My Boss is a Serial Killer (21 page)

“
You’re kidding.” This was a surprise.
I thought Suzanne loved it here. She had illusory power; people
needed her; and she could boss me around. “Is she moving or
something?”

“
From what I hear,” said Lucille, “it
is too emotionally distressing for her to work here.” Lucille’s
accent made a term like “emotionally distressing” sound rather
glamorous. Lucille added, “Sounds like a load of hooey to
me.”

“
She got a better job offer,” was my
guess.

Turns out I was wrong. Nobody, not even
goddess of gossip Lucille, knew the real reason why Suzanne was
leaving except for Bill Nestor, and he actually told me.

Though I went into his office to discuss our
suicide widows, and though my anticipation over these had reached a
sort of fever pitch, the first thing he said to me was, “I guess
you heard Suzanne is leaving.”

Fine, we could do this first. You almost
couldn’t get Bill to change topics once he started. I said, “I did
hear that.”

“
I’m glad she’s going,” he whispered.
“I don’t need that kind of trouble.”

“
Trouble?” I closed the door (a lot of
our meetings lately had involved closed doors, it seemed) and
waited for him to explain. Sometimes Bill seemed to be as big a
gossip as any woman in the office. He told me all sorts of details
about the other lawyers of the firm, some of which I’d rather not
have known, like who was a weekend nudist and who had once been
arrested for soliciting a hooker. All of these details, I learned
after swearing a sincere oath of secrecy.

And in fact, the next thing Bill said was,
“You can’t tell a soul.”

“
Not a soul,” I said.

Bill was genuinely upset, I realized. With
bewilderment he told me, “For some reason, she thinks we’re an
item.”

“
What do you mean?” Questioningly I
gestured between us.

“
No, she thinks that she and I—Suzanne
and me—are an item. Or rather,” he paused to find the right words,
“she thinks we were on our way to being an item. Carol, she came to
my apartment this weekend. She showed up Sunday and said she
thought it was time we talked.”

“
God, how awkward.”

“
You have no idea. And when you think
of the trouble it could cause. Sexual harassment suits. Hostile
workplace. I’ve never done anything to lead her on.”

“
I know you haven’t.” In fact, I
doubted anyone who really knew Bill would ever suspect him of such
a heinous crime as flirtation, and it didn’t help my opinion of
Suzanne much. I hadn’t liked her a lot before. Now she sounded
delusional.

“
She wanted to have this talk,” Bill
said desperately, “about where our relationship was going, and
about whether she should look for another job so it would be okay
for us to see each other socially. I’ve never done anything to
encourage this.”

I put up my hands, assuring him that I needed
no further convincing. “It’s not your fault, Bill. I think Suzanne
has been in a lot of strange relationships, and maybe she gets her
signals mixed up.”

“
She certainly was mixed up. But I
didn’t ask her to quit. I hope she hasn’t told anyone
that.”

“
What did you say?”

“
I told her that she had misunderstood
me. And that I didn’t like her that way.”

Sounded like junior high. I like you, but I
don’t like you like you. Surely this could not all be about my
getting assignments that she thought were rightfully hers. Yet it
probably was. Women can get accustomed to taking care of a man, be
it son, father, boss, husband, brother, or just a friend. If he
starts getting his care from someone else, it felt like a slight,
whether or not it was. But none of this was something I wanted to
explain to Bill. He was too upset by being the object of passion.
No need to bring psychology into it. And I definitely didn’t want
to suggest that Suzanne’s confrontation had probably been because
he’d given me a special assignment last week, and now she thought I
was a threat to her love life. That would crush him with
embarrassment and make things strained between us. I wouldn’t give
Suzanne the satisfaction of messing up my good thing. I certainly
didn’t need Bill feeling more uncomfortable around me at a time
like this, knowing the touchy subjects I wanted to discuss with
him.

“
Well, good riddance to her anyway,” I
said, a bit unfairly.

Bill was happy that I was still on his side.
“If you hear any rumors…”

“
I’ll squash the ones I can and let you
know about any others. But I don’t think you have to worry.
Everyone knows she’s flaky.”

“
Flaky? Well, there’s something off
there, anyway. I wish I could stop worrying about it.”

“
Apparently in two weeks she’ll be
gone.” To divert his attention, which could be so easily
preoccupied with strangeness, I said, “Now, let’s talk about my
research from last week.”

“
Yes, we have a little ordinary work to
catch up on, but not too much,” he told me, handing me two tapes of
dictation. “Two new estate clients this week and a little bit of
discovery due on Thursday. These are just some status letters, no
rush. Later today is fine.”

I took the tapes and looked from them to him.
Was I being put off? “Okay. Did you have a chance to look at those
articles this weekend?”

Bill straightened his desk as he spoke to me,
which was a comical endeavor because it’s quite a trick to
straighten a desk that is already about as straight as it can
possibly be. To do it, he had to pick things up and replace them
exactly where they were before. Sometimes he had to create a little
mess in order to clean it, like dropping some paper clips on his
desktop, putting them in a line, and then putting them away again.
He fiddled and scooted and twitched. I supposed that it was more of
his upset over Suzanne’s strange behavior.

And as he did all this, he answered my
question. “Yes, I did. Yes, I looked them over quite carefully. And
it seemed for a while that there was something there…something
noteworthy.”

“
What?” I pressed. I didn’t know what
he had found that was noteworthy. Aside from our list of dead
clients, there wasn’t anything in those materials that was even
very interesting.

“
The patterns, the statistics. You know
I have a undergraduate degree in accounting?”

I did know it. The degree was on the wall,
along with his law degree.

“
I took a good look at the statistics.
The mean, the average, of the deaths that you listed. Simple stuff,
really. Just the information you found and a few additional
mathematical calculations. A sort of word problem. I’m fairly
convinced that we have a quirk in the statistical analysis that
might draw the eye but doesn’t have statistical
significance.”

I gave my head a shake to show him I didn’t
understand what he meant.

“
What’s your favorite food?” he
asked.

“
Uh, spaghetti, I guess.”

“
All right, spaghetti. If you went
outside today and polled ten people about their favorite foods,
they might all say that their favorite food is spaghetti. But you
would be mistaken to believe that meant spaghetti was everyone’s
favorite food, even though you could technically say that ten out
of ten people list it as their favorite. You found a quirky sample,
but not a statistically significant one. Poll another two hundred
people, and then you’d start to have some results that have
statistical significance.

“
Six women committing suicide is not
significant within the entire population of people who commit
suicide. It was a quirk that you encountered in this sample, but
your data-gathering technique had a bias. You were only looking for
women who were dead, to start with.”

I put up a hand to stop him from yammering on
about statistics. “Bill, I wouldn’t look for a sample of suicide
victims among living people.”

“
But you see what I mean.”

“
Not really.”

“
I’m sorry; I know it’s complex. The
short version is every year in the Kansas City area, well over a
thousand people inflict injury on themselves. Some of them end up
dead, and some don’t. But six women over ten years in a city of
this size? It’s so insignificant as to not even make a spike in the
data.”

I had worked around attorneys long enough to
know that their speech was littered with unnecessary hooey. Listen
hard to them, and you’ll find that they’d never say in six words
what can be said in sixty. Yet Bill had never tried this on me
before. Frankly I didn’t care for it. “Bill, the metro area has
half a million people in it,” I pointed out. “In the past ten
years, at least six widows of late middle age have killed
themselves—and they were all our clients.”

“
Yes,” Bill agreed, “which shows an odd
quirk in the data that must be a factor that we haven’t yet
considered.”

“
What could we have not considered,
factor-wise?”

Bill was remarkably able to glean my question
from that mush. “It could be anything, any remote influencing
factor. Our location. The socioeconomic status of our clientele.
There’s a good chance that, since our clients have usually been
recommended by other clients, we’re getting a biased population,
because this means most of our client base come from very similar
backgrounds and cultures.”

“
Oh.” I looked at the tapes in my
hands. I felt something like devastation. It seemed like an
inappropriate way to react, but I couldn’t help it. My boss, my
Bill, the best boss ever, was trying to dupe me with numbers and
jargon. Why would he do that, I wondered. Why on earth.

“
Statistics are highly sensitive,” said
Bill, sensing my disappointment. “You never know what little factor
can sneak in there and mess with them. That’s why advertisers find
them so easy to manipulate.”

I didn’t know how else to approach this
except to be honest. The time for cajoling had passed as soon as
Bill decided to lay a big fat lie on me. I asked, “Why are you
doing this?” He pretended to not understand my meaning. I said,
“Why are you trying to bullshit me?”

My use of a vulgar term made him draw back in
surprise. He wasn’t a prude when it came to swearing, but he and I
had a good enough relationship that my own swearing habit seldom
came up when we were together.

Still he didn’t answer. I pressed him. “Bill,
you’ve never done this to me before. If you really know something
about this, I wish you’d tell me.”

“
Something about what?”

“
The suicide widows. Why they come to
this firm. Why they die a couple years later.”

“
I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why
people kill themselves. You can’t make a person kill herself.” He
gestured sharply at the spot on his desk where my stacks of
research had rested last Friday—even though the papers were no
longer there. “This research tells us that, if nothing else,
suicide isn’t anybody’s fault and that no one can be blamed for a
person—“

“
The research,” I interrupted, “says
nothing useful about why six women clients of this firm killed
themselves. Do you understand why I’m focused on this?”

He harrumphed.

“
What did you want me to find, when you
sent me out of the office for two days? What information were you
really looking for, Bill? Because I didn’t find anything that
answered my question. Pre-retirement age widows who are clients of
this firm tend to kill themselves. Why?”

He nodded toward the long-gone stack of
papers and said, “There’s plenty of information.”

“
There’s nothing there,” I reminded
him. “It’s all smoke and mirrors. Just like your little speech
about statistics. Which I assume was meant to distract me from
something.”

“
Distract you?”

“
Yes. You’re familiar with the term,
right? Distraction? Subterfuge? Obfuscation?” From my memory I
pulled terms that I’d learned on
The X-Files
, the ultimate
paranoia TV show, except maybe for that old series
The
Prisoner
, but that one didn’t teach me as many
words.

I said, “Based on the statistical crap you’re
throwing at me, I’m starting to think my two days in the library
were nothing but a diversion.”

“
Are you insinuating something, Carol?
Why don’t you just come out and say it, if you have something to
say? If you…” and here he paused, looking wildly around his desk as
if he’d lost something, “if you’d like to imply that somehow I have
the power to guide a woman to overdose herself to death. Like I
have suicide telepathy or something. Maybe that’s what you’d like
to say.”

“
Can I ask you something strange, Bill?
Were you at my house this weekend?”

“
Was I what?” He pulled his hands into
his lap, almost protectively as if I’d punched him in the stomach.
“What do you mean?”

“
It’s a simple question. Did you come
to my house this past weekend?”

“
No. I didn’t. Why would you think
that?”

“
Because someone was at my house, who
hates disorder almost as much as you.”

“
No. I wasn’t at your house. As I told
you, I was rather busy this weekend.”

“
I doubt that Suzanne’s making a pass
at you took the entire weekend.”