My Boss is a Serial Killer (10 page)

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 invaders.

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.

I felt this many years after escaping him. A
dropping dread fell in my stomach, because I was asked a question
for which I didn’t have a good answer. I felt prickling in the skin
on my shoulders, I felt the urge to snap at Bill, I was ready to
fight. The psychotic sadist would probably be pleased to know that,
all this time later, I still cringed at reminders of him.

With an unexpected amount of effort, I
managed to answer Bill’s question as lightly as I’d been speaking
only a moment before. “He really couldn’t talk about the case. I
got just the barest details.”

Bill raised his eyebrows and looked
interested.

“
Only that the medications weren’t
something she had in the house. They don’t know where the pills
came from.”

“
Pills can come from anywhere. She
could have gotten them from a friend. And you can order just about
anything you want online. I wonder why it’s
significant.”

“
Like I said, he couldn’t give me
details. He did seem sorry that he couldn’t, though. Maybe after
their investigation is over, I can get him to tell me
more.”

“
Yes, that would be
interesting.”

“
I’m sorry,” I said. I was apologizing
as much for thinking he’d ever be as unfair as the psychotic sadist
as I was for having a lack of information.

“
What? Oh, no, it’s not a pleasant talk
to have on a date anyway.” Bill looked at the same piece of mail
he’d already checked. His mind was elsewhere, I could
tell.

I’d rather lost interest in thumbing through
Bonita Voigt’s file, now that my first date with Gus had passed
successfully and we had more than suicide to talk about. Since I
had gone to the trouble (or rather, Lloyd had gone to the trouble)
of getting it out, though, I pulled out Bill’s notes to see what
the last few entries had been.

Yes, it was all as I expected. His maniacal
attention to note-taking and details was never more beneficial than
in hindsight, as Bonita’s file was meticulously rounded out. Bonita
Voigt was rather like Adrienne Maxwell in that she came to Bill as
a recent widow who wanted to redo her will and estate documents to
better suit her new circumstances. Bill’s written notes from her
meetings mentioned, “Client is despondent over loss of her husband
and is currently unwilling to make plans for the future.” Poor
thing.

Bonita Voigt had apparently taken her own
life a few months after her last appointment here. No accompanying
newspaper article or anything, because Bill wasn’t into
scrapbooking and he didn’t like how newsprint faded and smeared. I
was hoping to uncover a cause of death, actually. I knew she’d
killed herself, but how? With a gun? Slitting her wrists? More
pills, like Adrienne? Or maybe she had thrown herself from a
bridge? Finding a real newspaper article was a silly idea on my
part, considering that the self-inflicted death of an elderly woman
probably wasn’t even considered newsworthy. Well, unless she really
had thrown herself from a bridge. There was a copy of her funeral
announcement that, of course, said she’d passed away but not how or
why. What surprised me was that Bill’s notes didn’t mention her
method of suicide. Normally he wrote down everything. The only
reason I could propose for his neglecting that detail was tact.
Maybe he thought it would just be tacky to write a notation about
that.

I put the file aside. Then, just because
Charlene had piqued my curiosity about the suicide she claimed to
recall, I went back to the computer’s archive files. My search
criteria for the previous week was still stored on my word
processor. I searched for file type “Letters”, file owner
“Bnestor,” key word search “sorry”. I ran it again and the same
letters appeared. Again I eliminated the men, and this time, I went
beyond Bonita Voigt’s name. Here was one in 2001, Bryony Gilbert.
Bryony rhymed with Hermione; that’s why it caught my eye.