I puzzled over this; my memory of everything from the time I’d been whacked over the head was hazy. After a long moment, some images came back to me: the file clerk, old Paul with his fax, Donna’s kindness toward me. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Some hair fell out of it. Is it the victims’ hair? Has she been keeping hair samples? Ask her about the hair samples. I bet if you check that file for prints, Bill’s won’t be on it. Bill never goes in the file room. I do all his filing. Tell Charlene that. Maybe it’ll crack her!”
“Maybe we should just wait until you can come down and conduct the interview yourself.”
For a moment that booger got me excited about the prospect: a real police interview! But then I saw he was teasing me. I wasn’t going to be embarrassed, though. I said, “Whatever I can do to nail that six-ways-from-Sunday nut job, I’ll do. I thought she was my friend, but she attacked me. And she ruined my go-to skirt. And she also tried to push all the blame on poor nutty Bill. About the murders, not about my skirt.”
Gus shrugged. “Since they were Bill’s clients and since he had an obvious mental illness, Bill Nestor would be an excellent fall guy.”
Excellent fall guy. Now that sounded like detective talk. I realized that Gus and I were having a denouement just like they do on TV shows. It was really fun, especially since I was drugged to the gills. I smiled at Gus adoringly.
“Don’t you grin at me, Carol My-Last-Name-is-Frank. I’m furious with you.”
But he wasn’t furious at me. He was furious at what I’d done. That’s not the same. I couldn’t stop this so-called grin in the face of all that adorability.
“Stop that,” he commanded. “For God’s sake, I’ve seen zombie movies where the walking dead looked better.”
“Hey, there’s no need to be nasty.” I scolded him, even though he wasn’t being nasty. Gus compared me to the walking dead out of concern. I tried to explain, “I didn’t know Charlene was our killer when I met her in storage; I actually thought Suzanne Farkanansia was our most likely suspect. This is Charlene we’re talking about. I’m not sure I’d believe it yet, except that she started filling in all those weird details.”
“And maybe that she assaulted you with a deadly weapon and pushed a shelf of boxes on top of you.”
“Aw, I don’t think that was a legitimate murder attempt. I think she just wanted to slow me down until she could get rid of the evidence in the file. That way, the hot lead detective could never make a definite case against anyone, and it would just be her word against mine about anything that was said or done in that storage room.” Vaguely I recalled her garage claims that she’d only been acting in self-defense. “She could make me out to be the scary nut job.”
“That was a potentially lethal way to slow you down.”
“Yes, but women are temperamental that way.”
“Are you high?” Gus asked, looking at me suspiciously. He seemed ready to summon the doctor.
“I’m on a significant buzz, but I am not high.”
“I was wondering how you could lie there looking like death and sounding happy as a clam.”
“Gussie, I had one objective in this whole mess, which was to make sure that Bill Nestor came through it okay. That being done, I feel I have the right to be happy as a clam.”
“Even though your friend could have killed you.”
“Even though.” I paused. “Bitch made me ruin my best skirt, though,” I muttered.
“So I don’t think tonight is the best time for us to take your statement,” surmised Gus.
“No, maybe not. I’ve had better days.”
“No doubt you have,” said Gus. He pressed his lips hard together, and I sensed that he had swung back towards anger again. In retrospect, I think it was because I’d expressed concern over a skirt rather than my head. He cleared his throat before speaking again. “So this time you spent with Charlene in the storage room, allegedly chatting away about her motives and all, you didn’t think was better spent, perhaps, running away? Or phoning for help? Or at least staying out of arm’s length so she couldn’t split your skull open?”
Best to stop cracking wise and admit my faults. “That was a mistake.”
“And I believe last night we had a discussion about what people can do when they’re afraid. That they get unpredictable. That they get dangerous. And you are not in the middle of a television show. You could have died today.”
“Yes, Gus. I’m sorry. I’m not stupid, but it’s hard to believe anything really dramatic could ever happen in the middle of a law office.”
Gus took my hand and held it gingerly. I squeezed his hard with my fingers, because my hand was one place on me that actually wasn’t hurt. I said, “I know that officially you’re not supposed to be fraternizing with me, but can you stay for a while?”
“You’re my key witness and a victim. I can probably invent a good reason for being here.”
“I could use some help finding my way home. I was going to call my parents to come rescue me.”
“Your friendly police liaison—that being me—would be happy to help you with that.”
“Though I was hoping you could meet my parents under better circumstances.”
For a split second Gus lost his gloomy frown, considering this turn of events. He said, “Actually, I might come out of this looking pretty good to your mom and dad.”
“That’s the spirit.” I wanted him to join me in my increasing happiness. I had fixed things for Bill; I had not died in file storage; and despite the fact that I was forbidden to fraternize with Gus Haglund, here he was at my bedside. The only downside was the loss of my go-to skirt, and even that one was not Gus’s personal favorite of my skirts, which he had so efficiently removed from me in our little role-playing game.
“What are you grinning about?” he demanded.
I answered innocently, “Don’t mind me. It’s the drugs.”
Chapter Nineteen
At long last, I got my car and keys back from Bill. He drove my car over to me Friday night. That was an amusing meeting: Bill, my mother, and I sitting in my less-than-tidy living room, me loopy from medication, my mother overprotective, and Bill utterly horrified at a number of things. He was beside himself emotionally over my appearance, my trauma, and what he saw as my rescue of his life, but mostly that he didn’t think they’d gotten my stitches in very well, because they weren’t what he’d call “evenly spaced.” While he was there, he straightened my bookshelves, and he managed to charm my mother, who was like me in her ability to be open-minded to insanity so long as the crazy person was polite. Plus, he let her know in no uncertain terms that he was eternally in my debt, an opinion that she shared.
I told them both to stop being so dramatic. I figured, and I told them so, that eventually Gus would have discovered, if not that Charlene Templeton was guilty, then at least that Bill Nestor was not guilty. Bill wasn’t convinced. He didn’t have my faith in Gus. Besides, he said, in the time it took them to accept his innocence, his entire life could have been ruined by his assumed guilt. I granted him that. Yet I don’t like to get too much credit for simple loyalty and a bit of lucky guessing.
I still felt that most of my motives, from the start of this little adventure, had been rather selfish. Occupying time at work. Trying to impress Gus. Trying to impress Bill. Wanting to keep my good boss, even at the risk of working for a serial killer.
*****
Gus came to see me on Sunday morning. My mother sat in the same room with us as we spoke, like some chaperone from the Victorian Age. Actually this was preposterous because, yes, my hormones jumped into high gear whenever Gus was around, but Sunday morning saw the full fruition of my bruises, contusions, and swellings. Even if I had felt physically capable of passion, I had my doubts about whether Gus would have been willing. I thought he probably liked his women to look human. As I had hobbled into the bathroom that morning I’d thought I looked sort of cool, a black-and-blue girl who’d had a wild night at the roller derby. That was befo
re my hot cop boyfriend showed up. That’ll make a black-and-blue girl wish for some concealer. But he was my big, sweet grizzly bear, regardless of my hideous appearance. He brought me a large bouquet of wildflowers, which was so nice of him, and the complete first season of Lost, which was absolutely brilliant of him.
The official reason for his visit was to apprise me of the situation with Charlene Templeton and what had been learned from her lately. First of all, she admitted that she was the one who’d been at my house the previous Saturday, and had straightened up my supplies to make it look as if Bill Nestor had been there. This was, I suppose, all part of her plot to throw suspicion on Bill.
More interesting was the history that Gus had learned from her.
Before she came to MBS&K as a secretary in 1991, Charlene Templeton had worked as a secretary in a hospital legal department for several years as her first job out of school. During those years, there had been at least three less-than-satisfactorily explained hospital deaths. This happened back before absolutely every hall in every public building had video surveillance. I barely remember the time.
“They were badly injured, middle-aged women,” Gus explained. “All three were hospitalized for injuries sustained in accidents where one or more of their family members had died. Two car accidents, and one house fire. Investigations were conducted, but eventually closed; because of their ages and injuries, there was only a vague suspicion of malpractice from the hospital. However, when we mentioned this to Charlene, she started talking again. About her mission from God, or whatever the hell she thinks she’s doing.”
He also told me also that my piecing together of Charlene’s modus operandi had been close to correct. Unfortunately my boss Bill took notes that were far too detailed and included information about the widows’ home security systems, watchdogs, and even where they kept their spare keys. Once she’d found a victim that both fit her profile and had an accessible home, Charlene could easily enter the widow’s house with her face covered, confront the widow under the guise of being a thief, and tell her victim that she’d shoot her if she didn’t ingest the pills. The widows complied without overwhelming protest because Charlene promised to call for help after she left the house. And because she was obviously a woman, the widows didn’t fear being raped or molested while they were unconscious.
Charlene apparently told them the pills were just mild sedatives meant to ensure that they didn’t call the police until she’d ‘made a getaway,’ but nothing she gave those women was a mild sedative. She was feeding them heavy-dosage sleeping medications and highly toxic amounts of over-the-counter painkillers. Charlene never left behind any indication that she’d been there and obviously was able to do this eight times without detection. On her ninth murder, she was spotted leaving Adrienne Maxwell’s house by a witness who could not have identified her for all the tea in China. But Charlene, I suppose, had not known that. There were two aborted attempts, if we could believe what Charlene said, but no one ever saw her face so these were just reported as attempted burglaries. Bill Nestor therefore had a couple of clients who were lucky to still be alive.
Also, in Bill’s miscellaneous red-rope file, which was kept with all the other miscellaneous files in Lloyd’s great file cavern, the crime scene investigators found six little locks of hair from various victims on the list. Where the other three victims’ hair was, I didn’t know and didn’t much want to know. Charlene planted the hair in one of Bill’s seldom-used miscellaneous files on the day she sent me searching for the Bryony Gilbert file.
“Has she said anything about her childhood?” I asked him.
“That’s something the psychiatrist is going to deal with,” replied Gus. “I’m more concerned about things I can send her to prison for.”
“Like attempted murder,” interjected my mother, who had kept quiet through the horrific details.
“Charlene said something when we were in the file room,” I mused. “Something about her mother and her grandmother, and I felt, kind of…”
I didn’t want to complete that sentence. Everyone seemed plenty annoyed with me over nearly getting myself killed and plenty annoyed that I wasn’t angrier about it. Gus finished for me, though, without sounding especially irritated. “You felt sorry for her.”
He looked at me with surprising tenderness. I liked to think that he was bowled over by my generosity of spirit, though he may just have been sympathizing with a drug-addled, badly bruised dingbat. There was sure something in his gaze, though, because my mother suddenly stood up, declared that she forgot to do something important in the kitchen, and rushed away to leave us alone and unchaperoned.
Gus moved to sit beside me on the couch. He didn’t touch me—that was a no-no. He said, “You’ve been really understanding about this boycott my boss has put on our…”
“Affiliation?”
“Affair, I was going to say.”
“Oh I like that—it sounds exotic.”
“It doesn’t bother you much, I guess,” he ventured, in an uncharacteristic show of doubt, which I was compelled by adoration to fix immediately.
“It bothers me some,” I admitted, “but you’re seeing that as a lack of commitment to our ‘affair’ when in actuality, it’s the opposite. I’m completely secure. I’ll wait for the case to close— for a month or six months or six years.”
He looked pleased but didn’t seem to want to look too pleased. “You would wait six years? No you wouldn’t.”
“Excuse me, but have you failed to notice that you’re a detective who has promised me a motorcycle ride? I’d wait sixteen years.”
“Carol, I’m serious. I’m so sorry about this.”
“I’m serious too. People always think I’m joking when I’m serious.”
“You’re not worried at all?”
Was I not? Was I really so confident about us that I had not a shadow of doubt? You might be thinking that I was ignoring one obvious problem—I was willing to wait for up to sixteen years for a detective on a motorcycle—but was that same detective willing to wait even that first postulated increment of one month for a bruised-up secretary? I may have been on a heavy dose of medication that day, but the fact that Gus brought it up first and seemed truly anxious made me think he was probably almost as patient as me. All we had to do was keep our clothes on.
Chuckling hurt some, in my ribs and certainly in my face, but I did it anyway. “Everything’s going to be fine. I’m in complete denial of any other outcome.”
“My girlfriend is such a pain in the ass,” muttered Gus as he grinned at me.
I explained, “I know all about this; it’s another benefit of watching a lot of television. Many great television pairings thrive on the sexual tension of being kept apart. Scully and Mulder kept their hands off each other for years. In fact, on Moonlighting, when they finally had sex, it ruined the show. And have you ever seen Wire in the Blood? Her name is Carol, too. She and Tony—”
To stop my lecture on televised sexual tension, Gus leaned over and very, very carefully kissed me. The combination of painkillers and muscle relaxers made my lips feel strangely numb. I had to kiss back hard to get my share.
“Well,” said a husky-voiced Gus when he drew away, “I’d better go before I do something stupid like kiss you.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “See you Wednesday?”
Wednesday was our next date. I was going to the police station to give my formal statement. If my bruises had faded by then, maybe I’d show up in a tank top and fishnet stockings. But then, I remembered that Gus Haglund liked secretary clothes.
*****
So, would you believe that Monday morning, I got up and went to work? I know what you’re thinking. Carol, you’re thinking, you didn’t even have a job any more. But no, that was not the case.
Over my long weekend of drugged lethargy, I got a lot of phone calls. My mother, who was kind enough to stay with me and field the calls, didn’t let many of the callers speak to me. I did talk to Donna, wh
o told me: Yes, she was still my supervisor. No, I had not been fired. Yes, surviving attempted murder by a coworker is an acceptable excuse for being absent. Yes, I was technically guilty of job abandonment two days in a row. But, no, nobody was going to smack me around for it. I was informed that a note had been made in my permanent record.
“I’ve been written up?” I asked her, which everyone knows is code for “you’re on your last leg here, sister.”
“Not written up,” Donna had told me. “There’s just a notation that we had a conference with you about it.”
A notation. But not written up. I didn’t know what to make of it. Perhaps they feared a worker’s compensation claim for injuries I sustained when my coworker tried to kill me. Anyway Donna told me to take as much time off as needed and come back when I was ready.
Saying that I was “ready” on Monday morning was perhaps an overstatement. Physically I was still banged up. I moved like a woman three times my age, and the blow to my left temple had turned into a great, blue bruise that no amount of makeup or clever hairstyling would cover as it puffed up and discolored my cheekbone.
But I went stir-crazy at home. I worried about the millings of MBS&K and about what might happen without me. And television, my great love, is really fun when you use it as a reward for a hard day’s work or as a weekend tele-stravaganza, but not when you’re trapped and sore, and there’s nothing better to do.
So against my mother’s pleas, I went to work Monday morning. I assured her, and myself, that if I got there and started feeling too bad, I’d just come back home again. What were they going to do, refuse to let me? Not when I looked like I’d just gone nine rounds in a prizefight.
Upon returning to MBS&K, I had expected a crowd of people to bombard me, asking for a thrilling retelling of my adventures. However, I was studiously avoided. Everyone’s head seemed to be down over their work. Even Lucille, the goddess of gossip, just exclaimed pityingly over my injuries and told me that it was “so great” to see me back. As if I’d been gone for months, instead of three days.
My Boss is a Serial Killer Page 26
