My Boss is a Serial Killer (11 page)

I picked up my necessary “look busy” pen and
pad of paper and walked purposefully to Charlene’s cubicle. She was
on the phone when I approached, and I paused outside her cubicle
walls so as not to appear overly nosy. Still, I really wanted to
stay and listen. I could tell from her tone and words that she was
speaking to the pissed-off ex-husband of one of Aven Fisher’s
clients, and hearing Charlene in action on the phone was fun.

She was saying, “Well since you refused to
accept service of the complaint by mail, we were forced to serve
you with a private process server…No, sir, that is state law…Yes,
in fact, we are permitted to bill you for it…because your ex-wife
is not obligated to pay for your fits of pique…it means temper
tantrum…I beg to differ; you were given the opportunity to accept
service by mail and, for some reason, thought that rejecting that
offer would cause problems for someone besides yourself…well, I
think that’s an issue you need to take up with the process service
company. That big fellow who served your papers to you would
remember who you are…I guess you might have considered that before
you impregnated your sister-in-law. Thank you for calling.”

I mimed applause as she turned to face me.
She groused, “Men. Men make me sick.”

“
Don’t they ever complain about the
mean secretary who yells at them?”

“
Who cares if they do?”

“
I wish you’d been the secretary for my
divorce attorney,” I sighed, pleased at the thought of Charlene
ripping my stupid ex-husband a new asshole. Technically, I had been
my divorce attorney’s secretary. The matter was handled by a junior
associate at the firm where I used to work for the psychotic
sadist.

“
I see these divorce proceedings and
can’t even think what brought couples together in the first
place.”

“
I wondered that myself when I was
divorcing my stupid ex-husband.”

“
You don’t remember?”

“
I remember just fine. Temporary
insanity.”

Her eyebrows rose in surprise, and I couldn’t
help laughing at her expression. I waved off her curious gaze,
excusing myself with, “We’re just going to chalk my first marriage
up as a learning experience and hope that if I get another chance,
I’ll be smarter about it. Like next time, I might get a guy with an
actual job.”

“
Like a detective, maybe.”

“
In my wettest dreams.” I realized what
I’d said and felt my cheeks redden. To cover this female silliness,
I asked her, “Was it Bryony Gilbert? Is that the name of the other
woman?”

Charlene studied me thoughtfully and tested
the name. “Bryony. That one sounds right. I knew it was something
Scottish sounding. Irish. Or whatever.”

“
Well, okay then. Mystery
solved.”

“
Is it? Let me know what you find
out.”

This time, I wasn’t going to give the file
request to Lloyd. Lloyd didn’t need to be a part of this
transaction. I found a file clerk hiding behind a mountainous stack
of copy machine paper and asked him to go get the file for me. The
young man blinked as if I spoke a foreign language. Surely he must
work here. He didn’t seem to have seen daylight in a while, though.
He was small and ghostly pale.

“
I’m Carol.” I spoke slowly so as not
to startle him. “I work for Bill Nestor. I’d like you to get a file
for me.”

He ducked his head and scooted toward a
wobbly table that seemed to serve as his desk. He tried to give me
a pink slip of paper.

I took it and filled it out in big block
letters, like writing something down for a small child.

He didn’t understand. He looked fretfully up
and down the room, reminding me of those pathetic lobsters waiting
in a tank to be captured and thrown into boiling water. I did not
eat lobster, and I did not like the way Lloyd scared his
employees.

“
I’m Carol,” I repeated. “What’s your
name?”

“
Eric,” he said. When he finally made
eye contact with me I got a better fix on his age. Pre-law, so
probably about twenty years old. It was so hard for kids to get
jobs coming out of law school that they were willing to do things
like this—work as a lowly file clerk in a big firm—just to have an
extra little blurb on their resume and maybe to be able to say,
“Please interview me. I slaved under Lloyd for two years so you
know that no judge or jury can scare me.”

Speaking gently now, I said, “Eric, it would
be a big favor to me if you’d go get this file right now.”

Just when I thought I was going to have to
get a candy bar to dangle before him (he didn’t appear to have
eaten in a while), Eric broke and, checking behind him, took the
request slip. “Do you think Lloyd will mind if I leave?” he
asked.

That’s when I decided that eliminating the
middleman was necessary. I took the slip back and said, “You know
what? I think I’ll just go get this one myself.”

He shrunk back in terror.

“
It’s all right. You’re doing a good
job. I think it might just be quicker this way.” I searched his
stricken face and said, “You’re not in trouble.”

But he didn’t believe me. I felt like I
should call OSHA or something, so maybe they could assign a social
worker to his case and get him a foster-boss.

MBS&K storage is the scariest place in
the building, scary in the way that library stacks can be scary, or
catacombs, or a vast garden maze. A person could wander into one of
these places and become lost to the world, break a leg, have a
heart attack, or fall under a massive weight of old paper and just
die and not be found for days. Is that a morbid way to think?

How does one construct a place this scary in
a modern office building? Take a good-sized basement room, say
about as large as a union banquet hall, and fill it with flimsy
soldier-rows of shelves. Then load ’em up, one box after another
until they’re stuffed full of paper, plastic, cardboard, and vinyl.
Do this for twenty or so years, run out of actual usable space
somewhere after seven of those years, and then begin cramming what
still must be made to fit wherever you can manage. The result is
where I now stood, a labyrinthine crypt of flammable materials.

God forbid anyone should ever light a
cigarette in here; the radiant heat would start a catastrophic
fire. Everyone in the eleven stories above would die of smoke
inhalation within ten minutes because no one upstairs pays the
slightest attention to alarms. I know I’m prone to sarcasm, but
that’s not a joke. I’d been at work when the fire alarms went off,
and people could barely be bothered to look up and say, “What the
hell is that noise?” before going back to their conference
calls.

It is impossible to light a room like this
correctly. The walls of paper block whatever feeble light the
fluorescents produce. I don’t know how an old bastard like Lloyd
can even see to find things down here, unless he traces files by
their scent, which is entirely possible. I was a relative youngster
with my eyesight not yet failing, and I was going to have to dive
way back into the dark recesses of 2001. That’s five years of real
time and five centuries of storage time. Already my skin was
itching from the dust mites, an unpleasant thought.

But I was curious now, and as I have
mentioned, people will do just about anything to pass the time at
work.

When I returned to my cubicle, Bill was
pacing in and out of his office door. He looked enormously relieved
to see me.

“
Where have you been?” he cried. His
tone was never that of a demanding boss so much as that of a
worried parent. I suppose he thinks I am in the same danger as his
files and documents when nobody is around to hold down the
fort.

“
I was in storage,” I said. I had
successfully found Bryony Gilbert’s file and now held it close to
me with its file number and name not precisely in Bill’s sight. I
wasn’t trying to hide information from him specifically but I was
trying to hide the fact that I wasn’t working on an actual
assignment. “Bill, I told you I was going to storage.”

“
But you were gone such a long
time.”

What a nut. I had been down there no more
than twenty minutes. Dislike Lloyd though I may, the man did know
how to keep things where they were supposed to be. My major
obstacle had been that I was only five and a half feet tall and had
trouble reaching the shelf where Bryony’s file was stored. Anyway
when Bill got like this, when he started fussing over things that
didn’t deserve fuss, the best solution was to thank him profusely
for his concern.

“
I appreciate that you were keeping an
eye out,” I said, slipping the file discreetly onto my desk and out
of his line of sight. “That storage room is about the scariest
place in the building. I’m always afraid I’ll get locked in or
injured or something and then not be found for days.”

“
Is it possible to get locked in?”
Things like that worried Bill very much.

“
Probably not really, but you can think
all kinds of spooky thoughts when you’re actually down
there.”

“
You should have a file clerk go down
there. You don’t have to be messing around in storage.”

“
Oh, sometimes it’s just quicker to do
it myself. Anyway I’m back now safe and sound, so what is it you
needed me for?”

“
I have those letters signed and ready
to go,” he said. But he was still distracted. “How could you get
locked in?”

Oh, damn it. I’d given him something to
obsess over. Despite the fact that Bill would probably never have
to go to storage, if I didn’t put a stop to this right now he’d
worry for the next week about getting locked in down there, or me
getting locked in, or someone being trapped in the storage room. I
had no desire to send him into a compulsive cycle of checking, like
that time he feared that there were used staples stuck in his
carpet or leaves clogging the gutter outside his apartment. In this
case, it would likely manifest in his going downstairs every couple
hours to make sure there wasn’t anyone locked in storage.

“
You can’t get locked in,” I said.
“Bill, I was being flip. I was joking around. It’s just a big room
with a lot of paper. The door locks from the inside. See? I
shouldn’t have said anything, but you know me, always trying to be
funny.”

He asked, “There’s no way someone could lock
you inside?”

“
Absolutely not. The worst thing anyone
could do,” and I had to be careful here, because I didn’t want him
trying to think of worse things anyone could do, “is close the
door. I’d just walk over and open it right back up again. Please
calm down. Give me your letters, and I’ll get them in the
mail.”

Bill wandered thoughtfully away, a frown of
concern still trying to wheedle its way onto his forehead. Had my
explanation worked? I couldn’t tell for sure yet. If he started
making unexplained trips downstairs, then I’d have to find a way to
talk him out of the ritual. I spent enough time doing this kind of
thing, and darn it, I was his secretary, not his psychiatrist.

Of course you might not believe that,
considering our history. Allow me a little time. I’ll try to
explain.

My boss Bill wasn’t a popular man among the
secretaries at the firm, and a lot of them didn’t know how he and I
managed to get along so well. I was his first secretary ever to
last more than seven months. We were nearing our third anniversary.
He gave me glowing reviews; he was mannered, polite, and
soft-spoken to me. Sometimes he was also funny.

When a stressor jumped at him, though, he
could go off the deep end into an attack of
obsessive-compulsiveness. If his attack went unchecked, he could
get so upset that it nearly made him sick. I lived through a couple
of these attacks early on, and they scared me—for his sake, not for
my own. Even at the height of his panic, his wrath was always
turned inward. I was lucky to discover that in a manic state, he
responded well to firm commands and gentle humor. If I could figure
out the source of his anxiety, as unlikely as that source might be,
I could often dispel his fears. And I did not mind. The other women
found that hard to understand. Silly girls, who didn’t know the man
I used to work for. Manic-but-polite neurotic beats psychotic
sadist any day of the week.

I loved working for Bill, as much as anyone
can love being someone’s secretary. So why didn’t others like him?
Mannered, polite, and soft-spoken though he might have been, he
could drive the most patient secretary crazy with his fanatical
beliefs in sameness. For Bill, disorder was not just annoying, but
physically upsetting. He lost his previous secretary because she
spent two days arranging for the copying and distribution of a huge
legal brief with an impending deadline and, just before she was
about to package it all for mailing, Bill noticed that one
attorney’s phone number was formatted (555) 555-5555 and another’s
was formatted 1-555-555-5555 (no parentheses and the long-distance
“1” glaring before it). He insisted that the entire project be
redone. She worked until midnight, ended up driving it to the FedEx
pickup site at the airport to make the deadline, and resigned the
next day. It’s a legendary story around the office called “The Time
Bill’s Secretary Quit Because of the Phone Number Thing.”

The same situation went down differently
between us. Another brief was ready to go, and the deadline loomed
large. Bill meticulously prepared the document for two weeks. By
then I had been over that thing with such care that I felt I knew
the patterns of its word stops. It was never content that troubled
Bill, but format, and this brief was so perfect in form that it had
attained a spiritual beauty of its own. I wanted to keep a copy to
stroke lovingly in my old age. “Oh, my lovely Appellee’s Reply
Brief,” I would sigh, gazing at it, while the other inmates
cherished their grandchildren’s pictures or their old love letters,
“though your cover page has faded, the memory of our love never
shall.”