My Boss is a Serial Killer

by Christina Harlin

  Bill’s fingers reached for the original copy of the brief. “I just want to check this over before we send it out.”

  “No.” On the impulse of self-preservation, I took it away from him.

  He thought I was kidding. He tried to reach for it again, but I held it near my breasts so he wouldn’t dare come closer for fear of an embarrassing harassment suit.

  “Carol, come on. We’re on a deadline.”

  “That’s right, and I’m mailing this out now. You’re not to touch it.”

  “I need to review it.”

  “No. It’s been reviewed. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect.”

  “I want . . .” unhappily he began. His fingers began to worry at his tie, straightening a garment that could not have been straighter if he’d put it on with guidance from a slide rule. He may have, in fact. He glanced around as if looking for someone to help him.

  “You did already. Trust yourself. Trust me.” I put the original brief behind me and put my hands on his shoulders to push. “Go away.”

  There was some protesting, and he ground his heels into the carpet so I couldn’t move him.

  I commenced with threats. “So help me, if you touch that brief and make me redo a single bit of it, I’ll put all the binder combs on backwards before I send it out. All those teeth, pointing the wrong way. Think of the horror.”

  Bill knew that I was teasing him about his abject fear of backwards binder comb teeth, but he was also considering with terror the idea that I might actually do something that evil. He made a move to take a copy with him, but I reached for the bound document and snapped the binder comb hard enough to pull three teeth loose. Bill gasped.

  “There’s more where that came from,” I warned. “Get away from my desk.”

  He stared at the loose binding, sweat breaking out on his forehead.

  I promised, “I’ll fix it when you go away.”

  “I don’t appreciate this,” he informed me, not precisely walking but stuttering away, held in the vice grip of the bad binder comb.

  “You can fire me tomorrow, I guess.”

  He didn’t fire me, though. A new legend was born. “The Time Carol Threatened Bill with Backwards Binder Combs and He Didn’t Fire Her.”

  *****

  Here’s another anecdote, on a larger scale:

  One morning Bill had an astoundingly important nine o’clock hearing before a judge. We had prepped and prepped for this thing; it was almost on the scale of a trial, it was so vital to the case. But on the morning of his hearing, I got stuck in a traffic jam and, thanks to my own carelessness, my cell phone battery was dead. The devil himself couldn’t have arranged more perfectly for Bill Nestor to freak out.

  Ordinarily I have a twenty-minute commute to the office from my nearby suburb, but that morning, someone rear-ended someone else on the highway and traffic snarled into an unholy mess, turning the busiest highway in Kansas City into its most crowded and angry parking lot. I should have been there at 7:30 to help Bill get his head together, but instead I found myself racing off the elevator at 8:35.

  Lucille cried to me, “Oh thank God you’re here!”

  “What, what?” I had anticipated this, knowing that Bill, frantic about appearing before a judge, would be in a state of contagious chaos. He had gone into estate law specifically to lessen his confrontations with judges and juries.

  Lucille snapped her fingers at me and gestured violently around. “Find Bill! Find Donna! And find Suzanne!”

  “Why Suzanne?” I didn’t wait for an answer, though. I hurried back, dropping my coat and purse somewhere along the way, trusting my coworkers not to rob me blind. I had worked diligently on this hearing’s preparation, and I was not happy that Bill had decided to freak out on the morning of it, just because I was an hour late and he didn’t have anyone who could effectively reassure him.

  People had been watching for me to make an appearance. Three different people at once—Donna, my supervisor; Suzanne the paralegal; and Junior Gestapo Brent—each assaulted me from a different side.

  “Where is the Swanson Discovery file?”

  “Where do you keep Bill’s passwords for online electronic filing?”

  “Do you have a courier coming to pick up the boxes?”

  “What boxes?” was all I could think to ask. I looked at their harried faces. Bill had been busy, it seemed. These were all people, much like myself, who had been trained to do whatever the attorneys told them to do, and the more emphatic and hysterical the attorney was, the more attention he got. That’s a Catch-22, but it’s hard to break habits.

  “The file boxes that are going to the trial!”

  “He needs a complete docket sheet for the case!”

  “He wants copies of all the documents they have produced so far!”

  I wasn’t able to piece together who was talking about what, but that’s okay because the truth is, it didn’t matter. I looked to the closest copy station where stacks of documents were piled around the heaving copy machine while two frantic file clerks passed booklets and binders back and forth, apparently trying to build exhibit notebooks.

  “Kids!” I shouted at them. They jumped and turned to me, startled and wary. A boy and a girl, neither of whom could have been older than twenty-two. “Are you doing that for Bill Nestor?”

  “He needs four exhibit notebooks by eight-forty-five!” they cried almost in unison.

  “No, he doesn’t,” I said. “Stop that right now.”

  “Bill said,” Suzanne started to tell me, but I waved her off. Technically, I should have been respectful to her because I worked for her, too. But this was not a time for respect. Bill was trying to turn the office upside down.

  I interrupted her. “Forget everything he said. He’s flipping out. He’s wasting time and the client’s money. Just chill; go back to whatever you were doing before he attacked.”

  Leaving the horror-stricken clerks behind, I turned and hurried to Bill’s office before he could strike again. My coworkers did not do as I’d suggested but followed me, eager to witness the coming scene in the same way that onlookers this morning had been eager to ogle the car accident, causing the traffic snarl that made me late in the first place.

  Bill was in his office, messing it up rather badly, which gave a good indication of how hysterical he was. In his normal state, Bill was perversely neat; it was only when he lost control and began to fear the irrational that he turned into something like the Looney Toons’ Tasmanian Devil—whirlwind, gibberish and all. I’d definitely have to clean this up before he returned from court.

  “Bill!” I barked at him from the doorway.

  He jerked his head up to look at me, an expression of intense relief crossing his face. “Carol! Carol, you’ve got to help me! I’ve got to leave for court in ten minutes, and I don’t have any of the discovery documents! Where are my discovery documents?” He fumbled with the files before him, showing me how lost he was. “I need a courier or one of the file room guys to get this stuff down to my car. It isn’t all going to fit!”

  “Stop.” I lowered my voice to almost a whisper. This was a trick I learned from babysitting my nieces. Lower your voice enough, and a child must quiet down to hear you. It works for attorneys, too. I approached Bill and put my hands on the file box, scooting it across the conference table and out of his reach. “Look at me.”

  He looked at me.

  “I’m sorry I was late,” I said. “There was a bad, bad traffic jam. Traffic is tied up all over the city. Now follow me.”

  Obediently he did follow, saying, “Can you call a courier?”

  “No, Bill.” My cubicle was just outside his office, and I led him there before the group of onlookers. “See this?” I gestured to a pristine white box on my desk. “Remember I introduced you to this box yesterday?”

  He did not seem to remember. He looked bewildered.

  “This is the only box you are taking to the hearing. Everything you need is inside.”

 
; “Exhibits?”

  I opened the box and showed him twenty exhibit folders labeled with huge white stickers that proclaimed their contents.

  “Copies for opposing counsel and the judge?”

  “Right behind the originals.”

  “Docket sheet?”

  “Right here,” I said, pulling it from a similarly marked folder. I replaced it.

  “What about the rest of the file?”

  “You don’t need the rest of the file.”

  “But what if…”

  “No.”

  “But the golden rule letters.”

  “No. It’s all here.”

  “But what about…

  “Stop.” I put a nicely labeled lid on top of the box. “This is the special box, Bill. It is nice and clean and neat. See how pretty the label is?”

  He looked at it wistfully. Then he grinned at me, for teasing him. “Okay, I remember now.”

  “But you let yourself get upset this morning and forgot that I was looking out for you.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right. I went to a lot of trouble with this, and there’s nothing missing. You have my word on that.” I shook my head. “Honestly, Bill, you can’t go crazy and start working up the other staff like this just because I’m late. What if I had been sick or something? What if some day I get hit by a bus?”

  “You must never, ever be hit by a bus.” He said this to me and then he turned to Donna, Suzanne, and Junior Gestapo Brent. “Sorry about that. Sorry.”

  Donna and even Junior Gestapo Brent accepted his apology with relief, slinking away before they were trapped into another ordeal. Suzanne, who did not especially like me or the way I handled Bill, remained and said, “Well, as long as you’re sure that you have everything you need.”

  Yeah, she meant that in a bitchy way. Before I came along, she was the only one in the office who came close to being able to control Bill Nestor, and she didn’t like the fact that I took that title away from her. I know it sounds stupid, but in a limited office universe, you grab at whatever renown you can get.

  “Everything’s fine,” Bill told her. “Thank you, Suzanne. You’ll have to excuse me. It’s a really important hearing, and I got concerned.”

  Concerned was not exactly the right word, I didn’t think. I called him on it. “Concerned is one thing, Bill, and hysterical is another. You mustn’t go tearing into the courtroom like this.”

  “No, of course not, Mom.” Now that he was calming down, he could joke along with me. His calling me Mom, though, I don’t know just how funny that was. It wasn’t far from the figurative truth.

  “Fetch your jacket,” I instructed. “I’ll carry this down to your car, and we’ll talk about the best route to take to the courthouse that avoids the highways. Absolutely everyone is going to be late today, except for you.”

  I was his hero that day. When he came back from court, he brought me a chocolate chip muffin.

  *****

  Here’s another incident—actually kind of a freaky one. Last year I was enjoying an autumn weekend, minding my own business. I was watching old episodes of The Incredible Hulk (because I can connect most of the things that have happened to me in the last three years to what I was watching on television at the time). And yes, I like that show quite a bit. We can thank Bill Bixby for being able to make turning into a big green bodybuilder every time he got furious a completely credible plot device. I’m not ashamed to admit my fandom. Anyway, not much of that show was available on DVD at the time, but enough was that I had made a perfectly lovely Saturday night out of it when at almost 11 p.m. I received an unexpected phone call from a stranger.

  The stranger quickly identified herself as Bill Nestor’s apartment landlord. Apartment? I asked. I had been under the impression he lived in a house. No, she rented his apartment to him. That wasn’t the point, she said. The point was that he was in the lobby of the building, and she couldn’t get him to go back to his apartment. He had been there all afternoon. He was inconsolable over some mysterious problem. She told me almost tearfully, “I don’t want to call the police, but he’s got me so worried, and he doesn’t seem to have any family. When I asked him who to call, he told me to call you. Are you a friend?”

  “I’m his secretary,” I said, bewildered. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know at all!”

  A secretary has to set her limits, particularly with a man like Bill. Going to your boss’s apartment at almost midnight on a Saturday is outside the boundaries of acceptable expectations. But his landlord had tugged at my sympathies. I could tell from the stress in her voice that she had gone to some lengths with Bill already and was calling me as a last resort.

  I found the building easily, an antiseptic and personality-free concrete stack on the outskirts of an affluent suburb. I’d seen the place before and assumed it was offices. I parked, as the landlord had instructed, in the underground garage and rode an elevator up to the lobby, where I found Bill and his landlord alone, looking out the window.

  “Are you Carol?” she asked hopefully. She was about Bill’s age, a very big woman in both length and breadth, with beautiful, flaming curly red hair. Her hair belonged on a movie star. The rest of her was raw, pink and blobby. Her elevated blood pressure flamed in her cheeks.

  Bill turned and looked at me with surprise. I’d never seen him outside the office before that night but I wasn’t surprised to find him wearing his gray suit pants, white oxford and tie, just as if he’d been working all day. The lobby, which would not have been out of place in a college dorm or hospital ward, was fronted by dark glass windows and he was fretting in front of them. He either had nothing to say to me or simply couldn’t find words, because he shook his head in desperation and turned away again.

  Hmm. A puzzle for Carol. I asked the landlord to describe exactly what the problem was, my implication being that having Bill want to stand in the lobby all night long shouldn’t matter, since he wasn’t hurting anything. What she described sounded familiar enough. He was having one of his episodes. Something was bothering him outside. Throughout the day, he had paced here. Several times he strode outside to the gutter and checked something. She did not know what. Often he got down on his knees—which I noticed were very dirty—and looked into the storm drain. Bill was a good tenant, a nice man. She’d tried to talk him out of his ritual, but nothing worked.

  “Why don’t you go to bed?” I asked. “I’ll take it from here.”

  The landlord rushed from us in utter relief. She promised various things, that she’d check on him the next day or whatever, but I paid little attention.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, standing next to Bill and peering into the black night. “What’s kept you in the lobby all day? What’s out in the gutter?”

  It wasn’t the best start. Probably he’d already been asked these questions a hundred times, and he didn’t feel capable or responsible to answer them.

  “Hey,” I snapped at him. “Look at me.”

  He did as requested.

  “I’m standing in your lobby at midnight on a weekend in my pajamas. This is outside my job description. Tell me what the heck you wanted me for, or I’m lodging a complaint with Donna on Monday morning.”

  “She wouldn’t leave me alone,” he whined about his landlord. “She kept insisting that she had to call someone. I couldn’t think of anyone else. I just wanted her to leave me alone, that was all.”

  “She probably figures you’re her responsibility, since you live in her building. I didn’t even know you lived in an apartment.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’ve always told me things about your house,” I argued.

  “It was just a figure of speech,” said Bill. “Like you might call your cubicle an office.”

  “Did you not want me to know you lived in an apartment? It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” I was trying to distract him from the problem in the g
utter. I tried to think of reasons why apartment living would suit Bill. “You don’t have to care for a lawn, which is messy work. You have a more manageable space. You don’t have to do your own repairs, usually.”

  “I like the floors here.”

  “Are they all like this?” I indicated the awful flat tiles beneath our feet. “Looks like this used to be some other kind of building. Little offices, maybe? And they converted it when the population boomed around here?” I was guessing, but I was probably right, too. Housing was pricey in this part of town and much in demand.

  “I just liked the hard floors.”

  “What’s out in the gutter, Bill?”

  “Leaves. They’re falling everywhere.”

  “It’s autumn, Bill. That happens every year.”

  “They’re getting in the gutter out there.”

  “Every year,” I reiterated. “Why is that worrying you?”

  “If the gutter clogs, the rainwater backs up.” It was not raining. It was not supposed to rain anytime soon. I didn’t even bring it up because an argument like that was not relevant to Bill. He said, “When rainwater backs up, the cars driving through it could hydroplane. There can be accidents and wrecks. People injured. It could be a mess out there.”

  “If leaves pile up in the gutter.”

  “Those trees across the street are dropping thousands of leaves, and they’re all landing in the gutter.”

  That much, at least, was absolutely correct. “Have you cleared the gutter?”

  “I’m trying to keep it clear. But every time I go out, there are more leaves. And I don’t know where they are coming from.”

  “They probably blow down the street from other trees in other yards. You do realize, Bill, that you’re having one of your episodes?”