we knew her at the office. And everybody there is so bored, they’ll do about anything to pass the time. A murder investigation, well, that’s almost as interesting as The Time a Car Hit the Building and We Thought it was a Bomb.”

  I could see I was going to have to explain that one.

  *****

  I tried not to whine like a disappointed kid when Gus told me that he had to take me home at six. How we were going to run off to Vegas for a quickie wedding if he had to take me home at six? He confessed that he had many errands to run and had to be at work early Sunday morning. To his credit, he added that if he’d known things were going to go so well between us, he would have kept more of his evening free.

  Before we left Gus’s house, I went upstairs to wish Lyvia luck on her term paper. She looked a little bleary-eyed and didn’t seem pleased with her work so far. I might add here that I won major brownie points when I paused to help her use the auto-number feature in her word processor. Occasionally the skills of a secretary, which seem so mundane and repetitive when you perform them forty-five hours a week, look like incredible magic to the inexperienced. If there was one thing I can do, it’s work a word processor. Pleased that I could contribute to the good of others, I wrote my phone number down for her. “If that thing gives you any more trouble,” I said, gesturing to the computer’s screen, “feel free to call me. I’ll make it behave.”

  “The hell with Gus,” said Lyvia. “I think I’m going to ask you out.”

  I walked outside with my afternoon date, squashing the desire to ask what he had to do that evening. That was none of my business unless he offered. I got a clue, though, when he opened his garage to retrieve a gas can. It was possible that his big Saturday night plans involved mowing his yard. My relief—secretly I had feared he might have another date lined up, a lingerie model with a degree in nuclear physics, or hooker with a heart of gold, something like that—anyway, my relief was bright but also brief, because in his garage I saw that he had a Harley. Nothing fancy, but hard and sleek, well loved and cared for. It was one of those great black motorcycles that tough, misunderstood bad boys ride, straight out of a movie. I damn neared swooned.

  “Oh, Lord,” I said weakly. “Oh my God, you have a motorcycle.”

  “Eh.” I’d made him shy again.

  “What kind is it?”

  Gus looked fondly at the bike. He said, “It’s a Softail Deuce,” with a throaty undertone that made me dizzy. “I like to ride when the weather’s good. I’m not a Hell’s Angel or anything. You’re not afraid of them, are you?”

  It was hard for me to speak through the aneurysm—or was it an orgasm? Felt a little like both. Yeah, I’m one of those women who get a little light-headed over a motorcycle. “One of those women,” in that I think there are only five women in existence, probably holed up in some Quaker town, who don’t love motorcycles. And the big devil hadn’t told me up front, “I own one of your fantasy toys, wanna see me sit on it?” Oh, no. He’d let me see the dowdy sedan first.

  “Not afraid of motorcycles,” I said. My knees were weak.

  “Great. Well maybe…when it gets a little warmer, we can, you know, go for a ride.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That was really nice, what you did for Lyvia with the computer.”

  “Piece of cake,” I said. “I do that stuff every day.”

  “I can tell. It all looks like voodoo to me.” Gus put his hands in his pockets, a little insolent and challenging.

  I just couldn’t help it. He was the finest thing I’d laid eyes on in years and the nicest thing that had happened to me since I found Bill Nestor. Three steps brought me flush against his impressively broad and immensely hard body, and I kissed him. Firm at first, hardly more than affectionate, just in case he recoiled in horror, but as soon as I felt that he wasn’t recoiling, things softened between our lips and I wound an arm around his neck to pull him closer. Gus Haglund was a thorough kisser, and all that lopsided menace I’d imagined in his smile was alive and well when he kissed me. He took my lower lip in his teeth, and he parted my mouth with his tongue. He took his time and let the blood rush into my head, and after a few seconds, I could feel a hard pulse thumping in every dark corner of my body.

  He kept his hands in his pockets. Clever devil.

  Finally I let him go, dropped dreamily back to the ground, and was able to focus again. “That wasn’t all about the motorcycle,” I assured him. “The motorcycle just made it unavoidable.”

  “My God,” murmured Gus. “What would you do if I showed you my lawnmower?”

  Chapter Six

  On Monday, my great date story was in danger of being overshadowed by a Kay’s Mother Is In The Hospital story. Kay’s mother was an eighty-something-year-old woman who spent so much time in the hospital that I believed she had actually died several years before and her corpse was simply reanimated every few weeks. That’s a terrible thing to say? Well, maybe, unless you knew Kay. Kay believed that the illnesses of herself, her family, her extended family, her friends, her neighbors, their families and their pets, and their pets’ families, were of concern to everyone at MBS&K. Get enough people together, and someone will always be sick or hospitalized. I could have done the same thing if I’d wanted, but I didn’t because I knew that others simply didn’t care if my auntie was having an MRI of her bladder.

  Kay’s Mother Is In the Hospital. What was the matter with her this time? I’m sure that the ailment was gruesome and mysterious, as they always were with Kay’s family of perpetual hypochondriacs. The word spread around of its own volition. Someone wondered if we should send a card. The firm could go bankrupt sending cards to Kay’s sick family.

  Over the fabulous weekend, I not only forgot entirely about Adrienne Maxwell and the Bonita Voigt file; once I was at my desk, shutting away my possessions, glancing at the weekend mail, I realized that I’d more or less forgotten what my job was. What was I, some kind of number cruncher? I inspected the desk and found indications that I was somebody’s secretary. Oh, yes. Bill had left a tape of dictation and a list of documents to prepare while he was out in a meeting.

  At 8:30, Charlene appeared magically before my cubicle, as she was wont to do, and ducked silently inside. She had a file in her hand, which was good. Junior Gestapo Brent was probably already patrolling the floor, making sure nobody was up to mischief. If we heard him coming, we could revert to our generic business talk. We had a standard set of emergency comments to make: “So have you ever worked on this file?” “No, that file has not been in my workload.” “Who do you think I should ask about this file?” “I think that asking about that file is a good idea.” Jun
ior Gestapo Brent wasn’t that bright, and it sounded like work, so he’d go away to find other evildoers.

  When I began working for MBS&K, there was only one secretarial supervisor, and that was Donna. As far as supervisors go, she was a good one. She trusted us to get our work done and, provided that we did that, she didn’t bother us about much else. We could go to her with any problems and she’d try to help. She was also effective at mediating between the secretaries and attorneys when the need arose. But she was one person in charge of twenty secretaries, plus overseeing the office management, plus dealing with the endless supply of nonsense that attorneys can generate, and so she was extremely overworked.

  Terry Bronk decided to hire an assistant for her. What Donna really needed was her own secretary, but the idea was too practical. What Terry Bronk hired instead was a useless middle-management clone named Brent Downey. Brent came to us fresh from graduate school where he’d earned one of those meaningless degrees that teach you how to name everything, but not how to do anything. He brought his lexicon of office jargon, starting with “mission statements,” and asserted his authority by getting everyone in trouble as soon as possible. The secretaries are congregating too long in the break room, he said. The secretaries are engaging in personal conversations during work hours. The secretaries are pushing the limits of the dress code. The secretaries are failing to follow firm procedures about font sizes and types. Ridiculous nitpicky baloney, but he could distribute long memos that made it look like he was working.

  He wasn’t any help to Donna that I could see. Her job didn’t change a bit. His job, I think, was to create a need for himself by becoming Terry Bronk’s snitch. Absolutely nobody liked him; he had zero interpersonal skills and a huge inferiority complex. Brent had one of those vacant young-man faces that was on the verge of being attractive, but wasn’t attractive because there was no strength of character behind it, and he had lips like a sow. I doubt that women had ever been particularly fond of him, and he took it out on us now by reveling in and abusing his authority over us. Would you believe he tried for the first couple months to get us to call him “Mr. Downey?” As if. Except for etiquette-maniac Mr. Miller, we didn’t even have to call the attorneys by their surnames, and we certainly weren’t going to do it for this weasel. A few of the more naïve secretaries tried to use him as they would Donna by asking him to mediate arguments or solve problems for them, but they quickly learned that in Brent’s school of thought, secretarial problems are caused by secretaries, and the best way to solve them was to use robotic replacements. Barring that option, what one can do instead is call a disciplinary hearing and work the poor secretary over until she’s too afraid to say boo.

  Since I’m always the one who thinks of the nicknames, I started calling him “Junior Gestapo Brent,” and I could probably have been fired, if he’d learned it came from me first. Junior Gestapo Brent would have loved to fire me because I did not fear him. I detested and avoided him, but fear? Oh no. In comparison to the psychotic sadist, Junior Gestapo Brent’s reign of terror was like a buzzing junebug wanging itself against a lighted window. He’d catch me looking at him that way sometimes (as a distasteful bug-like creature, I mean), and the rage would bubble up inside him, impotent and pointless. You can’t fire a secretary for thinking you’re an ass.

  “Tell all,” ordered Charlene, once we’d established that we were alone and not in danger of being discovered talking by his Royal Pain-in-the-Assedness.

  So I told all, including updating the office database of information on what had happened to Adrienne Maxwell, before a dark cloud erupted menacingly over my cubicle, thunder rolled, and lightning flashed. Charlene and I looked up to see Lloyd glaring in at us. He held a file, too.

  “Thought you needed this first thing Monday,” he said snidely. He dropped Bonita Voigt’s old file on my desk, and it thudded so hard my coffee nearly sloshed over the sides of the cup.

  To my recollection, I had said nothing about first-thing-Monday. Hadn’t I just said Monday? That’s about ten hours worth of wriggle time, there, Lloyd my friend.

  He bitched, “It’s been sitting in there all morning long. Thought I’d bring it by, since it was so important.”

  All morning long, yes, it was all of a quarter to nine. Had I not been physically immune to any upset that day, I might have mentioned this. Instead I said, “Thank you!”

  Charlene looked blankly at Lloyd: of all the employees here, she was the only one who appeared completely unaffected by his moods. She asked, “Are you trying to make a point?”

  Lloyd grumbled.

  “I don’t understand,” said Charlene. “What are you telling us? That we can’t leave files on your cart? That we have to follow up immediately on our requests?”

  Coming from my mouth, these comments would have been considered smart-assed, but Charlene asked these things in complete sincerity. When Lloyd only glared at her, which was what Lloyd did when he didn’t have satisfactory answers, she pressed him. “If you don’t tell us what the point is, we’ll just keep doing the thing that irritates you so much.”

  Lloyd finally relented with actual words. “Emergencies are only emergencies for as long as anyone’s paying attention, that’s all I mean.”

  “Well that doesn’t make sense,” said Charlene. “You go to storage every day. Carol asked for a file. I don’t understand—”

  “I’m busy,” said Lloyd brusquely. He stalked away.

  “Did you hear horses braying?” whispered Charlene, eyeing him as he went. I snorted at the unexpected joke; Charlene’s sense of humor always struck like static shock. She glanced at Bonita’s file. “That’s an old one. Look, it still has the letters on the file number.”

  “It’s a little archeological expedition. That’s the other of Bill’s client’s who committed suicide.”

  After a weekend it is hard to recall anything you said or did the week before, and it seemed to take Charlene a moment to remember that we’d even discussed suicidal clients. She shook her head, though, her fingers touching the stick-on file number. “No, that’s the wrong one.”

  “Oh really? Well, it’s too late for it to matter anyway. Thought I’d regale the detective with a little of my own investigative skills, but it’s probably better that I couldn’t.”

  “You can’t really discuss our other clients. That’s a breach of confidentiality.”

  “I wasn’t going to mention names. God, Charlene, what are you, the hall monitor?”

  “I only meant that if it’s something of interest, you’ve got to be careful how you approach it with the police department. Maybe you should ask Mr. Miller.”

  I put my hand to her arm to stop her talking. “I promise I’m not going to break attorney/client privilege, Charlene, for heaven’s sake. I was only trying to show off.”

  “But it’s not the right file, anyway. This one is way too old. The woman I was talking about was a client much more recently. Her name was Hermione or something—or maybe I’m just thinking of those Harry Potter books. So you actually met his sister?”

  I was confused; I didn’t even know Harry Potter had a sister. Wait, no. She meant Gus. I told her about Lyvia and the term paper, and how I used my secretarial superpowers to make myself look brilliant. Then I sent her on her way, trusting that she’d do her duty and tell Lucille what I’d said, so that the goddess of gossip could get the word out. All went according to plan. As I had hoped, word of the motorcycle got around. Kay’s mother wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as that.

  *****

  Later Bill came bustling in. I went into his office after he’d had a few minutes to settle down, asked him how the meeting went, and began my usual list of reassurances to convince him that all went smoothly while he was away. Bill used to be reluctant to leave the office because he didn’t believe that anything could work without his interference. That doesn’t apply so much anymore; he’s come to trust me to hold down the fort. It’s cute that he seems to think I’m fending off inv
aders.

  I brought him his mail, opened and stapled horizontally (no paperclips!), the files he wanted to work on that day, and a neat stack of typed dictation (12-point Times New Roman font, no bold, no italics, no paragraph indentations, single space after each period, the date precisely one half inch below the letterhead), and the prepared estate documents in spotless manila folders just the way he liked them. At the beginning, it took me about two weeks to figure out exactly how he wanted everything, and after that, he never changed.

  “Well, how was your weekend?” asked Bill as he straightened his sleeve cuffs. “Did you and the detective hit it off?”

  I’d never had a boss with whom I’d feel comfortable sharing this kind of information, but Bill looked as excited as Charlene had earlier. I couldn’t help but grin. “Yes, we had a really nice time.”

  “Seeing him again?”

  “I hope so. No definite plans yet. His schedule is weird, and I’m pretty busy, too.”

  “I guess he’s busy working on this Adrienne Maxwell case.” At his desk, Bill began to carefully page through the mail. He never flipped through anything, and he never bent corners. “Did you manage to find out anything about it?”

  I had a bad flashback right then of the days I’d spent slaving for the psychotic sadist. I often had to call clients or witnesses and interview them for information. The psychotic sadist would say, “Call and ask what medications they’re taking,” and I would do as instructed. I’d get the information, the names of the prescribing physicians and the number of refills, the pharmacy name and the side effects, specific complaints for which the prescription had been given, and anything else I could humanly think to ask. What color are the pills? Do you take them with juice? Then I would give all this information, typed in memo form or maybe in a nice graph, to the psychotic sadist. About half the time, he’d toss the damned thing aside, never look at it again, and absent-mindedly assign me the same task the following week. And about the other half of the time, he would ask me for some rather off-topic bit of information like, “Has she been able to continue doing housework while she’s had these complaints?” Naturally I would not know the answer. His face would grow red. Here it would come; the insinuation that I wasn’t doing my job. That he had to do all the thinking. That I was wasting his precious time with this incomplete, half-assed report.