“It’ll look better than what?” asked Bill, turning his eyes back to mine with a considerable fire of desperation behind them. “Than nine dead women? Than my dead clients? Or the copies of the notes I took for their files that have all their personal information including where they keep their spare keys and whether they have attack dogs? The fact that I haven’t noticed in fifteen years that an unusual number of my clients eat pills until they die? My inability to have an alibi for any night of my life because I’m always alone? My history of mental illness?”
At the end of that tirade, I had to force myself to relax. Tension had seeped into me like ice water pouring. I mustn’t patronize him. He wasn’t stupid. “Yes,” I said, “for all those reasons, you’ve got to talk to him.”
“So he can figure out what I’ve done,” Bill said in desolation. “How I’ve managed to cause nine women to die.”
After a serial killer is captured or killed, our media always tracks down his acquaintances, friends if he had any, family members if they’ll speak, and it’s always the same story. He was such a nice, quiet guy. Never caused trouble. Kind of a loner. Good member of the community. It’s never “Oh sure, you could tell just by lookin’ at him that he was running over virgins with a lawnmower.”
After Bill said those words to me, I had a bad moment where I thought he could have done it. If anyone really can force someone else into suicide, then Bill must be considered a possibility. For all the reasons he just listed, and for others. Like, why exactly had he come to my house last weekend—if indeed he had? And here I sat across from him in his maniacally neat living room, and he could do almost anything to me. I’d probably never see it coming.
The very next thing I thought was this: Bill was the best boss I’d ever had, and if he had to go to the electric chair, who was I supposed to work for? We’d had three peaceful years together. My nights and weekends were my own, not plagued by thoughts of attorneys shouting at me; I had no worries about being blamed for things that were someone else’s fault or no one’s fault at all, and experienced no weird sexual one-upmanship or tension. Everything was just about working well together and then getting paid, and then just being okay with that. If Gus and his reopened case were to suddenly disappear, could I go on working for Bill as if nothing had changed? We can forgive a lot from the people we really care about.
Nine dead women, I thought dismally. All my mother’s age. No, of course, ultimately I couldn’t live with it, tempting though it may have been.
Of course, Bill saw the moment when I seriously considered the possibility of his guilt. I’m not very good at hiding my thoughts, and Bill knew me well. He nodded sagely, watching his hands in his lap. “Do you think I have time to leave town?”
This was a moment to keep cool. I thought fast. “I’m sure you do. If you don’t waste too much time, you could probably be on the other side of the world before Gus figures it out.”
Don’t be startled at my agreeing with him. I knew very well that Bill Nestor was no more likely to travel to another country than he was to travel to the moon. Public transportation upset him badly; it was far too disorganized. All those disorganized people climbing in and out of the plane, leaving their things tucked haphazardly under their seats. What if a backpack strap flopped into the aisle and tripped the stewardess, and she fell into the drink cart and the plane crashed? What if all the overhead compartments came open and dumped luggage on everyone’s heads, and there were multiple concussions and the plane crashed? If he couldn’t drive somewhere in his car, he simply found a way not to go. I saw him shudder at the thought of flying away.
“Or I suppose you could drive somewhere,” I continued, “but in this country, you can’t hide. Everything’s on videotape. Everyone’s a detective. They’ll have your picture up on the news from here to Timbuktu; they’ll trace your credit cards and your car; they’ll hunt down every friend or relative you’ve ever had.”
“I suppose so,” he said. Of more concern to Bill would be the horror of staying in strange beds and eating in strange places. I knew he could cope with business travel because I’d sent him out of town often enough, but it was stressful for him, utterly exhausting if he had to be gone for more than a couple days. Rigidly straightening every room you enter is a tiring activity.
“But hiding will make you look guilty.”
“Guiltier than I already look? Is that possible?”
“Hold on. Just hold on a second.” A sigh heaved out of me of its own accord. “Bill, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Nobody’s even said for certain that there has been any wrongdoing.”
“Nobody needs to say it.”
“Let’s go together to meet with Detective Haglund and explain everything to him.”
“Turn myself in, you mean.”
“No, it would keep you from having to turn yourself in, Bill. It’s only if you run that things will begin to look really wrong.” That felt like a hollow statement in the face of everything already looking as wrong as it did.
“Are you patronizing me, Carol?” His mouth quirked into a weak smile.
“Maybe a little bit. I’m sorry, Bill, but what am I supposed to say? I’m trying to think of a way to make this go more easily for you. I’d like for you to let me do my job.”
“This isn’t really part of your job, though, is it?” For a few seconds we looked at each other, and I felt his assessment of me like more of that cold water that had been trying to seep into my veins. Bill had never regarded me without a certain baffled affection until these past couple days. I didn’t feel I deserved it, either, his sudden drama over what he saw as my awful betrayal. This mess was not my fault just because I was the one who had noticed it first. I was going out of my way to keep his situation under control.
Finally Bill asked, “Do you think they’ll beat me up? The police?”
“Beat you up? God, no! Why on earth would they do that? Besides, I’ll be with you the whole time. It’s just a meeting, Bill.”
“Like a lunch meeting,” he said wryly. “Would you like to call your detective now and set up a lunch meeting?”
“Sure, a lunch meeting.”
“Did we have any other appointments today?” he asked off-handedly. “I didn’t remember anything on the schedule.”
“No. Your calendar is clear today. Hand me my purse.”
He picked it up from the floor and passed it to me, and after I dug out my cell phone, I began searching through my purse for Gus’s business card. I hadn’t known him long enough to have phone numbers memorized, and besides, I’d never called him at the police station before. I found Gus’s card and concentrated on dialing, listening to the phone tree directing me on how to leave a message for Detective Haglund or how to have him paged. I watched out the window as Bill shuffled around the room behind me. He kept his distance, doing nothing to alarm me. I pressed the numbers to speak to a dispatcher or receptionist and waited while they paged Gus. “Yes, it’s urgent,” I said. I gave my name. I was on hold then, listening to a soft-rock station playing Simon & Garfunkel.
I stared out the bare window into the daylight. Bill didn’t have curtains on his windows, I supposed because he couldn’t stand the chance that the material wouldn’t fall evenly. Outside it was a clear and sunny day, and it was hard to believe I was discussing with Bill how to best go the police and admit our numerous connections to a possible serial murder case. I heard a jingling behind me and turned to look at Bill.
He gestured to the door and a set of keys gripped in his hand, and mouthed something about water.
Just then Gus’s voice was on the phone. “Carol?” he asked.
Bill pantomimed some strange motions that I believed were meant to show him tipping something onto something else.
“Hello, Carol?” Gus said again.
“Yeah, just a second,” I said to Gus.
To Bill, I said, “What?” and he said, “Watering the plants. Neighbor.” Then he turned and walked out his front door, leaving
it wide open. He moved away and a second later, I heard him knock on the next door down the hall.
Gus asked, “Carol, is everything okay?”
“Gus, I need to see you. Bill and I both need to meet with you. It’s about Adrienne Maxwell.”
“Really? What’s happening?”
“It’s about your list of suicide widows.”
“Suicide widows?”
I had forgotten, that this was a term I’d only used between Bill and myself. “I have a list too,” I said. “Alice Hooper, Bonita Voigt, Wanda Breakers, Rose Ann Trask, Bryony Gilbert.”
On the other end Gus was silent for a few seconds, then he asked, “How did you know all those names?”
“They’re all Bill’s clients.”
“Bill? Your boss, Bill Nestor?”
“Yes, my boss Bill Nestor. I’m with him right now. I know this is going to sound obnoxious, but can you meet us? Can you come to Bill’s apartment? I’ll give you the address.” Out in the hallway, I heard a vague chiming sound. What was that, a doorbell? I had to concentrate to recall Bill’s street address.
To his credit, Gus overcame his confusion enough to sound businesslike with me. “Sure, sure.” He copied the address down as I recited it.
“Can you come soon? I’m not sure I can keep him still for very long.”
“Carol, you’re not there alone with him, are you?”
I ran my eyes over the apartment behind me, everything neat and sealed and clipped close. Moving to the open doorway, I looked into Bill’s hall, which was utterly empty.
“Carol?” Gus asked, his voice rising in concern. “Are you there right now?”
I stepped into the hall, looking wildly around. At the far end of the lifeless slate gray hallway, I heard the elevator door lurch closed.
“He’s leaving!” I shouted in disbelief, no longer actually speaking to Gus. “He’s going!”
I started to race for the elevator and then remembered my car keys—in case I had to do something like a TV detective and “follow that car,” so I rushed back into Bill’s apartment to get my purse and then I realized something. My keys weren’t in my purse. They’d been dropped to the floor when Bill couldn’t stand the sight of them on his table. And when Bill had left the apartment, the set of keys he’d held up to show me had been my own. He’d taken them.
Chapter Fourteen
Bill didn’t take my car. He only took my keys so I couldn’t use my car. He left his apartment building in his own BMW.
Much later, I learned that Gus ran Bill’s plates and put out an APB for the car, which was spotted (with Bill at the wheel) by three different intersections’ videocameras and found forty-five minutes later in the parking lot of a small local business that was unfortunately not under any sort of video surveillance. Bill was not with the car, obviously. Nearby where he’d abandoned it, there was a metro bus stop, but it was a busily bustling little area of Kansas City, Kansas and the bus was not the only direction he could have taken. Whatever direction that was, he’d managed to disappear for the time being.
I didn’t know about that at the time. All I knew was that I was stuck at Bill’s apartment building, numb with disbelief, waiting for police to show up. I didn’t even go back upstairs to Bill’s rooms, just sat in the lobby staring at my shoes. Outside I could see where I’d stood with Bill, trying to convince him that he did not need to scrape up the leaves that clogged the gutter.
Footsteps sounded on the tile floor of the lobby, and I looked up to see Gus and a uniformed officer. She was a young woman who observed me as one might observe a friend’s unattractive pet. You know, you have to be nice to it, but you don’t really want to touch it.
“Hi, Carol,” Gus said, stopping before me. His tone was gentle, his eyes kind and full of concern. But there was something else in his face as well, hectic and wild. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“Good. You should come with us.”
*****
I was going to say that I wouldn’t bore you with the details about the day that followed, to make myself sound magnanimous. But to be honest, I don’t remember clearly enough to describe it all in any coherent detail. All I can say with any certainty is that I told Gus and then about two hundred other people how I came up with a list of suicide victims from Bill’s records, how I got from having a list to asking Bill to come forward so he’d look less suspicious, and how I’d managed to do this so badly that I’d scared him into running away. The authorities were alternately angry with me for different reasons. How could you have been so careless as to go to his apartment? And then, the very next question, How could you have just let him walk out the door?
I told the story to Gus in the middle of Bill Nestor’s apartment. Then I told it to his supervisor, the gargantuan Sergeant Paige, who didn’t look like any real human woman had ever looked. She was like a middle-aged Barbie doll incarnate—boobs, hair and all—and was probably 6 feet, 3 inches tall. I spoke with Sergeant Paige in an interview room at the Kansas City Police Department. Gus stood nearby, in what I hope was a protective manner.
“Do you know where he is?” the statuesque Sergeant Paige asked. “Where he may have gone? We have units outside both his apartment and your law firm. Where else should we look? I understand from your supervisors and Detective Haglund that William Nestor is a fairly private man and that you are the only one who has a clear idea of his patterns.”
“His patterns?” Yes, this was feeling more and more like a bad dream. I think it was when she called him “William Nestor” that my feelings of guilt and horror began to overwhelm me. I said, “I need coffee.”
“I’ll get it,” said Gus, my hunky knight in shining armor. “Take a deep breath, Carol, and go over what’s happened recently. We need to know where he is. We think you’ll probably be able to help us with that. Now, you think it over, and I’ll be right back with an espresso.”
You see, that’s why he was not hard-boiled: because they served espresso at the police station. MBS&K didn’t even have an espresso machine, but the cops had one? Gus left me with Sergeant Paige. I watched him go, and then I looked to his boss. “This is the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m sorry if I act like a flake.”
She didn’t look any less threatening, but she said, “If it makes you feel any better, I think we can take him without any violence. If you can just let us know where to find him.”
“Give me a minute. Let me think.” But I couldn’t think. I was worried. I said, “Bill Nestor is not a bad man. You don’t have to ‘take him’ at all. He just acted as the attorney for those women. It doesn’t have to mean anything. There are sixty people working at that law firm.”
Sergeant Paige’s expression did not change. How many of those sixty people, she was thinking, had ever met these clients? How many of the sixty had been at the firm for fifteen years? How many of these sixty people had turned to run as soon as the police were called into the matter? Or maybe she wasn’t thinking those things. Maybe I was the one who couldn’t stop thinking them.
“Easy there,” said Sergeant Paige. Perhaps she saw I was on the verge of hyperventilating.
“I can’t come up with anything.” I was referring to places Bill might be.
“Detective Haglund,” Paige said, seeing Gus return with my espresso. “Stay with her. See if you can’t calm her down and get some place names from her.”
The door to the interview room closed, and I was able to gulp half the espresso and resisted the temptation to begin sobbing. Crying wasn’t going to solve any problems, and it would just make Gus uncomfortable. Gus knelt in front of me, but he didn’t try any charm. Probably a good thing; I couldn’t stand charm just then. I felt like an evil traitor to Bill, and I also felt like an evil conspirator in front of these nice detectives. Maybe I shouldn’t have espresso. My nerves were wound tightly enough. At least without Commander Barbie in there, I could gather my thoughts.
“There are a few places he co
uld be, if he’s just running errands,” I said. I reached for the pad of paper and pen that had been left for me, and wrote down the name of his grocery store, his dry cleaner’s, the place where he rented videos, the offices of his doctor and dentist, the place where he had his haircuts. Staring at this, I thought: running errands? What on earth would make me think he’d be running errands? Does a man grab a quick haircut before turning himself in? Or perhaps it is terribly rude to go into hiding when one’s video rentals are overdue. I gave the tablet to Gus and then I admitted sheepishly, “I doubt he’s at any of them. But it’s hard for me to think of him in any other way.”
Apparently my emotional instability was forgiven. “Can you help us with next of kin, family or friends, places he might go if he wanted to hide?”
“He doesn’t have any family that I know of. And lawyers all seem to know each other. He could be parked in someone’s garage. But as for friends?”
I didn’t even say it out loud to Gus. He could probably read my mind though. I was Bill Nestor’s only friend.
So for the rest of the day I talked into microphones; I signed things; I talked again to a panel of gruff looking men; I talked to alternate interviewers of indiscernible purpose; and then, just when I supposed that they were as tired of hearing me talk as I was of talking, we started over again and Sergeant Paige came at me with the same questions asked a new way. Were they trying to trip me up? Did they suspect I was covering for Bill? I would not have been surprised to end up in a cell, after a point.
While I was undergoing interrogation that would have made Junior Gestapo Brent go into climactic ecstasy, MBS&K was in its own upheaval. I learned this much later, and never in great detail, but my grapevine network at the office eventually told me all they could.
My Boss is a Serial Killer Page 18
